From d897ae448fb1de36974e1da2cf244f8d89cdd36a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Olivier DOSSMANN Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 16:42:25 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] Initial commit --- .extract2makefly.bash.swp | Bin 0 -> 12288 bytes 20020510231400.blog | 5 + 20020513205800.blog | 47 +++ 20020514150000.blog | 98 +++++++ 20020515025000.blog | 13 + 20020515110500.blog | 7 + 20020517030900.blog | 116 ++++++++ 20020520094500.blog | 7 + 20020521064100.blog | 41 +++ 20020525073200.blog | 77 +++++ 20020525080800.blog | 6 + 20020526060500.blog | 70 +++++ 20020529064500.blog | 10 + 20020601060500.blog | 66 +++++ 20020603082500.blog | 13 + 20020605171400.blog | 47 +++ 20020607172200.blog | 36 +++ 20020610185900.blog | 70 +++++ 20020613154600.blog | 31 ++ 20020616221200.blog | 267 +++++++++++++++++ 20020618193800.blog | 91 ++++++ 20020619101800.blog | 75 +++++ 20020620162436.blog | 99 +++++++ 20020623154800.blog | 192 ++++++++++++ 20020630014700.blog | 13 + 20020703014700.blog | 112 +++++++ 20020717132600.blog | 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20141109150617.blog create mode 100644 20141112225043.blog create mode 100644 contributors.txt create mode 100755 extract2makefly.bash diff --git a/.extract2makefly.bash.swp b/.extract2makefly.bash.swp new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..08a244ef2b8107f61094d8db24946c3f8495ddb3 GIT binary patch literal 12288 zcmeI2&ubGw6vwB6H>;vvh36y^tL8^ru_dwvQLzP!U{gUTG?Sf4c5rt#>`YRnuHwzy#}Z8~M~ zXFtwH^~5E@cXN?=th(XTT1VL6p9v^{2oQmT2@G7fx;V||=VlvOK#5;~vuD;1jwLG* zAOb{y2oM1xKm>>Y5g-EpB>~r;VlQxK$BNyZFXpMg=HiwnB0vO)01+SpM1Tko0U|&I zhyW2F0z}{l5)k;=esF@Z>Y z5ja8wlpn;IfOA%Ym8c(TUpu%Zl0=K1f<(DNVwjALVgPw$)j*|I!MhUN*0vvtry!so zYvaJi-~!=bU{wOXFkqE}Ed_xXD(GsXZJ;DZMal)*^xzT(hRWKR@!I8WKQ<0~qElD` zUf#BeFLjdE%iB)7P^Gm<@^Nfc0dK9e?%e?o#{La+bG@~E|3Pk&sw)Pe+Y|#A#7Vkg zS~u^m9pvGoWU^D_lESI<>Uhms^f=2|f~`cmjEKcW(NI+CwSC-iSwFM5waTolw9%JW zyXOg%kbu}`^BAnVVoUW>sh5Xl$-H(pLRDsamXFdZj!{0!6!#{V(bgJg%dDoH)K` y937>{i&lDcWM}4a+2L&Tu6P`0&h`rMcrEL$=h*Xmp+2xly`xQCnIYsY^?v~VXE=EP literal 0 HcmV?d00001 diff --git a/20020510231400.blog b/20020510231400.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4682d53 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020510231400.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Testing +

Welcome to Armed And Dangerous, an experiment in weblogging.

+

This is a test. This is only a test. If this had been an actual
+emergency, this post would be immediately followed by a pointer to
+some old-media channel that would tell you what to think.

diff --git a/20020513205800.blog b/20020513205800.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..15b3bc7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020513205800.blog @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ +Acting White +

Eugene Volokh comments that
+many of the leading promoters of racial identity politics in the
+U.S. have begun to lump Asians in with white people, but declines to
+attempt an interpretation. Actually this development is very easy to
+understand. All you need to break the code is to know that “white” =
+“assimilated”.

+

Asians tend to be perceived as “white” not
+because they have white skin but because they behave as white people
+are expected to behave — they pursue prosperity and value education,
+and seek to blend into the U.S.’s broad middle class rather than
+creating a defiant, adversarial ghetto or barrio culture. Compare the
+epithet “acting white”, used among urban blacks to sneer at kids with
+black skin who work at being good students or holding down regular
+jobs.

+

This is nothing new. Historically, “whiteness” has never been a
+purely racial category. As late as the turn of the 20th century,
+Irish immigrants in the U.S. were sometimes separated from “whites” in
+speech and writing. Later, Eastern Europeans and Italians had to
+assimilate to U.S. cultural norms before being considered as “white”
+as the English, Germans, and Irish who had preceded them. Today,
+prosperous Asians have edged over that border. In our big cities,
+Chinese New Year is headed the way of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade,
+becoming as American as apple pie.

+

So why aren’t black people white too? The answer, I suggest, has
+very little to do with race and a lot to do with class —
+specifically, the persistence of the black urban underclass. Not just
+as a population but as a culture that remains mired in high crime,
+high rates of single motherhood, high unemployment, and all the other
+symptoms of high dependency on government largesse. The “Great
+Society” programs of the 1960s and the race-hustling identity politics
+that followed stalled out the assimilation process that turned Irish,
+Italians, and (recently) Asians into whites.

+

Try to imagine a Korean equivalent of gangsta rap. Or a bunch of
+Vietnamese high-school students taunting one of their own for “acting
+white”. Or Chinese kids fixating exclusively on Chinese adults as
+role models. These things don’t happen. And that’s why Asians are
+white.

+

UPDATE: Several Asians have written to tell me that I was doing OK
+until the last paragraph. There are anti-assimilationists among Asian
+immigrants, as it turns out; there is, in fact, even Korean gangsta
+music. However, my sources agree that these phenomena don’t persist
+among American-born Asians. I think it’s also significant that Asian
+anti-assimilationism is not a public phenomenon — it’s
+visible to other Asians but there are no movies glorifying it nor
+political organizations trading on it.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20020514150000.blog b/20020514150000.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..10974ab --- /dev/null +++ b/20020514150000.blog @@ -0,0 +1,98 @@ +Firearms and the dominant media culture +

A recent flurry of
+nearly identical editorials in American newspapers conveys the
+degree of fluttering endemic in dovecotes everywhere in the wake of
+the Justice Department’s new statement of position on the Second
+Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The New York Times
+and Washington Post have viewed with alarm, displaying an
+almost pathetic degree of panic at the thought that lawmakers might
+once again have to start taking that pesky “shall not be infringed”
+language seriously.

+

The dominant culture of the American national media knows what it
+believes about guns. Firearms are evil juju that have the power to
+induce murderous violence in otherwise normal human beings. Firearms
+owners are all either ghetto drug dealers whose idea of the good life
+is a drive-by a day, or else tractor-cap-wearing rural sociopaths jes’
+itchin’ to shoot up a schoolyard. Firearms-rights advocates are a
+tiny nut-fringe of reactionary wackos barely one step from blowing up
+a federal building. Gun-control boosters are virtuous crusaders
+animated by selfless love of children and small fuzzy things. There
+will come a day when all guns are banned, hallelujah, violent crime
+will plummet, and we can stop being embarrassed for being
+Americans.

+

Over the last thirty years this mythology has grown so thick, so
+armored with smugness, that the dominant media culture is normally
+incapable of noticing mere facts that happen to contradict it. Gary
+Kleck’s Point
+Blank: Guns and Violence In America should have put paid the
+demonization of gun owners back in 1993. John Lott’s 1998 book
+More Guns, Less Crime demonstrated that civilian firearms
+dramatically reduce crime and violence. And Sanford Levinson’s 1989
+study The
+Embarrassing Second Amendment began a wave of legal scholarship
+that established what is now called the `Standard Model’, that the
+Second Amendment does indeed protect an individual citizen’s right to
+bear arms.

+

That smugness has been shook, badly, by three different
+events of which the Justice Department’s finding is only the most recent.
+The media panic we’re seeing is a cumulative result of all three.

+

First there was Michael Bellesiles’s exposure as a fraud. His book
+Arming America won the Bancroft prize and gushing encomiums
+from the dominant media culture when it purported to show that the
+armed and self-reliant American frontiersman was a myth — that the
+gun culture of the U.S. postdates the American Civil War and was alien
+to the framers of the Constitution.

+

Alas for the bien pensants of the world that the book
+turned out to be a tissue of lies, invented but nonexistent evidence,
+and willful misquotation of existing evidence. A fabrication, in
+fact, so egregious that it has induced the National Endowment for the
+Humanities to open its first official fraud investigation in thirty-seven
+years. Suddenly the fraud claims gun-rights activists had been making
+for years about other anti-gun scholarship (such as the infamous
+Kellerman “43:1″)
+study) were no longer so easily dismissible as paranoid ranting.

+

But worse was to come, on September 9th 2001. Because Al-Qaeda’s
+ability to turns airliners into weapons of mass destruction using
+nothing but carpet knives illustrated in the most dramatic possible
+way the folly of believing that a disarmed world is a safe one. All
+the “security” that kept civilian firearms off airplanes did was make
+terrorism easier for the determined few who could smuggle weapons on
+board.

+

Many tides turned after 9/11, and not the least result of it was
+a huge groundswell in popular support for civilian self-defense and
+firearms rights. The
+Pink Pistols and chapters of the
+Second Amendment Sisters on college campuses previously known
+as strongholds of anti-firearms politics became impossible to ignore.
+The new wave of popular pro-gun agitation could not be forced into the
+“right-wing kooks” box so beloved of the dominant media culture.

+

It’s no wonder the Justice Department’s endorsement of a
+pro-gun-rights brief in “Emerson vs. U.S.” has the mavens of the
+dominant media culture feeling faint and panicky. One of the pillars
+of their world-view (up there with the unquestionable sanctity of
+environmentalists, say, or the importance of `diversity’, or the
+superior virtue of the putatively oppressed) is creaking. Those loony
+gun nuts night turn out to be (a) right on the facts, (b)
+overwhelmingly popular, and (c) backed up by the Bill of Rights, the
+Justice Department, and the Supreme Court, after all!

+

If the Supreme Court grants certiorati on the Emerson case, we can
+expect the dominant media culture to get its knickers in a knot so
+complicated it would baffle an algebraic topologist. Because given
+the composition of the Court and the tenor of the times, the result
+might well be a dramatic rollback in the reach of firearms regulation.
+Gun-rights advocates can hope that laws touching the Second Amendment
+may in the future have to pass the same strictest level of scrutiny
+as laws touching the First. A wave of lawsuits successfully striking
+down state and local gun laws under the doctrine of incorporation
+could well follow.

+

The closest historical precedent for what may be about to happen is
+the rediscovery of the First Amendment in the early 20th century.
+Before 1919 speech advocating unpopular ideas could be made a
+punishable offense. Oliver Wendell Holmes created the doctrine,
+since become sacred to the dominant media culture, that unpopular
+ideas demand the most constitutional protection, and that
+the press has a broadly privileged role under that shield.

+

There is irony in the fact that, having benefited from the
+reassertion of the first article of the Bill of Rights, the dominant
+media culture should so be resisting the second.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20020515025000.blog b/20020515025000.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f7f2bbf --- /dev/null +++ b/20020515025000.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Terrorism Becomes Bad Art +

Minnesota art student Luke Helder has been charged with the recent string of Midwestern mailbox bombings. There doesn’t seem to be much doubt that he’s the perpetrator.

+

An art student. Yeah. That fits; the tone of the portentious twaddle in pipe-bomb-boy’s manifesto was exactly that of the artist manque, big ideas being handled stupidly by a doofus whose ambition exceeds both his talent and his intellect. He fronted a grunge band called “Apathy”, we hear.

+

You know what? I’d lay long odds the band sucks. And I’m not making that guess out of hostility or contempt, either, but because an artist with any confidence in his own ability would have found it a much better way to achieve his artistic goals than anonymously bombing mailboxes. (Artistic goals, in a guy that age, usually have a lot to do with meeting girls. I was a rock musician in my youth, and am therefore un-foolable on this issue.)

+

It was inevitable, I suppose, that sooner or later terrorism would become bad performance art. It’s easy to condemn pipe-bomb-boy for callously putting people at lethal risk with his toys, but difficult to summon up the kind of personal hatred for this perpetrator that Al-Qaeda’s flamboyant fanatic nut-jobs have so richly earned. I think our ire might be more properly directed elsewhere — at all the people who have cooperated in dumbing down the definition of `art’ so completely that Luke Helder actually thought he was doing it.

+

Once upon a time, art had something to do with achieving a meeting of minds between artist and audience. The artist’s job was to rework the symbols and materials of his culture into expressions that affirmed and explored the values of that culture and pleased audiences. Artists operated within interpretive traditions that they shared with the non-artists in the audience. The truly able artist earned the privilege of making his work personal and individual, but only by successfully finding an audience and communicating with it in acceptable conventional terms first.

+

In the late 19th century Western culture began to admit a new definition of `art’ and a new role for artists. Under the influence of modernism and various post-modern movements, artists began to see their job as the systematic subversion of the interpretive traditions they had inherited. “Back to zero!” was the cry. After zero, the new goal could no longer the meeting of minds in a culturally shared commons, but rather that the audience’s minds should be invaded by the disruptive brillance of the artist’s individual insight.

+

In the hands of a few early moderns — Stravinsky, Brancusi, Picasso, Joyce — the new agenda produced astonishingly fine work. In the hands of too many others, it produced vacuous, narcissistic nonsense. Luke Helder inherited its most vulgar form — the notion that all the artist is required to do is “make a statement” about the contents of his own muddled mind, and it’s the world’s job to catch up.

+

Luke-boy’s last art project at school was “a pencil sharpener embedded in a tree stump that was rigged to illuminate Christmas lights as it sharpened pencils”. No comedian could make up such a perfect paradigm of bad art. The pointless artifice, the banal superficial cleverness, the utter lack of respect for materials, and the complete disconnection from the millennia-long cultural conversation that includes all the great art of our civilization. It’s really not a long step from this garbage to pipe bombs as `art’. Not a long step at all.

+

No account of Luke Helder suggests that he’s particularly evil. I wonder…suppose he had learned formal prosody, or how to paint in oils, or compose a fugue, or do figurative sculpture. Suppose he had learned artistic forms and media that were situated in history, connected with the world, concerned with beauty. Suppose he had been taught something for art to be about other than the vacancy in his own head. Suppose he had been taught (shocking concept) standards?

+

Perhaps, then, he would not have required explosives to express himself.

+

UPDATE: And back in 1996, there were conceptual art bombs in Seattle.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20020515110500.blog b/20020515110500.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..75aaebb --- /dev/null +++ b/20020515110500.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Foo on you, Asparagirl! +

Asparagirl has committed a base calumny
+against me. While it’s true she had something to do with me entering
+the blogosphere, this business about threatening her with a Glock is
+totally off-base. I would never do anything like that. My carry
+weapon is a Colt Officer’s Model 45 ACP. It’s my wife who
+carries the Glock…

diff --git a/20020517030900.blog b/20020517030900.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cf2711a --- /dev/null +++ b/20020517030900.blog @@ -0,0 +1,116 @@ +Socialists to the Stars +

Science fiction, because it deals in extrapolated futures, has a long
+tradition of employment as a vehicle for political argument. More than that,
+science fiction encourages politically-minded writers to narratize their
+beliefs in ways that can sometime reveal more than the writers intended
+about the problems and contradictions in their own theories.

+

I was powerfully reminded of this fact while reading Ken MacLeod’s
+latest The Sky Road. A reference in the book led me to
+think about Iain Banks, and from there I flashed on some recent
+analyses of post-9/11 confusion among the European left. And I
+realized that MacLeod and Banks between them inadvertently reveal some
+interesting things about socialism in the post-Soviet world.

+

Ken MacLeod and Iain Banks are two of the most interesting young
+writers in science fiction. Both are rooted in Scotland, and both
+manage the peculiar and somewhat arresting trick of writing rather
+hard SF from a Marxist political stance. For multiple historical and
+structural reasons, the dominant strain in the politics of SF has long
+been individualist, anti-authoritarian, even libertarian in tone —
+and this has been most true near the hard-SF heart of the field.
+MacLeod and Banks, then, are almost unique in proposing SF narratives
+in which socialism has a heroic future — and in doing so giving us an
+SFnal window into how socialists in the post-Soviet world think,
+and the unrecognized contradictions in their ideas.

+

Banks is the less explicit of the two. His Culture novels
+(including Excession, Use of Weapons,

+

The Player Of Games, and Look To Windward
+are wide-screen space operas in which the good guys are a communist
+utopia. In the Culture, there is no money and no want and no markets;
+the economy is run by the vast AIs called Culture Minds, who somehow
+centrally plan everything so that human beings never have to make
+unpleasant scarcity choices. It’s Marxist eschatology entire,
+with the withering-away of the state sustained by deus ex machina.

+

But Banks never refers to communism or capitalism or any feature of
+present-day politics by name. You get his politics by indirection,
+mainly by noticing how he thinks economics and history work. In his
+universe all the non-communist cultures are barbarians waiting to be
+assimilated by Culture contact expeditions. The cat gets let out of
+the bag in a historical aside; Banks imagines Earth itself being
+subsumed. Marx’s dialectical imperative having failed us, Banks is
+imaginatively counting on invasion by superior aliens to sweep
+capitalism and markets into the dustbin of history.

+

Banks’s Culture is not quite the dreary exercise in correct-think
+the above description might suggest; in fact, the Culture is a lot of
+fun to read about. But there is a black hole at the center of Banks’s
+construction. Leaving aside all the tendentious political questions
+about who gets to use force in the Culture, and when, and for what
+reasons…the economics can’t possibly work. The Culture Minds, if
+they existed, would run slap-bang into F. A. Hayek’s `calculation
+problem’. In 1936, Hayek showed that a planned economy, deprived of
+the demand signals generated by markets, will inevitably malinvest its
+way to collapse. The Soviet Union took less than sixty years to act
+out Hayek’s prediction, and in 2002 there is really no better excuse
+for an SF writer not understanding this than there would be for
+getting the physics of a story gimmick wrong.

+

If Banks narratizes the fundamentalist version of socialism
+(believe and heaven will take you up), MacLeod gives us something
+rather weirder and more complex. Unlike Banks, he is economically
+literate. His characters are staunch old socialists who have figured
+out that Marxism is a total crock and the Soviet Union was a doomed,
+murderous failure. In fact MacLeod is an anarchist at heart, and his
+futures succumb to the inevitability of markets in the absence of
+state control. And yet, his characters cannot let go of that old-time
+religion — they fetishize posters of Che Guevara and hate
+“imperialism” and sing the Internationale and get all misty-eyed over
+hammer-and-sickle emblems and even obey orders from the shadowy
+remnants of the Communist Party.

+

MacLeod gives us post-Communist Communism, heavy metal irony,
+socialist camp — indeed, one of the two viewpoint characters uses the
+latter phrase to describe the “worker’s state” she runs in Central
+Asia. The program is gone, all that’s left is the attitude and the
+conspiracy and the dreary verbal cliches and the resentment.
+Including the hatred of capitalism. The results in MacLeod’s weiting
+sometimes have an appealing gritty contrarianism, but more often just
+the morbid fascination of a bad auto accident. One pities his
+characters in the way one might pity any gifted obsessive. In
+fact, one pities MacLeod himself.

+

Banks’s denial-drenched wish-fantasy. MacLeod’s
+self-loathing-tinged politics of resentment, intermittently
+intelligent but unable to escape the sentimental gravitational pull of
+the old Soviet evil. Voila! The two poles of the European left after
+the fall of the Soviet Union, and especially after 9/11. Neither one
+of them which much sustainability or mass appeal.

+

Leftist theory has been in a state of accelerating disintegration
+ever since “real existing socialism” fulfilled the fate Marx predicted
+for capitalism by collapsing under the weight of its own
+contradictions. Once the European left could no longer seriously
+propose a Marxist program, it had to settle for a defensive
+hunker-down around the socialist-inspired institutions of state — the
+dole, national health services, and so forth. This is why ever since
+Margaret Thatcher, most of the dynamism of European political change
+within countries has come from the right — and the European Union,
+always an enterprise of the left, may now be in jeopardy under
+populist and nationalist pressure.

+

Pim Fortuyn and Jean-Marie Le Pen (to name the two most ecent
+upsetters of the Euroleftist applecart) really had very little in
+common except for having been branded “right-wing” by left-sympathizing
+journalists. In fact, both their platforms are traditionally left
+on economic policy. What they did have in common is that they were
+both shrewd opportunists who stepped into the vacuum created by
+the ideological collapse of the traditional left.

+

Nowhere in either Banks’s or MacLeod’s mythologizations of future
+socialism is there any hint of an answer for the rising political
+problems of the present. The failure of multiculturalism as a strategy
+for preventing inter-ethnic and sectarian strife is the one Fortuyn
+and Le Pen exploited. There are others; environmental policy,
+information privacy, biotech. The European left, an increasingly
+tired anachronism in a capitalist world, no longer has either the
+energy or the intellectual heft to tackle any of these. The best its
+parties can hope for is to do as the British Labor party did; shift
+towards centrist pragmatism while making obeisances to left rhetoric
+that everyone involved recognizes as increasingly meaningless.

+

Perhaps it’s not surprising that both Banks and MacLeod
+are creatures of the post-Soviet world. Their fantasies of
+socialism to the stars may be all the Left has left.

+

+

Blogspot comment

diff --git a/20020520094500.blog b/20020520094500.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1261f3c --- /dev/null +++ b/20020520094500.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +That’s Why They Call It ‘Sex Education’ +

I’m on the road in Thailand, speaking at a U.N. conference on sustainable A
+development in the Third World. Earlier today I listened to a presentation
+on the effects of sex education for women. The presentation mentioned some
+cultural value conflicts about sex education, but it occurred to me that it
+didn’t touch the biggest one. To wit: worldwide, the teachers want the
+kids to learn abstinence, but what the kids to learn is technique.

diff --git a/20020521064100.blog b/20020521064100.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7f1fd6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020521064100.blog @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +Closed Source — Who Dares Call It Treason? +

The cat is out of the bag. During testimony
+before a federal judge, Microsoft executive Jim Allchin has
+admitted that some code critical to the security of Microsoft products
+is so flawed it could not be safely disclosed to other developers or
+the public.

+

Allchin was arguing against efforts by nine states and the District of
+Columbia to impose antitrust remedies that would require Microsoft to
+disclose its code. He constructed dire scenarios of U.S. national
+security and the war against terrorism being compromised if such
+disclosure were required.

+

Now turn this around. Allchin has testified under oath in a Federal
+court that software Microsoft knows to be fatally flawed is deployed
+where it may cost American lives. We’d better hope that Allchin is
+lying, invoking a “national security” threat he doesn’t actually
+believe in to stave off a disclosure requirement. That would merely
+be perjury, a familiar crime for Microsoft.

+

If Allchin is not committing perjury, matters are far worse — because
+it means Microsoft has knowingly chosen to compromise national
+security rather than alert users in the military to the danger its own
+incompetence has created. Implied is that Microsoft has chosen not to
+deploy a repaired version of the software before the tragedy Allchin
+is predicting actually strikes. These acts would be willful
+endangerment of our country’s front-line soldiers in wartime. That
+is called treason, and carries the death penalty.

+

Perjury, or treason? Which is it, Mr. Allchin?

+

There is another message here: that security bugs, like cockroaches,
+flourish in darkness. Experience shows that developers knowing their
+code would be open to third-party scrutiny program more carefully,
+reducing the odds of security bugs. And had Microsoft’s source code
+been exposed from the beginning, any vulnerabilities could have been
+spotted and corrected before the software that they compromised became
+so widely deployed that Allchin says they may now actually threaten
+American lives.

+

Thus Mr. Allchin’s testimony is not merely a self-indictment of
+Microsoft but of all non-open-source development for security-critical
+software. As with many other issues, the legacy of 9/11 is to raise
+the stakes and sharpen the questions. Dare we tolerate less than the
+most effective software development practices when thousands more
+lives might be at stake?

+

Closed source. Who dares call it treason?

diff --git a/20020525073200.blog b/20020525073200.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7cc65b8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020525073200.blog @@ -0,0 +1,77 @@ +Sexual Competence +

Most of the participants in the recent blogospheric
+mini-flap about a Yale Press Daily article on the fine points of
+fellatio
+either make crude jokes, dismiss the article as either a sophomoric
+exercise in tweak-the-fogies or shocking evidence of the depravity of
+today’s youth.

+

I think both are missing the real point. Well, OK, the
+tweak-the-fogies camp is not completely off base, but there is
+something the Natalie Krinsky who wrote this item of tweakery
+understands that they don’t seem to. And that is this: today,
+sexual competence is a mainstream virtue — part of the
+normal toolkit of adults, like table manners or choosing appropriate
+clothes.

+

And by “sexual competence” I specifically do not mean just the
+ability to get laid, but being good in bed once you get there. Sexual
+competence includes the ability to give and receive sexual pleasure.
+It includes the ability to express one’s playfulness, affection, lust,
+passion, and love towards a sexual partner with physical acts; to give
+pleasure with behavior that is considered, purposed, and conscious,
+and which expresses pride in and enjoyment of one’s own sexual
+nature.

+

In the dark and backward abysm of time (that is, before about
+1973), nice people weren’t really supposed to work at being
+good in bed. Only prostitutes, gigolos and sex symbols were allowed
+the privilege of treating sex as a conscious art of pleasure.
+Everybody else was, essentially, only allowed to be good in bed only
+by accident of endowment.

+

There was a limited exception for married couples and other people
+passionately in love. They were permitted to improve their sexual
+competence as long as the goal was to affirm the relationship. The
+idea that competence at giving sexual pleasure could be a good in
+itself, even in a one-night stand, was simply not part of our culture.
+The outraged critics of Ms. Krinsky’s article seem still to be living in
+that world.

+

But the reality around them has changed. Alex Comfort’s The
+Joy of Sex was probably the breakthrough, nearly thirty years
+ago now. Today’s college kids have grown up in an environment in
+which questions of sexual competence (and expectations about it) go
+way beyond “will-she/won’t-she?” and “can he avoid coming too soon if
+she does?”.

+

Today, even teenage boys and girls expect each other to cultivate
+sexual competence; those who don’t are simply not competitive in the
+dating-and-mating game. Ms. Krinsky’s article may have been intended
+to tweak the fogies — but it also describes learning behavior that is
+perfectly adaptive for today’s environment, because oral sex is a
+gateway behavior for the aspiring hedonist.

+

That is, learning how to give good head is usually the first
+pleasure-giving behavior in sex that is not a straight-line
+elaboration of instinct. Kissing, caressing, and intercourse are
+wired in; one can refine technique, but the behavioral basis is
+already present. Oral sex is the usually the first behavior sexual
+hedonists acquire that has to be completely learned.

+

A significant and related fact is that taking pleasure
+from giving head has to be learned, by a kind of transference from the
+pleasure taken by one’s partner. Experienced fellatrices and
+cunnilinguists may learn to take direct sensual pleasure in the act,
+but that usually follows from and is conditioned in by the
+transference effect rather than leading it. Thus, for beginners,
+giving oral sex is a particularly unselfish and adult skill.

+

Finally, for most pairs of partners oral sex is the most important
+method of orgasmic gratification other than vaginal intercourse. So
+learning to give good head is not just a gateway behavior, it’s one
+that tends to remain central in the adult repertoire.

+

Therefore, a teenage girl teaching herself how to give a good
+blowjob is not merely learning how to give a blowjob. She is
+declaring her intention to acquire the (now mainstream) virtue of
+sexual competence. She is matter-of-factly reaching not just for a
+particular skill that she knows will be expected of her as an adult,
+but to learn the attitude and sensitivity that will take her
+further on the path of sexual ability. She is growing herself
+up.

+

Looked at this way, it’s hard to see why anyone living in 2002
+should find Ms. Krinsky’s report of her self-training exceptionable. One
+might just as well object to her teaching herself how to cook, or drive,
+or dance.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20020525080800.blog b/20020525080800.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..82ca8ea --- /dev/null +++ b/20020525080800.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Women With Guns +

James Rummel why men keep teaching women to shoot, despite the fact that they tend to outdo us at this manly pursuit.

+

As a man who makes something of a hobby of teaching woman to shoot, I can answer in two ways:

+

One: Women need to learn to shoot more than men do. Men have a 2:1 advantage in upper-body strength over women. Most criminal assailants are men. While we Y-chromosome types have a fair chance of fighting the average assailant off without technological help, women do not. I teach women to shoot on the principle that the only good rapist is a dead one.

+

Two: A pretty woman with a gun in her hand is way sexier than one without. Why this is I don’t know, but I do know that I am far from the only male with this reaction. There was that legendary video of bikini-clad models firing automatic weapons…

+

Which reason is more important? Let’s just observe that all interesting behavior is overdetermined and leave it at that.

diff --git a/20020526060500.blog b/20020526060500.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0ff28be --- /dev/null +++ b/20020526060500.blog @@ -0,0 +1,70 @@ +Arm and Assimilate +

A current Weekly Standard article,
+Crime Without Punishment, observes that European crime rates are
+soaring to levels that match or exceed the U.S.’s even while U.S crime
+rates decline for the tenth consecutive year. Schadenfreude
+is not a pretty emotion, but it’s hard not to feel a twinge of it
+after so many years of listening to snotty Europeans lecture us
+Americans on how U.S. crime rates demonstrate that we are a nation of
+violent barbarians who can be saved only if we swallow European social
+policies entire.

+

The article proposes as an explanation that local control of
+policing is more effective than Europe’s system of large centralized
+police agencies. This may well be true; in fact, it probably is true.
+But it fails to explain the time variance — because that structural
+difference is not new, but the flipover in relative crime rates
+between the U.S. and Europe is recent.

+

If that’s not what is going on, what is? The article passes over
+two potential explanations far too quickly. One: differences in
+patterns of civilian firearms ownership. Two: the novel presence of
+large unassimilated minority groups in European cities.

+

The article correctly notes that “John Lott has shown that greater
+gun ownership reduces crime” but then dismisses this with “gun
+ownership levels are about the same as they were when crime hit its
+all-time highs in America 30 years ago”. However, the
+distribution of firearms has changed in relevant ways. As
+Gary Kleck noted ten years ago, the composition of the U.S. firearms
+stock in the early 1970s was dominated by rifles and shotguns.
+Nowadays it is dominated by pistols. Americans, aided by a recent
+state-level trend towards right-to-carry laws, are packing concealed
+weapons on the street in greater numbers than ever before — and those
+are the weapons known to have the most dramatic effect in suppressing
+crime. Indeed, one of the principal results of Lott’s regression
+analysis is that encouraging civilians to carry concealed is both a
+cheaper and a more effective way to deter crime than increasing police
+budgets.

+

The article dismisses immigration with “violence and theft have
+also spiked in countries that let in few immigrants”. Again, there is
+an issue of distribution here. American experience tells us that it
+is not the absolute number of unassimilated poor that matters, but the
+extent to which they are concentrated in subsidized ghettos with
+little contact with the mainstream and no incentive to assimilate.
+After the repeated news stories observing that skyrocketing crime in Paris
+is largely a phenomenon of Arab thug-boys from bleak government-run
+housing projects, this should not be a difficult concept to grasp.

+

What’s new in Europe is not comparatively poor policing, but rather
+the combination of two trends: laws disarming civilians and the
+formation of persistent, crime-breeding ghetto cultures analogous to
+the U.S.’s urban underclass. Both trends are clearest in Great
+Britain, where violent assaults and hot burglaries have shot up 44%
+since handguns were banned in 1996, and police now find they have to
+go armed to counter gangs of automatic-weapon-wielding thugs in the
+slum areas of Manchester and other big cities.

+

The prescription seems clear: arm and assimilate. Arm the victims
+before they become victims and assimilate the criminals before they
+become criminals. Raising the frequency of civilian concealed carry
+of firearms will deter crime, just as it does in the U.S.
+Assimilating the new wave of poor Third-World immigrants and breaking
+up the ghettos will drain the stagnant pools in which crime
+breeds.

+

And the next Euro-snob to lecture me on how America’s “gun culture”
+causes crime is going to get both barrels of this prescription right
+in his face…

+

UPDATE: The Boston Globe is running a story on the failure
+of gun control in Great Britain.

+

UPDATE: A reader points out that I was inexplicit about what has
+led to the formation of a ghettoized underclass in Europe’s cities.
+It is, of course, the same blunder that started the same process in
+American cities forty years ago — the social-welfare state,
+subsidizing poverty.

+

Blogspot Comments

diff --git a/20020529064500.blog b/20020529064500.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a7d76c6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020529064500.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Teen Sex vs. Adult Resentment +

A wise and cynical friend of mine once described the motivation behind puritanism as “the fear that someone might be fucking and getting away with it”. I think the subtext of the periodic public panics about teen sex has always been resentment that sexy young things just might be getting away with it — enjoying each others’ bodies thoughtlessly, without consequences, without pregnancy, without marriage, without “meaningful relationships”, without guilt, without sin.

+

The traditional rationalizations for adult panic about teen sex are teen pregnancy and STDs. But if teen pregnancy really had much to do with adult panic, anti-sex rhetoric would have changed significantly after reliable contraception became available. It hasn’t. Similarly, we don’t hear a lot of adult demand for STD testing in high schools. No; something else is going on here, something more emotional and deeper than pragmatic fears.

+

Conservatives and liberals alike are attached to the idea that sex ought to be controlled, be heavy, have consequences. The Judeo-Christian tradition of repression, which yokes sex to marriage and reproduction, is still powerful among conservatives. Liberals have replaced it with an ethic in which sex is OK when it is harnessed to building relationships or personal growth or therapy, but must always be undertaken with adult mindfulness.

+

Both camps are terrified of mindless sex, of hedonism, of the pure friction fuck. Lurking beneath both Judeo-Christian and secularized taboos is a fear that too much pleasure will damn us — or reduce us to the status of animals, so fixated on the drug of orgasm that we will become unfit for marriage and society and adult responsibility. What has not changed beneath contingent worries about pregnancy and STDs is the more fundamental fear that pleasure corrupts.

+

And beneath that fear lurks something uglier — the envy that dares not speak its name. The unpalatable truth is that a teenager’s “immature” hormone-pumped capacity to have lots of mindless sex makes adults jealous. The conscious line is that the kids have got to be stopped before they have more sex than is good for them — the unconscious line is that they’ve got to be stopped before they have more fun than we can stand.

+

Thus the curious sense of relief that lurks behind a lot of the propaganda about the dangers of AIDS, even the version of it retailed by lifestyle liberals. Being able to tell the kids that they shouldn’t casually fuck around because it will kill them feels good; it neatly rationalizes our resentment of their capacity for pleasure.

+

But resentment makes for lousy morality just as surely as it makes for lousy politics. It prevents us from forming rational strategies to avoid the bad side-effects of teen sex, mires us in denial and cant. The real issue here is not the teens’ experience but our envy of their youth, innocence, and sexual capacity. And don’t think the kids don’t sense this!

+

Teenagers, whatever their other failings, are keenly attuned to the smell of adult hypocrisy; they can tell when our stated reasons for telling them to keep their pants zipped are just cover, even when they lack the experience to understand what’s really bothering us. By bullshitting them, we forfeit our own moral authority. We damage our ability to intervene when the kids really do have to be protected from their impulses.

+

There may be good reasons to stop teens from screwing each other with the avidity that nature intended. But we adults won’t be able to focus on those, or make a case for them that is honest and persuasive, until we stop kidding ourselves about why teen sex makes us panic. Until we face our sexual fears and resentments squarely, the kids won’t listen. And, arguably, shouldn’t listen.

diff --git a/20020601060500.blog b/20020601060500.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7ac4bd2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020601060500.blog @@ -0,0 +1,66 @@ +Arm the Passengers +

The recent controversy over arming airline pilots against a
+possible repetition of the 9/11 atrocity misses a crucial problem that
+makes arming pilots relatively ineffective: terrorists would know in
+advance where the guns are, and be able to game against that.

+

Let’s say you are a terrorist executing a hijacking. You know the pilots
+are armed. Then here are your tactics — you send the pilots a message that
+you will begin shooting cabin crew and passengers, one every five minutes,
+until the pilots throw their guns into the main cabin. Just to make sure,
+you split your gang into an A team and a B team. After the pilots have
+thrown out some guns, you send the A team into the cockpit. If the pilots
+resist, the B team kills more people.

+

Sky marshals can be taken out in a similar way. Your B team, armed
+with knives, breaks cover and announces the hijacking. The sky
+marshals (if there are any present; they’re now flying on less than 1%
+of planes, and can’t be trained fast enough for that figure to go up
+significantly in the foreseeable future) break cover. Now your A
+team, armed with guns, breaks cover and disposes of the sky marshals.
+Game over.

+

Anyone who thinks either scenario can be prevented by keeping
+firearms off-board should put down that crack pipe now.
+Tiger team exercises after 9/11 have repeatedly
+demonstrated that the new, improved airport security has had
+effectively zero impact on a determined bad-guy’s ability to sneak
+weapons past checkpoints — it’s still easy. Despite government spin,
+there is no prospect this will change; the underlying problem is just
+too hard.

+

For terrorists to be effectively deterred, they need to face a
+conterthreat they cannot scope out in advance. That’s why the right
+solution is to arm the passengers, not just the pilots.

+

Now, as a terrorist, you would be facing an unknown number of guns
+potentially pointed at you from all directions. Go ahead; take that
+flight attendant hostage. You can’t use her to make people give up
+weapons neither you nor she knows they have. You have to assume
+you’re outnumbered, and you dare not turn your back on
+anyone, because you don’t know who might be packing.

+

The anti-gun bien pensants of the world wet their pants at
+the thought of flying airplanes containing hundreds of armed
+civilians. They would have you believe that this would be a sure
+recipe for carnage on every flight, an epidemic of berserk yahoos
+blowing bullet holes through innocent bystanders and the cabin walls.
+When you ask why this didn’t happen before 1971 when there were no
+firearms restrictions on airplanes, they evade the question.

+

The worst realistic case from arming passengers is that some gang
+of terrorist pukes tries to bust a move anyway, and innocent
+bystanders get killed by stray bullets while the passengers are taking
+out the terrorists. That would be bad — but, post-9/11, the major
+aim of air security can no longer be saving passenger lives. Instead,
+it has to be preventing the use of airplanes as weapons of mass
+destruction. Thus: we should arm the passengers to save the lives of
+thousands more bystanders on the ground.

+

And, about that stray-bullet thing. Airplanes aren’t balloons.
+They don’t pop when you put a round through the fuselage. A handful
+of bullet holes simply cannot leak air fast enough to be dangerous;
+there would be plenty of time to drop the plane into the troposphere.
+To sidestep the problem, encourage air travelers to carry fragmenting
+ammunition like Glaser rounds.

+

Think of it. No more mile-long security lines, no more obnoxious
+baggage searches, no more women getting groped by bored security
+guards, no more police-state requirement that you show an ID before
+boarding, no more flimsy plastic tableware. Simpler, safer, faster
+air travel with a bullet through the head reserved for terrorists.

+

Extending this lesson to other circumstances, like when we’re
+not surrounded by a fuselage, is left as an exercise for
+the reader…

+

Blogspot comment

diff --git a/20020603082500.blog b/20020603082500.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..29e70a1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020603082500.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +We are all Jews now +

This afternoon I was reading a quote from a woman who had left a comment on Tim Blair’s weblog. She wrote:

+

rld, I feel it’s my duty as a woman to wear clingier clothing, flirt more outrageously, have more orgasms, and get on top more often. In short, anything that’s taboo to the islamofascists.”

+

Boo-yah, sister! This struck me as a wonderful example of what computer hackers and science-fiction fans call a `ha ha only serious’, which is just the the opposite of a `ha ha only kidding’. It’s a wonderfully multi-leveled utterance.

+

Generally when people start out with “As an X, I feel it’s my duty” one expects the followthrough to be some ennobling exhortation to self-sacrifice and a stiff upper lip. The sheer cheekiness of following instead with “gonna get laid more” is wonderful — I can imagine the sister, with a gleam in her eye and a curl of her lip, daring anybody to call her on it, and daring anybody not to notice that she is one hot chick who knows exactly how to use what she’s got.

+

An idiot, or a conservative of the ramrod-up-the-ass school, would stop there, take her rhetorical flip-the-bird at islamofascists as more than an excuse for narcissism-tinged self-display or a thin bit of patter, and perhaps splutter with jowly indignation. Me, I got respect for this sister. I think she meant every word she said and was being wicked smart.

+

The true mindfucking beauty of this quote only becomes apparent when you hold both meanings (the sexual self-display and the the anti-islamofascist flip-the-bird) in your mind at once, and allow each to play off the other in a spirit of intentional irony. Our sister has uttered the perfect sexual battle cry for the islamofascists’ occidentalist nightmare — and I think she knows it.

+

Since 9/11 it has become easier to notice that Islamic fear and hatred of the West (and of America as its political and cultural hyperpower) is rooted in a hostility to all the freedoms and self-indulgences of urban western civilization — commerce, mixed populations, artistic freedom, sexual license, scientific pursuits, leisure, personal safety, wealth. Indeed, one of the circumstances that justifies the term “islamofascism” is that this catalog of resentments is exactly that of classical fascism. And the icon of subversive modernity, to all fascists everywhere, has been the Jew — rootless, cosmopolitan, urbane, commercial, and (in anti-Semitic propaganda) sexual seducer of the pure.

+

Two perceptive commentators (op. cit.) have written “Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Hitler, Japanese agrarian fascists, and of course Islamists all extolled the simple life of the pious peasant, pure at heart, uncorrupted by city pleasures, used to hard work and self-denial, tied to the soil, and obedient to authority. Behind the idyll of rural simplicity lies the desire to control masses of people, but also an old religious rage, which goes back at least as far as the ancient superpower Babylon.”

+

By saying “fuck me”, the sister is saying a big “fuck you” to all that. She is choosing to embody the whore of Babylon for reasons that mingle her own desire with deliberate defiance of the bearded patriarchs and their stormtroopers. She is acting out the culture war as sexual politics. She is not merely a hedonist or a rebel (though either would be bad enough) but an ultimately enraging combination of the two, conscious blasphemy written with the body under those clinging clothes.

+

In the fevered mind of any islamofascist, the sister is certainly urban and probably Jewish. In fact, we are all Jews now, every one of us in the West. This is what lies behind the standard-issue Arab-world mutterings about U.S. policy being controlled by Jews and Israelis, and the tremendous wave of pro-Jewish, pro-Israeli solidarity in the U.S. after 9/11. The alliance both we and the Islamists are sensing is more than geopolitical; it’s founded in everybody’s gut-level understanding that rage against the Jews and rage against modernity have become effectively synonymous.

+

Yes, we’re all Jews now, even blue-eyed Germano-Celtic goyim like me. We are going to be everything the islamofascists fear and hate, and we’re going to glory in it. We’re going to embody all the worst nightmares of those butt-ignorant ragheads in Al-Qaeda. We’re going to kill them, we’re going to subvert their children with MTV, and we’re going to teach their women to wear clingy clothing and say “fuck me” and “fuck you” to men whenever they damn well feel like it.

+

And, sister? Here’s my ha ha only serious, offered in the same spirit as yours. You are a warrior. I salute you. And if you want to commit exactly the kind of scandalous, adulterous, hedonistic, casual sex best calculated to drive fascists and patriarchs up a wall sometime, I’m your guy. You can be on top.

diff --git a/20020605171400.blog b/20020605171400.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..08a3978 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020605171400.blog @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ +Who’s a warblogger? Blogotypology considered +

My good buddy Doc Searls says I’m
+a warblogger, not a techblogger. Truth is I’ve never thought of
+myself either way. I had only the vaguest notion what a `warblogger’
+is until I followed his links to the definitional discussion. I write
+stuff related to 9/11 because it’s one of the definining events of our
+day, but I didn’t start blogging particularly because I wanted to
+comment on the war. Y’all may have noticed that I write about sex and
+guns a lot. Nothing about witchcraft yet, but give it time… :-) +

+

The blogotypological distinction that makes the most
+sense to me is “thinker” vs. “linker”. I know which of those
+camps I’m in. I’m a thinker, an essayist. I’d rather write about
+my original thinking than reflect or index other peoples’ words.
+VodkaPundit was right on when he compared me to Steve Den Beste over at U.S.S. Clueless. Glenn Reynolds is, of course, the king of the linkers (though
+he goes into thinker mode off-blog).

+

I’d actually say there’s a
+third setting on this switch; “diarist”, someone who blogs
+essentially as a public journal. Like Den Beste, I’m not a diarist; you wouldn’t find ramblings about my beagle or my infant daughter here even if I had either.
+My personal life appears in this blog only insofar as it’s the
+frame in which my ideas happen. I can imagine writing personal journalism, but it’s not my default style.
+Asparagirl, on
+the other hand, is a good paradigmatic example of a diarist; her ideas are embedded in a narrative of her life.

+

Of course, people do mix modes. James Lileks is
+a diarist/thinker, or thinker/diarist, and
+Andrew Sullivan
+oscillates among all three modes in a (dare I say it?)
+gaily promiscuous fashion. But most bloggers seem to
+have a base style that’s one of these three, from which they
+may make occasional excursions but to which they
+inevitably return.

+

As Doc points out, I’m not a techblogger either. Technology
+evangelism is what I do off-blog; Armed and
+Dangerous is for the writing that doesn’t fit that box, just
+as a lot of other bloggers treat the medium as an outlet for
+whatever is not their day job. Maybe that’s another
+distinction we need; `problogger’ (someone like Jonah Goldberg
+whose blogging is a seamless extension of his day job) versus `playblogger’ (someone who blogs to let off steam that their day-job channels don’t have a good vent for).

+

While the best I can say about the term `warblogger’ is that
+it’s not completely useless, `techblogger’ seems to me to be a
+category that’s likely to survive as the medium matures. So
+does the thinker/linker/diarist distinction, and the playblogger/problogger flag bit.

+

I’ll end with the obligatory abjurgation not to take any such
+terminology too seriously. We’re all writers, a prickly bunch,
+and we’re all to some degree category-busters by nature or
+we wouldn’t be here in the infancy of a new medium at all. Still…I suspect that more definite blogotypes will emerge as people explore the space of available styles and discover which ones
+are most effective at communication.

diff --git a/20020607172200.blog b/20020607172200.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5784ca2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020607172200.blog @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +Why does porn got to hurt so bad? +

A couple days ago I chased a link over to unablogger and found myself unexpectedly confronted by pictures of naked women. This picture, in particular. And I noticed something unusual — which was that I liked it.

+

Don’t get me wrong, here. I’m a functioning heterosexual male; I enjoy looking at naked women. It’s most pictures of naked women I can’t stand. I’ve found by experience that most of the vast amounts of pornography available on the Internet leave me feeling more repelled than aroused. And not out of puritanism either; I have no intrinsic moral objection to porn, and I judge that the consequentialist arguments against it don’t stand the reality test.

+

No, the truth is that I find most porn subtly and deeply ugly. Unablogger’s picture (which happens to be of a Czech model named Veronika Zemanova) was a sufficiently glaring exception that it stimulated me to think seriously about why.

+

It was immediately clear to me that Ms. Zemanova’s physique was not the primary reason this photograph struck me as an exception. Ms. Zemanova unquestionably has a very shapely and appealing body and a pretty face. However, I have seen many photographs of women with equally lovely bodies and equally pretty faces that I nevertheless found ugly and unstimulating as entire compositions, without being completely clear about why.

+

My initial reaction was reinforced when I searched for other images of Ms. Zemanova and discovered ugly generic porn. The difference, clearly, was not in Ms. Zemanova’s body but in way the attitude and setting — one might say the implied narrative — of her pictures differed. Time for some analysis…

+

Like any good scientist, I proceeded to do some research. I surfed to a well-known porn index site and random-sampled the content, sticking to pictures of single unclad women in order to control some obvious variables. Using my own hypothalamus as a calibration instrument, I graded the samples into “excellent” (I want to keep a copy) “good” (pleasant to look at) “mediocre” (mechanically arousing but unpleasant) and “bad” (just plain unpleasant). There were very, very few “excellents”, and almost none of the caliber of Unablogger’s image of Ms. Zemanova.

+

After the first grading pass, I re-sorted the images in an attempt to compensate for the presence of particular physical features that I know are powerful sexual releasers for me (red hair is an example). I did this because, to the extent possible, I wanted to try to separate my autonomic arousal reaction to the images from my esthetic and psychological reaction. So I downgraded images in which the women had obvious, powerful releaser traits for me.

+

Now, this was hardly a controlled experiment. And it’s just me. But once I corrected for my autonomic biases, a clear pattern emerged, especially in the “bad” category. Many images contained elements that were, at least to me, anti-arousing. Over-styled hair — especially over-styled blonde hair. Fake pearls. Strappy high heels being worn by otherwise naked women. Feather boas and tacky hooker lingerie. Bloated silicone breasts. Excessive makeup; excessive makeup was, in fact a rule even in most otherwise uncompromised images.

+

The pattern was not surprising; I had had some insight about this before without thinking it through completely. Bad porn is full of the fetish signifiers of sexual allure, to the point where they crowd out the reality of sexual allure. Porn models often look more like women trying desperately hard to be sexy than they look like sexy women. There is a wrongness there.

+

Contrast this picture of a model named India Allen with Ms. Zemanova’s picture. I have no doubt that Ms. Allen is quite a fetching young woman; indeed, I chose her image because on the physical-traits level she can compete with Ms. Zemanova quite handily. But this image is not good porn; it is crowded with elements that distract one from Ms. India’s native sexiness. The silly carousel horse. The glare spot behind her left hip. The teddy artfully half-removed despite the fact that she is obviously not planning to strip for sex in the immediate future.

+

I can’t speak for other men, but my gut reaction is “What is all this bullshit?” Where the Unablogger photo of Ms. Zemanova offers us a narrative about sex (“I’m taking my clothes off because I want to have sex with the person I’m looking at — yes, that would be you.”) Ms. Allen’s offers us a narrative about being sexy — looking alluring in a fantasy context that makes actual sex quite unlikely. How many of us, after all, have ever gotten laid anywhere near a carousel horse?

+

And typical porn is actually far worse than this. Mostly the models have a vacant-eyed, stunned look to them. They frequently contort themselves into bizarre positions that would make sex impossible and aren’t really plausible as a stage of foreplay either. Or they sprawl, surrounded by fetish objects, passively waiting to be fucked. They don’t smile; their faces are either mindlessly slack or locked in a rictus of simulated passion as obviously fake as a three-dollar bill.

+

As I looked at more bad-porn images, I found myself waking up to a deep bewilderment. How could these pictures arouse anyone who was actually paying attention to them? Why is there a market for this crap?

+

When I remember the good sex I’ve had, or imagine the good sex I might have, my head is not populated by vacant-eyed women surrounded by fetish objects and passively waiting to be fucked. No; my fantasies, and my experience, is of women who are intelligent horny animals like me; live-eyed, smiling, fully awake and quite ready to seize the initiative if I drop it, thank you. For real women, the meaning of the sex is the sex, not the ooh-look-I’m-hot posing that goes before it. The Unablogger image of Ms. Zemanova looks like she has a real woman’s attitude; most of her competitors’ pictures (and indeed most of her own) don’t.

+

Bad porn is superficially sexual in a way as stylized as Kabuki theater, but deeply anti-erotic. To be aroused by it, you have to be reading the code that tells you are supposed to be aroused — the artificial boobs, the decorticated stares, the garter belts. If you delete or mask out that code, no actual sexual charge remains — there is nothing left that connects your desire to the subject of the picture.

+

Mediocre porn, though mechanically arousing enough to facilitate masturbation by someone with a case of serious hormonal back-pressure, has only the subject’s body parts and the viewer’s autonomic response going for it. For very few men is it plausible to have sex with a lipstick-and-eyeshadow-wearing starlet/bimbo type with 40DD breasts who’s somehow had her skin lacquered to a gloss that resembles model-airplane dope and just happens to be bent over a motorcycle while stark naked. Sorry, no sale; a real woman would at least have her hair a bit mussed.

+

The fetishistic perfection of such scenes actually puts distance between the subject and the viewer’s desire. It removes the subject from any real world in which one might meet her and actually take her to bed. Autonomic response to the picture itself is the limit of the possible.

+

Good porn, by contrast, conveys a sense of plausibility. You believe the women in it exist. You can imagine meeting them. You can imagine liking one of them, having her like you, and the two of you sliding off somewhere for a mutually happy fuck. Being aroused by such a picture makes emotional sense; you don’t have to either fight or ignore any sense that the subject is an inaccessible fantasy.

+

The contrast is perfectly evident in two pictures of Ms. Zemonova. In this one, she looks like an unusually sexy but normal young woman in the act of removing her panties while she looks at the viewer. The narrative is clear; she is stripping for action, and you are the fortunate object of her desire. Women do this sort of thing. If you are not a virgin, you’ve probably seen it happen, though perhaps never with a partner quite as exuberantly mammalian as Ms. Zemanova. This is a plausible scenario.

+

In this picture, by contrast, Ms. Zemanova is a heavily cosmeticized, unsettlingly glossy womanoid-thing in an unlikely position, masturbating herself and gazing off into space over your right shoulder. You are not involved. Nothing like this would be even remotely plausible in your bathroom — if only because sensible women masturbate in their bedrooms, where they can collapse onto something more comfortable than a tile floor when they orgasm. This picture is not presenting a plausible scenario, unless you are the sort of wealthy British rock star who builds huge custom bathrooms in which to boff acquiescent supermodels.

+

This image makes an ironic example of good porn because it demonstrates that the apparent lack of artifice in good porn can be just as misleading as the fetish objects of bad porn. This innocent-looking girl-next-door posing as though she’s giving her boyfriend a private thrill is actually the star character of a large and very raunchy German porn site. While one can hope she has nevertheless remained as sweet-natured and unjaded as she looks, betting money on this possibility would be imprudent at best.

+

Nor, despite the partial clothedness of my two examples, am I arguing that good porn has to be soft-core, either. This woman is leaving little to the imagination. But she has a nice smile — something which, in a medium supposedly devoted to pleasure, is astonishingly rare. I searched through many hundreds of images and found almost none that combined full nudity with a simple human smile. Symbolically, the first one I found had disappeared by the following day, and I won’t lay odds that the link above will stay good.

+

Very well, the facts are in hand; as many of them as I’m likely to get, anyway — I’ve had as much exposure to bad porn as I can tolerate. Let’s return to the central question. Why does pornography have to hurt so bad? Why is there so much bad porn out there and so little good stuff?

+

At one level the answer is fairly obvious. Like the purveyors of any other commodity, the people who produce porn have to respond to demand. Indeed, because production is cheap and the sales cycle is short, market selection can be expected to drive production to match demand very rapidly. There is no evidence of massive market-rigging, and good porn is no more expensive to produce than bad porn — in fact, it may be less expensive (the same models can be used for good and bad, and the good stuff needs less in the way of elaborate props). Therefore, if most porn is bad, it’s because most porn consumers want it to be bad.

+

Let’s unpack that. The trash percentage of porn is so high that, unless the producers are collectively insane, most consumers must actually want images of women who are doing the bad-porn thing. That most porn consumers actually like the trash is further suggested by the tacky, gaudy, crude design of almost all porn websites. They scream, they leer, they spew misspellings and degrading language at high volume. The sheer aggressive ugliness is far too consistent to be the result of incompetence.

+

So the real question is this: why do most porn consumers seek trash? Why do they buy the fetish objects, the implausable poses, the unobtainable women? Why welcome such an anti-erotic distance between their sexual fantasies and their sexual reality?

+

We can certainly imagine how it might be different. Why don’t porn consumers choose images they might plausibly act out, with partners rather sexier than the ones they have but still attainable? In fact some do; most porn sites have an `amateurs’ category — but it’s marketed like a minority taste along with pictures of older women and fat women.

+

I am forced to the unhappy conclusion that plausibility is exactly what most porn consumers don’t want. That somehow they feel better when their fantasies are safely distant from reality. All the possible reasons I can imagine for this are very sad.

+

One reason could be simple old-fashioned sexual guilt. If you believe sex is sinful and desire is dirty, if you have that old madonna/whore complex, than you may be more comfortable thinking of porn models as whores. You may indeed, be so conditioned to associate sex with sin that you can’t get it off without feeling wicked first.

+

A more plausible construction for most potential porn consumers today is that they have issues about female power. Men who get lots of attention from attractive three-dimensional women are not likely to be buying porn-site subscriptions. Therefore, we can safely assume that the consumers who define demand patterns for porn producers generally feel that their sex life is hemmed in by female choices and the female power to refuse. Defining the objects of their desire as “cum-sucking sluts”, to be used but not related to any emotional way, is a kind of equalizing move in the sexual-power game.

+

This theory differs sharply from conventional feminist critiques of porn, in which porn seen as a ratification of existing power relationships that privilege males. The difference is testable. If the conventional theory is correct, porn should be becoming more and more irrelevant as women become more independent — or, at least, assume the nostalgic character of references to a golden age of male privilege that has already passed.

+

On the other hand, if bad porn is a compensation for male feelings of powerlessness, we should expect it to become steadily tackier, uglier, more strident, and more popular in direct proportion to the degree that female power in the real world increases.

+

I think it’s pretty clear which of those worlds we are living in. The gloomy conclusion is that porn is likely to get worse before it gets better. If it ever does.

+

UPDATE: Have since corresponded with “German Lucy”, the woman whose picture I described as an ironic example of good porn. It’s nice when cynicism turns out to be a mistake; she really is like that.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20020610185900.blog b/20020610185900.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5f82790 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020610185900.blog @@ -0,0 +1,70 @@ +After reading too much political news +

Top Ten Reasons I’m Not A (Left-)Liberal:

+
    +
  1. Gun control. Liberals are completely wrong about this. A fair number
    +of them know better, too, but they sponsor lies about it as a form of class
    +warfare against conservative-leaning gun owners.
    2. +
  2. Nuclear power. They’re wrong about this, too, and the cost in
    +both dollars and human deaths by pollution and other fossil-fuel
    +side-effects has been enormous.
    3. +
  3. Affirmative action. These programs couldn’t be a more diabolical or
    +effective plan for plan for entrenching racial prejudice if the Aryan
    +Nations had designed them.
    4. +
  4. Abortion: The liberals’ looney-toon feminist need to believe that
    +a fetus one second before birth is a parasitic lump of tissue with no
    +rights, but a fetus one second afterwards is a full human, has done
    +half the job of making a reasoned debate on abortion
    +nigh-impossible.
    5. +
  5. Communism. I haven’t forgiven the Left for sucking up to the monstrous
    +evil that was the Soviet Union. And I never will.
    6. +
  6. Socialism. Liberals have never met a tax, a government
    +intervention, or a forcible redistribution of wealth they didn’t like.
    +Their economic program is Communism without the guts to admit it.
    7. +
  7. Junk science. No medicical study is too bogus and no environmental
    +scare too fraudalent for liberals. If it rationalizes bashing
    +capitalism or slathering on another layer of regulatory bureaucracy,
    +they’ll take it.
    8. +
  8. Defining deviancy down. Liberals are in such a desperate rush to
    +embrace the `victimized by society’ and speak the language of
    +compassion that they’ve forgotten how to condemn harmful,
    +self-destructive and other-destructive behavior.
    9. +
  9. William Jefferson Clinton. Sociopathic liar, perjurer, sexual predator.
    +There was nothing but a sucking narcissistic vacuum where his principles
    +should have been. Liberals worship him.
    10. +
  10. Liberals, by and large, are fools.
    11. +
+

Top Ten Reasons I’m Not A Conservative:

+
    +
  1. Pornography. The complete absence of evidence that exposure to
    +sexually-explicit material is harmful to children or anyone else doesn’t
    +stop conservatives from advocating massive censorship.
    2. +
  2. Drugs. We found out that Prohibition was a bad idea back in the
    +1930s — all it did was create a huge and virulent criminal class, erode
    +respect for the law, and corrupt our politics. Some people never learn.
    3. +
  3. Creationism. I don’t know who I find more revolting, the drooling
    +morons who actally believe creationism or the intelligent panderers
    +who know better but provide them with political cover for their
    +religious-fundamentalist agenda in return for votes.
    4. +
  4. Abortion. The conservatives’ looney-toon religious need to
    +believe that a fertilized gamete is morally equivalent to a human
    +being has done the other half of making a reasoned debate on abortion
    +nigh-impossible.
    5. +
  5. Racism. I haven’t forgiven the Right for segregation, Jim Crow laws,
    +and lynching blacks. And I never will.
    6. +
  6. Sexism. Way too much conservative thought still reads like an
    +apologia for keeping women barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.
    7. +
  7. Anti-science. Stem cells, therapeutic cloning — it doesn’t matter
    +how many more diabetes, cancer and AIDS patients have to die to
    +protect the anti-abortion movement’s ideological flanks. Knowledge —
    +who needs it? Conservatives would try suppressing astronomy
    +if the telescope had just been invented.
    8. +
  8. Family values. Conservatives are so desperate to reassert the
    +repressive `normalcy’ they think existed in Grand-dad’s time that they
    +pretend we can undo the effects of the automobile, television, the
    +Pill, and the Internet.
    9. +
  9. Ronald Wilson Reagan. A B-movie actor who thought ketchup was
    +a vegetable. His grip on reality was so dangerously weak that the
    +Alzheimer’s made no perceptible difference. Conservatives worship him.
    10. +
  10. Conservatives, by and large, are villains.
    11. +
+

a href=”http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&commentid=77590690″>Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20020613154600.blog b/20020613154600.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..947e66f --- /dev/null +++ b/20020613154600.blog @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +Bad porn reprise +

Many people wrote me with comments on my essay
+Why Does Porn Got To Hurt So Bad?. For all of those who
+sent praise, thank you. It’s actually nice to know there are so many
+people who would like to reject the bad-porn aesthetic. For all
+of those who refrained from calling down fire and brimstone on me for messing with smut, also thank you. I’d have ignored you,
+but thank you anyway.

+

I got two responses I thought were particularly interesting.
+One was from a gentleman who works as a pornographer. He
+opined that I overestimated the porn industry by supposing that
+bad porn reflected market demand. The real problem (he claims)
+is that it’s hard to find women who simultaneously don’t look
+hard and jaded yet are willing to bare all for the camera. Most
+outfits, he said, don’t even try. They settle for the fake-pearl-and-synthoboob look out of laziness, knowing it’s crap
+but will sell well enough.

+

This doesn’t explain to me why, if Veronika Zemanova can look like a girl one might willingly take to bed in one picture and an unnatural womanoid-thing in another, they don’t try to photograph
+women like her in the more natural mode more often. But perhaps
+this one was just a trick of the light.

+

Another respondent proposes the interesting theory that the
+girls are dressed (or rather undressed) to look inaccessible
+because if they weren’t, there might be an epidemic of stalking
+as various creeps and wackos tried to get next to them.

+

It would be touching to believe the porn industry cares that
+much about its performers, but I’m skeptical.

+

Finally, I got mail from
+“German Lucy”, who said she was honored to appear in my
+essay and quite enjoyed it. Rather to my astonishment, her email style
+suggests that she really is “as sweet-natured and unjaded as she
+looks”. She answered my questions plausibly and thoughtfully and didn’t even pitch me to sign up for her site.

+

Holy Diogenes, Batman! I think I might have found the
+one honest porn star…

diff --git a/20020616221200.blog b/20020616221200.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d92dc1e --- /dev/null +++ b/20020616221200.blog @@ -0,0 +1,267 @@ +The Elephant in the Bath-House +

Mary Eberstadt’s Weekly Standard article
+The Elephant in the Sacristy shines a strong light on facts that
+will discomfit many of the politically correct. I don’t completely
+agree with her analysis; as Amy Welborn argues, Ms. Eberstadt is too quick to dismiss the role of the
+doctrine of celibacy in creating an ingrown, perfervid, and corrupt sexual
+culture among priests, and too easy on the culture of secrecy and denial
+within which priestly abuse flourished.

+

I would go further than Ms. Eberstadt or Ms. Welborn; I think this
+scandal is grounded in the essentials of Catholic doctrines about sex,
+sin, guilt, and authority. This is not an accidental corruption of
+the church, any more than Stalin was an accidental corruption of
+Communism. Bad moral ideas have consequences, and those consequences
+can be seen most clearly in the human monsters who are both created by
+those ideas and exploiters of them. There is a causal chain that
+connects loathsome creatures like the “Reverend” Paul Shanley directly
+back to the authoritarianism and anti-sexuality of St. Augustine; a
+chain well-analyzed by psychologists such as Stanley Milgram and
+Wilhelm Reich. I suggest that any religion that makes obedience to
+authority a primary virtue and pathologizes sex will produce abuses
+like these as surely as rot breeds maggots.

+

One need not, however, attack the essentials of Catholic doctrine
+to agree with Ms. Eberstadt’s main point: that the dominant media
+culture seems bent on obscuring a central fact about the pattern of
+crimes — which is that they are predominently homosexual abuse by
+priests with a history of homosexual activity. Cases of priestly abuse
+of females of any age are rare (though at least one horrifying tale of
+multiple priests cooperating in the abuse of a teenage girl has
+surfaced from California). The overwhelming majority of the cases
+involve either pederasty (homosexual acts with post-pubescent boys and
+young men) or homosexual pedophilia with pre-pubescent boys as young
+as six years old. Yet you would be hard-put to deduce this from most
+of the vague accounts in the U.S. media, which traffic in terms that
+seem designed to obscure the gender and age of the victims and the
+homosexual orientation of almost all the abusers. Why is that?

+

Apparently, because one of the rules of the U.S.’s dominant media
+culture is that Homosexuals Are Not To Be Stigmatized (I think it’s
+carved in stone right next to “Environmentalists are Saints” and “Gun
+Owners are Redneck Nut-Jobs”). Gay conservative Andrew Sullivan
+famously noted this rule in connection with the Jesse Dirkhising
+murder. We are not supposed to think of either Jesse’s murderers
+or abusive priests as homosexuals; that might reflect badly on a
+journalistically-protected class by associating it with criminal
+behavior.

+

But more than that; the truth the dominant media culture really
+doesn’t want to go near is that pederasty has never been a marked or
+unusual behavior among homosexuals, and even advocates of outright
+pedophilia are not shunned in the homosexual-activist community.

+

The public spin of gay activist groups like Queer Nation is that
+most male homosexual behavior is androphilia, adult-to-adult
+sex between people of comparable ages. And indeed, gay historians agree with
+anthropologists that in the modern West, androphilia is more common
+relative to pederasty and homosexual pedophilia than has been
+historically normal. But another way of putting this is that in most
+other cultures and times, pederasty and pedophilia have been more
+common forms of homosexuality than androphilia.

+

Pederasty, at least, remains a common behavior among modern
+homosexuals. The `twink’ or compliant teenage boy (usually blond,
+usually muscled, depicted in the first dewy flush of postpubescence)
+is the standard fantasy object of gay porn. By contrast, I learned
+from recent
+research that the archetypal fantasy object of straight porn is a
+fully-developed (indeed, usually over-developed) woman in her early
+twenties. And a couple of different lines of evidence (including
+surveys conducted within the gay population by gays) lead to the
+conclusion that older homosexuals actually pursue boys quite a bit
+more frequently than either older lesbians or older heterosexual men
+pursue girls.

+

Homosexual activists, when challenged on this point, like to retort
+that older men nailing barely-nubile teenage girls is far more
+common. And in absolute terms it is — but only because there are
+twenty-five to a hundred times more straight men than there are gay
+men in the world (reliable figures for the incidence of male
+homosexuality range between 1% and 4%). Per capita among gays,
+pederasty is more frequent than among straights by a factor of
+between three and ten, depending on whose statistics you believe —
+and the North American Man-Boy Love Association, actively advocating
+pederasty and pedophilia, is welcomed at gay-pride events
+everywhere.

+

If the prevalence of homosexuality in the Catholic priesthood is
+the elephant in the sacristy, the homosexuality/pederasty/pedophilia
+connection in gay culture is the elephant in the bath-house. No
+amount of denying it’s there is going to make the beast go away.

+

But homosexual activists don’t want straights to see the elephant,
+and no wonder. One of the most persistent themes to show up in
+hostility towards homosexuals is the fear that they will recruit
+impressionable boys who might otherwise have grown up straight. Thus
+their insistance for straight consumption that homosexuality is an
+inborn orientation, not a choice. Thus also their insistance that the
+gay life is all about androphilia, none of that pederasty or
+pedophilia stuff going on here. And thus, they’d rather not have
+anyone thinking about the fact that most priestly abuse is in fact
+classically pederastic and pedophilic behavior by men who behave as
+homosexuals and identify themselves as gay.

+

That there is a pattern in the national media of political
+correctness and spin on behalf of preferred `victim’ groups isn’t
+news, nor is the fact that homosexuals are among those groups. But
+get this: Richard Berke, the Washington editor of the New York
+Times recently said “literally three-quarters of the people
+deciding what’s on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals”.
+There you have it in plain English; gays run the “newspaper of
+record”. Berke made these comments before a gay advocacy group — not
+merely admitting but outright asserting, as a matter of
+pride, that the Times engages in gay-friendly spin
+control. And it has already been well established by statistical
+content studies that the national media tend to follow where they’re
+led by the Times and a handful of other prestige
+newspapers, all broadly similar in editorial policy.

+

The expected next step in this sequence would be for me to start
+screaming about the evil of it all and demand that Something Be Done.
+If I were a conservative, that’s what I’d do. But in fact it’s not
+self-evident that this particular disinformation campaign is worth
+anybody’s time to be concerned about, except as yet another example of
+wearily predictable bias in the dominant media culture. Whether it is
+or not depends upon one’s value judgment about consensual pederasty
+and pedophilia.

+

NAMBLA and its sympathizers in the rest of the gay community think
+they’re engaged in a worthy campaign for sexual liberation. If they
+are right, then the anti-antigay spin on the priestly-abuse scandal is
+arguably analogous to what pro-civil-rights sympathizers in the early
+1960s might have done if there had been a long string of incidents of
+incidents of black men seducing white women, both parties violating
+the miscegenation laws still on the books in many states at that
+time.

+

The pro-spin argument would have run like this: interracial sex is
+taboo for no good reason, so soft-pedaling the race of the people involved
+as much as possible is a justifiable form of suppressio veri —
+not outright lying but being economical with the truth. Our readers will
+be able to deduce the whole truth if they put in even a little effort, but
+be needn’t pave the road for them. By doing this, we will avoid inflaming
+racial bigotry and advance the worthy cause of civil rights.

+

For this analogy to hold good, we need two preconditions. First,
+we must believe that almost all the pederasty/pedophilia between
+priests and boys has been voluntary. Second, we must believe that
+consensual pederasty and pedophilia are not, in fact, harmful to the
+boys involved. Intellectual honesty (and, I’ll admit, a low delight
+on my part in watching prudes and cultural conservatives turn purple
+with indignation) demands that we not dismiss this case without
+looking at the evidence.

+

The modern West condemns pederasty and pedophilia. Our cultural
+ancestors did not always do so; among the Athenian Greeks consensual
+pederastic relationships were praised and thought to be a good deal
+for both parties. Pederasty is socially normal in Afghanistan and
+other parts of the Islamic world; pederasty and pedophilia are also
+un-tabooed in parts of Southeast Asia and in Japan. Where pederasty
+and pedophilia are not taboo, the boys who participate in it
+frequently grow up to form normal heterosexual relationships and marry.
+In fact, it’s the modern West’s hard separation between straights
+who never have sex with other males and gays who
+never have sex with females that is anthropologically
+exceptional.

+

Of course, the fact that pederasty and pedophilia have been an
+approved practice in other cultures does not automatically mean we
+should give them a nod. Cannibalism, slavery and infanticide have
+been approved practices too. But the anthropological evidence doesn’t
+suggest that boys who have voluntary sex with men automatically turn
+into traumatized basket cases; indeed some present-day cultures agree
+with the ancient Greeks that such liaisons are good for the maturation
+of boys. There are real secondary risks, starting with the fact that
+anal sex is a much more effective vector of venereal diseases such as
+AIDS than is vaginal sex — but given a cultural context that doesn’t
+stigmatize the behavior, clear evidence that consensual pederasty and
+pedophilia are intrinsically damaging is remarkably hard to find.

+

Accordingly, NAMBLA may well be right on one level when they argue
+that what matters is not so much which tab A gets put into which slot
+B, but whether the behavior was coerced or consensual. According to
+this argument, the elephant in the bath-house can be lived with —
+might even be a friendly beast — if it’s docile-tempered and won’t
+give the tusk to unconsenting parties.

+

Gay men, or at least the sort of university-educated gay men who
+wind up determining what’s on the front page of the New York
+Times and spiking stories like the Dirkhising murder, know
+these facts. How surprising would it be if they interpreted most
+victims’ charges of abuse as a product of retrospective false
+consciousness, implanted in them by a homophobic and gay-oppressing
+culture? By suppressing the homosexual identification of most of the
+accused priests, gays in the media can protect their own sexual and
+political interests while believing — perhaps quite sincerely — that
+they are quietly aiding the cause of freedom.

+

The trouble with this comforting lullaby is that, even if NAMBLA is
+right, coercion matters a lot. As Ms. Eberstadt
+reports, the pederastically and pedophilically abused often become
+broken, dysfunctional people. They show up in disproportionate numbers
+in drug and alcohol rehab. They have a high rate of involvement in
+violent crime. Worse, they end to become abusers themselves,
+perpetuating the damage across generations.

+

Voltaire once said “In nature there are no rewards or punishments,
+only consequences”. Gays experimented with unfettered promiscuity in
+the 1970s and got AIDS as a consequence. The mores of gay bath-house
+culture turned out to be broken in the way that ultimately matters; a
+lot of people died horribly as a result of them.

+

It may turn out that the consequences of sympathizing with NAMBLA
+are almost equally ugly. If a climate of `enlightened’ tolerance for
+consensual pederasty and pedophilia tends to increase the rate at
+which boys are abused, that is a very serious consequence for which gay
+liberationists will not (and should not) soon be forgiven.
+The homosexual gatekeepers at the Times may be making
+themselves accessories before and after the fact to some truly hideous
+crimes.

+

And this is where we come back to the priestly-abuse scandal.
+Because a theme that keeps recurring in
+histories of the worst abusers is that they were trained in
+seminaries that were run by homosexual men and saturated with
+gay-liberationist subculture. Reading accounts of students at one
+notorious California seminary making a Friday-night ritual of cruising
+gay bars, it becomes hard not to wonder if gay culture itself has not
+been an important enabler of priestly abuse.

+

Now it’s time to abandon the catch-all term abuse and speak plainly
+the name of the crime: sexual coercion and rape. It is very clear
+that pederasts and pedophiles in the priesthood have routinely used
+their authority over Catholic boys not merely to seduce them, but to
+coerce and rape them. In a few cases the rape has been overt and
+physical, but in most cases it has been a subtler and arguably more
+damaging rape of the victim’s mind and self.

+

The single most revolting image I have carried away from the
+priestly-abuse scandal is victims’ accounts of priests solemnly
+blessing them after sex. That is using the child’s religious feelings
+and respect for authority to make him complicit in the abuse. If I
+believed in hell, I would wish for the priests who perpetrated this
+kind of soul-rape to fry in it for eternity.

+

And we must call it rape; do otherwise is to suppose that
+most of the thousands of known victims wanted to be sodomized. Even
+if we discard the victims’ and witnesses’ reports, this is highly
+unlikely; there were simply too many victims. Some priests had sex
+with hundreds of boys, far too many to fit into the 1-4%
+cohort of homosexual orientation in the population they had access to.
+And we are not entitled to dismiss the victims’ protests in any case,
+not given the corollary evidence that the trauma of abuse reverberated
+through the victims’ lives, continuing to damage them years and
+decades afterwards. Comforting gay-lib delusions about false
+consciousness won’t wash here.

+

Continuing our civil-rights analogy, the correct parallel would
+have been with an epidemic of interracial rape, rather than
+cohabitation. Had there in fact been such an epidemic, civil-rights
+proponents would have faced the question of whether black men had a
+particular propensity to rape white women. The analogous question,
+whether homosexual men have a particular propensity to rape boys, is
+precisely the one that homosexuals and their sympathizers in the media
+don’t want anyone to examine — and precisely the question that the
+priestly-abuse scandal demands that we ask.

+

It’s easy to sympathize with gay activists’ fears that opening this
+question will expose them to a firestorm of prejudice from people
+who will prejudge the answer out of anti-gay bigotry. But the
+pattern of homosexual abuse by the Catholic priesthood has been so
+egregious and so longstanding that we need to understand the relative
+weight of all the causes that produced it — whether those
+causes are specific to Catholicism or more general.

+

Are gay men biologically or psychologically prone to rape boys at a
+level that makes a gay man even without a known history of abuse into
+a bad risk around boys? Does queer culture encourage a tendency to
+rape in gay men who are put in authority over boys?

+

Here is where the question becomes practical: were the Boy Scouts
+of America so wrong to ban homosexual scoutmasters? And here we are
+with a crashing thud back in the realm of present politics. After the
+numbing, horrifying, seemingly never-ending stream of foul crimes
+revealed in the scandal, even staunch sexual libertarians like your
+humble author can no longer honestly dismiss this question simply
+because it’s being raised by unpleasant conservatives.

+

The priestly-abuse scandal forces us to face reality. To the
+extent that pederasty, pedophilic impulses, and twink fantasies are
+normal among homosexual men, putting one in charge of adolescent boys
+may after all be just as bad an idea as waltzing a man with a known
+predisposition for alcoholism into a room full of booze. One wouldn’t
+have to think homosexuality is evil or a disease to make institutional
+rules against this, merely notice that it creates temptations best
+avoided for everyone’s sake.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20020618193800.blog b/20020618193800.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b221aa7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020618193800.blog @@ -0,0 +1,91 @@ +The Mirage of Moderate Islam +

Diplomatic lies notwithstanding, Islam is anything but a `religion
+of peace’. Any honest scholar will tell you that Islam is a religion
+of violence, martyrdom, and conversion by the sword. The duty to wage
+war for the propagation of the faith is plainly written in the Koran;
+Osama bin Laden’s suicide bombers are part of a tradition that springs
+from Islam’s warlike origins and has been re-affirmed in every generations
+by ghazis, hashishim, and numerous other varieties of holy warrior.

+

It is the interiorization of `jihad’ as a struggle for self-mastery
+that is revisionist and exceptional, one proposed by only a few
+Westernized and progressive Muslims and (one senses) not wholeheartedly
+believed even by them. A truer window on the nature of Islam is the way
+that it divides the Earth into the Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam)
+and the Dar al-Harb — the House of War, the theater of battle to
+be waged with zeal until the infidel is crushed and submits to the
+Will of God. The very word, islam, means `submission’.

+

Conspicuous by their absence are any clear denunciations of
+bin-Ladenite terror from the members of the ulama, the loose
+collective of elders and theologicians that articulates the Islamic
+faith. Such internal criticism as we do hear is muted, equivocal,
+often excusing the terrorists immediately after half-heartedly
+condemning them. Far more common, though seldom reported in Western
+media, are pro-jihadi sermons that denounce America as a land of
+devils and praise Al-Qaeda’s mass murderers in one breath with
+Palestinian suicide bombers as martyrs assured of a place in
+heaven.

+

There has been some play given in the media lately to the notion
+that the ideological force behind Islamic terrorism is not Islam per
+se but specifically the puritanical
+Wahhabi sect associated with the House of Saud. Some accounts
+trace the rise in terrorism to Wahhabi prosyletization in Afghanistan,
+Pakistan, and elsewhere. Most versions of this theory have it that
+Wahhabism is an unattractive doctrine (by contrast with, say, the Sufi
+tradition of the Caucasus or the relaxed syncretic Buddhist-influenced
+Islam of Indonesia) but that it wins converts because, with billions
+in Saudi oil money behind it, the Wahhabites can afford to field
+missionaries and build schools that promulgate the puritan party
+line.

+

The trouble with this theory is that it ignores the history of
+Islam and the internal logic of Islamic doctrine. The history of
+Islam is a collection of cycles of doctrinal decay followed by
+fundamentalist renewal. Believers tend to drift away from strict
+Islam, but ever century or two some mad-eyed wanderer will come
+screaming out of the desert and haul the faithful back on to the
+Narrow Way with a blend of personal charisma, argument and force (the
+latter generally administered by some allied warlord who sees political
+gain in it).

+

This drama keeps getting re-enacted because, in general, these
+charismatic fundamentalist looney-toons are correct in their
+criticism of `soft’ Islam. The Koran, the actions and statements of
+the prophet Mohammed, and the witness of the lives of his immediate
+followers are pretty clear on what the religious duties of a Muslim
+are. Long before the 9/11 attacks, I read large portions of the Koran
+(in translation) and more than one history of Islam, because I collect
+religions. I learned about the Five Pillars and the hadith (the
+traditional sayings of Mohammed) and the ulama.

+

Moderate Muslims trying to argue against the latest version of
+Islamic fundamentalism are in a difficult situation. All the
+fundamentalists have to do to support their position is to point at
+the Koran, which is much more authoritative in an Islamic context than
+the Bible is in most Christian ones. Moderates are reduced to arguing
+that the Koran doesn’t really mean what it says, or arguing from
+hadith that qualify or contradict the Koranic text. Since the Koran
+trumps the hadith, this is generally a losing position.

+

The grim truth is that Osama bin Laden’s fanatic interpretation
+of Islam is Koranically correct. The God of the Koran and Mohammed
+truly does demand that idolatry be purged with fire and sword, and
+that infidels must be forced either to convert to Islam or (as a
+limited exception for Christians and Jews, the “Peoples of the Book”)
+live as second-class citizens subject to special taxes and legal
+restrictions. The Koran really does endorse suicidal martyrdom and
+the indiscriminate killing of infidels for the faith.

+

(The Koran does not, however, require purdah and the veil; these
+are practices the Arab world picked up from Persia after the tenth
+century CE. Nor does it require female genital mutilation, which
+seems to have been acquired from sub-Saharan Africa.)

+

For both shallow diplomatic/political reasons and deeper
+psychological ones, Westerners have trouble grasping just how
+bloody-minded, intolerant, and prone to periodic murderous outbreaks
+of fundamentalist zeal Islam actually is. But we must come
+to grips with this. If we treat the terror war as a merely
+geopolitical conflict, we will be fighting the wrong battle with the
+wrong weapons.

+

It is not merely Al-Qaeda or the Taliban or even Wahhabism we are
+fighting, it is a fanatic tendency wired deep into the origins and
+doctrine of Islam itself, a tendency of which these movements are
+just surface signs. That tendency must be cured or cauterized out.
+No lesser victory will do for a world in which means and weapons of mass
+destruction grow ever easier for terrorists to acquire.

+

(To be continued…)

+

Blogspt comments

diff --git a/20020619101800.blog b/20020619101800.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8044a0f --- /dev/null +++ b/20020619101800.blog @@ -0,0 +1,75 @@ +Beating software version fatigue +

In his latest
+Tech Central Station column, Glenn Reynolds complains
+of `version fatigue’, his accumulating angst over the fact that since the
+emid-1980s he’s had to migrate through three word processors and several
+different versions of Windows.

+

I can’t fix the sad fact that every new VCR and remote control you get
+has a different control layout. But if we’re talking software, baby, I have
+got your solution.

+

I have been using the same text editor since 1982. I have been using the
+same command-line shell since 1985, and the same operating system since 1993.
+But that last date is actually misleading, because I still get use out of
+programs I wrote for the previous dialect of my OS as far back as 1982,
+without ever having had to alter a line.

+

The last time I had to learn a new feature set for any of the tools
+I regularly used was when I decided to change window systems in 1997,
+and that was not a vendor-forced upgrade. Yes, that’s right; it means
+I’ve been getting mileage out of essentially the same user interface
+for five straight years. Half a decade.

+

Does this mean I’m using software tools that were feature-frozen when
+dinosaurs walked the earth? No, actually, it doesn’t. The text editor,
+which is what I spend my screen time interacting with, has grown tremendously
+in capability over the twenty years I’ve been using it. The shell I use
+has a lot of convenience features it didn’t in 1985, but I’ve only had
+to learn them as I chose.

+

I don’t have a version-fatigue problem, and never have. I get to
+use cutting-edge software tools that probably exceed in capability
+anything you are directly familiar with. And I have every confidence,
+based on my last twenty years of experience, that my software will both
+continue to both offer me the innovative leading edge and remain
+feature-stable for the next twenty years if I so choose.

+

How do I achieve this best of both worlds? One word: Unix.

+

I’m a Unix guy. You may have heard that I have something to do
+with this Linux thing, and Linux is indeed what I use today. But
+Linux is only the most recent phase of a continuous engineering
+tradition that goes back to 1969. In that world, we don’t have
+the kind of disruptive feature churn that forces people to upgrade
+to incompatible operating systems every 2.5 years. Our software
+lifetimes are measured in decades. And our applications,
+like the Emacs text editor I use, frequently outlast the version
+of Unix they were born under.

+

There are a couple of intertwined reasons for this. One is that
+we tend to get the technology decisions right the first time — Unix
+is, as Niklaus Wirth once said of Algol, “a vast improvement over
+most of its successors”. Unix people confronted with Windows for
+the first time tend to react with slack-jawed shock that any product
+so successful could be such a complete design disaster.

+

Perhaps more importantly, Unix/Linux people are not stuck with a
+business model that requires planned obsolescence in order to generate
+revenue. Also, our engineering tradition puts a high value on open
+standards. So our software tends to be forward-compatible.

+

As an example: about a year ago I changed file-system formats from
+ext2 to ext3. In the Windows world, I’d have had to back up all my
+files, reinstall the OS, restore my files, and then spend a week
+hand-fixing bits of my system configuration that weren’t captured in
+the backups. Instead, I ran one conversion utility. Once.

+

Most of the consumer-level problems with computer software —
+crashes, bad design, version fatigue due to the perpetual upgrade
+treadmill — are not inherent in the technology. They are, rather,
+consequences of user-hostile business models. Microsoft, and
+companies like them, have no incentive to solve the problems
+of crashes, poor security, and version fatigue. They like
+the perpetual upgrade treadmill. It’s how they make money.

+

Want to beat software version fatigue? It’s easy, Glenn. Take
+control; dump the closed-source monopolists; get off the treadmill.
+OpenOffice will let you keep your MS-Word documents and your Excel
+spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. Join the Linux revolution,
+and never see a Blue Screen of Death again.

+

UPDATE: A reader complains that Linux is difficult to install.
+Answer: Get thee to the Linux user group near you, who will be more
+than happy to help you get liberated. Or get thee to Wal-Mart, which
+is now selling cheap machines with Lindows, a Linux variant tuned to
+look like Windows, for $299.

+

Blogspot
+comments

diff --git a/20020620162436.blog b/20020620162436.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..70c3b58 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020620162436.blog @@ -0,0 +1,99 @@ +What Al-Qaeda wants +

(Second in a series.)

+

In a The
+Mirage of Moderate Islam, I have described the Koranic roots of
+Islamic fanaticism, and observed that Osama bin Laden’s terror war on
+the west is part of a recurring pattern of fundamentalist revival
+associated with jihad in Islamic history.

+

In this essay, I’ll get more specific about what Osama bin Laden is
+really after. In the process, it will become clear why Arab-world
+governments are so frightened of him.

+

The first thing to understand is that Osama bin Laden is neither
+crazy nor stupid. He is a very intelligent, educated, visionary man
+who is operating from deep within the Islamic worldview. He’s trying
+to do on a global scale what the Ayatollah Khomeini did in Iran in
+1979; he’s bucking for the job of Caliph of Islam (“Khalifa” in
+Arabic).

+

The position of Khalifa
+has been vacant since the last Padishah Emperor of the Ottoman Empire
+was deposed in 1924, when the British and French broke up the Empire
+after it picked the wrong side in World War One. Before that, the
+Caliph was in theory both the supreme temporal and spiritual ruler
+of the Islamic world.

+

I say “in theory” because the Caliph’s actual authority varied
+considerably. In the early centuries of Islam, during the initial
+expansionary phase of the Empire, it was absolute — in European
+terms, as though Charlemagne or Napoleon were also the Pope. It
+tended to decrease over time as the increasing size of the Islamic
+empire led to political fragmentation. Independent emirs swore
+nominal fealty to the Caliph and accepted his symbolic authority
+in religious matters, while otherwise behaving as sovereigns. An
+able Caliph backed by strong armies could buck this disintegrative
+trend and make the allegiance of the emirs more than nominal. Eventually
+emperors of the Ottoman Turks collected this title, and gathered most
+of the Islamic world under their sway. But the Ottoman Empire had been in
+decline for four centuries by 1924, and the title of Caliph had
+become almost meaningless.

+

One of the signature traits of Islamic revivalism is nostalgia for
+the halcyon days of Islamic expansion, when the Caliph was the
+undisputed Arm of Allah and there was plenty of plunder and rapine
+to go around as the armies of God smote the infidel and claimed
+new lands for the Dar-al-Islam.

+

Here’s where we cue the ominous theme music. It is part of Islamic
+tradition that the title of Khalifa may be attained by conquest if the
+incumbent is not fulfilling his duties — or if there is no incumbent.
+Under shari’a law and hadith, the umma (the consultative assembly of
+the elders of Islam) is required to recognize as Khalifa
+anyone who is able to fulfill the duties of the position and
+demonstrates the sanction of Allah by mobilizing the Dar-al-Islam in
+successful jihad. Jihad, here, is interpreted broadly; a war of
+consolidation that united a substantial portion of the Dar-al-Islam
+under a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy would do it.

+

In other words, since 1924 the position of Caliph has been waiting
+for a Man on Horseback. Or, for you science-fiction fans out there, a
+Muad’Dib. The Ayatollah Khomeini could never quite make this nut;
+first, because he was not a plausible warlord, and second because he’s
+part of the 10% Shi’a minority branch that disputes the Khalifal
+succession. The next Caliph, if there is one, will have to belong to
+the 90% Sunni majority.

+

Osama bin Laden has behaved precisely as though he intends to fill
+that role. And in doing so, he has frightened the crap out of the
+rulers of the Arab world. Because he’s played his religious and
+propaganda cards very well in Islamic terms, barring the detail that
+he may well be dead and buried under rubble in an Afghan cave.

+

On 9/11, bin Laden took jihad to the symbolic heart of the West
+more effectively than any Islamic ruler has managed since the Siege of
+Vienna was broken in 1683. By doing so he caught Arab rulers
+(especially the Saudis) in a neat theo-political trap. They have been
+encouraging hatred of Israel and the West, and hyping the jihadist
+mythology of fundamentalist Islam, as a way of diverting popular anger
+that might otherwise focus on their own corrupt and repressive
+regimes. But Bin Laden has trumped and beaten them at this game. He
+has acted out the Koranic duty of jihad in a way they never dared —
+and in doing so, seized the religious high ground.

+

The sheikhs and ayatollahs now have a dilemma. If they support
+jihadism, they must either start a war against the West they know they
+cannot win or cede their own legitimacy to the Caliph-claimant who is
+leading the jihad. But if they come out against jihad, bin Laden or
+his successor can de-legitimitize them simply by pointing to the
+Koran. The possibility that the semi-mythical “Arab street” would
+revolt behind local Khomeini-equivalents hot to join al-Qaeda’s jihad is
+quite real.

+

Let the last word go to the mentor of Osama bin Laden, Sheik
+Abdullah Azzam: “Jihad must not be abandoned until Allah alone is
+worshipped by mankind…Jihad and the rifle alone…no negotiations,
+no conferences and no dialogue.” The Palestinians are, as usual,
+disposable pawns in a larger game. The objective of al-Qaeda’s game
+is to follow the Koranic blueprint to its logical conclusion; global
+jihad, a second age of conversion by the sword, the destruction of the
+West, and the establishment of a global Islamic theocracy.

+

Osama bin Laden himself may be dead now. Unfortunately, this
+doesn’t necessarily stop the game, because his body hasn’t been found.
+The Twelfth Imam of Shi’a disappeared under mysterious circumstances
+in 941CE; persons claiming to be him and calling the faithful to jihad
+emerged at intervals for a thousand years afterwards, the most recent
+one being the Mahdi who led an anti-British revolt in Egypt in 1899.
+If the jihadist tendency in Islam is not confronted and destroyed,
+Osama bin Laden could haunt the West for a thousand years.

+

(To be continued…)

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20020623154800.blog b/20020623154800.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f85a010 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020623154800.blog @@ -0,0 +1,192 @@ +Mirror, Mirror — why Americans Don’t Understand the Threat of Jihadism +

(Third in a series.)

+

In What
+al-Qaeda Wants and the first essay in this series, The
+Mirage of Moderate Islam, I have described Islam as a warlike and
+bloody religion subject to periodic fits of violent fundamentalist
+revival. I have analyzed the roots of Islamic terror in the Koranic
+duty of jihad, and elucidated Osama bin Laden’s goal as nothing less
+than the destruction of the West and the establishment of a global
+Islamic theocracy.

+

I have further explained why it is difficult for anyone living
+within the Islamic worldview to reject or argue against these goals.
+Jihadism — the belief that Muslims have not merely the right
+but the duty to smite the infidel and propagate the Faith by
+force — proceeds direct from the Koran and is accepted as a core
+religious duty by almost all Muslims.

+

These are simple truths, readily discernable from reading the words
+of the Koran, the study of even an outline of Islamic history, and the
+propaganda of Osama bin Laden himself. Yet they are truths that
+almost no one in the West is speaking in public, in plain language.
+In this essay, I will examine the reasons Americans are not yet
+ideologically prepared to fight the war against terror as it must be
+fought if we are to win.

+

First, the U.S. government is telling a Big Lie for diplomatic
+reasons. It is trying to sell the idea that Islam is a `religion of
+peace’, with al-Qaeda representing only a small fringe of extremists.
+Part of this is in order not to be seen attacking the religion of our
+Arab allies in the Middle East.

+

But domestic politics is an even more important motive for this Big
+Lie. U.S. policymakers in the know may well fear that if they
+described the relationship between terrorism and Islamic doctrine
+accurately, the current broad consensus on war policy might collapse
+under a hailstorm of accusations of bigotry, prejudice, and
+intolerance by the bien pensants who run the national media
+and academe. In a political climate where directing extra scrutiny at
+young male Middle Eastern air travellers is attacked as unacceptable
+`racial profiling’, this fear would be well-grounded.

+

Second, the academy has failed us. Americans are almost
+universally ignorant of Islamic doctrine and history. Most of the few
+who have some knowledge of the area cannot connect that knowledge to
+current events. The Islamic-studies and Middle Eastern history
+establishment completely, utterly failed to anticipate al-Qaeda’s
+revival of jihadism, ignored or rationalized the decade of
+anti-American terrorist acts that led up to 9/11, and is presently
+incapable of supplying any significant analytical help to defeating
+the terrorists.

+

The exact anatomy of this failure is well described in Martin
+Kramer’s Ivory Towers On
+Sand. One background problem was a Marxist-influenced tendency to
+see political change as all-important and dismiss religious fervor as
+a spent force. Another was a reluctance to confront or discuss the
+continuing phenomenon of terrorism at all except through the lens of
+`post-colonial theory’ that excused it as a legitimate tactic of the
+Palestinian or anti-imperialist struggle. Yet a third was the
+postmodern belief that objective truth is impossible. In effect, the
+Marxist/multiculturalist/postmodernist preoccupations of the
+Islamic-studies establishment rendered it incapable of seeing,
+thinking, or passing judgment. Confronted by the smoking hole where
+the World Trade Center used to be and Osama bin-Laden’s gloating
+videos, the academics had no way of connecting their theoretical
+abstractions to the brutal facts and nothing to say. Nine months
+later, they still doesn’t.

+

Americans outside of universities have few grounds for smugness,
+however. While most of the rest of us have not had our critical
+faculties rotted out by Marxism, multiculturalism and postmodernism in
+their explicit forms, a lower-grade version of the same infections has
+done much to damage our capacity to understand the threat of jihadism.

+

Americans have always had the odd parochial habit of assuming that,
+down deep underneath, everyone is basically like us — sharing
+our historically peculiar mix of pragmatism and idealism; valuing
+honesty and fair dealing; tolerant, materialistic, freedom-loving,
+open-minded, tempting to value comfort and success over ideology. We
+reflexively believe that everyone can be reasoned with essentially in
+our own terms. Most Americans don’t understand fanaticism and violent
+evil. We have a tendency to be `fair’ by assuming that in any dispute
+there must be some right and some wrong on both sides. It’s telling
+that we use `extreme’ as a political pejorative.

+

Since at least the end of World War II, this parochialism has
+become so acute that it has almost blinded us to serious threats.
+While more of the left-liberals who shilled for the Soviets and Mao
+Zedong and Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot during the Cold War were closet
+Communists than is yet publicly admitted, a good many were honest
+dupes who simply couldn’t believe that Communists were actually
+motivated by the sinister craziness of hard Marxism, and therefore
+assumed that America must somehow be at fault. Conservatives
+apologizing for unsavory pro-American strongmen mostly weren’t closet
+fascists, either; a good many of them had obvious trouble seeing
+caudillos as more than cigar-chomping CEOs running a particularly
+tough business, and never mind the gold braid and funny hats.

+

The see-no-evil tendency in American folk psychology created
+fertile ground for the rather less benign dogmas of multiculturalism
+(“all cultures present ways of living that are equally morally valid”)
+and postmodernism (“there is no objective truth”). Originally
+constructed by Marxists (and one ex-Fascist) as part of a program to
+ideologically disarm the West against the radical evil of Communism,
+these dogmas have both outlived their original ends and seeped into
+American pop culture. Their effect is that many of us can no longer
+bring ourselves to think of any political movement, religion, or
+culture as radically evil unless it is safely part of history (and,
+for political correctness, was run by dead white European males when
+it was alive and kicking).

+

This was a relatively harmless form of self-delusion between 1992
+and 2001, the decade of self-indulgence bracketed by the fall of the
+Soviet Empire and 9/11. No longer. We are at war. Western
+civilization is under attack by a foe that revels in the wholesale
+slaughter of civilians, one that proudly announces its intention to
+bring a second Holocaust of fire and blood down upon us all.

+

If our civilization is to survive, we will need to recover the
+moral judgment needed to recognize radical evil, the language in which
+to condemn it, and the determination to act.

+

In a perverse way, al-Qaeda has made this easy. They have murdered
+thousands in a single attack on one of our heart cities, they have
+attempted to unleash biological weapons on us, and have actively
+planned to detonate nuclear/radiological weapons in our population
+centers. Those who cannot recognize even this as radical evil
+— those who persist in arguing that the 9/11 attack was somehow
+justified by something United Fruit did in Guatemala or the Israelis
+did in Lebanon — are rapidly dealing themselves out of the game
+of deciding how we shall respond.

+

Having recognized al-Qaeda’s behavior as radically evil, we must
+next recognize that its motivating ideology is evil, too. And the
+first step there is recognizing that Islam’s apologists are
+
+systematically lying to us about what they believe and intend.
+Outside of a few fringe groups like the Dauri
+Bohras and a tiny minority of intellectual reformers who generally
+dare not speak their ideas in their own home countries, there is
+simply no constituency in Islam prepared to recognize Western concepts
+of peace, tolerance, and pluralism.

+

We will not be prepared to win the war against Islamic terror until
+we understand the following things:

+
    +
  • Islam is a religion of war and conversion by the sword, not peace.
    • +
  • The primary threat of terrorism comes from Arabs and
    +middle-easterners between the ages of fifteen and forty, and we must summon
    +the will to profile accordingly.
    • +
  • We are dealing with religious fanaticism rather than rational grievances
    +against America or the West.
    • +
  • Our enemies cannot be reasoned with or appeased anywhere
    +short of surrender and submission to shari’a law.
    • +
  • Apologists for mainstream Islam are systematically
    +lying to us about Islamic doctrine in order to shield terrorists who
    +they know are acting in strict accordance with that doctrine.
    • +
+

The hardest challenge for Americans is to grasp is the fact that
+the evil of the 9/11 hijackings, the destruction of the World Trade
+Center, and the threat of al-Qaeda weapons of mass destruction set off
+in American cities is not simply the evil of al-Qaeda. It is in fact
+the Koranically-correct expression of the tendency of Islam (Sunni
+fundamentalism) which is has been pre-eminent through most of Islamic
+history and now encompasses over 90% of the worlds Muslims.

+

We need to face the fact that we are confronting not just a
+barbaric and evil group of men, but a barbaric and evil religion. To
+protect ourselves, we must either force the complete reform of Islam
+(purging it of jihadism and its tendency towards periodic
+fundamentalist outbreaks) or destroy its hold over its followers.

+

This is a problem for Americans; first, because we have been taught
+that we that we must not be intolerant of other peoples’ religions;
+and second, because fully grasping the nature of the danger Islamic
+poses to Western civilization requires thinking uncomfortable
+thoughts about the dominant Christian religion of our own culture.

+

The reader is at this point invited to learn more about the
+
+developing alliance between Islamic and Christian fundamentalisms.
+Then, to learn all about Kissing Hank’s Ass.
+Before 9/11, “Kissing Hank’s Ass” was an edgy joke. Today it
+demonstrates why ending the threat of religiously-motivated terror will
+require us to confront and destroy the fundamentalist/jihadist impulse
+not merely in Islam, but also in Christianity and all other
+eschatological monotheisms where it finds a natural home.

+

Christianity, like Islam (and unlike almost all of the other
+religions of the world) has violent intolerance of other religions and
+the impulse to conversion by the sword wired into its doctrinal DNA.
+Most Americans have trouble believing the Koran means what it says
+about the duty of jihad because for most Christians, the parallel
+Christian duty to smite the infidel is a historical dead letter. But
+counterparts of al-Qaeda such as the Christian
+Identity Movement exist in the West, imbued with all of
+al-Qaeda’s rage. Christian fundamentalists express the same
+hatred of modernity and determination to jam the world back into
+a medieval mold that motivates Osama bin Laden.

+

To win the war on terror, we must understand jihadism and clearly
+distinguish it from ethical self-defense. We must be prepared not
+merely to counter fanaticism not merely by killing the fanatical in
+self-defense, but also by discrediting the doctrines and habits of
+thought that make fanatics in the first place — whether they occur in
+the other guy’s religion or our own. Islam has declared itself the
+immediate adversary of modernity — but more than one world religion
+will have to go under the knife before our children can sleep in
+peace.

+

(To be continued…)

+

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diff --git a/20020630014700.blog b/20020630014700.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c714adf --- /dev/null +++ b/20020630014700.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Why Diplomacy Is Doomed +

(Fourth essay of a series.)

+

In Mirror, Mirror: Why Americans Don’t Understand the Threat of Jihadism, What al-Qaeda Wants and The Mirage of Moderate Islam, I have described Islam as a warlike and bloody religion subject to periodic fits of violent fundamentalist revival. I have analyzed the roots of Islamic terror in the Koranic duty of jihad, and elucidated Osama bin Laden’s goal as nothing less than the destruction of the West and the establishment of a global Islamic theocracy. I have analyzed the reason Americans have trouble comprehending the scope of the threat. Now I’ll explain why diplomacy is not a path toards a solution.

+

The Western tradition of diplomacy, which originated from the “balance of power” model for coexisting nation-states in Renaissance Europe, stigmatizes the use of arms as an admission of failure and elevates good-faith negotiation as a virtue of the strong. Westerners think of a plurality of nation-states with conflicting interests as the natural and right way of the world, and Western diplomacy is themed around compromise as a way of allowing the members of that plurality to continue in more or less peaceful coexistence.

+

Arab cultures (and the Arabized cultures of the rest of the Islamic world) are very different. The Western idea of a plurality of nation-states is considered iniquitous, a sign that men have turned away from Allah. Islam promotes a world united under a single Caliph with absolute authority in both secular and religious matters.

+

Further, Arabs respect strength in war. Several features of the Islamic worldview — including fatalism and the belief that Allah guides the arm of conquerors — reinforce this. Extending an olive branch or seeking compromise, on the other hand, is read as a sign of weakness, inviting more pressure and more attacks.

+

Applying the assumptions of Western diplomacy to Islamic-world conflicts, therefore, tends to have perverse results. The utter failure of diplomacy in the Israeli/Palestinan conflict is a perfect example. Yasser Arafat and his followers interpreted every Israeli compromise not as a sign of virtue requiring a reciprocal response, but as a sign that that their terror campaign was working. As the Israelis conceded more and more legitimacy to Palestinian political objectives, the terror
+actually intensified in pitch.

+

The U.S.’s refusal to negotiate with the Taliban for anything less than the unconditional surrender of Osama bin Laden, by contrast, seemed harsh to apostles of the Western diplomatic tradition but was exactly correct in terms of Islamic psychology. Backing a clear, hard-line position with the threat of force actually gave the U.S. a moral advantage it had lacked when our policy was seen as weak and vacillating. The expected furor of the “Arab street” never materialized.

+

Diplomacy or negotiation are in any case of very limited use in curbing state terrorism and no use in curbing non-state terrorism. For the forseeable future, the U.S.’s capability to project military power into Third World terrorist havens will be so much greater than that of other members of any imaginable coalition of allies that having a military alliance at all will be almost pointless. Diplomacy need therefore be aimed only at preventing military opposition by nearby nation-states.

+

Third parties who urge `diplomatic’ solutions to problems like Iraqi, Iranian, and Saudi Arabian sponsorship of al-Qaeda should be ignored. In the Islamic cultural context, force and the threat of force stand some chance of obtaining useful results. Talk does not.

+

(To be continued…)

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20020703014700.blog b/20020703014700.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f1da06c --- /dev/null +++ b/20020703014700.blog @@ -0,0 +1,112 @@ +Winning the War Against Terror +

(Final essay of the series.)

+

In previous essays in this series, I have described
+Islam as a warlike and bloody religion subject to periodic fits of
+violent fundamentalist revival. I have analyzed the roots of Islamic
+terror in the Koranic duty of jihad, and elucidated Osama bin Laden’s
+goal as nothing less than the destruction of the West and the establishment
+of a global Islamic theocracy. I have analyzed the reason
+Americans have trouble comprehending
+the scope of the threat, and I have explained why Western-style
+diplomacy is next
+to useless in this situation. In this final essay I’ll suggest
+paths towards a solution.

+

In order to win, we must begin with realism about the scope of the
+war and the objectives of the enemy. We must realize that although in
+theory and theology al-Qaeda is making war on the entire infidel West,
+in practice they are only interested in attacking the U.S., the
+`hyperpower’ that leads it.

+

There is no possible gain for al-Qaeda in attacking Europe and
+risking a change in the pro-Arab, pro-Palestinian tilt of the EU
+(which has just resumed support payments to the Palestinian Authority
+despite conclusive evidence that the money is diverted to pay for
+massacres of Israeli children). Nor can al-Qaeda gain any leverage by
+attacks on the remainder of the world. The theaters of the war will
+include the U.S. and terrorist base areas in the Islamic arc
+stretching from Morocco through the Maghreb through the Middle East to
+Pakistan, and perhaps in Indonesia and the Phillipines as well.

+

To people who view the entire world through the lens of the Western
+tradition, the strategy I will outline is doubtless going to sound
+bellicose and regressive. It is not; it is founded on a cold-blooded
+realization that Arab cultures (and the Arabized cultures of the rest
+of the Islamic world) regard victory in war as a sign of Allah’s favor
+and regard compromise and concession as a sign of weakness.

+

The war against Islamic terror must be fought on three levels:
+homeland defense, military power projection, and cultural subversion.
+We must foil terrorist acts; we must imprison or kill the terrorists
+who plan and execute them; and we must dry up the pool of potential
+recruits before they become terrorists who can only be stopped by
+being imprisoned or killed.

+

Homeland defense includes all those measures designed to make the
+attacks on U.S. civilians less likely to succeed. These will include
+conventional police and security measures. It must also include a
+revival of the role of the unincorporated militia and the armed
+citizen. Al-Qaeda has limited resources, but the advantage of
+choosing where they will strike; since the police and military cannot
+be everywhere, civilians (like the passengers of flight 93) must take
+anti-terrorist defense into their own hands.

+

Military power projection includes direct military action against
+terrorist bases and havens. As an anarchist, I would prefer a world
+in which private security agencies under contract to insurance
+companies pursued al-Qaeda; persons of some other political persuasions
+might propose supranational agencies such as the U.N. Unfortunately,
+under the current world system there is no alternative to governments
+to do this work. The U.S. has begun it in Afghanistan; the war must
+continue in Iraq, and it is likely to encompass Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi
+Arabia as well.

+

The goal of military power projection must be twofold: physical and
+psychological. The physical goal must be to destroy the physical
+infrastructure of terrorism — the headquarters, bases and training
+camps. While this is important, the psychological goal of humiliating
+and crushing jihadists is even more important.

+

Islamic armies and resistance movements are fanatical in attack but
+brittle on the defense. When motivated by the conviction that Allah
+guides their arm, suicidal bravery is routine.
+On the other hand, when the fortunes of a cause decline past a
+certain point, Arabs tend to consider the will of Allah to be manifest
+and abruptly abandon it. These tendencies form part of the cultural
+background that includes even secularized terrorist movements
+(such as Yasser Arafat’s al-Fatah) in the Islamic world.

+

The U.S. was able to exploit this brittleness effectively in
+Afghanistan. By moving in overwhelming force when it moved at all,
+the U.S. was able to intimidate many warlords affiliated with the
+Taliban into switching sides — an important reason the campaign
+involved so little actual fighting.

+

We must repeat this maneuver on a larger scale. We must teach the
+Dar-al-Islam to respect and fear the power of the West. We
+must not negotiate or offer concessions until it is clear from the
+behavior of governments, the umma, and the “Arab street” that the
+public will to support jihad has been broken.

+

Our most important long-term weapon against Islamic terrorism,
+however, will be cultural subversion. That is, to break the hold of
+the Islamist/jihadist idea on the minds of Muslims. To do this, it
+may be necessary to discredit the entirety of Islam; the question
+depends on whether any Islamic figure will be clever enough to
+construct an interpretation of Islam purged of jihadist tendencies,
+and whether that version can propagate and displace the
+Sunni-fundamentalist varieties now dominant in the Islamic world.

+

I can do no better than to quote Michelle Efird, the woman who
+inspired my essay
+We Are All Jews Now. In private mail afterwards
+(quoted with permission) she wrote:

+

+I don’t want to appease them, I don’t want to understand them, I
+don’t want to let them reap the benefits of our liberalism while
+plotting our destruction. Like most Americans, I would have been more
+than happy to let them pretend the last 400 years of progress never
+happened, as long as they didn’t force their warped-vision goggles on
+anyone else. But since they brought the war to us, let’s pave the
+middle east with outlet malls, fast food franchises, and Disney
+Mecca. Let’s infect their entire population with personal liberty and
+dissension and critical thinking. And if that doesn’t work, let’s
+flood them with porn spam. +

+

Osama bin Laden may, in the end, have materialized his own worst
+fears. The ideology of jihad has created its mirror and opposite; the
+dawning sense that we in the West have the right, the power, and the
+duty to wipe bin Laden’s brand of religion from the face of
+the earth before it destroys us all.

+

UPDATE: N.Z. Bear has written an
+
+excellent essay on memes and cultural subversion.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20020717132600.blog b/20020717132600.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..db82526 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020717132600.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Diet Considered as a Bad Religion +

A current New York Times news story, What If It’s All Been A Big Fat Lie, entertainingly chronicles the discovery that low-fat diets are bad for people. More specifically, that the substitution of carbohydrates like bread and pasta and potatoes for meat that we’ve all had urged on us since the early 1980s is probably the cause of the modern epidemic of obesity and the sharp rise in diabetes incidence.

+

I have long believed that most of the healthy-eating advice we get is stone crazy, and the story does tend to confirm it. One of my reasons for believing this is touched on in the article; what we’re told is good for us doesn’t match what humans “in the wild” (during the 99% of our species history that predated agriculture) ate. The diet our bodies evolved to process doesn’t include things like large amounts of milled grain or other starches. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate wild vegetables (especially tubers) and meat whenever they could get it.

+

I’ve always had to suppress a tendency to laugh rudely when vegeterians touted their diet as “natural”. Vegetarianism is deeply unnatural for human beings; it’s marginally possible in warm climates only (there are no vegetarians in Tibet because the climate kills them), and only possible even there because we’re at the near end of 4,000 years of breeding for high-caloric-value staple crops.

+

So what’s the natural diet for human beings? Our dentition (both slashing and grinding teeth) and the structure of our digestive system (short colon, no rumen) is intermediate between that of herbivores like cows and obligate carnivores like cats; both systems resemble those of non-specialized omnivores like bears. Actually, the earlier hominids in the human ancestral line were designed for a more vegetarian diet than we; they had large flat molars and powerful jaws designed for grinding seed-cases. The increase in brain size in the hominid line correlates neatly with a shift to a more carnivorous dentitition and skull structure.

+

Physical anthropologists will tell you that the shift from hunter-gatherer existence to sedentary agriculture enabled human beings to live at higher population densities, but at the cost of a marked deterioration in the health of the average person. The skeletons of agricultural populations are shorter, less robust, and show much more evidence of nutritional diseases relative to their hunter-gatherer ancestors.

+

For twenty years I’ve consciously been trying to eat what I think of as a caveman diet — heavy on the meat and raw vegetables, very little sugar, light on the starches. I’m a bit overweight now, not seriously so for a 44-year-old man, but enough to notice; what this NYT article tells me is that I didn’t follow my own prescription strictly enough and ate too much bread and potatoes.

+

But the evolutionary analysis only tells us what we probably should be eating. It doesn’t explain how the modern diet has come to be as severly messed up as it is — nor why the advice we’ve been getting on healthy eating over the last twenty years has been not merely bad but perversely wrong.

+

The answer is, I think, implicit in the fact that “health food” has a strong tendency to be bland, fibrous, and nasty — a kind of filboid studge that we have to work at convincing ourselves we like rather than actually liking. Which is, if you think about it, nuts. Human food tropisms represent two million years of selective knowledge about what’s good for our bodies. Eating a lot of what we don’t like is far more likely to be a mistake than eating things we do like, even to excess.

+

Why do we tend to treat our natural cravings for red meat and fat as sins, then? Notice the similarity between the rhetoric of diet books and religious evangelism and you have your answer. Dietary mortification of the flesh has become a kind of secular asceticism, a way for wealthy white people with guilt feelings about their affluence to demonstrate virtue and expiate their imagined trangressions.

+

Once you realize that dieting is a religion, the irrationality and mutual contradictions become easier to understand. It’s not about what’s actually good for you, it’s about suffering and self-denial and the state of your soul. People who constantly break and re-adopt diets are experiencing exactly the same cycle of secondary rewards as the sinner who repeatedly backslides and reforms.

+

This model explains the social fact that the modern flavor of “health”-based dietary piety is most likely to be found in people who don’t have the same psychological needs satisfied by an actual religion. Quick now: who’s more likely to be a vegetarian or profess a horror of “junk food” — a conservative Christian heartlander or a secular politically-correct leftist from the urban coasts?

+

The NYT article tells us that the dominant dietary religion of the last twenty years is cracking — that the weight of evidence against the fat-is-evil/carbs-are-good theory is no longer supportable. Well and good — but it won’t necessarily do us a lot of good to discard this religion only to get stuck with another one.

+

I say it’s time to give all bossy nutritionists, health-food evangelists and dietary busybodies the heave-ho out of our lives — tell the sorry bitches and bastards to get over themselves and go back to eating stuff that tastes good and satiates. And enjoy the outraged squawking from the dietarily correct — that, my friends, is the music of health and freedom.

+

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diff --git a/20020718071000.blog b/20020718071000.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c2d15c0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020718071000.blog @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +The Non-Portability of Barbecue +

(Originally titled: Travelling in Texas)

+

I was on the road in Texas last week, addressing Linux user groups in Dallas and Austin. I always enjoy visiting Texas. It’s a big, wide-open place full of generous people who cultivate a proper appreciation of some of my favorite things in life — firearms, blues guitar, and pepper sauces.

+

And, of course, one of the biggest things Texas has going for it is barbecue. And not the pallid imitation served up by us pasty-faced Yankees here where I live (near Philadelphia, PA) but the real thing. Barbecue, dammit. Red meat with enough fat on it to panic a health-foodist right out of his pantywaist, slow-cooked in a marinade sweeter than a mother’s kiss and eaten with sauces hot enough to peel paint. Garnish with a few extra jalapenos and coleslaw and wash it down with cheap soda, lemonade, or beer. Food of the gods.

+

I swear your testosterone level goes up just smelling this stuff. After a few mouthfuls of Rudy’s carnivoral bliss you’ll be hankerin’ to cultivate a drawl, wear a Stetson and drive a pickup truck with a gun rack. (I draw the line at country music, though. A man’s got to have some standards.)

+

At a real barbecue joint like Rudy’s (“Worst barbecue in Texas!”) they serve you piles of beef, pork and chicken wrapped in butcher paper in a plastic basket. No plates, just more butcher paper and bread. And, unfortunately, the bread is where this gustatory Nirvana nearly crashes back to earth. Because the bread at real barbecue places is invariably utter crap — spongy sliced white with all the taste of building insulation.

+

Here in Philadelphia we can’t make barbecue worth a damn, but we know better than to put a hot sandwich on American bread. One of our regional-food glories is the Philly steak sandwich, fried beef and onions and mushrooms (and usually cheese, but I don’t eat cheese) nestled in a foot-long Italian roll. The bread is important. It’s tasty, it’s chewy, it’s got a crust on it. It’s worthy of respect. One of the reasons you can’t get a decent steak sandwich more than fifty miles from Billy Penn’s hat is that bread. It depends on an Italian baking tradition that just doesn’t exist outside the mid-Atlantic metroplex, and is found in its highest form only in Philly and South Jersey. Philadelphians laugh at the pathetic imitations of “Philly steaks” offered elsewhere for the same reason Texans laugh at barbecue made north of the Mason-Dixon line. And both groups are right to laugh. It just ain’t the same.

+

Every time I order up a mess of barbecue at a place like Rudy’s or County Line or Dick’s Last Resort I think to myself “Someday, one of these barbecue outfits has got to start offering decent bread. Their sales would go through the roof.” I’ve been waiting for the market to correct this problem for more than twenty years now — and it hasn’t happened. And thereby hangs a mystery.

+

The mystery is the curious persistence of regional food differences in a country with cheap transport and the best communications network in the world. There are places in the U.S. where you can reliably get really good bread — mostly the coastal metroplexes. There are places you can get real barbecue, in the heartland South and Southwest. And these zones just don’t overlap. (Yes, they have a gourmet-bread bakery in Austin. I suspect, if I went there, I’d find it a lot like the Chinese food in Ann Arbor — impressive to the locals, maybe, but only because their standards are so low.)

+

I could multiply examples. Sourdough bread — I’ve had it everywhere you can get it and it just doesn’t taste right outside of San Francisco. The East Coast versions are competent, but lack some subtle tang. Yeast strain? Something in the water? Who knows?

+

Cheesecake. There’s a good one. Anybody who has lived in New York won’t touch most cheesecake made elsewhere at gunpoint, and with good reason. Next to a traditional New-York-style baked cheesecake (the kind you can stand a fork in because it has the approximate density of neutronium) all others are a sort of pathetic, tasteless cheese gelatin. In this case the recipe is clearly what matters.

+

Or deep-dish pizza. Try to get that done right anywhere but Chicago. Good luck. Actually, the Philly/South Jersey area may be the only other part of the U.S.that can almost make this nut, and our thin-crust pizza is better. But why? Why don’t the good techniques go national and drive out the weaker competition?

+

The obvious answer would be that nationwide, tastes differ too much for one regional variant to dominate. But many cases there isn’t even any dispute about where the best variant comes from; the superiority of “New York style” cheesecake. for example, is so universally understood that restaurants elsewhere often bill their cheesecake that way even when it’s actually half-composed of “lite” garbage like ricotta or cottage cheese. Nobody who has ever tasted one doubts that Philly steaks are the acme of the art. And nobody — but nobody — who can get both passes up Texas barbecue for what they make in New Haven or Walla Walla.

+

So you’d think that the market would have propagated Texas slow-cooking, San Francisco yeast starters and the Philly steak roll all over the country by now. But some food technologies travel better than others, and some seem curiously unable to thrive outside their native climes. Cheesecake recipes may survive transmission relatively well, but the mysteries of good barbecue are subtle and deep. Pizzas rely on elaborate oven and dough-mix technology that probably tends to conserve regional variations simply because it’s too capital-intensive to mess with casually.

+

I’ve meditated on the matter and still can’t decide whether I think that’s a good thing or not. The approved thing for travel writers to do is wax lyrical about the wonderfulness of regional variety, as if it would somehow fail to be an improvement in the world if I could get decent bread with my barbecue. The hell with that kind of sentimentality; I’d rather have a better meal.

+

But there’s a point buried there somewhere — something that isn’t about the bread or the barbecue, but about what it feels like to sit in a dusty roadside joint like Rudy’s,surrounded by cases of Red Pop and overweight rednecks in tractor caps and checked shirts, with the food of the gods melting in your mouth, and thinking “Damn, this place is tacky, but I hope it lives forever.”

+

And you know what? I suspect that kind of barbecue joint will live forever, or as close to forever as humans manage, anyway. They’ve probably existed since the first proto-hominids roasted mammoth haunch over a slow fire, washing it down with some badly-made tuber-beer equivalent of Red Pop. And their equivalents will probably persist in the zero-gee arcologies and Dyson spheres of the year 3000. Even if they get hip about the good bread, somewhere in the universe there will always be a Texas. And that’s a good thing.

+

UPDATE: Some respondents have reminded me of the Piedmont (and specially North Carolina) tradition of pulled-pork barbecue. Let me state for the record that I find it equally delicious. Both the Texas and Piedmont versions are so damn good that there is no call for petty disputation about which is superior. But for those of you who know what I am talking about, I am quite partial to burnt
+ends.

+

UPDATE: Jane Galt has commented in her usual witty and illuminating fashion.

+

UPDATE: The mystery of San Francisco sourdough, was, as it turns out, solved in 1970. You can buy a starter with the proper symbiosis of bacteria and yeast — and, contrary to myth, local bacteria won’t overwhelm it. Of course this makes it harder to understand why the stuff isn’t everywhere…

+

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diff --git a/20020721161800.blog b/20020721161800.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8d7f9a8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020721161800.blog @@ -0,0 +1,80 @@ +Run Silent, Go Feep +

Warning: The following blog entry provides way more than the
+recommended daily allowance of geeking. If you don’t have a serious
+propeller-head streak, surf outta here now before it’s too
+late.

+

I’m mainly a software guy, but occasionally I build PCs for fun.
+Design them, rather; the further away I stay from actual hardware the
+happier it usually is for everybody. Last year, I designed an Ultimate
+Linux Box; the good folks at Los Alamos Computers built it and
+will cheerfully sell you one. It was a successful design in most
+respects, but unpleasantly noisy. This year, as we do the 2002
+refresh, I’m going to be working hard at getting the most noise
+reduction I can without sacrificing performance. I’m experimenting
+now with ways and means.

+

So I spent a couple of hours today disassembling the case of my
+wife Cathy’s machine (minx.thyrsus.com) and lining three sides of it
+with Dynamat, a kind of stick-on
+rubber acoustic insulation often used in car-stereo installations.
+The malevolent god that normally attends me when I futz with hardware
+must have been off tormenting some other hapless ex-mathematician; no
+hardware was destroyed, no blood was shed, and I’m typing this on the
+selfsame reassembled machine.

+

Minx is a pretty generic mid-tower system made with cheap Taiwanese
+parts in mid-2002 by my local hole-in-the-wall computer shop: I
+spent only $150 to have it built, recycling a few parts from an only
+slightly older machine. It has a 300W power supply, Athlon 950 mobo
+with stock CPU cooler fan, one 80mm case fan, 7200RPM ATA drive. I
+succeeded in lining both 14″-square side panels and the case top; this
+used up the 4’sq piece I bought so efficiently that there was only
+about 10″sq in two small piece left over. I used those to cover the
+only exposed solid section of the back panel.

+

If you want try this yourself, the tools I found useful were a
+utility knife and a metal footrule, the latter useful both for
+measuring to fit and as a cutting guide.

+

I took before and after measurements with the db meter. dbA scale,
+measurements made with the probe one inch above the center-rear edge
+of the case.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Machine off:44dbA
Machine on, before:63dbA
Machine on, after:61dbA
+

In other words, only a 2dbA drop — marginal when you consider
+that the meter is only rated 1.5dB accurate! but it’s worth bearing in
+mind that the scale is logarithmic; 2dbA is more than it looks like.

+

I have studio-engineer ears and sensitive musician fingers. I took
+before-and-after measurements with those, too, listening to the sound
+tambre and feeling for case resonance.

+

My ears tell me that the box is only slightly quieter, but the noise
+spectrum has changed. The proportion of high-frequency noise has
+dropped; more of what I’m hearing is white noise due to turbulant
+airflow, less is bearing noise. This is a good change even if total
+emission hasn’t dropped much.

+

My fingers tell me that the amount of case resonance has dropped quite
+dramatically, especially on the side panels.

+

Was it worth doing? I am not sure. There would probably be more
+benefit on a system emitting more bearing noise from 10K or 15Krpm
+drives. On this one, I think the power supply is emitting most of
+the noise, and acoustic lining can’t do much against that.

+

In fact, my clearest take-away from this is that the big gains in
+noise reduction on conventional PCs are likely to come from
+obsessing about power-supply engineering — including details like
+whether the fan blows through a slotted grille or a cutout with a
+wire-basket finger guard (the latter will generate less turbulence
+noise).

+

I’d like to retrofit minx with a Papst 12dbA muffin fan and see if
+that makes a measurable difference. But the best change would
+probably be one of the Enhance
+300W PSUs that are supposed to only emit 26dbA. I’ll bet that would
+win big.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20020729234800.blog b/20020729234800.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f0612a8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020729234800.blog @@ -0,0 +1,386 @@ +Right back at ya, Captain +

Last Saturday morning in San Diego I had breakfast with Steven den
+Beste, the redoubtable captain of U.S.S. Clueless. One of the
+side-effects of that meeting was a long
+critique of open-source development. Herewith my response.

+

Steve and I agree on the scaling problem that has pushed software
+development efforts to the ragged edge of what is sustainable even by
+corporations with lots of money. Software project sizes are roughly
+doubling every eighteen months, and for reasons Steve alluded to the
+expected bug count per thousand lines is actually rising.

+

My assertion is that software development has reached a scale at
+which (a) even large corporations can often no longer afford to field
+enough developers to be effective at today’s project scales, and (b)
+traditional methods of software quality assurance (ranging from formal
+methods to internal walkthroughs) are no longer effective. The only
+development organizations that seem to thrive on today’s complexity
+regime are open-source teams.

+

Note that I am not claiming that open source is a silver bullet for
+the software-complexity problem. There are no silver bullets, no
+permanent solutions. What I am claiming is that at the
+leading edge of large-scale software, closed-source development
+doesn’t work any more. The future belongs to open source plus
+whatever other practices and technologies we learn to use with
+it to develop at ever-higher scales of complexity.

+

Steve’s analysis of the open-source phenomenon is very intelligent,
+but doesn’t quite understand either the mode of organization, the
+associated technology, or the factional politics within the movement.
+Diagnostic of the slight disconnect is when he writes “For [the
+zealots], the only true “Open Source” is governed by the strong form
+of the GPL, and all other forms and licenses are harmful dilution of
+the concept.” In fact, the people he’s talking about reject the term
+“open source” entirely and insist on the ideologically-loaded term
+“free software”.

+

A more serious error is when he writes “It is plausible that an OSS
+project would require each participant to sign an NDA before being
+given access to the source.” It is not plausible. The licenses
+and community values of the open-source community would not permit this.
+His two bullet points characterizing open source are missing its most
+important characteristic: the entire practice is designed to facilitate
+scrutiny by people with no institutional or contract relationship to the core
+development team. The astringent effect of peer review by people who
+have nothing to lose by reporting bugs is precisely the
+point of the whole game.

+

Steve doesn’t undertand the importance or the power of this effect. This
+slightly skews his whole essay; much of it is talking past what open-source
+people do, rather than addressing us. He’s also unaware of a lot of the
+real-world evidence for the success of the method. Some of the things he
+thinks are technologically or economically impossible are actually being
+done, routinely.

+

He’s correct when he says that most contributors are self-selected and
+self-motivated. He overestimates the cost of training newbies, though. They
+self-train; normally, the first time a core developer hears from a newbie
+is typically when the newbie sends a patch — self-evidence that the newbie
+has already acquired a critical level of knowledge about the
+software. The “sink or swim” method turns out to work, and work well.

+

It’s incorrect to imply, as he does, that open-source development
+is unsustainable because the people doing it are flaky amateurs.
+Steve hasn’t absorbed the implications of the Boston Consulting
+Group study that shows that about 40% of contributors to core projects
+are professionals getting paid for working on open source by patrons
+who need to use the results. In fact, what the open-source community
+is evolving into is something very like a huge machine for bringing
+newbies into apprenticeship contact with experienced developers and
+professionalizing both groups.

+

He also writes “OSS by its nature tends to be reactive rather than
+predictive. It doesn’t look into the future, try to predict a problem
+which doesn’t exist now but will exist then, and be ready with a
+solution. Rather, it tends to see problems that exist now and work on
+solutions for them.” This is false — or, at any rate, no more true
+than it is for closed-source development.

+

The open-source community built the Web and the Internet before it
+had acquired a name for itself and full consciousness of its own
+practices. Today, the cutting-edge work in operating systems
+languages, desktop user interfaces, relational databases and many
+other areas is being done either within the open-source community or
+in cooperation with it by academics. These prodigious efforts of
+imagination dwarf any “prediction” produced by closed-source software
+development in the last two decades.

+

Steve’s “open source is reactive” claim strikes me as ironically
+funny, because I can remember when the standard knock on my crowd was
+that we’re great at innovation but can’t actually field product. How
+quickly they forget…

+

He’s right enough about the difficulty of planning and high cost
+of face-to-face meetings, though. These are real problems. It’s
+a testimony to the power of our practices that we manage to ship large
+volumes of high-quality software despite these obstacles.

+

What Steve called “player-killer” tactics have been tried — there
+was a famous incident a few years back in which a TCP-wrappers
+distribution was Trojaned. The crack was detected and the community
+warned within hours. The black hats don’t seem to bother trying this
+any more; our reaction time is too fast for that game to be very
+rewarding. The technical design of Linux helps here in ways that
+I won’t go into here — suffice it to say that it’s intrinsically
+much harder to get a Trojan to do anything interesting than it
+is under Windows or other single-user operating systems.

+

So far, the supply of open-source developers seems to be pretty
+elastic — we’re not limited much by lacking bodies. Other factors
+loom much larger; patents, the DMCA, intrinsically hard technical
+problems. I don’t understand why this is as well as I’d like to, but
+the facts are undeniable; the community is ten times the size my
+wildest high-end scenarios predicted a decade ago and seems to be
+growing faster as it gets larger.

+

Steve’s whole argument that open-source can’t win in embedded
+systems is very curious, since it predicts exactly the opposite of
+what is actually happening out there. Linux is taking over in
+embedded systems — in fact, many observers would say it has already
+won that space. If Steve had worked in the field within the last
+three years he would probably know this.

+

Here are some data about the demand; the only non-general-purpose
+open-source software magazine in existence is the Linux Embedded
+Systems Journal. Open-source embedded developers like Monta Vista
+Software are bucking the recession by growing like crazy. The first
+cell-phone prototype running entirely open-source software just
+entered beta testing.

+

I was in California to meet Steve partly because Real Networks
+wanted me to be on stage when they announced the open-sourcing of
+their RTSP engine. Their CEO, Rob Glaser, was quite frank about the
+immediate business reasons: they needed to get ports to forty
+different Nokia cellphones and just couldn’t figure out how to muster
+the resources for that short of inviting every stakeholder on the
+planet to hack the problem. Scaling bites. Hard.

+

In fact, some of the very characteristics that Steve thinks make
+embedded systems like cellphones safe for closed development seems to
+be the factors that are driving increased open-sourcing. The close
+tie to hardware actually decreases the value of secrecy,
+because it means the software is typically not easily re-usable by
+hardware competitors. Thus open sourcing is often a great way to
+recruit help from customer engineers without a real downside risk of
+plagiarism.

+

In fact, it’s an open secret in the industry that the most
+important reason most closed-source embedded and driver software
+remains closed is not nerves about plagiarism but fear of patent
+audits on the source code. Graphics-card manufacturers, in
+particular, routinely swipe patented techniques from their competitors
+and bury them in binaries. (This is generally believed to be the
+reason nVidia’s drivers aren’t open.)

+

Another trend that’s driving Linux and open-sourcing in embedded
+stuff is the shift from specialty embedded 8-bit processors to 32-bit
+chips with general-purpose architectures. Turns out the development
+costs for getting stuff to run on the 8-bit chips are sickeningly high
+and rising — partly because the few wizards who can do good work on
+that hardware are expensive. The incremental cost for
+smarter hardware has dropped a lot; it’s now cheaper to embed
+general-purpose chips running Linux because it means you have a
+larger, less expensive talent pool that can program them. Also,
+when your developers aren’t fighting hardware limits as hard,
+you get better time to market (which, as Steve observes, is
+critical).

+

Steve is right about the comparative difficulty of applying
+open-source methods to vertical applications. But the difficulty is
+only comparative; it’s happening anyway. The metalab archive carries
+a point-of-sale system for pizza parlors. I know of another case in
+which a Canadian auto dealership built specialized accounting software
+for their business and open-sourced it. The reasons? Same as usual;
+they wanted to lay off as much as possible of the development and
+maintainance cost on their competitors.

+

This is the same co-opetition logic that makes the Apache Software
+Foundation work — it’s just as powerful for vertical apps, though
+less obviously so. Each sponsoring company sees a higher payoff from
+having the software at a small fraction of the manpower cost for a
+complete in-house development. The method spreads risk in a way
+beneficial to all parties, too, because the ability of separate
+companies to sustain development tends to be uncorrelated — unless
+they all sink, the project endures.

+

The way to solve the problem of not exposing your business logic to
+competitors is to separate your app into an open-source engine and a
+bunch of declarative business-rule schemas that you keep secret.
+Databases work this way, and websites (the web pages and CGIs are the
+schema). Many vertical apps can be partitioned this way too — in
+fact, for things like tax-preparation software they almost have to be,
+because the complexity overhead of hacking executable code every time
+the rules change is too high.

+

Steve thinks the differences between Apache and Mozilla are bigger
+than they are. In fact, the core groups of both projects are
+full-time pros being funded by large users of the software.

+

So, let’s address Steve’s objections point by point:

+

For embedded software, OSS has the following problems:

+
    +
  • +

    It can’t be scheduled; timely delivery can’t be relied
    +on.

    +

    Timely delivery can’t be relied on for any software; see
    +De Marco and Lister’s excellent book Peopleware: Productive
    +Projects and Teams     on the delusion of deadlines, especially
    +the empirical evidence that the “wake me up when it’s done” strategy
    +of not setting them actually gets your project done faster (also the
    +implication of a recent Harvard Business School study of software
    +project outcomes).

    +

    Open source is at least not noticeably worse than closed-source on this
    +axis. Arguably it’s better, because the rapid release cycles allow users
    +to pick up on project results as soon as they’re good enough.

    +
    • +
  • +

    Debugging requires access to custom hardware which usually
    +can’t easily be accessed across the net.

    +

    There aren’t good solutions to this problem yet, but the increasing
    +use of “overpowered” 32-bit processors using standard busses is
    +tending to reduce it in scope. The development tools and interface
    +hardware used in embedded stuff are rapidly getting more generic and closer
    +to what’s used in general-purpose computers.

    +
    • +
  • +

    Active participation even for junior people requires substantial
    +amounts of project-specific knowledge which isn’t easily acquired,
    +especially remotely.

    +

    This one puzzles me, because I think Steve ought to be right about
    +it — but I’m not hearing the kinds of noises that I’d hear if it were
    +slowing down the move to Linux and open source significantly.

    +

    At least part of the answer is that embedded-systems work is
    +getting de-skilled in a particular sense — more of it’s being done by
    +application specialists who are training up to the required level of
    +programming, rather than programmers who have acquired expensive
    +application-specific knowledge.

    +
    • +
  • +

    A great deal of proprietary information is usually involved in
    +the process, and if that’s released the company can be seriously
    +harmed.

    +

    It’s a question of tradeoffs. As RealNetworks found out when
    +costing its Nokia contract, the choice is increasingly between giving
    +up control of some of your proprietary IP and being too resource-bound
    +to ship at all.

    +

    There is no market for secrecy. There’s a market for product. If
    +you can’t ship product, or your customers aren’t confident that you
    +can maintain it after shipping, all that proprietary IP amounts to is
    +a millstone around your neck.

    +

    There will be more stories like RTSP in the future. Count on it.
    +In fact, the day will come when most of your contract partners simply
    +won’t accept the business risks of having someone else hold
    +proprietary rights on the embedded software they use.

    +
    • +
  • +

    It’s nearly impossible to do embedded software without
    +common impromptu face-to-face meetings with co-workers, either to ask
    +questions or to brainstorm. Doing this electronically is sufficiently
    +different as to not be practical.

    +

    Yeah. They used to think that about operating systems, too. Obviously
    +the Linux kernel is impossible, and therefore doesn’t exist.

    +

    (At which point Oolon Colluphid disappeared in a puff of logic.)

    +
    • +
+

For vertical apps, the objections are:

+
    +
  • +

    Security, security, security. You want me to trust my
    +billing system to code written by anyone who happens to come along and
    +volunteer to work on it, without any kind of check of credentials or
    +checks on trustworthiness?

    +

    One of the lessons the business world has been absorbing is that
    +open-source projects are dramatically more secure than their
    +closed-source competition — anybody who compares the Bugtraq records
    +on Apache vs. ISS defacements, or Linux vs. Windows remote exploits,
    +will notice that real fast.

    +

    It’s not hard to understand why this is — I’ve found that even
    +corporate executives grok the theory pretty quickly. I won’t do the whole
    +argument here, but this article on Kerckhoff’s
    +Law     holds the crucial clue. When you rely on the obscurity of source
    +code for security, it means that the bad guys find the bugs faster than
    +you can plug them — there are more of them, and they have entropy on
    +their side. Open source evens the odds for the good guys.

    +
    • +
  • +

    Recruitment: for most of the kind of people involved in
    +OSS, vertical apps are boring. (Unless they want to figure out how to
    +steal from it.)

    +

    This remains a problem. On the other hand, open source makes it
    +easier to train domain specialists to be good enough programmers to
    +get the job done. It’s easier for physicists to learn to hack than
    +it is for hackers to learn physics.

    +
    • +
  • +

    It takes a lot of knowledge of the specific aspects of the
    +problem to make a significant contribution, which means things like
    +observing the actual process of guests checking in at the front desk
    +of the hotel.

    +

    This just reinforces the tendency for vertical-app developers to be
    +obsessives about something else who learn to program, rather than obsessives
    +about programming who learn something else.

    +

    Professional programmers tend to bridle at this thought. Well, better
    +learn to live with it. As software becomes more pervasive, the amount
    +of it done by application-specialist “amateurs” is going to increase.

    +
    • +
  • +

    The industry is full of horror stories of vertical apps
    +which ran badly over budget and over schedule; the idea scares the
    +hell out of business people. They’re unlikely to be very enthused by
    +the use of a process which by its nature *cannot* be reliably
    +scheduled. (Remember that Mozilla ran two years long.)

    +

    Schedules — and the belief that deadlines make software happen
    +faster — are a delusion in the mind of management, one not supported
    +by the actual evidence about project outcomes. This delusion is
    +so entrenched that managers fail to interpret the 70% rate of
    +project failures correctly. It’s as if people were so determined
    +to believe the Earth is flat that they ignore what their eyes tell
    +them when ships sink over the horizon.

    +

    No software larger than toy programs can be scheduled.
    +Tactics aimed at doing so normally have the actual effect of
    +increasing the time to market. `Aggressive’ schedules
    +effectively guarantee failure. The sooner we learn these objective
    +truths, and that the illusion of control that schedules give is not
    +worth the real costs, the sooner rates of outright project failure
    +will dip below 70%.

    +

    Go read Peopleware. Now.

    +
    • +
+

For short life apps:

+
    +
  • +

    Schedule is everything. If you’re six months late, you’re dead.

    +

    See above. There are reasons open sourcing is less applicable to short-life
    +applications, but this turns out not to be one of them.

    +
    • +
  • +

    Secrecy is everything else. If you’re on time but your
    +competitor knows what you’re doing a year ahead, he’ll wipe you
    +out.

    +

    This argument has more force for short-life apps than for Steve’s other
    +categories, but remember that increasingly the alternative to open source
    +is not being able to ship at all. Your competitor is in the same boat
    +you are.

    +
    • +
  • +

    How do you make money selling what anyone can get for free
    +from any developer? If your product was developed out in the open, who
    +exactly buys it afterwards?

    +

    Steve has a stronger point here. It’s one that people used to
    +think applied to almost all software, but which turns out to be mainly
    +a problem for short-life apps. Actually the distinguishing
    +characteristic isn’t expected lifetime per se, but something
    +correlated with it — whether the product needs continued downstream
    +work (maintainance and upgrades) or not.

    +

    Long-life, high-maintainance apps create niches for service businesses.
    +That’s the main way you make money in an open-source world. It’s
    +harder to make that work with a short-life app. Sometimes it’s
    +impossible. Life is hard.

    +
    • +
+

For long life apps:

+
    +
  • +

    Will the participants be willing to work on what our
    +marketing analysis says we need, or will they insist that they know
    +what is required and try to add that instead? We don’t need feature
    +creep, or people trying to change the direction we’re moving.

    +

    In open-source projects, the function of “marketing analysis” tends to
    +be taken be direct interaction with the user community. We find we
    +do better work without a bunch of marketroids getting between us and
    +our customers.

    +
    • +
  • +

    There is major learning curve involved in making a
    +reasonable contribution to these kinds of programs; you don’t learn
    +how a circuit board router works in a few days of study. In most cases
    +you have to be conversant with the way that the package’s customers do
    +what they do, and most programmers don’t know these things and can’t
    +easily learn them.

    +

    See my previous remarks about application specialists and the
    +democratization of programming. And every time you’re tempted to
    +say “But they couldn’t possibly get away with that in application
    +area X” remember that they once said that about all the areas where
    +open source now dominates.

    +

    It’s just not smart to bet against the hackers. Not smart at all.
    +We generally end up having the last laugh on the naysayers. As recently
    +as 1990, “serious analysts” laughed at the idea of ubiquitous Internet.
    +As late as 1996, they said Unix was dead. We showed them — and there
    +are more of us now, with better tools, than ever.

    +
    • +
+

Steve is right that one of the most effective ways to head off bugs
+is to have a core group of professional engineers do a clean design.
+Where he’s mistaken is in believing this truth has anything to tell
+us about open vs. closed development. Us open-source guys, it turns
+out, are really good at clean design.

+

This something to do with the fact that, as individuals, we tend to
+be exceptionally capable and self-motivated — an elite selected by
+dedication to the art of programming. It has more to do with not
+having managers and marketroids pissing in the soup constantly,
+telling us what tools to use, imposing insane deadlines, demanding
+endless checklist features that don’t actually benefit anyone.

+

But mostly it has to do with the ruthless, invaluable pressure of
+peer review — the knowledge that every design decision we make will
+be examined by thousands of people who may well be smarter than we
+are, and if we fail the test our effort will be pitilessly
+discarded. In that kind of environment, you get good or you get
+gone.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20020913105000.blog b/20020913105000.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4e5f320 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020913105000.blog @@ -0,0 +1,111 @@ +When there’s nothing left to say, self-parody is the way +

I’m just, barely, old enough to remember the anti-war Leftists of
+the 1960s and 1970s. I disagreed with them over Vietnam then, and
+I disagree with the anti-war Left’s agitation against a war on Iraq
+today. But as I read what comes out of minds of people like Robert
+Fisk and Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag these days, I wonder if I’m
+getting old and allowing a golden haze to cloud my recollection of
+past decades. Because I find myself feeling almost nostalgic for
+the anti-Vietnam-war Left.

+

Yes, yes, I still think “Hanoi Jane” and her crowd were basically
+wrong. Wrong about the consequences of a North Vietnamese victory
+(Communists turn out to be murderously repressive — what a shock!);
+wrong about the motives and interests of the U.S.; wrong about almost
+everything except the level of incompetence, buffoonery, and myopia
+afflicting the generals and politicians running that war.

+

But there was one important difference. The anti-Vietnam-war Left
+may have been deluded and prone to masturbating in front of Che
+Guevara posters…but if you sifted through enough of their ranting
+you could detect the outlines of a principled case, or several
+principled cases. There was one argument on which they persuaded me;
+though I was not of draftable age, I found I agreed with them that the
+military draft was an intolerable form of slavery years before I
+encountered Robert Heinlein’s pithy objurgation that “A nation that
+cannot find enough volunteers to defend itself will not survive
+— and does not deserve to.”

+

But try as I might, I can’t detect a principled case anywhere in today’s
+anti-war Left. Which is all the more curious since I think they
+could be making one. Several, in fact: starting with the argument
+that we should abandon the path of war not even because of what it does
+to our enemies but because of what it does to ourselves. At every
+level from the personal to the political, warfare is a brutalizing
+experience that erodes our freedoms and empowers the nastiest elements
+of human psyches and societies.

+

There are principled responses to that case, but that particular
+argument is not my point. My point is that today’s anti-war
+rhetoric, as exemplified by reports on a planned September 11
+“Teach-In and Panel regarding Oppression” at UCLA, never seems
+to even confront the question of whether war against Afghanistan and Iraq
+is justified by the Islamist threat. Instead, the topic is “U.S. Law
+and Policy Against Immigrants of Color”, as if there is any kind of
+equivalence between the U.S.’s border policies and the catastrophic
+mass murder of 2,500 people.

+

There is a curious kind of evasiveness at work here. We can see it
+at work in the arid deconstructionism of Susan Sontag’s NYT op-ed, Real
+Battles and Empty Metaphors. Even the title announces that she’s
+going to lucubrate about the relationship between language and
+reality, not confront reality itself. A similar denial is evident
+it the rhetoric of Noam Chomsky; prodded for commentary on the war,
+he recites a litany of past American wrongdoing as if that somehow
+banishes the question of how soon Saddam Hussein will have nuclear
+weapons and what he will do with them when he gets them.

+

Maybe I’m getting senile, but it seems to me that the Left of my
+teens was in better contact with reality than today’s crew. There
+really was a military-industrial complex and the desire for war
+profits probably did drive some of the political support for the
+Vietnam war. The military-industrial complex is still with us today,
+but the Left seems to have forgotten even the little it once knew
+about political economics and isn’t even bothering to raise that
+issue. Perhaps this amnesia is a post-traumatic effect of watching
+Marx take a header into the dustbin of history; we’ve come to strange
+days indeed when I have to conclude that my libertarian self could
+easily write a better Marxist critique of Dubya’s war propaganda than
+anyone on the Left has yet issued in public.

+

Instead, what we’re seeing is a rhetoric that is half a retreat
+into language-chopping and half an expression of contempt for the
+U.S. — contempt so out of balance that it’s doomed to be tuned out by
+anyone less far to the left than the unlamented former Congresswoman
+Cynthia McKinney.

+

When did the Left descend into such empty self-parody? And why?

+

Watching “real existing socialism” self-destruct must have been
+part of it. I speculated on the psychological effects of that
+political collapse in a previous essay Socialists
+to the Stars, about Scottish SF writers Ken McLeod and Iain Banks.
+But something weirder and more diffuse happened to the Left on
+this side of the pond, and I’m not sure what it was.

+

Some days I wonder if Greg Egan, the reclusive West Australian
+author who has produced some of the best hard SF of the last decade,
+may not have called it right in the following passage from his novel
+“Teranesia”:

+

+“Feminism was working, and the civil rights movement was working, and
+all the other social justice movements were getting more and more
+support. So, in the 1980s, the CIA [...] hired some really clever
+linguists to invent a secret weapon; an incredibly complicated way of
+talking about politics that didn’t actually make any sense, but which
+spread through all the universities in the world, because it sounded
+so impressive. And at first, the people who talked like this just
+hitched their wagon to the social justice movements, and everyone else
+let them come along for the ride, because they seemed harmless. But
+then they climbed on board the peace train and threw out the driver.”

+

“So instead of going to the people in power and saying, `How about
+upholding the universal principles you claim to believe in?’ the
+people in the social justice movements ended up saying things like `My
+truth narrative is in conflict with your truth marrative!’. And the
+people in power replied `Woe is me! You’ve thrown me into the briar
+patch!’ And everyone else said `Who are these idiots? Why should we
+trust them when they can’t even speak properly?’ And the CIA was
+happy. And the people in power were happy. And the secret weapon
+lived on in the universities for years and years, because everyone
+who’d played a part in the conspiracy was too embarrassed to admit
+what they’d done,” +

+

Egan’s account is implausible only because it seems unlikely that
+the CIA is quite that subtle. But he’s right in pointing out that the
+rise of the language of postmodernism — the sterile, involuted,
+pseudo-profundity famously skewered by the Sokal Hoax
+— seems to be an important correlate of the decline of the
+American Left.

+

Self-parody is where you end up when you have nothing left to say.
+And when all you can talk about is `discourse’ that’s a damn short road,

+

Bogspot comments

diff --git a/20020917033700.blog b/20020917033700.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3f74e4c --- /dev/null +++ b/20020917033700.blog @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +Living With Microsoft +

In today’s episode of the Microsoft follies, we learned that
+Media Player 9
+is un-uninstallable. Deliberately.

+

A A Microsoft spokesthing confirmed that Media Player 9 is so deeply
+integrated into the operating system that it cannot be removed without
+doing a `system restore’. Which, incidentally, will wipe out your
+Office installation.

+

It’s at times like this that, contemplating Microsoft users, one
+feels as though one is wandering among people lashing themselves with
+stinging nettles until blood runs off them in rivulets. One wants to
+know why they don’t just stop. One is told “But it’s the
+standard!”

+

One shakes one’s head bemusedly.

+

They pay heavily for the privilege of lashing themselves, too.
+Except for those blessed, blissful occasions on which they pay still
+more, grease themselves, bend over, and prepare to be buggered by a
+chainsaw. That’s called a “System Upgrade”.

+

One contemplates the uptime figures on one’s Linux box and
+feels — admit it! — a bit smug.

+

Comment

diff --git a/20020918224400.blog b/20020918224400.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ffdc10b --- /dev/null +++ b/20020918224400.blog @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +So, Howell Raines isn’t a complete waste of air +

The NYT ran a
+pro-Linux editorial today.

+

That’s good. They had to slip their “communitarian” spin in there, though, as if Linux hackers are all a bunch of PBS-worshiping Mother Jones readers and natural suckers for the fuzzy-sweater cause of the week.

+

Hah. If they only knew. I’m not going to say my gun-toting
+red-meat libertarianism is typical, because it isn’t. Actually
+the mass centroid of hackers’ politics is a lot like the
+blogosphere’s, a sort of soft-libertarianism-leaning-towards-conservatism or vice-versa
+(the centroid used to be further left but a lot has changed in the last decade).
+Much less radical than me, but still enough to give the likes
+of Raines a bad case of the vapors.

+

But let’s keep that our little secret, OK? If Raines wants to believe that open-source people are some kind of cross between Greenpeace and the Ethical Culture Society, that’s just fine. We’ll
+take the Gray Lady’s backing. It’s another small step on the road to world domination.

+

The day will come when we will be the guys running the
+world’s entire digital infrastructure (not such a stretch; we
+already run the Internet). Our example will teach Howell’s
+kids stuff about the power of decentralization and voluntary cooperation, all the things leftists pay lip-service to until the
+last second before they’d have to actually apply them. And
+the world will change out from under him. Subtly. Powerfully.
+And in ways he can’t guess at yet.

+

It should be a fun ride.

diff --git a/20020919030200.blog b/20020919030200.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..992b641 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020919030200.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +Imperialists by necessity? +

Steven den Beste wrote a long, intelligent and insightful essay on who the enemy is. I think he is right to see Afghanistan, Iraq, and the suppression of Al-Qaeda as phases of longer, wider war — a clash of civilizations driven by the failure of Islamic/Arab culture (though I would stress the problem of the Islamic commandment to jihad more than he does). I think he is also right to say that our long-term objective must be to break, crush and eventually destroy this culture, because we can’t live on the same planet with people who both carry those memes and have access to weapons of mass destruction. They will hate us and seek to destroy us not for what we’ve done but for what we are.

+

I wonder if Steve sees what this implies in the longer time horizon, though? The cultures that produced Al-Qaeda, despite swimming in oil wealth that should have made it easy, have failed in all essential ways to join the modern world. They mutilate the genitalia of the female half of their population, they educate only a vanishingly small number of scientists and engineers, and their politics is a perpetual brawl conducted by tribes with flags. Their capability to get with even the 20th century on their own has been tested and found wanting, let alone the 21st.

+

Steve may well be right that the only solution to a festering boil like Iraq or Saudi Arabia starts with military defeat, Western occupation, and a forced restructuring of society along the lines of what Douglas MacArthur did to the Japanese after 1945.

+

I used to think we could corrupt Islamism out of existence, make it fat and lazy with cheap consumer goods and seduce it with porn. Maybe that would be the best way to go if we had two generations to solve the problem. But if the likes of Hussein are breeding botulism and about to get his hands on nukes, we’ve run out of time. We can’t afford the soft option if the price of futzing around might be a mushroom cloud over Manhattan, or over Tel Aviv.

+

We must win. And we must impose our will and our culture on the losers, not for old-fashioned reasons like gold or oil or craving conquest, but because the likely alternative is nuclear megadeath, plague in our home cities, and the smell of Sarin in the morning. Is there anyone left who doubts that Saddam Hussein, who nerve-gassed Iraqis by the hundreds of thousands in the 1980s, would use nukes if he had them?

+

There’s a word for the process of conquering a third-world pesthole and imposing your culture on it. It’s called imperialism.

+

In the 19th century, the Western powers built empires for prestige and economic advantage. In the 21st century, we may be discovering that we need to get back into the imperialism business as a matter of survival. It may turn out that the 20th century was an interlude doomed to end as cheap transportation made the world smaller and improving weapons technology made large-scale destruction inexpensive even for barbarian thugs like Saddam Hussein.

+

Envy the British of Sir Richard Burton’s time. They could conquer half the world for simple gain without worrying about the Fuzzy-Wuzzies or the Ndebele aerosol-dropping pasteurella pestis on Knightsbridge. We — and I mean specifically the U.S. now — may have to conquer the Islamic world a second time, simply because the risks of war and the moral hazards of imperialism are less threatening than the prospect of some Allah-crazed Islamofascist detonating a knapsack nuke on the Smithsonian Mall.

+

I’m not joking about the moral hazards of imperialism, either. They may be a more serious danger to a free society than the short-term exigencies of war. Witness the fact that I, a radical libertarian anarchist for more than twenty years, find myself arguing for a position not all that easy to distinguish from reactionary military expansionism. Urgent survival threats make strange bedfellows. And it is all too plausible that. if we take this path, we might degenerate from imperialists by necessity to imperialists by habit and predilection.

+

Still. Reality is what it is. If there’s no way short of straight-up imperialism and nation-building all over the Islamic world to prevent a holocaust on American or European soil that would make 9/11 look like a garden party, then that’s what we’re going to have to do — civilize the barbarians at the point of a gun.

+

There is precedent; the British did a pretty good job of civilizing India and we did a spectacularly effective one on Japan. And the U.S. would be well equipped to do it again; our economy is now so large that we could run a globe-spanning empire from the petty-cash drawer. Seriously. The U.S, a hyperpower so dominant that no imaginable coalition of other nations could defeat it at conventional warfare, spends a ridiculously low percentage of GNP (6%, if I recall correctly) on its military.

+

Civilizing the barbarians needn’t even be a bloody process if you start the job right after their will has been smashed by a major defeat in war. The U.S. burned essentially every major Japanese city except Kyoto to the ground with incendiaries during World War Two and then atom-bombed two of them. This seemed to help. It would be nice if we didn’t have to get so drastic this time, but it might come to that yet; judging by measures like relative GDP and number of Nobel prizes earned, the Arab/Islamic world is actually further behind the civilization curve than the Japanese were in their militarist phase. They may need to be smashed flatter before a latter-day MacArthur will be able to do anything with them.

+

Some of my readers will be creaming in horror. Imperialism? Barbarians? How dare I use such language? How dare I argue that the U.S. has the right to commit deliberate cultural genocide?

+

There’s a big hole in the ground in Manhattan. That’s my argument.

+

If Pearl Harbor was good enough reason for us to conquer Japan and run it like a proconsulate until the Japanese learned manners, then 9/11 was damn good and sufficient reason for us to do the same number on the Islamists. That meant Afghanistan, it means Iraq, and down the road it may mean Saudi Arabia as well.

+

History is not over.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20020921231700.blog b/20020921231700.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..af7edb2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020921231700.blog @@ -0,0 +1,100 @@ +Defeating Hussein Without Government +

The aftermath of 9/11 is a hard time to be an anarchist.

+

For many years before the WTC came down I believed that America
+could be better defended by have no government than by the system we
+have now, I imagined a nation of heavily armed militias, without
+the power-projection capabilities of a conventional military but
+with the capability to inflict a world of grief on an invader — and
+with nobody having the authority to tell them to surrender. We
+could have a home defense better than Switzerland’s, our larger
+population and longer distances doing for us what mountainous terrain
+does for the Swiss.

+

There would still be a place in an anarchist America for
+professional soldiers — not many, but a few heavy troop formations
+would be kept on retainer by consortia of insurance companies. Yes, I
+said insurance companies, that’s because how free markets socialize
+shared risks. Normal law enforcement would be funded by pools set up
+by vendors of crime insurance looking to reduce their payouts;
+national defense and overseas power projection (to the extent the term
+still had meaning in a stateless society) would be funded by people
+who bought war insurance (say, businesses with overseas assets to
+protect).

+

These measures, I was and am convinced, would stop conventional
+wars of conquest dead in their tracks. Invade a nation of 350,000,000
+libertarians, most of them routinely armed? Yeah. Right. Any
+War-College-trained military officer will tell you that urban warfare
+against guerrillas on their home ground chews up armies faster than
+anything else. Witness Stalingrad.

+

Without a government, many of the reasons people might go
+to war against America would also vanish. No entangling alliances, no
+foreign policy to object to. Conventional terrorism would become a
+lot dicier proposition in a libertarian anarchy, too — as in
+Israel, where armed civilians have on numerous occasions thwarted
+attempted massacres by shooting back. And, of course, the WTC would
+probably still be standing if the passengers had been
+armed…

+

I grew up in the shadow of the Soviet threat. Theirs was an evil,
+evil system, but they were at bottom geopolitically rational. They
+calculated their chances very cold-bloodedly, and never pushed the
+big red button. An ungoverned America would have stood them off, I
+believe, long enough for the inevitable Hayekian collapse to remove
+the problem.

+

But now we face the prospect of weapons of mass destruction dropping
+into the hands of people who are behaviorally indistinguishable from
+stone psychotics. That prospect poses problems of a different nature
+than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union ever did. Because what Al-Qaeda
+wants is not driven or constrained by geopolitics, by pragmatism, by a
+rational estimation of risk and reward. They have no population to
+answer to even in the limited sense that Hitler and Stalin did. They
+were madmen, but they were constrained by the necessities of leading
+a country.

+

Under the present system, I see no alternative to state action as a
+way to suppress this threat, up to and including conventional warfare
+and the proconsular occupation of significant parts of the Arab world.
+I am not happy with this evaluation; war is the health of the State,
+and statism is the most lethal enemy humanity will ever know short of
+a giant meteor strike (those who think this statement hyperbolic are
+recommended to read Robert Conquest’s “The Great Terror”). The
+question that drives this essay is whether, supposing the
+U.S. were to become a market anarchy, there would be other means to
+the same end.

+

It’s a tough case. Al-Qaeda would not hate us any less; it is not,
+at bottom, U.S. policy that enrages them, it is the fact of our wealth
+and freedom and refusal to submit to the One True Way of Allah. An
+ungoverned America, more wealthy and more free by the exact measure
+that its productive capacity is spent efficiently on a network of
+security agencies and judicial associations rather than being wasted
+on the support of parasitic government, would hardly enrage them
+less.

+

Al-Qaeda in itself is not an exceptional threat; in a properly
+armed society the 9/11 hijackers would never even have tried
+their stunt, because they would known that the certain outcome was
+death in a hail of civilian bullets. It is the combination of
+Al-Qaeda-like suicidal fanaticism with state sponsorship (specifically
+the ability to produce chemical/biological/nuclear weapons) that
+strains the anarcho-libertarian theory of national self-defense, It
+does so by dramatically lowering the cost of aggression for both
+sets of bad guys; the fanatics get the capability to strike a
+hammer-blow at the Great Satan, and their state sponsors get
+deniable cat’s paws.

+

It is worth pointing out, however, that it strains the statist
+theory of self-defense almost as badly. A governed U.S. has the
+neo-imperialist option (conquer Iraq, install Colin Powell as
+miltary governor, and try to transform the place as we transformed
+Japan), and that may even appear to be the option with the lowest
+odds of catastrophic failure, but we don’t actually have any clue
+whether this will actually work — Al-Qaeda might well
+be able to get their bombs from the failing states of former-Soviet
+Central Asia, or from North Korea. The historical situation
+is truly unprecedented.

+

Harder than the theoretical problem, perhaps, is the practical one.
+How to oppose that expansion of state power without acting as an
+unwilling enabler for the terrorists? In some ways that’s easy;
+pushing to abolish all the police-state bullshit at airports is
+a no-brainer, since tiger-team tests of the system consistently show
+that none of it has made smuggling weapons on board more difficult
+(now, as before 9/11, approximately 30% of attempts succeed).

+

In a wider sense, though, it’s a very difficult question. One I
+will be thinking about — and possibly writing about — in the
+coming months.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20020925124400.blog b/20020925124400.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f3db126 --- /dev/null +++ b/20020925124400.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Failsafe +

I just sent the following letter to the Boston Globe
+after reading Elaine Scarry’s excellent piece Failsafe!:

+
+

Congratulations on having the bravery to publish Elaine
+Scarry’s “Failsafe”. She is right to point out that distributed
+threats require distributed countermeasures. She is right to point out
+that centralized defense of the U.S. massively failed us. She is
+right to point out that the founders of the U.S. envisioned citizens,
+not standing armies, as the backbone of the nation’s defense.

+

After all that argument and build-up, it is only unfortunate
+that she stopped short of the logical conclusion: that to prevent
+future hijackings, the logical course is to arm the passengers.

+

The extension to other situations involving crime, terrorism, and
+politics (insofar as the three are distinguishable at all) is left
+as an exercise for the reader.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20021016013400.blog b/20021016013400.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d67594b --- /dev/null +++ b/20021016013400.blog @@ -0,0 +1,128 @@ +Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 1) +

WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed
+the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers,
+politicians, and activists operating within conventional political
+categories;

+

WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive
+anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding
+squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of
+evil for the act of evil;

+

WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist’
+measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the
+central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically
+descending to almost the same level of religious jihad as our
+enemies;

+

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more
+intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to
+recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war to
+the enemy is our only practical instrument of
+self-defense;

+

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of
+the anti-idiotarian position:

+
    +
  1. THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death
    +perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the
    +hands of terrorists by rogue states;
    2. +
  2. THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser
    +sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and
    +a smoldering resentment of the West’s success and Islam’s failures;
    3. +
  3. THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or
    +concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against
    +globalization, or otherwise worthy efforts to alleviate world poverty,
    +are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;
    4. +
  4. THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from
    +their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam
    +and shari’a law on the kaffir West;
    5. +
  5. THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use
    +civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent
    +people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we
    +underestimated their future malice;
    6. +
  6. THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance
    +with rogue states such as Iraq and North Korea; states that are known
    +to have active programs working towards the development and delivery
    +of weapons that would multiply the terrorists’ ability to commit
    +atrocities by a thousandfold;
    7. +
  7. THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger
    +through his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of
    +chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated
    +willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and
    +his known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and
    +elsewhere. +
    8. +
+

RE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state
+sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man,
+to be dealt with as wolves are.

+

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause’ of Islamo-fascist terrorism
+lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam
+and not in any significant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of
+the war against terror must be to displace, discredit, and destroy
+those animating ideas.

+

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy
+elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can
+be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free
+speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear
+arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures
+such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level
+surveillance of public areas;

+

WE REJECT the theory that `fairness’ requires us not to notice and
+use the dominant gender, age range, ethnic character and religion of
+our terrorist enemies; and we urge the systematic use of such profiling to
+both make anti-terrorist screening more effective and reduce the
+overall intrusiveness of anti-terror measures on the majority of
+the population.

+

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies,
+and the West to hunt down and and capture or kill individual members
+of the Islamic terror network;

+

WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the
+rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating
+the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of
+terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.

+

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future nuclear
+blackmail of the West, the conquest and occupation of Iraq and other
+nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession
+of weapons of mass destruction, until such time as the root causes of
+terrorism have been eradicated from their societies.

+

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion
+within the moral community of mankind that gives
+aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.

+

ism of the Left — the moral blindness that
+refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and
+experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place
+than any culture in which jihad, ‘honor killings’, and female genital
+mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.

+

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right — whether it manifests as
+head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a Christian religious chauvinism
+and bigotry that all but mirrors the Islamo-fascist fanaticism of our
+self-declared enemies.

+

WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization
+to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it
+to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in
+our words, and in our deeds.

+

WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the
+Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through
+the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much both to
+make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it
+afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that
+evil.

+

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the
+apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we
+ shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing
+their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our
+wealth and freedoms to seduce their women and children to civilized
+ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent culture from
+the face of the Earth.

+

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World
+Trade Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those
+who died on the U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the
+nameless victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered
+by terrorism and rogue states;

+

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

+
+					Eric S. Raymond
+					16 October 2002
+
+					____________________
+					(your signature here)
+
+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20021016111200.blog b/20021016111200.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dc53057 --- /dev/null +++ b/20021016111200.blog @@ -0,0 +1,150 @@ +Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 2) +

Substantive changes from version 1 are marked in
+red. I think the changes largely speak for themselves. I will
+say that I think some of the criticisms I received reflect a
+conservative bias in the blogosphere population, and that for appeal
+to a wider audience it is necessary to excoriate the Right a
+little harder than a lot of people here will be completely comfortable
+with.

+

Major trivia points to anyone who can identify the source of the
+phrase I was quoting in my first draft, the longer form of which reads
+“we declare them the enemies of all men, to be dealt with as wolves
+are”. And no, a Web search won’t do it.

+
+

WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed
+the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers,
+politicians, and activists operating within conventional political
+categories;

+

WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive
+anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding
+squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of
+evil for the act of evil;

+

WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist’
+measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the
+central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically
+descending to almost the same level of bigotry as our enemies;

+

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more
+intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to
+recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war to
+the enemy is our only practical instrument of
+self-defense;

+

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of
+the anti-idiotarian position:

+
    +
  1. THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death
    +perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the
    +hands of terrorists by rogue states;
    2. +
  2. THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser
    +sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and
    +a smoldering resentment of the West’s success and Islam’s failures;
    3. +
  3. THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or
    +concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against
    +globalization, or otherwise worthy efforts to alleviate world poverty,
    +are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;
    4. +
  4. THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from
    +their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam
    +and shari’a law on the kaffir West;
    5. +
  5. THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use
    +civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent
    +people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we
    +underestimated their future malice even
    +without weapons of mass destruction    ;
    6. +
  6. THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance
    +with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and
    +North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working
    +towards the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction
    +that would multiply the terrorists’ ability to commit atrocities by a
    +thousandfold;
    7. +
  7. THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger
    +through his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of
    +chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated
    +willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and
    +his known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and
    +elsewhere.

    +
    8. +
+

RE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state
+sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man,
+to be dealt with as feral beasts are.

+

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause’ of Islamo-fascist terrorism
+lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam
+and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of
+the war against terror must be to displace, discredit, and destroy
+those animating ideas.

+

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy
+elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can
+be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free
+speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear
+arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures
+such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level
+surveillance of public areas;

+

WE REJECT the theory that `fairness’ requires us not to notice the
+dominant gender, age range, ethnic character and religion of our
+terrorist enemies; and we urge the systematic use of such profiling to
+both make anti-terrorist screening more effective and reduce the
+overall intrusiveness of anti-terror measures on the majority of the
+population.

+

IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings
+out the worst in both individual human beings and societies, we reject
+the alternative of ceding to the world’s barbarians the exclusive
+privilege of force.

+

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies,
+and the West to hunt down and and capture or kill individual members
+of the Islamo-fascist terror network;

+

WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the
+rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating
+the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of
+terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.

+

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the
+military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the
+distributed threat with a distributed response; to arm not merely
+airline pilots but ordinary citizens, and to recognize the citizen’s
+right and obligation to respond to terrorist aggression with effective
+force.

+

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future
+nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the conquest and
+occupation of Iraq and other nations that combine sponsorship of
+terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass destruction, until
+such time as the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from
+their societies.

+

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion
+within the moral community of mankind that gives
+aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.

+

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left — the moral blindness that
+refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and
+experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place
+than any culture in which jihad, ‘honor killings’, and female genital
+mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.

+

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right — whether it manifests as
+head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a Christian-identity chauvinism that all but mirrors the
+Islamo-fascist fanaticism of our enemies.

+

WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization
+to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it
+to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in
+our words, and in our deeds.

+

WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the
+Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through
+the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much both to
+make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it
+afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that
+evil.

+

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the
+apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we
+shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing
+their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our
+wealth and freedoms to seduce their women and children to civilized
+ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent ideologies from the face of the Earth.

+

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World
+Trade Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those
+who died on the U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the
+nameless victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered
+by terrorism and rogue states;

+

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

+
+			Eric S. Raymond
+			16 October 2002
+
+			____________________
+			(your signature here)
+
+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20021017165100.blog b/20021017165100.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a7b554b --- /dev/null +++ b/20021017165100.blog @@ -0,0 +1,175 @@ +Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 3) +

Substantive changes from version 1 to 2 are marked in red; changes from 2 to 3 are marked in blue. I think the changes largely
+speak for themselves. I will say that I think some of the criticisms
+I received reflect a conservative bias in the blogosphere population,
+and that for appeal to a wider audience it is necessary to
+excoriate the Right a little harder than a lot of people here will be
+completely comfortable with.

+

I have removed the paragraph about profiling, not out of political
+correctness but because I have been presented with good arguments that
+profiling is easy for terrorists to game against (and apparently they
+have often done so in Israel).

+

It has been suggested that I should add the heroes of Flight 93 to
+the list of those we swear shall not have died in vain. But they
+had already achieved that; they saved many lives and provided a
+moral example which shall not be forgotten.

+

Congratulations to the trivia spotters who identified “to be dealt
+with as wolves are” as a quote from H. Beam Piper’s Lord Kalvan
+of Otherwhen. Jerry Pournelle did, I believe, quote it in
+Prince Of Sparta. I had always assumed Piper
+was referring to the Viking sentence of outlawry, in which the outlaw
+was declared a “wolf’s head”. Apparently there is a 1703 historical
+cite from the US as well.

+
+

WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed
+the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers,
+politicians, and activists operating within conventional political
+categories;

+

WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive
+anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding
+squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of
+evil for the act of evil;

+

WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist’
+measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the
+central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically
+descending to almost the same level of bigotry as our enemies;

+

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more
+intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to
+recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war to
+the enemy is our only practical instrument of
+self-defense;

+

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of
+the anti-idiotarian position:

+
    +
  1. +

    THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death
    +perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the
    +hands of terrorists by rogue states;

    +
    2. +
  2. +

    THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser
    +sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and
    +a smoldering resentment of the West’s success and Islam’s failures;

    +
    3. +
  3. +

    THAT the terrorists have declared and are
    +pursuing a war not against the vices of Western civilization but
    +against its core virtues; against the freedom of thought and speech
    +and conscience, against the life of reason; against the equality of
    +women, against pluralism and tolerance; against, indeed, all the
    +qualities which separate civilized human beings from bestiality,
    +slavery, and fanaticism;

    +

    THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or
    +concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against
    +globalization, or efforts to alleviate world poverty,
    +are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;

    4. +
  4. +

    THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from
    +their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam
    +and shari’a law on the kaffir West;

    +
    5. +
  5. +

    THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use
    +civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent
    +people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we
    +underestimated their future malice even
    +without weapons of mass destruction;

    +
    6. +
  6. +

    THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance
    +with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and
    +North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working
    +towards the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction
    +that would multiply the terrorists’ ability to commit atrocities by a
    +thousandfold;

    +
    7. +
  7. +

    THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger
    +in combination with them, a danger demonstrated by his known efforts
    +to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even on his
    +own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit aggression
    +against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the Islamic terror
    +network in Palestine and elsewhere.

    +
    8. +
+

RE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state
+sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man,
+to be dealt with as feral beasts are.

+

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause’ of Islamo-fascist terrorism
+lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam
+and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of
+the war against terror must be to displace, discredit, and destroy
+those animating ideas.

+

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy
+elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can
+be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free
+speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear
+arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures
+such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level
+surveillance of public areas;

+

IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings
+out the worst in both individual human beings and societies, we reject
+the alternative of ceding to the world’s barbarians the exclusive
+privilege of force.

+

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies,
+and the West to hunt down and capture or kill individual members
+of the Islamo-fascist terror network;

+

WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the
+rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating
+the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of
+terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.

+

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the
+military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the
+distributed threat with a distributed response; to arm airline pilots, and to recognize as well the
+ordinary citizen’s right and obligation to respond to terrorist
+aggression with effective force.

+

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future
+nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the forcible overthrowing of the governments of Iraq and of other
+nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of
+weapons of mass destruction; and the occupation of those
+nations until such time as the root causes of terrorism have
+been eradicated from their societies.

+

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion
+within the moral community of mankind that gives
+aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.

+

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left — the moral blindness that
+refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and
+experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place
+than any culture in which jihad, ‘honor killings’, and female genital
+mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.

+

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right — whether it manifests as
+head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a Christian-identity chauvinism that all but mirrors the
+Islamo-fascist fanaticism of our enemies.

+

WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization
+to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it
+to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in
+our words, and in our deeds.

+

WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the
+Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through
+the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians, who did so much both to
+make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it
+afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that
+evil.

+

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the
+apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we
+shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing
+their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our
+wealth and freedoms to win their women and
+children to civilized ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and
+virulent ideologies from the face of the
+Earth.

+

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World Trade
+Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those who
+died on U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the nameless
+victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered by
+terrorism and rogue states;

+

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

+
+			Eric S. Raymond
+			16 October 2002
+
+			____________________
+			(your signature here)
+
+

Blogspot
+comments

diff --git a/20021018093500.blog b/20021018093500.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0ef539e --- /dev/null +++ b/20021018093500.blog @@ -0,0 +1,183 @@ +Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 4) +

Substantive changes from version 1 to 2 are marked in red; changes from 2 to 3 are marked in blue; changes from 3 to 4 are marked in purple.

+

Counting email, this now reflects approximately 200 comments from
+across the blogosphere. Thanks for the feedback and suggestions.
+Since this process has to close sometime, I’m declaring that there
+will be at most one more pre-publication draft.

+

I will post a fair copy of the final version. For legal purposes,
+this work is ©2002 by Eric S. Raymond. Email me for distribution
+terms — I’m not especially interested in making money from it, but I
+want some artistic control of how it’s used.

+
+

WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed
+the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers,
+politicians, and activists operating within conventional political
+categories;

+

WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive
+anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding
+squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of
+evil for the act of evil;

+

WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist’
+measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the
+central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically
+descending to almost the same level of bigotry as our enemies;

+

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more
+intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to
+recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war back to the aggressors is
+our only practical instrument of self-defense;

+

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of
+the anti-idiotarian position:

+
    +
  1. +

    THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death
    +perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the
    +hands of terrorists by rogue states;

    +
    2. +
  2. +

    THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser
    +sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and
    +a smoldering resentment of the West’s success and by their own culture’s failures;

    +
    3. +
  3. +

    THAT the terrorists have declared and are
    +pursuing a war not against the vices of Western civilization but
    +against its core virtues; against the freedom of thought and speech
    +and conscience, against the life of reason; against the equality of
    +women, against pluralism and tolerance; against, indeed, all the
    +qualities which separate civilized human beings from     savagery, slavery, and
    +fanaticism;

    +
    4. +
  4. +

    THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or
    +concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against
    +globalization, or efforts to alleviate world poverty,
    +are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;

    +
    5. +
  5. +

    THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from
    +their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam
    +and shari’a law on the kaffir West;

    +
    6. +
  6. +

    THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use
    +civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent
    +people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we
    +underestimated their future malice even
    +without weapons of mass destruction;

    +
    7. +
  7. +

    THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance
    +with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and
    +North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working
    +towards the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction
    +that would multiply the terrorists’ ability to commit atrocities by a
    +thousandfold;

    +
    8. +
  8. +

    THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present
    +danger in combination with them, a danger
    +demonstrated by his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use
    +of chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated
    +willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his
    +known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and
    +elsewhere.

    +
    9. +
+

WE THEREFORE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state
+sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man,
+to be dealt with as rabid dogs are.

+

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause’ of Islamo-fascist terrorism
+lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam
+and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of
+the war against terror must be to displace, discredit, and destroy
+those animating ideas.

+

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy
+elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can
+be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free
+speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear
+arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures
+such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level
+surveillance of public areas;

+

IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings
+out the worst in both individual human beings and societies, we reject
+the alternative of ceding to the world’s barbarians the exclusive
+privilege of force;

+

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies,
+and the West to hunt down and capture or kill individual members
+of the Islamo-fascist terror network;

+

WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the
+rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating
+the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of
+terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.

+

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the
+military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the
+distributed threat with a distributed response; to arm airline pilots, and to recognize as well the
+ordinary citizen’s right and obligation to respond to terrorist
+aggression with effective force.

+

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future
+nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the forcible overthrowing of the governments of Iraq and of other
+nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of
+weapons of mass destruction; and the occupation of those
+nations until such time as the root causes of terrorism have
+been eradicated from their societies.

+

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion
+within the moral community of mankind that gives
+aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.

+

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left — the moral blindness that
+refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and
+experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place
+than any culture in which jihad, ‘honor killings’, and female genital
+mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.

+

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right — whether it manifests as
+head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a a
+Christian-chauvinist political agenda that echoes the religious
+absolutism of our enemies.

+

WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization
+to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it
+to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in
+our words, and in our deeds.

+

WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the
+Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through
+the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians, who did so much both to
+make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it
+afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that
+evil.

+

WE SHALL DEMAND as citizens and voters that
+those we delegate to lead pursue the war against terror with an
+unflagging will to victory and all means necessary — while
+remaining always mindful that in the process of fighting the enemy we
+must not stoop to the enemy’s level of contempt for human rights and
+dignity, must not become what we fight;

+

WE SHALL REMEMBER that in this struggle more
+than previous conventional wars, the West’s keenest weapons are reason
+and the truth; that it is our obligation as citizens to insist on
+reason and the truth; that we must shine a pitiless light on the lies
+from which terrorist hatred is built; and that we must also be
+vigilant against the expedient lie from our own side, lest our
+victories become tainted and hollow, leaving root causes unaddressed
+and sowing trouble for the future.

+

WE HAVE FAITH that we are equal to these
+challenges; we shall not be paralyzed by fear of the enemy, nor
+yet by fear of ourselves;

+

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the
+apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we
+shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing
+their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our
+wealth and freedoms to win their women and
+children to civilized ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and
+virulent ideologies from the face of the
+Earth.

+

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World Trade
+Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those who
+died on U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the nameless
+victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered by
+terrorism and rogue states:

+

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

+
+			Eric S. Raymond
+			17 October 2002
+
+			____________________
+			(your signature here)
+
+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20021018094800.blog b/20021018094800.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a9c5a79 --- /dev/null +++ b/20021018094800.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +A request to web artists +

I am planning on publishing the Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto soon, via
+petitiononline.com and possibly other channels. My hope is that
+enough bloggers will sign it and talk about it to get the position it
+describes some notice in the more blog-friendly of the mainstream
+media.

+

Towards this end, I’m seeking volunteers to design a web button for
+the Manifesto. Use your imagination — but I’m thinking a design
+using the letters A I M in red, white and blue might be
+appropriate.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20021020041600.blog b/20021020041600.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6b2f148 --- /dev/null +++ b/20021020041600.blog @@ -0,0 +1,188 @@ +Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 5) +

+

Changes are deliberately not marked. Read the whole thing, this is
+a final pre-publication draft. Most of the changes from version 4
+are deletions of excess verbiage.

+

Counting email, this now reflects approximately 200 comments from
+across the blogosphere. Thanks for the feedback and suggestions.
+Since this process has to close sometime, I’m declaring that there
+wuill be at most one pre-publication draft.

+

I will post a fair copy of the final version. For legal purposes,
+this work is ©2002 by Eric S. Raymond. Email me for distribution
+terms — I’m not especially interested in making money from it, but I
+want some artistic control of how it’s used.

+

However, this may not happen for a week, as I am about to go on
+the Linux Lunacy Caribbean cruise.

+

Brian O’Connell has supplied this excellent button for
+JavaScript-aware browsers:
+ +src="http://www.catb.org/~esr/graphics/aim-off.png"
+onmouseover="swtchon('aim')" onmouseout="swtchoff('aim')"
+alt="Click to Read" title="Click to Read"/>

+

And Erica from Sperari has suppiled a very tasteful static button:
+ +src="http://www.catb.org/~esr/graphics/aim-button-thumb.jpg" alt='AIM button' />

+

These buttons will be included with the final version.

+
+

WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed
+the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers,
+politicians, and activists operating within conventional political
+categories;

+

WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive
+anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding
+squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of
+evil for the act of evil;

+

WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist’
+measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the
+central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically
+descending to almost the same level of bigotry as our enemies;

+

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more
+intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to
+recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war back to
+the aggressors is our only practical instrument
+of self-defense;

+

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the premises of
+the anti-idiotarian position:

+
    +
  1. +

    THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death
    +perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the
    +hands of terrorists by rogue states;

    +
    2. +
  2. +

    THAT the terrorists and their state sponsors have declared and
    +are pursuing a war not against the vices of Western civilization but
    +against its core virtues: against the freedom of thought and speech
    +and conscience, against the life of reason; against the equality of
    +women, against pluralism and tolerance; against, indeed, all the
    +qualities which separate civilized human beings from savagery,
    +slavery, and fanaticism;

    +
    3. +
  3. +

    THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or
    +concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against
    +globalization, or efforts to alleviate world poverty,
    +are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;

    +
    4. +
  4. +

    THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from
    +their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam
    +and shari’a law on the kaffir West;

    +
    5. +
  5. +

    THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use
    +civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent
    +people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we
    +underestimated the scope of their future malice even
    +without weapons of mass destruction;

    +
    6. +
  6. +

    THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found,
    +alliance with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea;
    +states that are known to have active programs working towards the
    +development and delivery of weapons of that would multiply the
    +terrorists’ ability to commit atrocities by a thousandfold;

    +
    7. +
  7. +

    THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present
    +danger in combination with them, a danger demonstrated by his known
    +efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even
    +on his own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit
    +aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the
    +Islamist terror network in Palestine and elsewhere.

    +
    8. +
+

RE DECLARE that both the terrorists and their state
+sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of mankind,
+to be dealt with as rabid dogs are.

+

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause’ of Islamo-fascist terrorism
+lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam
+and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of
+the war against terror must be to displace and discredit those
+animating ideas.

+

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy
+elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can
+be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free
+speech, or the right of peacable assembly, or the right to bear
+arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures
+such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level
+surveillance of public areas;

+

IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings out the worst in
+both individual human beings and societies, we reject the alternative
+of ceding to the world’s barbarians the exclusive privilege of
+force;

+

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies,
+and the West to hunt down and capture or kill individual members
+of the Islamo-fascist terror network;

+

WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the
+rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating
+the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of
+terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.

+

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the military and police
+cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the distributed threat with a
+distributed response; to arm airline pilots, and to recognize as well
+the ordinary citizen’s right and duty to respond to terrorist
+aggression with effective force.

+

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future
+nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the forcible
+overthrow of the governments of Iraq and of other nations that combine
+sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass
+destruction; and the occupation of those nations until such time as
+the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from their
+societies.

+

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion
+within the moral community of mankind that gives
+aid and comfort to terrorists and tyrants operating outside it.

+

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left — the moral blindness that
+refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and
+experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place
+than any culture in which jihad, ‘honor killings’, and female genital
+mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.

+

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right — whether it manifests as
+head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a a Christian-chauvinist political
+agenda that echoes the religious absolutism of our enemies.

+

WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization
+to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it
+to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in
+our words, and in our deeds.

+

WE HAVE AWAKENED; we have seen the face of evil in the acts of the
+Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through
+the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much to
+enable and excuse their evil. We shall not flinch from our duty to
+confront that evil.

+

WE SHALL DEMAND as citizens and voters that those we delegate to
+lead pursue the war against terror with an unflagging will to victory
+and all means necessary — while remaining always mindful that we
+must not become what we fight;

+

WE SHALL REMEMBER that the West’s keenest weapons are reason and the
+truth; that we must shine a pitiless light on the lies from which
+terrorist hatred is built; and that we must also be vigilant against
+the expedient lie from our own side, lest our victories become tainted
+and hollow, sowing trouble for the future.

+

WE HAVE FAITH that we are equal to these challenges; we shall not
+be paralyzed by fear of the enemy, nor yet by fear of ourselves;

+

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the
+apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we
+shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing
+their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our
+wealth and freedoms to win their women and children to civilized ways,
+and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent ideologies from the
+face of the Earth.

+

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World Trade
+Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those who
+died on U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the nameless
+victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered by
+terrorism and rogue states:

+

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

+
+			Eric S. Raymond
+			17 October 2002
+
+			____________________
+			(your signature here)
+
+

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20021031163900.blog b/20021031163900.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7d75abd --- /dev/null +++ b/20021031163900.blog @@ -0,0 +1,95 @@ +Armed children +

The Bear of Considerable Brain, writes:
+“This does not mean every man, woman and child should roam the streets
+packing heat, much as some of my more rabid hoplophile colleagues in
+the Blogosphere might enjoy the sight.”

+

N.Z. was probably thinking of me as one of his “rabid hoplophile
+colleagues.”; I’d be rather disappointed if he weren’t, actually. I
+endorse all his good sense about citizen miltias and the necessity of
+a decentralized response to decentralized threats; in fact, I wrote an
+essay
+on that topic the day of the WTC attack. Establishing it as normal
+custom that adults go armed strikes me as an excellent idea, and
+not merely as a tactic against terrorism and crime either. “The possession
+of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave.”

+

I was originally going to respond to His Ursinity’s remark by
+tossing off some denial that I contemplate universally arming children
+as a response to terrorism. But I’ve decided it would be more
+interesting to attack the question from the opposite side: under what
+circumstances should children be armed?

+

If your answer is “Never!” than consider that this is actually
+quite a radical position. In large parts of the U.S., rather young
+children have and use BB rifles. In much of rural America,
+including most of my own state of Pennsylvania, boys learn to hunt
+early, and to accept both the weapons and responsibilities of men
+when barely into their teens.

+

The bloody slaughters nervous urban liberals would expect from this
+policy somehow never materialize. Kliebold and Harris, the Columbine
+shooters, were the exception that demonstrates the rule; they were
+not taught to use firearms within approved contexts by their
+parents and other adults, but instead devedloped a pathological,
+isolated relationship to weapons that mirrored their pathological,
+isolated lives. Their victims were not killed by the rural gun
+culture, but by its absence.

+

So part of our answer is this: children should be armed, at least
+part of the time when in company with responsible adults, in order
+to prepare them for the responsibility of arming themselves as adults
+and participating in civilian defense against terrorism and crime.

+

The next logical question is: under what circumstances should
+children be trusted to carry weapons for self-defense without
+direct adult supervision? Again, “Never!” would be a radical and
+historically exceptional answer. It would also be unfair to the
+children, especially poor children who live in areas where the chance
+of encountering criminal or terrorist predators is significant.

+

It’s worth bearing in mind that most decisions about using a
+firearm in self-defense are pretty simple. They don’t tend to involve
+complicated ethical abstractions — the relevant question is
+usually “Am I or a defenseless person I am responsible for in imminent
+danger of being assaulted, abducted or killed?” If the answer is no,
+you don’t even draw your weapon.

+

Of course, the capacity to make those judgments varies from child
+to child. I have known intelligent, precocious children as young as
+eight years old who I would sooner trust with my .45 than, say, an
+adult alcoholic with an impulse-control problem. In fact, I wouldn’t
+consider most adult pro-gun-control voters as trustworthy as the
+children I have in mind; people who project fear of their own behavior
+with weapons onto others make that spot between my shoulderblades
+itch.

+

At the other extreme, it’s pretty obvious that pre-verbal children
+don’t have the apparatus to make even the simplest ethical decisions
+about lethal force. They don’t know enough about the world yet. The
+standard models of childhood development tell me the same thing as my
+experience of real kids; the on average, possibility of ethical
+competence sufficient for self-defense decisions opens up at around
+twelve years old. It is not invariably present at that age, but the
+possibility deserves to be taken seriously.

+

I can say this. If a person who is legally a minor but twelve or
+over shows signs of continuing responsibility (including either
+holding down a job or applying him/herself to make steady grades in
+school), and does not have a history of substance abuse or other
+self-destructive or criminal behavior, and wants to accept
+the responsibility of going armed — then I think custom should
+support that.

+

Finally, I want to point out that we may be doing children no favor
+by `protecting’ them from the decisions that go with bearing arms.
+Thomas Jefferson once wrote to his teenage nephew as follows:

+

+“As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives [only]
+moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence
+to the mind. Games played with the ball and others of that nature, are too
+violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun,
+therefore, be the constant companion to your walks.” +

+

This was no aberration. I have developed elsewhere
+the theme that the practice of bearing arms was not important to the
+Founding Fathers merely as a counter against crime and overweening
+government, but as a school of moral character in the individual
+citizen.

+

The retreat of American gun culture from our cities and suburbs has
+coincided with the the fetishization of adolescence and
+the infantilization of our entire society. To reverse that trend, we
+need to remember the ways we used to use to encourage people to
+acquire self-discipline, character, and maturity. One of those ways
+was — and in large parts of the U.S., still is — the
+healthy use of lethal weapons.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20021102105100.blog b/20021102105100.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1c15efb --- /dev/null +++ b/20021102105100.blog @@ -0,0 +1,121 @@ +The capsaicinization of American food +

Consider spicy-hot food — and consider how recent it is as a
+mainstream phenomenon in the U.S. In 2002 many of us cheerfully chow
+down on Szechuan and Thai, habaneros and rellenos, nam pla and sambal
+ulek. Salsa outsells ketchup. But it wasn’t always that way.

+

In fact it wasn’t that way until quite recently, historically
+speaking. I’ve enjoyed capsaicin-loaded food since I was a pre-teen
+boy in the late 1960s; I acquired the taste from my father, who picked
+it up in South America. In those days our predilection was the
+peculiar trait of a minority of travelers and a few immigrant
+populations. The progression by which spicy-hot food went from there
+to the U.S. mainstream makes a perfect type case of cultural
+assimilation, and the role and meaning that the stuff has acquired on
+the way is interesting too.

+

(Oh. And for those of you who don’t understand the appeal? It’s
+all about endorphin rush, like a runner’s high. Pepper-heads like me
+have developed a conditioned reflex whereby the burning sensation
+stimulates the release of opiate-like chemicals from the brainstem,
+inducing a euphoria not unlike a heroin buzz. Yes, this theory has
+been clinically verified.)

+

Baseline: Thirty years ago. The early 1970s. I’m a teenager, just
+back in the U.S. from years spent overseas. Spicy-hot food is pretty
+rare in American cuisine. Maybe you’d have heard of five-alarm chili
+if you’d lived in Texas, but chances are you’d never have actually
+eaten the stuff. If you’re from Louisiana, you might have put Tabasco
+sauce on your morning eggs. Aside from that, you wouldn’t have
+tasted hot peppers outside of a big-city Chinatown.

+

It’s actually a little difficult to remember how different American
+cooking was then. Those were the years when Kool-Whip was cool and
+the casserole was king, an era of relentless blandness well-skewered
+by James Lileks’s
+Gallery of Regrettable Food. Mom didn’t know any better. Well,
+most moms didn’t, anyway; mine had acquired a few clues overseas.

+

But most Americans of that day inherited the pale hues of British
+and German cooking. What zip there was in our cuisine came from
+immigrants, especially (at that time) Italians. Thai, Vietnamese
+and Ethiopian had not gained a foothold. Chinese was on educated
+peoples’ radar but only eaten in restaurants; nobody owned a wok
+yet.

+

Indeed, Chinese food had already caught on in a few leading-edge
+subcultures by the mid-1970s: science-fiction fans, computer hackers,
+the people who would start to call themselves `geeks’ fifteen years
+later. But most of what was available was Americanized versions of
+the blander Shanghainese and Cantonese varieties; restaurants that
+made a point of authenticity and advertised Szechuan and Hunan cooking
+to round-eyes were not yet common.

+

This all began to change in the early 1980s. The yuppies did it to
+us; experimentation with exotic and ethnic foods became a signature
+behavior of the young, upwardly mobile urban elite, and the variety of
+restaurants increased tremendously in a way that both met that demand
+and stimulated it. More importantly, cooking techniques and
+ingredients that hadn’t been traditional in European cuisine started
+to influence home cooking — white people started buying
+woks. And Szechuan fire oil.

+

The first vogue for Cajun cooking around 1984 was, as I recall,
+something of a turning point. Chinese cooking was popular but still
+marked as `foreign'; Cajun was not. Spicy-hot gumbo joined five-alarm
+chili on the roster of all-American foods that were not only expected
+but required to deliver a hefty dose of capsaicin zap. I
+remember thinking the world was changing when, in 1987 or ’88, I
+first saw spicy Cajun dishes on the menu of a white-bread roadside
+diner. In Delaware.

+

This diner was never going to show up in Michelin’s or Zagat’s; in
+fact, it was the next thing to a truck stop. Something else was going
+on in the 1980s besides yuppies buying woks — and that was the
+embrace of spicy-hot food by the small-town and rural working class,
+and its coding as a specifically masculine pleasure.

+

This probably evolved out of the tradition, going back at least to
+the late 1940s, of defining barbecue and chili as what an
+anthropologist would call a “men’s mystery”. Despite the existence of
+male professional chefs and men who can cook, most kinds of domestic
+cooking are indisputably a female thing — women are expected to
+be interested in it and expected to be good at it, and a man who
+acquires skill is crossing into women’s country. But for a handful of
+dishes culturally coded as “men’s food”, the reverse is true.
+Barbecue and chili top that list, and have since long before spicy-hot
+food went mainstream.

+

For people who drive pickup trucks, spicy-hot food went from being
+a marked minority taste to being something like a central men’s
+mystery in the decade after 1985. I first realized this in the early
+1990s when I saw a rack of 101 hot-pepper sauces on display at a
+gun-and-knife show, in between the premium tobacco and the jerked
+meat. There’s a sight you won’t see at a flower show, or anywhere else
+in women’s country.

+

The packaging and marketing of hot sauces tells the same
+story. From the top-shelf varieties like Melinda’s XXX (my favorite!)
+to novelty items like “Scorned Woman” and “Hot Buns”, much of the
+imagery is cheeky sexiness clearly designed to appeal to men.

+

Nor is it hard to understand why the association got made in the
+first place. It’s considered masculine to enjoy physical risk, even
+mostly trivial physical risks like burning yourself on a sauce hotter
+than you can handle. Men who like hot peppers swap capsaicin-zap
+stories; I myself am perhaps unreasonably proud of having outlasted
+a tableful of Mexican college students one night in Monterrey,
+watching them fall out one by one as a plate of sauteed habaneros
+was passed repeatedly around the table.

+

There’s a sneaky element of female complicity in all this. Women
+chuckle at our capsaicin-zap stories the same way they laugh at other
+forms of laddish posturing, but then (as my wife eloquently puts it)
+“What good is a man if you rip off his balls?” They leave us capsaicin
+and barbecue and other men’s mysteries because they instinctively grok
+that a certain amount of testosterone-driven male-primate behavior is
+essential for the health of Y-chromosome types — and best it
+should be over something harmless.

+

This gastronomic pincer movement — Yuppies pushing spicy food
+downmarket, truckers and rednecks pushing it upmarket —
+coincided with the rise in cultural influence of Hispanics with a
+native tradition of spicy-hot food. In retrospect, it’s interesting that
+what mainstream America naturalized was jalapenos rather than
+Chinese-style fire oil. Tex-Mex assimilated more readily than
+Szechuan, as it turned out.

+

We can conveniently date that mainstreaming from the year salsa
+first passed ketchup in sales volume, 1996. Perhaps not by
+coincidence, that’s the first year I got gifted with a jar of
+homegrown habaneros. They came to me from an Irish ex-biker, a
+take-no-shit ZZ-Top lookalike who runs a tire dealership in the next
+town over. He’d be a great guy to have with you in a bar fight, but
+nobody who would ever be accused of avant-garde tastes. I guess
+that was when I realized spicy-hot food had become as all-American
+as apple pie.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20021103090400.blog b/20021103090400.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..41217f1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20021103090400.blog @@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +That bad old-time religion +

It’s official. The anti-war movement is a Communist
+front.

+

No, I’m not kidding — go read the story. Investigative reporter
+David Corn digs into last Saturday’s D.C. antiwar rally and finds it
+was covertly masterminded by a Communist Party splinter originally
+founded in support of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. For good
+later, he further digs up the fact that one if the principal
+organizers of the inane “Mot In Our Name” petion is a revolutionary
+Maoist.

+

Words almost fail me. There are just too many levels of delicious,
+deadly irony here.

+

For starters, the U.S. revolutionary Communist movement has been
+reduced to organizing demonstrations in support of a fascist dictator
+with a history of brutally suppressing and murdering Communists in
+Iraq. OK, so there’s precedent for this; the CPUSA organized
+anti-war demonstrations in the U.S. during the Nazi-Soviet
+nonaggression pact of 1939-41. It’s still bleakly funny.

+

More generally the American Left seems bent on fulfilling every
+red-meat right-winger’s most perfervid fantasies about it. All those
+earnest anti-war demonstrators were actual communist dupes! Oh,
+mama. Somewhere. Tailgunner Joe McCarthy is smiling. Who was it who
+said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the
+second as farce?

+

Farce because, of course, Communism as an ideology capable of
+motivating mass revolutions is stone-dead. (Well, everywhere outside
+of Pyongyang and the humanities departments of U.S. universities,
+anyway.) At this point one can contemplate vestigial organs of
+Stalinism like the Revolutionary Communist Party with a sort of
+revolted pity, like portions of a vampire corpse still twitching
+because they haven’t yet gotten the message about that stake through
+the heart.

+

If I were a conservative, I’d go into a roaring, vein-popping rant
+at this point. And, secretly I’d be damn glad for them Commies. They
+simplify things so much. Because there will be more stories like this
+one. All the Communists can accomplish by organizing the anti-war
+movement is to thoroughly discredit it — a fact our reporter
+(quite typical of U.S. journalists in that he both leans left and
+is too ignorant to notice how much of his world-view is Communism with
+the serial numbers filed off) notes with poorly-veiled regret.

+

So, by supporting a militarist fascist in Iraq, them commies are
+very likely to wind up increasing the influence of precisely the
+`reactionary’ element in U.S. politics that they most abominate.
+Congratulations, comrades! Welcome to the International
+Capitalist Conspiracy!

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20021104102700.blog b/20021104102700.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5abbfa2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20021104102700.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +The Anti-Idiotarian-Manifesto is officially released +

It’s out. The Manifesto site is here. The Manifesto has been
+submitted to PetitionOnline. To show your
+support, please add one of thw web buttons to your splash page.

+

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diff --git a/20021106125500.blog b/20021106125500.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bab27c2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20021106125500.blog @@ -0,0 +1,96 @@ +Post-postmodern politics +

The Democratic Party fell off a cliff last night. Never mind their
+shiny new governorships — the `smart’ money pre-election was on
+them picking up an absolute majority of governor’s seats, and at the
+Congressional level they took a shellacking nearly as bad as 1994’s.
+The races Terry McAuliffe targeted as most critical — notably
+the Florida governorship — were all lost. And the big Democrat
+losses bucked historical trends — the mid-term election and the
+weak economy should have helped them.

+

We’re going to hear a lot of gloating from Republicans and
+soul-searching from Democrats in the aftermath. The easy explanation
+is that 9/11 did the Democrats in; that American elected to get behind
+a president who seems to be handling the terror war with decisiveness,
+prudence, and strategic acumen.

+

I think this conventional wisdom is wrong. I think 9/11 merely
+exposed a longer-term weakness in the Democratic position, which is
+this: the Democrats have forgotten how to do politics that is about
+anything but politics itself. They’re a post-modern political party,
+endlessly recycling texts that have little or no referent outside
+the discourse of politics itself.

+

The disgusting spectacle they made of Paul Wellstone’s funeral
+is diagnostic. We were treated to trumpet calls about honoring
+Wellstone’s legacy without any discussion beyond the most superficial
+cliches of what that legacy was. All the ritual invocations of
+time-honored Democratic shibboleths had a tired, shopworn, unreal
+and self-referential feel to them — politics as the literature
+of exhaustion.

+

The preconditions for paralysis had been building up for a long
+time; arguably, ever since the New Left beat out the Dixiecrats for
+control of the party apparat in 1968-1972. Caught between the
+blame-America-first, hard-left instincts of its most zealous cadres
+and the bland dishwater centrism recently exemplified by the DLC, the
+Democrats found it more and more difficult to be about anything at
+all. The trend was self-reinforcing; as Democratic strategy drifted,
+the party became ever more dependent on cooperation between dozens of
+fractious pressure groups (feminists, gays, race-baiters, the AARP,
+the teachers’ and public-employee unions), which made the long-term
+drift worse.

+

Bill Clinton was the perfect master of political postmodernism and
+James Carville his prophet. For eight years they were able to
+disguise the paralysis and vacuum at the heart of Democratic thinking,
+centering party strategy on a cult of personality and an
+anything-but-Republicanism that was cunning but merely reactive. The
+Republicans cooperated with this strategy with all the naive eagerness
+of Charlie Brown running up to kick Lucy’s football, perpetually
+surprised when it was snatched away at the last second, repeatedly
+taking pratfalls eagerly magnified by a Democratic-leaning national
+media.

+

But Bill Clinton was also a borderline sociopath and a liar, a man
+whose superficial charm, anything-to-get-elected energy, and utter
+lack of principle perfectly mirrored the abyss at the heart of the
+Democratic party. The greedy, glittery, soulless Wellstone-funeral
+fiasco was the last hurrah of Clintonism, and it cost Walter Mondale
+his last election fight.

+

Reality had to intrude sometime. The destruction of the WTC
+reduced all the politics-about-politics rhetoric of the Democrats to
+irrelevance. They stood mute in the face of the worst atrocity on
+American soil since Pearl Harbor, arguably the worst in U.S. history.
+The superficial reason was that their anti-terror policy was hostage
+to the party’s left wing, but the deeper problem was that they long
+ago lost the ability to rise above petty interest-group jockying
+on any issue of principle at all. The most relevant adjective is not
+`wrong’, or `evil’, it’s `feckless’.

+

Republicans, by contrast, forged a workable consensus during
+the Reagan years and never quite lost it. They’ve often been wrong,
+frequently been obnoxious as hell, and have their own loony fringe
+(abortion-clinic bombers, neo-fascists like Pat Buchanan, and
+the Christian Coalition) to cope with. But when Osama bin Laden
+demonstrated a clear and present danger to the United States of
+America they were able to respond.

+

They were able to respond not merely with reaction, but by taking
+a moral position against terrorism that could serve as the basis of
+an effective national strategy. Quarrel with “Homeland Security” all
+you like — but then imagine Al Gore in charge of defeating
+Al-Qaeda and shudder. He would actually have had to take the likes of
+Cynthia McKinney and Maxine Waters seriously.

+

I think these 2002 elections are going to turn out to have been much
+more of a turning point than the aborted `Republican Revolution’ of
+1994. Unless Bush’s war strategy completely screws the pooch, he is
+going to completely walk over the Democratic candidate in 2004. The
+Democrats show no sign of developing a foreign-policy doctrine that can
+cope with the post-9/11 world, and their domestic-policy agenda is
+tired and retrogressive. Their voter base is aging, and their national
+leadership couldn’t rummage up a better Wellstone replacement than
+Walter “What decade is this, anyway?” Mondale. The Democratic
+party could end up disintegrating within the decade.

+

This is not a prospect that fills me with uncomplicated glee.
+Right-wing statism is not an improvement on left-wing statism; a smug
+and dominant GOP could easily become captive to theocrats and
+know-nothings, a very bad thing for our nation and the world. And,
+unfortunately, the Libertarian Party has courted self-destruction by
+choosing to respond to 9/11 with an isolationism every bit as vapid
+and mindless as the left’s “No War for Oil!” chanting.

+

Welcome to post-postmodern politics. Meaning is back, but
+the uncertainties are greater than ever.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20021109090100.blog b/20021109090100.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e6e914d --- /dev/null +++ b/20021109090100.blog @@ -0,0 +1,381 @@ +Libertarianism and the Hard SF Renaissance +

(There is an extended and improved version of this essay, A Political
+History of SF.)

+

When I started reading SF in the late Sixties and early Seventies,
+the field was in pretty bad shape — not that I understood this
+at the time. The death of the pulp-zines in the 1950s had pretty much
+killed off the SF short-fiction market, and the post-Star-Wars boom
+that would make SF the second most successful genre after romance
+fiction was still years in the future. The core writers of the first
+“Golden Age”, the people who invented modern science fiction after
+John Campbell took the helm at Astounding in 1938, were
+beginning to get long in the tooth; Robert Heinlein, the greatest of
+them all, passed his peak after 1967.

+

These objective problems combined with, or perhaps led to, an insurgency
+within the field. The “New Wave”, an attempt to import the techniques and
+imagery of literary fiction into SF, upset many of the field’s certainties.
+Before it, everyone took for granted that the center of Campbellian SF was
+“hard SF” — stories, frequently written by engineers and scientists,
+which trafficked in plausible and relatively rigorous extrapolations of
+science.

+

Hard SF was an art form that made stringent demands on both author
+and reader. Stories could be, and were, mercilessly slammed because the
+author had calculated an orbit or gotten a detail of physics or biology
+wrong. The Campbellian demand was that SF work both as story and
+as science, with only a bare minimum of McGuffins like FTL star drives
+permitted; hard SF demanded that the science be consistent both
+internally and with known science about the real world.

+

The New Wave rejected all this for reasons that were partly
+aesthetic and partly political. For there was a political tradition
+that went with the hard-SF style, one exemplified by its chief
+theoretician (Campbell himself) and his right-hand man Robert
+Heinlein, the inventor of modern SF’s characteristic technique of
+exposition by indirection. That tradition was of ornery and insistant
+individualism, veneration of the competent man, an instinctive
+distrust of coercive social engineering and a rock-ribbed objectivism
+that that valued knowing how things work and treated all political
+ideologizing with suspicion.

+

At the time, this very American position was generally thought of
+by both allies and opponents as a conservative or right-wing one. But
+the SF community’s version was never conservative in the strict sense
+of venerating past social norms — how could it be, when SF
+literature cheerfully contemplated radical changes in social
+arrangements? SF’s insistent individualism also led it to reject
+racism and feature strong female characters long before the rise of
+political correctness ritualized these behaviors in other forms
+of art.

+

After 1971, the implicit politics of Campbellian hard SF was
+reinvented, radicalized and intellectualized as libertarianism.
+Libertarians, in fact, would draw inspiration from Golden Age SF;
+Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, H. Beam Piper’s
+Lone Star Planet, and Poul Anderson’s No Truce With
+Kings (among many others) would come to be seen retrospectively
+as proto-libertarian arguments not just by the readers but by the
+authors themselves.

+

The New Wave was both a stylistic revolt and a political one. Its
+inventors (notably Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss)
+were British socialists and Marxists who rejected individualism,
+linear exposition, happy endings, scientific rigor and the U.S.’s
+cultural hegemony over the SF field in one fell swoop. The New Wave’s
+later American exponents were strongly associated with the New Left
+and opposition to the Vietnam War, leading to some rancorous public
+disputes in which politics was tangled together with definitional
+questions about the nature of SF and the direction of the field.

+

But the New Wave was not, in fact, the first revolt against hard SF.
+In the 1950s, a group of young writers centered around Frederik Pohl
+and the Futurians fan club in New York had invented sociological S.F.
+(exemplified by the Pohl/Kornbluth collaboration The Space
+Merchants). Not until decades later did the participants admit
+that many of the key Futurians were then ideological Communists or
+fellow travellers, but their work was half-understood at the time to
+be strong criticism of the consumer capitalism and smugness of the
+post-World-War-II era.

+

The Futurian revolt was half-hearted, semi-covert, and easily
+absorbed by the Campbellian mainstream of the SF field; by the
+mid-1960s, sociological extrapolation had become a standard part of
+the toolkit even for the old-school Golden Agers, and it never
+challenged the centrality of hard SF. But the New Wave, after 1965,
+was not so easily dismissed or assimilated. Amidst a great deal of
+self-indulgent crap and drug-fueled psychedelizing, there shone a few
+jewels — Phillp José Farmer’s Riders of the Purple
+Wage, some of Harlan Ellison’s work, Brian Aldiss’s
+Hothouse stories, and Langdon Jones’s The Great
+Clock stand out as examples.

+

As with the Futurians, the larger SF field did absorb some New Wave
+techniques and concerns. Notably, the New Wavers broke the SF taboo
+on writing about sex in any but the most cryptically coded ways, a
+stricture previously so rigid that only Heinlein himself had had the
+stature to really break it, in his 1961 Stranger In A Strange
+Land.

+

The New Wave also exacerbated long-standing critical arguments
+about the definition and scope of of science fiction, and briefly
+threatened to displace hard SF from the center of the field. Brian
+Aldiss’s 1969 dismissal of space exploration as “an old-fashioned
+diversion conducted with infertile phallic symbols” was typical New
+Wave rhetoric, and looked like it might have some legs at the
+time.

+

As a politico-cultural revolt against the American vision of SF,
+however, the New Wave eventually failed just as completely as the
+Futurians had. Its writers were already running out of steam in 1977
+when Star Wars took the imagery of pre-Campbellian space
+opera to the mainstream culture. The half-decade following (my
+college years, as it happened) was a period of drift and confusion
+only ended by the publication of David Brin’s Startide
+Rising in 1982.

+

Brin, and his collegues in the group that came to be known as the
+“Killer Bs” (Greg Bear and Gregory Benford), reasserted the primacy of
+hard SF done in the grand Campbellian manner. Campbell himself had
+died in 1971 right at the high-water mark of the New Wave, but
+Heinlein and Anderson and the other surviving luminaries of the
+Campbellian era had no trouble recognizing their inheritors. To
+everyone’s surprise, the New Old Wave proved to be not just
+artistically successful but commercially popular as as well, with its
+writers becoming the first new stars of the post-1980 boom in SF
+publishing.

+

The new hard SF of the 1980s returned to Golden Age themes and images, if
+not quite with the linear simplicity of Golden Age technique. It also
+reverted to the libertarian/individualist values traditional in the
+field. This time around, with libertarian thinking twenty years more
+developed, the split between order-worshiping conservatism and the
+libertarian impulse was more explicit. At one extreme, some SF (such
+as that of L. Neil Smith) assumed the character of radical libertarian
+propaganda. At the other extreme, a subgenre of SF that could fairly
+be described as conservative/militarist power fantasies emerged,
+notably in the writing of Jerry Pournelle and David Drake.

+

Tension between these groups sometimes flared into public
+animosity. Both laid claims to Robert Heinlein’s legacy. Heinlein
+himself maintained friendly relationships with conservatives but
+counted himself a libertarian for more than a decade before his death
+in 1988.

+

Heinlein’s evolution from Goldwater conservative to anti-statist
+radical both led and reflected larger trends. By 1989 depictions of
+explicitly anarcho-libertarian future societies were beginning to
+filter into mainstream SF work like Joe Haldeman’s Buying
+Time. Haldeman’s Conch Republic and Novysibirsk were all
+the more convincing for not being subjects of polemic.

+

Before the 1980s changes in U.S. law that reversed the tax status
+of inventories and killed off the SF midlist as a side effect, a lot
+of Golden Age and New Wave era SF was pretty continuously in print
+(though in sharply limited quntities and hard to find). I still own a
+lot of it in my personal collection of around 3,000 SF paperbacks and
+magazines, many dating back to the ’50s and ’60s and now long out of
+print. I read it all; pre-Campbellian space opera, the Campbellian
+classics of the Golden Age, the Futurians, the New Wave ferment, and
+the reinvention of hard SF in the 1980s.

+

In some respects, it took me thirty years to understand what I was
+seeing. I’m one of Heinlein’s children, one of the libertarians that
+science fiction made. Because that’s so, it was difficult for me to
+separate my own world-view from the assumptions of the field. In
+grokking the politics of SF, I was in the position of a fish trying to
+understand water.

+

Eventually, however, a sufficiently intelligent fish could start to
+get it about hydrodynamics — especially when the water’s behavior is
+disturbed by storms and becomes visibly turbulent. I got to look back
+through the midlist at the Futurian ripples. I lived through the New
+Wave storm and the pre-Startide-Rising doldrums. By the time cyberpunk
+came around, I was beginning to get some conscious perspective.

+

Cyberpunk was the third failed revolution against Campbellian SF.
+William Gibson, who is generally credited with launching this subgenre
+in his 1984 novel Neuromancer, was not a political
+writer. But Bruce Sterling, who promoted Gibson and became the chief
+ideologue of anti-Cambellianism in the late 1980s, called it “the
+Movement” in a self-conscious reference to the heady era of 1960s
+student radicalism. The cyberpunks positioned themselves particularly
+against the carnographic conservative military SF of David Drake,
+Jerry Pournelle, and lower-rent imitators — not exactly a hard
+target.

+

Despite such posturing, the cyberpunks were neither as
+stylistically innovative nor as politically challenging as the New
+Wave had been. Gibson’s prose has aptly been described as Raymond
+Chandler in mirror-shades. Cyberpunk themes (virtual reality,
+pervasive computing, cyborging and biosculpture, corporate feudalism)
+had been anticipated in earlier works like Vernor Vinge’s 1978 hard-SF
+classic True Names, and even further back in The
+Space Merchants. Cyberpunk imagery (decayed urban landscapes,
+buzzcuts, chrome and black leather) quickly became a cliche replicated
+in dozens of computer games.

+

Neal Stephenson wrote a satirical finis to the cyberpunk genre in
+1992’s Snow Crash, which (with Bruce Sterling’s
+Schismatrix and Walter John Williams’s
+Hardwired) was very close to being the only work to meet
+the standard set by Neuromancer. While most cyberpunk
+took for granted a background in which late capitalism had decayed
+into an oppressive corporate feudalism under which most individuals
+could be nothing but alienated and powerless, the future of Snow
+Crash was a tellingly libertarian one. The bedrock
+individualism of classical SF reasserted itself with a smartass
+grin.

+

By the time cyberpunk fizzled out, most fans had been enjoying the
+hard-SF renaissance for a decade; the New Wave was long gone, and
+cyberpunk had attracted more notice outside the SF field than within
+it. The leaders of SF’s tiny in-house critical establishment, however
+(figures like Samuel Delany and David Hartwell), remained fascinated
+on New Wave relics like Thomas Disch and Philip K. Dick, or
+anti-Campbellian fringe figures like Suzette Hadin Elgin and Octavia
+Butler. While this was going on, the readers voted with their Hugo
+ballots largely for writers that were squarely within the Campbellian
+tradition — Golden age survivors, the killer Bs, and newer
+writers like Lois McMaster Bujold and Greg Egan (whose 1998 work
+Diaspora may just be the single most audacious and
+brilliant hard-SF novel in the entire history of the field).

+

In 1994, critical thinking within the SF field belatedly caught up
+with reality. Credit for this goes to David Hartwell and Cathryn
+Cramer, whose analysis in the anthology The Ascent of
+Wonder finally acknowledged what should have been obvious all
+along. Hard SF is the vital heart of the field, the radiant core from
+which ideas and prototype worlds diffuse outwards to be appropriated
+by writers of lesser world-building skill but perhaps greater
+stylistic and literary sophistication. While there are other modes
+of SF that have their place, they remain essentially derivations of or
+reactions against hard SF, and cannot even be properly understood
+without reference to its tropes, conventions, and imagery.

+

Furthermore, Gregory Benford’s essay in The Ascent of Wonder
+on the meaning of SF offered a characterization of the genre which may well
+prove final. He located the core of SF in the experience of “sense of wonder”,
+not merely as a thalamic thrill but as the affirmation that the universe
+has a knowable order that is discoverable through reason and science.

+

I think I can go further than Hartwell or Cramer or Benford in
+defining the relationship between hard SF and the rest of the field.
+To do this, I need to introduce the concept linguist George Lakoff calls
+“radial category”, one that is not defined by any one logical
+predicate, but by a central prototype and a set of permissible or
+customary variations. As a simple example, in English the category
+“fruit” does not correspond to any uniformity of structure that a
+botanist could recognize. Rather, the category has a prototype
+“apple”, and things are recognized as fruits to the extent that they
+are either (a) like an apple, or (b) like something that has already
+been sorted into the “like an apple” category.

+

Radial categories have central members (“apple”, “pear”, “orange”)
+whose membership is certain, and peripheral members (“coconut”,
+“avocado”) whose membership is tenuous. Membership is graded
+by the distance from the central prototype — roughly, the
+number of traits that have to mutate to get one from being like
+the prototype to like the instance in question. Some traits
+are important and tend to be conserved across the entire
+radial category (strong flavor including sweetness) while
+some are only weakly bound (color).

+

In most radial categories, it is possible to point out members that
+are counterexamples to any single intensional (“logical”) definition,
+but traits that are common to the core prototypes nevertheless tend to
+be strongly bound. Thus, “coconut” is a counterexample to the
+strongly-bound trait that fruits have soft skins, but it is sorted as
+“fruit” because (like the prototype members) it has an easily-chewable
+interior with a sweet flavor.

+

SF is a radial category in which the prototypes are certain
+classics of hard SF. This is true whether you are mapping individual
+works by affinity or subgenres like space opera, technology-of-magic
+story, eutopian/dystopian extrapolation, etc. So in discussing the
+traits of SF as a whole, the relevant question is not “which traits
+are universal” but “which traits are strongly bound” — or,
+almost equivalently, “what are the shared traits of the core (hard-SF)
+prototypes”.

+

The strong binding between hard SF and libertarian politics
+continues to be a fact of life in the field. It it is telling that
+the only form of politically-inspired award presented
+annually at the World Science Fiction Convention is the Libertarian
+Futurist Society’s “Prometheus”. There is no socialist, liberal,
+moderate, conservative or fascist equivalent of the class of
+libertarian SF writers including L. Neil Smith, F. Paul Wilson, Brad
+Linaweaver, or J. Neil Schulman; their books, even when they are
+shrill and indifferently-written political tracts, actually
+sell — and sell astonishingly well — to SF
+fans.

+

Of course, there are people in the SF field who find this deeply
+uncomfortable. Since the centrality of hard SF has become inescapable,
+resistance now takes the form of attempts to divorce hard SF from
+libertarianism — to preserve the methods and conceptual apparatus
+of hard SF while repudiating its political aura. Hartwell
+& Cramer’s 2002 followup to The Ascent of Wonder,
+The Hard SF Renaissance, takes up this argument in its
+introduction and explanatory notes.

+

The Hard SF Renaissance presents itself as a dialogue
+between old-school Campbellian hard SF and an attempt to construct a
+“Radical Hard SF” that is not in thrall to right-wing tendencies.
+It is clear that the editors’ sympathies lie with the “Radicals”, not
+least from the very fact that they identify libertarianism as a right-wing
+phenomenon. This is an error characteristic of left-leaning thinkers,
+who tend to assume that anything not “left” is “right” and that approving
+of free markets somehow implies social conservatism.

+

All the history rehearsed so far has been intended to lead up to
+the following question: is the “Radical Hard SF” program possible?
+More generally, is the symbiotic relationship between libertarian
+political thought and SF a mere historical accident, or is there an
+intrinsic connection?

+

I think I know what John Campbell’s answer would be, if he had not
+died the year that the founders of libertarianism broke with
+conservatism. I know what Robert Heinlein’s was. They’re the same as
+mine, a resounding yes — that there is a connection, and that
+the connection is indeed deep and intrinsic. But I am a proud
+libertarian partisan, and conviction is not proof. Cultural history
+is littered with the corpses of zealots who attempted to yoke art to
+ideology with shallow arguments, only to be exposed as fools when the
+art became obsolescent before the ideology or (more often)
+vice-versa.

+

In the remainder of this essay I will nevertheless attempt to prove
+this point. My argument will center around the implications of a
+concept best known from First Amendment law: the “marketplace of
+ideas”. I am going to argue specifically from the characteristics
+of hard SF, the prototypes of the radial category of SF.

+

Science fiction, as a literature, embraces the possibility of
+radical transformations of the human condition brought about through
+knowledge. Technological immortality, star drives, cyborging —
+all these SFnal tropes are situated within a knowable universe, one in
+which scientific inquiry is both the precondition and the principal
+instrument of creating new futures.

+

SF is, broadly, optimistic about these futures. This is so for the
+simple reason that SF is fiction bought with peoples’ entertainment
+budgets and people, in general, prefer happy endings to sad ones. But
+even when SF is not optimistic, its dystopias and cautionary tales
+tend to affirm the power of reasoned choices made in a knowable
+universe; they tell us that it is not through chance or the whim of
+angry gods that we fail, but through our failure to be
+intelligent, our failure to use the power of reason and science
+and engineering prudently.

+

At bottom, the central assumption of SF is that applied science is
+our best hope of transcending the major tragedies and minor irritants
+to which we are all heir. Even when scientists and engineers are not
+the visible heroes of the story, they are the invisible heroes that
+make the story notionally possible in the first place, the creators of
+possibility, the people who liberate the future to become a different
+place than the present.

+

SF both satisfies and stimulates a sort of lust for possibility
+compounded of simple escapism and a complex intellectual delight in
+anticipating the future. SF readers and writers want to believe that
+the future not only can be different but can be different in many,
+many weird and wonderful ways, all of which are worth exploring.

+

All the traits (embrace of radical transformation, optimism,
+applied science as our best hope, the lust for possibilities) are
+weakly characteristic of SF in general — but they are
+powerfully characteristic of hard SF. Strongly bound, in the
+terminology of radial categories.

+

Therefore, hard SF has a bias towards valuing the human traits and
+social conditions that best support scientific inquiry and permit it
+to result in transformative changes to both individuals and societies.
+Also, of social equilibria which allow individuals the greatest scope
+for choice, for satisfying that lust for possibilities. And it is is
+here that we begin to get the first hints that the strongly-bound
+traits of SF imply a political stance — because not all
+political conditions are equally favorable to scientific inquiry and
+the changes it may bring. Nor to individual choice.

+

The power to suppress free inquiry, to limit the choices and thwart
+the disruptive creativity of individuals, is the power to strangle
+the bright transcendant futures of optimistic SF. Tyrants, static
+societies, and power elites fear change above all else — their
+natural tendency is to suppress science, or seek to distort it for
+ideological ends (as, for example, Stalin did with Lysekoism). In the
+narratives at the center of SF, political power is the natural enemy
+of the future.

+

SF fans and writers have always instinctively understood this.
+Thus the genre’s long celebration of individualist anti-politics; thus
+its fondness for voluntarism and markets over state action, and for
+storylines in which (as in Heinlein’s archetypal The Man Who
+Sold The Moon) scientific breakthrough and and free-enterprise
+economics blend into a seemless whole. These stances are not
+historical accidents, they are structural imperatives that follow from
+the lust for possibility. Ideological fashions come and go, and the
+field inevitably rediscovers itself afterwards as a literature of
+freedom.

+

This analysis should put permanently to rest the notion that hard SF
+is a conservative literature in any sense. It is, in fact, deeply and
+fundamentally radical — the literature that celebrates not merely
+science but science as a permanent revolution, as the final and most
+inexorable foe of all fixed power relationships everywhere.

+

Earlier, I cited the following traits of SF’s libertarian
+tradition: ornery and insistant individualism, veneration of the
+competent man, instinctive distrust of coercive social engineering and
+a rock-ribbed objectivism that values knowing how things work and
+treats all political ideologizing with suspicion. All should now be
+readily explicable. These are the traits that mark the enemies of the
+enemies of the future.

+

The partisans of “Radical Hard SF” are thus victims of a category
+error, an inability to see beyond their own political maps. By
+jamming SF’s native libertarianism into a box labeled “right wing” or
+“conservative” they doom themselves to misunderstanding the deepest
+imperatives of the genre.

+

The SF genre and libertarianism will both survive this mistake
+quite handily. They were symbiotic before libertarianism defined
+itself as a distinct political stance and they have co-evolved ever
+since. If four failed revolutions against Campbellian SF have not
+already demonstrated the futility of attempting to divorce them, I’m
+certain the future will.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20021109121000.blog b/20021109121000.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ed31ed3 --- /dev/null +++ b/20021109121000.blog @@ -0,0 +1,233 @@ +My Very First Fisk +

Ta-daa! In ritual obeisance to the customs of the blogosphere, I now
+perform my very first fisking. Of Der Fisk himself, in his 8 Nov 2002 column
+“Bush fights for another clean shot in his war”.

+

+“A clean shot” was The Washington Post’s revolting description of the
+murder of the al-Qa’ida leaders in Yemen by a US “Predator” unmanned
+aircraft. With grovelling approval, the US press used Israel’s own
+mendacious description of such murders as a “targeted killing”
+— and shame on the BBC for parroting the same words on Wednesday. +

+

One wonders which word in the phrase “targeted killing” Mr. Fisk is
+having problems with. Since he avers that the phrase “targeted killing”
+is “mendacious”, we can deduce that he believes either the word “killing”
+or the word “targeted” to be false descriptions.

+

We must therefore conclude that in Mr. Fisk’s universe, either (a)
+members of al-Qaeda can be reduced to patch of carbonized char without
+the event properly qualifying as a “killing”, or (b) the drone
+operators weren’t targeting that vehicle at all — they unleashed
+a Hellfire on a random patch of the Hadrahamaut that just happened
+to have a half-dozen known terrorists moseying through it at at the moment
+of impact.

+

+How about a little journalistic freedom here? Like asking why this
+important al-Qa’ida leader could not have been arrested. Or tried
+before an open court. Or, at the least, taken to Guantanamo Bay for
+interrogation. +

+

One imagines Mr. Fisk during World War II, exclaiming in horror
+because the Allies neglected to capture entire divisions of the Waffen-SS
+intact and subject each Aryan superman to individual criminal trials.

+

Mr. Fisk’s difficulty with grasping the concept of “warfare” and
+“enemy combatant” is truly remarkable. Or perhaps not so remarkable,
+considering his apparent failure to grasp the terms “targeted” and
+“killing”.

+

+Instead, the Americans release a clutch of Guantanamo “suspects”, one
+of whom — having been held for 11 months in solitary confinement —
+turns out to be around 100 years old and so senile that he can’t
+string a sentence together. And this is the “war on terror”? +

+

Yes, Mr. Fisk, it is. It’s a war in which our soldiers gives
+individual enemy combatants food, shelter, and medical care for 11
+months while their terrorists continue mass-murdering innocent
+civilian women and children.

+

+But a “clean shot” is what President Bush appears to want to take at
+the United Nations. First, he wants to force it to adopt a resolution
+about which the Security Council has the gravest reservations. Then he
+warns that he might destroy the UN’s integrity by ignoring it
+altogether. In other words, he wants to destroy the UN. Does George
+Bush realise that the United States was the prime creator of this
+institution, just as it was of the League of Nations under President
+Woodrow Wilson? +

+

Interesting that Mr. Fisk should mention the League of Nations. This
+would be the same League of Nations that collapsed after 1938 due to its
+utter failure to prevent clear-cut aggression by Nazi Germany? One wonders
+how Mr. Fisk supposes the U.N. can possibly escape the League’s fate
+if it fails to sponsor effective action against a genocidal, murdering tyrant
+who has stated for the record that he models himself on Hitler.

+

I congratulate Mr. Fisk — the phrase “destroy the U.N.’s
+integrity”; it is very entertaining. In other news, George Bush is
+plotting to destroy Messalina’s chastity, William Jefferson Clinton’s
+truthfulness, and Robert Fisk’s grasp on reality.

+

Supposing that the U.S. was the prime creator of the U.N., and
+supposing that was a mistake, is Mr. Fisk proposing that we should not
+have the integrity to shoot our own dog?

+

+“Targeted killing” — courtesy of the Bush administration —
+is now what the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon can call
+“legitimate warfare”. And Vladimir Putin, too. Now the Russians
+— I kid thee not, as Captain Queeg said in the Caine Mutiny
+— are talking about “targeted killing” in their renewed war on
+Chechnya. After the disastrous “rescue” of the Moscow theatre hostages
+by the so-called “elite” Russian Alpha Special forces (beware, oh
+reader, any rescue by “elite” forces, should you be taken hostage),
+Putin is supported by Bush and Tony Blair in his renewed onslaught
+against the broken Muslim people of Chechnya. +

+

We note for the record that should Mr. Fisk be captured by
+terrorists, he would prefer to be rescued by non-elite forces; perhaps
+a troop of Girl Scouts waving copies of The Guardian
+would satisfy him. I would defer to Mr. Fisk evident belief that “non-elite”
+rescuers would increase his chances of surviving the experience, were
+it not that I dislike the sight of dying Girl Scouts.

+

+I’m a cynical critic of the US media, but last month Newsweek ran a
+brave and brilliant and terrifying report on the Chechen war. In a
+deeply moving account of Russian cruelty in Chechnya, it recounted a
+Russian army raid on an unprotected Muslim village. Russian soldiers
+broke into a civilian home and shot all inside. One of the victims was
+a Chechen girl. As she lay dying of her wounds, a Russian soldier
+began to rape her. “Hurry up Kolya,” his friend shouted, “while she’s
+still warm.” +

+

In other words, Russian soldiers behaved like al-Qaeda terrorists, and
+this is a bad thing. Excellent, Mr. Fisk; you appear to be showing some sign
+of an actual moral sense here.

+

+Now, I have a question. If you or I was that girl’s husband or lover
+or brother or father, would we not be prepared to take hostages in a
+Moscow theatre — Even if this meant — as it did —
+that, asphyxiated by Russian gas, we would be executed with a bullet
+in the head, as the Chechen women hostage-takers were — But no
+matter. The “war on terror” means that Kolya and the boys will be back
+in action soon, courtesy of Messrs Putin, Bush and Blair. +

+

Ahh. So, Mr. Fisk is taking the position that the Russians’ atrocious
+behavior in Chechnya justifies hostage-taking and the cold-blooded murder of
+hostages in a Moscow theater. Very interesting.

+

Let’s follow the logic of just retribution here. If the rape of a dying
+girl in Chechnya by Russian soldiers justifies terrorizing and murdering
+hostages in a Moscow theater, then what sort of behavior might the murder of
+3000 innocent civilians in Manhattan justify?

+

We gather that Mr. Fisk thinks it does not justify whacking half a
+dozen known terrorists, including the organizer of the U.S.S. Cole
+bombing, in the Yemeni desert. We conclude that Mr. Fisk concedes the
+righteousness of retribution, all right, but values the life of each
+al-Qaeda terrorist more than those of five hundred unsuspecting
+victims of al-Qaeda terrorism.

+

+Let me quote that very brave Israeli, Mordechai Vanunu, the man who
+tried to warn the West of Israel’s massive nuclear war technology,
+imprisoned for 12 years of solitary confinement — and betrayed,
+so it appears, by one Robert Maxwell. In a poem he wrote in
+confinement, Vanunu said: “I am the clerk, the technician, the
+mechanic, the driver. They said, Do this, do that, don’t look left or
+right, don’t read the text. Don’t look at the whole machine. You are
+only responsible for this one bolt, this one rubber stamp.” +

+

Mr. Fisk apparently believes that Mr. Vanunu had no responsibility
+to betray his country’s defensive capabilities in the presence of
+enemies bent on its utter destruction. Or did I somehow miss the
+incident in which Israel aggressively atom-bombed a neighbor?

+

+Kolya would have understood that. So would the US Air Force officer
+“flying” the drone which murdered the al-Qa’ida men in Yemen. So would
+the Israeli pilot who bombed an apartment block in Gaza, killing nine
+small children as well as well as his Hamas target, an “operation”
+— that was the description, for God’s sake — which Ariel
+Sharon described as “a great success”. +

+

Mr. Fisk, whose love for legalism and international due process
+commends giving al-Qaeda terrorists individual criminal trials, seems
+curiously unaware of that portion of the Geneva Convention relating to
+the use of non-combatants as human shields.

+

One wonders if he would be persuaded by the Geneva Convention
+language assigning responsibility for these deaths not to Israel, but
+to Hamas.

+

One suspects not. In Mr. Fisk’s universe, it’s clear that there is
+one set of rules for Israelis and another for terrorists. Hamas
+terrorists committing atrocities are justified by Israeli actions,
+while Israelis committing what Mr. Fisk prefers to consider atrocities
+are evil and the behavior of Hamas completely irrelevant.

+

But we know, from Mr. Fisk’s famous report of his beating in Afghanistan,
+what his actual rule is: hating Americans justifies anything.

+

+These days, we all believe in “clean shots”. I wish that George Bush
+could read history. Not just Britain’s colonial history, in which we
+contrived to use gas against the recalcitrant Kurds of Iraq in the
+1930s. Not just his own country’s support for Saddam Hussein
+throughout his war with Iran. +

+

This would be the same Iran that belligerantly and unlawfully seized
+the U.S. Embassy in 1979, correct? And held Americans hostage for 120
+days, committing an act of war under the international law Mr. Fisk
+claims to so scrupulously respect?

+

It would be entertaining to watch Mr. Fisk argue that Saddam Hussein
+was not then fit to be an ally of the U.S. against its enemies, but is now
+— after twenty years of atrocities aggressive warfare — such
+an upstanding citizen of the international community that we should
+stand idly by while he arms himself with nuclear weapons.

+

+The Iranians once produced a devastating book of coloured photographs
+of the gas blisters sustained by their soldiers in that war. I looked
+at them again this week. If you were these men, you would want to
+die. They all did. I wish someone could remind George Bush of the
+words of Lawrence of Arabia, that “making war or rebellion is messy,
+like eating soup off a knife.” +

+

I wonder if Mr. Fisk can point to any instance in which George Bush ever
+stated that he expected the war with al-Qaeda to be “clean”? If I recall
+correctly. “clean shot” was the Washington Post’s phrase.

+

Can Mr. Fisk fail to be aware that the Post’s editorial board is
+run by ideological enemies of George Bush, persons who would, outside
+of wartime, hew rather closer to Mr. Fisk’s positions than George
+Bush’s?

+

Mr. Fisk, I don’t think any American policymaker doubts that war is hell.
+Nor that terrorism is even worse.

+

+And I suppose I would like Americans to remember the arrogance of
+colonial power. +

+

We have quite vivid historical memories of the arrogance of Mr. Fisk’s
+particular colonial power, in fact. We recall fighting a revolution to
+deal with it.

+

If Mr. Fisk could point out any American colonies in Iraq, or Iran, or
+Palestine, or Chechnya, we would be greatly educated.

+

+ Here, for example, is the last French executioner in Algeria during
+the 1956-62 war of independence, Fernand Meysonnier, boasting only
+last month of his prowess at the guillotine. “You must never give the
+guy the time to think. Because if you do he starts moving his head
+around and that’s when you have the mess-ups. The blade comes through
+his jaw, and you have to use a butcher’s knife to finish it off. It is
+an exorbitant power — to kill one’s fellow man.”
+So perished the brave Muslims of the Algerian fight for freedom. +

+

Ah. Did I miss the part where American were using guillotines as a method
+of execution, then?

+

+No, I hope we will not commit war crimes in Iraq — there will be
+plenty of them for us to watch — but I would like to think that
+the United Nations can restrain George Bush and Vladimir Putin and, I
+suppose, Tony Blair. But one thing is sure. Kolya will be with them. +

+

Mr. Fisk’s surety that American troops will while away their time
+in Baghdad raping dying Iraqi girls appears to come from the same
+eccentric brain circuitry that supposes U.S. to be a “colonial” power and to
+be in imminent danger of performing botched executions with guillotines
+and butcher knives.

+

Mr. Fisk neglects an important difference between U.S. soldiers and
+al-Qaeda terrorists.

+

Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, U.S. soldiers found
+guilty of such behavior can be — and, on the rare occasions it
+has occurred, frequently have been — court-martialed and shot.
+Not that it seems Mr. Fisk would be likely to acknowledge the
+existence of this law, or that it is ever applies.

+

To Mr. Fisk’s inability to grasp the terms “targeted” and “killing”
+we may therefore add an inability to grasp the terms “barbarism” and
+“civilization”.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20021113092000.blog b/20021113092000.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..973c858 --- /dev/null +++ b/20021113092000.blog @@ -0,0 +1,107 @@ +The Charms and Terrors of Military SF +

I took some heat recently for describing some of Jerry Pournelle’s
+SF as “conservative/militarist power fantasies”. Pournelle uttered a
+rather sniffy comment about this on his blog; the only substance I
+could extract from it was that Pournelle thought his lifelong friend
+Robert Heinlein was caught between a developing libertarian philosophy
+and his patriotic instincts. I can hardly argue that point, since I
+completely agree with it; that tension is a central issue in almost
+eveything Heinlein ever wrote.

+

The differences between Heinlein’s and Pournelle’s military SF are
+not trivial — they are both esthetically and morally important.
+More generally, the soldiers in military SF express a wide range
+of different theories about the relationship between soldier,
+society, and citizen. These theories reward some examination.

+

First, let’s consider representative examples: Jerry Pournelle’s
+novels of Falkenberg’s Legion, on the one hand, and Heinlein’s
+Starship Troopers on the other.

+

The difference between Heinlein and Pournelle starts with the fact
+that Pournelle could write about a cold-blooded mass murder of human
+beings by human beings, performed in the name of political order,
+approvingly — and did.

+

But the massacre was only possible because Falkenberg’s Legion and
+Heinlein’s Mobile Infantry have very different relationships with the
+society around them. Heinlein’s troops are integrated with the society
+in which they live. They study history and moral philosophy; they are
+citizen-soldiers. Johnnie Rico has doubts, hesitations, humanity.
+One can’t imagine giving him orders to open fire on a stadium-full of
+civilians as does Falkenberg.

+

Pournelle’s soldiers, on the other hand, have no society but their
+unit and no moral direction other than that of the men on horseback
+who lead them. Falkenberg is a perfect embodiment of military
+Fuhrerprinzip, remote even from his own men, a creepy and
+opaque character who is not successfully humanized by an implausible
+romance near the end of the sequence. The Falkenberg books end with
+his men elevating an emperor, Prince Lysander who we are all supposed
+to trust because he is such a beau ideal. Two thousand years of
+hard-won lessons about the maintenance of liberty are thrown away
+like so much trash.

+

In fact, the underlying message here is pretty close to that of
+classical fascism. It, too, responds to social decay with a cult of
+the redeeming absolute leader. To be fair, the Falkenberg novels
+probably do not depict Pournelle’s idea of an ideal society, but they
+are hardly less damning if we consider them as a cautionary tale.
+“Straighten up, kids, or the hero-soldiers in Nemourlon are going to
+have to get medieval on your buttocks and install a Glorious Leader.”
+Pournelle’s values are revealed by the way that he repeatedly posits
+situations in which the truncheon of authority is the only solution.
+All tyrants plead necessity.

+

Even so, Falkenberg’s men are paragons compared to the soldiers in
+David Drake’s military fiction. In the Hammer’s Slammers
+books and elsewhere we get violence with no politico-ethical nuances
+attached to it all. “Carnography” is the word for this stuff,
+pure-quill violence porn that goes straight for the thalamus. There’s
+boatloads of it out there, too; the Starfist sequence by
+Sherman and Cragg is a recent example. Jim Baen sells a lot of it
+(and, thankfully, uses the profits to subsidize reprinting the Golden
+Age midlist).

+

The best-written military SF, on the other hand, tends to be more
+like Heinlein’s — the fact that it addresses ethical questions
+about organized violence (and tries to come up with answers one might
+actually be more willing to live with than Pournelle’s quasi-fascism
+or Drake’s brutal anomie) is part of its appeal. Often (as in
+Heinlein’s Space Cadet or the early volumes in Lois
+Bujold’s superb Miles Vorkosigan novels) such stories include elements
+of bildungsroman.

+

The Sten sequence by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch was
+both a loving tribute to and (in the end) a brutal deconstruction of
+this kind of story. It’s full of the building-character-at-boot-camp
+scenes that are a staple of the subgenre; Sten’s career is carefully
+designed to rationalize as many of these as possible. But the Eternal
+Emperor, originally a benevolent if quirky paternal figure who earns
+Sten’s loyalty, goes genocidally mad. In the end, soldier Sten must
+rebel against the system that made him what he is.

+

Cole & Bunch tip their hand in an afterword to the last book,
+not that any reader with more perception than a brick could have
+missed it. They wrote Sten to show where fascism leads
+and as a protest against SF’s fascination with absolute power and the
+simplifications of military life. Bujold winds up making the same
+point in a subtler way; the temptations of power and arrogance are a
+constant, soul-draining strain on Miles’s father Aral, and Miles
+eventually destroys his own career through one of those
+temptations

+

Heinlein, a U.S naval officer who loved the military and seems to
+have always remembered his time at Annapolis as the best years of his
+life, fully understood that the highest duty of a soldier may be not
+merely to give his life but to reject all the claims of military
+culture and loyalty. His elegiac The Long Watch makes
+this point very clear. You’ll seek an equivalent in vain anywhere in
+Pournelle or Drake or their many imitators — but consider
+Bujold’s The Vor Game, in which Miles’s resistance to
+General Metzov’s orders for a massacre is the pivotal moment at which
+he becomes a man.

+

Bujold’s point is stronger because, unlike Ezra Dahlquist in
+The Long Watch or the citizen-soldiers in Starship
+Troopers, Miles is not a civilian serving a hitch. He is the
+Emperor’s cousin, a member of a military caste; his place in
+Barrayaran society is defined by the expectations of military
+service. What gives his moment of decision its power is that in refusing
+to commit an atrocity, he is not merely risking his life but giving up
+his dreams.

+

Falkenberg and Admiral Lermontov have a dream, too. The difference
+is that where Ezra Dahlquist and Miles Vorkosigan sacrifice themselves
+for what they believe, Pournelle’s “heroes” sacrifice others. Miles’s
+and Dahlquist’s futures are defined by refusal of an order to do evil,
+Falkenberg’s by the slaughter of untermenschen.

+

This is a difference that makes a difference.

+

Blogspot omments

diff --git a/20021114084500.blog b/20021114084500.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fe8ada5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20021114084500.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Conspiracy and prospiracy +

One of the problems we face in the war against terror is that al-Qaeda is not quite a conspiracy in the traditional sense. It’s something else that is more difficult to characterize and target.

+

(I wrote what follows three years before 9/11.)

+

Political and occult conspiracy theories can make for good propaganda and excellent satire (vide Illuminatus! or any of half a dozen other examples). As guides to action, however, they are generally dangerously misleading.

+

Misleading, because they assume more capacity for large groups to keep secrets and maintain absolutely unitary conscious policies than human beings in groups actually seem to possess. The history of documented “conspiracies” and failed attempts at same is very revealing in this regard — above a certain fairly small size, somebody always blows the gaff. This is why successful terrorist organizations are invariably quite small.

+

Dangerously misleading because conspiracy theories, offering the easy drama of a small group of conscious villains, distract our attention from a subtler but much more pervasive phenomenon — one I shall label the “prospiracy”.

+

What distinguishes prospiracies from conspiracies is that the members don’t necessarily know they are members, nor are they fully conscious of what binds them together. Prospiracies are not created through oaths sworn by guttering torchlight, but by shared ideology or institutional culture. In many cases, members accept the prospiracy’s goals and values without thinking through their consequences as fully as they might if the process of joining were formal and initiatory.

+

What makes a prospiracy like a conspiracy and distinguishes it from a mere subcultural group? The presence of a “secret doctrine” or shared goals which its core members admit among themselves but not to perceived outsiders; commonly, a goal which is stronger than the publicly declared purpose of the group, or irrelevant to that declared purpose but associated with it in some contingent (usually historical) way.

+

On the other hand, a prospiracy is unlike a conspiracy in that it lacks well-defined lines of authority. Its leaders wield influence over the other members, but seldom actual power. It also lacks a clear-cut distinction between “ins” and “outs”.

+

Prospiracy scales better than conspiracy, and thus can be far more dangerous. Because anyone can join simply by buying the “secret” doctrine, people frequently recruit themselves. Because the “secret” isn’t written on stone tablets in an inner sanctum, it’s totally deniable. In fact, members sometimes deny it to themselves (not that that ultimately matters). What keeps a prospiracy together is not conscious commitment but the memetic logic of its positions.

+

As an exercise (and to avoid any appearance of axe-grinding), I’ll leave the reader to apply this model for his or herself. There are plenty of juicy examples out there. I’m a “member” of at least two of them myself.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20021121144800.blog b/20021121144800.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8506f4c --- /dev/null +++ b/20021121144800.blog @@ -0,0 +1,60 @@ +What a responsible American Left would look like +

The congressional Democrats have made Nancy Pelosi their leader.
+Whether or not this is conscious strategy, it means they’re going to
+run to the left. And very likely get slaughtered in 2004.

+

It’s truly odd how self-destructive the American Left has become.
+They’re like that famous line about the Palestinians, never missing an
+opportunity to miss an opportunity. And there are so many
+opportunities! So many good things Republican conservatives can
+never do because they’re captive to their voter base.

+

Herewith, then, my humble offering of a program for the American
+Left. This is not sarcasm and I’m not trying to score points here,
+these are issues where the Left could take a stand and gain back some
+of the moral capital it has squandered so recklessly since the
+days of the civil rights movement.

+
    +
  • Support war on Iraq, but insist on nation-building
    +afterwards.     Saddam Hussein is a genocidal fascist tyrant, exactly the
    +sort of monster the Left ought to be against. Support deposing him
    +— then be the conscience of the U.S., insisting on our duty to
    +help rebuild Iraq as a free country afterwards. Push us to win the
    +peace, not just the war.
    • +
  • Derail the Homeland Security Act and other intrusions on
    +civil liberties.     The left hates John Ashcroft. So why don’t
    +we see more Left opposition to the law-enforcement power grab that’s
    +going on right now, or to the gutting of the Freedom of Information
    +Act? Many Americans would respond well to this.
    • +
  • Stop the War on (Some) Drugs. This is a civil-rights
    +issue. Blacks and other minorities are disproportionately victims
    +both of drug prosecution and of the criminal violence created by drug
    +laws. It’s a civil-liberties issue for many reasons too obvious to
    +need listing — how can any self-respecting liberal countenance
    +no-knock warrants and asset forfeiture? For too long the Left has
    +gone along with conservative anti-drug hysteria out of a craven fear
    +of being dismissed as a bunch of dope-loving ex-hippies. Time to
    +stand up and be counted.
    • +
  • Support school vouchers. Another civil-rights issue
    +— it’s precisely minorities and the poor who most need to escape
    +the trap that the public-school system has become, and black parents
    +know this. Yes, it will be hard to take on the teachers’ unions
    +— but you’re in serious danger of losing the black vote over
    +this issue, so switching would be not just the right thing but a
    +way to shore up your base as well.
    • +
  • Speak up for science. Religious conservatives are up to a
    +lot of anti-scientific mischief — banning stem-cell research,
    +excising evolutionary theory from textbooks. Make a principled stand
    +for science, secularism, and the anti-Establishment clause. Remind
    +the world that the U.S. is not a Christian nation, and seek to have
    +the tax exemption for religious organizations ended because it puts the
    +U.S. government in the position of deciding what’s a religion and
    +what is not.
    • +
  • Stop the RIAA/MPAA from trashing consumers’ fair-use rights.
    +The Left claims to be on the side of consumers and against corporate
    +power elites. So where was the Left when the DMCA passed? If the
    +RIAA and MPAA have their way, personal computers will be crippled
    +and consumers will go to jail for the `crime’ of copying DVDs they
    +have bought for their personal use. Young people, who are trending
    +conservative these days, care deeply about the RIAA attack on
    +file sharing. Wouldn’t you like to have them back?
    • +
+

Blogspot comment

diff --git a/20021126163700.blog b/20021126163700.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..21b60c6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20021126163700.blog @@ -0,0 +1,67 @@ +When to shoot a policeman +

A policeman was
+premeditatedly shot dead today.

+

Now, I don’t regard shooting a policeman as the worst possible
+crime — indeed, I can easily imagine circumstances under which I
+would do it myself. If he were committing illegal violence — or
+even officially legal violence during the enforcement of an unjust
+law. Supposing a policeman were criminally threatening someone’s
+life, say. Or suppose that he had been ordered under an act of
+government to round up all the Jews in the neighborhood, or confiscate
+all the pornography or computers or guns. Under those circumstances,
+it would be not merely my right but my duty to shoot the
+policeman.

+

But this policeman was harming nobody. He was shot down in
+cold blood as he was refueling his cruiser. His murderer subsequently
+announced the act on a public website.

+

The murderer said he was “protesting police-state tactics”. If
+that were his goal, however, then the correct and appropriate
+expression of it would have been to kill a BATF thug in the process of
+invading his home, or an airport security screener, or some other
+person who was actively and at the time of the protest implementing
+police-state tactics.

+

Killings of policemen in those circumstances are a defensible
+social good, pour encourager les autres. It is right and proper
+that the police and military should fear for their lives when they
+trespass on the liberty of honest citizens; that is part of the
+balance of power that maintains a free society, and the very reason
+our Constitution has a Second Amendment.

+

But this policeman was refueling his car. Nothing in the
+shooter’s justification carried any suggestion that the shooter’s
+civil rights had ever been violated by the victim, or that the
+murderer had standing to act for any other individual person whose
+rights had been violated by the victim. This killing was not
+self-defense.

+

There are circumstances under which general warfare against the
+police would be justified. In his indymedia post The
+Declaration of a Renewed American Independence the shooter utters
+a scathing, and (it must be said) largely justified indictment of
+police abuses. If the political system had broken down sufficiently
+that there were no reasonable hope of rectifying those abuses, then I
+would be among the first to cry havoc.

+

Under those circumstances, it would be my duty as a free human
+being under the U.S. Constitution not merely to shoot individual
+policemen, but to make revolutionary war on the police. As Abraham Lincoln
+said, “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people
+who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing
+government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending
+it or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow
+it.”

+

But the United States of America has not yet reached the point at
+which the political mechanisms for the defense of freedom have broken
+down. This judgment is not a matter of theory but one of practice.
+There are not yet police at our door with legal orders to round up the
+Jews, or confiscate pornography or computers or guns.

+

Civil society has not yet been fatally vitiated by tyranny. Under
+these circumstances, the only possible reaction is to condemn. This
+was a crime. This was murder. And I would cheerfully shoot not the
+policeman but the murderer dead. (There would be no question
+of guilt or due process, since the murderer publicly boasted of his
+crime.)

+

But that this shooter was wrong does not mean that
+everyone who shoots a policeman in the future will also be wrong. A
+single Andrew McCrae, at this time, is a criminal and should be
+condemned as a criminal. But his case against the police and the
+system behind them is not without merit. Therefore let him be a
+warning as well.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20021128052000.blog b/20021128052000.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c8046b6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20021128052000.blog @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +Today’s treason of the intellectuals +

The longest-term stakes in the war against terror are not just human lives, but whether Western civilization will surrender to fundamentalist Islam and shari’a law. More generally, the overt confrontation between Western civilization and Islamist barbarism that began on September 11th of 2001 has also made overt a fault line in Western civilization itself — a fault line that divides the intellectual defenders of our civilization from intellectuals whose desire is to surrender it to political or religious absolutism.

+

This fault line was clearly limned in Julien Benda’s 1927 essay Le trahison des clercs: English “The treason of the intellectuals”. I couldn’t find a copy of Benda’s essay on the Web. but there is an excellent commentary on it that repays reading. Ignore the reflexive endorsement of religious faith at the end; the source was a conservative Catholic magazine in which such gestures are obligatory. Benda’s message, untainted by Catholic or Christian partisanship, is even more resonant today than it was in 1927.

+

The first of the totalitarian genocides (the Soviet-engineered Ukrainian famine of 1922-1923, which killed around two million people) had already taken place. Hitler’s “Final Solution” was about fifteen years in the future. Neither atrocity became general knowledge until later, but Benda in 1927 would not have been surprised; he foresaw the horrors that would result when intellectuals abetted the rise of the vast tyrannizing ideologies of the 20th century,

+

Changes in the transport, communications, and weapons technologies of the 20th century made the death camps and the gulags possible. But it was currents in human thought that made them fact — ideas that both motivated and rationalized the thuggery of the Hitlers and Stalins of the world.

+

Benda indicted the intellectuals of his time for abandoning the program of the Enlightenment — abdicating the search for disinterested truth and universal human values. Benda charged that in
+abandoning universalism in favor of racism, classism, and political particularism, intellectuals were committing treason against the humanity that looked to them for guidance — prostituting themselves to creeds that would do great ill.

+

And what are the sequelae of this treason? Most diagnostically, mass murder and genocide. Its lesser consequences are subject to debate, equivocation, interpretation — but when we contemplate the atrocities at the Katyn Forest or the Sari nightclub there can beno doubt that we confront radical evils. Nor can we disregard the report of the perpetrators that that those evils were motivated by ideologies, nor that the ideologies were shaped and enabled and apologized for by identifiable factions among intellectuals in the West.

+

An intellectual commits treason against humanity when he or she propagandizes for ideas which lend themselves to the use of tyrants and terrorists.

+

In Benda’s time, the principal problem was what I shall call “treason of the first kind” or revolutionary absolutism: intellectuals signing on to a transformative revolutionary ideology in the belief that if the right people just got enough political power, they could fix everything that was wrong with the world. The “right people”, of course, would be the intellectuals themselves — or, at any rate, politicians who would consent to be guided by the intellectuals. If a few kulaks or Jews had to die for the revolution, well, the greater good and all that…the important thing was that violence wielded by Smart People with the Correct Ideas would eventually make things right.

+

The Nazi version of this disease was essentially wiped out by WWII. But the most deadly and persistent form of treason of the first kind, which both gave birth to intellectual Naziism and long outlived it, was intellectual Marxism. (It bears remembering that ‘Nazi’ stood for “National Socialist”, and that before the 1934 purge of the Strasserites the Nazi party was explicitly socialist in ideology.)

+

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1992 broke the back of intellectual Marxism. It may be that the great slaughters of the 20th century have had at least one good effect, in teaching the West a lesson about the perils of revolutionary absolutism written in letters of human blood too large for even the most naive intellectual idealist to ignore. Treason of the first kind is no longer common.

+

But Benda also indicted what I shall call “treason of the second kind”, or revolutionary relativism — the position that there are no moral claims or universal values that can trump the particularisms of particular ethnicities, political movements, or religions. In particular, relativists maintain that that the ideas of reason and human rights that emerged from the Enlightenment have no stronger claim on us than tribal prejudices.

+

Today, the leading form of treason of the second kind is postmodernism — the ideology that all value systems are equivalent, merely the instrumental creations of people who seek power and other unworthy ends. Thus, according to the postmodernists, when fanatical Islamists murder 3,000 people and the West makes war against the murderers and their accomplices, there is nothing to choose between these actions. There is only struggle between contending agendas. The very idea that there might be a universal ethical standard by which one is `better’ than the other is pooh-poohed as retrogressive, as evidence that one is a paid-up member of the Party of Dead White Males (a hegemonic conspiracy more malign than any terrorist organization).

+

Treason of the first kind wants everyone to sign up for the violence of redemption (everyone, that is, other than the Jews and capitalists and individualists that have been declared un-persons in advance). Treason of the second kind is subtler; it denounces our will to fight terrorists and tyrants, telling us we are no better than they, and even that the atrocities they commit against us are no more than requital for our past sins.

+

Marxism may be dead, but revolutionary absolutism is not; it flourishes in the Third World. Since 9/11, the West has faced an Islamo-fascist axis formed by al-Qaeda, Palestinian groups including the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, the rogue state of Iraq, and the theocratic government of Iran. These groups do not have unitary leadership, and their objectives are not identical; notably, the PA
+and Iraq are secularist, while al-Qaeda and Hamas and the Iranians and the Taliban are theocrats. Iran is Shi’a Islamic; the other theocratic groups are Sunni. But all these groups exchange intelligence and weapons, and they sometimes loan each other personnel. They hate America and the West, and they have used terror against us in an undeclared war that goes back to the early 1970s. The objectives of these groups, whether they are secular Arab nationalism or Jihad, require killing a lot of people. Especially a lot of Westerners.

+

Today’s treason of the intellectuals consists of equating suicide bombings deliberately targeting Israeli women and children with Israeli military operations so restrained that Palestinian children throw rocks at Israeli soldiers without fearing their guns. Today’s treason of the intellectuals tells us that because the U.S. occasionally propped up allied but corrupt governments during the
+Cold War, we have no right to object to airliners being flown into the World Trade Center. Today’s treason of the intellectuals consists of telling us we should do nothing but stand by, wringing our hands, while at least one of the groups in the Islamo-fascist axis acquires nuclear weapons with which terrorists could repeat their mass murders in New York City and Bali on an immensely larger scale.

+

Behind both kinds of treason there lurks an ugly fact: second-rate intellectuals, feeling themselves powerless, tend to worship power. The Marxist intellectuals who shilled for Stalin and the postmodernists who shill for Osama bin Laden are one of a kind — they identify with a tyrant’s or terrorist’s vision of transformingthe world through violence because they know they are incapable of making any difference themselves. This is why you find academic apologists disproportionately in the humanities departments and the soft sciences; physicists and engineers and the like have more constructive ways of engaging the world.

+

It may be that 9/11 will discredit revolutionary relativism as throughly as the history of the Nazis and Soviets discredited revolutionary absolutism. There are hopeful signs; the postmodernists and multiculturalists have a lot more trouble justifying their treason to non-intellectuals when its consequences include the agonizing deaths of thousands caught on videotape.

+

It’s not a game anymore. Ideas have consequences; postmodernism and multiculturalism are no longer just instruments in the West’s intramural games of one-upmanship. They have become an apologetic for barbarians who, quite literally, want to kill or enslave us all. Those ideas — and the people who promulgate them — should be judged accordingly.

diff --git a/20021204023400.blog b/20021204023400.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f455abb --- /dev/null +++ b/20021204023400.blog @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +Demographics and the Dustbin of History +

Karl Zinsmeister’s essay Old and In The Way presents a startling — but all too plausible — forecast of Europe’s future. To the now-familiar evidence of European insularity, reflexive anti-Americanism, muddle, and geopolitical impotence, Zinsmeister adds a hard look at European demographic trends.

+

What Zinsmeister sees coming is not pretty. European populations are not having children at replacement levels. The population of Europe is headed for collapse, and for an age profile heavily skewed towards older people and retirees. Europe’s Gross Domestic Product per capita (roughly, the amount of wealth the average person produces) is already only two-thirds of America’s, and the ratio is going to fall, not rise.

+

Meanwhile, the U.S population continues to rise — and the U.S. economy is growing three times as fast as Europe’s even though the U.S. is in the middle of a bust! Since 1970 the U.S. has been more than ten times as successful at creating new jobs. But most importantly, the U.S.’s population is still growing even as Europe’s is shrinking — which means the gap in population, productivity, and economic output is going to increase. By 2030, the U.S will have a larger population than all of Europe — and the median age in the U.S. will be 30, but the median age in Europe will be over 50.

+

Steven den Beste is probably correct to diagnose the steady weakening of Europe as the underlying cause of the increasing rift the U.S. and Europe’s elites noted in Robert Kagan’s essay Power and Weakness (also recommended reading). But Kagan (focusing on diplomacy and geopolitics), Zinsmeister (focusing on demographic and economic decline) and den Beste (focusing on the lassitude of Europe’s technology sector and the resulting brain drain to the U.S.) all miss something more fundamental.

+

Zinsmeister comes near it when he writes “Europe’s disinterest in childbearing is a crisis of confidence and optimism.”. Europeans are demonstrating in their behavior that they don’t believe the future will be good for children.

+

Back to that in a bit, but first a look on what the demographic collapse will mean for European domestic politics. Zinsmeister makes the following pertinent observations:

+
    +
  1. Percentage of GDP represented by government spending is also diverging. In the U.S. it is roughly 19% and falling. In the EU countries it is 30-40% and rising.
    2. +
  2. The ratio of state clients to wealth-generating workers is also rising. By 2030, Zinsmeister notes, every single worker in the EU will have his own elderly person 65 or older to provide for through the public pension system.
    3. +
  3. Chronic unemployment is at 9-10% (twice the U.S.’s) and rising.
    4. +
  4. Long-term unemployment and drone status is far more common in Europe than here. In Europe, 40% of unemployed have been out of work for over a year. Un the U.S. the corresponding figure is 6%.
    5. +
+

Zinsmeister doesn’t state the obvious conclusion; Euro-socialism is unsustainable. It’s headed for the dustbin of history.

+

Forget ideological collapse; the numbers don’t work. The statistics above actually understate the magnitude of the problem, because as more and more of the population become wards of the state, a larger percentage of the able will be occupied simply with running the income-redistribution system. The rules they make will depress per-capita productivity further (for a recent example see France’s mandated 35-hour workweek).

+

Unless several of the key trends undergo a rapid and extreme reversal, rather soon (as in 20 years at the outside) there won’t be enough productive people left to keep the gears of the income-redistribution machine turning. Economic strains sufficient to destroy the political system will become apparent much sooner. We may be seeing the beginnings of the destruction now as Chancellor Schröder’s legitimacy evaporates in Germany, burned away by the dismal economic news.

+

We know what this future will probably look like, because we’ve seen the same dismal combination of economic/demographic collapse play out in Russia in the 1980s and 1990s. Progressively more impotent governments losing their popular legitimacy, increasing corruption, redistributionism sliding into gangsterism. Slow-motion collapse.

+

But there are worse possibilities that are quite plausible. The EU hase two major advantages the Soviets did not — a better tech and infrastructure base, and a functioning civil society (e.g. one in which wealth and information flow through a lot of legal grassroots connections and voluntary organizations). But they have one major disadvantage — large, angry, totally unassimilated immigrant populations that are reproducing faster than the natives. This is an especially severe problem in France, where housing developments in the ring zones around all the major cities have become places the police dare not go without heavy weapons.

+

We’ve already gotten a foretaste of what that might mean for European domestic politics. At its most benign, we get Pim Fortuyn in Holland. But Jörg Haider in Austria is a more ominous indicator, and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s startling success in the last French presidential elections was downright frightening. Far-right populism with a racialist/nativist/anti-Semitic tinge is on the rise, an inevitable consequence of the demographic collapse of native populations.

+

As if that isn’t bad enough, al-Qaeda and other Islamist organizations are suspected on strong evidence to be recruiting heavily among the North African, Turkish, and Levantine populations that now predominate in European immigrant quarters. The legions of rootless, causeless, unemployed and angry young men among Muslim immigrants may in fact actually be on their way to reifying the worst nightmares of native-European racists.

+

One way or another, the cozy Euro-socialist welfare state is doomed by the demographic collapse. Best case: it will grind to a shambolic halt as the ratio of worker bees to drones goes below critical. Worst case: it will blow itself apart in a welter of sectarian, ethnic, and class violence. Watch the frequency trend curve of synagogue-trashings and anti-Jewish hate crimes; that’s bound to be a leading indicator.

+

The only possible way for Europe to avoid one of these fates would be for it to reverse either the decline in per-capita productivity or its population decline. And reversing the per-capita productivity decline would only be a temporary fix unless it could be made to rise faster than the drone-to-worker ratio — forever.

+

Was this foredoomed? Can it be that all national populations lose their will to have children when they get sufficiently comfortable? Do economies inevitably grow old and sclerotic? Is Europe simply aging into the end stages of a natural civilizational senescence?

+

That theory would be appealing to a lot of big-picture historians, and to religious anti-materialists like al-Qaeda. And if we didn’t have the U.S.’s counterexample to look at, we might be tempted to conclude that this trap is bound to claim any industrial society past a certain stage of development.

+

But that won’t wash. The U.S. is wealthier, both in aggregate and per-capita, than Europe. A pro-market political party in Sweden recently pointed out that by American standards of purchasing power, most Swedes now live in what U.S. citizens would consider poverty. If wealth caused decline, the U.S. would be further down the tubes than the EU right now. But we’re still growing.

+

A clue to the real problem lies in the differing degrees to which social stability depends on income transfer. In the U.S., redistributionism is on the decline; we abolished federal welfare nearly a decade ago, national health insurance was defeated, and new entitlements are an increasingly tough political sell to a population that has broadly bought into conservative arguments against them. In fact, one of the major disputes everyone knows won’t be avoidable much longer is over privatizing Social Security — and opponents are on the defensive.

+

In Europe, on the other hand, merely failing to raise state pensions on schedule can cause nationwide riots. The dependent population there is much larger, much longer-term, and has much stronger claims on the other players in the political system. The 5%/10% difference in structural unemployment — and, even more, the 6%/40% difference in permanant unemployment — tells the story.

+

So what happened?

+

Essentially, Euro-socialism told the people that the State would buy as much poverty and dependency as they cared to produce. Then it made wealth creation difficult by keeping capital expensive, business formation difficult, and labor markets rigid and regulated. Finally, it taxed the bejesus out of the people who stayed off the dole and made it through the redistributionist rat-maze, and used the proceeds to buy more poverty and alienation.

+

Europeans responded to this set of incentives by not having children. This isn’t surprising. The same thing happened in Soviet Russia, much sooner. There’s a reason Stalin handed out medals to women who raised big families.

+

Human birth rates rise under two circumstances. One is when people think they need to have a lot of kids for any of them to survive. The other is when human beings think their children will have it better than they do. (The reasons for this pattern should be obvious; if they aren’t, go read about evolutionary biology until you get it.)

+

Europe’s experiment with redistributionism has been running for about a hundred and fifty years now (the beginnings of the modern welfare state date to Prussian state-pension schemes in the 1840s). Until recently, it was sustained by the long-term population and productivity boom that followed the Industrial Revolution. There were always more employed young people than old people and unemployed people and sick people and indigents, so subsidizing the latter was economically possible.

+

Until fairly recently, Euro-socialist governments couldn’t suck wealth out of the productive economy and into the redistribution network fast enough to counter the effects of the long boom. Peoples’ estimate of the prospects for their children kept improving and they kept breeding. In France they now call the late end of that period les trentes glorieuses, the thirty glorious years from 1945 to 1975. But as the productivity gains from industrialization tailed off, the demographic collapse began, not just in France but Europe-wide.

+

Meanwhile, the U.S. was not only rejecting socialism, but domestic politics actually moved away from redistributionism and economic intervention after Nixon’s wage/price control experiment failed in 1971. The U.S, famously had its period of “malaise” in the 1970s after the oil-price shock ended our trentes glorieuses— but while in Europe the socialists consolidated their grip on public thinking during those years, our “democratic socialists” didn’t — and never recovered from Ronald Reagan’s two-term presidency after 1980.

+

The fall of the Soviet Union happened fifteen years after the critical branch point. Until then, Westerners had no way to know that the Soviets, too, had been in demographic decline for some time. Communist myth successfully portrayed the Soviet Union as an industrial and military powerhouse, but the reality was a hollow shell with a failing population — a third-world pesthole with a space program. Had that been clearer thirty years sooner, perhaps Europe might have avoided the trap.

+

Now the millennium has turned and it looks like the experiment will finally have to end. It won’t be philosophy or rhetoric or the march of armies that kills it, but rather the accumulated poisons of redistributionism necrotizing not just the economy but the demographics of Europe. Euro-socialism, in a quite Marxian turn of events, will have been destroyed by its own internal contradictions.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20021204034200.blog b/20021204034200.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..83a7c3b --- /dev/null +++ b/20021204034200.blog @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +Social Security and the Demography Bomb +

A friend of mine, Russ Cage aka Engineer-Poet, comments on my essay
+Demographics
+and the Dustbin of History:

+

+People used to have children to take care of them in their old age.
+Social Security took care of this by socializing the benefits, but all
+of the costs still fell to individuals; worse, taking time out of the
+workforce to raise kids reduces your Social Security benefits.
+Rational actors will stop having kids to have a good retirement. +

+

He’s right, and this applies to all public pension schemes.
+It’s a very simple, very powerful mechanism. When you subsidize old
+age, you depress birthrates. The more you subsidize old age, the more
+you depress birthrates. Eventually…crash!

+

It’s not just Euro-socialism that’s going to get trashed by
+demographics, it’s the U.S’s own welfare state. It might take longer
+here because our population is still rising, but it will happen.

+

Now that the effects of income transfer on demography are no longer
+masked by the Long Boom, this is going to become one of the principal
+constraints on public policy.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20021204092000.blog b/20021204092000.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ffdaaac --- /dev/null +++ b/20021204092000.blog @@ -0,0 +1,144 @@ +Sneering at Courage +

One of the overdue lessons of 9/11 is that we can’t afford to sneer
+at physical courage any more. The willingness of New York firemen,
+Special Forces troops in Afghanistan, and the passengers of Flight 93
+to put their lives on the line has given us most of the bright spots
+we’ve had in the war against terror. We are learning, once again,
+that all that stands between us and the night of barbarism is the
+willingness of men to both risk their lives and take the awful
+responsibility of using lethal force in our defense.

+

(And, usually, it is men who do the risking. I mean no disrespect
+to our sisters; the kind of courage I am talking about is not an
+exclusive male monopoly. But it has been predominently the job of
+men in every human culture since Olduvai Gorge, and still is today.
+I’ll return to this point later in the essay.)

+

The rediscovery of courage visibly upsets a large class of bien
+pensants in our culture. Many of the elite molders of opinion in
+the U.S and Europe do not like or trust physical courage in men. They
+have spent decades training us to consider it regressive, consigning
+it to fantasy, sneering at it — trying to persuade us all that
+it’s at best an adolescent or brute virtue, perhaps even a vice.

+

If this seems too strong an indictment, consider carefully all the
+connotations of the phrase “testosterone poisoning”. Ask yourself
+when you first heard it, and where, and from whom. Then ask yourself
+if you have slid into the habit of writing off as bluster any man’s
+declaration that he is willing to risk his life, willing to fight for
+what he believes in. When some ordinary man says he is willing to
+take on the likes of the 9/11 hijackers or the D.C. sniper — or
+even ordinary criminals — them, do you praise his determination
+or consign him, too, to the category of blowhard or barbarian?

+

Like all virtues, courage thrives on social support. If we mock
+our would-be warriors, writing them off as brutes or rednecks or
+simpletons, we’ll find courage in short supply when we need it. If we
+make the more subtle error of sponsoring courage only in uniformed men
+— cops, soldiers, firemen — we’ll find that we have
+trouble growing the quantity or quality we need in a crisis. Worse:
+our brave men could come to see themselves apart from us, distrusted
+and despised by the very people for whom they risk their lives, and
+entitled to take their due when it is not freely given. More than one
+culture that made that mistake has fallen to its own guardians.

+

Before 9/11, we were in serious danger of forgetting that courage
+is a functional virtue in ordinary men. But Todd Beamer reminded us of
+that — and now, awkwardly, we are rediscovering some of the
+forms that humans have always used to nurture and reward male courage.
+Remember that rash of news stories from New York about Upper-East-Side
+socialites cruising firemen’s bars? Biology tells; medals and
+tickertape parades and bounties have their place, but the hero’s most
+natural and strongest reward is willing women.

+

Manifestations like this absolutely appall and disgust the sort of
+people who think that the destruction of the World Trade Center was a
+judgment on American sins; — the multiculturalists, the
+postmodernists, the transnational progressives, radical feminists, the
+academic political-correctness brigades, the Bush-is-a-moron elitists,
+and the plain old-fashioned loony left. By and large these people
+never liked or trusted physical courage, and it’s worth taking a hard
+look at why that is.

+

Feminists distrust physical courage because it’s a male virtue.
+Women can and do have it, but it is gender-linked to masculinity just
+as surely as nurturance is to femininity. This has always been
+understood even in cultures like the Scythians, Teutons, Japanese, and
+modern Israelis that successfully made places for women warriors. If
+one’s world-view is organized around distrusting or despising men and
+maleness, male courage is threatening and social support for it is
+regressive.

+

For multi-culti and po-mo types, male physical courage is suspect
+because it’s psychologically linked to moral certitude — and
+moral certitude is a bad thing, nigh-indistinguishable from
+intolerance and bigotry. Men who believe in anything enough to fight
+for it are automatically suspect of would-be imperialism &mdash,
+unless, of course, they’re tribesmen or Third Worlders, in which
+fanaticism is a praiseworthy sign of authenticity.

+

Elite opinions about male physical courage have also had more
+than a touch of class warfare about them. Every upper crust
+that is not directly a military caste — including our own
+— tends to dismiss physical courage as a trait of peasants
+and proles and the lesser orders, acceptable only when they
+know their place is to be guided by their betters.

+

For transnational progressives and the left in general, male
+physical courage is a problem in the lesser orders because it’s an
+individualizing virtue, one that leads to wrong-think about
+autonomy and the proper limits of social power. A man who develops in
+himself the grit that it takes to face death and stare it down is less
+likely to behave meekly towards bureacrats, meddlers, and taxmen who
+have not passed that same test. Brave men who have learned to fight
+for their own concept of virtue — independently of
+social approval or the party line — are especially threatening
+to any sort of collectivist.

+

The multiculturalist’s and the collectivist’s suspicions are
+backhanded tributes to an important fact. There is a continuity among
+self-respect, physical courage and ethical/moral courage. These virtues are
+the soil of individualism, and are found at their strongest only in
+individualists. They do not flourish in isolation from one another.
+They reinforce each other, and the social measures we take to reward
+any of them tend to increase all of them.

+

After 1945 we tried to separate these virtues. We tried to teach
+boys moral steadfastness while also telling them that civilized men
+are expected to avoid confrontation and leave coping with danger to
+specialists. We preached the virtue of `self-esteem’ to adolescents
+while gradually abolishing almost all the challenges and ordeals that
+might have enabled them to acquire genuine self-respect. Meanwhile,
+our entertainments increasingly turned on anti-heros or celebrated
+physical bravery of a completely mindless and morally vacuous kind.
+We taught individualism without responsibility, denying the unpleasant
+truth that freedom has to be earned and kept with struggle and blood.
+And we denied the legitimacy of self-defense.

+

Rudyard Kipling would have known better, and Robert Heinlein did.
+But they were written off as reactionaries — and many of us were
+foolish enough to be surprised when the new thinking produced a bumper
+crop of brutes, narcissists, overgrown boys, and bewildered hollow men
+apt to fold under pressure. We became, in Jeffrey Snyder’s famous
+diagnosis, a nation
+of cowards; the cost could be measured in the explosion in crime
+rates after 1960, a phenomenon primarily of males between 15 and 35.

+

But this was a cost which, during the long chill of the Cold War,
+we could afford. Such conflicts as there were stayed far away from
+the home country, warfare was a game between nations, and nuclear
+weapons seemed to make individual bravery irrelevant. So it remained
+until al-Qaeda and the men of Flight 93 reminded us otherwise.

+

Now we have need of courage. Al-Qaeda’s war has come to us. There
+is a geopolitical aspect to it, and one of the fronts we must pursue
+is to smash state sponsors of terrorism. But this war is not
+primarily a chess-game between nations — it’s a street-level
+brawl in which the attackers are individuals and small terrorist cells
+often having no connection to the leadership of groups like al-Qaeda
+other than by sympathy of ideas.

+

Defense against this kind of war will have to be decentralized and
+citizen-centered, because the military and police simply cannot be
+everywhere that terrorists might strike. John F. Kennedy said this during
+the Cold War, but it is far truer now:

+

+“Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to
+take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic
+purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and
+sacrifice for that freedom.” +

+

The linked virtues of physical courage, moral courage, and
+self-respect are even more essential to a Minuteman’s readiness than
+his weapons. So the next time you see a man claim the role
+of defender, don’t sneer — cheer. Don’t write him off with some
+pseudo-profound crack about macho idiocy, support him. He’s trying to
+tool up for the job two million years of evolution designed him for,
+fighting off predators so the women and children can sleep safe.

+

Whether he’s in uniform or not, young or old, fit or flabby
+— we need that courage now.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20021212043500.blog b/20021212043500.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8605910 --- /dev/null +++ b/20021212043500.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +Away from Keyboard +

I’ve on hiatus for a bit while I wrap up my next book, The Art Of Unix Programming.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20021217162500.blog b/20021217162500.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c4b75ca --- /dev/null +++ b/20021217162500.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Some Christmas cheer +

Some deeply warped Christmas humor here . Now,
+this Santa might get me the presents I really want. Like,
+say, a custom-tuned Baer .45 semiauto. Or Liv Tyler, fetchingly
+attired in nothing but a pair of Arwen ears.

+

I actually did get a really peculiar Christmas present from a
+stranger this morning. It was a gourmet frying pan with a
+Tux-the-Linux-Penguin on it. And
+ an earnest cover letter explaining that it is #8 of a special limited
+edition of 1024. Made by a German cookwares company that has
+gotten good service out of Linux and decided to commemmorate
+the fact.

+

Odd…

diff --git a/20030422091000.blog b/20030422091000.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ea322c9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20030422091000.blog @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +Fascism Is Not Dead +

Fascism is not dead. The revelations now coming out of Iraq about Baathist atrocities lend this observation particular point; Saddam Hussein was able to successfully imitate Hitler for three decades. Baathists using similar methods still run Syria, and elsewhere in the Islamic world there are militarist/authoritarian tendencies that run uncomfortably close to fascism.

+

Recent events — including the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime and Glenn Reynolds blogging on Pio Moa’s The Myths of the Civil War have inspired me to dust off some research and writing I did a while back on the history of fascism. Some of the following essay is about the Spanish Civil War annd Francisco Franco, but much of it is about the history and structure of fascism.

+

Pio Moa’s thesis is that the Spanish Civil War was not a usurping revolt against a functioning government, but a belated attempt to restore order to a country that had already collapsed into violent chaos five years before the Fascists landed in 1936.

+

I’ve studied the history of the Spanish Civil War enough to know that Moa’s contrarian interpretation is not obviously crazy. I had an unusual angle; I’m an anarchist, and wanted to grasp the ideas and role of the Spanish anarchist communes. My conclusions were not pleasant. In short, there were no good guys in the Spanish Civil War.

+

First, the non-anarchist Left in Spain really was pretty completely Stalin’s creature. The volunteers of the International Brigade were (in Lenin’s timeless phrase) useful idiots, an exact analogue of the foreign Arabs who fought on in Baghdad after Iraqi resistance collapsed (and were despised for it by the Iraqis). They deserve neither our pity nor our respect. Insofar as Moa’s thesis is that most scholarship about the war is severely distorted by a desire to make heroes out of these idiots, he is correct.

+

Second, the Spanish anarchists were by and large an exceedingly nasty bunch, all resentment and nihilism with no idea how to rebuild after destroying. Wiping them out (via his Communist proxies) may have been one of Stalin’s few good deeds.

+

Third, the Fascists were a pretty nasty bunch too. But, on the whole, probably not as nasty as their opponents. Perceptions of them tend to be distorted by the casual equation of Fascist with Nazi — but this is not appropriate. Spanish Fascism was unlike Communism or Italian and German Fascism in that it was genuinely a conservative movement, rather than a attempt to reinvent society in the image of a revolutionary doctrine about the perfected State.

+

Historians and political scientists use the terms “fascist” and “fascism” quite precisely, for a group of political movements that were active between about 1890 and about 1975. The original and prototypical example was Italian fascism, the best-known and most virulent strain was Naziism, and the longest-lasting was the Spanish nationalist fascism of Francisco Franco. The militarist nationalism of Japan is often also described as “fascist” .

+

The shared label reflects the fact that these four ideologies influenced each other; Naziism began as a German imitation of Italian fascism, only to remake Italian (and to some extent Spanish) fascism in its own image during WWII. The militarist Japanese fascists took their cues from European fascists as well as an indigenous tradition of absolutism with very similar structural and psychological features

+

The shared label also reflects substantially similar theories of political economics, power, governance, and national purpose. Also similar histories and symbolisms. Here are some of the commonalities especially relevant to the all too common abuse of the term.

+

Fascist political economics is a corrupt form of Leninist socialism. In fascist theory (as in Communism) the State owns all; in practice, fascists are willing to co-opt and use big capitalists rather than immediately killing them.

+

Fascism mythologizes the professional military, but never trusts it. (And rightly so; consider the Von Stauffenberg plot…) One of the signatures of the fascist state is the formation of elite units (the SA and SS in Germany, the Guardia Civil in Spain, the Republican Guard and Fedayeen in Iraq) loyal to the fascist party and outside the military chain of command.

+

Fascism is not (as the example of Franco’s Spain shows) necessarily aggressive or expansionist per se. In all but one case, fascist wars were triggered not by ideologically-motivated aggression but by revanchist nationalism (that is, the nation’s claims on areas lost to the victors of previous wars, or inhabited by members of the nationality agitating for annexation). No, the one exception was not Nazi Germany; it was Japan (the rape of Manchuria). The Nazi wars of aggression and Hussein’s grab at Kuwait were both revanchist in origin.

+

Fascism is generally born by revolution out of the collapse of monarchism. Fascism’s theory of power is organized around the `Fuehrerprinzip’, the absolute leader regarded as the incarnation of the national will.

+

But…and this is a big but…there were important difference between revolutionary Fascism (the Italo/German/Baathist variety) and the more reactionary sort native to Spain and Japan.

+

The Italo/German/Baathist varieties were radical, modernist ideologies and not (as commonly assumed) conservative or traditionalist ones; in fact, all three of these examples faced serious early threats from cultural-conservative monarchists (or in Baathism’s case, from theocrats).

+

But Japanese and Spanish Fascism were a bit different; they were actually pro-monarchist, conservative in essence, aimed at reasserting the power relationships of premodern Spain and Japan. In fact, Spanish Fascism was mostly about Francisco Franco’s reactionary instincts.

+

After the fall of the Second Republic in 1931 Francisco Franco had rather better reason than Hitler ever did to regard the Communist-inspired left as a mortal threat to his country; a wave of `revolutionary’ expropriations, massacres, and chaos (unlike the opera-bouffe capitulation of the Italian monarchy or the relatively bloodless collapse of Germany’s Weimar Republic) followed. Obedient to what remained of central authority, Franco sat out the undeclared civil war for five years before invading from Morocco with Italian and German help. His belief that he was acting to restore a pre-1931 order of which he was the last legitimate representative appears to have been genuine — perhaps even justified.

+

The declared portion of the Spanish Civil War lasted from 1936 to 1939. It has passed into legend among Western leftists as a heroic struggle between the Communist-backed Republican government and Nazi-backed Franco, one that the good guys lost. The truth seems rather darker; the war was fought by two collections of squabbling, atrocity-prone factions, each backed by one of the two most evil totalitarianisms in human history. They intrigued, massacred, wrecked, and looted fairly indiscriminately until one side collapsed from exhaustion. Franco was the last man left standing.

+

Franco had no aspirations to conquer or reinvent the world, or to found a dynasty. His greatest achievements were the things that didn’t happen. He prevented the Stalinist coup that would certainly have followed a Republican victory. He then kept Spain out of World War II against heavy German pressure to join the Axis.

+

Domestically, Spain could have suffered worse. Spanish Fascism was quite brutal against its direct political enemies, but never developed the expansionism or racist doctrines of the Italian or German model. In fact it had almost no ideology beyond freezing the power relationships of pre-Republican Spain in place. Thus, there were no massacres even remotely comparable to Hussein’s nerve-gassing of Kurds and Shi’as, Hitler’s Final Solution or Stalin’s far bloodier though less-known liquidation of the kulaks.

+

Francisco Franco remained a monarchist all his life, and named the heir to the Spanish throne as his successor. The later `fascist’ regimes of South and Central America resembled the Francoite, conservative model more than they did the Italo/German/Baathist revolutionary variety.

+

One historian put it well. “Hitler was a fascist pretending to be a conservative. Franco was a conservative pretending to be a fascist.” (One might add that Hussein was not really pretending to be about anything but the raw will to power; perhaps this is progress, of a sort.) On those terms Franco was rather successful. If he had died shortly after WWII, rather than lingering for thirty years while presiding over an increasingly stultified and backward Spain, he might even have been remembered as a hero of his country.

+

As it is, the best that can be said is that (unlike the truly major tyrants of his day, or Saddam Hussein in ours) Franco was not a particularly evil man, and was probably less bad for his country than his opponents would have been.

+

Blogspt
+comments

diff --git a/20030505095200.blog b/20030505095200.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..47f6c64 --- /dev/null +++ b/20030505095200.blog @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +The Delusion of Expertise +

I learned something this weekend about the high cost of the subtle delusion that creative technical problem-solving is the preserve of a priesthood of experts, using powers and perceptions beyond the ken of ordinary human beings.

+

Terry Pratchett is the author of the Discworld series of satirical fantasies. He is — and I don’t say this lightly, or without having given the matter thought and study — quite probably the most consistently excellent writer of intelligent humor in the last century in English. One has to go back as far as P.G. Wodehouse or Mark Twain to find an obvious equal in consistent quality, volume, and sly wisdom.

+

I’ve been a fan of Terry’s since before his first Discworld novel; I’m one of the few people who remembers Strata, his 1981 first experiment with the disc-world concept. The man has been something like a long-term acquaintance of mine for ten years — one of those people you’d like to call a friend, and who you think would like to call you a friend, if the two of you ever arranged enough concentrated hang time to get that close. But we’re both damn busy people, and live five thousand miles apart.

+

This weekend, Terry and I were both guests of honor at a hybrid SF convention and Linux conference called Penguicon held in Warren, Michigan. We finally got our hang time. Among other things, I taught Terry how to shoot pistols. He loves shooter games, but as a British resident his opportunities to play with real firearms are strictly limited. (I can report that Terry handled my .45 semi with remarkable competence and steadiness for a first-timer. I can also report that this surprised me not at all.)

+

During Terry’s Guest-of-Honor speech, he revealed his past as (he thought) a failed hacker. It turns out that back in the 1970s Terry used to wire up elaborate computerized gadgets from Timex Sinclair computers. One of his projects used a primitive memory chip that had light-sensitive gates to build a sort of perceptron that could actually see the difference between a circle and a cross. His magnum opus was a weather station that would log readings of temperature and barometric pressure overnight and deliver weather reports through a voice synthesizer.

+

But the most astonishing part of the speech was the followup in which Terry told us that despite his keen interest and elaborate homebrewing, he didn’t become a programmer or a hardware tech because he thought techies had to know mathematics, which he thought he had no talent for. He then revealed that he thought of his projects as a sort of bad imitation of programming, because his hardware and software designs were total lash-ups and he never really knew what he was doing.

+

I couldn’t stand it. “And you think it was any different for us?” I called out. The audience laughed and Terry passed off the remark with a quip. But I was just boggled. Because I know that almost all really bright techies start out that way, as compulsive tinkerers who blundered around learning by experience before they acquired systematic knowledge. “Oh ye gods and little fishes”, I thought to myself, “Terry is a hacker!”

+

Yes, I thought ‘is’ — even if Terry hasn’t actually tinkered any computer software or hardware in a quarter-century. Being a hacker is expressed through skills and projects, but it’s really a kind of attitude or mental stance that, once acquired, is never really lost. It’s a kind of intense, omnivorous playfulness that tends to color everything a person does.

+

So it burst upon me that Terry Pratchett has the hacker nature. Which, actually, explains something that has mildly puzzled me for years. Terry has a huge following in the hacker community — knowing his books is something close to basic cultural literacy for Internet geeks. One is actually hard-put to think of any other writer for whom this is as true. The question this has aways raised for me is: why Terry, rather than some hard-SF writer whose work explicitly celebrates the technologies we play with?

+

The answer now seems clear. Terry’s hackerness has leaked into his writing somehow, modulating the quality of the humor. Behind the drollery, I and my peers worldwide have accurately scented a mind like our own.

+

I said some of this the following day, when I ran into Terry surrounded by about fifty eager fans in a hallway. The nature of the conference was such that about three-quarters of them were hackers, many faces I recognized. I brought up the topic again, emphasizing that the sort of playful improvisation he’d been describing was very normal for us, and that I thought it was kind of sad he’d been blocked by the belief that hackers need to know mathematics, because about all we ever use is some pieces of set theory, graph theory, combinatorics, and Boolean algebra. No calculus at all.

+

Terry then admitted that he had at one point independently re-invented Boolean algebra. I didn’t find this surprising — I did that myself when I was about fifteen; I didn’t mention this, though, because the moment was about Terry’s mind and not mine. I think reinventing Boolean algebra is probably something a lot of bright proto-hackers do.

+

“Terry,” I said, fully conscious of the peculiar authority I wield on this point as the custodian of the Jargon File, the how-to on How To Become A Hacker and several other related documents, “you are a hacker!“

+

The crowd agreed enthusiastically. Somebody handed Terry one of the “Geek” badge ribbons the convention had made for attendees who wanted to identify themselves as coming from the Linux/programming side. Much laughter ensued when it was discovered that the stickum on the ribbon had lost its virtue, and a nearby hacker had to ceremonially affix the thing to Terry’s badge holder with a piece of duct tape.

+

Terry actually choked up a little while this was going on, and I don’t think there was anyone there who didn’t understand why. To the kind of teenager and young man he must have been — bright, curious, creative, proud of his own ability — it must have been very painful to conclude that he would never cut it as the techie he so obviously wanted to be. He ended up doing public-relations work for the British nuclear-power industry instead.

+

The whole sequence of events left me feeling delighted that I and my friends could deliver the affirmation Terry had deserved so long ago. But also — and here we come to the real point of this essay — I felt very angry at the system that had fed the young Terry such a huge load of cobblers about the nature of what programmers and hardware designers do.

+

I’m not referring to the obvious garbage about needing a brain-bending amount of mathematics. No; they fed Terry something much subtler and more crippling, a belief that real techies actually know what they’re doing. The delusion of expertise.

+

The truth is that programmers only know what they’re doing when the job is not very interesting. When you’re breaking new ground in any technical field, exploration and improvisation is the nature of the game. Your designs are going to be lash-ups because you don’t yet know any better and neither does anyone else. Systematization comes later, with the second system, during the re-write and the re-think. Einstein had it right; imagination is more valuable than knowledge, and people like Terry with a demonstrated ability to creatively wing it make far better hackers than analytically smart but unimaginative people who can only follow procedures.

+

The thought that Terry may have spent thirty years of working days grinding out press releases for the Central Electricity Generating Board because he didn’t know this, rather than following his dreams into astronomy or programming or hardware design, bothers the crap out of me. If Terry was bright enough to invent Boolean algebra, he was bright enough to cut it in any of these fields. The educational system failed him by putting artificial requirements in his way and making him believe they were natural ones. It failed him even more fundamentally by teaching him a falsehood about the nature of expertise.

+

In doing this, it failed all of us. How many bright kids with first-class minds, I wonder, end up under-employed because of crap like this? How much creative potential are we losing?

+

OK, some might answer, so we got the Discworld fantasies instead…that ain’t exactly chopped liver. The thing is, I’m not sure that was actually a trade-off. I’m enough of a writer myself to believe that you can’t block a writing talent like Terry’s merely by dropping him into a more demanding day job. It will come out.

+

On the other hand, one thing I am sure of is that you don’t need intelligence or talents like Terry’s just to do PR. One way or another, this man was going to do something with more lasting effects than soothing British farmers about radiation leaks. Inventing one of the funniest alternate worlds of the last hundred years during your free time is nice, and I devoutly hope he will get to keep doing it for decades to come — but in a society that valued and nurtured genius properly, I think Terry might have helped re-imagine the real world just as radically during his day job.

+

But he didn’t. Tot it up to the cost of taking creativity too seriously, of undervaluing improvisation and play and imagination. And wonder how much else that error has cost us.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20030513161100.blog b/20030513161100.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2158d68 --- /dev/null +++ b/20030513161100.blog @@ -0,0 +1,70 @@ +A Taxonomy of Cognitive Stress +

I have been thinking about UI design lately. With some help from my
+friend Rob Landley, I’ve come up with a classification schema for the
+levels at which users are willing to invest effort to build
+competence.

+

The base assumption is that for any given user there is a maximum
+cognitive load any given user is willing to accept to use an
+interface. I think that there are levels, analogous to Piagetian
+developmental thresholds and possibly related to them, in the
+trajectory of learning to use software interfaces.

+

Level 0: I’ll only push one button.

+

Level 1: I’ll push a sequence of buttons, as long as they’re all visible
+ and I don’t have to remember anything between presses. These people
+ can do checklists.

+

Level 2: I’m willing to push as sequence of buttons in which later ones may
+ not be visible until earlier ones have been pressed. These people
+ will follow pull-down menus; it’s OK for the display to change as long
+ as they can memorize the steps.

+

Level 3: I’m willing to use folders if they never change while I’m not looking.
+ There can be hidden unchanging state, but nothing must ever
+ happen out of sight. These people can handle an incremental replace
+ with confirmation. They can use macros, but have no capability to
+ cope with surprises other than by yelling for help.

+

Level 4: I’m willing to use metaphors to describe magic actions. A folder
+ can be described by “These are all my local machines” or “these
+ are all my print jobs” and is allowed to change out of sight in an
+ unsurprising way. These people can handle global replace, but must
+ examine the result to maintain confidence. These people will begin
+ customizing their environment.

+

Level 5: I’m willing to use categories (generalize about nouns). I’m
+ willing
+ to recognize that all .doc files are alike, or all .jpg files are
+ alike, and I have confidence there are sets of actions I can apply
+ to a file I have never seen that will work because I know its type.
+ (Late in this level knowledge begins to become articulate; these
+ people are willing to give simple instructions over the phone or
+ by email.)

+

Level 6: I’m willing to unpack metaphors into procedural steps. People at
+ this level begin to be able to cope with surprises when the
+ metaphor breaks, because they have a representation of process.
+ People at this level are ready to cope with the fact that HTML
+ documents are made up of tags, and more generally with
+ simple document markup.

+

Level 7: I’m willing to move between different representations of
+ a document or piece of data. People at this level know that
+ any one view of the data is not the same as the data, and lossless
+ transformations no longer scare them. Multiple representations
+ become more useful than confusing. At this level the idea of
+ structural rather than presentation markup begins to make sense.

+

Level 8: I’m willing to package simple procedures I already understand.
+ These people are willing to record a sequence of actions which
+ they understand into a macro, as long as no decisions (conditionals)
+ are involved. They begin to get comfortable with report generators.
+ At advanced level 8 they may start to be willing to deal with
+ simple SQL.

+

Level 9: I am willing to package procedures that make decisions, as long
+ as I already understand them. At his level, people begin to cope
+ with conditionals and loops, and also to deal with the idea of
+ programming languages.

+

Level 10: I am willing to problem-solve at the procedural level, writing
+ programs for tasks I don’t completely understand before
+ developing them.

+

I’m thinking this scale might be useful in classifying interfaces and
+developing guidelines for not exceeding the pain threshold of an
+audience if we have some model of what their notion of acceptable
+cognitive load is.

+

(This is a spinoff from my book-in-progress, “The Art of Unix
+Programming”, but I don’t plan to put it in the book.)

+

Comments, reactions, and refinements welcome.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20030614175100.blog b/20030614175100.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3c6b4f1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20030614175100.blog @@ -0,0 +1,237 @@ +Hacking and Refactoring +

In 2001, there was a history-making conference of software-engineering
+thinkers in Snowbird, Colorado. The product of that meeting was a remarkable
+document called the Agile Manifesto,
+a call to overturn many of the assumptions of traditional software development.
+I was invited to be at Snowbird, but couldn’t make it.

+

Ever since, though, I’ve been sensing a growing convergence between
+agile programming and the open-source movement. I’ve seen agile
+concepts and terminology being adopted rapidly and enthusiastically by
+my colleagues in open-source-land—especially ideas like
+refactoring, unit testing, and design from stories and personas. From
+the other side, key agile-movement figures like Kent Beck and Martin
+Fowler have expressed strong interest in open source both in published
+works and to me personally. Fowler has gone so far as to include
+open source on his list of agile-movement schools.

+

I agree that we belong on that list. But I also agree with
+Fowler’s description of of open source as a style, rather than a
+process. I think his reservations as to whether open source can be
+described as just another agile school are well-founded. There is
+something more complicated and interesting going on here. and I
+realized when I read Fowler’s description of open source that at some
+point I was going to have to do some hard thinking and writing in an
+effort to sort it all out.

+

While doing research for my forthcoming book, The Art of Unix
+Programming, I read one particular passage in Fowler’s
+Refactoring that finally brought it all home. He
+writes:

+
+

One argument is that refactoring can be an alternative to up-front
+design. In this scenario, you don’t do any design at all. You just
+code the first approach that comes into your head, get it working, and
+then refactor it into shape. Actually, this approach can work. I’ve
+seen people do this and come out with a very well-defined piece of
+software. Those who support Extreme Programming often are portrayed
+as advocating this approach.

+
+

I read this, and had one of those moments where everything comes
+together in your head with a great ringing crash and the world assumes
+a new shape—a moment not unlike the one I had in late 1996
+when I got the central insight that turned into The Cathedral
+and the Bazaar. In the remainder of this essay I’m going to
+try to articulate what I now think I understand about open source,
+agile programming, how they are related, and why the connection should
+be interesting even to programmers with no stake in either movement.

+

Now I need to set a little background here, because I’m going
+to need to have to talk about several different categories which are
+contingently but not necessarily related.

+

First, there is Unix programmer. Unix is the operating
+system with the longest living tradition of programming and design.
+It has an unusually strong and mature technical culture around it, a
+culture which originated or popularized many of the core ideas and
+tools of modern software design. The Art of Unix
+Programming is a concerted attempt to capture the craft wisdom
+of this culture, one to which I have successfully enlisted quite a few
+of its founding elders.

+

Second, there is hacker. This is a very complex term, but
+more than anything else, it describes an attitude—an
+intentional stance that relates hackers to programming and other
+disciplines in a particular way. I have described the hacker stance
+and its cultural correlates in detail in How To Become A
+Hacker.

+

Third, there is open-source programmer. Open source is a
+programming style with strong roots in the Unix tradition and the
+hacker culture. I wrote the modern manifesto for it in 1997, The
+Cathedral and the Bazaar, building on earlier thinking by
+Richard Stallman and others.

+

These three categories are historically closely related. It is
+significant that a single person (accidentally, me) wrote touchstone
+documents for the second and third and is attempting a summum
+bonum of the first. That personal coincidence reflects a larger
+social reality that in 2003 these categories are becoming increasingly
+merged — essentially, the hacker community has become the core
+of the open-source community, which is rapidly re-assimilating the
+parts of the Unix culture that got away from the hackers during
+the ten bad years after the AT&T divestiture in 1984.

+

But the relationship is not logically entailed; we can imagine
+a hacker culture speaking a common tongue other than Unix and C (in
+the far past its common tongue was Lisp), and we can imagine an
+explicit ideology of open source developing within a cultural and
+technical context other than Unix (as indeed nearly happened several
+different times).

+

With this scene-setting done, I can explain that my first take on
+Fowler’s statement was to think “Dude, you’ve just described
+hacking!”

+

I mean something specific and powerful by this. Throwing together
+a prototype and refactoring it into shape is a rather precise
+description of the normal working practice of hackers since that
+culture began to self-define in the 1960s. Not a complete one, but it
+captures the most salient feature of how hackers relate to code. The
+open-source community has inherited and elaborated this practice,
+building on similar tendencies within the Unix tradition.

+

The way Fowler writes about design-by-refactoring has two huge
+implications for the relationship between open source and agile
+programming:

+

First, Fowler writes as though he didn’t know he was describing
+hacking. In the passage, he appears unaware that design by
+repeated refactoring is not just a recent practice semi-accidentally
+stumbled on by a handful of agile programmers, but one which hundreds
+of thousands of hackers have accumulated experience with for over three
+decades and have in their bones. There is a substantial folklore, an
+entire craft practice, around this!

+

Second, in that passage Fowler described the practice of hacking
+better than hackers themselves have done. Now, admittedly,
+the hacker culture has simply not had that many theoreticians, and if
+you list the ones that are strongly focused on development methodology
+you lose Richard Stallman and are left with, basically, myself and
+maybe Larry Wall (author of Perl and occasional funny and illuminating
+ruminations on the art of hacking). But the fact that we don’t have a
+lot of theoreticians is itself an important datum; we have always
+tended to develop our most important wisdoms as unconscious and
+unarticulated craft practice.

+

These two observations imply an enormous mutual potential, a gap
+across which an arc of enlightenment may be beginning to blaze. It
+implies two things:

+

First, people who are excited by agile-programming ideas can
+look to open source and the Unix tradition and the hackers for the
+lessons of experience. We’ve been doing a lot of the stuff the
+agile movement is talking about for a long time. Doing it in a
+clumsy, unconscious, learned-by-osmosis way, but doing it
+nevertheless. I believe that we have learned things that you agile
+guys need to know to give your methodologies groundedness. Things
+like (as Fowler himself observes) how to manage communication and
+hierarchy issues in distributed teams.

+

Second, open-source hackers can learn from agile programmers
+how to wake up. The terminology and conceptual framework of
+agile programming sharpens and articulates our instincts. Learning to
+speak the language of open source, peer review, many eyeballs, and
+rapid iterations gave us a tremendous unifying boost in the late
+1990s; I think becoming similarly conscious about agile-movement ideas
+like refactoring, unit testing, and story-centered design could be
+just as important for us in the new century.

+

I’ve already given an example of what the agile movement has to
+teach the hackers, in pointing out that repeated redesign by
+refactoring is a precise description of hacking. Another thing we can
+stand to learn from agile-movement folks is how to behave so that we
+can actually develop requirements and deliver on them when the
+customer isn’t, ultimately, ourselves.

+

For the flip side, consider Fowler’s anecdote on page 68-69, which
+ends “Even if you know exactly what is going on in your system,
+measure performance, don’t speculate. You’ll learn something, and
+nine times out of ten it won’t be that you were right.” The Unix guy
+in me wants to respond “Well, duh!“. In my tribe, profiling
+before you speculate is DNA; we have a strong tradition of
+this that goes back to the 1970s. From the point of view of any old
+Unix hand, the fact that Fowler thought he had to write this down is a
+sign of severe naivete in either Fowler or his readership or both.

+

In reading Refactoring, I several times had the
+experience of thinking “What!?! That’s obvious!” closely followed
+by “But Fowler explains it better than Unix traditions do…” This may
+be because he relies less on the very rich shared explanatory context
+that Unix provides.

+

How deep do the similarities run? Let’s take a look at what the
+Agile Manifesto says:

+

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Yeah,
+that sounds like us, all right. Open-source developers will toss out
+a process that isn’t working in a nanosecond, and frequently do, and take
+gleeful delight in doing so. In fact, the reaction against heavyweight
+process has a key part of our self-identification as hackers for
+at least the last quarter century, if not longer.

+

Working software over comprehensive documentation. That’s
+us, too. In fact, the radical hacker position is that source code of
+a working system is its documentation. We, more than any
+other culture of software engineering, emphasize program source code as
+human-to-human communication that is expected to bind together
+communities of cooperation and understanding distributed through time
+and space. In this, too, we build on and amplify Unix tradition.

+

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. In the
+open-source world, the line between “developer” and “customer” blurs
+and often disappears. Non-technical end users are represented by
+developers who are proxies for their interests—as when, for
+example, companies that run large websites second developers to
+work on Apache Software Foundation projects.

+

Responding to change over following a plan. Absolutely.
+Our whole development style encourages this. It’s fairly unusual for
+any of our projects to have any plan more elaborate than “fix
+the current bugs and chase the next shiny thing we see”.

+

With these as main points, it’s hardly surprising that so many of
+the Principles
+behind the Agile Manifesto read like Unix-tradition and hacker
+gospel. “Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks
+to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
+Well, yeah—we pioneered this. Or “Simplicity—the art of
+maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.” That’s
+Unix-tradition holy writ, there. Or “The best architectures,
+requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.”

+

This is stone-obvious stuff to any hacker, and exactly the sort of
+subversive thinking that most panics managers attached to big plans,
+big budgets, big up-front design, and big rigid command-and-control
+structures. Which may, in fact, be a key part of its appeal to
+hackers and agile developers—because at least one thing that points
+agile-movement and open-source people in the same direction is a drive
+to take control of our art back from the suits and get out from under
+big dumb management.

+

The most important difference I see between the hackers and the
+agile-movement crowd is this: the hackers are the people who never
+surrendered to big dumb management — they either bailed out of the
+system or forted up in academia or industrial R&D labs or
+technical-specialty areas where pointy-haired bosses weren’t permitted
+to do as much damage. The agile crowd, on the other hand, seems to be
+composed largely of people who were swallowed into the belly of the
+beast (waterfall-model projects, Windows, the entire conventional
+corporate-development hell so vividly described in Edward Yourdon’s
+books) and have been smart enough not just to claw their way out but
+to formulate an ideology to justify not getting sucked back in.

+

Both groups are in revolt against the same set of organizational
+assumptions. And both are winning because those assumptions are
+obsolete, yesterday’s adaptations to a world of expensive machines and
+expensive communications. But software development doesn’t need big
+concentrations of capital and resources anymore, and doesn’t need the
+control structures and hierarchies and secrecy and elaborate rituals
+that go with managing big capital concentrations either. In fact, in
+a world of rapid change, these things are nothing but a drag. Thus
+agile techniques. Thus, open source. Converging paths to the same
+destination, which is not just software that doesn’t suck but a
+software-development process that doesn’t suck.

+

When I think about how the tribal wisdom of the hackers and the
+sharp cut-the-bullshit insights of the agile movement seem to be
+coming together, my mind keeps circling back to Phil Greenspun’s brief
+but trenchant essay Redefining
+Professionalism for Software Engineers. Greenspun proposes,
+provocatively but I think correctly, that the shift towards
+open-source development is a key part of the transformation of
+software engineering into a mature profession, with the dedication to
+excellence and ethos of service that accompanies professionalism. I
+have elsewhere suggested that we are seeing a close historical analog
+of the transition from alchemy to chemistry. Secrets leak out, but
+skill sustains; the necessity to stop relying on craft secrecy is one
+of the crises that occupational groups normally face as they attain
+professional standing.

+

I’m beginning to think that from the wreckage of the software
+industry big dumb management made, I can see the outline of a mature,
+humane discipline of software engineering emerging — and
+that it will be in large part a fusion of the responsiveness and
+customer focus of the agile movement with the wisdom and groundedness
+of the Unix tradition, expressed in open source.

+

Blogspot
+comments

diff --git a/20030715102200.blog b/20030715102200.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ee52387 --- /dev/null +++ b/20030715102200.blog @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +The Myth of Man the Killer +

(An updated version of this essay lives here.)

+

One of the most dangerous errors of our time is the belief that human beings are uniquely violent animals, barely restrained from committing atrocities on each other by the constraints of ethics, religion, and the state.

+

It may seem odd to some to dispute this, given the apparently ceaseless flow of atrocity reports from Bosnia, Somalia, Lebanon and Los Angeles that we suffer every day. But, in fact, a very little study of animal ethology (and some application of ethological methods to human behavior) suffices to show the unbiased mind that human beings are not especially violent animals.

+

Desmond Morris, in his fascinating book Manwatching’, for example, shows that the instinctive fighting style of human beings seems to be rather carefully optimized to keep us from injuring one another. Films of street scuffles show that “instinctive” fighting consists largely of shoving and overhand blows to the head/shoulders/ribcage area.

+

It is remarkably difficult to seriously injure a human being this way; the preferred target areas are mostly bone, and the instinctive striking style delivers rather little force for given effort. It is enlightening to compare this fumbling behavior to the focussed soft-tissue strike of a martial artist, who (having learned to override instinct) can easily kill with one blow.

+

It is also a fact, well-known to military planners, that somewhere around 70% of troops in their first combat-fire situation find themselves frozen, unable to trigger lethal weapons at a live enemy. It takes training and intense re-socialization to make soldiers out of raw recruits. And it is a notable point, to which we shall return later, that said socialization has to concentrate on getting a trainee to obey orders and identify with the group. (Major David Pierson of the U.S. Army wrote an illuminating essay on this topic in the June 1999 Military Review).

+

Criminal violence is strongly correlated with overcrowding and stress, conditions that any biologist knows can make even a laboratory mouse crazy. To see the contrast clearly, compare an urban riot with post-hurricane or -flood responses in rural areas. Faced with common disaster, it is more typical of humans to pull together than pull apart.

+

Individual human beings, outside of a tiny minority of sociopaths and psychopaths, are simply not natural killers. Why, then, is the belief in innate human viciousness so pervasive in our culture? And what is this belief costing us?

+
+

The historical roots of this belief are not hard to trace. The Judeo-Christian creation story claims that human beings exist in a fallen, sinful state; and Genesis narrates two great acts of revolt against God, the second of which is the first murder. Cain kills Abel, and we inherit the “mark of Cain”, and the myth of Cain — the belief that we are all somehow murderers at bottom.

+

Until the twentieth century, Judeo-Christianity tended to focus on the first one; the Serpent’s apple, popularly if not theologically equated with the discovery of sexuality. But as sexual taboos have lost their old forbidding force, the “mark of Cain” has become relatively more important in the Judeo-Christian idea of “original sin”. The same churches and synagogues that blessed “just wars” in former centuries have become strongholds
+of ideological pacifism.

+

But there is a second, possibly more important source of the man-as-killer myth in the philosophy of the Enlightenment — Thomas Hobbes’s depiction of the state of nature as a “warre of all against all”, and the reactionary naturism of Rousseau and the post-Enlightenment Romantics. Today these originally opposing worldviews have become fused into a view of nature and humanity that combines the worst (and least factual) of both.

+

Hobbes, writing a rationalization of the system of absolute monarchy under the Stuart kings of England, constructed an argument that in a state of nature without government the conflicting desires of human beings would pit every man against his neighbor in a bloodbath without end. Hobbes referred to and assumed “wild violence” as the normal state of humans in what anthropologists now call “pre-state” societies; that very term, in fact, reflects the Hobbesian myth,

+

The obvious flaw in Hobbes’s argument is that he mistook a sufficient condition for suppressing the “warre” (the existence of a strong central state) for a necessary one. He underestimated the innate sociability of human beings. The anthropological and historical record affords numerous examples of “pre-state” societies (even quite large multiethnic/multilingual populations) which, while violent against outsiders, successfully maintained internal peace.

+

If Hobbes underestimated the sociability of man, Rousseau and his followers overestimated it; or, at least, they overestimated the sociability of primitive man. By contrasting the nobility and tranquility they claimed to see in rural nature and the Noble Savage with the all-too-evident filth, poverty and crowding in the booming cities of the Industrial Revolution, they secularized the Fall of Man. As their spiritual descendants today
+still do, they overlooked the fact that the urban poor had unanimously voted with their feet to escape an even nastier rural poverty.

+

The Rousseauian myth of technological Man as an ugly scab on the face of pristine Nature has become so pervasive in Western culture as to largely drive out the older opposing image of “Nature, red in tooth and claw” from the popular mind. Perhaps this was inevitable as humans achieved more and more control over their environment; protection from famine, plague, foul weather, predators, and other inconveniences of nature encouraged the fond delusion that only human nastiness makes the world a hard place.

+

Until the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, the Rousseauian view of man and nature was a luxury confined to intellectuals and the idle rich. Only as increases in urbanization and average wealth isolated most of society from nature did it become an unarticulated and unexamined basic of popular and academic belief. (In his book “War Before Civilization”, Lawrence Keeley has given us a trenchant analysis of the way in which the Rousseauian myth reduced large swathes of cultural anthropology to uttering blinkered nonsense.)

+

In reality, Nature is a violent arena of intra- and inter-species competition in which murder for gain is an everyday event and ecological fluctuations commonly lead to mass death. Human societies, outside of wartime, are almost miraculously stable and nonviolent by contrast. But the unconscious prejudice of even educated Westerners today is likely to be that the opposite is true. The Hobbesian view of the “warre of all against all” has survived only as a description of human behavior, not of the wider state of nature. Pop ecology has replaced pop theology; the new myth is of man the killer ape.

+

Another, darker kind of romanticism is at work as well. To a person who feels fundamentally powerless, the belief that one is somehow intrinsically deadly can be a cherished illusion. Its marketers know full well that violence fantasy sells not to the accomplished, the wealthy and the wise, but rather to working stiffs trapped in dead-end jobs, to frustrated adolescents, to retirees — the marginalized, the lonely and the lost.

+

To these people, the killer-ape myth is consolation. If all else fails, it offers the dark promise of a final berserkergang, unleashing the mythic murderer inside to express all those aggravations in a gory and vengeful catharsis. But if seven out of ten humans can’t pull the trigger on an enemy they have every reason to believe is trying to kill them, it seems unlikely that ninety-seven out of a hundred could make themselves murder.

+

And, in fact, less than one half of one percent of the present human population ever kills in peacetime; murders are more than an order of magnitude less common than fatal household accidents. Furthermore, all but a vanishingly small number of murders are performed by males between the ages of 15 and 25, and the overwhelming majority of those by unmarried males. One’s odds of being killed by a human outside that demographic bracket are comparable to one’s chances of being killed by a lightning strike.

+
+

War is the great exception, the great legitimizer of murder, the one arena in which ordinary humans routinely become killers. The special prevalence of the killer-ape myth in our time doubtless owes something to the horror and visibility of 20th-century war.

+

Campaigns of genocide and repressions such as the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s engineered famines, the Ankha massacres in Cambodia, and “ethnic cleansing” in Yugoslavia loom even larger in the popular mind than war as support for the myth of man the killer. But they should not; such atrocities are invariably conceived and planned by selected, tiny minorities far fewer than .5% of the population.

+

We have seen that in normal circumstances, human beings are not killers; and, in fact, most have instincts which make it extremely difficult for them to engage in lethal violence. How do we reconcile this with the continuing pattern of human violence in war? And, to restate to one of our original questions, what is belief in the myth of man the killer doing to us?

+

We shall soon see that the answers to these two questions are intimately related — because there is a crucial commonality between war and genocide, one not shared with the comparatively negligible lethalities of criminals and the individually insane. Both war and genocide depend, critically, on the habit of
+killing on orders. Pierson observes, tellingly, that atrocities “are generally initiated by overcontrolled personality types in second-in-command positions, not by undercontrolled personality types.” Terrorism, too, depends on the habit of obedience; it is not Osama bin Laden who died in the 9/11 attack but his minions.

+

This is part of what Hannah Arendt was describing when, after the Nuremberg trials, she penned her unforgettable phrase “the banality of evil”. The instinct that facilitated the atrocities at Belsen-Bergen and Treblinka and Dachau was not a red-handed delight in murder, but rather uncritical submission to the orders of alpha males — even when those orders were for horror and death.

+

Human beings are social primates with social instincts. One of those instincts is docility, a predisposition to obey the tribe leader and other dominant males. This was originally adaptive; fewer status fights meant more able bodies in the tribe or hunting band. It was especially important that bachelor males, unmarried 15-to-25 year-old men, obey orders even when those orders involved risk and killing. These bachelors were the tribe’s hunters, warriors, scouts, and risk-takers; a band would flourish best if they were both aggressive towards outsiders and amenable to social control.

+

Over most of human evolutionary history, the multiplier effect of docility was limited by the small size (250 or less, usually much less) of human social units. But when a single alpha male or cooperating group of alpha males could command the aggressive bachelor males of a large city or entire nation, the rules changed. Warfare and genocide became possible.

+

Actually, neither war nor genocide needs more than a comparative handful of murderers — not much larger a cohort than the half-percent to percent that commits lethal violence in peacetime. Both, however, require the obedience of a large supporting population. Factories must work overtime. Ammunition trucks must be driven where the bullets are needed. People must agree not to see, not to hear, not to notice certain things. Orders must be obeyed.

+

The experiments described in Stanley Milgram’s 1974 book “The Perils of Obedience” demonstrated how otherwise ethical people could be induced to actively torture another person by the presence of an authority figure commanding and legitimizing the violence. They remain among the most powerful and disturbing results in experimental psychology.

+

Human beings are not natural killers; very, very few ever learn to enjoy murder or torture. Human beings, however, are sufficiently docile that many can eventually be taught to kill, to support killing, or to consent to killing on the command of an alpha male, entirely dissociating themselves from responsibility for the act. Our original sin is not murderousness — it is obedience.

+
+

And this brings us to the final reason for the prevalence of the myth of man the killer; that it encourages obedience and legitimizes social control of the individual. The man who fears Hobbes’s “warre”, who sees every one of his neighbors as a potential murderer, will surrender nearly anything to be protected from them. He will call for a strong hand from above; he will become a willing instrument in the oppression of his fellows. He may even allow himself to be turned into a killer in fact. Society will be atomized into millions of fearful fragments, each reacting to the fear of fantasied individual violence by sponsoring the political conditions for real violence on a large scale.

+

Even when the fear of violence is less acute, the myth of man the killer well serves power elites of all kinds. To define the central problem of society as the repression of a universal individual tendency to violence is to imply an authoritarian solution; it is to deny without examination the proposition that individual self-interest and voluntary cooperation are sufficient for civil order. (To cite one current example, the myth of man the killer is a major unexamined premise behind the drive for gun control.)

+

In sum, the myth of man the killer degrades and ultimately disempowers the individual, and unhelpfully deflects attention from the social mechanisms and social instincts that actually underlie virtually all violence. If we are all innately killers, no one is responsible; the sporadic violence of crime and terrorism and the more systematic violence of governments (whether in “state” or “pre-state” societies, and in wartime or otherwise) is as inevitable as sex.

+

On the other hand, if we recognize that most violence (and all large-scale violence) arises from obedience, and especially from the commission of aggressive violence by bachelor males at the command of alpha male pack leaders, then we can begin to ask more fruitful questions. Like: what can we do, culturally, to disrupt this causal chain?

+

First, we must recognize the primary locus and scope of the problem. By any measure, the pre-eminent form of aggressive pack violence is violence by governments, in either its explicit form as warfare and genocide or in more or less disguised peacetime versions. Take as one indicator the most pessimistic estimate of the 20th-century death toll from private aggression and set it against the low-end figures for deaths by government-sponsored violence (that is, count only war casualties, deliberate genocides, and extra-legal violence by organs of government; do not count the deaths incurred in the enforcement of even the most dubious and oppressive laws). Even with these assumptions biasing the ratio to the low side, the ratio is clearly 1000:1 or worse.

+

Readers skeptical of this ratio should reflect tha government-directed genocides alone (excluding warfare entirely) are estimated to have accounted for more than 250,000,000 deaths between the massacre of the Armenians in 1915 and the “ethic cleansings” of Bosnia and Rwanda-Burundi in the late 1990s. Even the 9/11 atrocity and other acts of terrorism, grim as they have been, are mere droplets besides the oceans of blood spilled by state action.

+

In fact, the domination of total pack violence by government aggression reaches even further than that 1000:1 ratio would indicate. Pack violence by governments serves as a model and a legitimizing excuse not merely for government violence, but for private violence as well. The one thing all tyrants have in common is their belief that in their special cause, aggression is justified; private criminals learn and profit by that example. The contagion of mass violence is spread by the very institutions which ground their legitimacy in the mission of suppressing it — even as they perpetrate most of it.

+

And that is ultimately why the myth of man the killer ape is most dangerous. Because when we tremble in fear before the specter of individual violence, we excuse or encourage social violence; we feed the authoritarian myths and self-justifications that built the Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulags.

+

There is no near-term hope that we can edit either aggression or docility out of the human genome. And the individual small-scale violence of criminals and the insane is a mere distraction from the horrific and vast reality that is government-sanctioned murder and the government-sanctioned threat of murder.

+

To address the real problem in an effective way, we must therefore change our cultures so that either alpha males calling themselves “government” cease giving orders to perform aggression, or our bachelor males cease following those orders. Neither Hobbes’s counsel of obedience to the state nor Rousseau’s idolization of the primitive can address the central violence of the modern era — state-sponsored mass death.

+

To end that scourge, we must get beyond the myth of man the killer and learn to trust and empower the individual conscience once again; to recognize and affirm the individual predisposition to make peaceful choices in the non-sociopathic 97% of the population; and to recognize what Stanley Milgram showed us; that our signpost on the path away from mass violence reads “I shall not obey!”

+

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diff --git a/20030728153200.blog b/20030728153200.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..31f46ca --- /dev/null +++ b/20030728153200.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Brother, Can you Paradigm? +

I just read an interview with my friend Tim O’Reilly in which he approvingly cited Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. There are some books so bad, but so plausible and influential, that periodically trashing them in public is almost an obligation. The really classic stinkeroos of this kind, like Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, exert a weird kind of seduction on otherwise intelligent people long after their factual basis has been completely exploded.

+

Yes, Kuhn’s magnum opus is one of these. When I was a bright and naive young sprat, full of zeal to correct my fuddy-duddy elders, I loved Kuhn’s book. Then I reread it, and did some thinking and fact-checking, and discovered that it is both (a) deeply wrong, and (b) dishonest,

+

First, deeply wrong. Kuhn’s basic model that paradigm changes are generational — you have to wait for the old dinosaurs to die — is dramatically falsified by the history of early 20th-century physics. Despite well-publicized exceptions like Einstein’s refusal to accept “spooky action at a distance”, the record shows us that a generation of physicists handled not one but two major paradigm shifts in their lifetimes — relativity and quantum mechanics — quite smoothly indeed.

+

Later in the 20th century, the paradigm shift produced by the discovery of DNA and the neo-Darwinian synthesis of evolutionary theory didn’t require the old guard to die off before it was accepted, either. More recently, the discovery of things like reverse transcriptase and “jumping genes”, which broke two of the central dogmas of genetics, were absorbed with barely a ripple.

+

I found many other examples once I started looking. It turns out that the kind of story Kuhn wants to tell is quite rare in the hard sciences. There are a few examples of paradigm shifts that fit his model — my personal favorite is Wegener and the continental-drift hypothesis — but they are the exception rather than the rule. Most theoretical upheavals, even most very radical ones, happen rather smoothly.

+

The soft sciences are a somewhat different story, and the reasons for this are revealing. Look at the post-Freudian upheaval in psychology or the clashes between social contructivism and the evolutionary-psych crowd and you will see something much more like a Kuhnian shock going on (I suspect we’ve got another one coming in linguistics when Noam Chomsky kicks off). But these fields are vulnerable largely to the extent that they are not science — that is, when the dominant model is poorly confirmed or untestable, and holds largely for reasons of politics and/or the influence of a single charismatic personality.

+

One of the most pointed criticisms of Kuhn is that his book is a sort of soft-science imperialism, an attempt to project onto the hard sciences the kind of incoherence, confusion, and political ax-grinding we see in (say) sociology or “political science”. In doing so, it does real science a profound disservice.

+

The dishonesty in the book is that Kuhn evades the question of whether paradigm shifts are an emic or etic phenomenon. In fact, he does this so neatly that it’s possible to read the whole thing and not notice that the largest central question about the nature of paradigm shifts is being dodged. Do they change the world or just our description of it? Kuhn hints at a radical sort of subjectivism without ever acknowledging what that would actually mean.

+

Kuhn got me interested in the cultural history of science when I read this book around 1971. But the more I studied it, the more I became convinced that Kuhn’s thesis is simple, appealing, and wrong. Among many other flaws, he erects a binary distinction between “normal” science and paradigm-shattering earthquakes that is not really sustainable except through a kind of selective hindsight. It plays to our human tendency to want to make heroic narratives out of history, but it misrepresents science as it is actually practised and perceived by the people who do it.

+

(For a demolition of Kuhn that focuses less on the factual holes in his thesis and more on the historical and logical flaws, see this New Criterion article.)

+

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diff --git a/20030822100400.blog b/20030822100400.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e37625d --- /dev/null +++ b/20030822100400.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +An Open Letter To Darl McBride + +

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diff --git a/20030911225900.blog b/20030911225900.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..29706cb --- /dev/null +++ b/20030911225900.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +One year later… +

One year ago today, the World Trade Center fell in flames. And that very day, just a few hours after the event, I wrote the following:

+

QUOTE BEGINS

+

Some friends have asked me to step outside my normal role as a technology evangelist today, to point out in public that a political panic reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attack could do a great deal more damage than the attack itself.

+

Today will not have been a victory for terrorism unless we make it one. If we reward in any way the Palestinians who are now celebrating this hideous crime in the streets of the West Bank, that will have been a victory for terrorism. If we accept “anti-terrorism” measures that do further damage to our Constitutional freedoms, that will have been a victory for terrorism. But if we learn the right lessons, if we make policies that preserve freedom and offer terrorists no result but a rapid and futile death, that will have been a victory for the rest of us.

+

We have learned today that airport security is not the answer. At least four separate terror teams were able to sail right past all the elaborate obstacles — the demand for IDs, the metal detectors, the video cameras, the X-ray machines, the gunpowder sniffers, the gate agents and security people trained to spot terrorists by profile. There have been no reports that any other terror units were successfully prevented from achieving their objectives by these measures. In fact, the early evidence is that all these police-state-like impositions on freedom were exactly useless — and in the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center lies the proof of their failure.

+

We have learned today that increased surveillance is not the answer. The FBI’s “Carnivore” tap on the U.S.’s Internet service providers didn’t spot or prevent this disaster; nor did the NSA’s illegal Echelon wiretaps on international telecommunications. Video monitoring of public areas could have accomplished exactly nothing against terrorists taking even elementary concealment measures. If we could somehow extend airport-level security to the entire U.S., it would be just as useless against any determined and even marginally competent enemy.

+

We have learned today that trying to keep civilian weapons out of airplanes and other areas vulnerable to terrorist attack is not the answer either — indeed, it is arguable that the lawmakers who disarmed all the non-terrorists on those four airplanes, leaving them no chance to stop the hijackers, bear part of the moral responsibility for this catastrophe.

+

I expect that in the next few months, far too many politicians and pundits will press for draconian “anti-terrorist” laws and regulations. Those who do so will be, whether intentionally or not, cooperating with the terrorists in their attempt to destroy our way of life — and we should all remember that fact come election time.

+

As an Internet technologist, I have learned that distributed problems require distributed solutions — that centralization of power, the first resort of politicians who feed on crisis, is actually worse than useless, because centralizers regard the more effective coping strategies as threats and act to thwart them.

+

Perhaps it is too much to hope that we will respond to this shattering tragedy as well as the Israelis, who have a long history of preventing similar atrocities by encouraging their civilians to carry concealed weapons and to shoot back at criminals and terrorists. But it is in that policy of a distributed response to a distributed threat, with every single citizen taking personal responsibility for the defense of life and freedom, that our best hope for preventing recurrences of today’s mass murders almost certainly lies.

+

If we learn that lesson, perhaps today’s deaths will not have been in vain.

+

END QUOTE

+

As I reread the above, it does not seem to me that we have yet learned our lesson. We have taken steps towards arming pilots, but not passengers. Tiger-team probes of airport security have shown that the rate at which weapons can be smuggled through remains 30% — unchanged since before 9/11. A year later, therefore, the frisk searches of little old ladies and the no-sharp-edges prohibitions have bought us no security at all.

+

The scorecard is not entirely bleak. Al-Qaeda has not been able to mount another successful mass murder. Post-9/11 legal changes through the Patriot Act and related legislation have been troubling, but not disastrous. And the war against the Taliban was a rather less complicated success than one might have expected — civilian casualties minimal, no uprising of the mythical “Arab Street”, and Al-Qaeda’s infrastructure smashed. Osama bin-Laden is probably dead.

+

Still, the war is far from over. Islamic terrorism has not been repudiated by the ulema, the college of elders who prescribe the interpretation of the Koran and the Hadith. The call to violent jihad wired into the foundations of Islam has not yet been broken or tamed into a form civilization can coexist with. Accomplishing that is the true challenge that faces us, one greater and more subtle than merely military victory.

+

(Yes, I wrote the above in 2002. Some glitch in the blog software gives it a 2003 date. I don’t know why.)

+

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+

diff --git a/20030929184800.blog b/20030929184800.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d07a721 --- /dev/null +++ b/20030929184800.blog @@ -0,0 +1,90 @@ +Statism — Love It Or Leave It +

For many years I’ve been seeing proposals for implementing
+libertarian reforms that look superficially appealing and plausible,
+but on closer examination run hard aground either on some pesky
+reality of politics as it is or the extreme difficulty of waging a
+successful revolution. Since I’m a libertarian,
+you may well imagine that I find this annoying. How do we get there
+from here?

+

For the first time, I think I’ve seen a path that is both
+principled and practical. Not the whole path, but some firm steps
+that both accomplish good in themselves and open up great
+possibilities. And the best part is that it’s a path most statists
+can’t object to, one that uses the premises of the existing federal
+system to achieve a fair first test of libertarian ideas within that
+system. Even opponents of libertarianism, if they are fair-minded,
+should welcome this reality check. Libertarians should cheer it on
+and join it.

+

I’ve had troubles with other libertarians recently. Too many have
+retreated into isolationism in the face of a war with terrorism that I
+do not believe we can or should evade. The isolationists judge that
+empowering the State when we use it as an instrument of self-defense
+has consequences for the long term that are more dangerous than
+terrorists’ aims are in the short term. I sympathize with this view,
+but when all is said and done, Al-Qaeda shahids with backpack nukes
+from the ‘stans are more of a danger than John Ashcroft has ever been.
+I have done my homework and if anything, I believe the U.S. Government
+is understating the danger we face.

+

But the dangers of empowering the State to fight a necessary war
+make it more, not less urgent that we pursue all possibilities for
+libertarian reform at home. Now, I think I see a workable one. What
+if, by perfectly legal and proper means, we could take over a small
+American state and actually try out our ideas there?

+

Yes, I thought it was a crazy idea when I first heard it. An
+entire state? How? But the Free State Project has
+done the math. I’ve looked at their arguments and trend curves, and
+I’m pretty much convinced. It can be done. We can do it. The
+key is very simple; enough of us just have to move
+there. Vote with our feet, and then vote in a bloc. And why
+a state? Becausr that’s the only intermediate level of government
+with enough autonomy to make a good laboratory.

+

The Free State Project identified ten small states where 20,000
+active libertarians would be a critically large voting bloc. They are
+signing up libertarians and like-minded people to vote on the target
+state and to move there when the group passes 20,000. The winning
+state will be announced on 1st October; they’ve signed up about 5400
+people so far, on a classic exponential growth curve with a six-month
+doubling time that should get them there in late 2004.

+

What could be more American than migrating to a thinly-settled area
+to experiment with liberty? And this time we won’t have to kill off the
+natives, because they’re not going to be organizing any scalping parties.
+Most of the states under consideration have a strong local
+libertarian tradition, and none of them are going to look askance at
+the sort of bright, hardworking, highly-skilled people most likely to
+be pro-freedom activists.

+

Some people won’t like this idea, though. The national media
+establishment, which is statist down to its bones even in the few
+crevices where it isn’t leftist, will inevitably try to portray the
+Free State migrants as a bunch of racist conservative redneck gun-nuts
+(all these terms being effectively synonymous in the national media)
+intent on turning the poor victim state into one gigantic Aryan
+Nations compound (especially if it’s Idaho, as it could be). Expect
+network-news interviews with locals teary-eyed with worry that the
+incomers will be hosting regular cross-burnings on the courthouse
+lawn. Awkward little inconsistencies like the libertarian opposition
+to drug laws, censorship, and theocracy will be ignored. This prospect
+is especially ironic because, in most of the possible target states,
+it is our lifestyle liberalism that is actually most likely to produce
+a culture clash with the natives.

+

The more intelligent members of the political class won’t like this
+either. The brighter and better-able one is to extrapolate
+second-and-third-order effects, the more likely the potential success
+of libertarianism at a state level is likely to scare them —
+conservatives nearly as much as liberals, and conservatives perhaps
+more so when we challenge them to emulate our success with
+small-government policies that they speak but don’t really mean.

+

But I don’t think this will be easy to stop. Libertarian
+demographics being what they are, 20,000 of us in a small state will
+be a huge concentration of technical, creative and
+entrepreneurial talent. We’ll found software businesses, studios,
+innovative light-manufacturing shops and engineering companies
+by the bucketload. We’ll create favorable regulatory conditions
+for old-line businesses like financial-services houses and for
+bleeding-edge ones like the private space-launch industry.
+We’ll attract more people like us. The lucky state, especially
+if it’s depressed and mostly rural like a lot of the candidates, will
+experience a renaissance. And we’ll get to make the difference.

+

The real fun will start when Americans elsewhere start asking “Why
+can’t our state be more like this?”

+

Liberty in our lifetime? I think this might be how to get there.

+

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diff --git a/20031001064800.blog b/20031001064800.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7a54c4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031001064800.blog @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +If Guns Are Outlawed, Outlaws Will Use Crossbows +

This
+happened about 15 minutes from where I live:

+
+

Police in West Chester are looking for an assailant they believe used
+a crossbow to shoot a pedestrian from a passing SUV.

+

The victim, a restaurant worker who was walking home along High
+Street early Sunday morning, was shot in the stomach with a 16-inch
+hunting arrow. He was released Wednesday from the University of
+Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia.

+

Benito Vargas told police he was at the corner of High and Barnard
+Streets at about 1 a.m. when he saw the white SUV’s driver-side window
+slide down, revealing the front part a crossbow just inside. Seconds
+later, he was lying on the ground.

+

[...]

+

“This thing would be silent. You wouldn’t hear any noise,” West
+Chester Detective Thomas Yarnall said. [...] Yarnall said the
+shooting appeared random [...]

+
+

Gives a whole old meaning to the phrase “looking for a quarrel”,
+which in fact, originally referred to a crossbow bolt.

+

UPDATE:(Well, maybe. Some etymologists think the noun quarrel and verb quarrel have
+separate origins.)

+

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diff --git a/20031004113300.blog b/20031004113300.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4d689ba --- /dev/null +++ b/20031004113300.blog @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +No Flies On The U.S. +

In his recent article Flypaper:
+A Strategy Unfolds, Andrew Sullivan trots out some confirming
+evidence for the theory that the U.S. is pursuing a “flypaper
+strategy” in Iraq — encouraging the Islamist terror
+network to fight American soldiers there so they won’t be attacking
+American civilians here.

+

Mr. Sullivan’s analysis is plausible. Plausible enough that my reaction
+to the article, especially the last paragraph in which he urges Bush to
+articulate the strategy as a way of scoring domestic political points. was:
+“OK, you’ve demonstrated your cleverness. Now would you kindly
+zip your lip before you undermine the strategy?”

+

The leaders of the Islamist terror network are certainly evil and
+arguably insane (if only in the general way that all religious
+believers are insane) but they’re not stupid. If the
+President of the United States got on network T.V. and yelled
+“We have a flypaper strategy! We’re encouraging all the world’s
+nut-jobs to attack us in Iraq so they won’t attack us in the
+U.S.”, just what do you suppose would be the result?

+

Would our favorite murderous ragheads nod agreeably, say
+“Peachy, we’ll play your game and keep attacking you where you
+think you’re strongest?” Or would they bend all their efforts
+to ginning up another mass-murder in the U.S. just to prove they can
+do it and the flypaper isn’t working?

+

For anyone to talk about a flypaper strategy in public is
+irresponsible. For Sullivan to urge that Bush should cop to it in
+public in order to one-up his domestic opponents is beyond
+irresponsible into idiotic and feckless. The President of the
+U.S. would be profoundly derelict in his duty if he courted lethal
+danger to American civilians by doing any such thing.

+

I’m normally a fan of Andrew Sullivan. His writing is witty if
+occasionally a bit febrile, and he is clear-eyed on a handful of
+subjects that normally induce rectocranial inversion in conservatives.
+But today he should be ashamed of himself. He has engaged in the
+exact same error he has excoriated in others, which is treating
+the rest of the world as a mere backdrop to domestic American
+political feuds.

+

And I have some advice for him: Mr. Sullivan, next time you feel
+the urge to be clever in public, do us all a favor and ask yourself
+how many innocent lives you might be endangering by running your
+mouth. If the answer is more than zero, shut up!

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20031008181849.blog b/20031008181849.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a14e814 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031008181849.blog @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ +Nuke ‘em for Christ +

Pat Robertson, the same paragon of Christian virtue who has opined
+in the past that Wiccans like me should be burned alive the way they
+used to in the good old days, just created an interesting dilemma for
+me by suggesting that the State
+Department should be nuked.

+

As a pagan anarchist, I’m completely uninterested in being
+considered a paragon of Christian virtue. So I can admit to feeling a
+sneaking sympathy with Robertson’s modest proposal. I mean, it
+wouldn’t just be nuking the government, it would be nuking one of the
+more repulsive parts of same. The BATF and DEA are certainly a
+greater threat to liberty and happiness, but watching the Foggy Bottom
+crowd compete to see who can pander most abjectly to “international
+opinion” and a succession of enemies from the old Soviet Union to the
+France of today has been pretty nauseating.

+

But no. I have my own standards of virtue, and they don’t quite
+stretch to vaporizing Foggy Bottom. Innocents (that is, persons who
+are not causally implicated in the government’s normal practices of
+coercion and fraud) could be harmed. Cleaning staff, visiting
+children, that sort of thing. Shocking bad form to whack them, don’t
+you know.

+

Now. Seriously. I’ve taken some flak in the past for implying that
+Christianity is just as vile and violence-prone a religion as Islam.
+Pat Robertson has made this point for me before and doubtless will again.
+Because, like Osama bin Laden, he really believes. He pays
+attention to all the bits of the Bible and doctrine and history that
+most so-called ‘Christians’ edit out — a maneuver that
+makes them better human beings, but worse Christians.

+

Christianity is sold as a “religion of love” but that is just as
+bogus as calling Islam a “religion of peace”. What is far more
+important and fundamental to both is eschatological dualism, which
+Islam inherited through Mohammed’s roots in Monophysite Christianity.
+(What? You didn’t know that Islam started life as a mildly schismatic
+Christian sect? Yes, it’s true.)

+

“Eschatological dualism” is fancy theologist-speak for the belief
+that history consists of a titanic struggle between God and the Devil,
+which will culminate at the end of time with a great sorting out — godly
+obedient people to Heaven, sinners to Hell. Eschatological dualism
+is the root of the “Kill them all, God will know his own” attitude that
+has always been rather more characteristic of both religions than “peace”
+or “love”. Pat and Osama, brothers under the skin, are squarely in that
+grand old tradition.

+

Christianity, fortunately for all of us, has become quite decadent
+and weak these last 400 years or so — Robertson merely dreams of
+smiting the Devil’s minions with Godly fire, rather than actually
+incinerating 3000 people on a fine autumn morning. But it may take
+another 400 before Christianity withers away sufficiently that my
+descendants need not fear being burned at the stake by a charismatic
+looney-tune like Robertson. Islam, 600 years younger, will probably
+remain deadly for rather longer.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20031014020805.blog b/20031014020805.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..de39163 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031014020805.blog @@ -0,0 +1,84 @@ +Mohammed was a Christian +

In a recent blog entry I mentioned that Islam appears to have begun life
+as a mildly schismatic Christian sect. In the comments on that entry someone
+called for sources. Here is what I know about this:

+

(First, a note on my general background: I am neither a Christian
+nor a Moslem, and in fact consider those two religions #3 and #4 in
+the Most Toxic Ideologies Of All Time sweepstakes, after Communism and
+Naziism. I have therefore studied the history of Christianity and
+Islam fairly closely, basically on the know-your-enemies principle.)

+

There is a scholar somewhere in Germany using the alias Christoph
+Luxenberg. He has published a book called Die syro-aramaeische
+Lesart des Koran; Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der
+Quränsprache. He uses a pseudonym because he thinks many
+Moslems will want to kill him when they find out about it. In this
+he is undoubtedly correct.

+

What Luxenberg has done is applied the same methods of philology
+and linguistics to the Qur’an that were applied to the Christian Bible
+beginning in the mid-19th century. I have not read the book itself as
+I have no German, but when I read several summaries of its conclusions
+I was struck by the sense they made of some odd facts I had picked up
+over the years. Such as the datum that there is a Christian monastery
+in the Sinai which received a special immunity, apparently from
+Mohammed himself, under terms its abbots have kept mum about for 1400
+years. And the curious resemblance (you have to have read both the
+Qur’an and some odd Christian sources to notice, but I have) between
+the rhetoric of the Qur’an and that of a now-forgotten group of
+Christian ‘heretics’ called Monophysites who were particularly strong
+in the Syria and Arabia of Mohammed’s time. And the fact that early
+Muslims knelt to pray towards Jerusalem, not Mecca.

+

You can read this
+scholarly review for more. Another discussion, which was written
+before Luxenberg but is particularly telling on the evidence that Islam
+did not emerge as a separate faith until well after Mohammed’s death,
+is at this
+atheist site. I’ll give you a summary of the high points, some of
+which the reviewers (though not the atheists) tiptoe around.

+

Islam, the Qur’an, and classical Arabic all formed in a
+cosmopolitan culture of Syrio-Aramaic-speaking Arabs. The religious
+tradition that went with that language was Christian; in fact, the
+very word “Qur’an” probably derived from “queryana”, a Syrio-Aramaic
+term for a kind of Christian liturgical text. The variant spelling
+“qur’an” for that word is attested.

+

Mohammed was probably a Christian of a Nestorian or Monophysite
+stripe, and the Qur’an originally intended as a commentary or gloss on
+the Syriac recension of the Christian Bible. The surah or section of
+the Qur’an that Moslems believe is the oldest contains an exhortation
+to take the Christian Eucharist.

+

In fact, it is almost certain that the concept of an Islamic
+identity separate from Syriac Christianity did not develop in
+Mohammed’s lifetime; there are hints that it was a political creation
+of the Caliphate, constructed soon after Mohammed’s death by the
+Caliph ‘Othman. Notably, he had burned all recensions of the sayings
+of Mohammed other than the one prepared under his control.

+

Many textual difficulties in the Qur’an vanish once it is realized
+that a lot of the words in it are fossilized Aramaic. Luxenberg
+wanders deep into technical philology here and you have to know a lot
+of details about early Semitic writing systems, including the fact
+that they didn’t record vowels. (I know enough to smell that
+Luxenberg has a hell of a strong case.) But the upshot is that you
+can go to Syrio-Aramaic vocabularies and extract clear readings from
+many passages that are maddeningly obscure if you’re running under the
+assumption that they are written in the vocabulary of later
+Arabic.

+

Remember the brief rash of news stories about “72 virgins” actually
+meaning “72 white grapes”? That was Luxenberg reading the Qur’an in
+its original Syrio-Aramaic-derived vocabulary.

+

Islamic scholars of the Qur’an lost the knowledge of the Qur’an’s
+Aramaic origins shortly after ‘Othman’s book-burning. There are hints
+of it in the oldest hadith (traditional saying of Mohammed) but the
+hints don’t make any sense until you do the philology, at which point
+they snap into focus and startle the crap out of you. The traditional
+Islamic accounts of the Qur’an’s origins are are best confused, and at
+worst pure inventions of the Umaiyyad propaganda machine that was
+busily turning Mohammed’s reform of Syriac Christianity into a new
+religion as the basis for empire

+

One entertaining detail I didn’t discover until I did my
+fact-checking for this essay is that Catholic theologians have been
+claiming Mohammed was a renegade Nestorian, or something like, for
+about a thousand years. It also turns out that there are
+scholar-priests in odd corners of the Christian world (notably among
+Maronites in Lebanon) who had pieces of Luxenberg’s exegesis all
+along, but lacked the philological training to put them together.
+Now it turns out they were right. Who knew?

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20031015183153.blog b/20031015183153.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a402025 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031015183153.blog @@ -0,0 +1,79 @@ +Toxic Christianity, round two +

In the October 15th Best of the Web, James
+Taranto asks:

+
+

So let’s see if we have this straight: The head of the Anglican
+Church is telling us that the wanton murder of thousands of innocent
+people [by Palestinian terrorists] is a sign of “serious moral goals,”
+while the liberation of millions [of Iraqis] from one of the world’s
+most vicious dictatorships is, as he has put it, “immoral and
+illegal.”

+

Is this really what Christianity is all about?

+
+

Well, since you asked…yes, indeed it is.

+

To understand why, you first have to confront what Dr. Rowan
+Williams is actually doing. He is aligning himself with Islamic
+terrorists against individual Christians and against the liberation of
+Iraq from an Islamizing dictator by a predominantly Christian
+nation.

+

Now, why would the head of the second most prestigious of all
+Christian denominations do that? What is it in Christianity that
+could make him so confident in the morality of this position? What is
+it about the U.S.’s actions that make it so threatening?

+

A clue to the problem is that though the U.S. is demographically a
+mostly Christian nation, the effect of U.S. cultural hegemony is a
+secularizing one. American popular culture severs the bonds of fear
+and ignorance that hold people unquestioningly to their ancestral
+relgions. The American vision of each individual as an autonomous
+being who derives his rights from his humanness, from the simple fact
+of his capacity to assert them, is deadly antithetical to any
+religious tradition that vests moral authority in a transcendant
+God.

+

The Founding Fathers of the U.S. understood this antipathy full
+well. The pro-forma nods towards the distant god of the Deists in the
+Declaration of Independence and U.S. Consitution failed to conceal the
+fact that the Founding Fathers were freethinkers, agnostics and
+atheists almost to a man. As George Washington and John Adams
+explained to the Knights of Malta in 1787 “The United States is in no
+way founded upon the Christian religion”. It could not have been so
+founded without a fatal conflict with its aspiration to be a nation of
+freedom.

+

The Archbishop of Canterbury cannot be dismissed as a fringe figure
+as some are (incorrectly) wont to do of Pat Robertson. His enmity
+towards the U.S.’s anti-terror strategy, his willingness to line up
+with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden after no more than a pro-forma
+disclaimer of terrorist means, proceeds directly from this fundamental
+conflict. It is diagnostic of a deep sickness, an abiding evil in the
+heart of Christianity itself — the exaltation of obedience, the
+denial that humans can have any worth other than through the
+condescension of God.

+

Nietzsche called this one correctly. Christianity, which purports
+to be the religion of love, is only sporadically anything of the kind.
+It is primarily a religion of slavery and submission. Christian
+individualism, when it exists at all, is legitimized only by obedience
+to God. In a Christian worldview there is always someone to be
+obeyed, whether visible cleric or invisible Nobodaddy. You must
+submit; the only argument is about to whom your obedience is owed, and
+what humans under what circumstances may transmit the orders of God.
+Without that sinew of obedience the entire world-view
+disintegrates.

+

To a Christian cleric, a properly terrified and obedient Muslim is
+less of a threat than a person who has rejected the God of the
+Abrahamic faiths. The Muslim is still within the system of
+submission. Only a handful of symbols separate him from the Christian;
+the basic program is the same. Therefore, from the point of view of
+the operators of the religious obedience machine that is Anglicanism
+(or almost any other Christian denomination) Osama bin Laden is a more
+natural ally than any freethinker.

+

Am I accusing Dr. Rowan Williams of being part of a conscious
+totalitarian conspiracy? No; he is something far more dangerous
+— a leading figure in an unconscious totalitarian
+conspiracy, one which denies its own nature just effectively enough to
+fool others as well. That conspiracy encompasses every tyrant
+who has ever told human beings that their path to happiness lay
+in the exaltation of some authority, whether God or the State.

+

It is in this context that Dr. Williams’s statement makes perfect
+and consistent sense. For him, better a thousand terrorist acts than
+even one human being waking up to discover that he need not after all
+fear the wrath of God.

+

Blogspot Comments

diff --git a/20031017140300.blog b/20031017140300.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..533a702 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031017140300.blog @@ -0,0 +1,117 @@ +Planets of Adventure +

Bless Jim Baen, who at times seems determined to reprint the entire
+Golden Age midlist of SF. for he has given us a good thick anthology of
+some of the best stories of Murray Leinster — a writer once counted
+among science-fiction’s reliable best, but since unfairly forgotten.

+

I come away from Planets of Adventure (pb, Baen 2002,
+ISBN 0-7434-7162-8) with a renewed appreciation of something I have
+long known. When John W. Campbell and Robert Heinlein invented modern
+SF after 1938, Campbell perforce had to train a new crop of writers to
+produce it. Very few writers with established careers were able to
+meet Campbell’s standards.

+

Murray Leinster (born Wil F. Jenkins) was one of a very few
+exceptions — and one of only two (with Jack Williamson) who
+actually managed to produce better work after Campbell than before
+him, rather than merely imitating previous pulp successes on a grander
+scale (as did, for example, the now-unreadable Edmond Hamilton and the
+still-enjoyable E.E. “Doc” Smith).

+

For this alone Leinster deserves more attention from the historians
+and critics of SF than he usually gets. I, personally, was ready to
+rediscover him because I had fond childhood memories of reading his work
+from the 1950s and early 1960s when it was not too difficult to find
+in the used bookstores of ten years later.

+

One of my sentimental favorites was the Med Service
+series, tales of a doctor making interstellar house calls to solve
+ingeniously constructed medical puzzles. I was delighted when Baen
+Books printed a Med Service omnibus a few months ago — but it is
+after reading Planets of Adventure that I am truly
+impressed with Leinster’s achievement.

+

The first story, The Forgotten Planet is a fixup
+novel assembled from three novellas, published respectively in 1920,
+1921, and 1953. The rest of the stories were published in the decade
+after 1947, the last quite coincidentally in the year I was born. In these
+stories we get a fine view in miniature both of SF’s pre-Campbellian past
+and the most fertile period of the Campbellian Golden Age.

+

The first section of The Forgotten Planet, written
+in 1920, is deeply primitive. It’s a dark thalamic adventure of
+regressed humans battling lethal fungi and giant insects in a fetid
+alien ecology. The only touches we can recognize as SFnal are a
+framing story Leinster added after the fact, in the early 1950s, which
+make the humands descendents of a crashed starliner — in origin, the story
+had been set on a far-future Earth. One feature of the original
+repays notice; Leinster referred to climate change via a
+carbon-dioxide greenhouse effect caused by burning fossil fuels. In
+1920!

+

The end of The Forgotten Planet, as rewritten at
+the beginning of the 1950s, reads very differently. The stranded
+primitives, having struggled up on their own to barbarian status, are
+accidentally rediscovered by interstellar civilization. This is not
+merely a different story than Leinster had begun to write thirty
+years earlier, it is written in a profoundly different way, suffused
+with plucky optimism and cool efficiency. The protagonist, Burl,
+began the action as a a Joseph-Campbellian mythic hero; he ends
+it as the archetype of the John-Campbellian competent man, bestriding
+both his own world and that of his advanced galactic kindred with an
+ease that disconcerts the latter.

+

In the next section, The Planet Explorer, Leinster
+demonstrates a flawless command of the Campbellian idiom. These
+stories, written in 1955-56, are classic planetary-puzzle pieces of
+the sort that filled the pages of Astounding magazine.
+The protagonist solves life-threatening problems posed by conditions
+on alien worlds. These were intelligent stories when they were
+written and they’re still intelligent today. One of them won a Hugo
+in 1956. Aside from a slight stiffness in the language, they read
+remarkably well.

+

And we’re in for another surprise. The next story,
+Anthropological Note, dates from 1957. In it, Leinster
+captures perfectly the tone and style of the first post-Campbellian
+wave in SF, the social-science SF of the mid-to-late 1950s and
+pre-New-Wave 1960s. Truly this story could have been written by Fred
+Pohl or C.M. Kornbluth. The wry tone, the anthropologizing, and the
+not-so-subtle satirical edge are all there.

+

The story following that, Scrimshaw, is a creepy and
+dark little mood piece that manages to anticipate the New Wave of the
+mid-1960s by ten years. The rest of the anthology (Assignment
+on Pasik, Regulations and The Skit-Tree
+Planet) is mostly filler, workmanlike enough stuff from the
+late 1940s obviously written to pay bills. These stories are still
+readable, but of no special interest other than as a demonstration of
+consistent competence.

+

And there you have it. In these stories Leinster manages, with so
+little effort that you won’t be aware of it unless you’re looking, to
+span four eras of SF and meet all their demands with unobtrusive
+efficiency. I am unable to think of anyone else in the history of the
+field who can quite match that.

+

This observation is more interesting because Leinster was
+essentially a hack writer. Besides the SF, he churned out reams of
+pulp fiction — formulaic Westerns, hard-boiled detective stories,
+jungle adventures — during a career that begain in 1917 and
+ended only with his death in 1975. It appears that the last thing he
+wrote was a Perry Rhodan novel which I have not read but
+which almost certainly stank to high heaven.

+

His SF, though, was not mere hack-work, or at least not
+usually mere hack-work. He was a genuine innovator in the
+form who invented the parallel-world story in 1934 and the
+first-contact story in 1945. It is impossible to read Leinster
+without sensing that to him, constructing Campbellian puzzle stories
+was a delight, and probably the closest approach to art for art’s sake
+that he ever allowed himself. Certainly in Exploration
+Team, the story that won him the 1956 Hugo, one gets the sense
+that Leinster is using the story to think through some issues that are
+important to him — and they are not trivial issues, even
+today.

+

But for all that he helped invent some of SF’s central tropes,
+Leinster never quite became an SF writer of the first rank. He was a
+solid midlist presence — the comparisons that leap to mind are
+his rough contemporaries James Schmitz and Ross Rocklynne. His novels
+tended to be uninspired; his best work (including the genre-defining
+First Contact and the hilarious and rather prescient
+A Logic Named Joe) was in short-story form.

+

What Murray Leinster does show us is that SF was as liberating for him as
+for his readers — that even a hack writer could take from SF the
+challenge and the invitation to be intelligent, and give back
+something a bit better than he might have written otherwise. I never
+got to ask him, but I strongly suspect that Wil F. Jenkins would be
+prefer to be remembered for the SF more than for anything else he
+wrote.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20031019204300.blog b/20031019204300.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0b732b5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031019204300.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Hey, DLC, Rethinking Is Not Enough +

The Democratic Party is getting hip to the fact that advocating gun bans loses them elections. Way to go, Dems! For a crowd widely touted in the media as the best and brightest, it has taken you far too long to wake up.

+

But there is still a weird feeling of unreality about the exercise. It seems to be mostly about spin rather than substance, mostly about making people believe that Democrats have reformed on this issue without actual reform.

+

Various bloggers have waxed acidulous about this, but nobody has stepped up and said, explicitly, what the Democrats’ problem is and how to fix it. So. DLC honchos, you talk about being reality therapy for the rest of the party. Here is reality.

+

I am one of the independent, swing voters that could have won you the 2000 election. I do not consider myself a conservative, nor do I vote the Republican ticket.

+

I believe that the Founding Fathers of the United States bequeathed to me as a member of the unincorporated militia (that is, all citizens capable of bearing arms) the responsibility to remain armed and vigilant against both foreign enemies of my nation and domestic tyrants.

+

I am one of the people who will almost never vote for a Democrat, because I believe the Democratic Party wants to trash the Second Amendment, confiscate my guns, and destroy the balance of power between citizens and government that was intended by the framers of the Constitution.

+

I do not really trust either major political party on this issue, but whereas Republicans have less than sterling credibility, Democrats have negative credibility. That is, experience strongly suggests that when Democrats are quiet about firearms policy, they are concealing an anti-gun rather than a pro-gun agenda. Their silence is a lie.

+

Democratic pollster Mark Penn says “The formula for Democrats is to say that they support the Second Amendment, but that they want tough laws that close loopholes”. Be aware that I will interpret any Democrat talking about “tough laws that close loopholes” as an anti-gun agenda being pursued by stealth and deception.

+

If the Democrats want my vote, it is not sufficient for the Democratic merely to refrain from pushing more firearms restrictions. The Democratic leadership must explicitly recognize the Second Amendment as a guarantee of an individual right, explicitly repudiate the gun-grabbers in their ranks, and make the abolition of firearms restrictions part of their formal agenda.

+

Negative credibility means you have a ways to go before you can even get to zero. Want my vote, and that of millions of independent gun owners like me? Start earning it with pro-gun action, not just talk…because if you don’t, those millions of independents will have no realistic option but the Republicans, and the already serious decline of the national Democratic party may well become terminal.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20031020235500.blog b/20031020235500.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9c3eee6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031020235500.blog @@ -0,0 +1,71 @@ +Why Howard Dean Won’t Get My Vote +

After a previous post in which I called for the Democratic Party to
+walk the pro-firearms walk if it wanted to stop alienating freedom-loving
+independents like me, I was asked in comments what I think of Howard Dean
+— who, it is alleged, has an A++ rating from the NRA.

+

OK, I like the fact that Dean is pro-gun. In this, and in other
+ways, he’s sane on subjects where Democrats are generally insane. But
+it is almost certain I will not vote for him. Because the next
+President of the U.S. must have a strategic vision for fighting the
+threat of Islamist terror and WMDs, and Dean has no such vision.

+

Note that I am not saying the next president must have George
+Bush’s strategic vision — and don’t bother with the
+Bush-is-an-idiot, it’s-all his-handlers routine; Bush has routinely
+outsmarted people who underestimated him and as long as they delude
+themselves that he’s a moron, it will be easier for him to continue
+doing so. But there must be some strategic vision, some
+sense of realpolitik. Dean ain’t got it.

+

In fact, nobody on the list of Democratic presidential hopefuls
+appears to have any sense of the strategic stakes or possibilities,
+with the possible exception of Joe Lieberman. And supposing there
+were, no aspirant with a sane national-security program could make it
+through the gauntlet of the primaries to the general election.

+

And why? Because the Democratic Party apparatus has been captured by
+interest groups who are incapable of taking the war we are in seriously.

+

I’m not actually talking about the inmates of the asylum that is
+today’s loony left: the retread Marxists, the po-mo academics, the
+anti-globalization crowd — what conservatives call with some
+justification the Blame-America-First brigades. Expecting anything
+but toxic babble from these people was always doomed. No, the trouble
+is that the Democratic interest groups that aren’t outright
+insane have no way to fit an anti-terror strategy into their model of
+how to do politics.

+

How can feminists, gays, or the various skin-color cliques in the
+racial-problem industry cope? For these groups, politics is all about
+identity and grievance and maybe who gets the biggest slice in the
+next round of redistributing the domestic wealth — they’ve
+actually lost the very *concept* of the ‘national interest’, and are no
+more capable of grappling with the implications of 9/11 than they
+would be of speaking Sumerian.

+

Or the people who are *really* calling the shots in the Democratic
+Party — trial lawyers and the public-employee unions. (Forget
+labor in general. The Democrats stopped listening to the AFL-CIO
+about a nanosecond after it became clear that the private-sector
+unions could no longer keep most of their people from voting
+Republican.) Again, nothing about their relationship to the political
+game gives them anywhere to stand in foreign policy.

+

The Republicans don’t have this problem. All of their major
+factions have commitments that don’t stop at the water’s edge. The
+so-called “national-greatness conservatives”, the ideological
+free-traders, small business, big business, the Christian Right, even
+the Buchananite isolationalists — they may disagree violently on
+what the national interest is, but at least there is a place in their
+normal discourse about politics where they know that concept
+fits.

+

Not so most of the the Democrat pressure groups — which means
+that the terms of internal Democratic debate about foreign policy are
+being set by the loony left, because the people some of my warblogger
+colleagues call “barking idiotarian moonbats” are the only ones in the
+Democratic Party who actually care! They’re the only Democrats
+with a world-view that involves thinking about the rest of the world
+as anything other than a passive backdrop for domestic politics.

+

(I’m actually convinced that the reason most Democratic politicians
+suck up to the U.N. and the French so assiduously is that following
+“international opinion” relieves them of the intolerable burden of
+having to think about foreign policy.)

+

Thus, Dean. Mostly a mainstream Democrat in that what he really wants to
+do is ignore foreign-policy issues — but the only way he’s found
+to mobilize the angry-Left cadres who matter so much in the primaries
+is to bark like a moonbat.

+

That won’t get my vote.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20031021182300.blog b/20031021182300.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4b0c15a --- /dev/null +++ b/20031021182300.blog @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +Attack of the Malaysian Moonbats +

Today, a bunch of prominent warbloggers were hit by a
+denial-of-service attack apparently orchestrated by a bunch of
+comically incompetent al-Qaeda affiliates in Malaysia — and
+I wasn’t a target.

+

I’d ask what I’ve been doing wrong with my life that I missed out
+on the honor of being personally targeted by Osama’s fuckwit brigade.
+But alas, I know full well wherein I failed. This is what I get for
+going on hiatus for months to finish my book and put multiple spokes
+in the wheels of SCO. I didn’t maintain the momentum I had in
+2002/early-2003, and fell off the moonbats’ radar.

+

To all of you who were targeted — Internet Hagannah, InstaPundit,
+Steve denBeste, Charles Johnson, and others: you have my respect and
+my thanks for what you do every day. The war against terror is a war
+of ideas as well as bullets. You do great service by unflinchingly
+exposing the lies of the terror network and its apologists in the
+West. The Malaysian Moonbats, in recognizing this, have paid you
+greater tribute than I can.

+

Hmmm. Maybe I ought to update the Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto.
+Think that’d piss ‘em off enough that they’s try to DDOS me?

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20031027191400.blog b/20031027191400.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3f52726 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031027191400.blog @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +Stupid Like A Fox +

For the kind of articulate extrovert who tends to go into politics or the
+media, it can be very difficult to believe that a stumble-tongued,
+inarticulate man can be other than an idiot. As an articulate extrovert
+myself, I’ve had to struggle with this. Like most of our media and
+chattering classes, my instinct too was to write George W. Bush as an
+idiot who had stumbled into the Presidency through no merit of his own.

+

Events have forced me to nearly the opposite conclusion. George W. Bush
+is no idiot. In fact, he now appears to me to be an extremely cunning man
+who makes repeated and effective use of his opponents’ inability to take
+him seriously.

+

Over and over again we’ve seen the pattern. Bush says he’s gaing
+to do something. Opponents rant and rave and scream about what an
+idiot he is. Amidst all the name-calling, an effective opposition
+fails to materialize. When the smoke clears, events unfold pretty
+much according to the Bush script.

+

It’s pretty much been that way on every issue bigger than judicial
+nominations. Now, mind you, in this essay I’m not going to express
+or even imply a judgment about whether or should be that way.
+What I’m trying to point out is that even the U.N. has pretty much
+ended up dancing Bush’s tune. All of the Franco/German/Russian talk
+of thwarting that mad cowboy has come to this in the end: U.S, troops
+in control of Iraq, Saddam gone, and the U.N. formally committed by
+resolution to support the U.S. reconstruction without either a timeline
+or any U.N. authority over Iraq.

+

Once or twice could be luck. But Bush keeps doing this.
+He is such an effective political operator that his opponents find
+that their ability to block him has quietly vanished while they
+weren’t looking. The pathological rage now endemic in Democratic
+circles is fueled by impotence. They know they were suckered,
+swindled, had somehow, but they can’t pin down why or how the
+majority voters stopped listening. Bad enough to have Reagan pound
+the crap out of them — they thought he was an idiot too, but at
+least they could console themselves that he was a glib idiot.
+Being shellacked by a Republican who sounds like a moron behind a
+microphone is more than their blood pressure can take.

+

Well, Democrats, I’ve got news for you. Bush is using your rage to
+make you into idiots. I think, early in his political
+career, he somehow learned how to push this button reliably, and has
+been sucker-punching his opponents ever since. Clever of him —
+but then, as I belatedly realized when I was thinking this through. he
+has to be brighter than he looks. The dude flew fighter
+planes! Simpletons can’t do that; the Air Force screens pilots for
+intelligence because it has to.

+

Want to stop Bush? Then, Mr. J. Random Democrat, call Dubya evil if
+you want — but accept that, on his record, he is pretty damn
+bright. Stop screaming, take his brains seriously, and outsmart him.
+That is, if you can.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20031029031349.blog b/20031029031349.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..24d5921 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031029031349.blog @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +What Planet does Naomi Wolf Live On? +

Naomi Wolf’s essay The Porn Myth strongly suggests that she lives on some other planet. It has been pretty well fisked over at Haight Speech and elsewhere. But so far, all of the people I’ve seen shredding it are women.

+

Perhaps this is because it’s politically incorrect for us panting, grunting persons-of-testicle to trash-talk a feminist icon like Ms. Wolf or say anything nice about porn. But here at Armed and Dangerous, we are fearless — and, more to the point, we have cleverly prepared our ground by having previously written an essay entitled Why does porn got to hurt so bad? in which we analyzed in detail why most porn is so intensely ugly.

+

So I’m going to say a few words about Ms. Wolf’s viewing-with-alarm, speaking as a man. A man who is quite in touch with his own desires, thank you, and has studied (yes, I mean studied) the effects of porn on his libido with some care.

+

In brief, my response to Ms. Wolf is: Haw haw haw har har hee hee hyuck *snort* giggle. Ma’am, you clearly have no freaking idea what you are talking about.

+

You show a young woman who makes herself sexually available but has trouble attracting the interest of a young man away from porn, and I’ll show you a young man who is either homosexual or stone dead.

+

Well, OK, I can imagine one exception. If the young woman in question is hideously deformed, the can’t-compete-with-porn insecurity you describe might be justified. But in general, it’s safe to predict that an offer of pussy from any woman who is not aggressively ugly will easily outbid the young man’s hand for the attention of his penis.

+

This is so not because young men are in any way enlightened, but because they are fizzing with hormones and instincts that are designed for the express purpose of inducing them to fuck…you know…women. Lots of them. Young men are not noted for being excessively discriminating in this regard. A biologist would explain this as r-type strategy — since his energy investment in reproduction is low, promiscuity is optimal.

+

Show me a young woman who thinks she can’t compete with porn for a man’s attention and I’ll show you one of two things. Either (a), she’s having galloping insecurity for some other reason and doesn’t notice that the man enjoys having sex with real women a hell of a lot more than he enjoys porn, or (b) she’s not having sex with that man.

+

There is one truth buried, oblique and nearly invisible, in Ms. Wolf’s informants’ reports. Sex with a real woman trumps porn, but porn trumps women who dangle sex in front of men and don’t deliver. Again, this has nothing to do with enlightenment, and whether the dangling is a deliberate tease, a product of inhibition, or simple ineptness at the courtship dance doesn’t matter much either. The most relevant causal fact is that young men get erections a lot, and when they get erections, having an orgasm tends to move to the top of the to-do-list and stay there.

+

Ms. Wolf, here is some simple advice you can give any woman who thinks she can’t compete with porn. First item on the checklist: is she fucking him? If the answer is “no”, then I regret to inform you that her grounds for complaint against the fact that he likes to jack off while looking at or thinking about pictures of porn babes are nil. Zip. Zero. You might as well try resenting water for flowing downhill.

+

On the other hand, if she is fucking him, he is not going to swap that for feelthy pixels. Trust me on this. I have a penis. I’ve been fucking women for nearly thirty years, and not once was I even remotely tempted to trade an actual roll in the hay for a fantasy image and my hand. Not even as a confused adolescent, and not even with the ones who were, relatively speaking, lousy in bed.

+

Any woman who thinks this is happening is evading a problem with the relationship, not with his sexual response. By pointing at porn, she is giving herself leave to ignore real issues. Like: am I joyful in bed? This has nothing to do with facials or Brazilian wax jobs — and, actually, as much to do with the capacity to receive pleasure from that man’s touch as the capacity to give him pleasure.

+

Here’s another secret about most men, most of the time: given a choice between a buff “porn-worthy” chick with a drawerful of sex toys who’s grudging or unresponsive in bed, or a plain jane with rudimentary technique who orgasms easily and generously, plain jane is the one we’re going to go back to. Again, this has a sound basis in evolutionary bio; orgasm is a sperm-retention behavior that increases the probability of conception, so an orgasming woman is saying pre-verbally “I want your child!”.

+

Having delivered a smackdown on Ms. Wolf’s silly thesis, I will now thump a number of her critics. Pretty much all of them report this exchange:

+
+

“Why have sex right away?” a boy with tousled hair and Bambi eyes was explaining. “Things are always a little tense and uncomfortable when you just start seeing someone,” he said. “I prefer to have sex right away just to get it over with. You know it’s going to happen anyway, and it gets rid of the tension.”

+

“Isn’t the tension kind of fun?” I asked. “Doesn’t that also get rid of the mystery?”

+

“Mystery?” He looked at me blankly. And then, without hesitating, he replied: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sex has no mystery.”

+
+

Several of the fiskings I’ve read avoid Ms. Wolf’s dim-bulbed ascription of that response to the insidious effects of porn only by writing off the kid as a callow, ignorant doofus. By doing so, they miss his point as completely as she did.

+

In fact, the kid is right. There is no mystery to sex. The mystery is in the stuff that is modulated onto sex like a signal onto a carrier wave, Relationships. Love. Intimacy. Mysticism. What this wise child is saying is that he wants to get the purely sexual tension out of the way so that he can get to the mystery.

+

Shame on Ms. Wolf for being in such a swivet about porn that she failed to notice this. But a greater shame on her fiskers, who had no single axe to grind and time for reflection — and thus, not even a bad excuse for their lack of perception.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20031107122722.blog b/20031107122722.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..54b3634 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031107122722.blog @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +Call them Werewolves +

The blogosphere has shown some ability to change the terms and
+terminology of the terror-war debate in the U.S. It’s time for a bit
+of meme-hacking. Let’s see if we can displace terms like “insurgent”
+or “Saddam loyalist” with one that conveys the true depth of evil we
+are facing. I have a candidate to propose.

+

A little more than sixty years ago, the U.S. and its allies went to
+war another psychopathic, mass-murdering dictator — Adolf
+Hitler. In 1944, as the Third Reich was collapsing, the SS organized
+a Nazi resistance to commit assassinations, sabotage and guerrilla
+warfare behind Allied lines. The parallels in organization and
+tactics with Baathist-holdout activity in Iraq are very
+close.

+

It is a matter of record from Saddam Hussein’s autobiography that
+he admired Hitler’s ruthless efficiency and sought to emulate it. We
+should revive for these remnant Baathist thugs the term, redolent of
+willful evil and darkness, that the Nazi resistance fighters used for
+themselves.

+

Call them werewolves. It’s what they deserve.

+

Blogspot comments

diff --git a/20031110212617.blog b/20031110212617.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ac8f189 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031110212617.blog @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +Dehumanization +

A reader, responding to the suggestion that we call the Baathist
+holdouts in Iraq
+werewolves, asked rhetorically whether the intent was to dehumanize
+them. Lurking behind this question was the theory that war supporters
+like me need to make our enemies into un-persons in order to justify
+continuing to kill them.

+

This question displays a kind of self-absorption by a person who
+cannot really imagine a moral stance different from his/her own. In
+such tender-minded thinking, the world is neatly divided into humans
+that one must treat pretty much as though they were one’s next-door neighbor,
+and non-humans who are not part of the moral community. The possibility
+that a human being could be outside the moral community is essentially
+ignored.

+

But there are human beings who are outside the moral community by nature.
+We call them psychopaths. They lack the wiring for empathy and reciprocity
+that makes it possible for most human beings to cooperate; they can (and
+often do) commit sickening atrocities for pleasure. Fortunately, most
+psychopaths have other kinds of neurological deficits as well and are
+therefore not very bright.

+

Some people who probably were not born with psychopathy make themselves
+into psychopaths. Consider, as a relevant example, Saddam Hussein and
+his sons. They fed living people into shredders for amusement. No semantic
+debate over whether that sort of monster is “human” or “dehumanized”
+is going to change my judgment that that it deserves a violent
+death as quickly as that result can be arranged.

+

The Baathist holdouts in Iraq are the hench-monsters of the
+Husseins — the men who tore infants’ eyes out and strapped women
+to tables in rape rooms. Calling them “werewolves” or “orcs” is not
+an attempt to dehumanize them; that would be pointless, since they
+have already dehumanized themselves.

diff --git a/20031111022428.blog b/20031111022428.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8160620 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031111022428.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +The sleep of reason +

I’ve had a copy of David Frum’s Dead Right sitting on my coffee table for months. I didn’t buy it, it was landed on my by an old friend who persists in imagining that I’m interested in reading conservative political theory. In fact, it’s been years since I found conservative theorizing other than wearily predictable. and it would have been a lot more years if I hadn’t been unaccountably late in grasping Russell Kirk’s argument for the organic wisdom of institutions.

+

John Holbo’s smackdown gives form to all the inchoate reasons I didn’t want to face Frum’s book. Holbo, by his own account, goes looking for a unifying philosophy of conservative thought and finds only an attitude, an aesthetic, a hankering for people and situations to possess certain qualities without a logically or ethically coherent theory of why those qualities would be desirable. Holbo makes much of Frum’s yearning that people should be tough, self-reliant, and self-disciplined and Frum’s apparent willingness that the order of society should punish slackness, even if that is not necessarily the most economically efficient way to arrange things.

+

Holbo admits that he is loading onto Frum views that Frum would probably deny. But his argument that those views are logical extensions of positions Frum and other conservatives do hold seems basically fair, and so does his charge that Frum-like conservatism is an incoherent mishmash of emotional desires masquerading (not very convincingly) as a political philosophy.

+

What I am left wondering is why Holbo expected conservatives to have an actual theory in the first place. Or whether he actually expected it at all — his purported surprise and disappointment smells a bit disingenuous to me, a bit like a rhetorical flourish we’re not really expected to believe. Did he really give no thought beforehand to the implication of the label that conservatives use for themselves?

+

The word conservative is an adjectival noun formed from the verb ‘to conservate’ — to keep something from decaying, to hold it static, to preserve it. Almost all of the core attitudes of conservatism unfold from that definition. Almost all of conservatism is a set of rationalizations for a gut-level inclination to see any sort of change as a threat. Conservatism is the politics of dread, of people who are god-fearing, change-fearing, and
+future-fearing.

+

I say ‘almost all’ because, by historical accident, conservatism has got itself tangled up with impulses of a very different kind — specifically classical-liberal and libertarian ones. Many people who describe themselves as conservatives are in fact nothing of the kind — they are in bed with conservatism only out of a shared loathing of the Marxist/socialist left. The alliance depends on a sort of folie a deux — conservatives fooling themselves that free markets tend to freeze existing power relationships in place, and classical-liberals fooling themselves that freedom can be reconciled with the love of hierarchy and punishment wired into the conservative hindbrain.

+

The parts of ‘conservative’ theory that actually deserve to be called theory are usually classical-liberal or libertarian intrusions. Nor is this anything new; before being shotgun-wedded to classical liberalism by the threat of Marxism around the beginning of the 20th century, conservatives imported their theory from Aquinas or Plato or Calvin.

+

In fact, when you get down to trying, it is remarkably hard to name anybody who has done a systematic job of deriving conservative politics from a theory about the nature of good. Especially since the Enlightenment, conservative thinkers have tended to be critics rather than theory-builders, and in fact have tended to distrust theory. Edmund Burke, for example, wasn’t a philosopher so much as he was a critical aphorist. In our own day, Willam F. Buckley has been a similar exemplar of the conservative public intellectual — witty
+and devastatingly accurate about the failures and hypocrisies of his opponents, but neither capable of nor interested in producing an entire philosophy of right action or right government.

+

Russell Kirk is interesting precisely because he bucked this trend to some extent. His idea that the forms of institutions embody an unconscious wisdom about what tends to produce good outcomes is that rarest of things, an argument for conservatism that is not circularly bound to conservative, authoritarian, or religious assumptions.

+

It’s not enough, though. It isn’t sufficient to justify all the normative things Frum and mainstream conservatives want; you can’t get opposition to cloning stem cells out of it, for example. Nor does it stand comparison with the elaborate theoretical edifices produced bythe Left. The core assumptions of Marxist theory were false-to-fact and its results horrible, but there was a sort of system and logic in between that conservative thinking never really had.

+

Left-liberals have no room for glee or schadenfreude at conservative expense, though; their position is no better. Having been shown the hard way that Hayek was right and there is no alternative to the market, modern left-liberalism too is essentially a bunch of sentiments and attitudes rather than a philosophy. The practical politics of the left has become little more than a defensive huddle around welfare-state institutions everybody knows are headed for insolvency and collapse, and left attitudes increasingly amount to little more than being against whatever they think conservatives are for.

+

The inability to frame a positive philosophy is a serious problem for both groups. It reduces their politics to a series of gut rumbles and their conversation to increasingly enraged screaming straight from the hypothalamus (vide Michael Moore and Ann Coulter). A rational debate is hard to have when there isn’t any theory to frame and moderate emotional fixations. Or, as Goethe put it, the sleep of reason begets monsters.

diff --git a/20031111165539.blog b/20031111165539.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9b4d341 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031111165539.blog @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +A rant — Why are CSS designers so utterly freaking clueless? +

People who put absolute pixel sizes in CSS layouts should be lashed
+with knouts. I’ve tripped over this problem yet again while moving my
+blog; I’m using b2, and the default
+stylesheet shipped with it was obviously produced by some graphics
+designer who has failed to grasp the fact that there are lots of
+different display sizes and resolutions out there.

+

OK, for those of you who don’t see the problem here, it goes like this.
+Graphic designer composes his layout on a 1024×768 display. To make the
+spacing come out all pretty, he specifies a 10 or 11-pixel font which looks
+good on that 72-dot-per-inch display. Now I view it on my 1920×1440 display
+at over 120dpi resolution — and the font is 40% smaller and a hell of
+a strain to read. There are many other, related errors as well, like
+specifying absolute box or table widths when percentage of screen width
+would be more appropriate.

+

The basic error here is overcontrolling the layout rather than
+letting the user’s browser choose it in execution of the user’s
+preferences. Graphics designers are chronically prone to thinking of
+a browser as a device for delivering pixels, rather than information.
+But it doesn’t have to be this way — and, in fact, HTML isn’t
+supposed to be. You can make your CSS scale to the user’s chosen font
+size by specifying box dimensions in units of em, en and ex (which are
+evaluated relative to the parent box’s current font size) rather than
+pixels. But most CSS designers are apparently either too freaking
+incompetent to do this or just don’t give a rat’s ass about
+display-independence or the user’s preferences to begin with.

+

This sorry state of affairs is one of the better arguments for the
+proposition, widely shared among my peers, that graphics designers
+are basically a bunch of dope-smoking ponytailed
+dimwits who need to be smacked upside the head on a regular basis and
+not let anywhere near a software or web design without strict adult
+supervision by a cluebat-wielding programmer.

+

Another stupid graphic-designer stunt is changing the colors on
+visited and unvisited hotlinks away from the browser defaults (it’s especially bad when they’re mapped to the same color). What make this annoying is that it
+discards an important visual cue for web page users by making it less
+obvious where the hotlinks are. People who do this should be clubbed
+with a chair leg until they stop.

+

Sigh. Here’s the default b2
+stylesheet and here is the stylesheet I
+use. Notice how much simpler mine is? The more you default
+rendering decisions to the browser like Ghod and Tim Berners-Lee
+intended, the more error-prone crap your stylesheets can omit, the
+faster your pages will render, and the better the user experience
+will be.

+

UPDATE: A reader tells me that part of this is the browser vendors’
+fault. It seems that on older browsers, only pixel sizes worked
+reliably. He says this has long since been fixed but the damage to
+CSS designers’ minds was already done. Another reader pointed me to a
+good rant on this topic by Jamie Zawinski.

diff --git a/20031112150701.blog b/20031112150701.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c398bd7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031112150701.blog @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +CSS designer cluelessness in a nutshell +

The CSS designer for WordPress, the successor to the
+b2 engine that I may be upgrading to shortly, responded to my previous
+rant. In a generally thoughtful and responsive post, he said “But
+even if [pixel sizes] are defined for fonts, does your browser not let
+you easily resize this?”.

+

This, I’m afraid, is CSS designer cluelessness in a nutshell.

+

In particular, I should not have to do an explicit operation every
+time to get the font sizes I want. In general, answers of the form
+“you can override the designer’s preferences by jumping through hoops”
+show the wrong attitude. This attitude clashes with the objective
+reality of lots of different display devices out there.

+

It’s also bad human-factors engineering. As the user, my preferences
+should be primary — in font sizes as in all other things. That’s
+how the Web is supposed to work, and CSS and web designers who don’t
+get this are doing users a major disservice in order to gratify their
+own egos.

+

Ultimately they’re shooting themselves in the foot, too — think about
+what will happen over time as display sizes both average larger and
+the size dispersion increases (e.g. cell phones and PDAs get WiFi at
+the same time desktop displays go to 1600×1200 and higher).
+Fixed-size fonts, in farticular, are going to be a bigger and bigger
+lose as time goes on.

+

To the extent you think of yourself as a servant of the user, rather
+than an artist whose job it is to make things pretty, that’s when your
+designs will have real and lasting value. This is a hard lesson for
+artists to learn, but it’s the only way to avoid filling the web with
+designs that are gaudy, wearisome, and lose their utility as display
+technology improves and becomes more various.

diff --git a/20031112181936.blog b/20031112181936.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2cc0833 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031112181936.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Possible outage today +

The good folks at ibiblio.org are about to upgrade me from b2 to WordPress. There might be a short outage involved, and it’s possible the

+

new CSS will garble my pages. Any problems should be transient and fixed
+within a few hours.

diff --git a/20031112183357.blog b/20031112183357.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..99ba1ab --- /dev/null +++ b/20031112183357.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Yee-ha! W00t! Excelsior! +

I got email from Dr. Stanley Schmidt, the editor of Analog,
+about an hour ago. The bad news was, he turned down the short story. The
+good news was he accepted the fact article.

+

I’m going to be published in Analog!

+

/me does geeky victory dance

+

OK, so this is one of those things where if you don’t immediately
+get why it’s wicked cool, no amount of explanation is likely to
+enlighten you. I’ll just say I’ve been a science-fiction fan
+for 35 years and Analog has always been the banner-bearer
+for my kind of SF, the stuff with the rivets in it. I’ve wanted to
+get published there when I grew up ever since I was 11 years old;
+this is literally a childhood dream come true.

+

Oh. And Dr. Schmidt asked me to send him more fiction…

diff --git a/20031113120547.blog b/20031113120547.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0dbffcc --- /dev/null +++ b/20031113120547.blog @@ -0,0 +1,65 @@ +The desexualization of the American (fe)male +

There’s been quite a blogospheric flap lately about Kim DuToit’s
+essay The
+Pussification Of The Western Male. The single feature of the
+conversation that surprised me most is that nobody connected it to
+Steven den Beste’s equally searing essay Anglo Women are an
+endangered species.

+

Steve’s point complements Kim’s and amplifies it in some useful
+ways. Nobody wants to go back to the days when women were treated as
+chattels or second-class citizens. Anyway, attempts to do so would be
+doomed for reasons not so much moral as economic; societies that
+suppress the productivity and intelligence of 50% of their members are
+inevitably going to lose out to societies that don’t. But what Steve and
+Kim have pointed out is that Western society often has pursued the
+worthy goal of equality in a way that is hamfisted and destructive,
+because it tries to remake human nature rather than acknowledging and
+working with it.

+

These essays address two specific problems we’ve been saddled with;
+Kim’s with the attack on masculinity, and Steve’s with the attack on
+femininity. Among white anglos (especially bicoastal
+“progressive” white anglos), it is no longer respectable
+for a male person to behave like a man and a female person to behave
+like a woman.

+

In fact, in today’s bien-pensant circles, one can be attacked as a
+sexist for suggesting that the phrase “like a man” or
+“like a woman” has any meaning at all. Many of us have
+become obscurely terrified of sexual dimorphism, apparently out of
+fear that acknowledging it will bring back the bad old days.

+

This kind of attitude has done more damage than most people
+realize. Read those essays. There’s something gone badly wrong when
+normal boys are dosed with Ritalin for being normally loud and
+aggressive, and only strippers have the privilege of hugging a man
+they like while at work.

+

I think our culture will recover from this. Beginning in the
+1950s, portions of the kibbutz movement in Israel made the most
+fervent try yet at erasing sex differences — they raised kids
+in creches and tried to systematically stamp out sex-differentiated
+behaviors. They failed; the children of the first generation, despite
+intense socialization, gravitated back to traditional sex roles.

+

We’ll all be happier when we relax enough to acknowledge that
+although equality before the law is something every human deserves,
+some things naturally fall in men’s country and some in women’s
+country — and the fact that minorities of men and women behave
+in gender-atypical ways doesn’t change that reality. There will never
+be more female soldiers or policemen than male ones, and never more
+male nurses and child-rearers than female ones. Men are going to
+groove on power tools and women are going to coo at babies; that’s
+just the way it is. down to our DNA. Behavioral dimorphism is wired
+into us for good reasons that have everything to do with Darwin and
+nothing to do with political correctness.

+

The first stage of recovery is recognizing that there’s a problem
+— that men and women find each others’ behavioral as well as
+physical sex differences attractive, and that neither men nor women
+are well served by efforts to cram us all into a unisex box. My wife
+once observed, on behalf of a billion sisters, “What good is a man if
+you cut off his balls?” — and she was talking everyday behavior,
+not just anatomy or sexual function. There aren’t a lot of men who
+will seek out the company of defeminized women if they have a choice
+in the matter, either.

+

That is where essays like Kim’s and Steve’s can help. By waking us up
+and pissing us off, they remind us that our sex-linked behaviors and
+our preferences for sex-linked behaviors in others actually
+matter, that they’re every bit as much a part of our normal
+human makeup as having penises or vaginas. People who want us to
+forget this for ideological reasons are objectively inhumane.

diff --git a/20031114002046.blog b/20031114002046.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..877555b --- /dev/null +++ b/20031114002046.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Whose character are you? +

I always wanted to be a Heinlein character when I grew up. Somebody thinks I succeeded…

+

Robert Heinlein
Robert Heinlein wrote you – your stranger in a
strange land, you.

+

Which Author’s Fiction are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

diff --git a/20031114002737.blog b/20031114002737.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dac91ac --- /dev/null +++ b/20031114002737.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +Communism and the Jews +

Uh-oh. I see another identity-politics double-bind coming. Eugene Volokh comments on the anti-semitic canard that Jews were disproportionally influential in the development of Communism. The sides in this kind of dispute are very predictable. One one hand, the anti-Semites, a disgusting crew of racist troglodytes with evil motives. On the other, the good-hearted and right-thinking people in the world exclaiming in horror at the very thought that anyone might say anything veering so close to the classic tropes of anti-Semitic propaganda. (And I am not being the least bit ironic in either description, not this time.)

+

Unfortunately, the awkward thing about this particular canard is that it happens to be true. And that illustrates a serious problem, an inability to cope that most historians have acquired when questions of history go too near certain forbidden topics and modes of inquiry.

+

As Eugene Volokh’s sources note, a disproportionately large number of the original Bolsheviks were Jewish. Karl Marx was ethnically Jewish, though his parents had converted to Christianity. It is impossible to study the history of Marxism, Socialism, and Communism without noticing how many Jewish names crop up among the leading intellectuals. It is equally impossible not to notice how many of the Old Left families in the U.S. were (and still are) Jewish — and, more specifically, Ashkenazim of German or Eastern European extraction. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg didn’t come out of nowhere.

+

It’s not even very hard to understand why this is. There is a pattern, going back to Spinoza in the 1600s, of Jewish intellectuals seeking out the leading edge of certain kinds of reform movements. Broadly speaking, if you look at any social movement of the last 300 years that was secular, rationalist, and communitarian, somewhere in it you would find nonobservant Jews providing a lot of the intellectual firepower and organizational skills. Often a disproportionate share, relative to other population groups.

+

Communism was one example; there are many others. One of my favorites is the Ethical Culture movement. Today, we have the Free Software movement, not coincidentally founded by Jewish atheist Richard Stallman. There is an undeniable similarity among all these movements, an elusive deep
+structure having to do not so much with shared beliefs as a shared style of believing that one might call messianic social rationalism.

+

Anybody who thinks I’m arguing for a conspiracy theory should check their meds. No, there is something much simpler and subtler at work here. Inherited religious myths, even when they no longer have normative force, influence the language and conceptual frameworks that intellectuals use to approach other issues. The mythologist Joseph Campbell once noted that thinkers with a Catholic background like mine gravitate towards universalizing mysticisms and Protestants towards individualist redemptionism; he could have added that thinkers with a Jewish heritage tend to love messianic social doctrines. (One can cite exceptions to all three, of course, but the correlation will still be there after you’ve done so.)

+

Thus, assimilated Jews have a particular propensity for constructing secular messianisms — or for elaborating and intellectualizing secular messianisms invented by gentiles. But you can’t say this sort of thing in academia; you get called a racist if you do. And you especially aren’t allowed to notice the other reason movements like Communism sometime look not unlike Jewish conspiracies — which is that the IQ bell curve for Jews has a mean about a standard deviation north of the IQ bell curve for Caucasian gentiles.

+

In cold and sober truth, in any kind of organization where intelligence matters — even the Communist movement —, you are going to find a disproportionate number of Jews with their hands on the levers. It doesn’t take any conspiracy to arrange this, and it’s not the Jews’ fault the goyim around them are such narrs (Yiddish
+for “imbeciles”). It just happens.

+

But only people like me who don’t give a shit about being castigated for political incorrectness are willing to even whisper these things. Because that’s true, anti-anti-Semites can’t counter anti-Semitic muck-spreading with the truth; instead, they have to pretend that none of the historical patterns around which anti-Semites have constructed
+their paranoid delusions have any basis in fact at all.

+

This is denial, and leaves the good guys in a damn weak position against anti-Semitic racists, who by distorting the record only a little can not only feel they have the truth on their side, but in some nontrivial ways actually be justified in that belief.

+

Unlike the anti-Semites, I mostly like the cultural traits that led so many Jewish intellectuals to Communism — including one I haven’t mentioned yet, the urge to transcend ethnic tribalism
+and order the world according to a Law. But if the road to a Christian hell is paved with good individual intentions, the road to totalitarian hell is paved with communitarian idealism. It’s a tragedy that in Communism Jewish idealism, messianism, and intellectualism nourished a monster that turned on the Jews and killed so many of them.

+

If the discussion didn’t violate so many taboos, mainstream scholars could start asking even more interesting questions. Like: exactly how and why did thinkers raised in the relatively gentle communitarianism of the Jewish tradition become apologists for the vicious collectivism of Marxism and all its toxic children? And what can we do to keep the like from happening again, to Jews or anyone else?

+

But these questions probably won’t get seriously asked in my lifetime. Because political correctness has made us afraid to notice that, in some ways, the Jews really have had a special, shaping influence on the reform politics of the modern era, including Communism. About that much, the anti-Semites are right.

diff --git a/20031114135256.blog b/20031114135256.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..da5ab56 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031114135256.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Here’s what kept me from blogging +

This is what kept me too busy to blog for months:

+

Book cover image
+

+

To find out more about it, go here.

diff --git a/20031114182130.blog b/20031114182130.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5a83b55 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031114182130.blog @@ -0,0 +1,91 @@ +Selecting for intelligence +

Mike Smith relays an interesting possible explanation for the observed
+statistical fact that American and European Jews have a mean IQ a
+standard deviation higher than Caucasian gentiles:

+

+During the period from ancient times to modern times, there was a
+constant phenomenon of Jews converting to Christianity (there were
+many social pressures to do so). In a nutshell, the idea is that the
+lower-IQ Jews were statistically more likely to convert, as it freed
+them from having to learn to read Torah. During the Middle Ages, it
+was not worth the effort for most people to become literate; the
+payback was not worth it. Books were rare and expensive, and learning
+to read was no guarantee of getting ahead in life. Of course, people
+like to do what they’re especially good at, and the higher-IQ’s among
+the Jews did not find learning to read to be such a burden. As such,
+they were statistically less likely to convert (and statistically more
+likely to become fathers of many children in a culture that valued
+intelligence.) It is worth noting that in ancient times, Jews were not
+stereotyped as especially intelligent; that stereotype arose in the
+Middle Ages. +

+

This is a special case of one of my favorite Damned Ideas, originally
+developed by John W. Campbell in the 1960s from some speculations
+by a forgotten French anthropologist. Campbell proposed that the
+manhood initiation rituals found in many primitive tribes are a
+selective machine designed to permit adulthood and reproduction only
+to those who can demonstrate verbal fluency and the ability to override
+instinctive fears on verbal command.

+

Campbell suggests that all living humans are descended from groups
+of hominids that, having evolved full-human mental capability in some
+of their members, found the overhead of supporting the dullards too
+high. So they began selecting for traits correlated with intelligence
+through initiation rituals timed for just as their offspring were
+achieving reproductive capacity; losers got driven out, or possibly
+killed and eaten.

+

Campbell pointed out that the common elements of tribal initiations
+are (a) scarring or cicatricing of the skin, opening the way for
+lethal infections, (b) alteration or mutilation of the genitals,
+threatening the ability to reproduce, and (b) alteration of the mouth
+and teeth, threatening the ability to eat. These seem particularly
+well optimized for inducing maximum instinctive fear in the subject
+while actually being relatively safe under controlled and relatively
+hygenic conditions. The core test of initiation is this: can the
+subject conquer fear and submit to the initiation on the basis
+of learned (verbal, in preliterate societies) command?

+

Campbell noticed the first order effect was to shift the mean of
+the IQ bell curve upwards over generations. The second-order effect,
+which if he noticed he didn’t talk about, was to start an arms race in
+initiation rituals; competing bands experimented with different
+selective filters (not consciously but through random variation).
+Setting the bar too low or too high would create a bad tradeoff
+between IQ selectivity and maintaining raw reproductive capacity. So
+we’re descended from the hominids who found the right tradeoff to push
+their mean IQ up as rapidly as possible and outcompeted the groups
+that chose less well.

+

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Campbell or his sources, but
+this theory explains why initiation rituals for girls are a rare and
+usually post-literate phenomenon. Male reproductive capacity is
+cheap; a healthy young man can impregnate several young women a day,
+and healthy young men are instinct-wired to do exactly that whenever
+they can get away with it. Female reproductive capacity, on
+the other hand, is scarce and precious. So it makes sense to select
+the boys ruthlessly and give the girls a pass. Of course if you push
+this too far you don’t get enough hunters and fighters, but the right
+tradeoff pretty clearly is not 1-to-1.

+

(This would also explain why humans are designed for mild polygyny,
+1 to 3 sexual partners per male. You can spot this by looking at
+where human beings are on various physical characteristics that
+correlate with degree of polygyny in other primates — disparity in
+average size between males and females, for example, is strongly
+correlated with it.)

+

What Campbell did notice is that this theory of selection
+by initiation would neatly explain one of the mysteries of human
+paleoanthropology — how human beings got so smart so fast. The
+differences between H. Erectus and H. Sapiens are not large in
+absolute genetic terms (they can’t be, we share over 94% of our genome
+with chimps) but they’re hard to credit given normal rates of
+morphological change in mammals and only two million years to work
+in. Something must have been putting hominids under
+abnormally strong selective pressure — and Campbell’s idea
+is that we did it to ourselves!

+

Now, I’m not sure I believe Jews bootstrapping themselves up a
+whole standard deviation in less than 2000 years, but if you apply
+a similar idea to a longer timeframe it begins to look pretty
+reasonable. (And Campbell did suggest that the Jewish practice of
+infant circumcision had originally been a manhood rite.)

+

Within my lifetime, I expect we’re going to have the ability to do
+germ-line enhancement of human intelligence. I strongly suspect that that
+will set off another arms race — because cultures that suppress
+that technology will be once again doomed against cultures that do. And
+this time, we’re smart enough to know that in advance…

diff --git a/20031114213807.blog b/20031114213807.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4a7b665 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031114213807.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Funny, but incorrect +

From the November 12 “Kernel Panic”:

+

Nov 12 2003 strip
+

+

In fact, this strip is incorrect. I did not coin the term “open source”;
+I only popularized it. It was coined by
+my friend Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute. While it’s true that I more or less ran the brainstorming session and fortunately had enough of a clue to recognize a winner when it popped up, the creative leap was all hers.

+

UPDATE: Yes, it now reads “popularized”. Chris Wright changed it.

diff --git a/20031117214711.blog b/20031117214711.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d441a83 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031117214711.blog @@ -0,0 +1,139 @@ +What good is IQ? +

A reader asks:

+
+

To clarify, while I believe natural selection explains a lot I have
+caveats about IQ as a tool for testing intelligence. If you can’t
+measure the coast of France with a single number how can you do it
+with human intelligence?

+
+

Easily. Human intelligence is a great deal less complex than the
+coast of France. :-)

+

It’s fashionable nowadays to believe that intelligence is some
+complicated multifactor thing that can’t be captured in one number.
+However, one of the best-established facts in psychometry (the science
+of measuring mind) is that it is quite difficult to write a test of
+mental ability that is not at least 50% correlated with all other such
+tests. Or, to put it another way, no matter how you design ten tests for
+mental ability, at least about half the variance in the scores for any one
+of them statistically appears to be due to a “general intelligence”
+that shows up on the other nine tests as well.

+

Psychometricians call this general intelligence measure “g”. It
+turns out to predict important real-world success measures quite well
+— not just performance in school but income and job success as
+well. The fundamental weakness in multiple-factor theories of intelligence
+is that measures of intelligence other than g appear to predict
+very little about real-world outcomes. So you can call a lot of other
+things “intelligence” if you want to make people feel warm and fuzzy,
+but doing so simply isn’t very useful in the real world.

+

Some multifactor theorists, for example, like to describe accurate
+proprioception (an acute sense of body position and balance) as a kind
+of intelligence. Let’s say we call this “p”. The trouble with this
+is that there are very few situations in which a combination of high p
+and low g is actually useful — people need to be able to balance
+checkbooks more often than they need to walk high wires. Furthermore,
+g is easier to substitute for p than the other way around; a person
+with high g but low p can think up a way to not have to walk a high
+wire far better than a person with low g but high p can think up a way
+not to have to balance a checkbook. So g is in a strict functional
+sense more powerful than p. Similar arguments apply to most of the
+other kinds of specialized non-g ‘intelligence’ that have been
+proposed.

+

Once you know about g, you can rank mental-capability tests by
+how well their score correlates with g. IQ is valuable because a
+well-composed IQ test measures g quite effectively. For purposes
+of non-technical discussion, g and IQ can be considered the same, and
+pychometricians now accept that an IQ test which does not closely track
+g is defective.

+

A lot of ink has been spent by people who aren’t psychometricians
+on insisting that g is a meaningless statistical artifact. The most
+famous polemic on this topic was Stephen Jay Gould’s 1981 book
+The Mismeasure of Man, a book which was muddled,
+wrong, and in some respects rather dishonest. Gould was a
+believing Marxist; his detestation of g was part of what he perceived
+as a vitally important left-versus right kulturkampf. It is
+very unfortunate that he was such a persuasive writer.

+

Unfortunately for Gould, g is no statistical phantom. Recently g
+and IQ have been shown to correlate with measurable physiological
+variables such as the level of trace zinc in your hair and performance
+on various sorts of reaction-time tests. There are hints in the
+recent literature that g may be largely a measure of the default level
+of a particular neurotransmitter associated with states of mental
+alertness and speed of thought; it appears that calling people of
+subnormal intelligence “slow” may not be just a metaphor!

+

IQ is one of several large science-related issues on which
+political bias in the dominant media culture has lead it to present as
+fact a distorted or even reversed version of the actual science. In
+1994, after Murray and Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve got a
+thoroughly undeserved trashing, fifty leading psychometricians and
+psychologists co-signed a summary of mainstream
+science on intelligence. It makes eye-opening reading.

+

The reasons many popular and journalistic accounts continue to
+insist that IQ testing is at best meaningless and at worst a sinister
+plot are twofold. First, this belief flatters half of the population.
+“My IQ may be below average, but that doesn’t matter because IQ is
+meaningless and I have high emotional intelligence!” is,
+understandably, a favorite evasion maneuver among dimwits. But that
+isn’t the worst of it. The real dynamite is not in
+individual differences but rather that the distribution of IQ (and
+hence of g) varies considerably across groups in ways that are
+politically explosive.

+

Men vs. women is the least of it. With other variables controlled,
+men and women in a population have the same mean IQ, but the
+dispersion differs. The female bell curve is slightly narrower, so
+women have fewer idiots and fewer geniuses among them. Where this
+gets touchy is that it may do a better job than cultural sexism of
+explaining why most of the highest achievers in most fields are male
+rather than female. Equal opportunity does not guarantee equal
+results, and lot of feminist theory goes out the window.

+

But male/female differences are insignificant compared to the real
+hot potato: differences in the mean IQ of racial and ethnic groups.
+These differences are real and they are large enough to have severe
+impact in the real world. In previous blog entries I’ve mentioned the
+one-standard-deviation advantage of Ashkenazic Jews over gentile
+whites; that’s roughly fifteen points of IQ. Pacific-rim Asians
+(Chinese, Japanese, Koreans etc.) are also brighter on average by a
+comparable margin. So, oddly enough, are ethnic Scots — though
+not their close kin the Irish. Go figure…

+

And the part that, if you are a decent human being and not a racist
+bigot, you have been dreading: American blacks average a standard
+deviation lower in IQ than American whites at about 85. And
+it gets worse: the average IQ of African blacks is lower
+still, not far above what is considered the threshold of mental
+retardation in the U.S. And yes, it’s genetic; g seems to be about
+85% heritable, and recent studies of effects like regression towards
+the mean suggest strongly that most of the heritability is DNA rather
+than nurturance effects.

+

For anyone who believe that racial equality is an important goal,
+this is absolutely horrible news. Which is why a lot of
+well-intentioned people refuse to look at these facts, and will
+attempt to shout down anyone who speaks them in public. There have
+been several occasions on which leading psychometricians have had
+their books canceled or withdrawn by publishers who found the actual
+scientific evidence about IQ so appalling that they refused to print
+it.

+

Unfortunately, denial of the facts doesn’t make them go away. Far from
+being meaningless, IQ may be the single most important statistic about
+human beings, in the precise sense that differences in g probably drive
+individual and social outcomes more than any other single measurable
+attribute of human beings.

+

Mean IQ differences do not justify making assumptions about any individual.
+There are African black geniuses and Ashkenazic Jewish morons; humanity and
+ethics demand that we meet each individual human being as an individual,
+without prejudice. At the same time, group differences have a significance
+too great to ignore. In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but
+commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is
+unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the
+general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact
+independent of skin color.

+

And that is actually a valuable hint about how to get beyond
+racism. A black man with an IQ of 85 and a white man with an IQ of 85
+are about equally likely to have the character traits of poor impulse
+control and violent behavior associated with criminality — and
+both are far more likely to have them than a white or black man with
+an IQ of 110. If we could stop being afraid of IQ and face up to it,
+that would give us an objective standard that would banish racism per
+se. IQ matters so much more than skin color that if we started paying
+serious attention to the former, we might be able to stop paying
+attention to the latter.

+

UPDATE: An excellent summary of science relating to g
+is here

diff --git a/20031120051138.blog b/20031120051138.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..777f715 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031120051138.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Jack needs a girlfriend +


+

+

“Free Love”, eh? Well, that would explain a lot. Jack must have been the dude I saw
+damn near run into a doorframe yesterday because he was checking out my wife Cathy so intently he forgot to watch where he
+was going. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

diff --git a/20031121002410.blog b/20031121002410.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c10ccdf --- /dev/null +++ b/20031121002410.blog @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Re: My Photo diff --git a/20031121135521.blog b/20031121135521.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0b1a1f8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031121135521.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +The Prudential interview +

I’ve spent a lot of time and effort since 1997 developing effective propaganda tactics for
+reaching the business world on behalf of the hacker community — among other things, by
+popularizing the term ‘open source’. If you want to grok how this is done, read
+my October 15 interview with a bunch of Prudential Securities investors.

+

Pay attention to style as well as content. This is the language you have to learn to speak
+to reach the people who write big checks. It’s not very complicated, if you just bear in mind
+that these people are obsessed with two things: risk management and return on investment. As they should be — it’s their job.

diff --git a/20031205163808.blog b/20031205163808.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..aea11be --- /dev/null +++ b/20031205163808.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Salaries are dropping. Time to celebrate! +

So, the latest trend to hit the business magazines is falling programmer salaries. I can’t lay hands on the article just now, but it seems some CEO under pressure to outsource his programming to India had the bright idea of offering lower salaries (competitive with Indian levels, not U.S. levels) to programmers in the U.S. He got 90 applicants, even though the offer was for about half of what used to be considered normal for the positions.

+

A pointer to this article was posted to my favorite mailing list by a friend who is depressed about programmer salaries dropping, He wasn’t un-depressed by the revelation, at the end of the article, that said CEO ended up jacking some of his salaries back up to “normal” levels to keep his best people.

+

There are a bunch of ways I could respond to this. One is by arguing that outsourcing programming work is a fad that will largely reverse itself once the true, hidden costs start to become apparent. Even if that weren’t so, the Indian advantage would be temporary at best; as the Indian programmer’s value rises, so will the price he charges. I believe these things are true. But in keeping with tradition here at Armed and Dangerous, I’m going to skip the easy, soft arguments and cut straight to the most important and contentious one of all — falling salaries are good for you.

+

If you’re a programmer upset by falling programmer salaries, I hope you’re prepared to be equally gloomy about the continuing fall in real-dollar prices of all the other labor-intensive goods you buy. Because trust me, they get cheaper the exact same way — and somewhere out there, there are people who are pissed off and depressed because the market wouldn’t support their old salaries.

+

But each time this happens, more people gain than lose. The money programmers aren’t making is, ultimately, money some other consumer gets to keep and use for something else, because the price of the bundled goods programmmers were helping produce have dropped. The corporate cost-cutters only get to profit from this as a transient thing, until the next round of price wars. Lather, rinse, repeat.

+

The free market is a wonderful thing. I was going to call it the most marvellous instrument ever devised for making people wealthy and free, but that would be wrong — the free market isn’t a ‘device’ any more than love or gravity or sunshine are devices, it’s what you have naturally when nobody is using force to fuck things up.

+

Sometimes, when you and your friends are on the bad end of one of its efficiency-seeking changes, it’s hard to remember that the market is a wonderful thing for almost everybody almost all the time. But it’s worth remembering, just as it’s worth remembering that free speech is a wonderful thing even when it’s the Nazis or Communists exercising it.

+

Why is this? Because the alternatives to free speech, even when the people pushing them mean well, always turn into petty tyrannies now and become grand tyrannies in the course of time. The alternatives to markets decay into tyranny a lot faster.

diff --git a/20031206005254.blog b/20031206005254.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ce47c22 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031206005254.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +Da Big Snow +

Yup, the blizzard is big. Here in eastern Pennsylvania we’ve had over a foot of snow and
+a lot of drifting today. I shoveled my driveway. I’m going to be stiff tomorrow.

diff --git a/20031208053446.blog b/20031208053446.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..18a0af2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031208053446.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Cthulhu and Christ + + + + +

This is, of course, a parody of a fundamentalist Christian evangelical tract. More specifically, it is a remarkably accurate take on the style of Jack T. Chick, a pamphleteer who has occupied the scungy basement of Christian evangelism since the 1960s. Both the talking heads are recognizable, stock Chick characters — the sinful, scornful unbeliever and the saintly white-haired minister.

+

Some cultural-studies type ought to do a book on the way that the Cthulhu mythos has oozed forth from its pulp origins to become Western pop culture’s generic Nightmare From Beyond. This parody could have been written thirty years ago — Chick goes back that far and has been remarkably, er, consistent in his output — but thirty years ago only a handful of SF and fantasy fans would have recognized Cthulhu. Nowadays ol’ squid-face is all over the place; there are, ironically, plush toys.

+

I put it down to fantasy-role-playing games, which have reached a far larger audience than print SF or fantasy. Gamers have borrowed the Cthulhu mythos so frequently that it’s a cliché — but one which, thanks to the eerie power of Lovecraft’s imagery, never completely loses its power to send a chill down the spine. Even the mere names — the Necronomicon, Yog-Sothoth, the corpse-eaters of Leng, the Hounds of Tindalos, and of course dread Cthulhu himself — is to feel a vast and threatening darkness.

+

Hallis’s parody draws on a much more specific tradition. The idea of the Campus Crusade for Cthulhu as a parody of the Campus Crusade for Christ was already live when I was in college in the 1970s. But Hallis makes their point more compactly and effectively, and therein lies the real touch of genius in this piece.

+

Jack T. Chick’s pamphlets speak plainly the most fundamental message of Christian evangelism: believe or be damned. It’s all about fear, the induced fear that if you don’t get straight with God you will burn in Hell. Not for Chick the sugar-coating of talk about love or morality or becoming a better person. Writing for the lowest common denominator, he zeroes in on terror.

+

But so pervaded is our culture with Christian ideas and imagery that it is difficult to see how nasty and inhumane Chick and his ilk really are; even those of us who are not Christians tend to respond to the fear-mongering with a kind of numbness, reacting to Chick’s ugly, drab oeuvre mainly as an offense against good taste (or a form of unintentional found humor). For the more intelligent sort of Christian, Chick is embarrassing — like a slovenly relative you can’t quite kick out of your house because, after all, he is family.

+

What is really incisive about Hallis’s parody is his demonstration that very little about the Christian world-view or rhetoric has to change to make it indistinguishable from Lovecraft’s nightmare. Ah, the rapture of being taken up by the Elder Gods! Worship and sacrifice are good things. Trust the preacher, he will make you fear and show you the way.

+

It used to be popular among a certain sort of leftist to claim that the collectivist and apocalyptic ideas in socialism made it a proper political analog of Christianity. They were arguably correct in this; where they went wrong was in considering the connection flattering to socialism rather than damning of Christianity. Hallis’s parody is a starker demonstration; the fact that both the fictional cult of Cthulhu and the all-too-real religion of Christianity both depend so fundamentally on the terror of the Gods is not grounds for exonerating the former, but rather for condemning the latter.

diff --git a/20031209233634.blog b/20031209233634.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7053dcb --- /dev/null +++ b/20031209233634.blog @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +Ejected in Geneva +

The organizers of the Internet Summit in Geneva have had Dr. Paul
+Twomey, the president of ICANN (the organization that’s chartered to
+administer the international domain-name system), ejected by security
+guards after he’d flown twenty hours to participate in the
+meeting.

+

I was not especially surprised. The organizers of the Geneva
+summit seem to be very much the same scum of the planet that one
+normally finds running these U.N. events — third-string
+diplomatic timeservers, addle-brained NGO moonbats, a scattering of
+celebrity Eurotrash, and a legion of gray apparatchiks from
+authoritarian Third World pestholes. It didn’t astonish me that
+they’d use force to keep out anyone who might interfere with their
+plans for a government-friendly, politically-correct, censored, and
+very thoroughly controlled Internet.

+

No, the really surprising part is that I found myself sympathizing
+with Dr. Twomey. ICANN’s performance, while not the unmitigated
+disaster many of its critics like to portray, has not been glorious.
+Way too many deals have been done in back rooms and the organization has
+been far too kind to expansive trademark claims and other sorts of
+corporate land-grab.

+

Perhaps the one salutary effect of the Geneva summit is to remind us
+that things could easily be worse — and almost certainly will be, if
+the U.N. gets control.

diff --git a/20031215125657.blog b/20031215125657.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5244cbf --- /dev/null +++ b/20031215125657.blog @@ -0,0 +1,181 @@ +The Last Samurai +

Hollywood has given us a run of surprisingly good movies recently.
+By ‘surprisingly good‘ I mean that they’re rather better
+than one might expect from their genre. Loony Toons: Back In
+Action, for example, could have been a mere merchandising
+vehicle, a repetition of clichés and tired sight gags. Instead
+it was a wickedly funny combination of Animaniac edginess with classic
+Warner Brothers wackiness. It has a few moments of true brilliance
+— the sequence in which Elmer Fudd chases Bugs and Daffy through
+Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” (think of melting clocks)
+is jaw-droppingly wonderful, sublime art.

+

Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World was
+also a surprising treat. I’ve read all 20 of the Aubrey/Maturin
+novels. The movie doesn’t capture their texture and depth —
+that would be impossible, they are deeply literary works — but
+as an adventure movie that refers to the books without insulting the
+reader’s intelligence it works quite well.

+

The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter
+movies are so good that hard-core fans of their respective books are
+still pinching themselves, wondering when they’re going to wake up to
+the discovery that they’re actually watching the usual dumbed-down
+Hollywood crap. (I say this as a Tolkien fan so hard-core that I was
+able to catch nuances of the spoken Elvish that weren’t in the
+subtitles.)

+

Of course there have been dreadful turkeys where we expected
+better, as well. The third Matrix movie and Star
+Wars: Attack of the Clones leap to mind. But dreadful turkeys
+are part of the normal scene; what’s abnormal is that New
+Line gave Peter Jackson the money and freedom to make
+Rings movies that, while rushed and not without the
+occasional compromise, are almost achingly good.

+

Think about it. When was the last time you saw a movie that (a) was
+a book adaptation faithful enough for the fans to cheer it, (b) got
+great reviews from movie critics, and (c) was boffo box office? Just
+counting the Rings and Potter movies and Master & Commander,
+we’ve now had five of these in relatively quick succession. Something
+is going on here. Can it be that Hollywood is having an attack of
+intelligence and taste?

+

(My wife Cathy suggests Saving Private Ryan as a
+precursor of the trend.)

+

The movie that pushed me to think about this as a pattern, rather
+than a series of isolated incidents, is The Last Samurai.
+I’d been wanting to see this one since the first trailers six months
+ago, but was braced for a disappointment on the scale of Pearl
+Harbor. Hollywood’s record on wide-screen historicals is
+dreadful; they tend to be laughably ahistorical — either
+mindless spectacles or video sermonettes for whatever form of
+political correctness was in vogue the week they were made. Remarkably,
+The Last Samurai almost completely avoids these flaws.

+

I said “almost completely”. The movie is not without
+flaws. But even the flaws are interesting. They illustrate the ways
+in which Hollywood’s metric for a good (or at least successful) movie
+is changing.

+

Let’s start with the bad stuff. First, way too much camera time
+that could have been better employed gets spent on emotive closeups of
+the lead’s phiz (a misfeature The Last Samurai shares with the first two Ring
+movies and I am thus beginning to think of as ‘the Frodo
+flaw’). But this is Hollywood and it’s Tom Cruise and one
+supposes such excess is inevitable.

+

Secondly, the movie is seriously anti-historical in one respect; we
+are supposed to believe that traditionalist Samurai would disdain the
+use of firearms. In fact, traditional samurai loved firearms
+and found them a natural extension of their traditional role as horse
+archers. Samurai invented rolling volley fire three decades before
+Gustavus Adolphus, and improved the musket designs they imported from
+the Portuguese so effectively that for most of the 1600s they were
+actually making better guns than European armorers could produce.

+

But, of course, today’s Hollywood left thinks firearms are
+intrinsically eeeevil (especially firearms in the hands of anyone
+other than police and soldiers) so the virtuous rebel samurai had
+to eschew them. Besides being politically correct, this choice
+thickened the atmosphere of romantic doom around our heroes.

+

Another minor clanger in the depiction of samurai fighting: We are
+given scenes of samurai training to fight empty-hand and unarmored
+using modern martial-arts moves. In fact, in 1877 it is about a
+generation too early for this. Unarmed combat did not become a
+separate discipline with its own forms and schools until the very end
+of the nineteenth century. And when it did, it was based not on
+samurai disciplines but on peasant fighting methods from Okinawa and
+elsewhere that were used against samurai (this is why most
+exotic martial-arts weapons are actually agricultural tools).

+

In 1877, most samurai still would have thought unarmed-combat
+training a distraction from learning how to use the swords, muskets
+and bows that were their primary weapons systems. Only after the
+swords they preferred for close combat were finally banned did this
+attitude really change. But, hey, most moviegoers are unaware of
+these subtleties, so there had to be some chop-socky in the script to
+meet their expectations.

+

One other rewriting of martial history: we see samurai
+ceremoniously stabbing fallen opponents to death with a two-hand
+sword-thrust. In fact, this is not how it was done; real
+samurai delvered the coup de grace by decapitating their
+opponents, and then taking the head as a trophy.

+

No joke. Head-taking was such an important practice that there was
+a special term in Japanese for the art of properly dressing the hair on
+a severed head so that the little paper tag showing the deceased’s name
+and rank would be displayed to best advantage.

+

While the filmmakers were willing to show samurai killing the
+wounded, in other important respects they softened and Westernized the
+behavior of these people somewhat. Algren learned, correctly, that
+‘samurai’ derives from a verb meaning “to
+serve”, but we are misled when the rebel leader speaks of
+“protecting the people”. In fact, noblesse oblige was not
+part of the Japanese worldview; samurai served not ‘the
+people’ but a particular daimyo, and the daimyo served the
+Emperor in theory and nobody but themselves in normal practice.

+

Now for some of the good stuff. It begins with an amazingly strong
+performance by Ken Watanabe as the rebel daimyo Katsumoto. From the
+first moment that you see him, you believe him; there are no moments
+of hey-I’m-Tom-Cruise to mar his immersion in the character, for
+which excellent reason he actually upstages Cruise at several key points.

+

Through Katsumoto and the other Japanese characters, we are made to
+see the intertwined quests for perfection of both technique and self
+that was so central to the samurai warrior-mystic. Indeed, there are
+points at which the filmmakers have some subtle fun with the fact that
+Americans of our day, having successfully naturalized Japanese martial
+arts into our own culture, have learned to understand that path rather
+better than Cruise’s Captain Algren does. I’m thinking especially of
+the point at which a bystander watching Algren lose at sword practice
+tells him he has “too many minds”. The viewer probably knows what
+he is driving at even if Algren does not.

+

Better: the movie is properly respectful of Japanese virtues
+without crossing the line into supine multiculturalism. Captain
+Algren appreciates and accepts the best of an alien culture
+without renouncing his identity as a Westerner, an officer,
+and a gentleman. There is a telling scene after Algren has been
+accepted into the life of his Japanese hosts in which he takes a heavy
+load from Taka (the female lead), who protests that Japanese men never
+help with such things.

+

Algren replies that he is not a Japanese man. In this and other
+ways he refutes an already-standard knock on the movie, which is to
+refer to it as “Dances with Samurai”. But this movie,
+despite the flaws I’ve pointed out, is more honest and far less
+sentimental about the samurai than Dances With Wolves was
+about its Sioux. This is progress of a sort.

+

Algren’s romance with Taka is also handled with a degree of
+restraint that is appropriate but surprising. We get no sexual
+cheap thrills; instead, we get subtle but extremely powerful
+eroticism, notably in the scene where Taka dresses Algren in her
+dead husband’s armor just before the final battle.

+

The film is visually quite beautiful. The details of costume,
+weapons, armor, and the simple artifacts of Japanese village life are
+meticulously and correctly rendered. In fact there are a number of
+points at which the setting is stronger than the script and carries
+one through places where the plotting is a bit implausible.

+

This contrast is an illustration of the uneven way in which
+standards have risen. The Last Samurai, the Rings
+movies, Master & Commander, and the Harry Potter movies
+all have vastly better production values than (I think) they would
+have had even ten years ago — perhaps the huge advances in
+special-effects technology have created a sort of upward pressure on
+the quality of movies’ depictions of reality. On the other hand,
+downright silly plot twists are still acceptable and the conventions
+of the star-vehicle film remain firmly in place.

+

One gets ahistorical howlers and (in fiction) violations of the
+spirit of the original work, but fewer than formerly. In all these
+movies, you can see where they were trimmed to fit Hollywood’s
+marketing needs, but the trimming is done with a lot more sensitivity
+and taste than it used to be. Occasionally one even sees outright
+improvements — the moment in Peter Jackson’s version of
+Boromir’s death scene in which the fallen Gondorian hails Aragorn as
+his king, for example, achieves more power and poignancy than
+Tolkien’s original.

+

I like this trend a lot, but I’m not sure I understand it. The
+Hollywood establishment is in business to make money, but the link
+between market demand and the quality of films has always been
+tenuous at best. It would be nice to think that film audiences
+have required filmmakers to exhibit better taste by developing
+better taste themselves, but in the face of all the awful schlock
+that still gets churned out and makes money, this is a difficult
+case to sustain in general.

+

It feels to me more as though some balance of power within the
+system has shifted and, for whatever reason, creative artists
+have gained power at the expense of the marketeers. Thus, for
+example, Rowling had more than somewhat to do with the casting
+of the Harry Potter movies, and Peter Jackson’s films display
+a nearly obsessive concern with getting the look of Middle-Earth
+right that could hardly be shared by a typical studio exec.

+

Whatever the reason, I’m glad of the trend. I spend a lot more
+time in movie theaters than I use to — and that’s the
+message Hollywood wants to hear.

diff --git a/20031216014034.blog b/20031216014034.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..593fd57 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031216014034.blog @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +Giving Up The Gun +

In response to my post on The Last Samurai, one reader
+asked a question I should have expected: didn’t the Tokugawa Shogunate
+successfully suppress firearms in Japan?

+

No. Actually, they didn’t. Many American believe they did because
+they’ve vaguely heard the argument of Noel Perrin’s book Giving
+Up The Gun, explaining that the Tokugawa Shogunate successfully
+suppressed firearms in Japan, partly by promoting the cult of the
+sword.

+

But the book was wrong. Arthur Tiedemann, an eminent historian of
+Japan, once explained this to me personally. It seems that if you
+study the actual weapons inventories of daimyo houses, it turns out
+they maintained firearms and firearms-wielding troops from the
+Battle of Sekigahara clear through to the Meiji Restoration.

+

This was especially true of the so-called ‘outside
+lords’, the descendants of the survivors of the losing side at
+Sekigahara. Their domains were far from the capitol at Edo and the
+shogunate’s control over them was often little more than nominal.

+

But to significant degree it was true everywhere. The shogunate
+banned firearms, the daimyos pretended to obey the ban, and the
+shogunate pretended to believe them. A very Japanese, face-saving
+compromise.

+

Perrin, alas, was taken in, perhaps because he wanted to be.
+Hoplophobes have been citing his book with approval ever since. But
+while it doesn’t seem to have been a deliberate fraud like Michael
+Bellesisles’s Arming America, it’s just as false to
+fact.

diff --git a/20031218055944.blog b/20031218055944.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9f16893 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031218055944.blog @@ -0,0 +1,166 @@ +Sex and Tolkien +

Yes, I went to my local instantiation of the all-three-LOTR-movies
+marathon on Tuesday, and enjoyed it immensely. The movies were a
+delight; Peter Jackson’s Return Of The King fully lived up
+to the promise of The Fellowship of the Ring and The
+Two Towers. Despite minor flaws and some questionable omissions,
+Tolkien fans have reason to be vastly grateful both for Jackson’s vision
+and the fact that Hollywood actually allowed him to make these movies
+as good as they are.

+

The marathon was also quite a geekfest. The theater was
+wall-to-wall with SF and fantasy fans, SCAdians, computer hackers,
+and the like. A very intelligent, cerebral, imaginative crowd. My
+kind of people, talking and meeting and mixing with each other
+a great deal more than your typical movie crowd does. The fact
+that many people showed up hours early to get good seats, and the
+two half-hour intermissions, helped a lot.

+

In a refutation of stereotypes, many of those attending were
+female. And attractive. And often dressed to display it in Arwen or
+Eowyn outfits. Had I been actually trying, I believe I would have
+taken home at least three phone numbers, which is a significant datum
+even given that I’m a lot more self-confident about the flirting thing
+than most geek guys.

+

Part of me was in anthropologist mode, contemplating the mating
+behaviors on display, even as I was chatting with the pretty redheaded
+theater student from State College, the massage therapist in the seat
+next to me, the blonde in the concession-stand line, and the buxom
+big-eyed wench in the Ramones T-shirt who told me all about re-reading
+the Rings every year since she was eleven, and I’ll be damned
+if she didn’t mean that as at least a bit of a come-on. I wondered
+what Tolkien, Edwardian prude that he was, would have said of the
+human tendency to turn the appreciation of his works into a sort of
+pickup scene for the high-IQ crowd. That led me to consider ribald
+parodies like the hilarious Very Secret Diaries,
+which at least two of the women I chatted with obviously knew quite
+well and I’d bet money the other two did too.

+

I was also thinking, during the movies, about Liv Tyler. Long-time
+readers will be aware that I have warm and lusty feelings about our
+Liv. OK, so I will cheerfully concede that Miranda Otto is a dish and
+well into wouldn’t-kick-her-out-of-bed territory, but her Eowyn
+doesn’t nail the releaser circuitry in my hindbrain quite the way
+Tyler’s Arwen does. During the first movie I found watching Arwen’s
+lips as she spoke Elvish quite an erotic experience. (And it’s not
+just me. My sister Lisa reported, after I mentioned this, having been
+startled to discover the same reaction in herself. This is amusing
+because I have never had any reason to doubt her report that she’s
+normally as straight as a laser-beam.) Arwen isn’t any less sexy
+in the third movie.

+

So I was well-primed to read the essay Warm Beds Are
+Good this morning. This is an extended and thorough consideration
+of sex and sexuality in Tolkien’s works. Towards the end, the author
+makes the telling point that eroticizing various elements in Tolkien’s
+mythos is one of the ways in which modern readers adapt it to their
+own fantasy needs. This makes sense; giving a luscious version of
+Arwen screen time and playing up her thing with Aragorn is not just a
+crude sell-it-with-sex maneuver, it’s a way to make the mythos
+fundamentally more intelligible to a viewer in 2003 than the rather
+dessicated and repressed account of The romance of Aragorn and
+Arwen in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings would
+have been.

+

Warm Beds Are Good fails to grapple with the most
+interesting question of all, however, which is how Arwen and Aragorn
+could possibly have developed the hots for each other in the first
+place. It turns out to be rather hard to come up with any theory of
+Elvish reproductive biology under which Arwen’s behavior makes
+any sense at all.

+

Aragorn’s end isn’t that much of a mystery. He’s an alpha male of
+a warrior culture, chock full o’ testosterone and other dominance
+hormones guaranteed to make him into a serious horn-dog. She’s a
+beautiful princess, broadcasting human-compatible health-and-fertility
+signals in all directions. If she doesn’t actively smell bad, tab A
+fits slot B just fine from the point of view of his
+mating instincts.

+

No, the fundamental problem is Arwen’s lifespan. She is supposedly
+something like two thousand, seven hundred years old when she meets
+Aragorn. That’s an awful lot of Saturday nights at the Last Homely
+Disco West of the Mountains; if she has a sex drive anything like a
+normal human female’s, she ought to have more mileage on her than a
+Liberian tramp steamer. On the other hand, if her sexual wiring is
+fundamentally different from a human female’s, what’n’thehell
+is she doing with Aragorn? He shouldn’t look or smell or behave right
+to trigger her releasers, any more than a talking chimpanzee would to
+most human women.

+

“B-b-but…” I hear you splutter “This is
+fantasy!”, to which I say foo! Tolkien was very
+careful about logical consistency in areas where he was equipped by
+temperament and training to appreciate it; he invented a cosmology,
+thousand of years of history, multiple languages; he drew maps. He
+lectured on the importance of a having convincing and consistent
+secondary world in fantasy. Furthermore, Tolkien never completely
+repudiated the intention that his fiction was a mythic description of
+the lost past of our Earth, and that therefore matter, energy
+and life should be consistent with the forms in which we know
+them.

+

Therefore, it is entirely appropriate to analyze Middle-Earth as
+though it were a science-fictional creation, to assume Elves and Men
+both got DNA, and to ask if the freakin’ biology makes any sense at
+all under this assumption.

+

And one of the facts we have to deal with is that humans and elves
+are not just interfertile, they produce fertile offspring. That means
+they have to be genetically very, very similar. If there
+are dramatic differences between elf and human reproductive behavior,
+the instinctive basis for them must be coded in a relatively small
+set of genes that somehow don’t interfere with that interfertility.
+In fact, technically, Elves and Men have to be subspecies of the
+same stock.

+

When this came up on my favorite mailing list just after the first
+movie came out, my hypothesis was that elves (a) have only rare
+periods of vulnerability to sexual impulses, and (b) imprint on each
+other for life when they mate, like swans. This pattern is actually
+within the envelope of human variation, though uncommon — which
+makes it a plausible candidate for being dominant in another hominid
+subspecies.

+

This ‘swan theory’ would be consistent with Appendix A,
+which (a) has Arwen meeting Aragorn when he was garbed like an elven
+prince and (as near as we can tell through Tolkien’s rather clotted
+chansons-de-geste style) falling for him hard right then and there,
+and (b) has Arwen’s family apparently operating under the assumption
+that once that had happened, the damage was done and she wouldn’t be
+mating with anyone else, noway, nohow.

+

One of the techies on the list shot the swan theory down by finding a
+canonical instance of an Elf remarrying (Finwe, father of Feanor;
+first wife Miriel, second Indis). In subsequent discussion, we
+concluded that it wasn’t possible to frame a consistent theory that
+fit Tolkien’s facts. The sticking-point turned out to be the
+half-elven; Tolkien tells us that they get to choose whether
+they will have the nature of Men or Elves, and it is implied that they
+do so at puberty.

+

Since that’s true, the difference between Men and Elves can’t
+properly be genetic at all. It must be in the cloudy realm of spirit,
+magic, and divine interventions. This is not an area in which Tolkien
+(a devout Catholic) gives us any rules or regularities at all. Elvish
+sexual behavior could be arbitrarily variant from human without any
+reasons other than that Eru keeps exerting his will to make it so,
+and He very well might be intervening to keep elf-maidens’ hormones
+from getting them jiggy Until It’s Time.

+

Helluva way to run a universe, say I. Inelegant. A really
+craftsmanlike god would build his cosmos so it wouldn’t require
+constant divine intervention to function. It’s a serious weakness in
+Tolkien’s ficton, one that runs far deeper than anachronisms like
+domestic cats (which didn’t reach northern Europe until late Roman
+times) and tea (to Europe in 1610) in the Shire.

+

Meanwhile, back in this universe, I’m kind of wishing I’d asked the
+buxom big-eyed wench in the Ramones T-shirt for her phone number. Too
+many alpha-male horn-dog hormones, that’s me. Tolkien wouldn’t have
+understood a sexual culture in which that was even conceivable
+behavior for a happily married man. much less one in which the wench
+and wife would have then been more likely to become friends than not;
+his only category for it would have been debauchery. But I think his
+fantasy continues to work partly because it’s so repressed.

+

Sexual love (and all the mutability of human custom that goes with
+it) is essentially a side issue in Tolkien’s work, primarily a symbol
+of reward for valor (Faramir and Eowyn; Sam and Rosie; Aragorn and
+Arwen, for that matter). His Edwardian restraint produces a nearly
+blank ground on which Peter Jackson can project Liv Tyler and readers
+can project all their own sexual dramas and hopes, from the romance of
+Aragorn and Arwen to the rather weird ones like Gimli/Legolas slash
+fiction. Certainly that’s what the women in Arwen and Eowyn costumes
+were doing.

+

And for a good laugh, there’s always the Very Secret
+Diaries. Rather than launch into a postmodernist-sounding rant
+about irony and appropriation, I’ll just finish by observing that all
+of these things modulate each other; that not only do we project our
+sex onto Tolkien’s sex, we read Tolkien’s sex differently after
+the Very Secret Diaries, or after seeing Liv Tyler
+speak Elvish, than we did before. That much, Tolkien would
+have had no trouble understanding.

diff --git a/20031221033016.blog b/20031221033016.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3247ccb --- /dev/null +++ b/20031221033016.blog @@ -0,0 +1,68 @@ +Lessons of Libya +

Muammar Qaddaffi, Libya’s dictator and long-time terrorist
+sugar-daddy, has agreed to dismantle his WMD programs and allow
+international inspections. The NYT’s December 20th article Lessons
+of Libya, covering this development, is unintentionally
+hilarious.

+

An honest account would probably have read something like this:

+
+

When Qaddafi saw the Hussein capture pictures they must have scared
+him silly. Realizing that the U.S. is no longer in the mood to take
+shit from tin-pot tyrants in khaffiyehs, and that the U.S. military
+could blow its way into Tripoli and give him a free dental exam in
+less time than it would take for an utterly impotent U.N. to pass the
+resolution condemning American action, he crawled to the Brits
+whimpering “Don’t let your big brother hurt me,
+pleeeassseee…”

+
+

Instead, we’re treated to a bunch of waffle: “To an extent
+that cannot be precisely measured” and “yesterday’s
+announcement also demonstrates the value of diplomacy and United
+Nations sanctions”. I suspect the NYT will deny as long as it
+can the real lesson of Libya, which is the same as the lessons of Iraq
+and Afghanistan and, for that matter, Yugoslavia. And that is this:
+the disarmament of rogue states has never once been accomplished by
+the U.N. or by diplomacy or ‘international opinion’, but
+is now being driven simply and solely by the fear of American military
+power and the will to use it.

+

We are in what Karl Marx would have called a world-historical
+moment — the first time that American hyperpuissance has
+defanged a dictator without actual war. All the rules will
+be different from now on, and Qaddafi (wily survivor that he is) has
+figured them out well ahead of the Western chattering classes. The
+most important rule is this: do not make the U.S. fear what
+you might become, or it will break you.

+

Indeed, it seems very likely to me that future historians will date
+the beginning of the 21st-century Pax Americana from Qaddafi’s
+crawfishing. The U.S. is not merely maintaining its lead in economic
+vigor and military heft over any conceivable opposing coalition, that
+lead is actually increasing. Demographic trends (notably the fact that
+Europeans and Japanese are not breeding at replacement levels) suggest
+that U.S.’s relative power, in both ‘hard’ and
+‘soft’ terms, will continue to increase through at least
+2050.

+

The most visible indicator of this change, aside from the collapse
+of awful governments in any number of Third-World pestholes, will be
+the marginalization of the U.N. That organization, which has never
+had hard power, will now lose its soft power as well. It might have
+been different — but France and the other nations who aimed to
+set the U.N. up as a geopolitical counterforce to the U.S. overplayed
+their hand in the run-up to the liberation of Iraq. For that effort,
+the capture of Saddam and Qaddafi’s surrender in the face of an
+American-led New World Order are fatal blows. The U.N. may survive as
+an umbrella for international aid agencies and a few technical
+standards groups, but in the future it will constrain American
+behavior less, not more.

+

The ripple effects on Middle Eastern, European, and U.S. domestic
+politics will be significant. Even Arab News is
+beginning to come around to the realization that the U.S. did the Arab
+world a favor by deposing Saddam Hussein, and his capture
+significantly betters the odds that the reconstruction of Iraq will
+succeed. Since U.S. power has actually accomplished the peaceful
+disarmament of a rogue state, making political hay in Europe from a
+case against U.S. unilateralism is going to become steadily more
+difficult. And in the U.S., the antiwar opposition is increasingly
+marginal and demoralized as the war goes well and George Bush’s
+re-election now looks like a near certainty.

+

To borrow Churchill’s phrase, this is not the end of the War on Terror.
+But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

diff --git a/20031221170209.blog b/20031221170209.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..95fa021 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031221170209.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Comment policy +

I removed a comment from my blog today. This is only the second time
+I have done so, and the first was just cleaning up an accidental double
+post.

+

To whoever left the original comment #6 on Lessons of
+Libya: I won’t suppress a coment for being mindless, formulaic
+ranting. Nor will I suppress a comment for being anonymous. But
+the combination of both those traits is a crash landing.

+

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled bloggage…

diff --git a/20031222193610.blog b/20031222193610.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f11e47e --- /dev/null +++ b/20031222193610.blog @@ -0,0 +1,124 @@ +Racism and group differences +

At the end of my essay What good
+is IQ?, I suggested that taking IQ seriously might (among other
+things) be an important step towards banishing racism. The behavioral
+differences between two people who are far apart on the IQ scale are
+far more significant than any we can associate with racial origin.
+Stupidity isn’t a handicap only when solving logic problems; people
+with low IQs tend to have poor impulse control because they’re not
+good at thinking about the long-term consequences of their actions.

+

Somebody left a comment that, if what I was reporting about group
+differences in average IQ is correct, the resulting behavior would be
+indistinguishable from racism. In particular, American blacks (with
+an average IQ of 85) would find themselves getting the shitty end of
+the stick again, this time with allegedly scientific justification.

+

This is an ethically troubling point. It’s the main reason most
+people who know the relevant statistical facts about IQ distribution
+are either in elaborate denial or refusing to talk about what they know.
+But is this concern really merited, or is it a form of tendermindedness
+that does more harm than good?

+

Let’s start with a strict and careful definition: A racist is a
+person who makes unjustified assumptions about the behavior or
+character of individuals based on beliefs about group racial
+differences.

+

I think racism, in this sense, is an unequivocally bad thing. I
+think most decent human beings would agree with me. But if we’re
+going to define racism as a bad thing, then it has to be a behavior
+based on unjustified assumptions, because otherwise there
+could be times when the fear of an accusation of racism could prevent
+people from seeking or speaking the truth.

+

There are looser definitions abroad. Some people think it is
+racist merely to believe there are significant differences
+between racial groups. But that is an abuse of the term, because it
+means that believing the objective truth, without any intent to use it
+to prejudge individuals, can make you a racist.

+

It is, for example, a fact that black athletes tend to perform
+better in hot weather, white ones in cool weather, and oriental asians
+in cold weather. There is nothing mysterious about this; it has to do
+with surface-area-to-volume ratios in the population’s typical
+build. Tall, long-limbed people shed heat more rapidly than stocky and
+short-limbed people. That’s an advantage in Africa, less of one in the
+Caucasian homelands of Europe and Central Asia, and a disadvantage in
+the north Asian homeland of oriental asians.

+

And that’s right, white men can’t jump; limb length matters there,
+too. But whites can swim better than blacks, on average,
+because their bones are less dense. I don’t have hard facts on
+how asians fit that picture, but if you are making the same guess I am
+(at the other extreme from blacks, that is better swimmers and worse
+jumpers than white people) I would bet money we’re both correct. That
+would be consistent with the pattern of many other observed racial
+differences.

+

Sportswriter and ethicist Jon Entine has investigated the
+statistics of racial differences in sports extensively. Blacks,
+especially blacks of West African ancestry, dominate track-and-field
+athletics thanks apparently to their more efficient lung structure and
+abundance of fast-twitch muscle fiber. Whites, with proportionally
+shorter legs and more powerful upper bodies, still rule in wrestling
+and weightlifting. The bell curves overlap, but the means — and
+the best performances at the high end of the curve — differ.

+

Even within these groups, there are racially-correlated
+subdivisions. Within the runners, your top sprinters are likelier to
+be black than your top long-distance runners. Blacks have more of an
+advantage in burst exertion than they do in endurance. I don’t have
+hard recent data on this as I do for the other factual claims I’m
+making here, but it is my impression that whites cling to a thin lead
+in sports that are long-haul endurance trials — marathons,
+bicycle racing, triathlons, and the like.

+

It is not ‘racism’ to notice these things. Or, to put
+it more precisely, if we define ‘racism’ to include
+noticing these things, we broaden the word until we cannot justifiably
+condemn ‘racism’ any more, because too much
+‘racism’ is simply recognition of empirically verifiable
+truths. It’s all there in the numbers.

+

Knowing about these racial-average differences in athletic
+performance would not justify anyone in keeping a tall, long-limbed
+white individual off the track team, or a stocky black person with
+excellent upper-body strength off the wrestling team. But they do
+make nonsense of the notion that every team should have a racial
+composition mirroring the general population. If you care about
+performance, your track team is going to be mostly black and your
+wrestling team mostly white.

+

In fact, trying to achieve ‘equal‘ distribution is a
+recipe for making disgruntled underperforming white runners and
+basketball players, and digruntled underperforming black wrestlers and
+swimmers. It’s no service to either group, you get neither efficiency
+nor happiness out of that attempt.

+

Most people can follow the argument this far, but are frightened of
+what happens when we apply the same kind of dispassionate analysis to
+racial differences in various mental abilities. But the exact same
+logic applies. Observing that blacks have an average IQ a standard
+deviation below the average for whites is not in itself racist.
+Jumping from that observation of group differences to denying an
+individual black person a job because you think it means all black
+people are stupid would be racist.

+

Let’s pick neurosurgery as an example. Here is a profession where
+IQ matters in an obvious and powerful way. If you’re screening people
+for a job as a neurosurgeon, it would nevertheless be wrong to use the
+standard-deviation difference in average IQ as a reason to exclude an
+individual black candidate, or black candidates as a class. This
+would not be justified by the facts; it would be stupid and
+immoral. Excluding the black neurosurgeon-candidate who is
+sufficiently bright would be a disservice to a society that needs all
+the brains and talent it can get in jobs like that, regardless of skin
+color.

+

On the other hand, anyone who expects the racial composition of the
+entire population of neurosurgeons to be ‘balanced’ in
+terms of the population at large is living in a delusion. The most
+efficient and fair outcome would be for that population to be balanced
+in terms of the distribution of IQ — at each level of IQ the
+racial mix mirrors the frequency of that IQ
+level within different groups. Since that minimum IQ for
+competency in neurosurgery is closer to the population means for
+whites and asians than the mean for blacks, we can expect the
+fair-outcome population of neurosurgeons to be predominantly white and
+asian.

+

If you try to social-engineer a different outcome, you’ll simply
+create a cohort of black neurosurgeons who aren’t really bright enough
+for their jobs. This, too, would be a disservice to society (not to
+mention the individual patients they might harm, and the competent
+black neurosurgeons that would be discredited by association). It’s
+an error far more serious than trying to social-engineer too many
+black wrestlers or swimmers into existence. And yet, in pursuit of a
+so-called equality, we make this sort of error over and over again,
+injuring all involved and creating resentments for racists to feed
+on.

diff --git a/20031223011114.blog b/20031223011114.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5fb84d0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031223011114.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +The 2004 election is over +

From the Telegraph:

+
+

A spokesman for Mr Berlusconi said the prime minister had been
+telephoned recently by Col Gaddafi of Libya, who said: “I will do
+whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and
+I was afraid.”

+
+

This is the quote that will re-elect George W. Bush president.
+Because after 9/11, what Americans want is a president that will make
+tyrants and terrorists very, very afraid. Bush, for all his other
+failings, has delivered on that. As Edwin Edwards (four-term governor
+of Lousiana) might put it, Bush couldn’t lose the election now unless
+he got caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.

diff --git a/20031223192244.blog b/20031223192244.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..029a035 --- /dev/null +++ b/20031223192244.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Gay Marriage +

If I needed any reminder of why I’m not a conservative, the bizarre contortions that right-wingers have been putting themselves through lately in opposition to the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision on gay marriage would provide one. Watching this has been almost as much fun as watching the left thrash itself to pieces in a futile attempt to stop the War on Terror.

+

IsntaPundit points us at Jennifer Roback Morse’s analysis of the issue in National Review Online which he correctly describes as hilarious in a frightening way. It’s full of bloviations about the “natural and organic‘ function of sex and how we’ll all be happier if we adjust our behavior to conform to nature. It further argues that sex is not an individual activity but a social one, deriving much of its importance from the fact that it create and involves communities.

+

IsntaPundit acidly points out that the “natural and organic” purpose of sex is to recombine genes, and that casual ‘meaningless’ sex of the kind associated in conservative minds with gays and libertines is not just natural and organic but optimal strategy for the 50% of the population that is male. While InstaPundit is correct, he is missing some even more entertaining subtexts.

+

Conservatives have spent decades lambasting leftist feminists for their claim that the personal is political. They have argued that a world in which feminists and the state claim an ever-encroaching right to reinterpret sexual relationships as power relationships and intervene to ‘equalize’ them is a world slouching towards totalitarianism and the panopticon. Ahhh…but now watch the deft reverse spin as, when a conservative shibboleth is at stake, Ms. Morse suddenly argues that sexual choices are never private!

+

This whole business about ‘conforming to nature’ is almost funnier, in a bleak way. Exercise for the reader: chase this Google search on the phrase fascism nature organic and discover how very close Ms. Morse is sailing to the reasoning and rhetoric of classical Fascism.

+

These are the parts that are funny, at least if you get the kind of dark amusement I do from watching right-wingers obligingly behave like every left-wing caricature of conservatism ever cartooned. I would say that National Review Online ought to be ashamed of itself if I actually expected better from them on this issue. Hypocrites. Idiots. Ms. Morse’s reactionary rant is every bit as bad as the poisonous humbug that issues from the mouths of lefties like Robert Fisk or Noam Chomsky.

+

What’s even more comical is that when you corner a conservative about the consequences of gay marriage, what you’re more likely to hear than not is: “But what if the really icky people, like (gasp) polyamorists, use it as a precedent?” This is very revealing. Conservatives know that the gay lifestyle will never appeal to more than about 5% of the population — the rest of us ain’t got the wiring for it. What really terrifies them is the thought that people in the 95% of the population that is normally heterosexual might get the idea that they, too, could choose plural marriage or other forms of relationship that conservatives think of as ‘unnatural’, and not suffer for it.

+

But the part that’s really frightening is the argument that is not being made, but which seethes beneath every polished sentence of Ms. Morse’s screed. One cannot read it without sensing that all this namby-pamby “natural and organic” stuff is a thin pseudo-Deist cover; what Ms. Morse really wants to do is scream “IT’S GOD’S LAW AND YOU’LL BURN IN HELL, SINNERS!“. This is the “ancient religious rage” of Margalit and Buruma’s
+penetrating essay Occidentalism; fundamentally Ms. Morse is railing against Babylon, and in this she is at one with the hot-eyed Islamists who gave us 9/11.

+

I must make a point of committing an act that is technically sodomy tonight. Perhaps I should see if I can’t mix with it some blasphemy against the evil authoritarian Nobodaddy-God shared by Islamists and Western conservatives like Ms. Morse. The whiny identity politics of the Queer Nation crowd turn me off, and their buddies in NAMBLA utterly revolt me — but ultimately I have something in common with the gays that I never will with Ms. Morse.

+

That commonality is the belief that isn’t up to anybody else, feminist or conservative, to tell me and my consenting sexual partners what kind of sex is “natural” or “correct”. “Do it for the chillldren!“ is no more honest or respectable an argument against the liberty of the individual coming from Jennifer Roback Morse than it ever was from Hillary Rodham Clinton. Neither kind of moralism is more than a fig-leaf over the lust for power over others, and that is a lust I will always oppose with my words, my actions, and my weapons.

diff --git a/20040101134642.blog b/20040101134642.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9ead399 --- /dev/null +++ b/20040101134642.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Donald Sensing is so right +

Donald Sensing is dead on target in his post suggesting the U.S
+military re-adopt
+the M1911 .45ACP pistol. I’ve fired a Beretta 92F and it’s an
+ugly, awkward gun that neither feels good in the hand nor inspires
+confidence in its stopping power. Those who have actually seen the
+sharp end of combat generally agree that the M1911 is a far superior
+weapon; even today, more than fifteen years after it was officially
+deprecated, many troops carry it by choice. My own carry weapon of
+choice is the Colt Officer’s Model, a short-barrel M1911 variant.

+

If the M1911 design is too old to be politically viable or the
+single-action design is an insurmountable obstacle, then my next
+choice would be Glock’s double-action 45ACP design, I think it’s the
+Model 30. Glocks are very accurate, and rugged in the field. I think
+the lighter frame is actually a disadvantage; you don’t get thrown
+off target as much by the recoil when you’re shooting a big hunk of
+steel, so your second shot with a 1911 is more likely to count.

diff --git a/20040103151249.blog b/20040103151249.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9938cf9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20040103151249.blog @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +War is the Continuation of Journalism +

StrategyPage reports that Baathist dead-enders in Iraq are now using
+press credentials as cover. Some Iraqis working for Reuters were arrested
+after an attack on U.S. troops guarding a downed helicopter. Reuters is now
+protesting that this was an error.

+

Considering the virulently anti-American slant of Reuters coverage, this
+is bleakly funny. Those Iraqi employees thought, perhaps, that they could
+earn a nice bonus by doing with lead what Reuters does with ledes. Why not?
+After all, the terror network and Reuters share an important objective
+— the breaking and humbling of U.S. power.

+

Watch the aftermath closely. If (as seems not unlikely) there were
+Reuters stringers involved in the attack, you will probably see
+Reuters condemn the actions of its employees only on the general
+grounds that actually shooting Americans jeopardizes the
+customary privileges and immunities of the press, not because attacks
+on American troops are in any way intrinsically a bad thing. The
+anti-American slant of Reuters coverage will doubtless continue —
+in fact, any suggestion that it might have contributed to or enabled
+the violence of yesterday will be met with shock and indignation.

+

In the warped moral universe that Reuters and the BBC and much of
+America’s own elite media inhabit, American power is so frightening and
+loathsome that Islamist barbarians are actually preferable to George
+W. Bush. They’ll print with a straight face quotes by al-Qaeda apologists
+condemning the U.S. as a ‘rogue state’ and U.S. policies as
+terrorism, while refusing to use the word ‘terrorist’ for
+Al-Hamas attacks that target Israeli children for mass murder.

+

Reuters stringers firing bullets at American troops makes concrete
+a drama that has previously been abstract. Today’s war on terror is
+not just a war between the West and fundamentalist Islam, it is a
+confrontation of the healthy versus the diseased portions of the West
+itself. The disease is Julien Benda’s trahison
+des clercs and all its sequelae. And Reuters, marching in step
+with Old Europe and the American left, is objectively on the side of
+the West’s enemies.

+

UPDATE: Three Reuters employees who were alleged to have been involved in the attack have been
+released. This does not change my evaluation that anti-U.S., pro-terrorist bias is
+pervasive and deep in Reuters international coverage, sufficiently so to put them on the enemy side.
+As an index of this bias, consider that by editorial policy Reuters will not use the word “terrorist”
+to describe groups like Hamas or al-Aqsa.

diff --git a/20040106021927.blog b/20040106021927.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..49cc04f --- /dev/null +++ b/20040106021927.blog @@ -0,0 +1,120 @@ +Narcissism and the American Left +

John Perry Barlow, referring to the 2004 elections, writes:

+
+

We can’t afford to lose this one, folks. If we do, we’ll have to set our watches back 60 years. If they even let us have watches in the camps, that is.

+
+

“If they even let us have watches in the camps.” This is a perfect example
+of a kind of left-wing rhetorical posturing that makes me want to go out and
+vote for conservatives I normally loathe. In this it has exactly the opposite
+effect from what John Perry Barlow intends.

+

Barlow wants to leave us with an if-this-goes-on image of a Bush-dominated
+future in which Barlow and his friends are hauled off to concentration camps
+by mirrorshaded thugs, crushing dissent as though the U.S. were pre-liberation
+Iraq or something.

+

I would love to be able to echo Charles Babbage and say that I am
+not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that
+could provoke such a statement. Unfortunately, I’m afraid I find it
+all too comprehensible, and not in a way that’s very flattering to
+John Perry Barlow or others like him. It’s a form of posturing by
+anticipatory martyrdom, simultaneously demonizing Barlow’s enemies and
+inflating his own importance.

+

“Oh, look at me!” it says. “I’m a brave speaker of truth
+to power, so brave that I’m going to say bad things about Republicans
+despite the fact that they will certainly throw me in the gulags as
+soon as they think they can get away with it.” I’ve been around long
+enough to know that this is a line lefties of Barlow’s and my age
+originally learned in order to pick up women back in those halcyon
+radical-chic days of forty years ago. It gets a bit old after your
+third decade of waiting for the Man to bust your door down.

+

Let’s get real. Even supposing Bush were really the concretization
+of all those 1960s nightmares, an evil bastard backed by a cabal of
+goose-stepping minions, from their point of view throwing John Perry
+Barlow in the Lubyanka would be a ridiculous thing to do.
+Remember how conservatives think: from their point of view, Barlow is
+just another aging hippie burnout given to occasional quasi-coherent
+rants about that Internet thing. In their model of reality, all
+they’d be doing by giving him the Solzhenitzyn treatment is conferring
+an importance on him that he doesn’t possess.

+

I have somewhat more respect for Barlow myself, enough that it
+survived the fact that the last time I was actually face-to-face with
+him he was obnoxiously drunk and patronizing. He’s an erratic but
+occasionally brilliant polemicist. But trying to imagine anybody in
+the inner circle of Skull & Bones (or whatever the left-wingers’ hate
+focus is this week) taking him seriously enough to bother bagging and
+tagging him just makes me laugh.

+

And if I can’t believe John Perry Barlow is enough of a threat to
+get gulaged by the mythical Bush stormtroopers, how seriously am I
+supposed to take the-Man’s-coming-for-us posturing from the rank and
+file of the Bush-haters? Yeah, sure, the black marias are coming for
+all of you, all you twentysomething unemployed sysadmins and riot grrls
+and latte makers with your piercings and your Green Party T-shirts.
+As if.

+

There are lots of objective reasons this scenario is silly. One of
+many is that our institutions won’t support it. I know the police in
+my town; they wouldn’t obey orders to throw Dean voters in jail. I
+just got through reading a book about the force structure of today’s
+U.S. infantry, and I can tell you that even if the second Bush
+administration were to complete the trashing of the posse
+comitatus laws that Clinton began and withdraw every damn grunt
+from overseas, there aren’t enough troops. Even assuming
+100% of them signed up to be concentration-camp guards, there
+wouldn’t be enough of them to man the camps. And the trends are all
+towards a smaller, more skill-intensive military, so in the future
+assembling enough goons for a darkess-at-noon scenario will be
+harder rather than easier.

+

Then, of course, there’s the fact that Attorney-General Ashcroft is
+not pushing for federalized gun control and a ban on civilian
+firearms. Which is the first damn thing any right-wing cabal (or any
+left-wing one, for that matter) would do if they were contemplating
+really serious dissent-crushing. Again, the trend is in the other
+direction — the assault-weapon ban is going to lapse, and the
+Bush crowd is going to let it happen. Much of the American left
+fools itself that civilian firearms don’t matter in the political
+power equation, but conservatives know better.

+

For that matter, I am certain — because I’ve discussed
+related topics with him — that John Perry Barlow himself knows
+better. Which makes his willingness to posture about the Man coming
+to throw us in concentration camps less forgiveable than it would be
+in someone who’s a complete moron on the subject, like (say) Michael
+Moore.

+

But what really repels me about the kind of posturing I’m nailing
+John Perry Barlow for isn’t the objective silliness of it, it’s the
+fact that it represents a kind of triumph of paranoid self-absorption
+as a political style. People in the (mainly left-wing) anti-Bush
+crowd snort with derision when they hear hard-right propaganda about
+how the Zionist Occupation Government is going to come after all true
+American white men with those black helicopters; why do they tolerate
+rhetoric that is just as narcissistic coming from their own?

+

Idiots. They make me want to go vote for somebody like Pat Buchanan
+just out of spite. Fortunately, I’m not a spiteful person, and have so
+far resisted this temptation.

+

And I don’t think it’s just me that sees people like John Perry
+Barlow actually dealing themselves out of the future when they make
+remarks like this. Narcissistic politics is not a luxury we can
+afford any more. It was OK during our holiday from history,
+1992-2001, between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11, but we’re in
+serious times now. Our nation, and our civilization, are under
+continuing threat by terrorists who have demonstrated both the will
+and the ability to commit atrocities against Americans, and who loudly
+trumpet their intention to keep killing us.

+

We need people like John Perry Barlow to be in the debate
+about how to cope with this. That means we need people like John Perry
+Barlow not to trivialize and disqualify themselves with silly
+posturing. Please get real, people. George Bush has flaws I could
+list from here to Sunday, but pretending that you’re all doomed
+victims if he’s re-elected is pathological.

+

And deep down, you know better, too. The last two years have given
+us not just relatively smart people like John Perry Barlow but legions
+of mindless show-biz glitterati making a particularly ironic spectacle
+of themselves — protesting the crushing of dissent in front of
+huge audiences. Thereby demonstrating their own lack of
+contact with reality in a way that can only help the very opponents they
+think of as a sinister cabal. With enemies this visibly stupid and
+feckless, who needs friends? They’ll drive the big middle of the
+electorate right into Republican arms.

+

Let’s state the consequences very simply: Every time somebody like
+John Perry Barlow goes on in public about how the camps are waiting
+for us all, Karl Rove laughs and, quite rightly, figures his guy Bush
+is more of a lock this November. And you know what? He’s right.
+Because if I hear much more of this crap, even I am going to
+vote Republican for the first time in more than a quarter-century.

diff --git a/20040107141012.blog b/20040107141012.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..630a71e --- /dev/null +++ b/20040107141012.blog @@ -0,0 +1,66 @@ +The Web and Identity Goods +

InstaPundit writes:
+This seems to me to suggest that free downloads don’t do much to
+cannibalize actual [book] sales.

+

I have more (or at least longer-term) experience with this than
+anyone else. Back in 1991, The New Hacker’s Dictionary
+was the very first real book (like, with an ISBN) to be released
+simultaneously in print and available for free download on-line. Both
+of the books I’ve done since, The Cathedral and the
+Bazaar and The Art of Unix Programming, have also
+been released for free download at the same time they were in print.
+You can easily find all three on my
+website.

+

Of all my books, only the very first (Portable C and Unix
+Systems Programming, 1987) didn’t get webbed. It was a decent
+seller, but the least successful of my books. It’s now out of print, made
+technically obsolete by things that happened in the early 1990s. All
+three of my other books, the ones that got webbed, have remained
+continuously in print.

+

My four books do not a controlled experiment make, but the

+

thirteen years of experience with simultaneous print and Web
+publication that I’ve had suggests that Web availability has boosted
+the sales of the print versions tremendously. And my publishers
+agree. Even in 1991 I didn’t get resistance from MIT press, and
+Addison-Wesley was positively supportive of putting my most most
+recent one on the Web.

+

I’m one of a handful of technical-book writers who publishers treat
+like rock stars, because I have a large fan base and my name on a
+cover will sell a book in volumes that are exceptional for its
+category (for comparison my editor at AW mentions Bruce Eckel as
+another). I’m not certain my experience generalizes to authors who
+aren’t rock stars. On the other hand, it’s more than
+possible that I’m a rock star largely because I have been
+throwing my stuff on the Web since 1991. It’s even likely —
+after all, I was next to an unknown when I edited The New Hacker’s
+Dictionary.

+

So I don’t find the InstaWife’s experience very surprising.
+Webbing one’s books seems to be really effective way to build a fan
+base. My impression is that people start by browsing the the on-line
+versions of my books, then buy the paper copy partly for convenience
+and partly as what marketers call an identity good.

+

An identity good is something people buy to express their tie to a
+group or category they belong to or would like to belong to. People
+buy The New Hacker’s Dictionary because they are, or want
+to be, the kind of person they think should own a copy of it.

+

Here’s the causal connection: A Web version can’t be an identity
+good, because it doesn’t sit on your bookshelf or your coffee table
+telling everybody (and reminding you!) who you are. But Web exposure
+can, I think, help turn a book with the right kind of potential into
+an identity good. I suspect there is now a population of psychologists
+and social workers who perceive the InstaWife’s book as an identity
+good, and that (as with my stuff) that perception was either created or
+strongly reinforced by web exposure.

+

If so, this would explain why webbing her book made the auction
+price for the out-of-print paper version go up. The price of the
+paper version reflects buyers’ desires to be identifiable as members
+of the community of readers of the book. By making softcopy available
+for download, the InstaWife enhanced the power of the paper version as
+an identity token, by making it easy for a larger population to learn
+the meaning of the token.

+

I would go so far as to predict that any book (or movie, or CD)
+that functions as an identity good will tend to sell more rather than
+less after Web exposure. All three of my in-print books happen to be
+identity goods rather strongly, for slightly different but overlapping
+populations. I suspect the InstaWife’s book has this quality too. About those
+things which aren’t identity goods, I can’t say. Not enough experience.

diff --git a/20040131210352.blog b/20040131210352.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b5ab439 --- /dev/null +++ b/20040131210352.blog @@ -0,0 +1,120 @@ +Keeping Freedom Alive: a response to Vodkapundit +

In a trenchant essay he posted on the 30th of January, Vodkapundit
+fulminates
+against people he calls “doctrinaire libertarians”. While I sympathize in some
+respects — I too have been attacked for my pro-war position — I
+think there is some serious danger that Steve’s arguments are throwing out the
+baby along with the bathwater.

+

I’m an individualist anarchist. In most peoples’ books that would
+qualify me as a “doctrinaire libertarian”. I got reminded why
+recently by watching a Babylon 5 episode, the 4th-season one in which
+Sheridan is interrogated by an EarthGov psychologist who uses torture,
+isolation, and drugs, to try and break him. But more frightening than
+the torture is the ideology that comes out of the interrogator’s
+mouth; the command that truth is fluid and must bend to power; the
+disingenuous disclaimers of any responsibility for the hell Sheridan
+is being put through; and beneath it all like a constant drumbeat, the
+seductive invitation that if Sheridan will just surrender his will to
+the State, his pain will end.

+

The interrogator is never named. Like his prototypes in Nazi
+Germany and Soviet Russia, he is a case study in the banality of evil
+— the true face, the night face, the real face of the State.
+And what is truly terrifying is that the interrogator is not a mere
+thug but a man with a subtle and flexible mind. There is an angle on
+the world from which all his lies and acts of coercion issue from a
+coherent moral position — but it is one that promises everyone
+but his masters hell on Earth, forever and ever, amen.

+

In this episode J. Michael Straczynski gives us a fictional
+depiction of a type that is all too real. Anyone who has read Arthur
+Koestler’s Darkness at Noon or Aleksandr Solszhenitzyn’s
+The Gulag Archipelago knows that if anything, JMS (who
+clearly did his homework on the real-world techniques of brainwashing)
+understates the soul-destroying depths to which the ideology
+of statism can sink, trapping the interrogator and his victim in a
+machinery of coercion that will ultimately consume them both.

+

The moral climax of that episode comes after Sheridan says “You
+know, it’s funny I was thinking about what you said. ‘The pre-eminent
+truth of our age is that you cannot fight the system.’ But if, as you
+say, truth is fluid, that the truth is subjective, then maybe you can
+fight the system — as long as one person refuses to be broken,
+refuses to bow down.”

+

“But can you win?” the interrogator asks, almost gently. Sheridan,
+knowing it is likely to mean he will shortly die under torture, rasps
+out the bedrock libertarian reply “Every…time I…say…no!”

+

If I were the praying kind, I would be on my knees every day
+praying that if there ever comes a moment when I must confront the
+night face of the State, I too will meet it with that kind of courage.
+And that day may come. Because the hell that spawns creatures like
+that nameless interrogator is what waits for all of us down the road
+to serfdom that is paved with good intentions like “welfare” and
+“protecting the children” and “saving the environment” and, yes,
+“necessary war”.

+

This is why I think we all ought to be grateful for “doctrinaire
+libertarians”, even the ones more doctrinaire than me. It’s their job
+to keep reminding all of us where that road leads. And it frightens
+we when anyone replies to “War is the health of the state” by saying
+fearfully “Let’s be blunt here, kids. When foreigners are rearranging
+the Manhattan skyline because, in part, our women drive cars, then
+goddamnit its time for a healthier state.” Because it’s in
+the shadow cast by that kind of fear that creatures like the
+interrogator and his masters grow and flourish.

+

Necessity, as wiser men than me have observed, is the credo of
+tyrants and the excuse of slaves. It disturbs me to hear anyone
+talking like a slave.

+

I agree with you in conceding that the state is at this time the
+only way we have to answer the terrorist threat. The world in which
+Osama bin Laden would be killed by troops hired by a consortium of
+crime- and disaster-insurance companies rather than a government does
+not yet exist.

+

But having conceded the present necessity of state action makes it
+more necessary, not less, that we listen to the most
+contrary, ornery, anti-statist libertarians we have, and to hold
+harder than ever to our intentions for a libertarian future. Otherwise
+we risk becoming too comfortable with that concession, and letting the
+statists seduce us further down that road to serfdom.

+

Does this mean we can’t slam the LP for its attribution of the 9/11
+attacks to American foreign policy? No, you’re right; that position
+is not just wrong, it bespeaks a lack of moral seriousness and a kind
+of blinkered parochialism that cannot actually see anything outside
+of U.S. politics as having causal force.

+

But there is a big difference between observing that the LP is
+contingently wrong about the liberation of Iraq (true) and suggesting
+that our only course is to abandon our longer-term commitment to the
+abolition of drastic shrinking of the state (false). Beware of
+throwing out that baby with the bathwater. John Ashcroft is not yet a
+greater threat to liberty than Osama bin Laden — but that day
+may come yet. Only libertarian thoughts, libertarian words,
+libertarian deeds, and a principled libertarian opposition to the
+arrogance and seductions of power will prevent it.

+

UPDATE: Gary Farber thinks I’m making the same error I slammed John Perry
+Barlow for recently. But there is a large difference. Barlow
+was being specifically paranoid about a short-term threat which he ties to
+specific people he thinks are evil and has (at the very least) grossly
+overestimated. I have a longer-term concern about structural tendencies
+that are built into the nature of government, and which don’t require
+specific evil people running things to take us to some very nasty places.

+

Or, to put it another way, Barlow has what is essentially a devil theory;
+Bush, or Cheney, or Ashcroft or someone like them is evil and wants to put us
+in camps next year. This is silly. I, on the other hand, don’t think it
+much matters for the long term whether “good” or “evil” people are running
+the government; the premises and the process of government,
+and the collectivist ethos that underlies them, have a momentum of their own
+that grinds away at our liberty regardless. The founders of the U.S.
+understood this tendency and erected the Bill Of Rights as a firewall against
+it. The fact that in many jurisdictions U.S. law now suppresses “hate speech” and
+bans the possession of firearms demonstrates their failure.

+

The erosion of liberty which I fear is a far more gradual process than
+the sudden collapse into totalitarianism that Barlow envisions. But it
+is also more difficult to resist and counter. Because the end stages,
+where only evil people can adapt themselves to politics, are
+probably many decades away, few people can summon the concern and the
+will to say “Stop now, before it’s too late!”. There is always some
+short-term reason that seems good to accept the state’s poisonous candy
+— the new entitlement program, the next round of farm- or steel-mill
+subsidies, the airport metal detectors to make us “safe”.

+

Many (though not all) of the people who can summon that will are
+libertarians. Which is yet another good reason to listen to them carefully,
+even when they’re more doctrinaire than me.

+

(Exercise for the reader: Let’s stipulate that littering laws may not lead to 1984,
+but can you defend the proposition that laws banning speeech and weapons don’t? Discuss
+historical examples such as Nazi Germany and Tokugawa-period Japan. Be specific.)

diff --git a/20040202230937.blog b/20040202230937.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a020fbb --- /dev/null +++ b/20040202230937.blog @@ -0,0 +1,84 @@ +Inciting to riot +

Gary Farber asks:

+

+Would you assert that a modest libel law, or copyright law, or
+incitement to riot law, inevitably lead to 1984? How about a law
+banning private nuclear weapons? +

+

I would say that the risk from a modest libel law or copyright law
+is small, though not nonexistent; look at the way the DMCA has been
+used to justify schemes that would embed controlware in everyones’
+computers. State power is no less real if it consists of NSA or FBI
+back doors built in by an acquiescent Gateway or Dell.

+

If the lawmaker/law-enforcer is a monopoly government, then a law
+banning private nuclear weapons would worry me a little more, basically
+because I don’t trust governments to have any control over
+the weaponry their citizens can keep. History shows that that power
+is invariably extended by degrees and abused until the citizenry is
+totally disarmed; the case of Great Britain in the 20th century is a
+particularly telling one (and its sequel in the 21st is proving
+just as bloody and insane as the NRA diehards predicted, with criminal
+gangs machine-gunning each other in the Midlands cities while
+law-abiding citizens are jailed for carrying pocketknives).

+

I would prefer the risks of private nukes to the disarmament of the
+civilian population. But that’s not a choice anyone will actually
+ever have to make, because the intersection of the set of people who
+want nukes and the set of people who would obey or be deterred by a
+law against them is nil. A law against nukes would therefore be
+pointless, except as an assertion of the power and right to enforce
+other sorts of weapons bans that are harmful in themselves.

+

Nukes are different than handguns. Handgun bans are bad, but
+they’re not utterly pointless; there is a significant class of
+criminals who would carry in the absence of a ban but don’t in the
+presence of one. The real problem with handgun bans is that the good
+effects of slightly fewer bad guys carrying weapons are swamped and
+reversed by the bad effects of far fewer good guys carrying
+weapons. It’s all in how the disincentives against crime shift.

+

An “incitement to riot” law is a huge and obvious red flag. A
+political culture in which that becomes entrenched would be one headed
+for the überstate fairly rapidly.

+

But much depends on who makes those laws and how they are enforced. I
+could live with a ban on certain sorts of heavy weapons or a Riot Act,
+for example, if they were a condition of my contract with my
+crime-insurance company, or part of the covenant of my homeowners’
+association. Powers that are too dangerous to grant a monopoly
+government could safely be delegated to security agencies and
+judicial associations that have active competitors, and who do not
+in the nature of things have universal jurisdiction.

+

Mr. Farber may not be aware than anarchists like myself actually
+envision living in a society that still has police and courts and a
+common legal code, but one in which no one organization has a status
+that is uniquely privileged under the law. There would be something
+that is functionally not completely unlike a “government”, but it
+would be a virtual entity — a contract network of courts,
+police, and citizens. I would delegate my right to resist assaults on
+my life and property to the police agency that acts as my agents. That
+police agency would have reciprocity agreements with other police
+agencies; they, in turn, would contract with judicial associations
+to arbitrate disputes among their clients. Find a copy of
+The Market for Liberty for the details.

+

Finally, I comment on Mr. Faber’s attempt to reduce the
+slippery-slope argument against statism to an absurdity by applying it
+to libertarians (“libertarianism, because it values the individual
+without regard for society, inevitably leads any individual who
+believes in it to become a sociopathic serial killer”).

+

There are several obvious problems with this argument. First,
+sociopathy is a wiring defect only found in less than 1% of the general
+population (but including a large percentage of politicians,
+and that is no joke). Libertarianism cannot turn people into sociopathic
+serial killers because nothing (other than some odd and rare
+sorts of injuries to the brain) can turn people into sociopaths.

+

The argument also ignores a glaring asymmetry in the real-world
+facts. Extreme libertarians do not as a rule go on senseless killing
+sprees. Governments, even “good” governments, often do. In the U.S.,
+the scarifying examples of MOVE, the Branch Davidians, and Ruby Ridge
+are before us even if we agree to leave warfare out of the picture and
+consider only the last two decades.

+

But more importantly, the claim that libertarianism values the
+individual without regard for society is damagingly false. The
+assumption that “valuing the individual” and “valuing society” are
+opposed is precisely what thoughtful libertarians reject. Our highest
+value is non-aggression, peacefulness — voluntary cooperation.
+Our message is that only when individual freedom is properly held to
+be the greatest good can a sane, peaceful, and truly just society
+flourish.

diff --git a/20040916175954.blog b/20040916175954.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..22e49f2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20040916175954.blog @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +CBS and SCO Charge: Bush stole Unix! +

OREM, UTAH — In a startling and unexpected joint press conference, CBS
+and SCO, Inc. charged today that President George W. Bush had
+conspired with IBM to steal Unix code while Linus Torvalds was AWOL
+from the Finnish army.

+

Standing shoulder-to-shoulder at the podium, Dan Rather and Darl McBride
+flourished what they said was documentary proof, in the form of source
+code listings found in a wastebasket at Texas Air National Guard
+offices.

+

Open-source hackers and bloggers immediately questioned the report. “In
+1972 Linus was like, three years old!” one Slashdotter commented. “I could
+be wrong, but I don’t think they let toddlers into the Finnish army”. Others
+pointed out that the listings were laser-printed on sheet-fed paper
+using a technology not available in any form until 1978 and not deployed
+by the Texas Air National Guard until after 1984. The Linux operating
+system was launched in 1991.

+

“We at CBS have consulted numerous experts and believe these to be accurate,”
+Dan Rather said, “but it doesn’t really matter whether or not they are
+authentic. George W. Bush’s role in flouting the intellectual-property laws
+of this country must be fully investigated. It’s not the nature of the
+evidence, it’s the seriousness of the charges!”

+

“SCO is seeking additional discovery from IBM,” added Darl McBride.
+“We have confidence that if we can just get our hands on every IBM
+code listing from the dawn of time and depose every IBM employee
+living or dead, we will be able to drag this case out long enough to
+swing not just the the 2004 elections but the 2008 ones as well!”

+

In related news, the Kerry campaign — still struggling to rebut
+charges of computer illiteracy raised by the Swift Vets’ searing
+expose “Unfit for COMMAND.COM” — is rumored to have received a
+donation from Bill Gates that included both a large wad of cash and
+all known remaining copies of “Microsoft Bob”. Spokepersons could not
+be reached for comment.

diff --git a/20040919110615.blog b/20040919110615.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a151cb6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20040919110615.blog @@ -0,0 +1,70 @@ +Top Ten Reasons I’m Neither a Liberal Nor a Conservative: +

I’m reposting this screed from 2002 because it’s no longer visible on the Web, and in the near future I expect to post some things that will get me accused of right-wing bias.

+

Top Ten Reasons I’m Not A (Left-)Liberal:

+
    +
  1. Gun control. Liberals are completely wrong about this. A fair number
    +of them know better, too, but they sponsor lies about it as a form of class
    +warfare against conservative-leaning gun owners.
    2. +
  2. Nuclear power. They’re wrong about this, too, and the cost in
    +both dollars and human deaths by pollution and other fossil-fuel
    +side-effects has been enormous.
    3. +
  3. Affirmative action. These programs couldn’t be a more diabolical or
    +effective plan for plan for entrenching racial prejudice if the Aryan
    +Nations had designed them.
    4. +
  4. Abortion: The liberals’ looney-toon feminist need to believe that
    +a fetus one second before birth is a parasitic lump of tissue with no
    +rights, but a fetus one second afterwards is a full human, has done
    +half the job of making a reasoned debate on abortion
    +nigh-impossible.
    5. +
  5. Communism. I haven’t forgiven the Left for sucking up to the monstrous
    +evil that was the Soviet Union. And I never will.
    6. +
  6. Socialism. Liberals have never met a tax, a government
    +intervention, or a forcible redistribution of wealth they didn’t like.
    +Their economic program is Communism without the guts to admit it.
    7. +
  7. Junk science. No medical study is too bogus and no environmental
    +scare too fraudalent for liberals. If it rationalizes bashing
    +capitalism or slathering on another layer of regulatory bureaucracy,
    +they’ll take it.
    8. +
  8. Defining deviancy down. Liberals are in such a desperate rush to
    +embrace the `victimized by society’ and speak the language of
    +compassion that they’ve forgotten how to condemn harmful,
    +self-destructive and other-destructive behavior.
    9. +
  9. William Jefferson Clinton. Sociopathic liar, perjurer, sexual predator.
    +There was nothing but a sucking narcissistic vacuum where his principles
    +should have been. Liberals worship him.
    10. +
  10. Liberals, by and large, are fools.
    11. +
+

Top Ten Reasons I’m Not A Conservative:

+
    +
  1. Pornography. The complete absence of evidence that exposure to
    +sexually-explicit material is harmful to children or anyone else doesn’t
    +stop conservatives from advocating massive censorship.
    2. +
  2. Drugs. We found out that Prohibition was a bad idea back in the
    +1930s — all it did was create a huge and virulent criminal class, erode
    +respect for the law, and corrupt our politics. Some people never learn.
    3. +
  3. Creationism. I don’t know who I find more revolting, the drooling
    +morons who actally believe creationism or the intelligent panderers
    +who know better but provide them with political cover for their
    +religious-fundamentalist agenda in return for votes.
    4. +
  4. Abortion. The conservatives’ looney-toon religious need to
    +believe that a fertilized gamete is morally equivalent to a human
    +being has done the other half of making a reasoned debate on abortion
    +nigh-impossible.
    5. +
  5. Racism. I haven’t forgiven the Right for segregation, Jim Crow laws,
    +and lynching blacks. And I never will.
    6. +
  6. Sexism. Way too much conservative thought still reads like an
    +apologia for keeping women barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.
    7. +
  7. Anti-science. Stem cells, therapeutic cloning — it doesn’t matter
    +how many more diabetes, cancer and AIDS patients have to die to
    +protect the anti-abortion movement’s ideological flanks. Knowledge —
    +who needs it? Conservatives would try suppressing astronomy
    +if the telescope had just been invented.
    8. +
  8. Family values. Conservatives are so desperate to reassert the
    +repressive `normalcy’ they think existed in Grand-dad’s time that they
    +pretend we can undo the effects of the automobile, television, the
    +Pill, and the Internet.
    9. +
  9. Ronald Wilson Reagan. A B-movie actor who thought ketchup was
    +a vegetable. His grip on reality was so dangerously weak that the
    +Alzheimer’s made no perceptible difference. Conservatives worship him.
    10. +
  10. Conservatives, by and large, are villains.
    11. +
diff --git a/20040919181819.blog b/20040919181819.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5b6b74e --- /dev/null +++ b/20040919181819.blog @@ -0,0 +1,180 @@ +MSM Loses its Power to Swing Elections +

One of the most notorious lines of the 2004 campaign season came to us
+in Mid-July when Evan Thomas, the Assistant Managing Editor of
+Newsweek, said: “Let’s talk a little media bias here. The media, I
+think, wants Kerry to win. And I think they’re going to portray Kerry
+and Edwards – I’m talking about the establishment media, not Fox –
+but they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and
+dynamic and optimistic and all. There’s going to be this glow about
+them is going to be worth, collectively, the two of them,
+that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points.

+

Thomas’s admission validated the charges made in Bernard Goldberg’s
+book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the
+News, and capped waves of evidence from recent sociological
+studies by the Pew Foundation, scientists at UCLA, and others that
+have scrutinized the establishment that the bloggers call “MSM”
+(Main-Stream Media). All the evidence shows that the MSM is extremely
+left-wing compared to the U.S. population as a whole. Content analysis
+has repeatedly demonstrated how this bias both distorts public
+perception of specific issues and makes most Americans grossly
+mis-estimate where the political center of popular opinion actually
+is.

+

But the reaction to Thomas’s admission from Republicans and
+conservatives was more weary than angry. They have been wrestling
+with the reality of pro-Democrat and left-wing bias in the MSM since the
+counterculture wars of the 1960s. Ironically, however, Thomas’s
+public admission may have come just as the MSM’s power to reframe issues
+and swing national elections was suffering a critical breakdown.

+

Part of what I’m talking about the Rathergate
+forged-documents scandal, of course. It is not yet resolved as I
+write, ten days after the original 60 Minutes II story
+and a week after the evidence of crude fakery became undeniable to all
+but the most blinkered Bush-haters. Dan Rather is still hanging
+tough, and the editorial position of the New York Times
+is still “Fake But Accurate”. But the longer the holdouts cling to
+their forged evidence, the more damage they will take to their
+reputations, with effects that will go beyond the current election
+cycle.

+

Just the prompt effects of the scandal are interesting. The most
+obvious one is that John Kerry now seems headed for a Dukakis-like
+thrashing in the presidential elections. As I write, the
+anti-Bush-leaning Electoral Vote
+Predictor website is projecting Bush at 331 electoral votes and
+Kerry at 207. The site notes that this is the most lopsided spread
+since it was launched.

+

There are many reasons besides Rathergate that Kerry is
+losing so badly. He’s a pathetically weak candidate — a lousy
+stump speaker with no program and a nearly nonexistent legislative
+record, who ran on his Vietnam service only to have that prop knocked
+out from under him by former crewmates and superiors who accuse him of
+having been cowardly, opportunistic, and unfit for command. In fact,
+Kerry has no discernable political base of his own at all; his entire
+appeal comes from not being George W. Bush.

+

But Kerry’s weaknesses, glaring though they are, are not the
+interesting part of the explanation. It’s the MSM’s inability to
+cover them up and make them a non-story that is really
+interesting. The attempt to present Kerry and Edwards as “dynamic”,
+“optimistic” and “young” to which Evan Thomas admitted has mostly made
+them look vacillating, frivolous and jejune instead. CBS, the New
+York Times, the Boston Globe and the other centers of the MSM had also
+been trying very hard to bury and discredit the Swift Vets;
+nevertheless, Unfit For Command is now the #1 nonfiction
+bestseller in the United States.

+

Nor were the MSM, despite a visible effort to do so, able to
+suppress the evidence that Dan Rather’s anti-Bush memoranda had been
+forged. In fact, as I write they are proving unable to defend even
+the exculpatory fiction that Rather was an innocent dupe. The fact has
+come out that CBS was told in advance that two of the six documents it
+had were almost certainly bogus by its own examiners, and then witheld
+the other four from expert scrutiny and ran with the story anyway.
+The implications of that fact are being now dissected not just on
+partisan right-wing websites but out where the general public can see
+it.

+

There has been a lot of talk since the Rathergate
+scandal broke that the rise of the blogosphere made all the difference
+this time around. And sharp bloggers fact-checking the mainstream
+media made all difference in Rathergate itself, there is no
+doubt about that. But Rathergate is only part of a larger
+picture that goes back through the Swift Vets at least to the Jayson
+Blair scandal, and amidst the peals of blogger triumphalism I think
+it’s time to pull back at this point and get a little perspective.

+

As an immediate reality check, the bloggers had very little to
+do with the success of the Swift Vets’ book. It is indeed remarkable
+that the Swift Vets were able to get their story past the big-media
+gatekeepers, but nothing that the gentlemen at
+InstaPundit or Power Line or Little
+Green Footballs uttered can have had much influence on that.

+

For a more comprehensive explanation, I think we need to look at
+a couple of trends that are larger than the rise of the blogosphere
+itself, and which actually drove that rise rather than being driven
+by it. One of these is obvious: the plunging cost of communication.

+

Before the Internet and cheap long-distance phone calls, pulling
+together a cooperative network large enough to produce and back
+Unfit For Command, or to perform forensic analysis on the
+Rather memos, would have been an extremely expensive and long-drawn-out
+operation. The market for ideas had a much longer clearing time then.
+In fact it is rather unlikely these sorts of organization would even
+have been attempted more than a decade ago — everybody’s perception
+of the time and money cost would have been prohibitive.

+

Other forces are in play as well. One is that people are less
+willing than they used to be to derive their identities and a static
+set of political affiliations from the things about themselves that
+they can’t change. Your family’s politics is a far less important
+predictor of your vote than it was a generation ago (which, among
+other things, is why conservative talk of a “Roe effect”, of liberal
+abortion supporters selecting themselves out of the population, sounds
+so much like wishful thinking). Union membership stopped being
+predictive sometime in Ronald Reagan’s second term. Even traditional
+racial and ethnic interest blocs seem to be crumbling at the edges.

+

Increasingly, political power is flowing to consciously-formed
+interest groups that arise to respond to individual issues and survive
+(if they survive) as voluntary subcultures. The Swift Vets and
+MoveOn.org are highly visible examples of the trend. Internet hackers
+organizing against the DMCA and for open-source software is another.
+Indeed, the blogosphere as we know it is a voluntary subculture formed
+largely from the reaction to the trauma of 9/11.

+

To people in these subcultures, traditional party and ideological
+labels are less and less interesting. Case in point: Glenn Reynolds
+(aka InstaPundit), the pro-Iraq-war, pro-gay-marriage,
+anti-gun-control, pro-drug-legalization king of the bloggers. Is he a
+liberal Democrat with some conservative positions? A South Park
+Republican? A pragmatic libertarian? Not only do Glenn’s own writings
+make it difficult to tell, he seems to determined to flirt with all
+these categories without committing to any of them. Other prominent
+bloggers, including those who broke Rathergate, exhibit a
+similar pattern. The MSM, looking through a left-wing prism, sees it
+as conservatism — but most bloggers despise the Religious Right
+and Buchananite paleoconservatism as heartily as they loathe Noam
+Chomsky.

+

Finally, I think we need to look at what bloggers call the “cocoon
+effect” and understand that it too is a special case of a larger
+phenomenon. Even among bloggers who describe themselves as liberals
+there is a widespread sense that the MSM has become a sort of cocoon
+or echo chamber, in which left-liberal orthodoxy is shaped by a tiny
+self-selected elite and never questioned because no alternatives are
+ever permitted a serious hearing. Thus the MSM often experiences honest
+shock, disorientation, and disbelief when it is forced into
+contact with actual reality.

+

But it isn’t just bloggers who notice that cocoon. So do
+blue-collar workers, firearms owners, rural residents, and indeed
+anybody who lives in “red state” America. It wasn’t always like this;
+before 1965 or so your average auto-worker in Birmingham and an
+editorial-page writer in New York City might have disagreed on much,
+but they lived in the same political universe and spoke the same
+language. The Vietnam War ended that; during and after it, elites in
+academia, show business, and the media embraced the preoccupations of
+the New Left even as heartlanders were rejecting them.

+

The journalism schools went with them, and the MSM has been
+drifting steadily further out of touch ever since. An index of the
+drift is the the way that the degree of trust Americans have in
+journalists has plummeted since 1970. Today, survey instruments find
+Americans rate journalists lower in integrity and honesty then
+used-car salesmen or lawyers.

+

It’s a commonplace among analysts of American politics that the
+dispute over Vietnam has been at the bottom of our culture wars ever
+since. So there is some sort of completion in the fact that the
+disconnect between the MSM and the rest of America reached a critical
+break while the MSM was attempting to boost on its shoulders John
+Kerry — the man who cofounded Vietnam Veterans Against The War,
+who met with North Vietnamese Communists while still a Naval officer,
+and who described our involvement there as an extended war crime.

+

A long-serving governor of Louisiana once boasted that he could not
+fail of reelection unless he was caught in bed with a live boy or a
+dead girl. Thanks to Rathergate, George W. Bush has a lock
+on the White House unless he’s at least as seriously embarrassed
+during the next forty days. Kerry’s approval ratings are hovering
+around 36%. It seems that the MSM cannot deliver Evan Thomas’s
+15-point swing anymore — or, if it can, that the left-wing
+Democrats’ base has dwindled to 20% of the population or less and the
+Democratic National Committee, too long swaddled in the media cocoon,
+is in far worse trouble than it understands.

+

Either way, the self-destruction of the MSM and the collapse of
+John Kerry’s candidacy looks to me like no fluke. It is, rather, a
+culmination of trends that have been building for three decades. The
+trend in communications costs is not going to reverse. Therefore
+media gatekeepers will continue to lose power, voluntary subcultures will
+continue to gain influence, and the MSM’s ability to set agendas will
+soon be one with the dust of history.

+

UPDATE: A reader wonders if the MSM ever had the power to swing elections. The Assistant Editor
+of Newsweek thought it could deliver 15%. Popular-vote margins in Presidential elections have often
+been 5% or less. What does that suggest?

diff --git a/20040920125741.blog b/20040920125741.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7ca2c84 --- /dev/null +++ b/20040920125741.blog @@ -0,0 +1,72 @@ +What Did Dan Rather Know, And When Did He Know It? +

Dan Rather’s just-released statement just begs to be fisked:

+

+Last week, amid increasing questions about the authenticity of
+documents used in support of a 60 MINUTES WEDNESDAY story about
+President Bush’s time in the Texas Air National Guard, CBS News vowed
+to re-examine the documents in question—and their
+source—vigorously. And we promised that we would let the American
+public know what this examination turned up, whatever the outcome. +

+

Where was your skepticism about the four documents you ran with
+when your own experts told you two of the original six were bogus, Dan?

+

+Now, after extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the
+confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching
+for them journalistically. +

+

And why did you ever “have confidence” in those four when you withheld them
+from your own experts, Dan?

+

+I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for
+the documents came into possession of these papers. +

+

So, you’re still not admitting that your “source” passed you crude
+forgeries that anyone with the nerve to call himself an investigative
+journalist should have spotted in thirty seconds flat?

+

+That, combined with some of the questions that have been
+raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where—if I knew
+then what I know now—I would not have gone ahead with the story as it
+was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in
+question. +

+

Do you know that the memos were forged? Are you prepared to state for
+the record that your source was not a Kerry partisan engaged in a fraudulent
+attempt to manipulate a presidential election?

+

+But we did use the documents. We made a mistake in judgment, and for
+that I am sorry. It was an error that was made, however, in good faith
+and in the spirit of trying to carry on a CBS News tradition of
+investigative reporting without fear or favoritism. +

+

Ah, the nebulous “we” — favorite weasel-word of
+responsibility-evaders. Will you take responsibility for that
+decision, Dan? If you won’t, whose decision was it? If you will,
+where is your resignation?

+

+Please know that nothing is more important to us than people’s trust
+in our ability and our commitment to report fairly and truthfully. +

+

Oh, we believe that all right. After all, if you don’t
+have peoples’ trust, how can you manipulate them?

+

No admission that the documents are forgeries. No disclosure of
+the source. Dan, given your history of appearing at Democratic
+fund-raisers and donating to left-wing causes, can you give us any
+reason at all to believe you are not shielding John Kerry’s oppo
+researchers?

+

UPDATE: CBS claims
+that disgruntled ex-Guardsman Bill Burkett was the source of the
+documents, and misled CBS about them to protect the actual source.
+Who is the “actual source” of this fraud against the American
+electorate? Why didn’t CBS validate the documents before broadcasting
+an unfounded attack on the President of the United States during a
+time of war? Inquiring minds want to know!

+

AND MORE: This just keeps getting better! Burkett has not only
+admitted that the forged memos passed through him to CBS, he says
+he gave them
+to Max Cleland, John Kerry’s triple-amputee token Vietvet. Burkett
+has already changed his story at least once about who his source was.

+

I can’t be the only person thinking Burkett has been set up as the
+fall guy in order to make politically-motivated collusion between CBS
+and the Kerry campaign deniable.

diff --git a/20040921221124.blog b/20040921221124.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0f40a14 --- /dev/null +++ b/20040921221124.blog @@ -0,0 +1,83 @@ +The Art of Science +

One of my earliest blog essays (Terror Becomes Bad
+Art) was about Luke Helder, the pipe-bombing “artist” who created
+a brief scare back in 2002. Arguably more disturbing than Helder’s
+“art” was the fact that he genuinely thought it was art, because none
+of the supposed artists or arts educators he was in contact with had
+ever taught him any better and his own talent was not sufficient to
+carry him beyond their limits.

+

I am not the first to observe that something deeply sick and
+dysfunctional happened to the relationship between art, popular
+culture, and technology during the crazy century we’ve just exited.
+Tom Wolfe made the point in The Painted Word
+and expanded on it in From Bauhaus To Our House. Frederick Turner
+expanded the indictment in a Wilson Quarterly essay on
+neoclassicism which, alas, seems not to be available on line.

+

If we judge by what the critical establishment promotes as “great
+art”, most of today’s artists are bad jokes. The road from Andy
+Warhol’s soup cans to Damien Hirst’s cows in formaldehyde has been
+neither pretty nor edifying. Most of “fine art” has become a moral,
+intellectual, and esthetic wasteland in which whatever was originally
+healthy in the early-modern impulse to break the boundaries of
+received forms has degraded into a kind of numbed-out nihilism.

+

There are exceptions, though — artists who engage the world, who
+are deeply involved with ideas, and who playfully incorporate all the
+possibilities of our technological age into their work. When I was a
+guest of honor at Arisia 2004 I had the good fortune to meet one of
+these; Arthur Ganson, an
+artist/engineer who creates beautiful and sometimes disturbing kinetic
+sculptures.

+

One that I’ve just discovered is Bathsheba Grossman. She
+visualizes and then realizes beautiful ideas from mathematics,
+cosmology, and organic chemistry. Contemplate her Large Scale
+Model, an image of the galactic clusters in the three hundred
+million cubic light years around Earth — an eidolon of a
+substantial fraction of the observable universe laser-etched into a
+three-inch-tall glass block.

+

It isn’t quite “to see the Universe in a grain of sand”, but nobody
+with more sensitivity than a brick could fail to have dizzying and
+wonderful vistas of time/space and paradoxical thoughts about scale in
+the presence of this luminously beautiful work of art. All too many
+artists portentiously claim that what art is supposed to do is induce
+one to meditate on one’s place in the universe, then deliver pettiness
+(or perhaps a toxic political screed) as the punchline.
+Ms. Grossman’s Large Scale Model is the real deal, and a hard slap in
+their faces.

+

Or contemplate Ms. Grossman’s gorgeous metal sculptures, derived
+from mathematical forms by a process that combines hand-modelling with
+CAD and produced with cutting-edge 3D-printing technology. It’s not
+just the end results that are beautiful but the whole dialogue between
+art and technology implicit in her
+technique.
+After reading about it, I am not surprised to learn that she sometimes
+writes her own modeling software — and, having seen her art, I
+would lay a healthy bet that she writes damn good software.

+

There’s something refreshing even about Ms. Grossman’s most narrowly
+commercial work. She will laser-etch the protein structure of your
+choice into glass, using the same technique as in the Large Scale
+Model, for prices starting at $145. These images of cloudy, intricate
+structure are visually beautiful enough as abstracts, but they derive
+their true power from being about something. About
+hemoglobin, the molecule in your blood that carries oxygen. Or about
+the DNA polymerase crucial in cell replication, or the
+neurotransmitter acetylcholinesterase. Each one is a joyful
+celebration of our ability to know, to find beauty and meaning in the
+complexity of the natural universe.

+

To see these craft objects, unashamedly made for money (that’ll be
+$40 extra for molecular-surface etching, thank you), is to have your
+nose rubbed in the desperate poverty of most modern art, to be
+reminded of the vacuum at its core and the pathetic Luke Helders that
+the vacuum spawns. It’s a poverty of meaning, a parochialism that
+insists that the only interesting things in the universe are the
+artist’s own psychological and political quirks.

+

Bathsheba Grossman’s art reminds us that exploration of the narrow
+confines of an artist’s head is a poor substitute for artistic
+exploration of the universe. It reminds us that what the artist owes
+his audience is beauty and discovery and a sense of connection, not
+alienation and ugliness and neurosis and political ax-grinding.

+

Forgetting this value rotted the core out of the fine arts and
+literary fiction of the 20th century. We can hope, though, that
+artists like her and Arthur Ganson will show the way forward to
+remembering it. Only in that way will the unhealthy chasm between
+popular and fine art be healed, and fine art be restored to a healthy
+and organic relationship with culture as a whole.

diff --git a/20040924104643.blog b/20040924104643.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5ec1d41 --- /dev/null +++ b/20040924104643.blog @@ -0,0 +1,82 @@ +Deadly Genius and the Back-To-Zero Problem +

There are entire genres of art that have self-destructed in the last
+hundred years — become drained of vitality, driven their audiences
+away to the point where they become nothing more than museum exhibits
+or hobby-horses for snobs and antiquarians.

+

The three most obvious examples are painting, the literary novel
+and classical music. After about 1910 all three of these art forms
+determinedly severed the connections with popular culture that had
+made them relevant over the previous 250 years. Their departure left
+vacuums to be filled; we got modern genre literature, rock music, and
+art photography.

+

Other art forms underwent near-death experiences and survived only
+in severely compromised forms. Jazz, running away from its roots in
+honky tonks and dance halls, all but strangled on its own
+sophistication between 1960 and 1980; it survives today primarily as
+smoothed-out elevator music. Sculpture, having spent a century losing
+itself in increasingly meaningless abstraction, is only now feeling
+its way back towards a figurative vocabulary; the most interesting
+action there is not yet in the revival of mimetic forms but in artists
+who speak the vocabulary of mathematics and machine technology.

+

What makes an art-form self-destruct like this? Many things can
+contribute — hankerings for bourgeois respectibility, corruption
+by politics, clumsy response to a competing genre. But the one we
+see over and over again is deadly genius.

+

A deadly genius is a talent so impressive that he can break and
+remake all the rules of the form, and seduce others into trying to
+emulate his disruptive brilliance — even when those followers
+lack the raw ability or grounding to make art in the new idiom the the
+genius has defined.

+

Arnold Schoenberg (classical music). James Joyce (literary
+novels). John Coltrane (jazz). Pablo Picasso (painting). Konstantin
+Brancusi (sculpture). These men had the knack of inventing radical
+new forms that made the preexisting conventions of their arts seem
+stale and outworn. They produced works of brilliance, taught their
+followers to value disruptive brillance over tradition, and in doing so
+all but destroyed their arts.

+

Artistic tradition can be limiting sometimes, but it has one thing
+going for it — it is the result of selection for pleasing an audience.
+Thus, artists of moderate talent can imitate it and produce something that
+the eye, ear, heart and mind will experience with pleasure. Most artists
+are at best of moderate talent; thus, this kind of imitation is how
+art forms survive and keep an audience.

+

On the other hand…imitation Schoenberg or Coltrane is
+unlistenably bad. Imitation Joyce is unreadable. Imitation Picasso
+looks like a toddler’s daubings and imitation Brancusi is ugly junk.
+Worse still is when mediocre artists strain themselves to be the next
+disruptive genius. And perhaps worst of all is what happens when bad
+artists turn disruption into cliche.

+

Art forms self-destruct when enough of their establishment follows
+a deadly genius off a cliff. And we had a bad streak of this sort of
+thing just about a century ago; three of the four deadly geniuses I’ve
+named above flourished at that time. Why then?

+

Tom Wolfe argued in From Bauhaus to Our House that the
+breakdown of the traditional patronage system in the late 19th century
+had a lot to do with the degenerative changes in modern art. Wolfe never
+identified deadly genius as a core problem. but his argument readily
+extends to an explanation of why deadly genius become so much deadlier
+at that time.

+

Wealthy aristocratic patrons, had, in general, little use for
+disruptive brilliance — what they wanted from artists was
+impressive display objects, status symbols that had to be
+comprehensible to the patron’s peers. Thus, artists learned to
+stay more or less within traditional forms or starve. Evolution
+happened, but it was relatively gradual and unsconscious. Geniuses
+were not permitted to become deadly.

+

After 1900 all this changed. Wolfe elucidates some of the complex
+reasons that artists found themselves with more freedom and less
+security than ever before. In an increasingly bourgeois climate, the
+cry went up that artistic creation must become autonomous, heeding its
+own internal imperatives as much as (or more than) the demands of any
+audience. The breakneck pace of technological change helped reinforce a
+sense that possibilities were limitless and all rules could be
+discarded.

+

In the new environment, artistic tradition lost much of its normative
+force. “Back to zero!” was the slogan; forget everything so you can invent
+anything. And when the next wave of deadly geniuses hit, there was nothing
+to moderate them any more.

+

It is unlikely that anything quite like the Modernist disruption will
+ever happen again, if only because we’ve been there and done that now. But
+as we try to heal all the fractures it produced, this one lesson is worth
+bearing in mind. Genius can be deadly when it goes where mere talent
+cannot follow.

diff --git a/20041005133216.blog b/20041005133216.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1e5b1fb --- /dev/null +++ b/20041005133216.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +The Terror War Comes Home +

For the first time in my life, I find that I am seriously considering
+voting Republican in a presidential election. What has pushed me to it
+is this report of shots being fired into a Bush-Cheney campaign HQ in Knoxville. TN.

+

It’s not the first shot fired at the Republicans. And it comes on top of a frenzy of anti-Republican hate speech that has been building even as Democrats have watched their electoral prospects sinking into a Vietnam-flavored quagmire brought on himself by the most incompetent and feckless candidate either party has fielded in thirty years.

+

We’ve seen three-year-old girls reduced to tears by Democratic thugs. We’ve seen swastikas burned into the front yards of those who dared to announce themselves Republicans. And all this from a Democratic left that poses as the champion of dissent.

+

This caps it. If Kerry is elected, the terrorists will have won.

+

UPDATE: As I was writing, Democratic protesters stormed and
+ransacked Bush/Cheney headquarters in Orlando. Some now face
+assault charges.

+

UPDATE II: More
+thuggishness in West Allis, Wisconsin.

+

And these are the people who liken Bush to Hitler…

diff --git a/20041017113105.blog b/20041017113105.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ff2cbc3 --- /dev/null +++ b/20041017113105.blog @@ -0,0 +1,59 @@ +Software vs. Art +

Jamie Richards asks an intelligent question in response to my essay on
+deadly genius in the arts:

+
+

I’m not programming-savvy at all, so maybe this is crap… what do you
+think about the idea that computer programming is a cultural area
+operating under the same conditions that set up the “Modernist
+disruption”?

+

As I understand it, in the proprietary model of software building, a
+company patron spends money to create products that are
+“comprehensible to the patron’s peers.” In open-source software
+building, programmers self-select, working on projects that are
+interesting to them (art for art’s sake…). “The breakneck pace of
+technological change” certainly applies to this chunk of human
+history, as well.

+
+

Indeed it does, and your question is both subtle and astute.
+However, you’ve missed a crucial difference between software projects
+and fine art. Software has to work. Every piece of software
+exists in order to achieve some instrumental goal, and can be
+evaluated on how well it achieves that goal.

+

The vast con-game that most of modern art has become relies on a
+definition of “art” that equates it with pure expressiveness. The
+modern “artist” can say of some randomly ugly artifact “this is my artistic
+statement, and if you don’t get it you are simply proving your own
+lack of sensitivity and taste”.

+

Open-source hackers can’t get away with this sort of thing. If
+their code is broken and crash-prone or doesn’t meet the functional
+spec it claims to, nobody will take it seriously on any level at all
+— much less as art. The requirement of engineering competence
+has the kind of constraining and filtering effect on open-source
+programming that the patronage system once did on pre-Modern art.

+

The really sharp reader is going to be asking, right about now,
+“OK, so what about architecture?”

+

Architecture is like programming in that it’s a form of art that
+operates within powerful functional constraints. Buildings have to
+keep the rain off people, and not collapse on their heads. So why
+haven’t those requirements prevented modern architecture from falling
+into the back-to-zero trap, from blighting the landscape with
+thousands of ugly brutalist cuboids?

+

We may cheerfully admit that some modern architecture is very
+lovely; Santiago Calatrava’s or Eero Saarinen’s organiform buildings
+come to mind. Nevertheless, to save the argument I’m making, we need
+to show some relevant difference between architecture and software design.

+

One clue is that modern architects have not in fact forgotten how to
+make buildings that fulfil the minimum functional requirements. It is only
+in the aesthetic face those buildings present to the world that something
+bad has happened. On this analogy, the place we should expect open-source
+software to have regressed relative to the products of proprietary patronage
+is in the specific area of user-interface design.

+

I have pointed out
+elsewhere that this is open source’s weakest area. But on closer
+examination this analogy doesn’t work so well. Almost any software
+user interface (UI) is more complicated and much more interactive than
+a typical building’s interface — therefore, much more
+constrained by the cognitive limitations of human beings; therefore,
+designing software UIs is more like engineering and less like art than
+designing building UIs. Thus, the idiom of software UIs is less subject
+than is architecture to disruption by an expressive but deadly genius.

diff --git a/20041018232532.blog b/20041018232532.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..eaab1df --- /dev/null +++ b/20041018232532.blog @@ -0,0 +1,53 @@ +The Far Side of Irony +

Having seen Team America: World Police last Friday on its
+opening night, I’m amused by the mainstream-media spin that this movie
+is an anti-right-wing satire too subtle for the yokels to get. In
+fact, I think it’s it’s something much more peculiar and interesting
+— a movie that hides a strong fundamental patriotism and appeal
+to traditional values under a veneer of scatology and sexual crudity.

+

The MSM can’t see this, because in the MSM’s universe the kind of
+patriotism for which the movie ultimately plumps is at best a joke to
+be sneered at and at worst actually toxic. But the South Park guys
+tip their hand early, during a sequence in which the the protagonist
+Gary visits the Lincoln Memorial and other national monuments while
+wrestling with a question of duty. The soundtrack is country music
+of the most teeth-gritting, lachrymose awfulness — but the steel
+guitars and schmaltzy vocals fail to obscure the fact that the song is
+asking a serious moral question, and that the right answer (for Gary
+and for the rest of us) is that he must accept his duty to defend
+freedom. The entire rest of the plot follows from that decision.

+

This scene is a microcosm of the movie. In this satire, it’s the
+satire you’re supposed to see through. Irony is enlisted to
+anti-ironic purposes. In another early scene, Gary is cosmetically
+morphed for infiltration purposes into a caricature of the generic
+Islamo-terrorist so extreme that pained laughter is the only possible
+response — and his teammates think it’s a perfect disguise. But
+never once is this pointed jab at American parochialism allowed to
+obscure the genuine evil of the type he is disguised as.

+

Throughout the film, Team America is clumsy, parochial,
+hamfisted and inadvertently destructive. But this is emphasised mainly
+in order to point up a continuing underlying message that it’s better
+to be a dolt with traditional American intentions than a sophisticate
+in the service of evil.

+

In this and other ways, this movie seems profoundly conservative to
+me. I don’t often use the label ‘conservative’ as a compliment, but
+such use is merited here. Team America knows it’s their job to defend
+civilization, to conserve it. Part of the humor in this movie comes
+from the contrast between that fundamental conservatism and the
+profane, obscene, and jejunely disgusting moments that occupy much of
+the film. These are not your father’s conservatives, a point the
+South Park auteurs make early by showing two of the characters
+sprinting a lust-a-thon through a marrionette kama sutra of sexual
+positions.

+

And maybe that’s the most interesting message of this movie. We
+watch it blowing up scenery in a parody of the Bruckheimerian action
+flick, but what’s really being exploded is the fixed categories of the
+post-1960s culture wars. The South Park guys are trying to divorce
+the muscular self-confidence of a healthy civilization from the
+cultural-conservative and religious fixations that confidence has
+usually been married to. There is not one single reference to
+Christianity in the entire movie. The good guys drink, swear, and
+screw like frenzied minks, but they’re good guys just the same.

+

Ultimately, what matters about them most is that they never give
+up and never compromise with evil. That’s what makes this vulgar
+comedy ultimately a serious parable for our time.

diff --git a/20041019142339.blog b/20041019142339.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3f0442d --- /dev/null +++ b/20041019142339.blog @@ -0,0 +1,57 @@ +Predictability, Computability, and Free Will +

I’ve been reading some philosophical discussion of the free-will/determism question recently. Quite a number of years ago I discovered a resolution of this question, but never did anything with it because I assumed I had simply reinvented a well-known position and could not really contribute anything to the debate. However, the research I’ve done recently suggests that my resolution of the question is actually a novel one.

+

Like a lot of philosophy, the discussion of free will and determinism I’ve seen founders on two errors. One of this is Aristotelianism, an attachment to observer-independent two-valued logic in a system of universal categories as the only sort of truth. The other is a tendency to get snarled up in meaningless categories that are artifacts of language rather than useful abstractions from observed reality.

+

In this essay, I hope to show that, if one can avoid these errors, the underlying question can be reduced to a non-problem. More generally, I hope to show how ideas from computability and complexity theory can be used to gain some purchase on problems in the philosophy of mind that have previously seemed intractable.

+

Formulating The Problem

+

The free-will question is classically put thus: do we really have choices, or are our actions and behavior at any given time entirely determined by previous states of the universe? Are we autonomous beings, who ourselves cause our future actions, or meat robots?

+

The second way of forming the question gets at the reason most philosophers have for finding it interesting. What they really want to know is whether we cause our own actions and are responsible for them, or whether praise, blame, and punishment are pointless because our choices are predestined.

+

Thus the free-will question, which is traditionally considered part of metaphysics or the philosophy of mind, is actually motivated by central issues in moral philosophy. At the end of this essay, we will consider the implications of my proposal for moral philosophy.

+

Classical Determinism And Its Problems

+

The ways philosophers have traditionally asked these questions conceal assumptions that are false in fact and logic. First, the evidence says we do not live in the kind of universe where classical determinism is an option. In almost all current versions of physical theory there is an irreducible randomness to the universe at the quantum level. Thus, even if we knew the entire state of the universe at any given moment, its future states would not be determined; we can at best predict the probability distribution of those states.

+

Another characteristic of quantum theory is that observation perturbs the system being observed. Let’s sidestep that for the moment and introduce the concept of a perfect observer, with infinite computational capacity and the ability to take infinitely precise measurements in zero time without perturbing the system under observation. In a universe with quantum randomness, even this perfect observer cannot know the future.

+

Matters are worse for imperfect observers, who have only finite computational capacity, can take only finitely accurate measurements, and perturb what they measure when they measure it. Even in theories that preserve physical determinism, imperfect observers have two additional problems. One is that they perturb what they observe; the other is sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

+

Two physical systems that are measurably identical to an imperfect observer and evolve by the same deterministic laws can have different futures because unmeasurably small differences between their present states are chaotically amplified over time — and some of those unmeasurable differences may be produced by the act of observation!

+

Even in the absence of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, though, an imperfect observer’s attempt to predict the future may fail without warning because his finite computer loses information to round-off errors (there are more subtle limits arising from finite storage capacity, but round-off errors will stand as a readily comprehensible representative of them). And like it or not, human beings are imperfect observers. So even without quantum indeterminacy, we cannot know the future with certainty.

+

For philosophical purposes, quantum indeterminacy and sensitive dependence on initial conditions in classical (non-quantum) systems have nearly indistinguishable effects. Together, they imply that classical determinism is not an option for imperfect observers, even in the unlikely case that quantum reality is not actually rolling dice.

+

Non-Classical Determinism and Irreducible Randomness

+

Philosophers have tended to make a fast leap from the above insight to the conclusion that humans do in fact have free will — but this conclusion is a logic error brought on by Aristotelian thinking. There is an unexcluded middle here: we may be meat robots in a universe that rolls dice, both non-determined and non-autonomous.

+

Most people (even most philosophers) find the idea that we are puppets on random strings even more repugnant than classical determinism. In classical determinism there is at least a perfect-observer view from which the story makes sense. The religiously inclined can believe in that perfect observer and identify it with God, and the rest of us can take some sort of fatalistic comfort in the face of our adversities that things could not after all have been any different.

+

In the indeterminate universe we seem to inhabit, the only way for even a god to know the future would be for it to intervene in every single collapse of a quantum state vector, and thereby to create that future by a continuous act of will. But if that were so, the behavior of all the matter in our bodies could be nothing but the god’s will. We’re back to determinism here, but it’s one in which a god is the sole causal agent of everything — good, evil, and apparent randomness. Some varieties of Hindu theology actually read like this; one rather lovely version has it that the entire universe is simply the vibration of the voice of the god Atman (or Brahman) chanting a giant “OM!” and will end untold eons in the future when He next draws breath. In the West this position has been called “occasionalism”.

+

The trouble with occasionalism is that it’s untestable. There is no observation we can make from within the universe to establish causal intervention from outside it. If we could do so, we would simply extend our conception of “the universe” to the larger domain within which causality operates — including the mind of Atman. The testability problem would immediately re-present itself. (This, of course, is a slightly subtler version of the standard rebuttal to the “First Cause” argument for the existence of a creator-God.)

+

For those of us unwilling to take occasionalism on pure faith, then, free will is about the only comfort an indeterminate universe can offer. Our experience of being human beings is that some of the time our behavior is forced by factors beyond our control (for example, if we fall off a cliff we will accelerate at a rate independent of our desire or will about the matter), but that at other times we make unforced choices that at least seem to causally originate within our own minds and not elsewhere.

+

To carry the discussion further, we need to decide what the term “free will” means. Our challenge is to interpret this term in a way that both consistent with its ordinary use and fits into a larger picture that is rationally consistent with physical theory. Try as I might, I can only see two possible ways to accomplish this. One has to do with autonomy, the other with unpredictability.

+

The Autonomy Interpretation of “Free Will”, And Its Problems

+

Most people, if pressed, would probably come up with some version of the autonomy interpretation. All the philosophical accounts of “free will” I’ve ever seen are based on it. We have no problem with the idea that our choices are caused, or even determined by, our previous thoughts, but the intuitive notion of free will is that our thoughts themselves are free. This implies that the measure of a human’s degree of “free will” is the degree to each human being’s history of mental states is autonomous from the rest of the universe — not caused by it, but capable of causing changes in it.

+

There are several problems with this account. The most obvious one is that we can often locate causal influences from the rest of the universe into our mental states. To anyone who doubts this, I recommend the experience of extreme hunger, or (better) of nearly drowning. These are quite enlightening, and philosophers would probably talk less nonsense if they retained a clearer grasp of what such experiences are like.

+

Less extremely, evidence from sensory-deprivation experiments suggests that a mind deprived of sensory input for too long disintegrates. Not only does the rest of the universe have causal power over our mental states, but we cannot maintain anything recognizable as a coherent mental state without that input. Which makes sense; evolutionary biology tells us that we are survival machines shaped by natural selection to cope with a reality exterior to our minds. Consciousness, reasoning, and introspection — the “higher” aspects of human mental activity that mostly concern philosophers — are recent add-ons.

+

None of this evidence outright excludes the possibility that there is some part or aspect of our normal mental activity that is autonomous, uncaused but causal. The real problem, the problem of logic and principle, is that we don’t know how the autonomously “free-willing” part of the mind (if it exists) can be isolated from the part that is causally driven by sensory stimuli and normal physical laws.

+

For materialists like myself who model the mind as a kind of software or information pattern that happens to run on an organic substrate, this is an impossible problem. We have no warrant to believe that any part of that system is causally autonomous from the rest of the universe. In fact, on functional grounds it seems quite unlikely such a part would ever evolve — what would it be good for?

+

But the problem is not really any simpler for dualists or mysterians, those who hold that minds have some “soul” attached that is non-physical or inaccessible to observation. That “soul” has to interact with the mind somehow. If the interaction is one-way (soul affects mind, but mind does not effect soul) then the soul is simply a sort of blind pattern- or noise-generator with no access to reality. On the other hand, if mind affects soul we are right back to the beginning of the problem — is there anything in “soul” that is neither random nor causally driven by “mind”, which we already understand to be either random or causally driven by the rest of the universe?

+

The basic problem here is the same as the basic problem with occasionalism. Define the “causal universe” as all phenomena with observable consequences, whether those phenomena are material or “soul” or the voice of Atman. Unless the occasionalists are right and it is all just Atman saying a trillion-year “OM!”, the concept of “soul” does not actually in itself make us any space between determinism and chance. The autonomy account of free will leaves us finally unable to locate anywhere autonomy can live.

+

The Predictability Account Of Free Will

+

I have invented a predictability account of free will which is quite different. Instead of struggling with the limits of imperfect observation, I consider them definitional. I say human beings (or any other entity to which we ascribe possession of a mind) have “free will” relative to any given observer if that observer cannot effectively predict their future mental states.

+

By “effectively predict” I mean that the observer, given a complete description of the mind’s state and a set of stimuli applied to that state, can predict the state of the mind after those stimuli.

+

Since we have access to mental states only by observing the behaviors they generate, this is arguably equivalent to saying that an entity with a mind has free will with respect to an observer if the observer cannot predict its behavior. However, I specify the term “mental state” because I think the natural-language use of the term “free will” requires that we limit the candidates for it to entities which we believe to have minds and to which we thus attribute mental states.

+

I am deliberately not proposing a definition or theory of “mind” in this essay, because I intend my arguments to be independent of such theory. All I require of the reader’s theory of mind is that it not exclude human beings from having one.

+

Can There Be Minds Without Free Will?

+

The first thing we need to do is establish that this definition is not vacuous. Are there any circumstances under which an entity to which we ascribe mental states can fail to have free will?

+

A psychologist friend of mine with whom I discussed the matter reports that the answer is “yes”. The example case she reported is a bot (software agent) named Julia designed to fool people in Internet Relay Chat rooms into believing it was a person. Julia could be convincing for a few minutes, but human beings would eventually notice mechanical patterns as they came to the edge of her functional envelope. Studies of humans interacting with Julia showed that they continued to ascribe intentions and mental states to the bot even after noticing the determinism of its behavior. The study evidence suggests that they went from modeling Julia as being like a normal adult human to being like a child or a retardate.

+

This was not even the first such result. The AI literature reports humans projecting personhood even on much cruder early bots such as the famous ELIZA simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist — and not giving up that attachment even after the shallow and mechanical algorithms used to generate responses were explained to them.

+

The reader may object, based on some theory of “mind”, that Julia did not actually have one. But it is possible that we are all Julia. Suppose that the human mind is a deterministic machine with a very large but finite number of states; suppose further that the logic of the mind has no sensitive dependence on initial conditions (that is, its states are coarse enough for us to measure accurately). This simplest-possible model we’ll call the “clockwork mind”. If Julia has a mind, this is the kind of mind she has.

+

In principle, any clockwork mind can be perfectly simulated on a computer. The computer would have to be more complex than the clockwork mind itself. To predict the state of the clockwork mind, just run the simulation faster than the original. But — and this is an important point — a clockwork mind cannot be predicted by itself, or by any clockwork mind of comparable power to itself. Thus, whatever viewpoint a hypothetical perfect observer or god might have, human beings have free will with respect to each other.

+

It is also worth noting that human beings could have clockwork minds even in a universe of chaotic or quantum indeterminacy. If you put enough atoms together, the Law of Large Numbers will normally swamp quantum effects. If you make the states of a finite-state machine sufficiently coarse, there won’t be unmeasurable initial-condition differences to be amplified. After all, clockwork does tick!

+

The Indeterminate Mind

+

It is unlikely that humans have clockwork minds. The anatomy and physiology of the brain suggests strongly that it has chaotic indeterminacy. It may have quantum indeterminacy as well (the mathematician Roger Penrose suggested this in his book The Emperor’s New Mind, one of the favored texts of the new mysterians). It is possible that the mind cannot be modeled as a finite-state machine at all.

+

These distinctions make little difference, because what they all have in common is that that they make the prediction problem far less tractable than for a clockwork mind. Thus, they widen the class of observers with respect to which a non-clockwork mind would have free will.

+

At the extreme, if human minds have intrinsic quantum uncertainty then even a perfect observer could not predict their future mental states, unless it happens to be an occasionalist god and the only cause of everything.

+

The most likely intermediate case is that the mind is a finite-state machine with sensitive dependence on initial conditions and an intractably large state space. In that case it might fail to have free will with respect to a perfect observer, but will have free will with respect to any imperfect observer.

+

Implications for Moral Philosophy

+

The binding I have proposed for the term “free will” does not rely on any supposed autonomy of the mind or self from external causes. From the perspective of traditional moral philosophy, it combines the worst of both worlds — a non-autonomous mind in an indeterminate universe. How, then, can humans being be appropriate subjects of praise, blame, or punishment? In what sense, if any, can human beings be said to be responsible for their actions?

+

The first step towards solving this problem is to realize that these questions are separable. Because we ascribe intention and autonomy to human beings and believe their future behavior is controlled primarily by those intentions, we explain acts of praise, blame, and punishment directed at human beings in terms of the supposed effects on their mental states. But this is where remembering that we have no direct access to mental states is useful; what we are actually after when we praise, blame and punish is to change observable future behaviors.

+

Thus, we also praise and blame and punish animals without much regard to whether they have mental states or free will. When training a kitten it is of little interest to us in what sense it might be choosing to crap on the rug; what matters is getting it to use the litterbox. Humans, like animals, are appropriate subjects of praise and blame and punishment to the extent that those communications effectively alter their behavior. The attribution of “responsibility” is at best a sort of convenient shorthand, and at worst a red herring.

+

In any case the question of “responsibility” is simply the question of free will in another guise, and admits the same answer within a predictive account. An observer may hold a mind “responsible” for the actions it initiates to the extent that the observer is unable to identify external causes of those actions.

+

This accords well with the way people normally reason about responsibility. If all we know of a man is that he murdered someone in a fit of rage, our inclination is to hold him responsible. But if we then learn that he was unwittingly dosed with PCP, we have an external cause for the rage and can no longer consider him fully responsible.

+

Conclusion

+

The predictivist account of free will I have proposed here solves the classical problems with the autonomy account of free will, accords with natural-language use of the term “free will”, and is consilient with physical theory. It does so at the cost of making the ascription of free will dependent on the computational and measurement capacity of the observer.

+

The parallel with the way “space” and “time” are redefined in Relativity Theory is obvious. As in that theory, our intuitions about “free will” are largely valid in human-observable ranges but tend to break down at extremes. Relativity had to abandon the idea of absolute space/time; in our context, we need to abandon the ideal of the perfect observer and accept that finite computational capacity is yet another fundamental limit on theory-building.

+

I believe a similar change in stance is likely to prove essential to the solution of other outstanding problems in philosophy.

diff --git a/20041026161622.blog b/20041026161622.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5085b9e --- /dev/null +++ b/20041026161622.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +John Kerry — Communist agent of influence +

Read this:
+
+John Kerry and the VVAW: Hanoi’s American Puppets?.

+

They don’t mention that while John Kerry was operating as an agent
+of influence for the Vietnamese Communists, he was still an officer in
+the U.S. Naval Reserve.

+

There is a word for what a serving military officer does when he acts
+as an agent for a hostile power during wartime.

+

That word is ‘treason’.

diff --git a/20041103162722.blog b/20041103162722.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1b86d3a --- /dev/null +++ b/20041103162722.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Are the Democrats becoming a regional party? +

The 2004 elections are over. Bush won, of course, but I want to focus on an interesting question raised by the red-state/blue-state map of the outcome. It looks suspiciously as though the Democrats are on their way to becoming a regional party.

+

Specifically, a regional party of the urban Northeast and the West Coast metroplexes. The state-by-state voting patterns since 1980, and especially in 2000 and 2004, point clearly in this direction. The Democrats have lost the South, and they’re losing their grip on the Upper Midwest — Daschle’s loss to Thune and the size of Bush’s margin in Ohio are leading indicators.

+

I’ve written a couple of previous blog essays on the hole the Democrats are in. They have serious problems. Ronald Reagan peeled away the (private-sector) union vote after 1980; today they’re losing the blacks over gay marriage and the Jews over Israel and the Terror War. Their voter base is increasingly limited to public-employee unions and brie-nibbling urban elites — they’re no longer the party of the common man but of the DMV, Hollywood and the Upper West Side.

+

The state-level election results reinforce this picture, and I predict that county-by-county numbers will make it even more obvious, especially when correlated with SES. Add to this a serious structural problem, which is that their street-level cadres are largely drawn from a hard-left contingent that wants to pull their platform even further away from anything most Americans will vote for.

+

This was very clear here in Malvern; even in this staid suburb the Democratic pollwatchers looked like Central Casting’s idea of a fringy radical, bushy-haired and besweatered and festooned with paranoid slogan buttons. The DNC used to rely on unions to supply troops at campaign time; they can’t any more, so they have to lean on organizations like MoveOn.org and Democratic Underground.

+

Even this they could survive if the mainstream media retained the ability to deliver the 15% swing for Democrats that Evan Thomas of Newsweek boasted of a few months back. But the all-too-blatant partisanship of CBS and the New York Times actually backfired this time, most obviously when the bloggers caught Dan Rather trumping up an anti-Bush story on obviously-fake documents. I think Instapundit is on to something when he says the longest-term result of this election will be the collapse of mainstream-media credibility. With that will go one of the most effective weapons the Democrats have.

+

A serious rethink of the Democratic platform is in order. The smartest single move they could make is to try to peel off the single largest bloc of Republican-leaning voters — gun owners like me. Bill Clinton has pointed out that alienating the 50% of American households which own guns lost the Democrats the 1994 elections and has cost them critical swing votes in every national election since.

+

The sane thing for the Democrats to do would be to go unreservedly pro-Second-Amendment. Alas, I do not think they are a sane party any more.

+

UPDATE: My prediction about the county-by-county numbers proved correct,
+according to USA Today’s
+map.

diff --git a/20041105124709.blog b/20041105124709.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6f37d39 --- /dev/null +++ b/20041105124709.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Mobilizing the Poor and Other Delusions +

Yesterday a Democratic friend of mine emailed me in part: “There is a big constituency of poor people who are just not making it at all.” This is one of the American Left’s conventional dogmas — that there is some vast ocean of descamisados out there waiting to be mobilized into a political force that will sweep away all those nasty uncaring conservatives.

+

I laugh when I hear or read things like this, because — unlike most Americans — I know what real poverty looks like. I have lived in poor countries. I’ve seen the shantytowns that surround Caracas and the acres of concrete Stalinist shitboxes that ring Eastern European cities; I’ve played scoppa with rural peasants in Southern Italy who are worn out from toil at forty.

+

We have nothing like that here. Our poor people are fat. They have too much to eat. They have indoor plumbing and houses and cars and televisions. Real poverty no longer exists in the U.S. at any level above statistical noise, and hasn’t since civilization reached the last pockets of the Appalachians during my childhood.

+

This has political consequences. Mainly, that you can’t get American ‘poor’ people angry enough about their economic situation to make a voting bloc or a movement out of them. In fact, in the U.S. the poor are more conservative than the rich. American lefties think this is because the poor suffer from anti-revolutionary false consciousness, but this is exactly the kind of patronizing piffle that just lost lefties the 2004 elections. The truth is that in their calculus of their own interests, other things are more important to the American poor than bringing down the bloated plutocrats. In this particular election, those other things included supporting the liberation of Iraq and opposing gay marriage.

+

Believing that poverty is a live political issue is a form of self-delusion by elite liberals for which conservatives should be very grateful — it leads liberals into vast wastes of effort. But it isn’t just liberals who get taken in. A conservative friend who was in on the email discussion said to me, in effect, “But what about the homeless?”. His argument was that homeless people are America’s ‘real’ poor, and he has a point. The trouble with taking that argument any further is that there are too few homeless people to have any effect on politics other than as an emotive issue that wealthy white activists can flog to make themselves feel more virtuous.

+

And there will never be a politically significant homeless population in the U.S., for simple and obvious climactic reasons. Over much of the U.S., if you can’t find shelter, winter exposure will kill you fairly quickly. On the coasts you need to be south of about latitude 40 for survivability. The winter-kill zone reaches further south in mid-continent. There’s a summer-kill zone, too, that includes a lot of the Southwest.

+

If you can’t pay for a roof over your head, you have either build one or borrow one somewhere that the owners aren’t around to object. Wigwams would be conspicuous even if homeless people knew enough woodscraft to build them, so building is largely out. In general, finding a sheltered space to sleep where nobody will hassle you is quite difficult outside of large cities and not easy even inside them.

+

To check this theory, I went and looked for homeless population counts on the web. Leaving out the most obvious noise — figures pulled out of thin air by advocacy organizations with a drive to inflate them — I found almost no hard numbers.

+

Yes, you get people throwing around figures in the two million range. They’re bullshit. If we had that many homeless it would have obvious consequences we’re not seeing. Like, corpses littering the streets of Philadelphia on January mornings.

+

One reference said San Francisco, which has a reputation for a particularly large and visible homeless population, counted 4,535 in December 2003. In 2003, the New York city government estimated 1,560 people sleeping on the streets in Manhattan (at latitude 41 Manhattan is well into the winter-kill zone). I recall Philadelphia counting 3,500 a few years back. That’s numbers 1, 14 and 5 of the nation’s fifteen largest cities by population. Extrapolating from these, I’d bet the nationwide homeless count is almost certainly less than 40K, probably less than 20K.

+

Which brings me back to my original contention that real poverty is statistical noise in the U.S. Even if the homeless population were an order of magnitude larger than I’m estimating, you cannot build a political base out of 400K people in a nation of 300 million. There’s no electoral traction in one tenth of one percent, especially when most of the rest of the country has more or less correctly written off the homeless as largely being composed of addicts and the mentally ill.

+

Americans aren’t stupid. They know there has been genuine, large-scale poverty in this country’s relatively recent past — the folk memory of the Great Depression is still with us. They know there are lots of places in the world where the plight of the poor is still a genuine problem today. But that contrast only makes the posturing of today’s self-designated advocates for the American “poor” look more like a form of careerism, moral vanity or one-upmanship. Which, in most cases, is exactly what it is.

+

UPDATE: Supporting evidence for the nonexistence of real poverty in the U.S. here. Some commenters pointed out that my estimate of homelesness may be low because two of my three baseline cities are in the winter-kill zone. The main point, though, is that the homeless population is not within an order of magnitude of the numbers needed to have an an electoral impact.

diff --git a/20041113103848.blog b/20041113103848.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b72f2dc --- /dev/null +++ b/20041113103848.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Islamofascism and the Rage of Augustine +

In response to a long, thoughtful post on religion and democracy. a commenter on the Belmont Club wrote:

+

A favorite criticism of Christianity is to point to the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and claim that these events are somehow proof that Christianity is by nature “just another violent religion”. This is both an intellectually shallow and dishonest assessment, since this criticism ignores that fact that these institutionalized excesses did not occur until a full 1000 years into the history of the Christian religion.

+

The commenter, a Christian apologist, missed or evaded an important point that is relevant to the question of living with Islam and how we cope with the ideological problem of Islamic terrorism. It is indeed true that early Christianity committed only small-scale atrocities against its own ‘heretics’, rather than the really large-scale ones against Jews, witches, and other soi-disant unbelievers that came to characterize it later on. But in interpreting that early period, we need to bear in mind that Christianity changed in fundamental ways after the Donation of Constantine.

+

I think the turning point was Augustine, though you can see a prefiguration of his ideas in Paul of Tarsus. By making the theology of Fall, sin, and guilt central to Christianity, Augustine transformed it from a relatively harmless mystery cult into a successful monster. Islam underwent a very similar transformation during the early years of the Ummaiyyad caliphate, from a splinter of Monophysite Christianity no more bloody-minded than most tribal cults of the time to a new prosyletizing religion of especially virulent and violent stripe.

+

Both religions, in their “mature” forms, became strikingly similar to their most important ancestor, which was not Judaism but Zoroastrianism. Augustine was a former adherent of one of the Zoroastrian splinter groups, the Gnostics of Manicheus. He imported Manichean dualism into Christianity almost entire. One can read Zoroastrian descriptions of heaven, hell, angels, the devil, and the fate of sinners from 900 years before Christ and recognize them; they are like nothing else in world religion but very much like Christianity after Augustine, the Christianity that made the Book of Revelations part of its canon.

+

The Zoroastrian influence on Christianity had always been important. Early Christians had adopted Zoroastrian customs and terminology, especially under the influence of the cult of Mithras which was probably their most important competition in the early centuries. That’s where we got the Sunday sabbath and our words for “priest” and “pope”; even the Eucharist reflects a Mithraic initiation ceremony called the Taurobolion. After Augustine, the Manichean, quasi-Zoroastrian elements of Christianity became dominant and the massacres began, gradually increasing in tempo.

+

Part of the reason for the reconvergence with Zoroastrianism was doubtless functional. Zoroastrianism had been the state religion of the Persian Empire. It was designed to reinforce the authority of the Priest-Emperor over his vast multi-ethnic rabble of subjects, placing him at the apex of both secular and spiritual authority (and, indeed, making them indistinguishable). The emperors of Rome and the early Caliphs faced a similar set of problems, and enlisted the same kind of religious absolutism as a tool of totalitarian social control.

+

It was Augustine’s theology of sin and grace that sharpened that tool into a blade. In a nutshell, it reduces to this: (1) We are all sinners, broken and wrong. (2) To escape this condition, we must not only obey authority but internalize it. (3) Even if we succeed at (2), only the whim of divine authority can save us, and that whim is beyond human ken. The tyrant can never be called to account, and to act against him is to be damned.

+

Worse: in Augustinean theology, the intention to sin is as bad as the act. It is not sufficient to behave as though we believe when we really don’t. It is not even sufficient that we allow authorities to coerce us into believing absurd things or performing atrocities in God’s name. We must conform not only outwardly but inwardly, become our own oppressors, believing because it is absurd. The God-tyrant can never be rejected even in our own minds, or we are damned.

+

Only when we have installed the sin/guilt/thoughtcrime monitor in our own heads will we be even potentially among the saved. There is a straight line that connects Zoroastrian dualism and Augustine’s sin-centered theology with the Islamic concept of “sarfa” (turning away from God) and Communist talk of “false consciousness” — at some level, the mechanisms to run any stable totalitarianism have to look alike, because they’re all designed to control the same wetware.

+

The alliance now forming between the Islamo-fascists and the hard left should surprise nobody who understands the deep structure of either belief system. Both are, fundamentally, designed as legitimizing agents for tyranny — memetic machines designed to program you into licking the boot of the commissar or caliph that stomps you. But outside of a tiny minority of the brave (Robert Ingersoll) or the crazy (Nietzsche) Western intellectuals have averted their eyes from this truth, because to recognize it would almost require them to notice that the very same deep structure is wired into the Gnosticized Christianity of “Saint” Augustine — and, in fact, historically derived from it.

+

Hence the shared Christian/Islamic propensity for putting unbelievers to the sword for merely unbelieving. You will search in vain for such behavior among post-Exilic Jews, or Taoists, or animists, or any other world religion. Only a religion which is totalitarian at its core, fundamentally about thoughtcrime and sin and submission, can even conceive of a need to murder people wholesale for the state of their unbelief. The massacre on St. Bartholomew’s Eve and Stalin’s liquidation of the kulaks were of a piece, both jihads against thoughtcrime.

+

Islam conceals this less well than Christianity or Communism ever did. The very name, “Islam”, means “submission”. But when Christian evangelists called the destruction on 9/11 God’s punishment for feminism and homosexuals they were singing from the same hymnbook, channelling the same authoritarianism and “ancient religious rage” that Margalit and Buruma’s essay Occidentalism quite correctly diagnosed at the roots of fascism.

+

It is not difficult to recognize in that rage something deep, twisted, sick, and anti-human, and condemn it for the psychosis it is. It is more difficult, but necessary, to recognize Augustine’s theology of submission — and the concept of “islam” that Islam derived from it — as one of the most subtle and deadliest symptoms of that pychosis, one which leads to massacre as surely as a stab wound bleeds.

+

Totalitarian religion and democracy are not, in the end, compatible. Free people cannot — indeed, must never — submit in the way that Zoroaster, Augustine, Mohammed, and Stalin required. The Founding Fathers understood this, and when George Washington wrote “The United States is in no way founded upon the Christian religion” on a diplomatic message to the Knights of Malta they were expressing it.

+

Islamic terrorism is forcing us to face this fact. But we will not be able to understand and squarely confront the evil at the heart of Islam, Naziism, and Communism, until we face the fact that all three of these monsters are Augustine’s progeny, and that same evil is embedded in Christianity itself.

diff --git a/20041115021630.blog b/20041115021630.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7fbba06 --- /dev/null +++ b/20041115021630.blog @@ -0,0 +1,73 @@ +Hurray for Dollywood +

Hot damn! I wonder if this
+here post by Iowahawk means I’m gonna git me someplace near here
+in Pensylvay-ni-ay that can serve up a decent mess of Texas
+barbeque?

+

Put me down as a proud purple-stater. I like guns, but I hate
+country music. I love burnt-ends sandwiches, but I despise chewing
+tobacco. I agree that Waffle House makes the breakfast food of the
+gods, but I loathe fundamentalists. I not uncommonly use “y’all”
+rather than “you” for the second person plural because it’s clearer,
+but I assume people who use “y’all” for the second person
+singular really are dumb hicks.

+

Demography is not destiny. I was born in the Yankee heart of
+Boston, I went to an Ivy League university, I’m a fluent writer and
+speaker, every house I’ve lived in in the U.S. has been within a
+hundred miles of the Atlantic, and I’ve never had a manual-labor job
+in my life. By all that’s stereotyped I ought to be a member in good
+standing of the chattering classes and the tribe of fuzzy-sweater
+liberals, sucking up NPR and voting for Kerry like all decent
+blue-staters were supposed to.

+

I’m not quite sure how I escaped this fate. It wasn’t by becoming
+a conservative, oh dear no. I’m a radical Wiccan anarchist with a
+sexual style that your average red-stater wouldn’t even know the right
+words to describe (yes, I’ve checked). Right-wingers appall me
+— most are so narrow-minded that they don’t even have a prayer
+of understanding how narrow-minded they are. They live inside cages
+and never see the bars.

+

So instead of repudiating my blue-state pedigree by turning into
+some sort of repellant young-conservative lizardoid, I grew into
+someone half-blue, half-red. My wife Cathy thinks my father’s
+influence had a lot to do with that, and she’s probably got a point.
+He grew up hardscrabble poor in the red counties of rural central
+Pennsylvania during the Great Depression, clawed his way out to a
+profession in coastal blue-land with drive and brains, and married an
+upper-class girl with the looks of a movie star. Men like that don’t
+fall for easy, comfortable answers in politics or anywhere else.
+Among the traits I inherited from him are a contrarian streak, a
+studied and stubborn refusal to fit into anyone’s tidy categories, and
+some bedrock respect for red-state virtues.

+

Iowahawk ends his brilliant satire with the line “After the toilet
+backed up, I think he got my point”. Whether intentionally or not, he
+perfectly illustrates the single most important advantage of red-state
+culture and politics. It’s an advantage my father understood, and he
+passed that understanding on to me.

+

Here it is: your average red-state prole’s world-view may be
+strangely cramped, and is too often shot through with bizarre and ugly
+superstitions like creationism — but within his limits he
+is in contact with reality. On the other hand, your average
+elite blue-stater — insulated by wealth and a complacent
+mainstream media and thick layers of theoretical artifice —
+understands everything except reality. Which is great if
+what you need is irony or wit or skilled navigation through a maze of
+social constructions, but not so useful when you need a toilet
+fixed.

+

There’s nothing new about this dance. Aristocrats and yeomen have
+been doing it since the days when Sumer was the new kid on the block.
+The anti-red-state squawking now being emitted by blue-state pundits
+in the wake of Kerry’s defeat can be summed up as a fearful cry of
+“The peasants are revolting!” It isn’t really about political
+geography but about class and class snobbery.

+

And you know what? Class snobbery pisses me off, especially when
+the people peddling it are vapid ninnies whose smugness about their own
+sophistication doesn’t conceal their complete failure to get a grip
+on reality. Apparently it pisses off Iowahawk too — his satire
+doesn’t conceal a dark delight in the thought of all those blue-state
+aristo parents wringing their hands.

+

So, even though I’ll never be one of them, my response to
+Iowahawk’s satire is to root for the Neckies. Being one of them by
+birth myself, I have long since taken the measure of the blue-state
+elite. They’re more interesting to hang with, they tell better jokes,
+they understand all the finer things in life — and it’s past
+time for this country’s Y’alls to be rubbing their noses in the fact
+that they’re mostly full of shit.

diff --git a/20041116141504.blog b/20041116141504.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0aa643e --- /dev/null +++ b/20041116141504.blog @@ -0,0 +1,65 @@ +Condoleeza Rice in 2008! +

So Condi Rice is going to replace Colin Powell as Secretary of State.
+I have to think this means she’s being groomed for the Republican ticket
+in 2008.

+

Well, I hope so anyway. I know very little about her, but I’ve discovered
+that I really want to have a ringside seat on the farcical hijinks
+that will certainly ensue if the Republicans run a black woman for President,
+or even Veep.

+

Just so my position is clear, it is quite unlikely I’d vote for
+her. As in, not unless the Libertarian candidate is a werewolf or
+something. It’s just that the thought of Democratic strategists
+having shit fits over the hemhorraging black vote greatly amuses me.
+The panic and confusion that would reign on the New York Times
+editorial page as their political-correctness bias clashes
+(for once) with their anti-Republican bias would be good for many
+guffaws. I might actually listen to NPR just to hear them choking.
+In general, just watching the machinery of smug left-wing duckspeak
+seize up and damage itself on Condi’s blackness would be
+delicious.

+

Watching Republican racist/nativist types hold their gorges down
+for the sake of party unity would be entertaining too, but probably
+much less so as that type seems rather rare these days. In lieu of
+that, I’d just have to content myself with the screams of insenate
+rage that would issue from the neo-Nazis at Stormfront. Why, they might be
+almost as angry as the “Bush=Hitler” crew over at Democratic
+Underground. With any luck we might actually get to watch a few of
+the vicious morons on both sites die of thundering apoplexy.

+

Truly, what’s not to like?

+

There are, of course, excellent reasons for the Republicans to try
+this maneuver. Mainstream blacks are far more socially conservative
+than most of the other interest groups in the Democratic coalition. I
+personally do not consider this is a good thing, but there is no
+denying that it makes them pretty ripe to be the next demographic that
+gets chiseled out of the party (following southerners, rust-belt
+blue-collar whites, and most recently Catholics).

+

But having a corner on the black vote is important to the Democrats
+for more than just raw poll numbers. On it, now that the whites at
+the bottom of the socio-economic scale have gone majority-Republican,
+rests their last tenable claim to be the Party of the Oppressed. This
+claim has become so important to their image and internal mythology that,
+without it, the Democrats might very well collapse.

+

Who’s going to be their next favorite victim group to hang this
+myth from? Homosexuals won’t do; there are too few of them at 4%.
+The Jews wouldn’t do either, at 2%, even if the Dems hadn’t gotten
+badly tainted by the creeping anti-Semitism of their own left
+wing. Hispanics used to look promising, but they’re in a late stage of
+assimilation and obviously headed the way of the Italians or Irish —
+they won’t remain an ethnic voting bloc for even another decade.

+

It’s hard to peddle your outfit as tribunes of the disadvantaged
+when your main powerbases are the public-employee unions, Hollywood,
+and the Upper East Side. The Republicans have gotten pretty good at
+nailing the Democratic leadership as the spoiled children of wealth
+and privilege even with the blacks in the Democratic column;
+without them, it’s just going to get uglier. And Condi Rice would be
+the perfect wedge candidate.

+

Your average Democrat’s reflex seems to be to blame the sinister
+machinations of Karl Rove for this state of affairs. The trouble with
+this theory is that Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, and Condi Rice do
+actually exist. They’re not just fantasies, and they
+represent a degree of access and power black people never had under
+any Democratic administration.

+

Cynical tactical positioning? Maybe. Who cares? No matter what
+the Republicans mean by it, the cause of equality gains and the
+hate-spewing race-baiters on the left and right lose. Condi in
+2008!

diff --git a/20041118104258.blog b/20041118104258.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6be4eb6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20041118104258.blog @@ -0,0 +1,120 @@ +What happens if the Democrats collapse? +

I’ve written several blog essays recently
+[1]
+[2]
+[3]
+[4]
+pondering the deep trouble the Democratic party is in. I believe,
+on current demographic and political trends, that their problems
+are going to get worse and might actually prove terminal —
+especially if the Republicans have the strategic sense to run Condi
+Rice for President or Vice-President in 2008.

+

I’m not going to rehearse all their problems here. Instead I’m going
+to try to think through some scenarios for what U.S. politics might look like
+after a Democratic-party collapse, and discuss why I think they are
+plausible or implausible.

+

The common premise for all of these scenarios is that the Democrats
+collapse or split into warring factions once they discover that they
+just cannot win elections any more. The party breaks apart along the
+Democratic Leadership Council vs. hard-lefty split that’s been the
+main axis of tension within it since the 1980s. The variables are
+about what happens to the left-wing and centrist/DLC factions
+afterwards. I’m taking for granted that the handful of
+Zell-Miller-like conservative Democrats left in congress would jump
+the aisle to the GOP.

+

Case Gray: Republican Triumph

+

In this scenario, the left faction runs off to the Greens and
+minor Red parties such as the Socialists. The centrist/DLC types go
+Republican or exit politics. This one is a recipe for really
+long-term Republican-party dominance, with the Greens retaining some
+degree of clout in a handful of coastal cities and university towns;
+it’s the Karl Rove wet dream.

+

I rate this one moderately likely, and I’m not happy about that.
+It has benign possibilities, but it has fairly ugly ones too. Which
+we get depends on whether small-government conservatives or the
+Religious Right get the upper hand in the GOP’s factional struggles. The
+former seems more likely (especially since all those ex-Democrats will be
+pulling against the Religious Right). But the latter possibility is
+actually fairly scary.

+

At the worst-case end, we’d end up in the theocratic U.S. of Robert
+Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100. Mind you I think this is
+highly unlikely, and the widespread lefty panic about it seems to me
+to be mainly hyperventilation and hysteria — they’d have
+you believe it’s happening right now, whereas I see a decade
+or more before the threat could become acute. But it remains an outside
+possibility.

+

The more likely long-term outcome would be that the Republicans themselves
+split along small-government vs. cultural-conservative lines.

+

Case Green: Green Party Triumph

+

The Democratic-left refugees run more to the Reds. Greens get some
+of them, but absorb a larger cohort of the centrist/DLC refugees and
+evolve into a stronger and less left-wing party as a result, one with
+prospects to increase its mass appeal. In effect, they become the
+successor party of the Democrats and the familiar Democrat/Republican
+seesaw resumes, with the Greens out of power most of the time.

+

I rate this one very unlikely. The problem is that if it were
+possible for the DLC to come up with a new, centrist platform and stem
+the long-term decline in their base, this scenario (dump the lefty
+moonbats and reposition) is exactly the scenario they’d be engineering
+themselves as a means of institutional survival. Since they
+don’t seem to be able to manage it, I doubt the Greens (who are even more
+Red-infiltrated than the Democrats) could either.

+

Case Gold: Libertarian Party Triumph

+

The left runs to the Greens and Reds. The centrist/DLC types join
+the Libertarians. Small-government-Republican types drift to them, a
+process which accelerates as it gradually weakens the holdouts inside the GOP.
+At equilibrium, the Libertarians effectively replace the Democrats while
+the Republicans become more and more a hard-right party of evangelicals
+and nativists.

+

The key to Libertarian success in this scenario is gun owners.
+This is the largest single captive bloc in the Republican voter base
+at 50% of American households, one no less a politician than Bill
+Clinton has identified as the swing group in the 1994 election and
+subsequent Democrat disasters. The Libertarians succeed by prying
+them loose from the Republican base.

+

As a libertarian and a gun owner, this is the one I’d most like to
+see. However, I rate it unlikely. While I believe libertarian ideas
+could be much more effectively marketed than they are, the LP has
+proven almost comically inept at actually doing so. Post-9/11, its
+isolationist foreign policy is a non-starter as well; I do not think
+Americans will buy this until they perceive that the threat of Islamic
+terror has been broken.

+

I’m, frankly, skeptical that the LP can overcome its own history
+effectively enough to grasp this opportunity. But I’d love to be
+wrong about this.

+

Case Red: Reds Triumph

+

This is Michael Moore’s wet dream — a major comeback for American
+Marxism. It only happens if the Angry Left turns out to have been correct
+about the DLC/centrists sabotaging their efforts to tap a huge pool of
+naturally leftist voters. After the centrist/DLC types have faded from the
+scene or gone to the GOP, one of the Red parties successfully markets
+itself not just as a replacement for the democrats but in a way that
+peels off a significant part of the Republican voter base.

+

I’ve listed this one for completeness. I think it’s wildly
+unlikely, because I think the Angry Left’s belief that it can become
+the vanguard of a mass movement is a drug dream. I don’t believe
+there is any group in the majority-Republican voter base that is
+vulnerable to a Marxist pitch, so even if they cornered all of the
+Democrat base they’d still be in a minority position.

+

Case Blue: New Centrists

+

The lefty refugees dissipate themselves among the Reds and Greens.
+The centrist/DLC types either keep the Democratic rump or boot up a
+new party that abandons the socialist-economics and identity-politics
+side of the Democrat platform, fights the War on Terror hard, and
+remains strongly liberal shading towards libertarian on other social
+issues. The result is, in effect, a new party of classical liberalism
+— the Barry Goldwater Democrats.

+

As in Case Gold, their key tactical move is to peel gun owners out
+of the Republican base. Over time, small-government Republicans drift
+over from the GOP, which goes harder-right in consequence.

+

Nowadays I think this one is more likely than Case Gold. The key
+to it may be the blogs, in which I see a kind of pro-War-on-Terror
+libertarian centrism emerging as a new political force. The blogs
+have been far more successful than the Libertarian Party at creating a
+movement with mass appeal, quasi-libertarian attitudes, and enough
+influence to have already arguably scuttled one presidential campaign
+(Kerry’s, over Rathergate). +

Case Blue is different than Case Gold in that the new centrist
+party is not tied to libertarian ideology and pursues a
+neoconservative foreign policy. This is the future in which “Glenn
+Reynolds for President!” doesn’t sound crazy.

diff --git a/20041206152410.blog b/20041206152410.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1dd24e7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20041206152410.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Free Falling +

+

+

My friend Howard Tayler, the cartoonist behind Schlock Mercenary, invited me to post this.

diff --git a/20041208132124.blog b/20041208132124.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b009ccb --- /dev/null +++ b/20041208132124.blog @@ -0,0 +1,372 @@ +Left2Right – a critical appraisal +

I’ve been reading a new blog called
+Left2Right, founded in
+mid-November 2004 as an attempt by a group of left-wing intellectuals to reach
+out to intelligent people on the right of the American political spectrum.
+It is indeed a thought-provoking read, but the thoughts they are provoking
+are not necessarily of the sort they intend.

+

This response is intended for the Left2Right authors, so I’ll
+rehearse what will be obvious to regular Armed and
+Dangerous readers; I’m not a conservative or right-winger
+myself, but a radical libertarian who finds both ends of the
+conventional spectrum about
+equally repugnant. My tradition is the free-market classical liberalism of Locke and
+Hayek. I utterly reject both the Marxist program and the reactionary
+cultural conservatism of Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and (today) the
+Religious Right. Conservatism is defined by a desire to preserve
+society’s existing power relationships; given a choice, I prefer
+subverting them to preserving them.

+

One advantage my libertarianism gives me is that while I disagree
+violently with a lot of right-wing thinking, I understand it much
+better than most leftists do. The reverse is not quite as true; while
+I do believe I understand left-wing thinking pretty well, most
+right-wing intellectuals are not so ignorant of leftism that I have an
+unusual advantage there. They can’t be, not after having passed
+through the PC indoctrination camps that most American universities
+have become.

+

A right-winger, noting the concentration of philosophy and
+humanities professors in the Left2Right bios and the number of them
+who list topics like “race and gender issues” as interest areas, would
+say that the contributors are typical members of the elite that runs
+those camps. But one of the things that Left2Right suggests to this
+libertarian is that even these people are prisoners, locked in by
+their own group-think. The toughest challenge they face in reaching
+out to right-wingers is not a problem with right-wingers — it is the
+unexamined premises and lacunae in their own reasoning.

+

The post
+that is at the top of the blog as I write is a subtle but perfect
+illustration of this point. J. David Velleman, writing on Bush
+administration strategy about the liberation of Iraq, argues that they
+fell victim to a philosophical error, believing that giving the Iraqi
+people freedom would be sufficient to pacify the country. He writes
+“These decisionmakers seem not to have considered the possibility that
+freedom alone may not induce people to do wonderful things if they
+lack a shared sense of confidence in the legitimacy of the social
+order”.

+

This is a refreshing change from the dimmer sort of left-wing
+narrative, in which Bush and Cheney head a sinister cabal who dream
+of an American empire that enslaves the Iraqis and steals their oil
+for Halliburton. It’s an intelligent criticism; possibly even a
+correct one.

+

But…and this is a large ‘but’…the when Velleman goes on to
+imply that “shared confidence in the legitimacy of the social order”
+is one of the “values of the left” without which the “values of the
+Right are simply not viable”, he reveals himself to be inhabiting some
+sort of ahistorical cloud-Cuckoo land. He is making an archetypally
+right-wing sort of argument here, one which would sound far more
+likely from Russell Kirk or an eighteenth-century clericalist than from
+anyone who purports to be part of the tradition of Karl Marx or
+Mikhael Bakunin or Emma Goldman.

+

Velleman’s blythe unawareness of the reactionary tenor of his own
+argument suggests more than just a ignorance of right-wing political
+thinking that is crippling for anyone engaged in Left2Right’s project;
+it suggests that Left thought has become so empty of any content of
+its own, so stuck in reflexive oppositionalism, that all that remains
+to it is to grab at any concept that can be used to oppose George W.
+Bush.

+

In fact, this model of a Left stuck in reflexive oppositionalism is
+exactly what conservative intellectuals believe about it. Their
+narrative goes like this: once upon a time, Left thought was a genuine
+world-system, a coherent if tragically mistaken competitor to
+classical liberalism and capitalism. The Soviet Union used this
+theory for evil purposes, to seduce the intelligentsia of the West and
+foment among them anti-American, anti-capitalist hatred. When the
+Soviet Union collapsed, the Left’s world-system collapsed with it.
+All that remained was a catalogue of resentments clothed in the
+tattered remnants of Marxist theory, but the Left intelligentsia never
+let go of this. As the theory crumbled, the resentments
+became the theory. So we are left with a Left that is more
+hysterically anti-American than ever, and willing to suck up to
+monstrous dictators like Saddam Hussein, precisely because it no
+longer knows what to be for.

+

Now: reread the above paragraph, then ask yourself what Velleman’s
+rhetoric will inevitably sound like to a conservative intellectual. You
+will know you have gotten it when your hair stands on end.

+

We continue with a post
+by Jeff McMahan on “Support our Troops” bumper stickers. McMahan
+appears to mean well, but when writes as though he thinks that the
+owners of SUVs and vans who bear these stickers are performing some
+kind of Machiavellian calculation about oil-shock risks he is merely
+proving that he is laughably out of touch with the thinking of
+ordinary Americans.

+

A gentle hint for Mr. McMahan: People who own vans and SUVs
+live in the suburbs. People who live in the suburbs
+predominantly vote Republican; this is a cold demographic
+fact known to almost everybody whose horizons are wider than those of
+an average NPR radio-show host. The fact that you don’t know this, and
+instead chase after paranoid all-about-the-oil theories, makes you the
+sort of person conservatives laugh about and and point out as a
+paradigmatic example of left-liberal cluelessness.

+

The ahistorical J. David Velleman speaks some good sense in
+
+debunking a dead horse. He may be dead-ignorant of right-wing thought
+but he clearly isn’t stupid. Like all the contributors he radiates a
+sense that he is honestly trying.

+

David Estlund’s The
+First Data Point on Anti-Terrorism starts as fairly standard-issue
+Bush-bashing; he ignores the fact that, if the Bush administration was
+culpable, the Clinton administration was even more culpable on the
+same “knew or should have known” sort of argument. The intelligence
+estimates that made al-Qaeda out to be imminently dangerous long
+predate the 2000 elections.

+

The more interesting part of his post is his repetition of the meme
+that Republicans won’t listen to arguments or evidence from
+intellectuals like him. He is so full of self-congratulation about
+the Bushies’ alleged inability to let the evidence lead them where it
+will (and by implication, his own superior ability to do so) that he
+completely misses the real reason conservative policy makers tune his
+kind out.

+

Mr. Estlund, how can I break this to you gently…the Bushies ignore
+advice from left-wing academics because they believe the source is poisoned.
+They believe you hate America and want to destroy it. Given
+that belief, it would be their duty to listen to your advice only with
+the determination to do the exact opposite of anything you recommend.

+

Now, mind you, in pointing this out, I am not alleging that you
+actually do hate America and want to destroy it. My claim is
+that from the point of view of most conservatives, that is the only
+model that plausibly explains your speech and behavior. They do not
+merely pretend to believe your kind is evil as a matter of rhetoric or
+tactical positioning, they actually do believe it. With the
+best will in the world to listen to critics and weigh evidence, they
+still wouldn’t take policy advice from you any more readily than you
+would accept it from a Nazi.

+

(Allow me to contrast this with the position I think more typical of
+libertarians, which is that left-wing academics are not evil per se
+but have been so canalized by Marxist-derived ideology that on most
+politico-economic issues they should be ignored on grounds of
+irremediable incompetence.)

+

So, if you want to be listened to in Washington, your problem (one
+which is general to left-wing intellectuals) is how to falsify
+conservatives’ belief that you hate America and want to destroy it.
+This is not going to be possible at all as long as you express
+contempt for the values and reasoning ability of the majority of
+Americans that voted for George Bush.

+

But your problem runs deeper than that. To be listened to, you
+will need to demonstrate that you share what present-day American
+conservatives think of as their core beliefs, including but not limited
+to:

+
    +
  • The practical and moral superiority of free-market capitalism
    +over socialism and all other competing visions of political economics.
    • +
  • American exceptionalism — the belief that the U.S. is uniquely
    +qualified by history and values to bring liberty to the oppressed of
    +the world.
    • +
  • Islamic terrorism is an unqualified evil which cannot be explained
    +or excused either by “root cause” analysis; further, that laying it
    +to past failures in U.S. policy is a form of blaming the victim.
    • +
+

(Note that I am not endorsing these beliefs, simply pointing out that
+conservatives generally hold them.)

+

As long as conservatives believe that you do not share these core
+beliefs with them, they will conclude that your policy “help” on Iraq
+or the War on Terror would be an active detriment. And — here’s
+the hard part — they will be justified in that belief
+(which, as you doubtless know, is not the same as the assertion that
+the belief is confirmably true).

+

But you have yet another problem, which is not about the beliefs of
+conservative intellectuals or policymaking elites. It is that in
+rejecting the core beliefs I have pointed at, you are not merely
+defining yourself out of the policy conversation conservatives are
+ready to have, you are also out of step with the majority of the
+American people. The voters. As long as that continues to be the
+case, the Left will continue to lose elections.

+

Estlund’s posting responds to the previous one, in which Gerald Dworkin
+says intelligent things about the Bush administration’s apparent success
+at preventing major terrorist acts in the U.S., and the electoral ramifications
+thereof. Excellent; if the Left is prepared to face reality this squarely,
+there is hope for them yet.

+

J. David Velleman has more sensible things to say about the
+politics of homosexuality. His distinction between the respect that
+we owe “gay rights” and the problematic status of “gay pride” is
+astute. I think leftists also need to understand that many
+conservatives (and libertarians like myself) feel a deep and
+principled revulsion not just against “gay pride” but against all
+forms of manipulative identity politics, and are heartily fed up with
+having leftists construe that revulsion as bigotry.

+

Stephen Darwall’s School
+Resegregation and the Exurbs, on the other hand, feels like an
+attempt to force new wine into old wineskins. The Left’s tendency to
+turn every policy argument into a diatribe about racism (too often,
+racism that existed nowhere but in the Left’s imagination) was always
+one of its least attractive traits. We could do without a
+revival.

+

Again, I am not just discussing elite opinion here. If you go to
+the voters with the argument that wanting to live in exurbs is
+evidence of racism, they will stiff-arm you. Actually, I think it is
+only the hothouse atmosphere of the academy that has kept racism alive
+as a topic in American thought for the last fifteen years or so.

+

In Being
+Forthright, Seanna Shiffrin says nothing at all that has any
+chance of increasing understanding between Left and Right, and does so
+at some length. Her screed reads, to any conservative (and even to a
+libertarian like me) as extended self-congratulation about how Left
+convictions are so obviously correct that if leftists trumpet them
+loudly enough the people will come.

+

This is a perfect example of the wages of groupthink. In fact, if the
+six election cycles since 1980 demonstrate anything, it is that being
+more “forthright” about left-wing positions is a recipe for electoral
+disaster.

+

Kwame Appiah takes
+the opposite tack: “In these circumstances I think it would be
+better to show up first with an offer to listen than with an offer to
+talk.” A commenter correctly observes that this may be the most
+useful thing we have heard a Democrat say since the elections.

+

Unfortunately, the rest of the posting is yet another narrative about
+left-wing superiority, though Mr. Appiah gives it the novel twist of
+ascribing this belief to right-wingers! For this he is quite properly
+taken to the woodshed buy some conservative commenters.

+

Speaking as an observer who is (once again) not a
+conservative, I salute the commenter who said “I think you go
+profoundly astray in this understanding of why conservatives rail
+against the liberal media. It isn’t about being liked. It is about
+believing that the liberal media distorts the truth and manipulates
+beliefs by using such distortions. They rail against the political and
+social power which they believe is being corruptly used.

+

I’ll go further than that. I resent the way that the Left uses its
+effective control of the mainstream media to manipulate belief even
+when the manipulation advances causes I agree with —
+for example, abortion rights. I don’t like “pro-lifers” and I don’t
+agree with them — but that doesn’t stop me from noticing that
+they get stigmatized as all being yahoos and routinely associated with
+clinic-bombers by the same media that is very painstaking in
+separating the Left’s violent crazies from allegedly more
+“respectable” organizations like Greenpeace or PETA.

+

It is wise of Joshua Cohen to have noticed
+that gay-marriage initiatives probably actually hurt Bush rather than
+winning him the election. If the Left continues to comfort itself by
+believing its only real problem is with Christian evangelicals, it will
+slide further into denial and irrelevancy.

+

The American rejection of what Cohen calls “progressive values” is
+much, much broader based than that. As an agnostic Wiccan who thinks
+the War on Drugs was a huge toxic blunder, I am not personally
+thrilled about this development, but I recognize it as fact
+nevertheless. Mr. Cohen is to be commended for urging this unwelcome
+news on the Left.

+

On the other hand, J. David Velleman’s post
+on the Academic Bill of Rights does not go nearly far enough. His is
+a more sophisticated form of defensive crouch than the outright denial
+we usually see, but merely admitting that “large regions of the
+humanities and social sciences have become increasingly ideological,” doesn’t
+even come close to addressing the actual magnitude of the problem.

+

I am, in an important sense, an applied humanist/sociologist. My
+analysis
+of the anthropology and sociology of open-source software development
+has a significant reputation in academia; it has been cited with the
+coveted adjective “seminal” and spawned quite a number of master’s and
+doctoral theses. My work has required that I enter the conceptual
+world of modern “humanities and social sciences” — not merely to
+theorize about these disciplines, but to use them in ways
+that have helped trigger transformative changes in the software
+industry.

+

I have immodestly set forth these qualifications here because my
+experience requires an even stronger indictment than David Horowitz’s,
+let alone the mild one that Mr. Velleman will admit. I have
+encountered entire academic fields that have been effectively
+destroyed by Left politics, in the sense that they can no
+longer talk about anything other than power relations. Postmodern
+literary criticism is only the most obvious example; for that matter,
+postmodernist anything is reliably a nihilist swamp obsessed
+with ‘agendas’ and ‘power relations’ to the exclusion of its
+ostensible subject matter.

+

Here’s one that affects me particularly: the damage done to
+cultural anthropology has been horrific, with the perverse effect of
+making my amateur and tentative essays in it look far stronger than
+they would have if the field were actually healthy.

+

I don’t have a fix for this problem. But I do know that more than any
+mere housecleaning is needed. Some of these dwellings are so rotted out
+that they will have to be razed and rebuilt before they are habitable
+by anything but political animals.

+

Don Herzog is right to ask, in
+Religion and politics, exactly what conservatives want when they say
+Americans should agree that we a “Christian nation”. This is exactly the
+sort of question that the Left, if its continued existence is to mean
+anything useful, should be pushing.

+

J. David Velleman makes the surprising concession
+that Roe V. Wade was bad politics and bad law. As a pro-choicer who
+nevertheless agrees with conservatives on this point (and largely for
+the reasons Velleman states), I have been wondering when the Left
+would begin to wake up on this point.

+

Groupthink shows up again in Gerald Dworkin’s Less
+contempt; more mutual ground. I’m thinking in particular of his claim
+that “Both those who advocate gun-control and those who oppose it can
+agree that trigger-locks and other safety devices are desirable.”

+

It is evident here that Mr. Dworkin has no idea what pro-firearms
+activists like myself actually believe. It seems likely he has never
+actually spoken with one; otherwise he would know that we regard
+trigger locks as bad things, because they reduce the utility of
+firearms for one of their principal purposes — self-defense. If
+your friendly neighborhood junkie breaks into your home and menaces
+your family with a knife (or, as in one recent case, a branding iron)
+you need to be able to get the weapon into play fast.
+Trigger locks and soi-disant “safety devices” primarily benefit
+criminals by reducing their risks.

+

In fact, we regard the push for trigger locks as an underhanded
+attempt to make self-defense impractical so that popular support for
+firearms rights will lose a major prop. If Mr. Dworkin had ever discussed
+this issue outside a UC Davis faculty meeting, he would probably know
+this.

+

In Not
+Too Bright, J. David Velleman misses a central point about
+American hostility to the “intelligentsia” because he falls back into
+the comforting Left groupthink about the Christian evangelicals and
+“moral values”.

+

I’m an intellectual myself, not a Christian, not a conservative.
+Yet I understand the emotion Mr. Dworkin reads as
+“anti-intellectualism”; I even sympathize with it to some extent. It
+is a folk reaction to what Julian Benda called le trahison
+des clercs. The West’s intelligentsia — not all of it, but
+enough of it to tar all of us — was a willing accomplice in the
+terrible totalitarian crimes of the 20th century. Today, the same
+segments of the intelligentsia that cooperated with Stalinism are
+issuing apologetics for al-Qaeda. (This is not just metaphorically but
+literally the case, as the pedigree of A.N.S.W.E.R. and the
+“Not In Our Name” organizers shows.)

+

Until the academic Left faces up to the evil at the center of its
+own history, it will completely fail to understand why
+“anti-intellectualism” is common even anong people who find Christian
+“moral values” argument as off-putting as I do.

+

We could ask for no better illustration of the blindness induced by
+comforting groupthink than Elizabeth Anderson’s
+What Hume can teach us about our partisan divisions.

+

She writes “If interests were all that divided us, the Democratic
+Party (what there is of the Left that has institutional power) would
+enjoy an overwhelming majority, since it represents the interests of
+the bulk of the population, while Republican policies favor mainly the
+rich. Most people understand this, and the Left can offer sound
+arguments and evidence to persuade those who disagree.”

+

I am not a Republican. I have never been a Republican. But claims
+like this, presented as though they are unassailable fact, utterly
+infuriate me. And if they infuriate me, imagine how they
+would affect an actual conservative!

+

As a matter of political economics, I believe that the high-tax,
+high-spending policies of the Democrats benefit nobody except
+a small class of elite parasites and a slightly larger one of welfare
+clients; the “bulk of the population” gets shafted, forced to pay the
+bill for redistributive programs that wind up doing net damage to
+society. Nor is there any reason, given that the Democrats now rely
+more on wealthy contributors than the Republicans, to credit the
+worn-out canard that Republicans are tools of the rich.

+

It is not, however, the factual falsity of Ms. Anderson’s claim
+that is most infuriating, but its smugness, its blind arrogance,
+its casual assumption that no reasonable person could possibly
+disagree with the premises. Anyone who decides to reject Julian
+Benda’s analysis need look no further for an explanation of
+American anti-intellectualism than this. After reading it, I’m
+almost ready to torch the nearest ivory tower myself.

+

It is a good thing that the skein finishes (actually, begins) with
+David J. Velleman’s honest puzzlement about conservative notions of “absolute
+evil”; otherwise, with the taste of Ms, Anderson’s purblind parochialism
+in my mouth, I might have to conclude that Left2Right’s project is
+unsalvageable.

+

What can we conclude from Left2Right’s first three weeks of
+postings? My own evaluation begins with praise: comparing with what I
+read elsewhere, I think these writers truly do represent the best of
+the modern Left. I see more willingness than I might have expected
+to honestly question some of the Left’s sacred cows.

+

Unfortunately, the news is far from all good. Too many smug
+shibboleths are also being repeated here. There is too much talk and
+not enough listening – not enough attempt to engage the Right’s
+beliefs (as opposed to a comforting left-wing parody of those beliefs).

+

Kwame Appiah is right. If you really want to build a healthy
+dialogue with the right-wing majority in America, you need to approach
+them not to teach but to learn.

diff --git a/20041216185503.blog b/20041216185503.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6a20ec2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20041216185503.blog @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +The Racist of Earthsea +

In Slate magazine, SF author Ursula LeGuin complains that the
+producers of the new Earthsea miniseries have butchered her
+work. One form of butchery that she zeroes in on is by casting
+characters who she intended to be red, brown, or black as white
+people.

+

I have mixed feelings. LeGuin has every right to be POed at how
+her intentions were ignored, but on the other hand my opinion of her
+has not been improved by learning that she intended the books as yet
+another wearisomely PC exercise in
+multiculturalism/multiracialism.

+

I liked those books when I read them as a teenager. I didn’t
+notice any character’s skin color. I would really prefer not to have
+had my experience of those characters retrospectively messed with by
+LeGuin’s insistance that the race thing is important.

+

Note: I am not claiming that all casting should be colorblind. I
+remember once watching an otherwise excellent Kenneth Branagh
+production of Much Ado About Nothing that was somewhat marred for
+me by Branagh’s insistance on casting an American black man as a
+Renaissance Italian lord. This was wrong in exactly the same way that
+casting a blue-eyed blond as Chaka Zulu or Genghis Khan would be
+— it’s so anti-historical that it interferes with the suspension
+of disbelief. Fantasy like LeGuin’s, however, doesn’t have this kind
+of constraint. Ged and Tenar don’t become either more or less plausible
+if their skin color changes.

+

But what really annoyed me was LeGuin’s claim that only whites have
+the “privilege” of being colorblind. This is wrong and tendentious in
+several different ways. Colorblindness is not a privilege of anyone,
+it’s a duty of everyone — to judge people not by the color of their
+skin but the content of their character, and to make race a non-issue
+by whatever act of will it takes. (It doesn’t take any effort at all
+for me.)

+

If I had produced the Earthsea miniseries or been in charge of the
+art for her books, I would have both (a) respected LeGuin’s wishes
+about the skin color (she is the artist), and (b) regretted that she
+was so stuck on the issue.

+

To paraphrase one of my favorite Zen Comix punchlines “I left that
+issue at the riverside. Are you still carrying it?”

diff --git a/20041219101803.blog b/20041219101803.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8d366b7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20041219101803.blog @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Upgrading to WordPress diff --git a/20041220140301.blog b/20041220140301.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6ee7506 --- /dev/null +++ b/20041220140301.blog @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +The Revenge of the Nerds is Living Well +

Grant McCracken has argued in his book Plenitude that one of the defining characteristics of the last fifty years is an explosion of subcultural variety — people creating new lifestyles and new identities around occupations, sexual tastes, hobbies, genres of art and music, religions, and just about any other investment of time human beings have ever dreamed up.

+

When McCracken proposes that there is now as much divergence among individual subcultures in the life of the modern West as we can find among preindustrial tribes in the annals of anthropology he is probably exaggerating. Nevertheless, it is clear that he is onto something when he observes that the old idea of a ‘mainstream’ culture with subcultures developing in anti-conformist reaction to it is falling apart.

+

+[S]ubcultures now come from the cultural system in place. The culture of
+commotion is, as I have labored to demonstrate, dedicated to the production
+of new and different subcultures. +

+

SF fans. Skatepunks. Polyamorists. Gangsta rappers. Goths. McCracken certainly has this much right; there are now lots of voluntary subcultures out there that have the kind of adhesiveness once only associated with religious or tribal groupings. Belonging to them is not just a predilection like being a baseball fan or liking Chinese food, but a statement of identity with a whole social network and a set of myths and dreams and heroes attached to it.

+

Among the five groups I listed more or less at random above the culture of SF fandom is a bearded grandaddy, dating back to the late 1930s and thus predating the beginnings of the modern explosion of plenitude in the 1960s. The others are all much more recent, and illustrate how new tribes can emerge to become apparently permanent features of the landscape in less than a decade.

+

And this brings us to the geeks. When I was a teenager in the 1970s, there was not yet anything you could call “geek culture”. Sure, there were bright kids fascinated by computers or math or science, kids who were often poorly socialized in the jargon of the day and hung together as a defensive measure; I was one of them. But we didn’t see ourselves as having a social identity or affiliation the way the jocks or surfers or hippies did. We weren’t a subculture, nor even a community; we didn’t even have a label for ourselves.

+

Slowly, slowly that began to change. One key event was the eruption of science fiction into pop culture that began with the first Star Wars movie in 1977. This was our stuff and we knew it, even though most of us never joined the subculture of SF fandom proper. Personal computers made another big difference after 1980; suddenly, technology was cool and sexy in a way it hadn’t been for decades, and people who were into it started to get respect rather than (or in addition to) faint or not-so-faint scorn.

+

You could see the trend in movies. War Games in 1983; Revenge of the Nerds in 1984; Real Genius in 1985. To kids today Revenge of the Nerds doesn’t seem remarkable, because geek culture is more secure and confident today than a lot of older tribes like bikers or hippies. But at the time, the idea that you could have an entire fraternity of geeks — an autonomous social group with reason to be proud of itself and a recognized place in the social ecology — was funny; all by itself it was a comedy premise.

+

The heroes of Revenge of the Nerds were people who created a fraternity of their own, who bootstrapped a niche for themselves in Grant McCracken’s culture of plenitude. The movie was an extended joke, but it described and perhaps helped create a real phenomenon.

+

The term ‘geek’ didn’t emerge as a common label, displacing the older and much more sporadically-used ‘nerd’, until around the time of the Internet explosion of 1993-1994. I noticed this development because I didn’t like it; I still prefer to tell people I hang out with hackers (all hackers are geeks, but not all geeks are hackers). Another index of the success of the emerging geek culture is that around that time it stopped being an almost exclusively male phenomenon.

+

Yes, you catch my implication. When I was growing up we didn’t have geekgirls. Even if the label ‘geek’ had been in use at the time, the idea that women could be so into computers or games or math that they would identify with and hang out with geek guys would have struck us as sheerest fantasy. Even the small minority of geek guys who were good with women (and thus had much less reason to consider them an alien species) would have found the implications of the term ‘geekgirl’ unbelievable before 1995 or so.

+

(There are people who cannot read an account like the above without assuming that the author is simply projecting his own social and sexual isolation onto others. For the benefit of those people, I will report here that I had good relations with women long before this was anything but rare in my peer group. This only made the isolation of my peers easier to notice.)

+

What changed? Several things. One is that geek guys are, on the whole, better adjusted and healthier and more presentable today than they were when I was a teenager. Kids today have trouble believing the amount of negative social pressure on intelligent people to pass as normal and boring that was typical before 1980, the situation Revenge of the Nerds satirized and inverted. It meant that the nascent geek culture of the time attracted only the most extreme geniuses and misfits — freaks, borderline autists, obsessives, and other people in reaction against the mainstream. Women generally looked at this and went “ugh!”

+

But over time, geeky interests became more respectable, even high-status (thanks at least in part to the public spectacle of übergeeks making millions). The whole notion of opposition to the mainstream started to seem dated as ‘mainstream’ culture gradually effloresced into dozens of tribes freakier than geeks (two words: “body piercings”). Thus we started to attract people who were more normal, in psychology if not in talent. Women noticed this. I believe it was in 1992, at a transhumanist party in California, that I first heard a woman matter-of-factly describe the Internet hacker culture as “a source of good boyfriends”. A few years after that we started to get a noticeable intake of women who wanted to become geeks themselves, as opposed to just sleeping with or living with geeks.

+

The loner/obsessive/perfectionist tendencies of your archetypal geek are rare in women, who are culturally encouraged (and perhaps instinct-wired) to value social support and conformity more. Thus, women entering the geek subculture was a strong sign that it had joined the set of social identities that people think of as ‘normal’. This is still a very recent development; I can’t recall the term ‘geekgirl’ being used at all before about 1998, and I don’t think it became commonly self-applied until 2000 or so.

+

Interestingly, the dot.com bust does not seem to have slowed down or discredited the geek subculture at all. Websites like http://geekculture.com and http://thinkgeek.com do a flourishing business, successfully betting investment capital on the theory that there is in fact a common subculture or community embracing computer hackers, SF fans, strategy gamers, aficionados of logic puzzles, radio hams, and technology hobbyists of all sorts. Just the fact that a website can advertise The World’s Coolest Propeller Beanies! is indication of how far we’ve come.

+

I’ve previously observed about one large and important geek subtribe, the Internet hackers, that when people join it they tend to retrospectively re-interpret their past and after a while find it difficult to remember that they weren’t always part of this tribe. I think something similar is true of geeks in general; even those of us who lived through the emergence of geek culture have to struggle a bit to remember what it was like back when we were genuinely atomized outcasts in a culture that was dismissive and hostile.

+

There are even beginning to be geek families with evidence of generational transmission. I know three generations of one, starting when two computer scientists married in the late 1960s, and had four kids in the 1970s; the kids have since produced a first grandchild who at age five shows every sign of becoming just as avid a gamer/hacker/SF-fan as his parents and grandparents.

+

Little Isaac, bless him, will grow up in a culture that, in its plenitude, offers lots of artifacts and events designed by and for people like him. He will take the World Wide Web and the Sci-Fi Channel and Yugio and the Lord of the Rings movies and personal computers for granted. He’ll probably never be spat on by a jock, and if he can’t find a girlfriend it will be because the geekgirls and geek groupies are dating other guys like him, rather than being nonexistent.

+

For Isaac, Revenge of the Nerds will be a quaint period piece with very little more relevance to the social circumstances of his life than a Regency romance. And that is how we know that the nerds indeed got their revenge.

diff --git a/20041226105934.blog b/20041226105934.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..44d40ab --- /dev/null +++ b/20041226105934.blog @@ -0,0 +1,79 @@ +Hacking My Way To Stardom +

This is storyboard art for a movie called Nightmask, with
+the interesting property that I will probably get a speaking part in it
+if it’s actually produced.

+

+

+

“Whoa!” you may well ask. “How does a middle-aged geek with no
+showbiz history beyond a few singer/songwriter coffeehouse gigs in
+his college days land a part in, you know, a real movie?”

+

The answer, it turns out, is by hacking for a movie star. And thereby
+hangs a tale.

+

Back in October I was the top-billed guests of honor at the first
+Linucon, a convention for SF fans and Linux hackers in Austin, TX.
+First night I was there, at the invitation-only dinner for con guests,
+I found that I knew a lot of them. Steve Jackson, Wil Wheaton, Howard
+Tayler, Eric Flint…but there was one I didn’t recognize and she was
+striking enough to make an impression:

+

+
+ +

+

+

This woman’s charm was somehow only increased by the fact that at
+the time she was wearing black nerd-frame glasses; she looked like a
+supermodel playing a geekgirl, a guess which I discovered was nearly
+correct the next day when I found her sitting in the lobby of the
+hotel tapping keys on a PowerBook. I introduced myself, asked her
+name, and we were soon deep in conversation about all manner of
+interesting techie things. And her name? Tamara Gorski.

+

Yes, that would be the Tamara
+Gorski who played Rebecca Lowell in on an episode of
+Angel and Morrigan the Goddess of War (looking like Lucy
+Lawless’s kid sister) on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.
+She’s also had parts in quite a few B movies over the last decade; she
+told me later that she thinks she could get A-list parts if she pushed,
+but doesn’t really want the pressure or the fishbowl existence that would
+bring with it.

+

I had to admit to never having seen any of her stuff, as I don’t
+watch TV at all and hadn’t caught any of her movies. This, however,
+did not bother her in the least; in fact she seemed happy to be talking
+to someone who was (a) a low risk for going all fanboy on her, and (b)
+willing to teach her techie stuff, like how to program an automated
+way to mail people electronic thank-you cards. I launched into writing
+a Python program on her PowerBook to do exactly that.

+

That program took me about three hours to write, time scattered
+over the next two days, most of it with Tamara looking over my
+shoulder and (I kid you not) giggling with delight as I explained how
+this or that bit of Python helped get the job done. Tamara, it turns
+out, is (a) extremely bright, (b) by her own description, “shy and
+geeky”, and (c) intensely curious. And yes, formerly a successful
+model. So, not exactly a supermodel playing a geekgirl, more like one
+really letting her inner geek out to play for maybe the first time
+in her life.

+

Tamara loved discovering SF fandom; the atmosphere of Linucon
+delighted her. “I think I’ve found my people!” she said to me Sunday
+night. And I was her guide to the territory. By the time that program
+was finished, we were friends.

+

Tamara had told me early on that she was interested in writing and
+direction. She talked offhand at the con about casting me in her next
+film, but I didn’t know how seriously to take that until she emailed me
+a script and a character list and asked which ones I was interested in.

+

The plot is a sort of space opera with horror elements about a
+multispecies galactic future in which vampirism is a scourge that
+affects every species. The part she had in mind was Klaaghu, an
+initially sinister-appearing alien who dies heroically bringing

+

evidence to the anti-vampire resistance. After reading the script, I
+agreed that of the available roles, that one seemed like probably the
+best fit. It’s a nice juicy bit part; Klaaghu doesn’t get a lot of
+screen time, but he does get dialogue and a dramatic scene.

+

The big variable here is whether Tamara can get backers to produce
+the movie. She’s planning the low-budget route, shooting in New
+Zealand or Bulgaria. She’s got a natural market, as this is exactly
+the kind of thing the Sci-Fi channel buys. Tamara says “If you know
+anyone who wants to invest at all…there will be returns, and if it’s
+someone who would get their kicks from being in the film and getting
+screen credit as producer, that’s all cool and kosher.”

+

There you have it. Calling all dot.com millionaires: you wanna
+be a movie producer? Have a part in an SF flick? Your shot at stardom
+is waiting.

diff --git a/20041227161417.blog b/20041227161417.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..33287cf --- /dev/null +++ b/20041227161417.blog @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +Where’s Tom Wolfe when you need him? +

The Ananova site brings us this little gem:

+

Baseball star’s wife makes ultimate threat

+
+

The wife of a top US baseball player has vowed to have sex with all of
+his team mates if he ever cheats on her.

+

Anna Benson, a former model and stripper who was named Baseball’s
+Hottest Wife by FHM, is married to Mets pitcher Kris Benson.

+

She told Howard Stern’s radio show: “I told him, cheat on me all
+you want. If you get caught, I’m going to s***w everybody on your
+entire team. Coaches, trainers, players. I would do everybody on his
+whole team.”

+

Stern, egging her on, asked: “Even the coaches? What about, like, the
+bat boys?”

+

“Everybody would get a turn,” Anna pledged. “If my husband cheated on
+me and embarrassed me like that, I will embarrass him more than he
+could ever imagine.”

+
+

Uh huh. I see that, somehow, this woman managed to have a
+career as a “model and stripper” without developing the faintest shred
+of a clue how men think or respond to a challenge like this.

+

Bet on it. Somehere, a coalition of the most unattractive
+no-hopers in the Mets organization — probably organized by some
+dude with a beer gut, bad breath, and a bread-dough complexion who
+harbors a long-simmering lust for the wench — is now organizing
+a pool with which to engage the foxiest hookers in the Big Apple to
+waylay her husband. What a pitch! Throw $50 in the kitty and
+“Baseball’s Hottest Wife” will bang you too!

+

Think of it…everywhere Kris Benson goes, hired hotties in thongs,
+lingerie, and leather will be lying in wait for him. They’ll hit on
+him in bars and materialize unaccountably in his hotel room after away
+games. They’ll try to give him blow jobs in taxis. Confederates
+with cameras will lurk nearby.

+

I’m not sure which would be funnier…the version in which hubby
+succumbs to some soiled lily’s charms and wifey screws her way through
+the team before making an “Eeeew!” of disgust at the instigator and
+splitting for Cancun with the hunky batboy? Or perhaps the version in
+which hubby is cornered, hands over his crotch, by a gaggle of
+rapacious prostitutes who decide they’re not being paid enough for
+this shit and turn on organizer-dude to rend him limb from limb like
+some posse of latter-day Bacchantes.

+

O the humanity. O the satirical-novel possibilities!

+

UPDATE: My wife Cathy, who is an actual woman, comments “You have to
+wonder about her motives for making a threat like this in public. Me,
+I suspect that doing the whole team is her fantasy…”

diff --git a/20041229173715.blog b/20041229173715.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..458f19f --- /dev/null +++ b/20041229173715.blog @@ -0,0 +1,77 @@ +The Journalist as Herd Creature +

In September 2004, well before the elections, I wrote an essay on
+the collapse of
+mainstream media influence. I predicted that the Rathergate
+scandal and the Swift Boat Vets would lock up the election for George
+W. Bush, despite the MSM’s most determined efforts to get Kerry into
+the White House. I related this to a long-term decline in MSM influence as
+plunging communications costs erode its gatekeeper role, and predicted
+that decline would continue.

+

(For anyone who came in late, “MSM” is how bloggers abbreviate the
+“mainstream media”. But that term is imprecise, because the category
+actually excludes the contrarian/conservative but mainstream Fox News
+and includes certain niche media outlets such as National Public
+Radio. What MSM really refers to is what I have sometimes called the
+“dominant media culture”. The centers of this culture are the New
+York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the LA Times, ABC,
+CBS, NBC, and CNN. The MSM peddles news made by and for elite
+bicoastal liberals. One conservative commentator has aptly described
+the MSM as an “echo chamber of left and further-left scribblers and
+talkers and self-reinforcing head nodders who were overwhelmingly
+anti-Republican, anti-Christian, anti-military, anti-wealth,
+anti-business, and even anti-middle class”, which indictment could be
+dismissed as political ax-grinding if sociological studies by the Pew
+Foundation and others had not consistently shown journalists and
+editors to have exactly the voting and political-contribution patterns
+that description would suggest.)

+

Two months later, my predictions appear to have been correct, and
+have been repeatedly echoed in postmortems by Democratic political
+analysts. The wailing and gnashing of teeth in the MSM has been loud.
+The latest eruption is from Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis
+Star-Tribune, in which he frenziedly
+attacks the editors of one of the blogs that helped break the
+Rathergate scandal. Coleman has been quite properly slapped around
+for his frothy, hysterical. ad-hominem rhetoric by both his
+targets and many other bloggers (here
+is one representative shellacking).

+

Coleman’s anger so possesses him that he stoops to casting
+aspersions on an opponent’s genital adequacy. But spare him some pity
+along with your condemnation, because his rage transparently
+springs from fear — the fear that he’s being beaten at his own
+game of opinion-molding by amateurs, by bloggers, by (worst of all)
+Republicans.

+

What Coleman is acting out on an individual level is the same rage
+and fear that is rippling through the entire MSM. This rage and
+fear has three causes, intertwined but distinct and all readily
+discernable in Coleman’s rant.

+

First, the MSM is reacting badly to its loss of power. Few people
+would claim now what Newsweek editor Evan Thomas did less
+than six months ago, that the MSM can swing a national election by 15
+points in the direction it wants — not when the 2004 elections
+swung by at least three points in the direction it didn’t
+want.

+

Second, the MSM is acting from a genuine fear of the social
+consequences of the loss of its power. Many of its influence leaders
+genuinely believe that conservatives are evil thugs bent on plunging
+the world into a theocratic, imperialist dark age, and that it
+is their job to fight the good fight against this.

+

Third, they are most terrified of all at discovering how out of
+touch they are. In the past, your typical MSMer surrounded by other
+MSMers has believed that he is mildly “progressive”, merely holding
+the opinions that all reasonable people hold and opposed by at most a
+tiny and dismissable fringe of kooks and rednecks. MSMers are more
+undone than anything else by the discovery that the mainstream of the
+American population is rejecting them in droves for Fox News, talk
+radio, and the blogs.

+

The first two causes induce fear, but I think it’s the third one
+that tips it over into irrational panic. Almost all the working
+journalists I’ve ever met (and I’ve met boatloads of them) are herd
+creatures — they may talk about individualism and subverting the
+dominant paradigm, but they have a very strong need to believe that
+they’re “of the people”, simply writing the things that 99% of the
+people would think and write if they were capable.

+

It’s a short step from this belief to Coleman’s flavor of
+quasi-paranoid ranting. Anybody who doesn’t think like the MSM cannot
+be authentic, but must instead be a paid or suborned tool of evil
+forces. Watch for this theme to show up more and more frequently in
+the next year as most of the MSM sinks ever-deeper into denial.

diff --git a/20041230041948.blog b/20041230041948.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b871a0b --- /dev/null +++ b/20041230041948.blog @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +Susan Sontag is Dead +

Imagine a writer/playwright/intellectual whose most famous single
+remark was “the black race is the cancer of human history”. Who said
+“The Pinochet revolution is astonishingly free of repression
+and bureaucratization.” Who praised the attack on Pearl Harber as a
+brave deed. Do you suppose such a person would collect laudatory
+tributes and glowing obituaries on the occasion of her death?

+

Substitute “white” for “black”, “Cuban” for “Pinochet”, and “9/11″
+for “Pearl Harbor” and you’ll have remarks Susan Sontag actually did
+make, and never retracted. (She later glossed her equation of white
+people with cancer as a slander on cancer patients). Her equally
+abominable expressions of racism, tyrannophilia, and anti-American
+hatred have either gone totally unmentioned in the New York
+Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and AP wire service
+stories, or else been surrounded by exculpatory verbiage about
+Sontag’s alleged devotion to high ideals.

+

Sontag’s willingness to say in 1982 on the occasion of the
+anti-communist Polish worker’s revolution that “Communism is Fascism
+with a human face” has been much feted. In fact the utter
+anti-humanity of Communism had already been demonstrated by the
+Kronstadt massacre and other atrocities years before Sontag was born.
+Her failure to absorb that lesson forty years sooner than she did led
+her to utter a great deal of toxic garbage, and should neither be
+forgotten nor forgiven.

+

George Orwell once said that “There are some ideas so wrong that
+only a very intelligent person could believe in them.” In the AP
+obituary, author author Francine Prose says Sontag “represents
+something that I’m afraid that’s passing, I don’t think that many
+people these days say, `Oh, I want to be an intellectual when I grow
+up.'” Not the least of Sontag’s crimes is that Prose is right —
+by repeatedly living out Orwell’s observation throughout her lifetime,
+Sontag is one of the people who taught Americans by her example to hold
+intellectuals in contempt.

+

I have spoken ill of the dead here in order to make a point about
+the living. The damage Sontag did is in the past, but the
+muddleheadedness of her eulogists and their willingness to embrace
+the same evils she did is a problem for the present and the future.
+Only by confronting and condemning those evils can we excise the
+true cancers of human history.

diff --git a/20050103160129.blog b/20050103160129.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cba1800 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050103160129.blog @@ -0,0 +1,598 @@ +Appreciating Joe Satriani +

I like to listen to instrumental electric guitar, and have a very
+large collection of the genre from the pioneering Jeff Beck albums of
+the 1970s forward, and including most of the output of Jeff Beck, Steve
+Morse, Eric Johnson, Steve Vai, Gary Hoey, Marc Bonilla, and half a
+dozen other guitar virtuosi.

+

The seldom-disputed king of this genre today is Joe Satriani, who
+has produced a string of excellent and often groundbreaking albums
+since his debut in 1986. There are other guitarists who have had
+moments of brilliance exceeding anything in Satriani’s catalog (I
+think, for example, of Marc Bonilla’s astonishing EE
+Ticket album from 1992) but nobody else has sustained Joe’s
+level of quality over eighteen years and a dozen albums.

+

For those of you who have been living in a hole for fifteen years
+Joe Satriani definitely hails from the rock/blues end of the guitar
+spectrum rather than the jazz-fusion one — his technique is
+sometimes near to speed-metal. His commercial success seems to be
+built on an ability to appeal to both intelligent metalheads and
+old jazz-fusion fans like me.

+

Here’s my personal guide to appreciating Joe’s work. It covers
+every track on all of his studio albums, but not the EPs or
+live-concert anthologies. It’s aimed mainly at people who have
+heard parts of his music and would like to know where to go next, or
+who want to deepen their appreciation of what they’ve already heard.

+

One of the perils of being a virtuoso is that you can get so caught
+up in your own skill that it’s hard to know when to stop —
+musicality can get crowded out by meaningless elaboration. This is a
+trap that lies in wait for all guitarists above a certain technical
+level; some (like, say, Yngwe Malmsteen or Tony McAlpine) fall into it
+to the point of near-unlistenability, and others are badly compromised
+by it but still able to turn out good work when they restrain
+themselves enough (Joe’s student Steve Vai leaps to mind). Very few
+have the ability to sustain a flawlessly consistent balance between
+technique and musicality; Marc Bonilla managed it, Jeff Beck and Eric
+Johnson come very close.

+

Joe Satriani’s grasp on that happy medium is pretty good but prone
+to lapses. I think he is acutely aware of this problem. One of the
+themes you can see in his career development is how he struggles not
+to let his technique run away with him, sometimes reacting with a
+retreat into an obstinate minimalism or over-reliance on traditional
+forms (eight-bar blues, the 4/4 rock beat, etc.). Gradually, over
+time, he gets better at avoiding these extremes.

+

Joe takes chances, and sometimes he fails. Thus, this guide is not
+going to be an unbroken paean of praise. But one of the things that
+keeps me a fan is his very refusal to play safe, his determination to keep
+trying new things and pushing his own boundaries as a musician. Joe
+shows a rare combination of talent, hard-working dedication to his
+craft, and artistic courage that is worthy of all praise.

+

One pattern that became apparent to me as I was compiling this
+guide is that it is always worth holding Joe’s song titles in mind as
+you listen to his stuff. They are often valuable clues to his
+intentions. Many of his pieces seem to have been written as
+soundtracks to go with a strong visual image to which the title is a
+pointer, and it can thus substantially increase your enjoyment to
+decode whatever references are in the title.

+

Not Of This Earth (1986)

+

This was Joe’s freshman album. I first heard it after
+Surfing With The Alien and Flying In A Blue
+Dream, and it was fascinating with that experience to hear
+Joe’s style not quite yet fully developed.

+

The title track, Not Of This Earth, blends acoustic and
+electric guitar sounds in an interesting way that Joe would explore
+further in The Lords Of Karma on the next album. It’s
+followed by The Snake, a rather funny tone poem about
+slithery things that manages to include references to both the
+Volga Boatmen and some death-metal tune I’ve never
+quite been able to place, I think by Black Sabbath.

+

Rubinais named after Joe’s wife. It is built around a
+simple, pretty melody but somewhat marred by a drum track that sounds
+mechanical and is mixed way too far up. Memories is
+stronger, combining a reggae-like rhythm track with some raga-like and
+bluesy melodic influences to produce a unique and tasty sound.
+Satriani is finding his voice here. He continues to explore
+interesting territory with Brother John, an odd but
+pleasing little modal finger exercise.

+

The Enigmatic is one of the two standout tracks on
+this album — tense, dissonant, weirdly inventive. Joe’s bold use
+of atonality to depict an encounter with the alien is carried off
+beautifully and works well at both the technical and emotional
+levels.

+

After that, Driving At Night is positively reassuring as
+it reasserts the bluesy call-and-response pattern at the core of rock
+guitar. We are no longer in alien darkness but rather in a soothing and
+familiar night.

+

But that night has Earth creatures in it too, and some of them can
+be pretty scary. Hordes of Locusts is another tone-poem
+about creepy-crawlies, imbued with the faintly campy menace of a 1950s
+monster movie. This piece is funny, but (as you’ll especially learn
+if you ever get to hear it live) it also rocks bone-crunchingly hard.
+It’s a standout.

+

The remaining two tracks are slight, almost finger exercises.
+New Day feels like dawn after the night of the locusts.
+Headless Horseman is a silly bit of business that refers
+to Washington Irving’s famous short story.

+

This was a very thought-provoking debut — uneven, but promising.
+That promise would be fulfilled with the next two albums.

+

Surfing with The Alien (1987)

+

This was my first introduction to Joe’s amazing talents, and seems
+more generally to have been the album that made his name and secured
+him a long-term fan base (his official bio describes it as the most
+commercially successful instrumental-guitar album since Jeff Beck’s
+genre-defining Wired in 1974). The Satriani style is
+already fully developed here.

+

The title cut, Surfing With the Alien, is without a
+doubt one of the great instrumental rock guitar numbers of all time
+— a screaming hyperkinetic rave-up that goes straight over the
+top and then delivers everything it promises. The album cover
+makes it obvious that the alien in question is the Silver Surfer
+of Marvel Comics fame, and you can hear him swooshing through space
+at a couple of points in the track.

+

The title Ice 9 is a reference to an SF novel by Kurt
+Vonnegut in which a bizarre form of self-propagating ice freezes all
+the oceans of the world. This track is not quite such a tour de force as
+the first but tasty all the same. On almost any other album of
+instrumental guitar it would be a standout; here it tends to fade into
+the background in comparison to the flashier pieces.

+

My personal favorite on this album is Crushing Day.
+What makes this a standout is that there is not a wasted note in in
+it. Though the first and second solo sections reach blistering
+intensity, Joe has his technique under perfect control here; he never
+loses sight of the underlying melodic idea for a nanosecond, and the
+result is tight and right. Half a dozen albums and nearly twenty years
+later it is still one of his best pieces of playing.

+

Always With Me, Always With You is a quiet little
+number, this album’s equivalent of Rubina. He hasn’t yet
+attained the simple lyricism and delicacy we’ll hear in
+Home, two albums on, but he’s reaching for it.

+

Satch Boogie is another propulsive rave-up that stands
+comparison to the title track as a display of guitar pyrotechnics.
+Interestingly, what makes the whole piece work is a quiet section in
+the middle (about 1:44 in) that builds tension towards the ending.
+Joe has commented in an interview that a fan who disliked the
+quiet part once sent him a mix tape with the section deleted in an
+effort to prove his point. “It sucked,” said Satriani, succinctly
+and correctly.

+

Hill of the Skull is 1:48 of auditory comic book. You
+can see the evil skull-shaped temple brooding on the hilltop, torches
+guttering in the great gaunt eyesockets…

+

Circles is much more substantial, opening
+with a lovely acoustic-guitar appetizer that sets you up for a muscular
+electric main course in the manner of Led Zeppelin’s or Heart’s best.
+The loud-soft contrast is artfully handled, and like all of Joe’s
+best work this piece is distinguished by seventeen-jewel composition
+and exacting control of his instruments.

+

Lords of Karma continues the hot streak, opening with
+sitar sounds and launching into a driving raga-influenced melody. The
+exultant glissando guitar scream at about 1:42 is particularly
+lovely. At a couple of points in the piece the recurring sitar
+sounds make a pungent contrast to the guitar line. The whole
+is as tasty as a good Indian curry.

+

Midnight, by contrast, is as mannered as a Bach fugue,
+nearly a finger exercise. It segues directly into the final track,
+Echoes, which returns to the meditative feel of
+Circles and finishes off the album in excellent style.

+

This is a great album, barely a dud track on it. Even Hill of
+the Skull works in its silly way. It remains among Joe’s two
+or three best, and is probably still the best introduction to his
+music.

+

Flying in a Blue Dream (1989)

+

This album starts off strong with the hypnotic feedback and
+acoustic rhythm guitars of the title track. The long sustained
+electric guitar notes played over them contain subtle shifts of tambre
+and vibrato that would do Carlos Santana proud. The interplay between
+the acoustic guitars and the electric lead line recalls
+Circles and works equally well here. As with that track
+the effect is meditative, almost mystical. And, no, Satriani himself
+doesn’t know what the little boy is saying in that background sample.

+

The next track calls itself mystical, The Mystical Potato Head
+Groove Thing, but isn’t. The effect is more one of inspired
+whimsy, with subtle off-rhythms and a whirling, eccentric guitar line
+giving the piece the feel more of witty banter than anything else. The
+bridge section at about 3:00 in echoes the melody of Surfing with
+the Alien but the effect is of commentary rather than self-imitation.
+The track closes with a classic smashing rock finish, very satisfying.

+

In Can’t Slow Down, Joe Satriani sings.
+Unfortunately, even the most dedicated Satriani fan generally reacts
+to his singing with a heartfelt wish that the man would shut up and
+play his guitar. Fortunately, he does.

+

Headless is just as embarrassing, a pointless retake of
+Headless Horseman from the first album that is only partly
+redeemed by Joe’s quiet, rather self-mocking chuckle at the end.

+

In Strange, Joe sings again. The contrast between his
+clumsy vocals and the shimmering loveliness of the guitar bridges is
+almost painful to the ear. Alas, the worst is yet to come.
+That worst is the next track, I Believe, possibly
+the most cringe-worthy opus Joe has ever committed to tape. He sings
+again, wrapping an uncertain voice around lyrics that intend to be
+inspirational but come out mawkish. A few lovely guitar bits cannot
+redeem this mess.

+

In the next track, One Big Rush, Joe blessedly does not sing.
+We’re back in the familiar territory of Surfing With The Alien
+or Satch Boogie here. It’s not as inventive as the album’s
+first two numbers but a good solid piece of work. Probably the best bit
+is the last five seconds of coda.

+

On Big Bad Moon, Joe sings again. This time it works a
+little better, as he portrays some hapless geek who has become a
+werewolf and, far from considering it a curse, discovers But I
+like it!. His fretboard antics over a steaming boogie
+grind rescue this track.

+

The Feeling is 50 seconds of rootsy banjo. This works
+pretty well, considering.

+

In The Phone Call Joe seems to have figured out that
+his weak singing voice works best as comedy. This mini-soap-opera
+about a selfish and none-too-bright guy dumping his ditzy and
+gold-digging girlfriend is worth a chuckle or two.

+

Day at the Beach (New Rays From an Ancient Sun) echoes
+Midnight from the last album, and works best as a sort of
+extended intro to Back to Shalla-Bal. This track is
+straight-ahead leather-jacketed rock complete with a revving Harley.
+The motorcycle theme continues in the rather similar next
+track, Ride. Joe sings again, managing not to botch
+the job too badly. Still, one does wish he would stop.

+

The Forgotten begins with a short finger exercise that
+is, like Day at the Beach, a preface to something more
+substantial. Part two returns to the meditative, introverted feel of
+the title track, but with an emotionally powerful melody that feels
+almost like something a Romantic-era classical composer might have
+penned. It’s up there with the first two tracks as a standout.

+

The Bells of Lal is another two-part composition, but
+this one feels like noisy fragments that never quite come together or
+rise above the level of noodling.

+

,Into the Light by contrast, feels elegiac and
+graceful. I think of cloudscapes suffused with sunlight when I hear
+this piece, and rather wish Joe had given it more than 2:29 of
+development.

+

This album is uneven, undisciplined. Parts of it match and even
+exceed the quality of Surfing With The Alien, but a lot of
+it is experiments that should have been left on the studio floor. Joe
+clearly needs somebody working with him to curb his excesses.

+

The Extremist (1992)

+

Perhaps Joe found that somebody. This album returns to the consistent
+form of Surfing With The Alien; it’s neither as quirky nor
+as inventive as Flying in a Blue Dream, but full of energy
+and joy.

+

Friends, The Extremist. and
+War are all good solid work, intricate and high-energy
+guitar explorations in the now-standard Satriani mold that reward
+repeated listening pretty well. There’s some nice blues harp in the
+second track, but the third is probably the strongest of the three.

+

Cryin’ is a quiet, bluesy track with a prog-rock feel to
+it. It’s well followed up by Rubina’s Blue Sky, a down-home
+delight that uses mandolins and acoustic guitars to evoke the feel
+of folk or bluegrass music. The last two minutes sets off the acoustic
+guitars against a singing, joyful electric-guitar line, then mysteriously
+fades out with a pibroch-like ending.

+

Summer Song (which you can deduce from one of the the
+album-cover photos originally titled The Door Into Summer
+after Robert Heinlein’s novel) was this album’s big radio single, a job
+it fulfills admirably well. A tight and well-layered arrangement and
+immaculate production make this a crowd-pleaser.

+

Tears In the Rain is another intricate finger exercise
+like Midnight, conducted this time on a nylon-string
+guitar.

+

Why and Motorcycle Driver return to the basic
+style of propulsive and intricate guitar we’ve heard in the first three
+tracks and Summer Song. Like those, these tracks are
+sunny and exuberant music that would sound great pouring out of a
+boom box at your next beach party.

+

New Blues is a total contrast — a spare,
+introverted blues piece that fades into silence. It foreshadows where
+the next studio album is going.

+

Time Machine (1993)

+

The first disk of this two disk set combines rarities, oddities,
+and unreleased tracks from old studio sessions. The second is a
+collection of live performances. The quality is uneven here; some of
+this stuff is the equivalent of doodling. But for a serious fan this
+is definitely worth having, if only because it collects limited-release
+stuff like Dreaming #11.

+

Joe is generally pretty good at picking strong openings for his
+albums and Time Machine is no exception. This exercise
+in massive-guitars-of-doom can bear comparison with his best work and
+is a standout track. Following it, The Mighty Turtle Head is
+merely passable; the parts are OK but don’t seem to cohere
+well. All Alone works better; it’s a big blues tune in
+classic style. One can easily imagine it as movie music.

+

On Banana Mango II Joe jams with world-beat rhythms.
+The result is loose, floaty and interesting, quite different from his
+usual sound. Thinking of You is a simple, pretty tune,
+lovely and lyrical, proving once again that Joe doesn’t need effects
+or elaborate arrangements to sound good — another standout
+track.

+

From the sublime to the ridiculous: Crazy is another
+one of those regrettable occasions on which Joe sings. We live
+through it.

+

Speed Of Light nails once again the joyous
+power-pop-like groove Joe found in Summer Song. An
+unusual and interesting touch in this use is Joe’s use of wordless
+choral singing as a counterpoint to the guitar.

+

In Baroque Joe experiments with the idiom of classical
+guitar. His execution is good but the production is heavy-handed; I
+think it would have worked better without the effects.

+

Dweller On The Threshold is a Lovecraftian tone poem
+that is probably the closest approach to true speed metal in Joe’s oeuvre.
+He proves here that he could out-Metallica Metallica if he wanted to
+(Kirk Hammet was an early student of his in the 1970s). The atonal
+alien from Enigmatic makes a cameo appearance.

+

Banano Mango previsits the word-beat rhythms we heard
+earlier in Banano Mango II, but the guitar treatment is
+different in style. Not as good, I don’t think. but it’s instructive
+and interesting to have both versions included.

+

Dreaming #11 takes us to another unusual place that
+can only be described as surrealist comedy funk. The strain of sly,
+zany humor that flavors a lot of Joe’s music is in full evidence
+here.

+

The title of I am Become Death doubtless refers to Robert
+Oppennheimer’s famous quote from the Bhagavad-Gita at the first nuclear
+test in 1945. The piece is simultaneously grim, bathetic and jarring,
+a deliberately disjointed nightmare. On Saying Goodbye Joe sounds quite unlike himself and
+so much like Jeff Beck in a quieter moment that I think this piece
+must be an intentional tribute. The first disc then finishes with
+Woodstock Jam, which is also utterly like anything else
+Joe has ever recorded, sixteen minutes of atonal psychedelia that
+plays like the soundtrack for a drug dream.

+

The main thing the second disc demonstrates is that Joe plays his
+tunes live with great fidelity to the studio versions, so I won’t
+review all of these separately here.

+

Joe Satriani (1995)

+

In contrast with the sunny vibe of The Extremist, this
+album seems moody, sad, even depressed. I have no hard information, but I
+suspect Joe might have been going through a rough couple of years as
+this one was recorded.

+

Cool #9 If, and Down, Down, Down
+set the tone — deeply bluesy, well-executed, somehow rather
+dark.

+

Luminous Flesh Giants is one of the standout tracks on
+this album — angry, powerful stuff and doubtless a big
+live-concert number.

+

S.M.F. returns to the deep introspective groove of the
+first three tracks, burrowing into the classic 8-bar blues as though it’s a
+refuge from something. One of the problems with this album is that these
+four tracks are all too similar and tend to blur together in one’s memory.

+

Look My Way is one of Joe’s occasional comedy numbers. He
+sings, badly. But the composition is such that bad singing is sort of
+appropriate.

+

Home is a surprising island of calm and beauty. It’s
+the refuge that a lot of the rest of this album seems to be looking for,
+and a standout track.

+

Moroccan Sunset sounds a little happier, too. The
+melody line is indeed middle-Eastern flavored in spots. The rhythm
+guitars share the dark, fuzzed-out flavor we hear in many of the other
+arrangements on this album. Nevertheless this is another standout
+track.

+

In Killer Bee Bop Joe seems to be trying to capture
+some of the flavor of bebop jazz — the opening base line
+certainly suggests that. This is a fast, noisy track, interesting
+but at times rushed and incoherent-sounding.

+

The first section of Slow Down Blues slides even
+deeper into the blues idiom, with a spare and mostly acoustic
+arrangement featuring a dialogue between Joe’s understated electric
+lead and a blues harmonica. All this recalls New Blues
+from the previous album, and seems deeply sad. Things pick up some
+in the last four minutes as the track launches into a steady electric
+boogie with a big finish.

+

(You’re) My World is another simple, effective tune
+that seems (like Home) to express some kind of peace or
+resolution. The effect is very beautiful and a standout track.

+

The album ends with Sittin’ Round, another slow and
+sad blues reminiscent of the first section of Slow Down
+Blues.

+

Emotionally, Joe had nowhere to go but up after this album.

+

Crystal Planet (1998)

+

And up he goes, in what is certainly his best album since
+Surfing With The Alien. Whatever troubles informed
+Joe Satriani are gone; he seems to reach a new high in
+energy and inventiveness here.

+

The album opens strong with Up in the Sky, a fast and
+tight little number built around an odd guitar lick with an almost
+surf-rock feel to it. The tastiness continues with House Full
+of Bullets and Crystal Planet, which don’t break any
+particularly new ground but are well-composed works that deliver the kind
+of virtuosity Joe’s fans have come to expect.

+

Love Thing slows the pace a little to do a more
+melodic exploration in the mode of Home or (You’re)

+

My World from the previous album. It’s followed by
+Trundrumbalind which moves a bit up-tempo again but
+sustains great intensity of feeling and is one of the standout tracks
+of this album. The last minute is especially interesting.

+

Lights of Heaven starts off quietly, but the
+fanfare-like bit at about 1:13 leads into one of Joe’s best sustained
+stretches of composition ever, one in which occasional hushed stretches
+serve to build tension for soaring guitar lines that resolve them wonderfully.
+The shimmering finale in the last 40 seconds is magnificent. This is
+possibly the strongest single track on the album.

+

Raspberry Jam Delta Vee is not quite as impressive,
+but it delivers the goods. The break using string and cello tambres
+about four minutes in is unusual, and the track finishes strong with
+dual leads and and interesting use of what sounds like ring
+modulators.

+

Ceremony returns to the up-tempo pace and
+arpeggio-rich solos typical of the first three tracks, but there is
+nothing especially distinguishing about it. With Jupiter In
+Mind, on the other hand, is a standout track with a strong and
+attractive melody on which Joe works some interesting transformations
+before returning to the opening version. Fat rhythm guitars back up
+a powerful finale.

+

Secret Prayer is merely ordinary for this album,
+which is to say it is better than most guitarists could manage
+on their best days ever. Train of Angels opens interestingly
+with military-style drumming and remains tasty even after switching to
+a traditional rock beat; the second solo beginning at about 2:00 is
+especially nice. A Piece of Liquid is quiet and restful,
+making interesting use of a catchy South-American-flavored rhythm.

+

Psycho Monkey is a distortion-fest with a deliberately
+heavy attack; the dog-whistle feedback at the end is reminiscent of the
+title track from Flying In A Blue Dream.

+

Time is a clever tone poem in which the staccato
+4-chord figure the rhythm guitars repeat seems intended to evoke a
+ticking clock. There’s a lot more going on, here, though, and it
+repays several listens to find out what.

+

Z.Z.’s Song ends the album with a resonant acoustic solo
+piece that seems to use silence as much as sound.

+

There really isn’t a weak track on this whole album, which is especially
+impressive since it runs to 15 of them. It’s probably the right one
+to buy second, after Surfing With The Alien.

+

Engines of Creation (2000)

+

The title of this album seems to be a reference to to K. Eric
+Drexler’s seminal book on nanotechnology; the cover art and
+the song titles suggest that Joe had a lot of SFnal imagery in mind
+when composing it. Despite that promising start, a lot of Satriani
+fans would say this album shouldn’t have been made. In it, Joe seems
+to be trying to understand electronica and house music. The result is, alas,
+cold and mechanical-sounding in comparison to the rest of his work;
+drum machines and synthesizers almost drown out his guitar.

+

Despite that, this album has some excellent moments. And even when
+it doesn’t work, I think Joe deserves praise for being willing to take some
+risks. Another Crystal Planet or Surfing With The
+Alien would have been more of a crowd-pleaser — but at
+this point Joe could probably crank out ordinary guitar virtuosity in
+his sleep and would not necessarily have grown as a musician by taking
+that easy path.

+

Devil’s Slide tells you right away you are not in for the
+usual, with its drum machine and synthesizer-led attack. Parts of it achieve
+a chill, haunting beauty. Flavor Crystal 7 is very similar,
+but with a more up-front guitar line that makes it more interesting.
+Both tracks take us far from the rock/blues/metal roots of Joe’s style;
+he displays the superb musicianship we’d expect, but the results seem
+at times unnervingly soulless and antiseptic.

+

Borg Sex is more of the same, with a growling guitar
+line that manages (probably not by accident) to sound rather like
+industrial noise. Joe seems to use this one fairly frequently in
+concert.

+

Until We Say Goodbye, by contrast, is much more like a
+normal Satriani track; some superfluous electronic effects in the
+background fail to step on an appealing and rather jazz-tinged
+melody. The pizzicato strings in the last eight seconds are a nice
+touch.

+

Attack puts us right back in the territory of
+Devil’s Slide, which it rather resembles. The break
+about two minutes in, ornamented with little sequencer bits and
+drum-machine licks, is probably Joe’s most effective use of
+electronica idiom.

+

Champagne? is a bit of clowning in which glassy synth
+voices are set against a bouncing baseline and bluesy guitar. It
+changes style abruptly at about 2:04 when the drum machines turn on,
+but returns to being an appealingly silly romp in the last three
+minutes. The last section changes styles again, offering us a jazzy
+solo with beautiful arpeggios and an odd roots-rock sort of
+finish vaguely reminiscent of Creedence.

+

Clouds Race Across the Sky is a surprise and a
+standout, laying a beautifully simple guitar line over an infectious
+South-American-flavored rhythm track. The effect is tranquil and
+lovely.

+

The Power Cosmic 2000 is a two-part invention. In it,
+Joe seems to be trying to fuse electronica influences into his basic
+style (the first guitar line in part two will remind you of The
+Mystical Potato Head Groove Thing) but succeeds mainly in
+sounding chilly and remote. By contrast, the synthesizer
+instrumentation of Slow And Easy fails to completely
+suppress some moments of quiet beauty.

+

Engines of Creation is a gradually building crescendo
+that unaccountably cuts out just as it should be reaching a climax.
+Too bad; there are some good moments on the way there, and the track
+does better at integrating synthesizers with guitar and base than most
+of went before. But, like the album as a whole, the track is a
+brave experiment that doesn’t end well.

+

This is still the most difficult Satriani album to enjoy, and may be
+for hard-core fans and completists only. But I like it better than I
+did when I first heard it. It will take several listenings before
+you can get past the electronic clutter to what Joe is trying to
+achieve, but doing so has some rewards.

+

Strange Beautiful Music (2002)

+

If a comparative failure like Engines of Creation was
+what Joe needed to grow, this album tells us it was worth it. I think
+it’s his best ever, equalling Crystal Planet and
+Surfing With The Alien for creativity and melodic
+invention and showing a maturity and grace neither previous album
+can match.

+

Oriental Melody continues Joe’s flirtation with modal
+scales and time signatures derived from Middle Eastern and Indian
+music. It’s a good start to the album, which puts some creative
+distance between Joe and his roots as a rock player.

+

Belly Dancer moves back towards rock rhythms, but an
+eastern touch is still present in the melody line. The track centers
+on lovely series of arpeggios at about 3:08. The sitar tambre that Joe
+used so effectively in tracks like Lords of Karma reappears
+as a nice bit of background color towards the end.

+

We get a third beautiful melody in Starry Night,
+which though stylistically reminiscent of Home from the
+Extremist album is nicely original.

+

Chords of Life is themed around a nice bit of
+acoustic-guitar rhythm work that appears in it twice and dominates
+the finale. This is a crisp and satisfying little number in
+which the electric lead gets its licks in but, for once, takes a back
+seat to other elements of the composition.

+

Mind Storms is more in the conventional Satriani
+idiom, and a fine example of same. The alien from
+Enigmatic makes a brief reappearance at about 2:00
+in.

+

Sleep Walk covers a Santo & Johnny hit from 1959,
+archetypal syrupy fifties pop. I have a strong personal aversion to
+this particular sound, but there is no denying that Joe (with some
+help from, of all people, Robert Fripp) nails the style dead-on. If
+it has to be done at all, it should be done this well.

+

New Last Jam is another superior Satriani slice of
+fretboard frenzy, unremarkable only because it’s jostling so much
+good material on this album. Mountain Song, immediately
+following, is even better. His normal idiom has never sounded hotter.

+

What Breaks A Heart begins with what seems to be an
+experiment in vox humana guitar; the effect is almost like wordless
+singing. The middle section that begins at 1:19 builds to reggae
+rhythms and more vox-humana playfulness. The whole finishes with a
+very pretty ride-out as Joe riffs away with gleeful zest.

+

Seven String takes us back to basic rock’n’roll crunch
+with a somewhat Southern flavor — one can imagine Lynrd Skynrd or
+.38 Special playing this, if they had ever come within a light year of
+having the chops to try. It’s followed by Hill Groove, a
+bluesy piece that features some particularly nice interplay between
+lead guitar and electric base.

+

The Traveller has something of a prog-rock feel to it;
+listen for the nice use of harmonics at about 1:58. And the album
+finishes strong with Journey, another melodic and excellent
+track without a waste motion in it.

+

The music on this album is so consistently good that it’s hard to
+pick standouts. Pressed, I’d have to pick Mind Storms and
+Seven String, but there are several other tracks that give
+these a serious tussle.

+

With this album, Joe seems to have almost completely banished his
+occasional tendency to get lost in his technique. All of these tracks
+have a well-seasoned restraint about them, to a degree that was only
+true of exceptional pieces like Crushing Day in his
+earlier work.

+

Is There Love In Space (2004)

+

Is There Love In Space is a big contrast with
+Strange Beautiful Music. It’s a neoprimitive crunchfest
+of fat, distorted rhythm guitars that begs to be played at
+room-filling volume. Satriani is out to remind us that, by damn, he
+is a rock guitarist — and he succeeds.

+

The first track, Gnaah!, is a piece of sly humor. You
+can hear the title gnaah as a repeated rising note in the song’s main
+lick. Up In Flames is a loose bluesy howl that has good
+moments but some tendency to fall into mere noodling. Much in these
+will sound familiar to long-time fans.

+

Track three, Hands in The Air, is a standout — a
+stomping, shouting rock’n’roll rave-up that has “arena-filler” written
+on it in letters of fire. Fuck yeah, turn those Marshalls up to 11!

+

It’s interesting to contrast Hands in The Air with
+Luminous Flesh Giants from the Joe Satriani
+album. These two tracks are stylistically and structurally similar, but
+what a huge difference in emotional tone! Where the older one is
+dark, brooding and ominous, the newer one is a big joyful noise.

+

In Lifestyle Satriani accomplishes a personal first by
+by managing to sing without sucking. His voice actually sounds good
+run through a chorus box over a basic three-chord romp. The lyrics
+are pretty funny, too.

+

The title track Is There Love In Space, gives us a
+quieter and more reflective moment, especially in the final section
+about 4:00 in which takes us back towards Joe’s jazz influences.
+If I Could Fly continues in a similar vein, firming up to
+a steady rock groove around which Joe dances in trademark fashion.
+There’s nothing especially novel here but the effect is quite
+pleasant.

+

The Souls Of Distortion takes us back to the Land of the
+Monster Stomp, at a slower tempo than Hands in The Air
+but with tasty use of a wah-wah pedal. The fading feedback blare at the
+end is just right.

+

Look Up is lyrical and quiet, resembling Rubina’s
+Song and Always With Me, Always With You in flavor.

+

I Like The Rain, unfortunately, demonstrates that
+Lifestyle was probably a fluke; Joe sings and sucks. You’ll
+be reminded of Ride from Flying In A Blue Dream,
+but he did it better it the first time.

+

Searching is another standout track. It opens with a
+hypnotic ostinato reminiscent of Ted Nugent’s
+Stranglehold and holds to that line relentlessly amidst
+flurries of manic noodling and blares of feedback. You get the
+feeling this was recorded as a late-night jam-session with everybody
+half wasted, and you are right there with them.

+

Bamboo will remind you of Midnight from
+Surfing With The Alien or Tears In The Rain
+from The Extremist. There’s some interesting and subtle
+use of what sounds like reverse echo at about 3:25 in.

+

In some ways this album doesn’t compare well with the previous one;
+there is less variety and originality here than there was in
+Strange Beautiful Music. It’s got more in the way of
+simple, turn-it-up-loud visceral thrills, though. If Joe was out to
+prove that he can rock the house down better than 3/4ths of the
+spoiled children who call themselves ‘metal’ acts, he sure
+succeeded.

diff --git a/20050106085336.blog b/20050106085336.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..706ce4c --- /dev/null +++ b/20050106085336.blog @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +A Unified Theory of Male Slobbishness and Female Preening +

It’s all about asymmetrical investment, boys and girls….

+

One of the hot topics in the blogosphere recently has been the difference between male and female standards of attractiveness, and what this has to do with feminism and “the beauty myth”. Ann Althouse has been having fun at the expense of Laura Kipnis’s column bemoaning the grip that beauty has on women. Sissy Willis and has connected this issue to a gripe by Andrew Sullivan that women ought to demand that men turn themselves out better.

+

The bloggers rightly see the differing incentives attached to sexual selection as the key to understanding these differences. Those differences are the reason that the many forms of un-PC behaviors that Ms. Kipnis decries aren’t going to go away short of a genetic reengineering of human beings.

+

What’s missing, so far, is a unified explanation of why those incentives are different. This turns out not to be complicated, and understanding it helps us grasp some interesting and entertaining subtleties in the situation.

+

The central fact that controls the the preferences of both sexes is that bearing children is difficult and dangerous for women, but fertilizing a woman is almost trivially easy for a man. Furthermore, the female investment in childbearing is front-loaded (proportionally more of the risk is before and at birth) while the male investment is back-loaded (proportionately more of the risks and costs are incurred after birth).

+

Moderns living in a largely disease-free environment seldom realize how cruel and pressing these differences were over most of our species history. But before modern sanitation, death in childbirth was so common that men wealthy enough to afford it expected to have several wives during their lifetimes, losing many of them to childbed fever and other complications.

+

Also relevant is the extremely high rate of childhood death from infectious diseases and parasites that was characteristic of premodern societies. Disease resistance in humans is highly variable and generally increases with genetic mixing (the same reason a mongrel puppy or kitten is less likely to catch a disease than a purebreed). Thus, both men and women have instincts intended to maximize genetic variety in their offspring in order to maximize the chances that some will survive to reproductive age.

+

Our instincts evolved to cope with these patterns of life and death. The next piece we need to understand those instincts is what physical beauty means. Recent anthropology revealing strong cross-cultural patterns in the perception of pulchritude is helpful here.

+

In both sexes, the most important beauty indicators include symmetrical features and a good complexion (clear skin without blemishes, warts, etc.). It turns out these are indicators of resistance to infection and parasites,
+especially resistance in childhood and during adolescent growth. Good hair
+is also a health indicator.

+

In men, physical signs of strength, dexterity, and agility are also favored; this reflects the value female instinctive wiring puts on male specializations in burst exertion, hunting, and warfare. In women, signs of fertility and fitness to bear are favored (healthy and generous breasts, a certain range of hip-to-waist ratios).

+

Men fixate on physical beauty and youth because under primitive conditions it is a leading indicator of the ability to bear and suckle children. Through most of history, plain or ugly women were bad risks for the next round of infectious diseases — and their children, carrying their genes, were too.

+

The last piece of the puzzle is that men and women have asymmetrical information about the parentage of their children. A woman is seldom in doubt about which children are the issue of her womb; a man, by contrast, can never be as sure which are the fruit of his seed. Thus, genetic selfishness motivates the woman in a mated pair to sacrifice more for her children than it does the man. This is why women abandon their children far less often than men do.

+

While women do respond to male good looks, it’s not the agenda-topper for them that it is for men. To understand why this is, it helps to know that the optimal mating strategy for a woman begins with hooking a good provider, a man who will stick around to support the kids in spite of not being as sure that he’s their father as the woman is of being their mother. Where men look for fitness to bear children, women seek the capability and willingness to raise them.

+

Thus, robust health and infection resistance, while desirable in a potential husband, are not the be-all and end-all. Behavior traits indicating attachment, loyalty, nurturance, and kindness are more important than a tight six-pack. Men instinctively worry about these things less because they know women are more certain of parentage and thus more tightly bonded to their children. Fitness-to-raise also means that indicators of success and social status count for more in men. Men marry health and beauty, women marry security and good prospects.

+

There is, however, one important exception — one circumstance under which women are just as physical, beauty-oriented, and “shallow” in their mating preferences as men. That’s when they’re cheating.

+

Both sexes have a genetic-diversity incentive to screw around, but it manifests in different ways. Again, the reason is parentage uncertainty. For a man, diversity tactics are simple — boff as many hot babes as possible, accepting that you don’t know which of their kids are yours and counting on stronger maternal bonding to ensure they will have at least one devoted parent around. Because a woman can be more sure of who her offspring are, her most effective diversity tactic is different — get married to a good provider and then cheat on him.

+

Under those circumstances, she doesn’t have to value good character in a mating partner as much; hubby, who can’t tell the kids aren’t his, will supply that. Thus the relative value of handsomeness goes up when a woman is taking a lover on the sly. Marrying the lord and screwing the gardener is an old game, and from a genetic-selfishness point of view a very effective one.

+

All this should explain why men can often get away with being slobs while women primp and preen. But it is wise to distrust evolutionary accounts that are simply just-so stories without making testable predictions. This one makes a few.

+

Most notably, it predicts that women who are less concerned about security and the the status of their offspring (e.g. wealthier, older, or for other reasons less dependent on a male provider) are more likely to be interested in bagging studmuffins. It also predicts that by contrast, men’s tendency to value physical beauty over most other qualities in a mate will change little, if at all, with their wealth level — because their instincts tell them health, not wealth, is the woman’s most important input.

+

It also explains why gays and lesbians have such opposed attitudes about beauty. In (male) gay mating both parties are instinctive beauty-seekers, while in lesbian matings both parties are instinctive security-seekers. Thus, gay culture is full of posturing pretty-boys and lesbian culture full of sincere plane janes.

+

As others have noted, women who habitually demand peacock males are making themselves less effective at competing for the good-husband traits that instinct tells them are more valuable; they will lose out in the reproductive race to women who can tolerate a faithful slob. On the flip side, the instinctive male fixation on fitness-to-bear means that all attempts to devalue female beauty in the mating market are doomed. Hetero- and bisexual women know this in their bones; it takes a lesbian to believe this is even a reasonable project — which is why agitation against “lookism” has been the least successful facet of feminist ideology.

diff --git a/20050106100411.blog b/20050106100411.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8766f44 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050106100411.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +How the Left Betrayed Iraq +

Every opponent of the war in Iraq must read this essay by an Iraqi,
+How The Left Betrayed My Country. Short, sweet, and devastating.

diff --git a/20050106121102.blog b/20050106121102.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a9171a0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050106121102.blog @@ -0,0 +1,76 @@ +What Do You Believe That You Cannot Prove? +

I wrote this for John Brockman’s 2005 Edge Question. Can’t see
+any good reason not to blog it as well.

+
+

I believe that nature is understandable, that scientific inquiry is
+the sharpest tool and the noblest endeavor of the human mind, and that
+any “final answers” we ever get will come from it rather than from
+mysticism, religion, or any other competing account of the universe.
+I believe these things without being able to prove them despite — or
+perhaps because of — the fact that I am a mystic myself.

+

Science may be the noblest endeavor of the human mind, but I believe
+(though I cannot prove) that the most crippling and dangerous kind of
+ignorance in the modern West is ignorance of economics, the way
+markets work, and the ways non-market allocation mechanisms are doomed
+to fail. Such economic ignorance is toxic, because it leads to insane
+politics and the empowerment of those whose rhetoric is altruist but
+whose true agenda is coercive control.

+

I believe that the most important moment in the history of philosophy
+was when Charles Sanders Peirce defined “truth” as “predictive power”
+and made it possible to talk about confirmation of hypotheses in a
+non-circular way.

+

I believe the most important moment in the foreseeable future of
+philosophy will come when we realize that mad old Nazi bastard
+Heidegger had it right when he said that we are thrown into the world
+and must cope, and that theory-building consists of rearranging our
+toolkit for coping. I believe the biggest blind spot in analytical
+philosophy is its refusal to grapple with Heidegger’s one big insight,
+but that evolutionary biology coupled with Peirce offers us a way to
+stop being blind. I beleve that when the insights of what is now
+called “evolutionary psychology” are truly absorbed by philosophers,
+many of the supposedly intractable problems of philosophy will vanish.

+

I believe, but don’t know how to prove, a much stronger version of the
+Sapir-Whorf hypothesis than is currently fashionable. That is, I
+believe the way humans think is shaped in important ways by the
+linguistic categories they have available; thinking outside those
+categories is possible but more difficult, has higher friction costs.
+Accordingly, I believe that some derivation of Alfred Korzybski’s
+discipline of General Semantics will eventually emerge as an essential
+tool of the first mature human civilizations.

+

I believe, but don’t know how to prove, that Julian Jaynes was on to
+something very important when he wrote about the origin of
+consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

+

I judge that that “dark matter” is no better than phlogiston as an
+explanatory device, and therefore believe without being able to prove
+it that there is something very deeply wrong with the standard model
+of cosmology.

+

I believe, but cannot prove, that the “knowledge interpretation” of
+quantum mechanics is pernicious nonsense, and that physical theorists
+will essentially develop some testable form of nonlocal realism.

+

I believe, but cannot prove, that global “AIDS” is a whole cluster of
+unrelated diseases all of which have been swept under a single rug for
+essentially political reasons, and that the identification of HIV as
+the sole pathogen is likely to go down as one of the most colossal
+blunders in the history of medicine.

+

Much of the West’s intelligentsia is persistently in love with
+anything anti-Western (and especially anti-American), an infatuation
+that has given a great deal of aid and comfort to tyrants and terrorists
+in the post-9/11 world. Besides these obvious political consequences,
+the phenomenon Julian Benda famously called le trahison des
+clercs has laid waste to large swathes of the soft sciences
+through ideologies like deconstructionism, cultural relativism, and
+postmodernism.

+

I believe, but cannot prove, that le trahison des clercs is
+not a natural development of Western thought but a creation of
+deliberate propaganda, directly traceable to the successes of Nazi and
+Stalinist attempts to manipulate the climate of opinion in the early
+and mid-20th century. Consequently I believe that one of the most
+difficult and necessary tasks before us in the next half century will
+be to banish the influence of totalitarian nihilism from science in
+particular and our culture in general.

+

I know how to prove, or at least convincingly demonstrate, that
+open-source software development produces better results than
+secrecy and proprietary control. I believe that the same advantage
+applies to any other form of engineering or applied science in which
+the limiting factor of production is skilled human attention, but I
+don’t know how to prove that general principle.

diff --git a/20050212082302.blog b/20050212082302.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d59d006 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050212082302.blog @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Lies and Consequences diff --git a/20050705142256.blog b/20050705142256.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b8133c0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050705142256.blog @@ -0,0 +1,69 @@ +Punishment, Coercion, and Revenge +

Because I’m both both a libertarian and famous for conducting a
+successful propaganda campaign, libertarian activists sometimes come
+to me for tactical advice. During a recent email exchange, one of these
+criticized me for wishing (as he thought) to “punish” the Islamist
+enemies of the U.S. and Western civilization.

+

I explained that I have no desire to punish the perpetrators of
+9/11; what I want is vengeance and death. Vengeance for us, death for
+them. Whether they experience ‘punishment’ during the process is of
+little or no interest to me.

+

My correspondent was reflecting a common confusion about the
+distinctions among coercion, revenge, and punishment. Coercion is
+intended to make another do your will instead of their own; vengeance
+is intended to discharge your own anger and fear. Punishment is
+neither of these things.

+

Punishment is a form of respect you pay to someone who is at least
+potentially a member of the web of trust that defines your ethical
+community. We punish ordinary criminals to deter them from repeating
+criminal behavior, because we believe they know what ethical behavior
+is and that by deterring them from crime we help them re-integrate
+with an ethical community they have never in any fundamental sense
+departed.

+

By contrast, we do not punish the criminally insane. We confine
+them and sometimes kill them for our own safety, but we do not make
+them suffer in an effort to deter them from insanity. Just to state
+the aim is to make obvious how absurd it is. Hannibal Lecter, and his
+all-too-real prototypes, lack the capacity to respond to punishment
+by re-integrating with an ethical community.

+

In fact, criminal psychopaths are not even potentially members of
+an ethical community to begin with. There is something broken or
+missing in them that makes participation in the web of trust
+impossible; perhaps the capacity to emotionally identify with other
+human beings, perhaps conscience, perhaps something larger and harder
+to name. They have other behavioral deficits, including poor impulse
+control, associated with subtle neurological damage. By existing,
+they demonstrate something most of us would rather not know; which is
+that there are creatures who — though they speak, and reason,
+and feign humanity — have nothing but evil in them.

+

On the behavioral evidence, Saddam Hussein and his now-deceased
+serial-rapist son Uday fit the DSM-IV criteria for psychopaths
+exactly; by contrast Qusay, the other deceased son, appears to have
+been a merely ordinary thug. But it would be a dangerous mistake to
+dismiss Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and their ilk as merely
+psychopathic — they don’t have the deficits in impulse control
+and other areas that would imply. I fear they are examples of a
+phenomenon even more troubling — neurologically normal
+non-psychopaths who speak, and reason, and feign humanity, and
+have nothing but evil in them.

+

Osama bin Laden is a religious fanatic, not a psychopath. He
+suffers not from lack of conscience but from a particular kind of
+conscience, principles that drive him to plan and execute mass
+murder. Like a psychopath, he apparently lacks any capacity to
+identify with his victims; but rather than being neurological, his
+disorder is possession by a killer idea. He is a memebot.

+

Fanatics of bin Laden’s intensity are like psychopaths in that
+reason cannot reach them and punishment only fuels their rage. We
+have seen bin Laden’s like before in Hitler, Savanarola, and a
+thousand pettier examples. Their belief systems are closed, circular,
+self-justifying, bordering on if not becoming actually delusional.
+You can confine them or kill them, but they cannot be re-integrated
+into the ethical web of trust by the measures we use on mere
+criminals.

+

The attempt to fit the treatment of fanatical terrorists into
+a “criminal” frame, as though they were shoplifters or second-story
+men or even ordinary murderers, is symptomatic of a deep blindness
+in all too many Westerners — often a willful blindness. It
+is as though, by denying that these people are irredeemably evil,
+the tender-minded think they can edit evil out of the world. The
+rest of us, if we ever had that illusion, lost it on 9/11.

diff --git a/20050706211303.blog b/20050706211303.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4c28865 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050706211303.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Gayness is hard, lesbianism soft +

Fascinating. This NYT article bears out a suspicion I’ve held for a long time about the plasticity of sexual orientation. The crude one-sentence summary is that, if you go by physiological arousal reactions, male bisexuality doesn’t exist, while female bisexuality is ubiquitous.

+

I’ve spent most of my social time for the last thirty years around science fiction fans, neopagans, and polyamorists — three overlapping groups of people not exactly noted for either sexual inhibitions or reluctance to explore sexual roles that don’t fit the neat typologies of the mainstream culture. And there are a couple of things it’s hard not to notice about them:

+

First, a huge majority of the women in these cultures are bisexual. To the point where I just assume any female I meet in these contexts is bi. This reality is only slightly obscured by the fact that many of these women describe themselves and are socially viewed by others as ‘straight’, even as they engage in sexual play with each other during group scenes with every evidence of enjoyment. In fact, in these cultures the operational definition of ‘straight female’ seems to be one who has recreational but not relational/romantic sex with other women.

+

Second, this pattern is absolutely not mirrored in their male peers. Even in these uninhibited subcultures, homoerotic behavior involving self-described ‘straight’ men is rare and surprising. Such homeoeroticism as does go on is almost all self-describedly gay men fucking other self-describedly gay men; bisexuality in men, while an accepted and un-tabooed orientation, is actually less common than gayness and not considered quite normal by anybody. The contrast with everybody’s matter-of-fact acceptance of female bisexual behavior is extreme.

+

It is also an observable fact that many women in these cultures change either their sexual orientation or their sexual presentation over time, but that this is seldom true of men. That is, a woman may move from being sexually involved mostly with other women to being mostly involved with men, and back, several times during her adolescent and adult lifetime; nobody considers this surprising and it doesn’t involve much of a change in either self-image or social identity. Not so for men in these cultures; they tend to start out as straight or gay and stay that way, and on the unusual occasions that this changes it tends to involve a significant break in both self-image and social identity.

+

Until I read the abovementioned NYT article, I thought these were peculiar, contingent traits of this group of subcultures (which are influenced by each other). That is, I thought that (in the jargon of postmodernism) SF fans, neopagans and polyamorists had arrived at a common social construction of sexuality with no privileged relationship to the biological substructure.

+

Now I wonder. If the studies the article references are correct, the distribution of behaviors I’ve been describing is exactly what you see when you bypass self-consciousness and social construction entirely, and just measure how aroused people get when they look at pictures of other naked people. This actually is how our biology ‘wants’ us to be! Who knew?

diff --git a/20050718172850.blog b/20050718172850.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b785217 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050718172850.blog @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +The Hollywood Left is from Venus? +

David Koepp, the screenwriter behind the current blockbuster movie
+War of the Worlds has said:
+“the Martians in our movie represent American military forces invading
+the Iraqis.”

+

As InstaPundit observed, you just can’t make this stuff up. It’s
+hard to lampoon the Hollywood left any more, because they keep
+uttering inanities that venture beyond far, far beyond parody —
+yea and verily, into the Land of the Barking Moonbats. Nevertheless,
+here at Armed and Dangerous we’re not afraid to
+try…

+

OK, Mr, Koepp, let’s see if I have this straight. The Americans in
+the movie aren’t Americans. they’re Iraqis. The Martians aren’t
+Martians, they’re Americans. Fine, I follow you so far. Is there a
+scene where the Martians collect toys from the Red Planet to give to
+American children? Do they build schools and powerplants for the
+Earthlings who are blowing them up with IEDs? Is there a scene where
+the Martians depose the brutal American dicator George Bush —
+you know, the one who fought a pointless war with Mexico and
+nerve-gassed the population of the upper Midwest? Do we get to see his
+twin daughters amusing themselves by feeding dissidents feet-first
+into industrial shredders?

+

Koepp would have it that War of the Worlds is a fable
+about the perils of military adventurism. As an anarchist who
+believes that war is the health of the State and an overly healthy
+State is a damnably bad thing, I daresay I’m more dead set against
+“military adventurism” than he is; I’ll bet he thought it wasn’t so
+bad when, say, Soviet tanks were rolling into Prague in 1968, if he
+was alive then.

+

But “adventurism” is a peculiar word to use in this context. Not
+the movie, but what he claims it refers to. Um. Just checking,
+now…four years before the movie began, did the two tallest buildings
+on Mars get flying saucers crashed into them by terrorists operating
+from Guatemala? Did every intelligence service on Mars believe, and
+tell their leaders, that the terrorists had been getting training and
+logistical support from the CIA? Did the Martian press repeatedly
+publish investigative stories about the terrorist/American connection
+and urging Mars to do something about it — stories that were
+believed clean across the political spectrum before a campaign for
+Supreme Xyglfrntz made it convenient for one faction of Martians to
+forget that?

+

Probably not. But that’s the movie I want to see. You know,
+the one where John Kerry does a cameo as a failed candidate for Supreme
+Xyglfrntz who voted for the invasion before he voted against it.

diff --git a/20050721122928.blog b/20050721122928.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4b995b9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050721122928.blog @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +American Empire +

The American Left, and some of the Buchananite/isolationist elements of the American Right, have spent a lot of time and rhetorical energy fretting about the “American Empire”, and/or the “global system of American hegemony”. Lee Harris has written a very informative essay on Hegemony vs. Empire in which he points out that these two words mean different things, and delves into the history of “hegemony” as a form of voluntary organization of groups of states against external threats.

+

Harris’s implicit point is that in the post-9/11 world, confusion between “hegemony” and “empire” serves the ideological purposes of the enemies of our civilization — the head-hackers, the suicide-bombers, and the rogue states behind them. But even if the word “hegemony” had not been misappropriated and trashed by the anti-American left, the phrase “American Empire” would still have a sting. The implication, quite intentional, is that the U.S. aims to rule the known world after the manner of the Romans or the British.

+

Does the United States have an empire? There are at least two ways to address this question. One is extensional: ask to what extent the U.S. behaves as imperial powers have historically behaved. The other is intensional; ask what purpose empire serves for the people who control it, and then ask if the U.S. has created a structure of control that achieves the purpose. (The second question is useful partly because it may enable us to discern imperialism that dare not speak its name.)

+

Let’s take the second question first. What is the purpose of empire? In fact, this turns out to be an easy one. The one consistent feature of all empires, everywhere, is that commerce between subject regions and the imperial center is controlled so that the imperial center imports goods at below-market rates and exports them to the subject regions at above-market rates. The mailed fist, the satrap, and the gunboat are just enforcement mechanisms for imperial market-rigging.

+

This economic criterion may sound dry and abstract, but it is the one thing that relatively benign imperia like the British Empire have in common with out-and-out despotisms like the Russian or Persian empires. Thus, for example, the Roman grain ships feeding the population of Rome with wheat harvested by slaves in conquered Egypt; the British destruction of the Indian textile industry so its customers would be effectively forced to buy shoddy cloth made in the English Midlands; and, more crudely, the tribute wagons rolling to Persepolis.

+

Over time, imperial means of squeezing their subject nations’ economies have become more subtle. Early empires looted; later ones used discriminatory taxation; still later used preferential tariffs (all, and this is the point, enforced by the imperial military). Does the U.S. have an empire by this criterion?

+

Some would argue that it does, and cite U.S. attempts to force an American-style patent regime and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on its trading partners. The trouble with this theory is that the U.S.’s negotiating leverage comes from the size of its economy, not fear of its military. Not even the most tinfoil-hatted of paranoids imagines that U.S. troops will ever land in (say) Brazil to enforce the DMCA; rather, it’s the prospect of being locked out of the world’s biggest export market that alarms Brazilian politicians. Reasonable people may reject the U.S. patent regime and the DMCA, or differ about the fairness of the Brazilo-American relationship, but “empire” is not a good word for it.

+

(Arguably the U.S. in fact did have an empire by this criterion until the 1950s, in parts of Central and South America and the Pacific. However, that is the past. I am addressing the question of whether “American Empire” is a true or useful description of the present.)

+

To reduce the market-rigging claim to absurdity, consider oil. If the U.S. truly were an empire, Venezuela (which supplies 25% of U.S. oil needs) would have been subjugated and annexed long since rather than left to the tender mercies of an unstable anti-American dictator like Hugo Chavez. The corrupt and despotic House of Saud (supplying a much higher percentage I don’t have at my fingertips) would likewise have been replaced by American puppets, not left unmolested to dole out billions of back-channel petrobucks to any anti-American terrorist who can pronounce the word “Wahhabi”.

+

In both cases, these would have been distinct improvements and among the best arguments one could muster for imperialism in the 21th century. But the U.S. has neither done them nor sought the power to do them. It fails the intensional test of empire.

+

To perform the extensional test, let’s look at some things that previous empires normally did and ask if the U.S. does them. To make the anti-American case as easy as possible, I won’t pick straw-man brutalities like crucifying, impaling, or machine-gunning entire populations in order to suppress revolts, the sorts of things the Soviets or Mongols or Japanese routinely got up to; instead, I’ll confine myself to the subset of common imperial practices engaged in by the Victorian Britons. If the U.S. fails even to replicate the behaviors of that least oppressive empire in human history to date, it’s hard to see how the term “empire” can sensibly be applied to the U.S.’s situation at all.

+
    +
  • +

    Does the U.S. impose U.S. law by force on conquered peoples without giving them citizenship or representation in the national government?

    +
    • +
  • +

    Are there any places outside the U.S. where treaties with subject nations stipulate that an American citizen will be subject only to U.S and not local law?

    +
    • +
  • +

    Does the U.S. routinely conscript large portions of its armies from subject peoples who lack U.S. citizenship?

    +
    • +
+

The answer to all these questions is, of course, “no”. The U.S. fails the extensional test of empire as well.

+

Nevertheless, I am certain the charge will continue to be flung. The most forgivable reason for flinging it is gross ignorance of history and what actual empires are like. Far too often, however, people raising the cry of “American Empire” would not actually care about the facts if they had them; it is the emotion of anti-Americanism that drives their convictions, rather than the reverse.

diff --git a/20050722145256.blog b/20050722145256.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..38225c5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050722145256.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +American Empire Redux +

A respondent to my previous post on American Empire said “For non-Americans, the concern is not necessarily “does America behave like an empire?”, but “can we trust it not to act like one when the chips are down?” (e.g. if oil supplies dwindle to the point where the US economy is at real risk).

+

The answer is “of course not!”. You can never trust any nation-state not to go imperialist in a crisis of that kind, if it has the power to do so. But the United States is demonstrably exceptional in one important respect; it doesn’t hold on to its gains when the survival crisis is over.

+

Ask the Japanese or Germans, defeated in World War II and ruled by American proconsuls for years afterwards. Both became independent and prosperous nations. Or ask the Iraqis — defeated twice by the U.S., but now drafting their own constitution.

+

Contrast this with the great 19th-century and early 20th-century imperia. The British pattern was to shellack the hell out of the natives when they got uppity, then rule them lightly and (with only sporadic exceptions) quite benevolently. This was a small improvement on the French and German empires (almost as civilized, rather more nakedly exploitative) and a large one on the extremely brutal Belgian, Japanese, and Russian empires. But the Americans go the Brits one better; they civilize the natives and then get the hell out.

+

And why is this? I was travelling in Europe a few years back, and some Euroleftie began blathering in my presence about America’s desire to rule the world. “Nonsense,” I told him. “You’ve misunderstood the American character. We’re instinctive isolationists at bottom. We don’t want to rule the world — we want to be able to ignore it.”

+

The play of expressions on his face as he rethought his history was hilarious to watch. The other Europeans laughed at him, as well they might. Because it’s true. Whatever Americans may get up to abroad when some Hitler or Hussein needs squashing, at the end of the day they invariably do the one thing no previous global hegemon’s soldiers ever have. They go home.

diff --git a/20050724115404.blog b/20050724115404.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0b240da --- /dev/null +++ b/20050724115404.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Sowing Dragon’s Teeth +

David Lucas’s op-ed
+in the Knoxville News-Sentinel combines with this story about active-duty military personnel criticizing Edward
+Kennedy and Dick Durbin’s “gulag” rhetoric about Guantanamo Bay to suggest something interesting about the long-term political impact of the Iraq War.

+

Historically, one of the major byproducts of American wars is politicians. While it’s rare for a career military man to carve out a successful political career as Dwight Eisenhower did, there’s a strong pattern of non-career junior officers serving in combat returning to civilian life to become successful politicians. John Kerry, though he failed to win the presidency, has had a successful enough political career to count as one of the most recent examples.

+

I expect the Iraq war will produce a bumper crop of future politicians from its junior officer corps — men like David Lucas who are already making public names for themselves. So it’s worth asking what these people believe, and how the lessons they’re learning in Iraq will affect the attitude they bring to careers in civilian politics.

+

Recent surveys showing that 80% of the serving military officer corps voted Republican in 2004 combine with exceptionally high in-theater re-enlistment rates and op-eds like Lucas’s to paint a picture of a military that believes very strongly in the rightness of the Iraq war — a belief which appears to be strong not just among careerists but among short-timers who expect to return to civilian life as well. A related piece of evidence is negative but almost equally strong; the anti-war wing of U.S. politics has failed to discover or produce any returning veterans of Iraq who are both able to denounce the war effectively in public and willing to do so.

+

We already know, because they’re telling us themselves in mil-blogs, that the military serving in Iraq has developed a bitter contempt for the mainstream media. Biased, shoddy, and selective reporting with a heavy sensationalist and anti-war slant has had consequences; it has played well among bicoastal liberals in the U.S. but angered and alienated the troops on the ground. They know that reality there is greatly different from what’s being reported, and increasingly they’re willing to say so.

+

The Washington Times story shows that anti-war posturing by leading Democrats is angering and alienating the serving military as well. An increasing number seem to think they are seeing what is in effect a conspiracy between the mainstream media and the Democrats to make a just war unwinnable in order to score domestic political points. In the longer run, this is a disaster in the making for Democrats. It means that this war’s crop of successful politicians and influence leaders probably going to trend Republican and conservative to an unprecedented degree.

+

This is not a prospect that fills me with glee. Given their military background, the political children of the Iraq war seem more
+likely to reinforce the authoritarian/cultural-conservative side of the Republican split personality than the small-government/libertarian one. In the worst case, military resentment of the Democrats could fracture the strong unwritten tradition that keeps the serving military out of civilian politics. That could be very bad.

+

I think that worst case is still quite unlikely. But if it happens, the Democrats and the mainstream media will have nobody but themselves to blame. Their irresponsible and destructive political games have sown dragon’s teeth; let’s hope we don’t all come to regret the harvest.

diff --git a/20050724233703.blog b/20050724233703.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..69ba3d2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050724233703.blog @@ -0,0 +1,64 @@ +Love and Severus Snape +

OK, I’ve read “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” and enjoyed it
+I have a theory about what will happen in Book 7. Potential spoilers
+about Book 6 follow!.

+

+

I think it’s going to turn out that Severus Snape is still, despite
+all appearances, working to destroy Lord Voldemort. And, moreover, I
+think I know why. I’m expecting that revelation to be the emotional
+climax of the last book.

+

Here is what I believe to be the central secret of Snape’s character.
+It explains his general bitterness, his hostility to Harry, and his outright
+hatred of Harry’s father. It also explains why Dumbledore, if he knew the
+secret, trusted Snape absolutely but never explained why.

+

I believe that Snape was desperately, hopelessly in love with
+Lilly Potter, and still worships her memory. That he hated
+Harry’s father for winning her and wants to hate Harry for being
+the image of his father. But he turned against Voldemort when
+Voldemort killed Lilly. He snipes at Harry, but is unable to
+muster the will to actually kill the boy in their last
+confrontation, because when he looks at Harry’s face he sees
+James’s face but Lilly’s eyes.

+

This would fit a continuing theme in the books, which is that
+only love is powerful enough to stand against Voldemort’s will.
+It sets up some dramatic final scene in which Harry and Severus,
+in spite of their history, decide that they must trust each other
+and act together — both in the memory of Lilly.

+

This culmination would also supply a motif that has been
+conspicuous by its absence from the books. Amidst all of
+Rowling’s exploration of morality, good, and evil, there has so
+far been nothing of redemption. No instance of anyone having
+walked down the path of evil and rejected it for the good.

+

“But…but…” I hear you say, “he killed Dumbledore!”. True
+— and, I believe, a truly masterful piece of misdirection
+on Rowling’s part. I think both Dumbledore and Snape knew that,
+with four Death Eaters pounding up the stairs behind Snape and
+Dumbledore so desperately weak, his chances of survival were nil.
+So Dumbledore paralyzed Harry; and his one-word plea to Snape
+was not to spare his life but to act so that his death would
+maintain Snape’s cover and not be wasted.

+

I think the truly pivotal confrontation was the later one
+between Harry and Snape on the front lawn. Killing Dumbledore
+did not require Severus Snape to choose between light and darkness,
+because it was done (in effect) on Dumbledore’s plea but could
+always be spun as an act of loyalty to Voldemort.

+

But confronting Harry was different. Snape knew the prophecy that
+only one of them could live; it was his report of that prophecy to
+Voldemort that had moved the Dark Lord to kill Snape’s beloved
+Lilly. Snape’s contempt for Harry’s attempts at throwing curses makes
+clear that Snape could have killed Harry at that point. Instead, he
+talks. Rehearses his reasons for hating Harry and Harry’s father,
+looks into Harry’s eyes — and does not kill.

+

I think that is the moment at which Snape makes his redemptive
+choice. It’s the exact dual of Voldemort’s attempt to kill Harry.
+Lilly’s love saved Harry from Voldemort; Snape’s love for Lilly saves
+Harry from Snape — and, ultimately, Snape from evil.

+

Further prediction: Draco Malfoy is Snape’s dual. In book six he
+hesitates, never taking the step into irredeemable evil. In the
+climactic confrontation of book 7 he will take that step. What will
+propel him into evil is fear of weakness and the need to prove his
+will is strong — strong enough to deny the bonds of love as we
+saw him begin to do when he rejected Dumbledore’s offer. He will fall
+as Snape rises.

+

Of course I could be wrong — but can anyone plausibly deny that
+this is the kind of plotting Rowling likes to do?

diff --git a/20050726000148.blog b/20050726000148.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..896523d --- /dev/null +++ b/20050726000148.blog @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +Kurds in the Coal Mine +

How will we know if the attempt to reconstruct Iraq is failing?

+

This is a serious question. With as much hysterical anti-Iraq-war,
+anti-Bush-Administration fabrication going in the media as there has
+been, it’s tempting for a rational person to dismiss every negative
+report as just another load of Michael Mooronism and dismiss it. That
+would be a mistake. Things could still go very bad there. How would
+we tell?

+

+

I was pondering this question the other day, and I realized that there
+is an excellent test for the state of Iraq. When the Kurds start muttering
+about secession, then is the time to worry that matters are
+spinning out of control. Conversely, as long as they’re happy to
+stay in Iraq, outsiders can feel reasonably confident that the place
+is not going to hell in a handbasket.

+

Consider. The Kurds have mostly been running their own affairs
+since the end of Gulf War I, shielded by the northern no-fly zone.
+They’re a large, cohesive minority with cross-border ties to Kurds
+elsewhere and a recurring dream of an independent Kurdistan. They
+have enough oil to jump-start an independent national economy. Their
+militia, the peshmergas, has a reputation for effectiveness and is
+probably the best-trained factional army in Iraq. And of all the
+factions, they’re on the best terms with the U.S.

+

It was, frankly, a bit surprising to me that the Kurds didn’t bid
+for independence when the Hussein regime went down. Of all Iraq’s
+tribal factions (except the defeated Sunnis) they have the least to
+gain from staying in the national government. Consequently, the
+Shi’ites have been forced to cede them an allocation of ministries and
+top posts far out of proportion to the Kurdish percentage of the

+

population. The President of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, is a Kurd

+

(For those who need a reminder, the Kurds are roughly 20% of
+the population, Sunnis 17%, Shi’ites about 60%; other groups such
+as Turkomens are statistical noise)

+

An early respondent to this essay brought up the Turks. Out of
+nervousness about their large Kurdish minority, they have been
+threatening military action against any attempt to form Kurdistan
+for years; the conventional wisdom is that this is what kept the
+Kurds from declaring independence after Gulf War I. But there are
+at least two reasons the Kurds can now calculate much lower odds of
+a Turkish coup de main. One is that Turkey has its hopes for escape
+from Third-World-pesthole status pinned to joining the European Union
+which (to say the least) doesn’t look kindly on military adventurism
+in prospective members. The second is the presence of American troops
+on the ground in North Iraq. Any confrontation with them would turn
+a Turkish incursion into a disastrous failure.

+

All in all, the option to form Kurdistan has never looked more viable.
+This is why the Kurds’ attitude towards Iraq-the-nation should be a
+reliable barometer. The Baathist/Jihadi insurgency has very little
+strength in the Kurdish north; if the Kurds think it’s winning
+elsewhere, or that the politics of Iraq-the-nation has gone seriously
+dysfunctional, they’re very well positioned to bail out. Conversely,
+as long as they figure there’s something to be gained by staying in
+Iraq, the rest of us can take that as a proxy that the place is
+improving.

+

Figuring this out has been a relief. Now I can ignore the constant
+doomsaying by George Bush’s political enemies and just keep a weather
+eye on the Kurds. While they’re happy, I won’t worry about Iraq too
+much.

diff --git a/20050802002654.blog b/20050802002654.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..222d53d --- /dev/null +++ b/20050802002654.blog @@ -0,0 +1,68 @@ +The “Bush Lied” lie +

Today’s entry in the Belgravia Dispatch
+does an excellent job of demolishing the “Bush lied, people died!”
+canard so popular among the anti-war left — Greg Djerejian
+echoes my own conclusions when he writes: “But if you dig into the
+weeds of the investigations that have taken place — one must
+judiciously conclude that he didn’t.”

+

But let’s suppose that George W. Bush had in fact lied about Iraqi
+WMD during that State of the Union address. I long ago concluded that
+I would not care if he had lied. To see why, let’s try looking at this from
+George Bush’s (simulated) point of view…

+

+
+

Imagine you are the President of the United States in 2002. You
+know that the country with the world’s fourth-largest army is sitting
+within theater-missile range of every oilfield in the Mideast, and
+it’s run by psychopathic thug who nerve-gassed his own people in 1980
+and has been shipping money and guns to anti-American terrorist groups
+ever since. The thug has stated his intention to destroy the U.S. and
+tried to assassinate a U.S. president. Even without the reports that
+officers of his Mukhbarat have been training Al-Qaeda affiliates in
+chemical-weapons techniques, you have to take him out because he is a
+serious threat to the U.S.’s national interests.

+

Unfortunately, you have a problem. A lot of elite opinion in your
+country is allergic to the notion that the U.S. has national
+interests. For example, you used to be in the oil business; you know
+that if there is any serious interruption of Mideast oil supplies the
+U.S. economy will crash hard enough to make the Great Depression look
+like a Sunday-school picnic. But American politics has become so
+detached from reality that it is impossible for you to speak the plain
+truth — that the U.S., must, as a consequence, be prepared to go
+to war to keep the oil flowing. If you say this, you will be
+pilloried as a neo-imperialist by many of the people most likely to
+freeze or starve or die in riots if you don’t stave off an oil
+crash. And they call you an idiot!

+

You’re not actually planning to go to war over the oil, though that
+remains the long-term reason that keeping murderous anti-American
+nutballs out of power in the region is important. You’re much more
+concerned about Hussein forging closer links to the international
+terror network — you know it’s been looking for a new patron
+ever since the Soviet Union folded up, and occasional Iraqi
+collaboration with al-Qaeda could turn into a full-blown alliance at
+any time. You have to take out either Hussein’s regime or al-Qaeda
+before that happens, and Iraq is the more visible target.

+

Your options are limited by the intensity with which the Democrats
+are pursuing a vendetta against you (they never got over their failure
+to steal the 2000 presidential election). Bill Clinton may have been a
+pathological liar with a unhealthy yen for overweight interns, but he
+grasped the danger and was willing to say so in public. His
+successors have tossed everything that he and they used to know about
+the Iraq/terrorism connection down the memory hole. You think they’re
+contemptible frauds, throwing over the security of the U.S. in order
+to score partisan points — but they have so many willing
+water-carriers in the national media that you can’t sell
+anti-terrorism as a casus belli any more than you could sell
+protecting our oil supply.

+

You need a casus belli that the American people will buy. Your
+domestic opponents, by repeatedly and loudly lying through their
+teeth, have managed to turn any talk of the two soundest reasons for
+going to war into a political non-starter. What are you going to
+do?

+
+

Under those circumstances, I’d say a fib or two about African
+uranium would have been pretty forgivable. But I don’t think it was
+Bush that played games with the truth. Rather it’s his opponents who
+have been relentlessly promulgating a series of Big Lies — and
+that they never knew of or believed in an Iraq/al-Qaeda connection is
+the least of them.

diff --git a/20050802113026.blog b/20050802113026.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d4aa6af --- /dev/null +++ b/20050802113026.blog @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +Libertarian realism +

I hate war. Even when the results of defeat would be worse than
+the results of war, I hate war. It kills people and makes government
+stronger. But when the results of defeat would be worse, I face
+reality and support war.

+

Our Islamist enemies want to kill us all — starting with Jews and
+gays, but continuing to anyone who doesn’t convert to Islam and accept
+shari’a and the whole nine yards. That’s not melodrama, it’s
+reporting of the plain and simple statements Al-Qaeda uses in their
+recruiting videos. They want to kill us all. They demonstrated
+the deadly seriousness of this aim on 9/11.

+

The choice between “support the war” and “allow the pressure off of
+enemies who want to kill us all” is not a difficult one. As a libertarian,
+I’m deeply sorry we live in a world where governments are doing the fighting
+for us, and I fear the consequences of the power they will amass while
+doing so. But I don’t see an alternative.

+

If I had a magic wand that could instantly materialize a world of
+private security agencies, insurance pools, and mercenaries capable of
+fighting the war on terror, I would have waved it long before 9/11.
+But I am not capable of changing the objective conditions of the war
+any more than I am of changing the murderous intentions of our
+enemies.

+

Though I’ve been accused of abandoning my libertarianism for a
+conservative position, I still believe in the non-initiation of force
+as strongly as I ever have. I saw one damn huge freaking initiation
+of force on 9/11 — not just an attack on one city or one country
+but an assault on Western civilization. Everything al-Qaeda’s
+propaganda organs have said since confirms that is what they intend.

+

George Orwell, writing during World War II, wrote:

+

+Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common
+sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically
+help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining
+outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not
+with me is against me.'” +

+

If Orwell were alive today, I have no doubt he would view this war
+as equally pressing, nor which side of it he would choose. And all
+libertarians should heed his words. We’ve shown far too much of a
+tendency to slide into denial about the war on terror and the
+consequences of refusing to fight it.

+

Sliding off into denial and fantasyland is not noble, it’s an
+abdication of our responsibility as human beings and members of a
+civilization. If that denial becomes “the” libertarian position, our
+statist opponents will damn us as for deserting our neighbors and our
+civilization in its hour of need — and they will be right to
+damn us.

+

Other libertarians may fail this test. I will not.

diff --git a/20050825214145.blog b/20050825214145.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d585df2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050825214145.blog @@ -0,0 +1,66 @@ +Blame The Audience +

In Summer
+Fading, Hollywood Sees Fizzle, a writer for the New York
+Times explores the theory that movie attendance is tanking
+because the quality of all too many mega-hyped “major movies” has
+plunged into the crapper. Well, no shit, Sherlock — what was
+your first clue? Pearl Harbor? Alexander?
+Mission Impossible II? What’s really news about this story is
+that it’s news — a startling break from the blame-the-audience
+thinking so prevalent in Big Media over the last decade.

+

+

It’s been most egregious in the music industry, which has spent
+most of that decade desperately trying to pin the blame for anemic
+sales on anything other than the fact that it spends its marketing
+budget pushing no-talent assclowns like Limp Bizkit and ‘N Sync (and
+yes, for you Office Space fans, Michael Bolton too).
+“Nah,” say the record-company executives to themselves, “It couldn’t
+be that. I know, let’s blame file-sharing! Bad audience.
+Baaad!“

+

Newspaper circulation is in a death-spiral so steep that at least
+four major-city dailies and a national syndicate have been caught
+making up millions of readers out of thin air just to stay
+viable-looking to advertisers. Could it due to be shallow
+print-the-press-release reporting, political bias, and a surfeit of
+sensationalism and fluff? “Nah,” say the newspaper executives to
+themselves, “It couldn’t be that. I know, let’s blame the
+Internet! Bad audience. Baaad!“

+

Of course, one could argue that Big Media is simply taking its cue
+from the Democratic Party. (Yes, I know one of those is a wholly-owned
+subsidiary of the other, I just can’t keep straight which one is on
+top.) If Republicans are beating the stuffings out of you in every
+election, it couldn’t be because you have no program beyond screaming
+“George Bush is eeeeevil!” and licking the anus of the Designated
+Victim Group Of The Week. “Nah,” say the DNCers to themselves, “It
+couldn’t be that. I know, let’s blame talk radio and Karl
+Rove! Bad audience. Baaad!“

+

What’s really going on here is a confluence of trends. One, which
+the Times article points out, is that audiences are
+getting better at seeing through hype and rejecting the crap. A second
+that the article doesn’t highlight is the proliferation of media
+channels and the rise of the Internet. Blogs, cable, satellite radio,
+podcasts, remix culture, — these are all part of a trend that
+gives media consumers far more choices than they’ve ever had before.
+Which means more alternatives and less temptation to settle
+for the crap.

+

Which means that, exactly as audiences have been breaking free of
+media oligopolies, media bosses have been telling them they should
+kiss their chains. Bad audience. Baaad! But wait —
+perhaps this Times article, brought to you by the Grey
+Lady aka Dowager Empress of Big Media, is a leading indicator that
+some tenuous contact with reality is beginning to develop in the
+media-bosses’ brains.

+

That would be nice, wouldn’t it? But I’m not holding my breath.
+Here are some indicators to watch for. More movies like the
+Rings trilogy or the Harry Potter sequence that
+actually seem to have some kind of heart and respect for their
+sources. More pop bands like Lynkyn Park and System of a Down that can
+actually play their instruments and seem to have some ideas that weren’t
+test-marketed to death by some soulless A&R hack. Newspapers where you
+can actually tell the war news from the partisan editorial ax-grinding
+(sorry, can’t think of any of those). And — OK, I know this
+is a stretch, but stay with me here — a Democratic Party with
+an actual platform.

+

Hear that, media bosses? Best you get it together, because here’s
+the sentence that will spell your doom otherwise: I have choices,
+and I know how to use them.

diff --git a/20050826133151.blog b/20050826133151.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a6a5e4d --- /dev/null +++ b/20050826133151.blog @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +Out like Flynn +

Renowned pychometrician Charles Murray has given us, in The
+Inequality Taboo, a concise summary of the most current science on
+group differences in IQ and other measures of capability. Most of it
+is not surprising to anybody who has been following the actual science
+rather than press accounts severely distorted by the demands of
+political correctness.

+

There is some new information here, however, and perhaps the most
+interesting bit is that turns out to be much less to the Flynn effect
+than meets the eye. The Flynn effect is the long-term rise in average
+IQ scores recorded since IQ began to be measured in the early 20th
+century. Advocates of the view that IQ is unimportant or meaningless
+have seized on the Flynn effect to argue that IQ is either (a) a
+statistical artifact, or (b) almost entirely environmentally driven
+(and thus can presumptively be increased by correct social
+policy).

+

Murray’s news is that the Flynn effect is not being driven by a
+rise in average g, the measure of general mental ability that accounts
+for over 50% of variance in almost all kinds of mental aptitude tests.
+Since Spearman discovered the ‘g’ statistic, almost all psychometricians
+have accepted that IQ is interesting precisely because it is a good
+approxmation of g. Thus, the Flynn effect is basically a mirage —
+it’s taking place in the noise, not the signal.

+

I’m not entirely sure what this means yet, and I don’t believe
+Murray or other psychometricians have gotten to the bottom of it
+either. But at minimum, it’s very suggestive that IQ differences are
+either genetic or driven by environmental factors over which we have
+little control. Spearman’s g, in particular, is notoriously
+intractable. It is highly heritable according to separated-twin
+studies. And while there is good evidence that it can be lowered from
+its ‘natural’ genetic level by unfavorable environment (such as poor
+childhood nutrition), it apparently can’t be raised by a favorable
+one.

+

Indeed, Murray reports in a footnote evidence from a study in
+Denmark that the Flynn effect has leveled off since the early 1990s.
+Thus, it may be that we have already maxed out the effects of wealth
+and better nutrition on the both the g and non-g components of IQ that
+we can manipulate.

diff --git a/20050828183847.blog b/20050828183847.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b705a39 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050828183847.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +People Getting Brighter, Culture Getting Dimmer +

In response to my previous post noting that the Flynn effect turns out to be a mirage, at least two respondents have suggested that average IQ has actually been falling, and have pointed to the alleged dumbing-down of politics and popular culture in the last fifty years.

+

I think both those respondents and the psychometricians are correct. That is, it seems to me that during my lifetime I’ve seen evidence that average IQ has risen a little, but that other traits involved in the “smart or stupid” judgment have eroded.

+

+

On the one hand, I’ve previously described the emergence of geek culture, which I take among other things as evidence that there are more bright and imaginative individuals around than there were when I was a kid. Enough of us, now, to claim a substantial slice of turf in the cultural marketplace. This good news is reinforced for me be the explosive growth of the hacker community, which today is easily a hundred times the size it was in, say, 1975 — and far larger than I ever dreamed it would be then.

+

On the other hand, when I compare Americans today to the country of my childhood there are ways the present comes off rather badly. We are more obese, we have shorter attention spans, our divorce rate has skyrocketed. All these and other indicators tell me that we have (on average) lost a significant part of our capacity to exert self-discipline, defer gratification, and honor contracts when the going gets tough.

+

To sum up, we’re brighter than we used to be, but lazier. We have more capacity, but we use less of it. Physically and mentally we are self-indulgent, flabby, unwilling to wake up from the consumer-culture dream of entitlement. We pursue happiness by means ever more elaborate and frenetic, dimishing returns long since having set in. When reality hands us a wake-up call like 9/11, too many of us react with denial and fantasy.

+

This is, of course, not a new complaint. Juvenal, Horace, and Petronius Arbiter wrote much the same indictment of their popular culture at the height of the Roman Empire. They were smart enough to understand, nigh on two millenia ago, that this is what happens to elites who have it easy, who aren’t tested and winnowed by war and famine and plague and poverty.

+

But there are important differences. One is that while decadence used to be an exclusive problem of the upper crust, we are all aristocrats now. More importantly, where the Romans believed that decadence in individuals and societies was inevitable, we know (because we’ve kept records) that as individuals we are taller, stronger, healthier, longer-lived and more intelligent than our ancestors — that, in fact, we have reaped large gains merely within the last century.

+

We have more capacity, but we use less of it. And, really, is it any surprise? Our schools are abandoning truth for left-wing bullshit about multiculturalism and right-wing bullshit about “intelligent design”. Our politics has become a wasteland of rhetorical assassinations in which nobody but the fringe crazies believe even their own slogans any more. Our cultural environment has become inward-turned, obsessed with petty intramural squabbles, clogged with cant. Juvenal would find it all quite familiar.

+

In a cultural environment gone so decadent, why shouldn’t individuals spend most of their capability on idle pleasures — status games, video games, role-playing games, sex and drugs and rock and roll?

+

Notice that what I’m not offering here is any moral condemnation. The classical way to respond to noticing cultural decadence and individual self-indulgence is to launch into a conservative or reactionary rant, but I consider those boring and pointless. I don’t have the conservative’s desire to scold people and tell them what to
+do. Nor am I any more eager than the Roman satirists to see a return of virtue and toughness, if the price is a return to the poverty and suffering that hammered our ancestors into virtuous and tough
+people.

+

Instead, I’ll reverse the previous question, and ask: what are we offering people to do with all their capacity? The subcultures that are escaping decadence, like the open-source movement or the U.S.’s volunteer military in Iraq, are composed of people who have dedicated themselves to a goal bigger than they are. What are we doing to find new goals as large or larger? What more could we doing to call forth peak performance from our increased capabilities?

+

Yet another similarity with Rome is that the barbarians are at our gates, but far too many of us cannot summon the will to fight them. In some ways we are coping with the threat less well than Rome did, exhibiting not merely denial but an active willingness to pander to them as though they have the virtues we have given up. But while war against Islamofascism is necessary, it’s too easy — not in my judgment a sufficiently stiff challenge to demand peak performance from the average member of our civilization. Not enough to get the couch potatoes and slackers off their butts, not enough by itself to restore a tone of moral seriousness to our
+civilization. Not yet, anyway.

+

And I’m not going to fall into the temptation of hoping that changes, either. Much as I might like to live in a less decadent civilization — one in which our increased intelligence translates into more virtuous collective behavior — I hope we can find a way to it that doesn’t involve megadeaths at the hands of jihadis first.

diff --git a/20050828230316.blog b/20050828230316.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b130694 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050828230316.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Katrina and the Kos +

About twelve hours ago I toyed with the idea of writing a satire in
+which the Bush-haters blame W. for the magnitude of the disaster
+bearing down on New Orleans. I discarded the idea on the grounds that
+it’s (a) not funny, and (b) not believable enough. I mean, who could
+really imagine that theory even from a barking moonbat?

+

Shows you what I know. One of the contributors at Daily Kos has already
+flung those feces,
+before Katrina lands, yet. And — here’s the funny part —
+the charge is already falsified by the facts on the ground.

+

I’m not a fan of George W. Bush. But when his opponents are
+this transcendently foaming-at-the-mouth idiotic, it’s hard not to
+wind up supporting him.

diff --git a/20050829091500.blog b/20050829091500.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..78f931d --- /dev/null +++ b/20050829091500.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Pretty People Behaving Stupidly +

I’ve been learning about the romance genre recently. I have no intrinsic interest in it at all, but I have an intelligent friend who plows through romances the way I read SF, and we’ve been discussing the conventions and structural features of the genre. Along the way I’ve learned that romance fans use an acronym TSTL which expands to “Too Stupid To Live”, describing a class of bad romance in which the plot turns on one or both leads exhibiting less claim to sophont status than the average bowl of clam dip.

+

My wife and I have parts in an upcoming live-action roleplaying game set in early 16th-century Venice. As preparation, she suggested we watch a movie called Dangerous Beauty set in the period. I couldn’t stand more than about 20 minutes of it. “It’s just,” I commented later “pretty people behaving stupidly.”

+

On reflection, I’ve discovered that PPBS describes a great deal of both the fiction and nonfiction I can’t stand. It’s a more general category that includes not just TSTL, but celebrity gossip magazines, almost every “romantic comedy” ever made, and a large percentage of the top-rated TV shows (especially, of course, the soap operas).

+

Obviously there’s a huge market for this stuff. I must be from Mars or something, because I don’t get it. How is wallowing in PPBS any different from going to the zoo to watch monkeys masturbate?

+

B-but… half my readers are probably spluttering, “…those are monkeys. PPBS is about people. Their hopes, their loves, their foolishness and dreams.” Yeah. And your point is? The entire emotional range of PPBS is duplicated in the social dynamics of any chimpanzee band; that’s exactly what makes it so boring.

+

There is nothing there about what actually makes us human, neither the good stuff like science and art and discovery nor the bad stuff like warfare and governments. In a universe of satoris and supernovas, the people who produce and consume PPBS only care about who slept with or dissed or made up with who.

+

I find that truly sad.

+

UPDATE: I’m a shadow Tourette’s Syndrome case, not a shadow autist like many other geeks. Nevertheless, this description of neurotypicality seems relevant.

diff --git a/20050829175908.blog b/20050829175908.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6a1826e --- /dev/null +++ b/20050829175908.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Getting Orwell Wrong +

The interpretation of George Orwell could be a paradigm for how dead literary figures get knocked from pillar to post by the winds of political interpretation. During his lifetime, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm went from darling of the left to exile for having been willing to write the truth about Communist totalitarianism in allegories too pointed to ignore.

+

With the end of the Cold War, forty-two years after Orwell’s death, the poisonous fog breathed on Western intellectual life by Soviet agents of influence slowly began to lift. It became possible to say that Communist totalitarianism was evil and had always been evil, without being dismissed as a McCarthyite or reactionary not merely by those agents but by a lot of “no enemy to the left” liberal patsies who should have known better. In this climate, Orwell’s uncompromising truth-telling shone even more brightly than before. For some on the left, belated shame at their own complicity with evil transmuted itself into more adulation for Orwell, and more attempted identification with Orwell’s positions, than at any time in the previous fifty years.

+

Then came 9/11. Orwell’s sturdy common sense about the war against the fascisms of his day made him a model for a few thinkers of the left who realized they had arrived at another of Marx’s “world-historical moments”, another pivot point at which everything changed. Foremost among these was Christopher Hitchens, who would use Orwell to good effect in taking an eloquent and forceful line in favor of the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq. For this, he was rewarded with the same vituperation and shunning by the Left that had greeted the publication of Orwell’s anti-totalitarian allegories fifty years before.

+

Hitchens, who coined the term “Islamofascist” for the ideology of Al-Qaeda and its allies, is in particular responsible for having given renewed currency to the following Orwell quote addressing the war against the Nazis:

+

+Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically
+help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, he that is not with me is against me. +

+

Reading it in its original full form, in a 1941 essay Pacifism and the War published in Partisan Review, only makes it clearer how directly the quote applies to the War on Terror.

+

Stung by this, various creatures of the pro-Islamofascist Left (and, alas, some liberal and libertarian patsies who should have known better) responded by asserting that Orwell repudiated this position in his 1944 essay As I Please. But a careful reading of this essay shows that there is less here than meets the eye.

+

What Orwell actually warns against in this essay is not the concept of “objective pro-fascism”, it is any unwarranted leap from noticing that someone is objectively pro-fascist to assuming that the person is intentionally pro-fascist. Orwell explains that confusing these categories is dangerous because it can cause you to mis-predict peoples’ behavior.

+

There is nothing exceptionable here, and nothing that repudiates the substance of the earlier quote. Yes, Orwell does observe “I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once”, but his “guilty” is a rhetorical flourish, a setup for his real point about confusing effects with intentions.

+

Both essays are examples of the determined stab, straight through cant to the heart of the matter, that Orwell did so well and so consistently. It was perfectly consistent with the rest of his work for him to observe that there is such a thing as objective pro-fascism, then insist that we not confuse that condition with intentional treason.

+

As for those who would like to use this “retraction” to take Orwell out of the fight…your behavior is objectively pro-fascist in precisely the sense he intended. At the very least, it is evidence of careless reading and sloppy thinking.

diff --git a/20050901083218.blog b/20050901083218.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c634253 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050901083218.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +The first good thing to come of Hurricane Katrina +

Oh, my stars and garters. A pro-firearms story in the New York Times?

+

+

Yes, children, it has actually happened: Police and Owners Begin to Challenge Looters (link via InstaPundit). Property owners with guns maintaining civil order in their neighborhood are cited approvingly. There’s even a picture of a handsome armed couple “on the lookout for looters”.

+

I think I’m more shocked by this than I was by the hurricane. It’s bylined “FELICITY BARRINGER and JERE LONGMAN”; I wonder what life is going to be like for them at the Grey Lady’s next struggle session.

diff --git a/20050908104729.blog b/20050908104729.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..10203b0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050908104729.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Impotent radicals +

A minor SF writer of radical Marxist political convictions recently uttered a rather incoherent rant in which, among other things, she accused me of “simple-minded right-wing” views. I’m not going to name her because I don’t dislike the woman enough to want to add to her troubles. But I’ve heard this song before from other Marxists, and I can’t resist commenting on why I find such accusations darkly amusing.

+

+

The surface reason is that anyone who can describe a thoroughgoing libertarian anarchist like me as “right-wing” has already given evidence of having a set of political categories so far out of contact with reality that all one can do is laugh. Yeah, sure, I’m all about the right-wing agenda of freezing existing social power relationships in place or returning them to an idealized former state. Not!

+

But there’s something deeper and much funnier going on here. What do radical Marxists want? Among other things, they want to upend the system of industrial capitalism, abolish property rights, and give control of production to the workers.

+

So, let’s see. They pick on a guy who has a) successfully challenged the industrial-capitalist system of software production, b) argued, effectively, that the assertion of intellectual-property rights leads to bad outcomes, and c) helped lead the charge to put programming back in the control of programmers. And the ripple effects of my work have gone way beyond programming; it’s been cited by insurgent movements in bioinformatics, library science, game design, pharmaceuticals, third-world development economics, and half a dozen other disciplines.

+

And, you know, it’s not like I’ve made any secret of the fact that I believe open-source thinking has radical political consequences in the longer term. I’ve said many times that the economic-efficiency arguments for open-source decentralization should sufficient to get people to do it without buying my politics. Then I’ve turned around and observed that learning how to do without centralization and big management in one area provides people with both working models and efficiency arguments for getting rid of authority hierarchies elsewhere. Yeah, sure, that’s a conservative prescription!

+

I’ve even argued — in front of Wall Street analysts, and had them buy it! — that we’re entering an era in which the traditional capital-intensive, management-intensive corporate form is less and less appropriate for managing production in which the main bottleneck is skilled human attention. I don’t use the term “workers’ cooperative” for what’s replacing it, but hello…hello? Can’t any of the so-called “progressive” thinkers in the Marxist camp put two and two together?

+

“Right-wing”. It is to laugh. It is to laugh exceedingly.

+

Poor impotent radicals. After all their theorizing, they can’t recognize a real revolution even when its goals and actual achievements strongly parallel what they’ve been saying they want since 1860. But it’s 2005 as I write; by historical definition, these are the same people who didn’t get the lesson the Soviet Union taught about collectivist economics and the actual consequences of taking Marxism seriously. Expecting them to have any more intelligence than a pile of broken cinderblocks might be a bit much.

+

But let’s be charitable and assume some of them can string together two thoughts without drooling uncontrollably. After what I’ve done and written, how the hell can they mistake me for any kind of conservative?

+

The easy, cheap shot would be to say they’re too busy masturbating in front of their Che Guevara posters to notice what a successful revolutionary looks like. And there’d be lot of truth in that cheap shot; Western Marxists, in my experience, are more about self-congratulation on their own moral superiority and radical hipness than they are about actually changing the world they live in. They’d rather mouth the right slogans than do the hard work needed to actually realize the revolution they want.

+

But again, I think there’s something deeper going on here. Because, unlike me, these self-proclaimed, self-indulgent so-called “radicals” don’t behave as though they actually want the existing order to be smashed. Consider, in this connection, the jaw-dropping incoherence of anybody who advocates proletarian revolution and then slams me for arguing that the people should be armed against the arrogance of government.

+

These soi-disant Marxists and leftists claim to champion “the people” with one breath, then want to disarm them in the next — giving more power to the plutocratic fat cats who, in the Marxist view of the world, own the police and the government and the army.

+

And they dare call me a conservative? That’s just too funny for words.

diff --git a/20050908162446.blog b/20050908162446.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..52507a9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050908162446.blog @@ -0,0 +1,92 @@ +Microsoft tries to recruit me +

The following is, verbatim, a letter I received a few minutes ago
+from a Microsoft recruiter.

+

+
+ ++From: "Mike Walters (Search Wizards)" <v-mikewa@microsoft.com>
+To: <esr@thyrsus.com>

+

Eric,

+

I am a member of the Microsoft Central Sourcing Team. Microsoft is
+seeking world class engineers to help create products that help people
+and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.

+

Your name and contact info was brought to my attention as someone who
+could potentially be a contributor at Microsoft. I would love an
+opportunity to speak with you in detail about your interest in a career
+at Microsoft, along with your experience, background and qualifications.
+I would be happy to answer any questions that you may have and can
+also provide you with any information I have available in regard to the
+position s and work life at Microsoft.

+

Please take a moment to visit My Calendar
+<http://www.appointmentquest.com/provider/2010224927> online to
+schedule a convenient time for me to contact you. You can learn more
+about our vision for the New World of Work at
+<http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail>

+

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail.

+

Additionally, if you are aware of any current or previous colleagues
+who might also be interested in opportunities at Microsoft, I would be
+happy to speak with them as well. Referrals are always welcome, and
+are greatly appreciated.

+

Thank you in advance and I look forward to an opportunity to speak to
+you in the near future

+

Best regards,

+

Mike

+

<http://members.microsoft.com/careers/default.mspx>

+

How far will you go?

+

Mike Walters
+CST Senior Recruiter

+

Microsoft
+One Microsoft Way
+Redmond, WA 98052
+<http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?Pyt=Tmap&addr=One+Microsoft+Way&csz=Re
+dmond%2C+WA+98052&country=us> +

+
+

I called Mike Walters, who told me my name had been passed to him
+by his research team. I indicated to him that I thought somebody
+was probably having a little joke at his expense, and promised him an
+email reply. Here is my reply in its entirety:

+
+ ++To: "Mike Walters (Search Wizards)" <v-mikewa@microsoft.com>
+From: <esr@thyrsus.com>

+

I'd thank you for your offer of employment at Microsoft, except
+that it indicates that either you or your research team (or both)
+couldn't get a clue if it were pounded into you with baseball bats.
+What were you going to do with the rest of your afternoon, offer jobs
+to Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds? Or were you going to stick to
+something easier, like talking Pope Benedict into presiding at a
+Satanist orgy?

+

If you had bothered to do five seconds of background checking, you
+might have discovered that I am the guy who responded to Craig
+Mundie's "Who are you?" with "I'm your worst nightmare", and that I've
+in fact been something pretty close to your company's worst nightmare
+since about 1997. You've maybe heard about this "open source" thing?
+You get one guess who wrote most of the theory and propaganda for it
+and talked IBM and Wall Street and the Fortune 500 into buying in.
+But don't think I'm trying to destroy your company. Oh, no; I'd be
+just as determined to do in any other proprietary-software monopoly,
+and the community I helped found is well on its way to accomplishing
+that goal.

+

On the day *I* go to work for Microsoft, faint oinking sounds will be
+heard from far overhead, the moon will not merely turn blue but
+develop polkadots, and hell will freeze over so solid the brimstone
+will go superconductive.

+

But I must thank you for dropping a good joke on my afternoon. On
+that hopefully not too far distant day that I piss on Microsoft's
+grave, I sincerely hope none of it will splash on you.

+

Cordially yours,
+ Eric S. Raymond +

+
+

My wife, upon hearing of this, suggested that if something like
+this could happen maybe I haven’t made enough trouble for
+Microsoft lately, and I’m slipping off their radar. She might have a
+point…

+

UPDATE: For those of you who missed the subtlety (which was a surprising lot of you) I was quite polite to this guy on the phone.

+

FURTHER UPDATE: I had my serious, constructive converstation with Microsoft last year, when a midlevel exec named Steven Walli took me out to dinner at OSCON 2004 and asked, in so many words, “How can we not be evil?” And I told him — open up your file formats (including Word and multimedia), support open technical standards instead of sabotaging them, license your patents under royalty-free, paperwork-free terms.

+

I believe Steve Walli went back to his bosses and told them that truth. He is no longer with Microsoft, and what little he’ll say about it hints that they canned him for trying to change their culture.

+

This didn’t surprise me. Microsoft’s profit margins require a monopoly lock on the market; thus, they’re stuck with being predatory evil bastards. The moment they stop being predatory evil bastards, their stock price will tank and their options pyramid will crash and it will be all over.

+

That being the case, negotiation is pointless. Microsoft is not reformable. Jeering at offers like this is actually the most constructive thing we can do.

diff --git a/20050908183728.blog b/20050908183728.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fdb2d74 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050908183728.blog @@ -0,0 +1,52 @@ +Microsoft’s Worst Nightmare? +

A commenter writes, in reference to my letter to the Microsoft
+recruiter,

+

+BTW, I think abrogating to yourself the status of MS’s worst
+nightmare might be seen as presumptious, considering that FLOSS
+depends on a big community, and a lot of what FLOSS is about precedes
+your 97 work, but far be it from me to try to teach ESR strategy. +

+

Um. You meant “arrogating”, I think. A few words about that…

+

+

Well, duh. Of course the open-source community predates
+me and is much bigger than any one individual. I’ve done more than
+most to point that out, I think, asserting our continuity clear back
+to 1960 and the SPACEWAR hackers at MIT.

+

I’m Microsoft’s worst nightmare not so much because of myself as an
+individual but because I’ve served as a public focus and embodiment of
+the hacker community’s values. And (this is the nightmare part) I
+sold them to Wall Street. I broke us out of the geek ghetto.

+

I try not to have a big ego about this. I’m well aware that if it
+hadn’t been me in that role, somebody else would have done it. It was
+time in the late 1990s. OK, to be honest I think without me
+the open-source transition would have happened a few years later and
+with less up-front awareness, but it was going to happen; long-term
+trends in the underlying economics guaranteed that. I may have been
+the first to understand and publicize those trends, but that never
+gave me the illusion that I created them or that they wouldn’t have
+operated without “ESR” pushing.

+

In fact, having been the key man at one or two pivotal historical
+moments, I’m in an almost uniquely good position to plump for the
+“times make the man” theory. Yes, I supplied some individual vision.
+But I absolutely do not think of myself as indispensible and never
+have. Because I’ve felt the tide of history sweeping me forward, and
+I know that the hacker community created me.

+

This is something that is hard to talk about without sounding
+mystical. I sometimes feel almost as though I’m a sort of sense organ
+or mirror that the hacker community grew in order to see itself more
+clearly. To the extent I ended up “leading” or became a culture hero
+in that process, it was because the community desperately needed
+someone to do it and pulled me into the role, shaping me to fit
+in the process.

+

Cultures need culture heroes — and they’ll create ‘em if they
+don’t pop up spontaneously. Note: the process can be damn rough on
+the candidate. And being the focus of so many peoples’ dreams and
+aspirations is…well, it’s terrifying at times. I used to have a lot
+of contempt for rock stars who couldn’t handle the pressure and fucked
+up with drugs. Now I understand better. I’ve been through some
+awful, heartbreaking, soul-destroying shit on this job.

+

But let’s look on the positive side. I guess the most important
+point I want to make is that my success doesn’t belong to me alone but
+to all hackers, every one of us. I never forget this, and I hope no
+one else will either.

diff --git a/20050909031614.blog b/20050909031614.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..360b0ab --- /dev/null +++ b/20050909031614.blog @@ -0,0 +1,43 @@ +Eric writes about the shoes +

Aa a finger exercise in writing, I decided to submit a piece to Manolo’s
+Essay Contest. The constraints — low word count, a subject
+that really doesn’t interest me much — appealed to me. I
+figured if I could produce something interesting under those
+circumstances, it would be an accomplishment.

+

Here it is. You be the judge…

+

+

I’m a geek, not a fashion plate. I don’t think about shoes a lot,
+but I know what I like — and when I do think about shoes, I’m
+profoundly grateful for some of the changes that have come about in my
+lifetime. I’m thinking, more than anything else, of the way athletic
+shoes have taken over the world.

+

When I was a kid back in the 1960s and early 1970s, “shoes” still
+meant, basically, “hard leather oxfords”. Ugly stiff things with a
+high-maintainence finish that would scuff if you breathed on them.
+What I liked was sneakers. But in those bygone days you didn’t get
+to wear sneakers past a certain age, unless you were doing sneaker
+things like playing basketball. And I sucked at basketball.

+

I revolted against the tyranny of the oxford by wearing desert boots,
+which back then weren’t actually boots at all but a kind of high-top
+shoe with a suede finish and a grip sole. These were just barely
+acceptable in polite company; in fact, if you can believe this, I was
+teased about them at school. It was a more conformist time.

+

I still remember the first time I saw a shoe I actually liked and
+wanted to own, around 1982. It was called an Aspen, and it was built
+exactly like a running shoe but with a soft suede upper. Felt like
+sneakers on my feet, looked like a grownup shoe from any distance.
+And I still remember exactly how my Aspens — both of them —
+literally fell apart at the same moment as I was crossing Walnut
+Street in West Philly. These were not well-made shoes. I had to limp
+home.

+

But better days were coming. In the early 1990s athletic shoes
+underwent a kind of Cambrian explosion, proliferating into all kinds
+of odd styles. Reebok and Rockport and a few other makers finally
+figured out what I wanted — athletic-shoe fit and comfort with a
+sleek all-black look I could wear into a client’s office, and no
+polishing or shoe trees or any of that annoying overhead!

+

I look around me today and I see that athletic-shoe tech has taken over.
+The torture devices of my childhood are almost a memory. Thank you,
+oh inscrutable shoe gods. Thank you Rockport. It’s not a big thing
+like the Internet, but comfortable un-fussy shoes have made my life
+better.

diff --git a/20050909180844.blog b/20050909180844.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bfda319 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050909180844.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +Upgrade in progress +

My WordPress instance was just upgraded from 1.2 to 1.5. The visual presentation may have a glitch or two until I edit the template.

+

UPDATE: Aaargh. It looks like the special magic in the templates has been changed enough that I will have to rebuild my look and feel from scratch. This may take a while…

diff --git a/20050911104348.blog b/20050911104348.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a86ecaf --- /dev/null +++ b/20050911104348.blog @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +WordPress theme designers annoy the crap out of me diff --git a/20050912215220.blog b/20050912215220.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ef6468b --- /dev/null +++ b/20050912215220.blog @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Site theme no longer completely sucks diff --git a/20050913090607.blog b/20050913090607.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..12dd064 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050913090607.blog @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Help with WordPress diff --git a/20050913131706.blog b/20050913131706.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c394512 --- /dev/null +++ b/20050913131706.blog @@ -0,0 +1,104 @@ +Suicidalism +

The most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist
+terror network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker. The
+suicide bomber is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to
+spread terror; the suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or
+journalist or politician whose mission it is to destroy the West’s
+will to resist not just terrorism but any ideological challenge at all.

+

But al-Qaeda didn’t create the ugly streak of nihilism and
+self-loathing that afflicts too many Western intellectuals. Nor, I
+believe, is it a natural development. It was brought to us by
+Department V of the KGB, which was charged during the Cold War with
+conducting memetic warfare that would destroy the will of the West’s
+intelligentsia to resist a Communist takeover. This they did with
+such magnificent effect that the infection outlasted the Soviet Union
+itself and remains a pervasive disease of contemporary Western
+intellectual life.

+

+

Consider the following propositions:

+
    +
  • There is no truth, only competing agendas. +
    • +
  • All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority
    +over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and
    +colonialism.
    • +
  • There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture
    +to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such
    +standards is an evil oppressor.
    • +
  • The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of
    +the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be
    +impoverished and miserable.
    • +
  • Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal.
    +Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to
    +criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
    • +
  • The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only
    +victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals
    +are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying
    +with poor people and criminals.)
    • +
  • For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It
    +is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself.
    +But “oppressed” people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are
    +merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
    • +
  • When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner
    +is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of
    +view, and make concessions.
    • +
+

These ideas travel under many labels: postmodernism, nihilism,
+multiculturalism, Third-World-ism, pacifism, “political correctness”
+to name just a few. It is time to recognize them for what they are,
+and call them by their right name: suicidalism.

+

Trace any of these back far enough (e.g. to the period between 1930
+and 1950 when Department V was at its most effective) and you’ll find
+a Stalinist at the bottom. Among the more notorious examples ware:
+Paul de Man — racist and Nazi propagandist turned Stalinist, and
+fonder of postmodernism; Jean-Paul Sarte, who described the effects
+of Stalinism as “humane terror” and helped invent existentialism; and
+Paul Baran, who developed the thesis that capitalism depended on the
+immiseration of the Third World after Marx’s immiseration of the
+proletariat failed to materialize.

+

Al-Qaeda didn’t launch any of these memes into the noosphere, but
+it relies on them for political cover. They have another effect as
+well: when Islamists characterize the West as “decadent”, and aver
+that it is waiting to collapse in on itself at the touch of jihad,
+they are describing quite correctly and accurately the effects of
+Western suicidalism.

+

Stalinist agitprop created Western suicidalism by successfully
+building on the Christian idea that self-sacrifice (and even
+self-loathing) are the primary indicators of virtue. In this way of
+thinking, when we surrender our well-being to others we store up grace
+in Heaven that is far more important than the momentary discomfort of
+submitting to criminals, predatory governments, and terrorists.

+

The Communist atheists of Department V understood that Christian
+self-abnegation tends to inculcate a cult of self-sacrifice even among
+Westerners who are themselves agnostics or atheists. All the
+propagandists had to do was make the case that the value of
+self-abnegation applies to culture as well as individuals. By doing
+so, they were able to entrench the idea that suicidalists are morally
+superior to non-suicidalists.

+

They did this so successfully that at least one major form of
+Western self-abnegation seems to have developed as a secondary
+phenomenon: “deep environmentalism”. I can’t find any sign that this
+traces back to the usual Stalinist suspects, but it is rather
+obviously a result of generalizing suicidalism not just to culture but
+to species.

+

I think it’s important to understand that, although suicidalism
+builds on some pre-existing pathologies of Western culture, it is not
+a native or natural development. It is an infection that evildoers
+and their dupes created and then spread as part of a war against the
+West; their goal was totalitarian control, and part of their method
+was to talk the West into slitting its own throat.

+

Al-Qaeda’s goal is the restoration of the Caliphate and the
+imposition of shari’a law on the West so that the Dar al-Harb is
+abolished and absorbed into the Dar al-Islam. In other words,
+totalitarian theocracy. Western suicidalists have transferred
+their allegience from Communism to Islamofascism without a hitch.
+They’re doing their best to see that we lose — and their
+best is rather more effective than any bombing campaign.

+

Thus, to defeat al-Qaeda, stopping the suicide bombers is
+not sufficient. We must recognize, condemn, and reject the
+suicide thinkers as well.

+

UPDATE: Readers who think I’m peddling mere conspiracy theory here should read
+Double Lives : Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals for a description of the way KGB disinformation activity, espionage and memetic warfare fused in the 1930s.

+

MORE: Some intelligent comments on these memes
+here, pointing out that they get their
+infectivity from being partially true.

diff --git a/20051110194335.blog b/20051110194335.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ef15df9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20051110194335.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Paris is Burning +

As I predicted two years ago, in Demographics and the Dustbin of History, Paris is burning. The banlieu riots are so out of control that the French have declared a national state of emergency.

+

+

Pardon while I quote myself:

+
+

[L]arge, angry, totally unassimilated immigrant populations that are reproducing faster than the natives. This is an especially severe problem in France, where housing developments in the ring zones around all the major cities have become places the police dare not go without heavy weapons…

+

The legions of rootless, causeless, unemployed and angry young men among Muslim immigrants may in fact actually be on their way to reifying the worst nightmares of native-European racists.

+

One way or another, the cozy Euro-socialist welfare state is doomed by the demographic collapse. Best case: it will grind to a shambolic halt as the ratio of worker bees to drones goes below critical. Worst case: it will blow itself apart in a welter of sectarian, ethnic, and class violence.

+
+

That welter of sectarian, ethnic, and class violence has begun. Not just in France, but in Denmark; and it will spread, because the underlying structural problems of the Euro-socialist welfare state are by no means unique to France. Germany, when it blows up (and I mean ‘when’, not ‘if’), is likely to do so in a bigger and uglier way. Watch what happens when the demogogues on both sides start mobilizing ex-East-German proles and Turkish gastarbeiters against each other. I’d say a resurgence of neo-Naziism among the former is more likely than not, well matched by a rise in Islamofascism among the latter.

+

Remember the field day Eurosocialists and their wannabes on the American left had over reports of riots and large-scale lawlessness in New Orleans? Remember all that lecturing and barely-disguised gloating? Hey there — those reports turned out to be frauds ginned up by our media; it turns out there wasn’t in fact anybody shooting at helicopters or raping people in the Superdome or practicing cannibalism. Too bad for you than France’s suburbs are having a real collapse into civil disorder that no amount of media spin can undo.

+

The riots in France are all the more telling precisely because they are not fundamentally about jihad (or not yet anyway; I expect the Islamofascists to successfully change their complexion soon). They are an entirely predictable consequence of the fact that the economics of socialism are not sustainable — a consequence I did in fact predict, in so many words. The economic and cultural isolation of the banlieus follows as the night the day from the French choice of a dirigiste, slow-growth, redistributionist, and ultimately stagnant system that has no place for the beurs other than as welfare clients.

+

One of the more…persistent…among my commenters wrote that he was expecting “fulsome schadenfereude” from me over this. So let’s get that out of the way: yes, after years of listening to snotty Europeans drone on about the superiority of their milk-and-water collectivism over the violent cowboy/capitalist American system, part of me is indeed tempted to enjoy watching all those pretensions go down in flames. The doom your folly has earned is upon you now.

+

But I’m only part-tempted, because what we’re seeing is a genuine tragedy. Europe, before its elites took the Marxist poison, was the cradle of the West. The best possible outcome for it now is to degenerate into an ugly collection of nativist, racist police states run by shrinking minorities of ever-more-fearful whites. The worst outcomes begin with Islamofascists successfully seizing political power and getting control of nuclear weapons.

+

Even in the best case there will be consequences for the U.S., of course. Our birth and immigration rates lock in growth until at least 2050, that is if we don’t tax and regulate ourselves into Euro-style stagnation (a real possibility, alas). But the European civil wars that are beginning now will surely spill over onto us, if only in the form of waves of refugees.

diff --git a/20051113053901.blog b/20051113053901.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..864ad9e --- /dev/null +++ b/20051113053901.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Peak Oil — A Wish-Fulfillment Fantasy for Secular Idiots +

Secularists and leftists enjoy sneering at conservative Christians who believe in the Rapture and other flavors of millenarianism. Reasonably so: it takes either a drooling idiot or somebody who has deliberately shut off most of his brain, reducing himself to an idiotically low level of critical thinking, to believe such things. The draw, of couse, is that each individual fundamentalist implicitly believes he will be among the saved — privileged to honk a great big I TOLD YOU SO! at all those sinners writhing in the lake of fire.

+

It is therefore more than a little amusing to notice how prone these ‘sophisticated’ critics are to their own forms of idiotic millenarianism.

+

+

Anybody remember Paul “Population Bomb” Ehrlich? This is the guy who predicted that megadeaths from global famine would be the defining feature of the 1970s. Or Jeremy Rifkin, the guy who told us all in 1986 that the Frostban bacterium engineered to protect plants against cold snaps would mess up the Earth’s climate? Or the brigade of self-panickers (Carl Sagan was briefly one of them) who warned us all back around 1980 that an impending Ice Age was about to destroy civilization? Or, hey — how about the ozone hole; remember when we were all going to die of UV-B-induced skin cancer?

+

It’s easy to laugh at those particular doom-mongers now; there has been plenty of time for their predictions to fail. But we have plenty of apocalypse merchants peddling equally silly scenarios, on equally thin evidence and bogus reasoning, today. And the same ‘sophisticated’ secularists who lapped up Paul Ehrlich’s nonsense are swaying to the Gospel shout of global warming and “peak oil” — just as self-hypnotized, and just as stone-stupid, as an Ozark Mountains cracker at a tent-revival meeting.

+

Rather than getting to gloat over sinners writhing in a lake of fire, the draw is getting to feel superior to capitalists and Republicans and Americans; they will all surely Get Theirs and starve in their SUVs when the Collapse Comes, while virtuous tree-hugging Birkenstock-wearers, being in a state of grace with Gaia, will retire to renewable-energy-powered communes and build scale models of Swedish socialism out of macrame supplies or something.

+

The hilarious part is how self-congratulatory the secularist millennarians are about their own superiority over the religious ones, when in fact the secondary gain from these two kinds of delusional system is identical.

+

I could write a book on the amount of fraud and bullshit in the global-warming-panic industry — but I have other things to do this month. so let’s look at an even more recent manifestation of secular millenarianism — the peak-oil collapse scenario.

+

Witness, brothers and sisters, witness. The oil, it’s going to run out. Peak production of the world’s oilfields has either passed or is about to pass; from here on out it’s rising oil prices forever. Now we wave our hands and pronounce that the energy-guzzling capitalist West (and especially Amerikka) is so addicted to cheap oil that its decadent empire will collapse, collapse I tell you. Barely concealed gloating follows.

+

There are so many mutually-reinforcing idiocies here that it’s hard to know where to start. As I was thinking of writing about this, one of my commenters pointed out that above $32 per barrel it becomes economical to build Fischer-Tropf plants and make your oil out of coal. This is old tech; the Germans did it during WWI. At slightly higher price points, MHD generators to burn garbage start to look good.

+

These are instances of a more general phenomenon: markets adapt to price shifts! To wreck an economy with oil-price rises, they’d have to spike so fast and so far that you somehow couldn’t run the cement trucks to build the Fischer-Tropf plants. Not gonna happen.

+

In fact, the long-term trend will be that the amount of oil invested per constant-dollar value of goods produced in the U.S. economy drops faster than the price of oil rises. This is a safe prediction not because manufacturers have all bought into Green ideology but because they want to make money. This means that they have a market incentive to use their inputs (including oil) a efficiently as possible, and to substitute less expensive inputs for more expensive ones. It’s called capitalism, and it works.

+

(And, by the way, the cheapest input of all is information. Buckminster Fuller pointed out forty years ago that as technologies mature, the products tend to get smaller and lighter and less energy-intensive and smarter. Your cellphone today weighs less than it used to, and costs less oil to produces than it used to, because its design is smarter. Information has replaced mass. This trend will continue and accelerate.)

+

The peak-oil collapse scenario is not credible for five minutes to anybody who understands market economics. But the sort of people who believe it are blinded by their own prejudices; fundamentally they think market economics is an invention of the Devil. They need to believe in the collapse, because they need to believe that the wickedness of Americans and capitalists and Republicans will be punished.

diff --git a/20051117024102.blog b/20051117024102.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2d29b0a --- /dev/null +++ b/20051117024102.blog @@ -0,0 +1,65 @@ +Why “Commons” language gives me hives +

A bit of blogging for the record here. Doc Searls wrote:

+
+

“The Commons” and “the public domain” might be legitimate concepts
+with deep and relevant histories, but they’re too arcane to most of
+us. Eric Raymond has told me more than once that the Commons Thing
+kinda rubs him the wrong way. [...] (Maybe he’ll come in here and
+correct me or enlarge on his point.)

+
+

This is what I emailed him in response:

+

+
+

My problem with the language of “the commons” is that to me it it
+sounds, at best, like idealistic blather. At worst, and far more
+usually, it sounds like an attempt to conceal all kinds of individual
+decisions about cooperation under a vague collectivist metaphor so the
+individuals who made those decisions can be propagandized and jerked
+around.

+

The moment you start talking about “the commons”, you almost
+automatically start attributing needs and wants and rights to “the
+commons” that aren’t simply the needs and wants and rights of the
+people who made the decisions that define that commons. And that’s
+dangerous — before you know it, you have power-seekers telling you
+that your needs and wants and rights are overidden by those of
+“the commons”, even if (or especially if) that commons was partly
+your creation in the first place.

+

This is the same reason I never talk about “society” — because
+“society” does not, properly speaking, exist as a moral or ethical
+agent. Talking about “society” as though it has needs or wants or
+rights of its own is simply a form of ventriloquism used by some
+individual to seek power over others — oh, no, I’m not pursuing my
+personal agenda, I’m acting for the good of “society”, and please
+avert your eyes from anything I gain by so doing.

+

Our public life is already corrupted enough by this kind of
+ventriloquism. I’ve tried to shape the language of open-source
+advocates so as to at least not make the problem worse.

+
+

Doc agreed with these points in an email reply, but pointed out
+that the open-source community has allies (Larry Lessig, in particular)
+who are emotionally attached to “commons” language. This is true;
+it’s a bug, not a feature.

+

But this is almost a detail. I fully agree with the central point
+of Doc’s essay. (I chastised him gently for burying it amidst too
+much clutter.) There is a war of metaphors going on right now: the
+Internet as place versus the Internet as pipes. Is it an agora
+(that handy Greek word that hovers somewhere between “marketplace” and
+“public square”) or a “content-delivery system”?

+

How people think about this matters. As Doc points out, if the
+net-as-pipes metaphor prevails, then issues like free-speech rights
+and open access become subordinated to property rights over the
+pipes. If the net-as-agora metaphor prevails, free speech trumps
+property rights — even when the “agora” space is privately owned,
+our mental framework about it is that it’s a place where public
+expression is subject to minimum control.

+

Doc and Larry point out that the big corporations pushing for
+semi-infinite copyright extensions have been winning battles because they
+have presented a compelling narrative in which copyright is property,
+and Americans (by and large) think property is good.

+

Here’s our problem: we need to come up with a compelling narrative
+of the Internet-as-agora without challenging the
+property-is-good assumption. The FSF has been trying to disassociate
+copyrights/patents/trademarks from property for years (RMS regularly
+lectures people on why the term “intellectual property” is bad) but it
+has failed. We need better tactics than that. We need a propertarian
+case for the Internet as agora.

diff --git a/20051117155420.blog b/20051117155420.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c4e9ec5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20051117155420.blog @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +Is “Open Source Media” an abuse of the term? +

A correspondent wrote me to
+object to the fact that
+that-which-was-Pajamas-Media has launched as “Open Source Media”.

+

+

There’s an established use of the term “open source” prior to
+open-source software, it’s spook-talk (intelligence-community jargon)
+for a data source that is not secret. Various media outlets
+(like these guys)
+are, quite legitimately, keying off that sense of the
+phrase.

+

Are they, to some extent, influenced by the success and prestige of
+the open-source software movement? Probably so…but since
+neither I nor OSI has a trademark on the phrase “open source”, there’s
+not much we can do about that kind of coattail-riding. It’s not even
+clear that should try — better to concentrate on fighting
+battles we can win.

+

I made the decision some time back, when I was still president of
+OSI, to try to jawbone people out of using the phrase “open source”
+only when it would create confusion about software and software
+licensing. That’s narrower ground and easier to defend. Even though
+OSI doesn’t have a legal lock on the term, almost everybody recognizes
+our moral right to prescribe how it is used with respect to software (even Microsoft,
+interestingly enough). In every case — every case
+— that OSI has applied pressure, abusers have backed
+down.

+

So yes, I’m not real pleased by OSM’s restrictive license, now that
+it has been drawn to my attention; I do wish they had either chosen a
+different name or used something like a Creative Commons license. But
+I’m not going to fight them about it. They’ve got a legitimate claim on
+the “spook” sense of the term, not the software sense.

diff --git a/20051117210504.blog b/20051117210504.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4f7d62d --- /dev/null +++ b/20051117210504.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +The Halloween Documents are available again +

For all those who have been asking, the Halloween Documents are
+available on my website.

+

+

They were removed from the Open Source Initiative website, against my advice, a couple of weeks back.
+Having studied the history of other advocacy organizations and seen the traps they fall into, I specifically designed OSI not to be a founder-centered cult of personality; I think OSI’s decision to distance itself from the documents in order to look more “professional” was a mistake, but the open-source community is healthier because they had the power to make that mistake.

+

And for those of you who questioned the timing: the decision was made in February 2005, months before
+Microsoft started making kissy-face noises in OSI’s direction. (Yeah, you can tell how much I think
+that’s going to mean in the longer run.)

diff --git a/20051123234843.blog b/20051123234843.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9191ae7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20051123234843.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +“How To Become A Hacker” updated. +

I’ve added a pointer to Peter Norvig’s excellent essay “Teach Yourself Programming In Ten Years”.

+

The HOWTO itself is here.

diff --git a/20051124025233.blog b/20051124025233.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..11025d0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20051124025233.blog @@ -0,0 +1,54 @@ +LISP — The Language That Will Not Die +

I’ve spent large parts of the last week editing maps for a game
+system I’m working on. I’ve been using the GIMP graphics editor, and I’m pretty
+impressed with it. I haven’t found anything I can’t easily make it do
+— except, oddly enough, draw straight lines between defined
+endpoints. (I suspect there’s actually a way to do this using the
+path facility.)

+

I have a requirement to prepare about six different variants of a
+base map, using the same topographic map but with different
+arrangements of national borders. I’ve handled this by creating a
+multi-layered XCF file with the topo map as the background and the
+different borders as optional overlays.

+

OK, so I save the variants to flat PNGs by hand whenever I change the
+image, but that’s a pain. What I wanted was a way to put in my makefile
+instructions that say, for each variant map, that it depends on the XCF
+and the way to make it is to composite a particular selected subset of layers
+by running GIMP in batch mode.

+

Fortunately, GIMP has an embedded Scheme interpreter that’s good
+for exactly this kind of thing. Looking at some Python-Fu code by
+Carol Spears taught me enough about the API to get started; the fact
+that I’m an old LISP head got me the rest of the way.

+

Here it is.

+
+;; Batch-mode select and save of a layer set as a PNG.
+;; Has to be copied into  ~/.gimp-2.2/scripts to work
+;;
+;; Note: This assumes that gimp-drawable-get-name returns a list with
+;; the actual string name as its car.  This is what gimp-2.2 does, but
+;; not what the documentation says it should do!
+
+(define (layer-set-saver infile select outfile)
+   (let* ((image (car (gimp-file-load RUN-NONINTERACTIVE infile infile)))
+	  (layers (cadr (gimp-image-get-layers image)))
+	  (ind 0))
+     (while (< ind (length layers))
+	    (let* ((layer (aref layers ind))
+		   (layer-name (car (gimp-drawable-get-name layer))))
+	      (gimp-drawable-set-visible layer (if (member layer-name select) 1 0)))
+	    (set! ind (+ ind 1)))
+     (file-png-save-defaults RUN-NONINTERACTIVE 
+		     image 
+		     (car (gimp-image-flatten image)) 
+		     outfile outfile)
+     )
+   (gimp-quit 0)
+   )
+
+

Here's one of my makefile productions. The second arg is a list of layer names.

+
+basic.png: basic.xcf
+	gimp -i -b '(layer-set-saver "basic.xcf" (quote ("topographic" "skinny-borders" "grey-switzerland")) "basic.png")'
+
+

Apologies for the long line.

+

LISP truly is The Language That Will Not Die. And that’s a good thing.

diff --git a/20051125052608.blog b/20051125052608.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b6378d6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20051125052608.blog @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +The Ice Harvest +

In 1997 I was delighted by Grosse Point Blank, John
+Cusack’s masterpiece about a hitman who finds himself (in both senses
+of the phrase) at his high-school reunion. I loved that movie for its
+action, its dark comedy, and a script that never stopped being
+wickedly intelligent for even a second. I’ve been waiting nearly ten
+years for Cusack to do a movie as funny and as plain damn
+good.

+

+

Ice Harvest is not quite that movie, but it will do
+nicely until one comes along. Cusack’s character, Charlie Arglist, is
+a mob lawyer who has connived with a co-worker to steal two million
+dollars from their boss, the crimelord who owns the underside of
+Wichita, Kansas. As the movie opens it is an icy Christmas Eve; the
+two have bagged the money and plan to split for the tropics in the
+morning when the roads are passable. The boss seems blissfully
+ignorant that he’s been ripped off. All Charlie has to do until the
+roads clear is…act normal.

+

But it’s Christmas Eve. Charlie has a million dollars in the bag.
+He’s about to get out of town, leave behind the tag ends of a messy
+divorce and a dead-end life of booze and strip clubs, about to
+reinvent himself. He figures he’ll spend his last night in Wichita
+being nice to his friends.

+

But for Charlie, nice is not normal. His belated attempt to behave
+like a decent human being combines with his perfect heist in a way
+that tangles him up in a web of deceit, betrayals and violence worthy
+of a classic noir thriller from the likes of Dashiell Hammett or
+Raymond Chandler. The movie starts out slow…but the character
+studies of half a dozen people (Charlie’s drunken best friend, the
+too-hot-to-handle blonde who runs his favorite strip club, his
+accomplice Vic, the bartender, the strippers, and two extremely
+dyfunctional families) are lighting a bunch of fuses, and when they
+burn to their ends there will be hell to pay.

+

This movie isn’t quite as funny as Grosse Point Blank
+was and in some ways is even darker, but it has the same
+dead-on-target, never-miss-a-note quality in the script and the
+dialogue. I enjoyed every second of it.

+

Unaccountably, this movie has been getting poor reviews. But it is
+so much better than most of the bloated mega-pictures Hollywood cranks
+out that there is barely any comparison. Eric sez see it. If nothing else,
+it’s likely to permanently cure you of any desire to hang out in
+strip clubs.

diff --git a/20051127041900.blog b/20051127041900.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7027cee --- /dev/null +++ b/20051127041900.blog @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +2wenty minutes of goo +

Went to see the latest Harry Potter flick last night and got —
+no, I won’t say “assaulted”, I’ll say “oozed on” by the infomercials
+Regal Cinemas started running earlier this year, some sludge called
+“The 2wenty” that tries to be trendy and hip and cool and attractive
+and fails miserably on all four counts.

+

I deduce from the existence of this thing that either (a) ad
+executives have the brains of planaria, or (b) they’re engaged in a
+conspiracy to waste their clients’ money. The 2wenty isn’t even the
+kind of in-your-face bad that leaves an impression — it’s just
+unbelievably lame-ass bland, a kind of elevator music dressed up
+in video effects.

+

It’s all the more unbelievable that this thing got produced
+because, presumably, it was done by people who get paid to be current
+with popular culture. I’m just a 47-year-old white computer geek but
+it is dead clear that even I have way more street cool than
+whatever “creatives” they found to put the 2wenty
+together, fo’shizzle. How did that happen? On the
+production values alone they have to be sinking at least $300K a pop
+into these, and they can’t out-hip one single aging baby-boomer?
+Geez…I think I’m offended as much by their incompetence as by
+its results.

+

Neil Postman and Naomi Klein and their ilk have made a growth
+industry out of running around whining about consumer culture, how
+it’s all a spectacle designed to distract people from what’s really
+important. Never mind that their definition of “what’s really
+important” is tired Marxist bullshit…if this is
+representative of what the merchants of spectacle are pumping out,
+they have no worries. The 2wenty couldn’t do an effective job of
+distracting a hyperactive three-year-old. It’d be more likely
+to put the tyke to sleep.

+

Ah well. I look on the bright side. When Big Media wastes money
+and putative talent on this scale, it’s good news for the rest of us.
+It’s resources they’re not spending on screwing up our culture or our
+legal/political system in more effective ways.

+

UPDATE: After some discussion, my wife and I think we may have identified the 2wenty’s target demographic — early-teenage girls of the mall-rat persuasion.

diff --git a/20051128001610.blog b/20051128001610.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b68fc5f --- /dev/null +++ b/20051128001610.blog @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +Riots in France declared over +

The Brussels Journal reports that the
+French government has officially declared the banlieu riots over. The
+article continues:

+

+Police figures are at exactly 98 cars torched on Wednesday
+night. This, the police say, is a normal average. Consequently
+the 20th consecutive night of violence was declared the last one. +

+

Yes, you read that correctly. 98 car-torchings a night is
+“normal” in the glorious Fifth Republic in 2005. Civil order in the
+banlieus has collapsed, but instead of addressing the breakdown the
+French response is to define it out of existence. (In other breaking
+news, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ol’ George Orwell is
+spinning in his grave.)

+

The American mainstream media, alas, have so much invested in the belief
+that Eurosocialism is what we ought to be doing that they’ll
+certainly take this as an excuse to drop the story. They’d rather cover
+fictional riots in New Orleans than factual ones in Orleans, if only because
+they can more easily blame George Bush for the former.

+

The article also observes:

+

+…the French state was obliged to borrow money last week to pay the
+wages of its civil servants. The money has run out. One must
+concede: this is no example of a strong state. +

+

My previous prediction
+stands. We’ve seen only the beginnings of the reckoning for decades
+of folly. I expect to have the last laugh on every single one of the
+useless idiots who insisted on the superiority of “humane” European
+welfare-statism over American cowboy capitalism. But I don’t expect to
+enjoy that laugh very much, because the payback is going to be brutal,
+bloody, and horrible.

diff --git a/20051128084802.blog b/20051128084802.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..383613e --- /dev/null +++ b/20051128084802.blog @@ -0,0 +1,82 @@ +Anti-fashion +

Manolo the Shoeblogger writes in The
+Paradox of Not Caring: “claiming to not care about the clothes, to
+not be concerned about what one wears, it the paradox, for the clothes
+worn by one who claims not to care make as much the statement as those
+worn by one who dresses with the purpose.” He’s got a point. And yet,
+there is a difference between fashionistas like most of his fans and
+anti-fashionistas like me, and it’s an important one.

+

+

Here’s what I wear. Rockports or hiking boots, good-quality black
+jeans (usually Land’s End), chammy shirts a la L.L. Bean in the winter
+and polos or four-pocket bush shirts in the summer. Unlike most
+geeks, I don’t wear T-shirts very often. My color tastes run to solid
+high-saturation “jewel tones” and outdoorsy plaids.

+

I have an A-2, a classic brown-leather flight jacket, that I wear
+pretty much whenever it isn’t so hot I’d stifle, and I bought a
+polar-fleece vest specifically so I can keep wearing the A-2 in deep winter
+weather. Occasionally I wear Aussie-style bush fedoras.

+

The last clothing fad I actually liked was the vogue for safari
+gear in the mid-1980s; I’d still wear that stuff, but I wore almost
+all of mine out.

+

I tend to buy somewhat better-quality and more expensive clothing
+than my peers, but in styles that are designed for durability and ease
+of maintainance rather than flash (nothing I normally wear requires
+ironing or dry-cleaning). I favor simple designs in good materials, and
+I don’t buy anything I don’t expect to be wearing for at least five
+years (except that my shoes unavoidably wear out faster than that).

+

To use terms that Manolo wouldn’t, my clothing choices have both
+a functional level and a semiotic one. Manolo’s point is that the
+semiotic level will be there whether it’s intended or not. The
+functional level is obvious, I wear clothes that minimize the amount
+of time I have to spend worrying about clothes.

+

But I know what the semiotics of my clothes are, too. What I wear
+is a modern spin on classic no-nonsense men’s clothing, with an
+outdoorsy masculine emphasis — the sources for its design
+elements are explorers, soldiers, aviators, and engineers. There’s
+an implied contrast with high-maintainance indoor clothing designed
+primarily to express the wearer’s position in a social hierarchy;
+the implication is that I don’t care to play that game, and
+don’t have to.

+

(But there’s another level to that. When you consider durability
+and how often one has to buy new clothes, the L.L. Bean/Lands’ End
+version of outdoorsy clothing I wear is almost certainly less
+expensive over the long haul than most of the ostensibly cheaper stuff
+at your local mall. Nevertheless, it requires larger lumps of
+investment, so it is in its own way a form of wealth display.)

+

My choices also intentionally suggest that I have no use for
+fashion trends — that I’m self-assured enough to wear what
+I like, not what’s hip this season. And that’s why, at least

+

for me, Manolo’s Paradox of Not Caring is more apparent than real.
+Fashionistas are concerned with what everybody else thinks is cool, and
+that changes randomly and rapidly; anti-fashionistas, like me, seek a
+personal style to settle into that expresses what doesn’t
+change about them.

+

For me, that’s adventurers’ clothing, sort of Indiana Jones lite
+— except I liked that look before the movies. I can make it
+work because I’m a muscular guy with a strong physical presence;
+people look at the way I dress and carry myself and then aren’t very
+surprised to learn that I’ve lived on three continents, visited over
+fifteen countries, been fluent in three languages besides English, and
+that I’m a serious martial artist who can fight hand-to-hand in any of
+three styles or with sword or pistol. They aren’t supposed to be
+surprised; semiotically, conveying toughness and competence and
+resourcefulness is exactly what my clothes are for.

+

There’s a subtler message in there as well. I’m an intellectual,
+a thinker, a geek. I could dress to emphasize that, but why bother?
+It’s going to be obvious whenever I open my mouth. It’s much more fun
+to play off the fact that people don’t expect intellectuals to look
+natural in adventurers’ clothing, or people who look natural in
+adventurers’ clothing to be intellectuals. Yeah. I want to bust
+those categories! I want to make it clear that I don’t fit neatly in
+either box, or for that matter in any box at all.

+

So, even if I weren’t attracted to flight jackets and safari gear
+and the adventurer look, I would make something of a point of not
+usually dressing like a generic computer geek.

+

But getting back to Manolo’s point…the high-level message of
+fashion is “I am a herd animal, a follower, concerned primarily with
+the opinion of others”. When people claim not to care what they wear,
+than can be sloppiness or it can be an individualist impulse trying to
+break the herd-animal pattern. OK, so he’s got it right that we
+cannot avoid sending messages with our clothes — but at least
+some of us try to look like ourselves, rather than like everybody else.

diff --git a/20051129210148.blog b/20051129210148.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..abab83e --- /dev/null +++ b/20051129210148.blog @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +C.S. Lewis is morally incoherent +

I read C.S. Lewis’s “Narnia” books as a child, and have dim memories of enjoying them. Because of this, and because the trailers for the upcoming movie look gorgeous, I have been planning to see The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when it comes out. As preparation I thought it would be a good idea to reread the series. To my great disappointment, I’ve discovered that they don’t hold up well under adult perception — in fact, that Lewis’s creation is morally and dramatically incoherent in a deep and damaging way.

+

+

The core of the problem is Aslan, the godlike lion who sang Narnia into existence in The Magician’s Nephew (seventh book to be written but earliest in narrative time). The dramatic problem is that Aslan is a total deus ex machina, whisked onstage any time that Lewis wants to ratchet the plot past some obstacle or hammer home a moral, then whisked offstage before anybody has time to wonder why nothing ever seems to happen without Aslan in back of it. As a child I didn’t question this; as an adult, I grew quite fed up with the creature’s excessively convenient appearances and gnomic pronouncements by the middle of Book Three. He might as well have “Authorial Contrivance” stamped on his forehead in letters of fire.

+

But the problem with Aslan goes deeper than a mere dramatic flaw; or, if you like, the dramatic flaw is a symptom of a deeper incoherence in Lewis’s world. The deeper problem is that Aslan’s role in the Narniaverse fails to make either logical or mythical sense.

+

Logically, if Aslan is sufficiently powerful to sing Narnia into existence (as he does in the first book) he should have been able to create anything or anyone he needed to in order to cold-cock the White Witch (who is for certain not powerful enough to make worlds and hosts of sentient beings). Instead, all he does is mumble about a prophecy and rely on four children accidentally arrived from another universe to set things right.

+

OK, perhaps there is some constraint on Aslan’s power of which we are not aware. But Lewis never tells us that there is. By failing to do this, he reduces the Narniaverse to a travesty without any narrative integrity of its own, a mere puppet-show in which one is all too aware of the author pulling the strings. My suspension of disbelief was destroyed; the only entertainment left for me was to wait to see which string Lewis would pull next.

+

The closest to a clue we get to a rationale is a reference to the law of the “Deep Magic”, which the Lion and the Witch refer to when she claims the right to kill Edmund for his treachery. Aslan does not dispute this. Instead, he offers himself to be sacrificed on the Stone Table in Edmund’s place. But Aslan’s sacrifice is a fraud.

+

Consider what happens objectively. The Witch “kills” Aslan with a stone knife — but within minutes he is back and better than ever, it being by his representation a law of the Deep Magic that when one innocent of treachery is sacrificed on the Table the magic turns back on itself.

+

But I see no actual sacrifice here. It’s a sham, a put-up job. Aslan suffers no harm at all other than some transient pain and the indignity of having been trussed up like a Christmas goose. To a being that can sing worlds into existence this is surely no worse than a hangnail. We are only fooled into thinking otherwise, if we are, because Lewis abuses the word “death” to refer to a condition that is completely reversible, and is in fact reversed.

+

In retrospect, Aslan’s vaunted sadness on the way to the Stone Table is evidence of either (a) extreme cowardice, because he’s boo-hooing even though he knows he’s got a get-out-of-death-free card, or (b) an indication that he doesn’t know in advance he’ll survive. But (b) is ridiculous — he’s certainly quick enough to explain his resurrection to the children afterwards, and does so in terms which pretty much exclude the possibility that he wasn’t expecting it.

+

This is, at the very least, absurd sloppiness on Lewis’s part. He could have put some words in Aslan’s mouth that told us he was surprised to be alive; in that case Aslan’s bravery and sacrifice would have been real. In that case, the whole scenario would have at least made some sense on a mythic and moral level, even if it remained logically incoherent. But, as it is, Lewis misses no opportunity to miss an opportunity; he screws up on every level.

+

A comparison with Tolkien is apposite here. I read the Rings trilogy a few years before I read the Narnia books. In rereading Lewis, I discover that his prose construction is better than J.R.R Tolkien’s, his descriptions more evocative, his characters more fully drawn. Lewis is in almost all ways a more able writer than Tolkien; and yet, it is the Rings trilogy that stuck with me and the Narnia books I nearly forgot.

+

The difference, I think, is that Tolkien cared about the causal depth and autonomy of his secondary world in a way the Lewis did not. By “causal depth” I mean the degree to which events in the secondary universe are made to seem a natural unfolding of its laws and nature, rather than being products of divine or authorial whim. By “autonomy” I mean the degree to which we are convinced that the secondary universe has an existence of its own, separate from our primary reality.

+

Tolkien famously insisted that fantasy, when properly done, is the creation of a secondary world with both causal depth and autonomy. I have written elsewhere about flaws in Tolkien’s biology; but, as I observed there,

+

+Tolkien was very careful about logical consistency in areas where he
+was equipped by temperament and training to appreciate it; he invented
+a cosmology, thousand of years of history, multiple languages; he drew
+maps. He lectured on the importance of a having convincing and
+consistent secondary world in fantasy. +

+

And, indeed, Tolkien practised what he preached. The Ring trilogy is largely (though not entirely) internally coherent; you have to dig for edge cases like the sexual biology of elf/human matings before the seams really show. His detailed world-building addresses logical consistency. And because Tolkien’s Eru/Iluvatar creates Middle-Earth but then withdraws from it in order to let the Speaking Peoples work out their destiny, the choices they make have moral heft.

+

Lewis, by contrast, cheats his readers. His secondary world lacks causal depth — one way or another Aslan is at the back of everything. It lacks autonomy; Father Christmas shows up as a minor character. In these and other ways, Lewis’s contrivances are crude and obvious; he fails, on both the logical and moral levels, to create a secondary world with an integrity of its own. Or rather, he begins promisingly. Then he squanders that promise in order to prosecute a ham-handed allegory that fails to hang together even on its own terms. Thus, even if one doesn’t parse the various logical and moral flaws in detail, the whole edifice has a rickety and inauthentic feel to it.

+

(I discovered after I was well into writing this essay that Tolkien appears to have disliked the Narnia books, and even quarrelled with Lewis about them, for exactly these reasons.)

+

I think the problem has to be located in Lewis’s Christianity somewhere, if only because Aslan (the locus of the most serious structural flaws) is such an obvious Christ-figure. It’s as though Lewis gets so caught up in retailing his own odd spin on the Crucifixion that he forgets to make any logical or moral sense out of his version.

+

One thing that fantasy can do is re-imagine the familiar in a way that makes it possible for us to see it fresh, without our normal preconceptions. Lewis achieves this in the story of Aslan’s encounter with the Stone Table, but the effect is the opposite of what Lewis probably intended — because it’s only a short step from noticing that Aslan’s self-sacrifice was a fraud to noticing that Jesus’s purported self-sacrifice has to have been a fraud too, and for precisely the same reasons.

+

If we are to believe Christian myth, Jesus didn’t die and exists in eternity. A few hours or days on a cross should be meaningless to a being that knows it will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, especially when (being omniscient) it can foresee the entire “ordeal” in advance.

+

So the end result of Lewis’s attempt to write a veiled Christian apologia is to expose the vacuity of the Crucifixion myth. Nice going, Clive!

+

P.S.: I wrote this, then I thought about what J.K. Rowling has done with the moral-didactic children’s fantasy in the Harry Potter sequence. The comparison is devastating to Lewis.

diff --git a/20051201182843.blog b/20051201182843.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fe2007c --- /dev/null +++ b/20051201182843.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Mathematics versus reality +

In the comments to my posting on the incoherence of Narnia, it has become apparent that some of the respondents are deeply confused about the relationship between mathematical and empirical truth. Symptoms of this confusion have included a superficially plausible but mistaken application of the Law of the Excluded Middle and an an attempt to invoke Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem to suggest constraints on our ability to obtain empirical truth.

+

It’s time to bust some myths…

+

+

I think what these confusions mainly demonstrate is that even most of the bright college-educated geeks who comment on my blog have managed to avoid learning anything about philosophy or foundational mathematics. This is mostly not their fault; foundational mathematics is pretty recondite stuff, and the way philosophy is taught at most American universities (e.g. as a branch of literature, or worse as a kind of political indoctrination) is such that a lot of people walk out of philosophy courses less able to reason effectively than when they walked in.

+

I was, at one time, a mathematician with a strong interest in foundational mathematics and philosophy. Before that I had the good fortune to learn General Semantics from my grandfather at the age of twelve, an experience that gave me extremely effective filters against the kinds of map-vs.-territory confusion endemic in traditional philosophy. The effect of this background (and a lot of thinking) is that I happen to be an expert on the specific philosophical issue of the relationship of mathematical truth to empirical truth, and on some closely related areas in confirmation theory and epistemology.

+

All this laying-out of credentials is to motivate you to go read The Utility Of Mathematics, an essay on this topic I wrote back in the 1990s. Go read it now…

+

…and now that you have, I hope it will be clearer why the errors I called out above are in fact errors. In case it isn’t, a bit more education follows.

+

The “Law” of the Excluded Middle (“For any propositions x, either x is true or not-x is true”) is a specific property of some two-valued logics. Before you can use this “Law” to reason about the empirical world, you have to establish that the essential features of the empirical system you are describing are in fact captured sufficiently well for predictive purposes by a two-valued (or “Aristotelian”) logic.

+

Usually this will not be the case. We are commonly fooled into thinking that the empirical world obeys Aristotelian logic because the two-value assumption is wired into almost all natural languages. But in most cases Aristotelian logic is as wretched a guide as Aristotelian physics. (Most of General Semantics is techniques for getting rid of Aristotelian mental reflexes conditioned in by our birth
+languages.)

+

My essay should also make clear why trying to draw conclusions straight from Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem about the limits of human empirical knowledge is doomed. The GIT is about marks on paper, formulae in a formal system. To make it suggest anything about empirical reality, you have to ring in a lot of complicated and fragile assumptions about how exactly pieces of reality behave as models of certain specific and complex formal systems.

+

In the words of that famous recipe book: first, catch your rabbit. To apply GIT to human empirical reasoning, you’d have to start by showing that Peano arithmetic and classical two-valued predicate logic are a sufficient formalism to capture the entirety of human empirical reasoning.

+

Three words: Not. Gonna. Happen.

+

Be careful out there. The relationship between logic and/or formal mathematics (on the one hand) and observable empirical reality (on the other) is a helluva lot thinner and more contingent than most people think. Please consult a qualified expert before putting it under load.

diff --git a/20051201231809.blog b/20051201231809.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c7f64fa --- /dev/null +++ b/20051201231809.blog @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +Take the WRT54G challenge! +

So, LinkSys (formerly independent, now a tentacle of Cisco) has
+brought the Linux version of their WRT54GL wireless router back to
+life. We’d previously heard that Version 5 of the box would run
+proprietary VxWorks firmware. But according to this
+story over at LinuxDevices.com,

+

+LinkSys is shipping a Linux-based WRT54GL model that it says it
+created specially for Linux hobbyists, hackers, and aficianados[sic]. The L
+version is identical to the “series 4″ WRT54G units that Linux
+hobbyists have long enjoyed hacking, according to the company. [...] +

+

Here’s the key ‘graf:

+

+VxWorks allowed the company to halve the amounts of Flash and RAM in
+the device, while retaining similar functionality. Apparently,
+reducing memory-related BOM (bill-of-materials) costs more than offset
+the costs of licensing a proprietary OS +

+

You know, to me that sounds like a challenge. Personally, I have
+no firmware-hacking or cross-development skills; my interests lie in
+other directions. But some eager band of Linux hackers out there
+should strip Linux down far enough that it can fit in the reduced
+footprint, just to prove it can be done and undercut the idea that
+proprietary firmware is ever a good idea. And I have no
+doubt it can be done; heck, we’ve made Linux run on a Z80!

+

(I maintain the
+Linksys
+Blue Box Router HOWTO. There might be a new version, reflecting the
+fact that Cisco has dropped its lawsuit against Michael Flynn, up on the
+LDP site by the time you read this.)

diff --git a/20051202014915.blog b/20051202014915.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e737bbb --- /dev/null +++ b/20051202014915.blog @@ -0,0 +1,134 @@ +Rudyard Kipling Invented SF! +

Ever had a moment when somebody else drops an insight on you, and you feel
+totally stupid because you had all the facts and all the motivation to generate
+it yourself, it was about something you’re expert at, but you
+just…didn’t…see…it? And you should have, and you’re damn annoyed with
+yourself for missing it?

+

+

This happened to me recently. I gave permission for the newletter
+of the Libertarian Futurist
+Society to print my essay A Political
+History of SF In it, I wrote:

+

+Heinlein was the first of Campbell’s discoveries and, in the end, the
+greatest. It was Heinlein who invented the technique of description by
+indirection — the art of describing his future worlds not
+through lumps of exposition but by presenting it through the eyes of
+his characters, subtly leading the reader to fill in by deduction
+large swathes of background that a lesser author would have drawn in
+detail. +

+

This is pretty much the standard account by historians of the
+field. One William H. Stoddard wrote the newsletter editor as
+follows. He agrees that Heinlein introduced indirect exposition into
+SF, but observes:

+

+In fact, that technique had already been used, several decades
+before, in Rudyard Kipling’s two science fiction stories, “With the
+Night Mail” and “As Easy as A.B.C.” +

+

Mr. Stoddard goes on to note that Heinlein wrote a number
+of Kipling tributes into his own work, most notably in the early scenes of
+Citizen of the Galaxy (1957), and to speculate plausibly on
+Kipling’s influence on Heinlein.

+

This is the point at which I slapped my forehead and swore. For,
+indeed, I know With the Night Mail well, have reread it
+many times, and have described it to friends as an important work of
+early proto-SF. I had noticed before that the story prefigures modern
+Campbellian and hard SF very exactly in its concerns, its narrative
+tone, and its management of information about the imagined future.
+And that it could have been written by Heinlein if he had been more than
+a child of five in that year; I knew this. But….grrr….I
+missed the implications.

+

You see, I had a perspective problem; my eyes were too modern. I
+am so used to reading the idiom of hard SF in our time that until
+William Stoddard pointed it out, I was unable to see quite how unique
+and pathbreaking With the Night Mail had been in its
+time. Once Stoddard woke me up to this point, I immediately realized
+that the story was not, as I had previously thought, merely a sort of
+historical curio thrown off on the way to modern genre SF, but almost
+certainly one of the key steps without which modern genre SF as we
+know it would never have existed!

+

In researching the matter, I discovered an excellent essay by
+long-time fan Fred Lerner, A Master of our Art:
+Rudyard Kipling considered as a Science Fiction writer which
+develops this case in detail. Again, little in it was factually new
+to me; the biggest surprise is the report that John W. Campbell
+regarded Kipling as “the first modern science fiction writer”. But
+Lerner draws together well-known facts into a new shape, arguing
+effectively that both Campbell (the theorist of modern SF) and
+Heinlein (its first great practitioner) both saw themselves as
+explorers in a direction first set by Rudyard Kipling.

+

Having considered the matter, I think the sharpest insight in
+Lerner’s essay is his proposition that Kipling invented the technique
+of exposition by indirection while writing his India stories; and that
+it is in Kim (1901) — that great, warm, wonderful,
+sprawling, picaresque novel of the Raj and the Great Game — that
+the technique found expression in a form barely distinguishable from the SFnal
+use Heinlein and those who followed him would put it to forty years
+later. As Lerner himself puts it:

+

+Kipling had learned this trick in India. His original Anglo-Indian
+readership knew the customs and institutions and landscapes of British
+India at first hand. But when he began writing for a wider British and
+American audience, he had to provide his new readers with enough
+information for them to understand what was going on. In his earliest
+stories and verse he made liberal use of footnotes, but he evolved
+more subtle methods as his talent matured. A combination of outright
+exposition, sparingly used, and contextual clues, generously sprinkled
+through the narrative, offered the needed background. In Kim and other
+stories of India he uses King James English to indicate that
+characters are speaking in Hindustani; this is never explained, but it
+gets the message across subliminally. +

+

The point to keep bearing in mind (one that I think Lerner doesn’t
+emphasize enough) is that this had never been done before.
+There is no such subtlety in the contemporary proto-SF of H.G. Wells
+(mostly between 1894 and 1907) and Jules Verne (between 1863 and
+1905). These authors rely on expository lumps almost as heavily as
+did pre-Campbellian genre SF in the 1910s and 1920s — and for
+precisely that reason, they seem far more dated than Kim
+or With the Night Mail do to an SF fan reading today.

+

My title exaggerates a little; Kipling did not single-handedly
+invent modern SF. But I think we may safely credit him with inventing
+the style of exposition that was to become modern SF’s most important
+device for managing and conveying information about imaginary futures
+and otherwheres. In doing so, he exerted an influence on the style, tone,
+and even content of SF that remains pervasive.

+

Once we understand this, there are some apparently accidental
+features of the genre that make a great deal more sense. One is the
+degree to which SF and SF-influenced fantasy, essentially alone among
+modern genres, carry forward a tradition of high-quality
+moral-didactic children’s fiction that can be read with pleasure by
+adults. Robert Heinlein’s juveniles and even J.K. Rowling’s
+Harry Potter sequence are not just coincidentally like
+the Kipling of Kim, Stalky & Co. and
+The Jungle Book — they are organically derived from
+his work through the technique of indirect exposition.

+

Another is the persistence of military SF. The similarity between
+Kipling’s prose and verse about the North-West Frontier and genre SF’s
+frequent celebrations of the military ethos in exotic surroundings is
+hardly accidental either. These stories too, are all about indirect
+exposition — immersing the reader in a strange and challenging
+environment, not by telling but by showing. As I have discussed elsewhere, military SF tends
+to have as important subtext an examination of the soldier’s proper
+relationship to his society — much as do Kipling’s barrack-room
+ballads.

+

Lurking behind both these features is SF’s abiding concern with
+morality, right living, and humans’ place in the cosmos. Now of course
+all literature touches these concerns; but part of the SF tradition is
+a tendency to do so in ways that emphasize politics and psychology
+rather less, and the inexorableness of natural law rather more.

+

The archetypal example of this emphasis is Tom Godwin’s classic
+The Cold Equations (1954), in which an innocent and likeable
+girl stows away on a spaceship and must die — must, in fact, be
+killed — because she overstrains the capacity of
+the vessel, which is delivering supplies vitally needed to prevent
+mass death.

+

What is this, really, but Rudyard Kipling’s Gods of the Copybook
+Headings (1916) in the idiom of the Space Age? Perhaps Kipling’s
+most lasting legacy in the content of SF is his insistence
+(one expressed hardly ever, if at all, in literary genres other than
+SF) that human feeling and social construction cannot override natural
+law; that a tough-minded grasp of the way the universe actually works
+is both possible and necessary.

diff --git a/20051202183307.blog b/20051202183307.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5cbce83 --- /dev/null +++ b/20051202183307.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Iraq Gun Porn +

This is an essay blog; I don’t normally just carry links to other peoples’ postings,
+but Iraq Gun Porn is just too informative, and too much fun, to pass up.

+

I was particularly tickled by this:

+

+The ..45 pistol: Thumbs up. Still the best pistol round out there.
+Everybody authorized to carry a sidearm is trying to get their hands on one.
+With few exceptions, can reliably be expected to put ‘em down with a torso
+hit. The special ops guys (who are doing most of the pistol work) use the HK
+military model and supposedly love it. The old government model .45’s are
+being re-issued en masse. +

+

Yeah, baby! .45ACP rules OK.

+

UPDATE: Yes, I like cranking off the sort of person who is offended by a title like “Iraq Gun Porn”; why do you ask?

diff --git a/20051206053456.blog b/20051206053456.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..57c5f3e --- /dev/null +++ b/20051206053456.blog @@ -0,0 +1,98 @@ +Just desserts +

There comes to us from Iraq the news that a terrorist group
+calling itself Sword of Truth has kidnapped four people from a group
+called Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) and has threatened to kill
+them unless some demands for the release of certain terrorists from
+Iraqi jails are met. What makes this interesting is that CPT exists
+to oppose the U.S. occupation; that is, they are in effect (if not by
+intention) allies of the terrorists threatening them.

+

When I first learned this, my first gut reaction was to think “Ha!
+Off with their heads!” My second reaction was to feel ashamed of my first
+reaction. How have things come to such a pass that I find myself
+rooting for terrorists to kill Westerners?

+

+

I had to think about that for a while. I’m with the hawk side on
+the Iraq war, but reluctantly; I am all too aware of the long-term
+risks of violence as a method, even when we adopt it under stress of
+necessity and for defensive reasons. One of the risks is that we may
+come to love violence and embrace it too readily. Was this happening
+to me?

+

Time for some what-if scenarios and ethical analysis.

+

There are two features of this mess that make it different
+from a “normal” hostage situation. One of these is that I consider
+the members of CPT my enemies, because I consider them enemies of my
+civilization and my country.

+

Note that I did not say ‘enemies of my government’. That they
+undoubtedly are, but I’m not real fond of my government. I do not in
+general feel any desire for its enemies to die, unless they pose a threat
+to my civilization and my country. My country is not its government; my
+country is my neighbors, and their neighbors, and everybody who identifies
+with the American vision of freedom.

+

“But…” some of you will say, “peace groups like the CPT aren’t
+your enemy. Or at least, they don’t intend to be.”

+

It’s not at all clear to me that groups like the CPT don’t intend
+to be enemies of my country. So much of the soi-disant “peace”
+movement is run by
+unreconstructed Stalinists and Maoists that these days I tend to
+presume any so-called “peace activist” group is just another one of their
+fronts. I don’t think that assumption has yet turned out to be
+wrong.

+

But even if that’s a wrong assumption in this case, CPT’s
+intentions matter much less to me than their effects. David Duke, Noam
+Chomsky, Pat Robertson, and Michael Moore would certainly deny being
+enemies of my country, but the effect of their speech and actions is
+to suck up to totalitarianisms of all kinds and give aid and comfort
+to people like Osama bin Laden who are unequivocally enemies of my
+country. That makes them the enemy, too.

+

(Oh, boy, there’s a fantasy. David Duke, Noam Chomsky, Pat
+Robertson, and Michael Moore chopping each other to pieces with
+Sword-of-Truth scimitars in a Rabid-Right-vs.-Loony-Left deathmatch.
+I wish I could sell tickets.)

+

This is sufficient to explain why the thought of those four CPT people
+being executed doesn’t bother me. In general, I don’t mind when my
+enemies kill each other. It saves my friends the trouble — and,
+more importantly, relieves us of the moral burden of killing. I suppose
+I would consider it a better outcome if the CPT crew killed the terrorists,
+who are on the whole more dangerous; and the best outcome of all would
+be if CPT and the “Sword of Truth” gang managed to kill each other.
+But if only the CPT people get whacked, they’re no loss.

+

But my gut reaction was stronger than that. The thought that these CPT
+people might die didn’t just leave me indifferent, it filled me with
+satisfaction. I had to meditate for a while to understand why. I did
+finally get it.

+

I like it when villains or dangerous idiots are killed by their own folly.
+That seems just to me. More importantly, it’s how other people learn not
+to be that way. It’s evolution in action; it improves the meme pool,
+or the gene pool, or both.

+

This is actually one of my gut reasons for favoring drug legalization,
+though I’d never thought it through quite so far before. I don’t think we
+have enough selective pressures against idiocy any more; I’d like
+idiots to have more chances to kill themselves, ideally before they get
+old enough to vote or reproduce. Not because I relish their deaths,
+but because I want to live in a future with fewer idiots in it.

+

+

(By the way, I’m using “idiot” in its original sense here. To the
+ancient Greeks, an “idiot” was a person too closed in on himself to be
+a net plus to his neighbors and his society. Distinctions beetween
+mental impairments, communicative defects like deaf-muteness, or
+insanity were not clear and not considered important; the important
+question was whether the ‘idiotes’ (private person) was capable of
+discharging the responsibilities of a citizen in the agora.)

+

If the CPT people aren’t villains, they’re idiots. Idiocy is the
+least it takes to ally yourself with terrorists against Western
+civilization. — not because the West is the fount of all virtue,
+but because, whatever the West’s flaws, Islamofascism is incomparably
+worse. The death of those four CPT people would at least diminish by
+four the number of dangerous idiots in the world; therefore, it’s a
+good thing.

+

I checked this line of thinking by asking myself how my evaluation
+would change if drug intervention (say) could make idiots into
+non-idiots. In that case it would still be a good outcome for
+villains to off themselves, but there wouldn’t actually be any point
+in selecting against idiocy. Idiocy would become like
+nearsightedness, a defect too easily correctable to bother being
+eugenic about.

+

I felt much better once I thought all this through. I don’t want
+to become the kind of person who takes joy in the death of other
+people; but if rooting for a future with fewer idiots in it is wrong,
+I don’t want to be right.

diff --git a/20051206181516.blog b/20051206181516.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0d35c6e --- /dev/null +++ b/20051206181516.blog @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +Secret prisons +

I’m having real trouble understanding the current flap over allegations that
+the CIA is running secret overseas prisons for terrorists and enemy combatants.
+I would prefer not to believe this is just another outbreak of reflexive
+anti-Americanism, but I don’t see any principled case against what is
+being alleged. Can anyone explain it to me?

+

+

Now, mind you, if there were any reason at all to believe American
+citizens were being shipped off to these hypothetical gulags I would
+be screaming bloody murder. I believe even American citizens taken
+under arms as enemy combatants are entitled to the protections
+guaranteed by the Constitution. Violating the rights of non-combatant
+Americans in this way would be even worse — grounds for
+impeachment of every official in the chain of command, up to and
+including the President.

+

But the U.S. government has no constitutional, legal, or moral
+obligation to treat foreign terrorists or foreign enemy combatants as
+though they were American citizens. The laws of the host country
+might apply, but even that much is not clear if the locations are on
+U.S. military bases (often, by treaty or agreement, these are
+administered under U.S. military law).

+

I do think we have a moral obligation to treat such prisoners
+humanely. But the outrage being ginned up isn’t over any alleged
+inhumanity, it’s against the U.S. having such facilities at all. And
+I don’t get that. Back during the Cold War, not even the Left bleated
+over Communist-bloc agents being immured in similar conditions; what
+makes jihadi and Baathist terrorists any more deserving of anyone’s
+tender-mindedness?

+

To be clear, I recognize the obvious political and moral dangers of
+having such a system; they have to be traded off against the lives
+that are saved by the intelligence it collects and by keeping hardened
+terrists out of play. But it seems to me that’s a debate that should
+be confined to American domestic politics, and conducted with
+circumspection even there lest it provide political cover for our
+enemies.

+

Instead, we have European politicians mouthing off about denying
+the U.S. overflight rights and demanding more public disclosure. That
+is out of line; whether those prisons exist and what goes on there is
+to be decided by (a) Americans, (b) the host countries, and (c)
+nobody else. This is an elementary application of the same
+rules of sovereignity that Europeans treat with such fastidious
+tenderness when an anti-American dictator is the beneficiary.

+

As I said, I’d like to believe this flap isn’t just the routine
+and unjustified U.S.-bashing I’ve come to expect. But I’m not
+optimistic.

diff --git a/20051208163729.blog b/20051208163729.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f6430df --- /dev/null +++ b/20051208163729.blog @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +If this suite’s a success, why is it so buggy? +

This is my response to If
+this suite’s a success, why is it so buggy? by Andrew Brown of
+The Guardian.

+

+

Andrew Brown claims that OpenOffice “illustrates the limitations of
+open source” and establishes that my aphorism “Many eyes make bugs shallow” is
+false, but his reasoning is shaky.

+

Mr Brown appears to be arguing that because open-source development isn’t
+perfect, it isn’t any better than closed source. But there is no
+silver bullet for the problem of software complexity — all
+programs, open or closed, will have bugs. The figures he is waving
+around (6K bugs, 5K feature requests) are meaningless in isolation.

+

In fact, controlled comparisons between closed- and open-source
+versions of functionally equivalent programs have been done. Barton
+Miller’s well-known “Fuzz Papers” suggested that open source programs
+to have a 39% edge in reliability over closed-source equivalents.

+

So where are the comparative statistics for the bug load of Microsoft
+Office? Do we know that it has fewer than 11,000 bugs and feature
+requests outstanding? If Mr. Brown don’t know that, or at least have
+those figures for a closed-source program of comparable size to
+OpenOffice, he has no basis for asserting that the open-source method
+is failing.

+

His article does inadvertently illustrate an important point, however.
+If you make legal paperwork a requirement before volunteers can
+contribute to a project, very few will do so. If OpenOffice is
+failing its promise, it’s not because “many eyeballs” doesn’t work —
+it’s because bureaucratic obstacles are driving the eyeballs away.

diff --git a/20051209083218.blog b/20051209083218.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c7bf50a --- /dev/null +++ b/20051209083218.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +No War For Magnetite! +

I contemplete this
+news story:

+

+Earth’s north magnetic pole is drifting away from North America and
+toward Siberia at such a clip that Alaska might lose its spectacular
+Northern Lights in the next 50 years, scientists said Thursday. +

+

The story goes on to say “exactly why this happens is a mystery”.
+No it isn’t, or no it won’t be as soon as the unenlightened masses grasp the
+truth: It’s all George Bush’s fault for not ratifying the Kyoto treaty.

+

You see, Halliburton has plans for making huge profits in the
+navigational-equipment market. The pole shift is a nefarious
+neoconservative plot to make all existing compasses obsolete. Mwa ha
+ha. But you can stop it — just hook up with your local pathetic
+Communist-remnant organization and take to the streets screaming “No
+war for magnetite!”

+

(The preceding is satire. Any resemblance to actual moonbat conspiracy
+theories is not coincidental in the slightest.)

diff --git a/20051212115948.blog b/20051212115948.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7a383c7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20051212115948.blog @@ -0,0 +1,85 @@ +Saganami Island Tactical Simulator +

I like SF. I like wargames. I like naval adventure fiction.
+These tastes put me square in the middle of the target audience for
+David Weber’s Honor Harrington novels. And yes, I do
+enjoy them; Weber may be a hack, but he’s a very competent hack who
+delivers good entertainment value for my money. So I was pleasantly
+surprised to learn, this weekend at the annual Philadelphia Science
+Fiction Convention (Philcon), that there is now an Honor Harrington
+wargame — Saganami Island Tactical Simulator (SITS).

+

+

Weber started out as a game designer writing novel-length
+game tie-ins before launching the Honor Harrington books in the early
+1990s. In retrospect, it’s a little surprising that an Honorverse
+wargame didn’t get produced ten years ago. There has long been a
+flourishing genre of wargames that simulate 3D space combat;
+Star Fleet Battles, set in the Star Trek universe, is
+perhaps the best known of these. A tie-in to the Honorverse should
+have been a natural.

+

On the other hand…most tactical space wargames are junk. As much
+as I enjoy SF and wargaming, I can’t stomach a game that (as so many
+do) just blithely handwaves away the actual physics of space combat.
+Another deeply annoying flaw of most space wargames is that, though
+space is a 3D maneuvering environment, they tend to have at best
+rather poor support for modeling 3D movement and tactics. You end up
+with games that are essentially 2D naval maneuvering with a thin and
+patchy SFnal veneer.

+

If all I’m going to get is 2D maneuver with funny-shaped ships, I’d
+really rather play a Napoleonic-era naval wargame like Wooden
+Ships and Iron Men or Close Action — one
+that sweats the details, that tries to get cannon ranges and
+wind-driven movement right. And in fact I have a lot of experience
+with such games. In general, I find they reduce space wargames to the
+status of unsatisfying shams by contrast.

+

So I am pleasantly astonished to report that SITS (or rather, the
+earlier Attack Vector Tactical game it’s based on) is a
+true breakthrough in 3D game design. By use of an ingenious bit of
+shaped plastic called a tilt block, SITS ship miniatures can be
+placed with an 0, 30, 45, or 60-degree increment of roll or pitch with
+respect to the game table. The movement and firing rules use charts
+that hide a lot of 3D-geometry and spherical trigonometry under an
+easy-to-use interface.

+

Thus, you can really do 3D maneuvering in this system — and I
+did, in fact, in a demo game that pitted two Havenite
+Sultan-class battlecruisers against a Manticorn
+Star Knight-class heavy cruiser. The system reproduces
+the feel of Honorverse battles from the books extremely well, even to
+the point where it models the attrition of missile salvos by several
+layers of defenses from countermissiles down to sidewall. We even had
+one of those explosion-wreaks-havoc-on-the-Manticoran-bridge scenes
+Weber likes so much happen quite naturally.

+

Unlike most Peep division commanders in the books, I knew how to
+use my tonnage advantage effectively — in this case, “Never mind
+maneuvers, just go at ‘em”. And the Manties didn’t have Honor
+Harrington on the bridge pulling miracles out of her butt. So this
+time, the good guys lost.

+

It’s a sign of good design that I was able to apply the tactics
+that are supposed to work in the Honorverse books and get the
+notionally correct result. I was also impressed by the fact that the
+designer, Ken Burnside, modeled physics so carefully in his ruleset
+that there are explanatory sections describing the heat-dissipation
+equations he used.

+

Yes, there is a certain amount of handwavium and unobtainium in the
+game system — the Weber books are space operas, after all. But Ken
+(who I met and got to talk with) keeps the McGuffins to the bare minimum
+necessary to capture the feel of the Honorverse. For me, this painstaking
+effort at verismilitude makes the whole system far more enjoyable.

+

The only criticism of this game I have is that it is too
+complicated to be accessible to most casual or social gamers. While
+Ken Burnside’s components do a tremendously clever job of simplifying
+your tactical information management, the game domain is irreducibly
+complex and it shows. Personally, I relish that as a challenge, but
+undeniably this game is not going to be a hit with the
+beer-and-pretzels crowd. Only serious gamers need apply.

+

For those serious gamers, the rewards will be large. SITS aims
+both to break new ground in realistic tactical space wargaming and to
+capture the drama and feel of the Honor Harrington novels. It
+succeeds at both these objectives, combining them with a panache I
+would have thought impossible until I saw it. Kudos to Ken Burnside
+and Ad Astra games for a truly superb design, which I hope and believe
+will permanently raise the bar in space wargaming.

+

(Note: when I told Ken Burnside I was likely to plug SITS on my
+blog, he asked me if I did so to add the caveat that Attack
+Vector Tactical is temporarily unavailable due to production
+constraints. I gather they’re having to work hard just to keep up
+with the demand for SITS.)

diff --git a/20051216061413.blog b/20051216061413.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..36ad57d --- /dev/null +++ b/20051216061413.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Pornography redefined +

Long-time readers of this blog will be aware than I’m fascinated by the semiotics of pornography. Not by pornography itself; as I wrote in Why does porn got to hurt so bad? I find most pornography ugly and unappealing. No; I’m interested in the meaning of pornography, the code it’s written in and what it says about its producers and consumers.

+

Since I wrote my original meditation on this topic, an interesting shift in the received meaning of the word “porn” has been visible. Consider Domai. This is a site which traffics in pictures of naked women. Yet the front page claims “No porn on this site”.

+

+

Consider also GoodShit, which also traffics in pictures of naked women (and, it must be said, lots of quirky and interesting links). Occasionally it carries a link that says “Today’s porn”. Unlike the pictures of naked women, which are inline on the blog page itself, you have to click this link. If you do, you’ll generally find an image of intercourse or fellatio.

+

Both these sites are asserting, by implication, that there is a class of pictures of naked women that is not porn. And mind you, we’re not talking coy lingerie photos or pinup art here, but full-frontal nudity. Not artsy-fartsy nudity with solarization or chiaroscuro, either, but pictures of desirable young women displaying their desirability.

+

This does not appear to be an isolated phenomenon. Googling for babes “no porn” will turn up other sites like BadGirls Blog that advertise “No porn” but show lots of skin in presentations clearly intended to be masturbation material.

+

These assertions of “No porn” aren’t attached to explanations or manifestos. The site maintainers appear to simply take it for granted that their readers have a category “porn” that is more specific and narrower than “pictures to whack off by”, which was certainly what the term meant until recently. I find this interesting.

+

Comparing the “porn” with “non-porn” pictures accessible from these sites, the pattern of differences is clear. The “non-porn” pictures are typically just women, displaying themselves but not engaged in sex acts. The “porn” pictures depict fetish gear, intercourse, fellatio, and masturbation.

+

The evidence tells us that, at least on the Web, the meaning of “porn” may be narrowing, shifting towards what is otherwise called “hardcore”.

+

This, I think, is a good sign. It suggests that a substantial fraction of consumers of porn-in-the-broader-sense are fed up with the oceans of sleazy hardcore out here, and that website operators at places like Domai are catering to this by putting some semantic distance between the sleaze and the non-sleaze.

+

What we don’t yet see is a consensus label for the new style of non-porn porn. Some of these sites use the label “babe pictures”, but the market doesn’t seem to have sorted out whether that category includes full nudity or not (many “babe pictures” sites don’t). Domai and some other sites use the phrases “simple nudes” or “natural nudes”; the latter also has the more specific connotation of full nudity in outdoor settings.

+

At their best, “simple nudes” and “natural nudes” have a quality of sweetness and innocence, like old-fashioned pinup art but with full nudity and a totally unashamed erotic charge. In fact, I think emotional tone is the actual ground of the new meaning of “porn”. Porn is not innocent; it always has its own deliberate transgressiveness as part of its subject, and it won’t let you forget that.

+

I guess one of the people the non-porn porn is aimed at is me. I like my women 3D rather than 2D and seldom have much use for porn, but when I do I prefer the “natural nudes” style to anything else. Part of this is that when I look at pictures of women I want to see the woman, not a lot of extraneous clutter and decoration. But more than that, this style seems fundamentally respectful of both the individual models and of women in general in a way conventional porn is not. That’s an improvement. Finally, all considerations of morality or political correctness aside, I think it’s just plain more fun to look at pictures of women who have not been objectified (or lacquered, tweezed, enhanced, and airbrushed into looking like plastic doll-bots).

+

I’d like to think this shift in the definition of porn means that an increasing number of porn consumers share these values. But whether thay do or not, I think any reason for leaving behind the heavy makeup and the boas and the spike heels and the colossal fake boobs of doom would be a good enough one. There is quite enough ugliness in the world without making naturally sexy women into ugly travesties.

diff --git a/20051217071322.blog b/20051217071322.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6baefbc --- /dev/null +++ b/20051217071322.blog @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +Is that victory I smell? +

The last two days have seen a triple whammy for the Islamofascists
+and their Western quislings. The Iraqi elections were a thumping
+success; congressional Democrats voted in a resolution supporting
+prosecution of the Iraq war; and the Patriot Act failed to be renewed.

+

+

The huge turnout in the Iraqi elections was great news, but the
+underreported story is that Baathist dead-enders actually protected
+Iraqi polling places from al-Qaeda jihadis. This presages the entry
+of Sunni Arabs into normal politics, and marks what is likely to be a
+fatal fracture in the Baath/jihadi alliance. Couple this with the
+fact that attacks against Coalition troops have fallen to a
+seven-month low, and we begin to see a prospect of an end to the
+fighting in the near-term future. It seems unlikely to me that the
+insurgency can last another year; on current trends, it could well
+collapse in six months.

+

On the domestic front, the Republicans forced Congressional
+Democrats to a stand-up vote on a second resolution supporting U.S.
+war aims; the result will make it politically very difficult for
+any of them to call for immediate troop withdrawals. A longer-term
+effect will be to drive a wedge between Congressional Democrats and
+the pro-jihadis in the American hard left. I don’t think we’re going
+to see the DLC making kissy-faces at Michael Moore any more.

+

And the Patriot Act wasn’t renewed. I think this is good news. It
+had become more effective as an anti-American propaganda weapon than
+it ever was as a tool for routing out terrorism. This particular
+legislative defeat will neatly spill the wind from the sails of the
+Bush=Hitler crowd; what kind of Hitler lets the enabling legislation
+for his putative Gestapo be scuppered by a mere vote?

+

I think I smell victory coming. And not just over the Baathists
+and jihadis, but over their Western allies as well. The anti-American
+coalition is fracturing; even the most repellent elements of Old
+Europe’s elite are having second thoughts in face of the clear and
+present danger presented by an Iran that is building nuclear weapons
+and headed by a frothing nutcase.

+

But we’ll know the victory is final only when the West purges
+itself of the memetic poisons left over from the Cold War. The most
+unfortunate thing about the way our geopolitical confrontation with
+the Soviets ended is that the nihilists and pro-Communist apologists
+in the West’s intelligentsia were never exposed and hounded out of
+public life. It took them all of about six months to become
+Islamofascism’s quislings after 9/11; this time, I hope, they’ll be
+named, shamed, and ruined.

+

UPDATE: On reflection, I think I was far too generous with that
+“six months”. It was more like six minutes.

diff --git a/20051219080311.blog b/20051219080311.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..87bfc0a --- /dev/null +++ b/20051219080311.blog @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +King Kong is a gigantic mess +

My wife Catherine has written an excellent review of Peter Jackson’s King Kong, which we saw just last night. I concur with it; the movie is a meandering, flabby, over-long, self-indulgent mess that will be deeply disappointing to many of the fans Jackson attracted with the Rings movies. I hope it bombs, and he learns a lesson about artistic discipline. His next movie would be better for that.

diff --git a/20051219081555.blog b/20051219081555.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9e2a062 --- /dev/null +++ b/20051219081555.blog @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +The smell of victory, part deux +

Aha. The Sunnis
+say they want to work with US. This comes hard in the heels of
+reports that the Baathist dead-enders protected al-Qaeda polling
+places from jihadis during the just-concluded elections, in which
+turnout pushed 70% even in the heart of the Sunni triangle.

+

+

I expect this story will be just as thoroughly overlooked in the
+mainstream media as Qaddaffi’s
+terrified capitulation was back in 2003. But it’s even more
+important. We’re getting a clear message that the ex-Baathist end of
+the insurgency wants to put down its guns and enter electoral
+politics. This matters a lot, because they were most of the footsoldiers.
+The al-Qaeda fighters are far fewer, and have alienated most Iraqis with
+a terror campaign that has killed more Iraqis than it has coalition
+troops.

+

If the insurgent leaders believe they must stop fighting, this
+implies two other things: that the Sunni street has accepted that
+Sunnis aren’t going to run Iraq any more, and consequently that Iraq
+is not going to fly apart into three Kurdish, Sunni and Shi’a
+fragments. The political foundations for a stable Iraq deeply hostile
+to the Islamofascist program have been laid.

+

(Yes, I support the development of a stable Iraqi state despite
+my anarcho-capitalism. This is because I don’t think it’s possible to
+go from tribalism and autocracy to market anarchy in one go. At
+mininimum, it takes a couple of generations of civil society to prepare
+people for true self-government. Cultural experience matters.)

+

Others in the blogosphere have noted that George Bush’s most recent
+speech uses a lot more “I”, that he’s taking personal responsibility
+for the U.S.’s Iraq strategy, and that this means he is now sure of
+victory and wants to nail down the credit. I agree with this
+assessment. For the first time since 2003, I am now feeling fairly
+sure that all the home-front sabotaging of the Iraq campaign by the
+Left and the mainstream media is going to come to nothing in the end.
+It’s not, after all, going to be Vietnam II; they will not snatch
+defeat from the jaws of victory again.

+

I’d like to think this means emergency conditions will end soon,
+and I can return to my natural position of calling for the dismantling
+of government power rather than reluctantly supporting a government
+war. Unfortunately, the Iraq campaign, like the Afghani campaign
+before it, is only part of that longer-term war. I think it is quite
+likely we will be required to invade and subdue Iran before the larger
+struggle to break the will of Islamofascism is over. Alas, wishing we
+had tools other than state power for achieving this won’t make it
+so.

+

Still. I expect to enjoy the effect on U.S. domestic politics as
+the Iraq insurgency collapses. The American Left, having committed itself
+to defeatism, is going to get badly hammered in the 2006 elections. I’d
+relish that even more if I could be sure that the beneficiaries of their
+collapse wouldn’t be the Republicans, but you can’t have everything.

diff --git a/20051222082532.blog b/20051222082532.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..83ea3e7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20051222082532.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Utter IDiots +

Leon H. at RedState writes in Intelligent Design (The Debate Isn’t Helping):

+

+In other words, my feeling about Krauthammer, Derbyshire, et al is
+basically this: if you wish to denigrate ID and insult its proponents,
+go find an ID discussion board (they are legion) and do so there –
+don’t use the pages of NR or your token space in the WaPo to do it
+in. What possible benefit to the cause of conservatism could come
+about by you propounding your opinion on a topic which is neither your
+calling nor your area of expertise, and which will insult a
+significant portion of the Republican coalition? +

+

What a load of disingenuous crap this is!

+

I’m not a conservative, myself, and dislike conservatism for many reasons that I have written about elsewhere. But I can sympathize with conservatives who desire to put distance between themselves and the ID movement, which combines purblind stupidity with dishonesty about its actual aims in a way I’ve previously only seen in gun-control proponents.

+

The ID movement’s claim that it’s not about end-running the First Amendment and turning schools into instruments for the propagation of Christian dogma is just as transparently specious as most gun-grabbers’ claims that they don’t aim to render the Second Amendment a dead letter. Both gangs are enemies of liberty and the U.S. Constitution, and for precisely the same reasons. It’s hardly startling for anyone, conservative or otherwise, to want to avoid being associated with any movement that lies wholesale about its objectives.

+

And that’s before addressing the numerous gaping logical holes in the “intelligent design” argument. U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones, deciding Kitzmiller vs. Dover on December 20th, nailed many of these in his opinion. To actually buy the ID argument requires either a complete inability to do critical thinking or a zealot’s refusal to exercise it.

+

“What possible benefit to the cause of conservatism” he asks. Maybe…just maybe…Krauthammer and Derbyshire would like to demonstrate that there are some conservatives who are neither liars, religious zealots, nor plain-and-simple idiots.

diff --git a/20051223110509.blog b/20051223110509.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3a93be0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20051223110509.blog @@ -0,0 +1,137 @@ +Thoughts on the Prisoner of Narnia +

Since writing the essay C.S. Lewis is morally
+incoherent I have finished rereading the entire Narnia series. I
+could go on at length about how the writing deteriorates as Lewis’s
+imaginative impulse is more and more smothered by the clanking and
+wheezing of his allegory machine, but Adam Gopnik makes the point
+better than I could in Prisoner
+of Narnia.

+

+

Gopnik is particularly spot-on when he describes Lewis’s enthusiasts:

+

+Praise a good writer too single-mindedly for too obviously ideological
+reasons for too long, and pretty soon you have him all to
+yourself. The same thing has happened to G. K. Chesterton: the
+enthusiasts are so busy chortling and snickering as their man throws
+another right hook at the rationalist that they don’t notice that the
+rationalist isn’t actually down on the canvas; he and his friends
+have long since left the building. +

+

I could be the rationalist in this analogy. I admire the
+Screwtape Letters as a marvellous piece of writing,
+probably the most effective single Christian apologetic of the 20th
+century, but as an argument it completely fails to affect me; Lewis
+treats as deep mysteries issues that I think are obvious, and glides
+over or ignores entirely the questions I find most interesting.

+

I’ve met a number of Christians who are convinced his arguments
+should affect me, though, and seem genuinely puzzled when
+they don’t. The brutal truth is that Lewis was a primitive thinker, a
+fabulist who substituted spiritual/emotional passion for philosophical
+analysis and never clearly understood that he wasn’t achieving the
+latter.

+

Here again, Gopnik is both sympathetic and mercilessly exact:

+

+His works are a record of a restless, intelligent man, pacing a cell
+of his own invention and staring through the barred windows at the
+stars beyond. That the door was open all the time, and that he held
+the key in his pocket, was something he discovered only at the end. +

+

Gopnik never unpacks this analogy, but its elements are plain. The
+cage was Lewis’s Christian religiosity; the key was the pagan
+enthusiasm and wonder of his childhood; and the end was that last
+portion of his life during which he wrote Til We Have
+Faces, a re-paganized mythological examination of all the
+questions that most obsessed him. No part of his journey ever took
+place at the level of philosophy; it was all fable, all spirit-quest,
+all psychodrama occasionally dressed up in the language of intellectual
+argument but never really at home there.

+

Gopnik drops the ball only once:

+

+A bright and sensitive British boy turned by public-school sadism into
+a warped, morbid, stammering sexual pervert. It sounds like the usual
+story. What was special about Lewis was that, throughout it all, he
+kept an inner life. +

+

Gopnik’s description of “the usual story” is more awfully truthful
+than most Americans can know; I actually went to a British day school
+in the 1960s (it happened to be located outside Rome, but that’s a
+detail) and the decaying end of the same tradition that had warped
+Lewis fifty years before was still quite unpleasant enough. But
+Gopnik is wrong in thinking Lewis was exceptional for maintaining an
+inner life; most public-school boys did, even if only as a form of
+escape. No; what was exceptional about Lewis came later, when he
+converted to Christianity in 1931 for reasons that were desperately
+wrong from any Christian point of view.

+

Here again, Gopnik is clear-eyed:

+

+This was a new turn in the history of religious conversion. Where for
+millennia the cutting edge of faith had been the difference between
+pagan myth and Christian revelation, Lewis was drawn in by the
+likeness of the Christian revelation to pagan myth. Even
+Victorian conversions came, in the classic Augustinian manner, out of
+an overwhelming sense of sin. Cardinal Manning agonized over eating
+too much cake, and was eventually drawn to the Church of Rome to keep
+himself from doing it again. Lewis didn’t embrace Christianity because
+he had eaten too much cake; he embraced it because he thought that it
+would keep the cake coming, that the Anglican Church was God’s own
+bakery. +

+

The mythological arc of Lewis’s work, the arc that ends with
+Til We Have Faces, makes it clear that this account is
+correct. And from a pagan point of view (certainly a neopagan one
+like mine) cozying up to a god because that will keep the cake coming
+is eminently reasonable. The pagan bargain between god and human is
+an exchange of value, adoration given for power returned. But within
+an Augustinian Christian point of view this is horribly backwards:
+conversion is supposed to be all about submission to the will of God
+and what I have elsewhere described as installing a sin/guilt/thoughtcrime
+monitor in one’s own head. There is no evidence that Lewis
+ever did this; he doesn’t seem, for example, to have suffered the
+pangs of conscience one might have expected from a Christian
+enthusiast over committing adultery.

+

Thus, for all his enthusiasm, Lewis was a poor Christian, and an
+uneven (and ultimately unsuccessful) evangelist. J.R.R. Tolkien, who had
+been reponsible for Lewis’s conversion, understood this and was much
+bothered by it. When Gopnik reports that the Archbishop of Canterbury
+was offended by Lewis’s “vulgar, bullying” religiosity there is no reason
+at all for us to doubt that, either.

+

As regards the quality of Lewis’s writing, it was his Christianity
+that damaged him, not his pagan instincts. As Gopnik writes:

+

+Lewis is always trying to stuff the marvellous back into the
+allegorical—his conscience as a writer lets him see
+that the marvellous should be there for its own marvellous sake, just
+as imaginative myth, but his Christian duty insists that the
+marvellous must (to use his own giveaway language) be reinfected with
+belief. He is always trying to inoculate metaphor with allegory, or,
+at least, drug it, so that it walks around hollow-eyed, saying just
+what it’s supposed to say. +

+

This describes with laser-beam precision what’s wrong with the
+Narnia books. It’s already a serious problem in The Lion, the
+Witch, and the Wardrobe and it gets worse as the series
+progresses. By The Last Battle all that’s left of
+whatever narrative coherence Narnia originally possessed is a series
+of gorgeous imagistic set pieces. Lewis tries so obsessively to pump
+these full of allegorical meaning that, paradoxically, they lose all
+meaning. The clanking of the allegory machine is just too
+audible.

+

Even children pick up on this; I did, though when I first read the
+books I didn’t understand what I was feeling. As Gopnik puts it:

+

+The emotional power of the book, as every sensitive child has known,
+diminishes as the religious part intensifies. The most explicitly
+religious part of his myth is the most strenuously, and the least
+successfully, allegorized. +

+

I could dispute some of the pronouncements with which Gopnik
+finishes his essay; not being a neopagan himself, he crams pagan
+mysticism into an implicitly dualist framework, and thus understands it
+less well than he thinks he does. But when he writes

+

+Fairy stories are not rich because they are true, and they lose none
+of their light because someone lit the candle. +

+

he is dead on target. Tolkien understood this; Lewis never did. That’s
+why, at fifty years’ remove, it is Lewis who stands in Tolkien’s shadow
+as a fantasist and not the other way around.

diff --git a/20060104121507.blog b/20060104121507.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cc740a6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060104121507.blog @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +Live by government regulation, die by it too +

Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a blogger and much-respected figure in the
+science-fiction community, is staring at the ruin of her life, and
+she’s enraged
+about it. And rightly so. As her husband Patrick explains, she’s a
+narcoleptic, and the FDA has just banned the only drug that keeps her
+functional.

+

+

I’m not personally friendly with the Neilsen-Haydens, but I’m friendly
+towards them. They’re part of several communities in which I’m invested.
+They do good work. I don’t like to see them hurt. I feel for Teresa.

+

But I also think her anger seems curiously misdirected. She’s
+wishing death on Ralph Nader and his “Public Citizen” group, but it
+isn’t Nader who banned Cylert. The FDA did that. And it isn’t Nader
+who has the authority to jail pharmacists who sell the drug and harass
+companies who make it. It’s the FDA. More generally, what’s at fault
+here is not just any one pressure group, it’s the entire political
+system that gives government control of what adults put in their
+bodies in the privacy of their homes.

+

I don’t know the Neilsen-Haydens well, but I’m fairly sure their politics
+are conventional for elite coastal-liberals of the NPR-listening variety;
+good-government leftism underpinned by a conviction that people need to be
+regulated for their own good. And even if I’m wrong about them, that
+certainly describes a lot of the people who have been offering them
+sympathy.

+

Teresa, even as I feel your pain, I’m wondering if you’re going to learn
+the right lesson. The Cylert ban isn’t an accidental failure of the
+system, it’s an essential one. It wasn’t perpetrated by villains, but
+by well-intentioned people working the levers of a system designed to
+elevate “public safety” above individual choice. That system
+functioned as designed; it’s the design that’s broken.

+

I may have your politics wrong, and if so I apologize…but my gut
+reaction when I read your enraged post was “those who live by
+regulation get to die by it too”. Welcome, Teresa, to the ranks of
+those who have been royally screwed by “good government”. You’re now
+one with every homeowner who’s been raped by eminent domain, every gun
+owner, and every overtaxed working stiff in the United States.

+

UPDATE: Great Ghu, it’s an Instalanche!

diff --git a/20060111180210.blog b/20060111180210.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2ce96ad --- /dev/null +++ b/20060111180210.blog @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +The War Against Humorlessness +

From Iowahawk:

+

+WICCANS DECRY ‘WAR AGAINST SOLSTICE’

+

Wiccan Coven Association President Ozrius Ravenclaw announced today
+that his group would continue a formal economic boycott against
+several major US retailers “until they cease their relentless and
+cowardly attack on the Solstice.”

+

Retailers affected by the boycott include Target, WalMart, Dollar
+General, Mills Fleet Farm, Victoria’s Secret, AutoZone, and Hy Vee.

+

“This is ‘Political Correctness’ gone crazy. Where ever you shop these
+days, it seems like it’s ‘Happy Holidays’ or ‘Seasons Greetings,'”
+said Ravenclaw, who was formerly known as Chuck Sundergard. “Whatever
+happened to a good old fashioned ‘All Glory to Gaia’ or ‘Jhakkaa
+Solztovo Chthulu?'”

+

Tractor Supply Company spokesman Kevin Neves denied accusations that
+his company instructed sales clerks not to use traditional Wiccan
+greetings.

+

“We welcome everybody to TSC, regardless of how they celebrate the
+season,” said Neves. “We even stock a nice assortment of seasonal
+animal sacrifice altars, back in Lawn & Garden.”

+
+

I’m a Wiccan. Been one for thirty years. (Yeah, yeah, “I was a
+Wiccan before it was cool…”). Now, if I were the kind of humorless
+gink at which Iowahawk is aiming, I’d be spluttering with indignation at
+this insensitive and hurtful fling at my personal religion thing.

+

But you know what? I think it’s pretty funny.

+

+

See, unlike most members of huge evil monotheistic death cults, I
+understand that serious is deadly. Any spiritual tradition that can’t
+laugh at itself, that can’t step outside its own dogmas and admit how
+absurd it can look from the outside, has already become a cancer.

+

If you notice that damn few religions can pass this test, you’re
+getting the idea. There aren’t more than a handful fit to take up room
+in a sane human being’s head. Thankfully, Wicca is still one of them.
+It hasn’t become deadly serious. Yet, anyway.

+

Of course, Iowahawk isn’t actually flinging at Wicca at all. He’s
+using the entirely fictional “Ozrius” as a reductio ad absurdam of Christian conservatives
+who really do behave like this. Joke ‘em if they can’t take a fuck.

+

I take issue with his satire on only one minor technical point.
+What’s up with this “Jhakkaa Solztovo” nonsense? Everybody
+knows the correct greeting in the name of Cthulhu is “Ia! Ia! Cthulhu
+R’lyeh fhtagn!” Harrumph…you’re never
+going to successfully invoke any hideous all-devouring Elder Gods if you
+keep that up…

diff --git a/20060112000319.blog b/20060112000319.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7ed2bd5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060112000319.blog @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +If the Shoe Fits… +

From Confederate
+Yankee comes the story that an Iraqi journalist named Ali
+Fadhil claims U.S. soldiers invaded and shot up his home, then hustled
+him off for questioning before inexplicably returning him unharmed.
+What’s supposed to make this especially shocking is that he was
+working for a British newspaper, the Guardian.

+

+

Yes, that would be the same corrosively anti-American left-wing rag
+known to some pro-war bloggers as “al-Ghardiyan”, the one that has
+called for the assassination of George Bush on its editorial page, and
+that cheerfully serves as a megaphone for la Pilger and la Fisk and la
+Galloway and every frothing nutcase of a Wahhabist cleric in the
+British Isles.

+

My first thought on reading this was “What’s the big deal here?” I
+mean, I’ve read the Guardian; if I were an
+American intelligence officer in Baghdad, I’d feel safe in assuming
+that anybody working for that particular newspaper was not only having
+sloppy sex with the local terrorists every night of the week, but
+collecting a bonus from the head office for doing it without a
+condom. Confederate Yankee says “This story, as
+reported, is shocking and should result in an immediate
+investigation”, but to hell with that — if anything, some G2
+ought to be congratulated on intelligent target selection.

+

Alas. On reading further, it looks like the whole story is probably
+a put-up job a la Juliana Sgrena. There are no witnesses, no physical
+evidence, and (most tellingly) Fahdil’s description of the soldiers’
+behavior doesn’t match the way American troops are trained to secure
+prisoners. Not that any trifle like the mere lack of evidence is
+likely to stop al-Ghardiyan from ranting about “proven American
+brutality” until well into the next century!

+

I wish I could expect that CENTCOM would issue an unapologetic
+statement reminding everybody that Iraq is a war zone, and that any
+“journalist” believed on information received to be actively
+cooperating with terrorists is at exactly the same risk of being
+interrogated, jailed, and consequently shot as any other collaborator
+with the enemy.

+

But naah, that won’t happen. If they truly held journalists
+responsible for aiding and comforting the enemy, they’d have to shoot
+half the American correspondents in Iraq. I’m not yet disgusted
+enough with our mainstream media to wish that fate on them. Not quite,
+though they’re pushing it.

diff --git a/20060124172043.blog b/20060124172043.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..35f4d7d --- /dev/null +++ b/20060124172043.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Look over there… +

I haven’t posted for a while because my blogging energy has been going to the debate over at
+Cato Unbound. I may write an essay about Gramscian damage
+in the near future, however.

diff --git a/20060127082322.blog b/20060127082322.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1b734f9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060127082322.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Glenn Reynolds puts it perfectly +

Glenn Reynolds writes:

+
+

You know, to me Wal-Mart is a lot like George W. Bush. It’s not that I’m that big a fan in the abstract, really, it’s just that the viciousness and stupidity revealed in its enemies tends to make me view it more favorably than I otherwise would.

+
+

Thank you, Glenn, for expressing my feelings about both George Bush and Wal-Mart perfectly.

diff --git a/20060127190031.blog b/20060127190031.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..05ea464 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060127190031.blog @@ -0,0 +1,52 @@ +Oh, Canada! Oh, delicious! +

Stephen Harper, the newly-elected Conservative prime minister of Canada,
+is huffing and puffing about Canada asserting its sovereignity over the arctic
+waters of the Nortwest Passage. “The United States defends its sovereignty;
+the Canadian government will defend our sovereignty,” said Harper at the
+end of a news conference, promising to deploy naval icebreakers into the
+disputed waters.

+

The resulting brouhaha is hilarious on so many different levels
+it’s hard to know where to start.

+

+

But let’s just start by considering all the
+wisecracks about the Canadian military to have been made already,
+shall we? True, they’re about as intimidating as three troops of Girl
+Scouts nowadays, but it’s not really fair to harsh on them; they were
+a tough, professional service before po-mo leftism in the Canadian
+elite made it national policy that the military could never be more
+than a joke.

+

What’s much funnier is that the U.S. mainstream media sees Harper’s
+maneuver as an I’m-not-your-poodle message to George Bush. There’s
+some justification for this; Harper is doubtless playing that card to
+stroke Canadian Liberal voters, who indeed do tend to hate Bush almost
+as intensely and irrationally as the U.S. press does.

+

But really! Over a bunch of ice floes on the sub-zero ass-end of
+nowhere? Harper, an ex-libertarian, isn’t that stupid. Anybody who
+can’t hear the wink-wink-nudge-nudge in Harper’s parody of territorial
+posturing is tone-deaf.

+

Harper is doing something much deeper and funnier here. He’s
+catching the Left in a trap. If they want to join him in
+his anti-Bush polemic, they’re going to have to stand behind the
+principles of — national sovereignity?
+Patriotism? Rendered idiots by their hatred, many of them
+will probably take the bait — not anticipating that their own
+rhetoric is going to come back around to hammer them flat sometime
+when there’s a serious issue on the table.

+

Harper is such a clever bastard that he’s setting this trap right
+in front of their faces and daring them to notice. Read that quote
+again:

+

+“The United States defends its sovereignty; the Canadian government
+will defend our sovereignty.” +

+

By invoking Canadian national sovereignity, and justifying it on
+the direct analogy with the U.S.’s right to act as a sovereign
+nation, Harper just kicked transnational
+progressivism in the nuts. But by making it look like an
+anti-American, anti-Bush move, he has made it almost impossible for
+anyone in the Liberal Party to argue with the anti-tranzi terms in
+which he has framed the issue – because arguing would look
+like rolling over to the Americans!

+

It’s beautiful, I tell you. Beautiful. The most adroit political
+mindfuck I’ve seen in years. My respect for Harper just shot up about
+300%.

diff --git a/20060129204317.blog b/20060129204317.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2f362ef --- /dev/null +++ b/20060129204317.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +Evidently, I am lightning. + +

This is incorrect in one respect. I do not engage in random violence.

diff --git a/20060201162435.blog b/20060201162435.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..563ea34 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060201162435.blog @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +How low can they go? +

Here’s another one for the file marked “Bush’s opponents are so
+deranged that they are good reasons to support him”. At The Corner,
+via InstaPundit, Tim Graham has this
+report:

+

+Driving in, I had to sample some “progressive talk” on the SOTU [State of the
+Union address]. At the Stephanie Miller Show, they were laughing about (and
+playing an audio montage of) how many times Bush used the “F-Bomb” last night.
+That’s their strange description of the word “freedom.” They also mocked the
+mentions of “liberty.” +

+

This is a symptom of how degraded the soi-disant “progressive” wing of
+American political culture has become. I don’t like George Bush much, but
+as long as his opponents behave like this they make him look like the least
+nasty choice.

+

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe “respectable” liberals and the Democratic
+leadership will actually come out against treating the words “freedom” and
+“liberty” as obscenities or jokes.

+

I’m waiting…

+

(…the sound of crickets chirping…)

diff --git a/20060203083405.blog b/20060203083405.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..55105bb --- /dev/null +++ b/20060203083405.blog @@ -0,0 +1,73 @@ +The Cheesecake Factory Must Die +

Warning: I am about to vent. If splenetic ranting is not your
+thing, back outta here now, for I am seriously pissed off.

+

+

I’m four days into an intense seige of work at an
+I-can-tell-you-but-I’d-have-to-kill-you location in suburban New York,
+toiling away at a worthy cause. I’ve been at it for twelve hours, and
+I am truly ready for a decent meal. (Lunch was skimpy Japanese.) My
+colleagues and I send out for a massive order of comestibles from a
+place called the Cheesecake Factory.

+

The Cheesecake Factory is a chain joint, but the locals think it’s
+OK. And indeed my “Ton O’Fun” burger is reasonably well made, if of a
+size I normally associate with minor planetary bodies. One of my
+colleagues looks at it and mutters in a nearly reverent tone “Arteries
+be damned!” This fails to disturb me. I consume it with
+glee.

+

All goes well until I come to the alleged cheesecake.

+

At this point I need to explain that I take my cheesecake pretty
+seriously. Given that I am averse or allergic to most forms of
+cheese, this might strike some as mildly odd — but it’s the
+molds and fermentation products that make me go ick, not the dairy
+proteins or lactose. Cream cheese and I get along just fine, and one
+of my favorite dessertlike things is a good old-fashioned
+cheesecake.

+

By “good old-fashioned”, I mean what is sometimes called the New
+York style — immensely rich, made with pure cream cheese. It is
+not “lite” or “fluffy”; indeed, it rejoices in a density only slightly
+less than that of neutronium. Your true cheesecake is flavor-dense as
+well, requiring no silly embellishments like frosting or fruit sauce;
+this cheese stands alone. Though there is sugar in it, sugar should by
+no means dominate in the flavor, which should rather be savory and
+subtle.

+

The most important test for a proper traditional cheesecake is
+simple. Stick a fork in it vertically. A metal fork, not a silly
+lightweight plastic one. Now take your hand off the fork. If it
+falls over of its own weight, tearing a messy divot in your dessert,
+the cake is fake. A true cheesecake supports the fork indefinitely
+without so much as a quiver. Another test is the texture. A properly
+made cheesecake shows a distinct grainy texture when cut with a fork,
+slightly moist but not expressing liquid to the surface.

+

Color is also significant. Your good cheesecakes are usually pale
+yellow rather than white. The truly superior ones tend to have an
+ever-so-faint, nigh-indetectable bluish tinge. I have studied these
+nuances with attention and care.

+

I’m ordering from an entity called “The Cheescake Factory” in the
+New York heartland of the cheesecake. I order the variety labeled in big
+bold letters “Traditional”. And what do I get?

+

A vile, revolting, over-sweetened, bland cheese gelatinoid thing so
+lacking in integrity that it slumps on the plate.

+

OK, I’m cool with free markets. I’m even cool with free markets
+when they produce lowest-common-denominator results I don’t happen to
+like. It may be that most of the consumers out there adore the gooey
+studge that the soi-disant “Cheesecake Factory” passes off as
+cheesecake. If its crappiness were confined to atrocity-of-the-week
+flavors like “Coffee Heathbar Crunch” or “Craig’s Crazy Carrot Cake
+Cheesecake”, I could sigh in resignation at the wretched tastelessness
+and endure it nevertheless.

+

But, dammit, advertising the characterless pile of goo they gave me
+as “traditional” is fraud. And it’s not a harmless fraud, it’s
+an act of subtle but damaging violence against good taste. It
+de-educates the palate; it lowers everybody’s standards until we lose
+the capability to tell the real thing from a puddle of ersatz shite.
+This is how civilization ends, not with a bang but with a jingle.

+

Don’t get me wrong. I’d rather live with bad desserts than have
+anybody’s culinary standards, even my own, rammed down peoples’
+throats in the name of ‘civilization’ by some snotty academie of
+iron-fisted connoisseurs. Civilizations can die that way too,
+constipated on their own stuffiness.

+

But when some soulless android of a chain restaurant designer
+willfully perverts the meaning of “traditional” so he can sell dreck
+to the ignorant with the illusion that said dreck is just like what his
+Yiddish grandma made, that’s where I reach my limit. The Cheesecake
+Factory must die.

diff --git a/20060204011603.blog b/20060204011603.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..10b7eee --- /dev/null +++ b/20060204011603.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +All she needs is a lab coat and a fright wig +

They laughed at me when that bitch Monica rug-burned
+her knees in the Oval Office. They laughed at my universal health
+care plan. They laughed when I told them of my conversations with
+Eleanor Roosevelt’s ghost — they said I was mad.

+

+

Mad, am I? I’ll show them mad…soon, I’ll unleash my
+mainstream-media minions and deploy my orbital mind-control lasers on
+anyone they don’t successfully brainwash for me. Everyone will learn
+to rue the day they ever laughed at me. I’ll seize the very White
+House itself and dictate my terms to a trembling world!
+Bwahahahahaha!

diff --git a/20060207141813.blog b/20060207141813.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2b5a132 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060207141813.blog @@ -0,0 +1,79 @@ +Un-ending the Internet +

Recently, The Nation ran an article,
+The End of the
+Internet, that viewed with alarm some efforts
+by telephone companies to hack their governing regulations so they can
+price-discriminate. Their plans include tiered pricing so a consumer’s
+monthly rate could be tied to the amount of bandwidth actually used. They
+also want to be able to offer preferred fast access to on-line services
+that pay for the privilege — and the flip side of that could
+be shutting down services like peer-to-peer networking that big media
+companies dislike.

+

One of my regular visitors. David McCabe, asked me what a libertarian
+would do about this. A fair question, representative of a large class
+of problems about what you do to constrain monopolies already in place
+without resorting to more regulation.

+

+

Here’s the answer I gave him:

+

+Deregulate and let the telcos have their tiered pricing — as long as
+we also deregulate enough radio spectrum that the telcos
+(evil monopolist scum that they are) will promptly be hammered flat by
+wireless mesh networks. +

+

David replied “Beautiful. Blog it.” Hence this screed…

+

The fundamental problem with the telecoms regime we have is that
+the Baby Bells inherited from Mama Bell a monopoly lock on the last
+mile (the cables running to end-users’ homes and businesses). More
+backbone capacity would be easy and is in no way a natural monopoly,
+especially given the huge overbuild of optical-fiber trunk lines
+during the Internet boom of the 1990s. But the ‘last mile’, as long
+as it’s wire lines, truly is a natural monopoly or oligopoly —
+nobody wants more than one set of telephone poles per street, and
+their capacity to carry wires is limited. That system doesn’t scale
+up.

+

To a left-wing rag like The Nation, the answer is to
+huff and puff about more regulation. But more regulation would do
+nothing to attack the telcos’ real power position, which is the
+physical constraints on the last mile. The truly pro-freedom anwer is
+to enable the free market to take that power position away from
+them.

+

Wireless mesh networking — flocks of cheap WiFi nodes that
+automatically discover neighboring nodes and act as routers — is
+the technology that can do that. With the right software, networks of
+these can be self-configuring and self-repairing. It’s pure
+libertarianism cast in silicon, a perfectly decentralist bottom-up
+solution that could replace wirelines and the politico-economic
+choke-point they imply.

+

The main thing holding wireless mesh networking back is the small
+size of the bandwidth now allotted to it for spread-spectrum frequency
+hopping. With enough volume, competition would drive the price of
+these creatures to $20 or less per unit — low enough for
+individuals and community organizations to spot them everywhere
+there’s an electrical grid. Increments of capacity would be cheap,
+too; with the right software, your WiFi card could aggregate the
+bandwidth for as many nodes as there happen to be in radio range.

+

(And that software? Open source, of course. Mesh networking relies
+on open source and open standards. Some of the node designs out there
+are open hardware, too. The mesh network would be transparent, top
+to bottom.)

+

Today, many people already leave their WiFi access points open for
+their neighbors to use, even though DSL or cable costs real money,
+because the incremental cost of being nice is negligible. At the
+equilibrium price level of mesh networking, wireless free Internet
+access would be ubiquitous everywhere except deep wilderness areas.

+

But the wireline backbone wouldn’t vanish, because mesh networking solves
+the bandwidth problem at the expense of piling on latency (cumulative
+routing and retransmission delays). Large communications users
+would still find it useful to be hooked up to long-haul fiber networks
+in order to hold down the amount of latency added by multiple hops over the
+mesh. The whole system would self-equilibrate, seeking the most
+efficient mix of free and pay networking.

+

As usual, the best solution to the problems of regulation and
+imperfect markets is not more politics and regulation, but less of it
+— letting the free market work. Not that I expect The
+Nation to figure this out soon, or ever; like all leftists,
+they will almost certainly remain useful idiots for anyone, tyrant or
+telco monopolist, who knows that political ‘solutions’ to market
+problems always favor the powerful and politically connected over the
+little people they are ostensibly designed to help.

diff --git a/20060211043530.blog b/20060211043530.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..afee3e4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060211043530.blog @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +Gramscian damage +

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithet. Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois.

+

We don’t expect ideas to matter — or, when they do, we expect them to matter only because people have been flipped into a vulnerable mode by repression or poverty. Thus all our divagation about the “root causes” of Islamic terrorism, as if the terrorists’ very clear and very ideological account of their own theory and motivations is somehow not to be believed.

+

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions. Yes, the Nazis did this, through organizations like the “German-American Bund” that was outlawed when World War II went hot. Today, the Islamists are having some success at manipulating our politics through fairly transparent front organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

+

But it was the Soviet Union, in its day, that was the master of this game. They made dezinformatsiya (disinformation) a central weapon of their war against “the main adversary”, the U.S. They conducted memetic subversion against the U.S. on many levels at a scale that is only now becoming clear as historians burrow through their archives and ex-KGB officers sell their memoirs.

+

+

The Soviets had an entire “active measures” department devoted to churning out anti-American dezinformatsiya. A classic example is the rumor that AIDS was the result of research aimed at building a ‘race bomb’ that would selectively kill black people.

+

On a different level, in the 1930s members of CPUSA (the Communist Party of the USA) got instructions from Moscow to promote non-representational art so that the US’s public spaces would become arid and ugly.

+

Americans hearing that last one tend to laugh. But the Soviets, following the lead of Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci, took very seriously the idea that by blighting the U.S.’s intellectual and esthetic life, they could sap Americans’ will to resist Communist ideology and an eventual Communist takeover. The explicit goal was to erode the confidence of America’s ruling class and create an ideological vacuum to be filled by Marxism-Leninism.

+

Accordingly, the Soviet espionage apparat actually ran two different kinds of network: one of spies, and one of agents of influence. The agents of influence had the minor function of recruiting spies (as, for example, when Kim Philby was brought in by one of his tutors at Cambridge), but their major function was to spread dezinformatsiya, to launch memetic weapons that would damage and weaken the West.

+

In a previous post on Suicidalism, I identified some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons. Here is that list again:

+
    +
  • There is no truth, only competing agendas.
    • +
  • All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
    • +
  • There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
    • +
  • The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
    • +
  • Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
    • +
  • The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
    • +
  • For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
    • +
  • When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.
    • +
+

As I previously observed, if you trace any of these back far enough, you’ll find a Stalinist intellectual at the bottom. (The last two items on the list, for example, came to us courtesy of Frantz Fanon. The fourth item is the Baran-Wallerstein “world system” thesis.) Most were staples of Soviet propaganda at the same time they were being promoted by “progressives” (read: Marxists and the dupes of Marxists) within the Western intelligentsia.

+

The Soviets consciously followed the Gramscian prescription; they pursued a war of position, subverting the “leading elements” of society through their agents of influence. (See, for example, Stephen Koch’s Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals; summary by Koch here) This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.

+

Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people — at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.

+

Koch shows us that the worst-case scenario was, as it turns out now, the correct one; these ideas, like the “race bomb” rumor, really were instruments deliberately designed to destroy the American way of life. Another index of their success is that most members of the bicoastal elite can no longer speak of “the American way of life” without deprecation, irony, or an automatic and half-conscious genuflection towards the altar of political correctness. In this and other ways, the corrosive effects of Stalin’s meme war have come to utterly pervade our culture.

+

The most paranoid and xenophobic conservatives of the Cold War were, painful though this is to admit, the closest to the truth in estimating the magnitude and subtlety of Soviet subversion. Liberal anticommunists (like myself in the 1970s) thought we were being judicious and fair-minded when we dismissed half of the Right’s complaint as crude blather. We were wrong; the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss really were guilty, the Hollywood Ten really were Stalinist tools, and all of Joseph McCarthy’s rants about “Communists in the State Department” were essentially true. The Venona transcripts and other new material leave no room for reasonable doubt on this score.

+

While the espionage apparatus of the Soviet Union didn’t outlast it, their memetic weapons did. These memes are now coming near to crippling our culture’s response to Islamic terrorism.

+

In this context, Jeff Goldstein has written eloquently about perhaps the most long-term dangerous of these memes — the idea that rights inhere not in sovereign individuals but identity groups, and that every identity group (except the “ruling class”) has the right to suppress criticism of itself through political means up to and including violence.

+

Mark Brittingham (aka WildMonk) has written an excellent essay on the roots of this doctrine in Rousseau and the post-Enlightenment Romantics. It has elsewhere been analyzed and labeled as transnational progressivism. The Soviets didn’t invent it, but they promoted it heavily in a deliberate — and appallingly successful — attempt to weaken the Lockean, individualist tradition that underlies classical liberalism and the U.S. Constitution. The reduction of Western politics to a bitter war for government favor between ascriptive identity groups is exactly the outcome the Soviets wanted and worked hard to arrange.

+

Call it what you will — various other commentators have favored ‘volk-Marxism’ or ‘postmodern leftism’. I’ve called it suicidalism. It was designed to paralyze the West against one enemy, but it’s now being used against us by another. It is no accident that Osama bin Laden so often sounds like he’s reading from back issues of Z magazine, and no accident that both constantly echo the hoariest old cliches of Soviet propaganda in the 1930s and ’40s.

+

Another consequence of Stalin’s meme war is that today’s left-wing antiwar demonstrators wear kaffiyehs without any sense of how grotesque it is for ostensible Marxists to cuddle up to religious absolutists who want to restore the power relations of the 7th century CE. In Stalin’s hands, even Marxism itself was hollowed out to serve as a memetic weapon — it became increasingly nihilist, hatred-focused and destructive. The postmodern left is now defined not by what it’s for but by what it’s against: classical-liberal individualism, free markets, dead white males, America, and the idea of objective reality itself.

+

The first step to recovery is understanding the problem. Knowing that suicidalist memes were launched at us as war weapons by the espionage apparatus of the most evil despotism in human history is in itself liberating. Liberating, too, it is to realize that the Noam Chomskys and Michael Moores and Robert Fisks of the world (and their thousands of lesser imitators in faculty lounges everywhere) are not brave transgressive forward-thinkers but pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant.

+

Brittingham and other have worried that postmodern leftism may yet win. If so, the victory would be short-lived. One of the clearest lessons of recent times (exemplified not just by kaffiyeh-wearing western leftists but by Hamas’s recent clobbering of al-Fatah in the first Palestinian elections) is that po-mo leftism is weaker than liberal individualism in one important respect; it has only the weakest defenses against absolutist fervor. Brittingham tellingly notes po-mo philosopher Richard Rorty’s realization that when the babble of conflicting tribal narratives collapses in exhaustion, the only thing left is the will to power.

+

Again, this is by design. Lenin and Stalin wanted classical-liberal individualism replaced with something less able to resist totalitarianism, not more. Volk-Marxist fantasy and postmodern nihilism served their purposes; the emergence of an adhesive counter-ideology would not have. Thus, the Chomskys and Moores and Fisks are running a program carefully designed to dead-end at nothing.

+

Religions are good at filling that kind of nothing. Accordingly, if transnational progressivism actually succeeds in smothering liberal individualism, its reward will be to be put to the sword by some flavor of jihadi. Whether the eventual winners are Muslims or Mormons, the future is not going to look like the fuzzy multicultural ecotopia of modern left fantasy. The death of that dream is being written in European banlieus by angry Muslim youths under the light of burning cars.

+

In the banlieus and elsewhere, Islamist pressure makes it certain that sooner or later the West is going to vomit Stalin’s memes out of its body politic. The worst way would be through a reflex development of Western absolutism — Christian chauvinism, nativism and militarism melding into something like Francoite fascism. The self-panicking leftists who think they see that in today’s Republicans are comically wrong (as witnessed by the fact that they aren’t being systematically jailed and executed), but it is quite a plausible future for the demographically-collapsing nations of Europe.

+

The U.S., fortunately, is still on a demographic expansion wave and will be till at least 2050. But if the Islamists achieve their dream of nuking “crusader” cities, they’ll make crusaders out of the U.S., too. And this time, a West with a chauvinized America at its head would smite the Saracen with weapons that would destroy entire populations and fuse Mecca into glass. The horror of our victory would echo for a thousand years.

+

I remain more optimistic than this. I think there is still an excellent chance that the West can recover from suicidalism without going through a fevered fascist episode and waging a genocidal war. But to do so, we have to do more than recognize Stalin’s memes; we have to reject them. We have to eject postmodern leftism from our universities, transnational progressivism from our politics, and volk-Marxism from our media.

+

The process won’t be pretty. But I fear that if the rest of us don’t hound the po-mo Left and its useful idiots out of public life with attack and ridicule and shunning, the hard Right will sooner or later get the power to do it by means that include a lot of killing. I don’t want to live in that future, and I don’t think any of my readers do, either. If we want to save a liberal, tolerant civilization for our children, we’d better get to work.

+

UPDATE: My original link to Protein Wisdom went stale. I’m not certain the new one is the same essay, but it is on many of the same ideas.

diff --git a/20060215113617.blog b/20060215113617.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e5ad8f1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060215113617.blog @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +Wal-Mart and the morning after +

Politics is nasty enough when it’s about real issues, because it
+always reduces to somebody holding a gun on somebody else. But
+somehow I find it hardest to take when it’s about faux issues, all the
+machinery of coercion enlisted to no purpose other than for fools to
+posture at each other.

+

+

Here’s a perfect example. The state of Massachusetts, responding to
+a lawsuit backed by abortion-rights groups, has ordered
+Wal-Mart to sell emergency contraception, the so-called “morning
+after” pill that prevents implantation of a fertilized egg in the
+uterine wall.

+

Leading off the parade of morons in this little drama is the
+Religious Right, for huffing and puffing that the action of this pill
+is tantamount to killing a human being. Way to go, guys! Keep those
+women barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen where they belong; perish
+forbid they should be allowed any control over reproduction just
+because pregnancy can easily kill them. Your new slogan, I guess, is
+“Every child of rape is a child of God.”

+

No less idiotic are the three women who sued. Hello, girls? The
+effect period on the pill is less than the amount of time to ship the
+little suckers from Canada. Order on-line and save. Better yet, show
+a little forethought: buy in advance from some local pharmacy that
+wants the business Wal-Mart isn’t getting and keep ‘em handy.

+

Ahhh, but that sane and sensible course wouldn’t do anything
+for the public visibility and fund-raising of the groups backing them.
+The First Law of Victim-Group Politics is: You can never have too many
+victims. If they don’t occur naturally, you must create them.

+

Bringing up the rear, and the worst of the lot, is whatever meddler
+in the Massachusetts legislature thought it was a peachy idea to
+mandate what Wal-Mart sells. Repeat after me: it isn’t any of your
+damned business what Wal-Mart sells. There’s this concept called
+“free enterprise”. Maybe you’ve heard of it?

+

And all this foofaraw is completely meaningless. Because the bluenoses
+can’t actually prevent anyone from buying morning-after pills, there is
+absolutely no point in political mandates intended to ensure that they can.
+But Wal-Mart does its propitiatory dance to the right, and Massachusetts
+politicians do their propitiatory dance to the left, and nobody anywhere
+gains a damn thing.

+

Nobody, that is, except professional busybodies — people who want
+to politicize all choices. A swift death to all such vermin would
+leave the rest of us far better off.

diff --git a/20060217171916.blog b/20060217171916.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fb7ce07 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060217171916.blog @@ -0,0 +1,43 @@ +Ephemeralization against the bureaucracy +

Segway inventor Dean Kamen unveils his next act, and it’s a doozy.
+He’s invented two devices to address the power
+and clean-water problems in the Third World — essentially, a
+rugged still and a generator that burns cow dung. But the real
+challenge to conventional thinking is Kamen’s (rightly) contemptuous
+dismissal of conventional development economics, and his plan to
+end-run govenments.

+

+

What makes Kamen’s invention possible is the phenomenon Buckminster
+Fuller called ‘ephemeralization’ — the replacement of bulk
+matter by design information as technologies get smaller, lighter, and
+more clever. Of course the most dramatic example of this is the
+microchip, and the huge number of ways computer-mediated
+communications increasingly substitute for pushing around matter and
+energy — but the phenomenon is everywhere. I haven’t seen the
+blueprints for either device, but does anyone want to bet against the
+proposition that they’re a helluva lot smaller, lighter, and more
+ingeniously designed than their nearest functional equivalents would
+have been in 1960 or 1980?

+

No? No takers? I didn’t think so. Modern life is so saturated
+with ephemeralization that we hardly notice it any more. Think about
+the weight difference between your first cellphone and the one you
+have now — then think about how they compared to the big old
+Bakelite-encased wireline handsets of the 1960s. As we learn how to
+ephemeralize more and more of our technology, we downsize and
+decentralize it because that’s the cheap and effective way to go.
+Entire countries are now opting out of building telephone landlines.
+Why bother, when cellphone towers are cheaper and less obtrusive?

+

Kamen is taking the next logical step: downsizing and
+decentralizing the power and water infrastructure. And look at the
+way he plans to do it; not by enlisting governments, but by tapping
+local entrepreneurialism. Says Kamen: “Not required are engineers,
+pipelines, epidemiologists, or microbiologists,” says Kamen. “You
+don’t need any -ologists. You don’t need any building permits,
+bribery, or bureaucracies.”

+

Yeah, baby! Techno-libertarians like me have been saying for
+thirty years that the free market would someday simply compete the
+State out of existence. Kamen, bless him, is actually setting out to
+do it — or, at least, to demonstrate that the heavyweight
+physical and bureaucratic infrastructure many of us think we need to
+provide ‘public goods’ like clean water and power is an actual hindrance
+rather than a help. Today, Third-World villages; tomorrow the world.

diff --git a/20060223023320.blog b/20060223023320.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c8992f3 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060223023320.blog @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +Against Suicidalism from Down Under +

Keith Windschuttle gets it. In The Adversary
+Culture he identifies the same suicidalist pathology that
+Mark Brittingham and Jeff Goldstein and I have been writing about
+recently.

+

Windschuttle, an Australian historian, identifies historians and
+cultural-studies types on the academic left as vectors of the
+disease. I wonder if he’s read Koch on Willi Munzenberg or Haynes
+& Klehr’s Denial and gets how thoroughly these
+people were piping to a tune that Stalin’s espionage apparat wrote?

+

For anyone still tempted to believe blaming the Soviets for the
+flakiness of academia is just conspiratorial raving, get a load of this
+and this:
+it seems that during the Korean War the Soviets and North Koreans
+thought anti-U.S. dezinformatsiya so important that they gassed their
+own people in order to fabricate evidence for a legend that
+U.S. troops had used chemical weapons in Korea. They did this with
+the clear intention of damaging U.S. prestige, of breaking our will to
+oppose Soviet expansionism by making us doubt and loathe ourselves.
+We have statements from the people who planned and executed the
+operation.

+

They got the result they were after. Left-wing historians like
+Gabriel Kolko dutifully repeated legends of U.S. chemical warfare,
+terrorism and atrocities in Korea for forty years afterwards. In fact,
+Kolko continued to repeat the chemical-warfare legend even after the
+Soviets themselves repudiated it in a published 1953 letter to Mao
+Tse-Tung!

+

Whether Kolko himself (or any other individual leftie) was taking
+orders from Moscow or was an ‘honest’ dupe fed the legend by Soviet
+propaganda organs is not really very significant. What matters is
+that Kolko, and all the the rest of the Marxist intelligentsia who
+became cogs in Stalin’s memetic war machine, willingly did their part
+to injure ‘the main enemy’. They retailed the lies of a tyrant who
+murdered more people than Hitler, and they have not yet been called to
+account for it.

+

Say what you will about conservative historians and conservatives
+in general (I can find plenty of nasty things to say of them, and
+frequently have); at least they never sunk quite so low as to repeat
+totalitarian propaganda after the totalitarians themselves had
+disowned it.

diff --git a/20060223153824.blog b/20060223153824.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8af1f5e --- /dev/null +++ b/20060223153824.blog @@ -0,0 +1,67 @@ +Outsourcing breeds more jobs +

CNNMoney reports:

+

+Demand for technology workers in the United States continues to grow
+in spite of American companies shifting more technology work overseas,
+according to a new study. +

+

Sigh. Is there, like, some cosmic law that reporters have to be
+poisonously ignorant about economics? Of course outsourcing
+stimulates domestic demand. Increases in efficiency and better
+exploitation of comparative advantage do that.

+

Maybe I’m just naive, but shouldn’t a reporter at a business
+news channel know better than to subscribe to the fixed-lump-of-labor
+fallacy?

+

+

+The study cites estimates that between two to three percent of IT jobs
+will be lost annually to lower-wage developing countries through the
+process known as offshoring. But it said the U.S. IT sector’s overall
+growth should outpace that loss of jobs, expanding opportunities for
+those trained in fields such as software architecture, product design,
+project management and IT consulting. +

+

Comparative advantage, kids. That’s what it’s all about. If
+there’s any way in which the average programming skillsets in
+the U.S. and India diverge, market pressure will sort jobs and push them
+where they’re most efficiently performed.

+

+“Despite all the publicity in the United States about jobs being lost
+to India and China, the size of the IT employment market in the United
+States today is higher than it was at the height of the dot.com boom,”
+[...] lower wage scales in India and China are not pushing down pay
+for U.S. IT workers. [...] IT workers have seen steady gains in
+average annual wages for different fields in the sector of between
+about two to five percent a year. +

+

This is where libertarians like me get to gloat a bit, pump a fist
+while shouting “laissez-faire!”, and point out that both left-wing
+antiglobalization moonbats and right-wing isolationist/protectionist
+wingnuts that they are full of horse puckey up to here. Welcome to free
+trade, making everybody richer exactly the way we expect it to do when
+governments don’t piss in the soup because they think they’ll like the
+flavor better.

+

+The study suggests that there are several factors in the continued
+growth in demand for IT workers here. The report said part of it is
+due to the use of offshoring by U.S. companies, including start-up
+firms, to limit their costs and thus grow their businesses. That, in
+turn, creates more opportunities here even as an increasing amount of
+work is done overseas. +

+

And there it is. Offsharing grows businesses so they can find or
+create more domestic opportunities. That’s the invisible hand right
+there, giving a rude finger to every single “managed trade” idiot and
+regulatory busybody on the planet.

+

+The study also said that companies from a variety of sectors in the
+economy continue to discover greater efficiency and more competitive
+operations through investment in IT. The study therefore argues there
+will be continued growing demand for IT as underserved fields such as
+health care, retail trade, construction, and certain services make
+greater investment in technology. +

+

This means that IT is being substituted for other, more expensive
+inputs of production (a kind of ephemeralization). As long
+as that keeps happening, demand (and IT wages) will continue to
+rise.

diff --git a/20060224153119.blog b/20060224153119.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ea092d1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060224153119.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Game Theory and Vote Fraud +

Any democracy should aspire to a perfect, fraud-free voting system. But today’s loudest complainers on this issue — mainly Democrats complaining about Republican election victories — should be careful what they wish for, because they might get it.

+

To see why, let’s apply a little game theory to the problem. Ask yourself under what circumstances vote fraud will be most effective, and have the least risk of being detected.

+

+

Other factors being equal, the probability that vote fraud will be detected will scale up with the number of voting machines you tamper with rather than the number of votes. Thus, tampering will be most effective and least risky when relatively many people are being served by relatively few machines — that is, areas of high population density.

+

Another factor favoring high-density areas as vote-fraud sites is that poll-watchers are less likely to know most of their neighbors by sight, and thus more likely to pass a bogus voter. Also, in conditions of high traffic at the polling station people voting multiple times are less likely to be spotted.

+

We should expect vote fraud to be more common on behalf of the party controlling the local administration of a ward than on behalf of its opponents, because the controlling party will be better able to get covert access to the machines and better positioned to suppress any evidence of tampering.

+

Finally, we should expect vote fraud to be generally more prevalent among parties who think it less likely they’ll win an honest vote — that is, parties in an overall minority position. Especially, we should foresee fraud from minority parties who have reason to believe that polls and demographic projections overstate their strength.

+

What do these predictions tell us to expect, given the facts of American political demography? Well…the most important of these facts is that Democrats tend to carry areas of high population density and Republicans areas of low population density. To an excellent first approximation, the Democrat vote is urban, the Republican vote is rural, and the suburbs swing by local population density. Finally, it is also a well-known fact among political demographers that polls (especially those canvassing the general population rather than ‘likely voters’) tend to oversample Democrats.

+

(American voting patterns used to be more complicated, mainly because the Democratic party once had a strong rural Southern wing. But, as I have written elsewhere, the Democrats have spent the last forty years reducing themselves to a regional party of the coastal metroplexes.)

+

This tells us to expect that vote fraud will be primarily be a Democratic crime, especially practiced by Democratic urban party machines and increasing as the now-slender national Republican majority increases.

+

Both major parties behave as though they believe this to be true. This news story is entirely typical of the resulting skirmishes — a Republican legislature proposes a requirement that voters show photo ID, a Democratic governor vetoes it.

+

I’m in favor of moves to clean up electoral fraud, but that’s an easy position for me to take because I loathe both major parties. Partisan Democrats should be less sanguine; on the evidence, a perfectly clean voting system would cost them painful losses in swing districts without any corresponding gains in Republican heartland country.

diff --git a/20060227180837.blog b/20060227180837.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fd57417 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060227180837.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Telecoms regulation considered harmful +

Doc Searls asked me to put the argument for total telecoms deregulation into a nutshell, then blog it so he could point at it. Here it is.

+

+

Telecoms regulation, to the extent it was ever justified, was justified on the basis of preventing or remedying market failures — such as, in particular, lack of market incentives to provide universal coverage.

+

The market failures in telecoms all derive from the high fixed-capital costs of conventional wirelines. These have two major effects: (1) incentives to provide service in rural areas are weak, because the amount of time required to amortize large fixed costs makes for poor discounted ROI; and (2) in higher-density areas, the last mile of wire is a natural monopoly/oligopoly.

+

New technologies are directly attacking this problem. Wi-Fi, wireless mesh networks, IP over powerlines, and cheap fenceline cable dramatically lower the fixed capital costs of last-mile service. The main things holding these technologies back are regulatory barriers (including, notably, not enough spectrum allocated to WiFi and UWB).

+

The right answer: deregulate everything, free the new technologies to go head-to-head against the wired last mile, and let the market sort it all out.

diff --git a/20060228061503.blog b/20060228061503.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..aaaef1e --- /dev/null +++ b/20060228061503.blog @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +The Meme War Continues +

Former Soviet Dissident
+Warns For EU Dictatorship. Sound like a crazy premise? Wait. It gets
+better. Vladimir Bukovsky, a leading dissident of the Soviet era whom was
+invited to testify at the Russian government’s inquiry into whether the
+Soviet Communist Party had been a criminal institution. got to see more
+of the KGB’s secret reports to its masters than perhaps anyone else since
+the old Soviet Union fell. He says:

+
+

In 1992 I had unprecedented access to Politburo and Central
+Committee secret documents which have been classified, and still are
+even now, for 30 years. These documents show very clearly that the
+whole idea of turning the European common market into a federal state
+was agreed between the left-wing parties of Europe and Moscow as a
+joint project [...] the structures of the European Union were initially
+built with the purpose of fitting into the Soviet structure.

+
+

That’s right. The European Left cooperated with a Soviet project
+to make Europe amenable to totalitarian control from Moscow, and not
+way back in the 1950s, either; the key agreements were made around
+1985! Read the whole article; I can’t do justice to Bukovsky’s report
+in a summary.

+

To anyone who read my essay on Gramscian Damage and scoffed
+at the idea that the western Left operated as instruments of Soviet
+ideological subversion intended to wreck the West, wake up! This is
+not a phenomenon of the far past. Bukovsky draws a straight line from
+Western “political correctness” back to the Soviet meme war.

+

“[T]hat is one field in which I am an expert,” Bukovsky (who spent twelve
+years in Soviet labor camps) says, “I know how Gulags spring up.”

diff --git a/20060228132539.blog b/20060228132539.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b129c54 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060228132539.blog @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +How Sweet the Uses of Conspiracy +

Glenn Reynolds
+writes:

+
+

When other groups decide that the way to get favorable press is to
+use violence, those who have wimped out now will have no one to blame
+but themselves. As a reader emailed me a while back, what use is a
+free press if it doesn’t believe in free speech?

+

People talk about Eurabia, but what’s really happened is that
+Europe has become Weimarized, with governments and institutions too
+morally and intellectually weak to stand up for the principles they
+pretend to embody. And we know what that led to last time . . . .

+
+

Glenn’s ellipsis points to the same future I’ve foreseen, one in
+which true fascism re-emerges as an important ideology in the West.
+If that’s the only reservoir of Western will to resist Islamism
+remaining, may the gods help us all because we are going to hear
+marching jackboots again. And what’s worse, we’re going to learn to
+like that sound. To hear salvation in it, because the
+alternative of surrender and creeping dhimmitude is worse.

+

This is why understanding the nature and scope of the Soviets’ meme
+war against the West is important — because, whatever native
+defects in Western political culture there may be, European elites did
+not simply fall into a state of “morally and intellectually weak”.
+They were pushed. Manipulated, memetically poisoned, seduced
+by the agents of tyranny for more than sixty years.

+

Humans are a fractious lot, but we’re instinctively wired to
+respond to external threats by standing shoulder-to-shoulder.
+Exposing the Soviet meme war is more than just an exercise in
+recovering the truth of history, it’s a way of re-framing our
+intramural political conflicts that may allow us to purge suicidalist
+thinking and find a collective backbone again without having to go
+through a neo-fascist episode to get there.

+

I’ll go so far as to say that if no actual conspiracy to drag the
+West into intellectual
+nihilism and moral paralysis had existed, it would be necessary at
+this point in our history to invent one.

diff --git a/20060228213622.blog b/20060228213622.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..edc7c7c --- /dev/null +++ b/20060228213622.blog @@ -0,0 +1,43 @@ +Media Analysts Sound Pessimistic as Iraq Civil War Fails to Materialize +

WASHINGTON — Media analysts sounded an increasingly gloomy
+note today following news that a full-scale outbreak of civil war in
+Iraq had been averted. “The prospects for regime change in Washington
+seem increasingly remote,” said one senior White House reporter who
+spoke on condition of anonymity.

+

+

“We gave the insurgent Democrats millions of dollars worth of air
+time, fake-but-accurate reporting, and the deadliest editorials we
+could write,” he continued, “but their popular support in-country just wasn’t what we expected.”

+

Efforts to isolate and discredit the rogue theocratic regime of
+George “Chimpy” Bush in the international arena have been more
+successful, the press spokesman said. “The U.N. is completely with
+our program on that one,” he said, also citing moves by lawmakers
+in Belgium and elsewhere to have Bush arrested and charged with
+war crimes should he enter their jurisdiction.

+

While there is some resistance to the regime in the urbanized
+Northeast, the Bushites’ strong base of support in the tribal
+provinces of the South and Midwest has been sufficient to keep them in
+power. “Despite frequent overflights,” the spokesman admitted “we
+know almost nothing about conditions there.”

+

Faulty intelligence has been a continuing theme in the press’s
+failure to achieve its policy goals. Critics charge that expert
+evaluations have been routinely distorted or suppressed to further a
+preconceived agenda, reading to major embarrassments like the
+Rathergate scandal, false allegations of Koran-flushing at Guantanamo,
+and erroneous reports of cannibalism in the New Orleans Superdome.

+

In the wake of these failures, a rising tide of anti-press
+sentiment is making its choices more difficult. Fearing to venture
+from its limousines and air-conditioned hotels in the Blue State Zone,
+the press seems increasingly prone to live in a bubble, with wishful
+thinking substituting for a clear grasp of facts on the ground.

+

In this atmosphere, outright fabrications like those at the heart
+of the the Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair scandals have become all
+too common, and led to the tragic downfall of at least one major editor.
+Despite this, calls for “reality-based” reporting have gone largely
+unheeded by a media establishment insistent on its ideological vision
+of a better future.

+

Media planners have pinned most of their remaining hopes on the
+2006 elections despite the disappointments of 2000 and 2004. “Those
+elections didn’t come out the way we wanted,” a former CBS staffer
+observed, “so they must have been rigged by at least the 15% swing we can deliver.
+We’ll try harder next time.”

diff --git a/20060303132338.blog b/20060303132338.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..85b919b --- /dev/null +++ b/20060303132338.blog @@ -0,0 +1,112 @@ +Rethinking Imperialism +

One of the effects of the Soviet meme war I’ve been writing about
+recently is that to most educated Westerners it is absolutely taboo to
+think that Western imperialism might have been a good thing. Since
+the end of World War II, even conservatives have generally conceded
+this point, as a way not to look reactionary with respect to a class
+of controversies that seemed safely dead. Why defend imperialism when
+your country no longer has either the desire or the capability to
+engage in it?

+

+

Unfortunately, as I observed
+in 2002, some parts of the Third World have now become so
+dangerous to the whole world that some kind of neo-imperialism seems
+to be required of us as a matter of self-defence. Or, as I put it a
+few months before the second Iraq war began,

+
+

In the 19th century, the Western powers built empires for prestige
+and economic advantage. In the 21st century, we may be discovering
+that we need to get back into the imperialism business as a matter of
+survival. It may turn out that the 20th century was an interlude
+doomed to end as cheap transportation made the world smaller and
+improving weapons technology made large-scale destruction inexpensive
+even for barbarian thugs like Saddam Hussein.

+

Envy the British of Sir Richard Burton’s time. They could conquer
+half the world for simple gain without worrying about the
+Fuzzy-Wuzzies or the Ndebele aerosol-dropping pasteurella pestis on
+Knightsbridge. We — and I mean specifically the U.S. now —
+may have to conquer the Islamic world a second time, simply because
+the risks of war and the moral hazards of imperialism are less
+threatening than the prospect of some Allah-crazed Islamofascist
+detonating a knapsack nuke on the Smithsonian Mall.

+
+

I was only a little ahead of the curve on this one. In the war
+year of 2003, historian Niall Ferguson came at the same question from
+a slightly different angle in Empire:
+How Britain Made the Modern World and, later, in
+Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire. A summary of his
+argument can be read here.
+Ferguson makes a strong case that the British Empire was, despite
+obvious flaws, a good thing for the world. In 2006 that seems an even
+more difficult case to refute than it did three years ago — one
+doubts, for example, that an Iran still run by the British would be
+threatening to nuke Israel.

+

Ferguson goes on to argue explicitly that the U.S. has a global
+empire, that contrary to the fulminations of remnant Marxists this is
+a positive development, and that we’d bloody well better get
+good at running it. I’m not so sure about that; writing as an
+economist rather than a cultural historian, I have argued that U.S.
+hegemony has neither the intentions nor the structural features of
+empire. (Analysis continued here.)

+

For libertarian reasons, I hope the U.S. hegemony can continue to
+get away with not having the structural features of empire. Because,
+in the long run, empire is bad for the imperialist country itself on
+many levels ranging from economic to moral. Imperialists have to spend
+a lot of blood, treasure, and talent maintaining their dominion; the
+common end result is that the home-country economy is hollowed out and
+the imperial class becomes lazy and parasitic. Former imperial powers
+tend to degrade into stultified, shambolic backwaters absorbed in
+tattered dreams of past glory.

+

Still, at this point in world history it’s fair to reopen the older
+question: was imperialism so bad for the natives? Are there cases where
+they should have been grateful to be overrun and ruled by foreigners with
+Maxim guns? Are there cases where they were grateful, and even still are?

+

Actually, the answer turns out to be yes. The two most conspicuous
+cases I know of are the Phillippines and Belize — both places where a
+primarily non-European population looks rather fondly on its colonial
+occupiers. Some parts of what was formerly French West Africa have
+positive memories as well.

+

Very few places other than the Phillippines ever had the good luck to
+be colonized by Americans, and it’s indicative of the ‘good luck’ that
+almost all of them are parts of the U.S. now and the natives’
+descendants have full citizenship and are more numerous and wealthier
+than when they were at time of first contact.

+

But, as Ferguson eloquently argues, the British empire was
+generally a pretty good deal for the natives. Railroads, sanitation,
+and the rule of law count for rather a lot. And by objective measures
+like incidence of famine, warfare, and civil disorder much of Africa
+(and Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia) has been worse off
+since independence than under colonial rule.

+

More generally, whether imperialism was a good thing our not
+depends on who the imperialists were. All were bad some of the time,
+but only some were bad all of the time. Japanese imperialism was a genocidal
+nightmare, and the Russian Empire’s brutality was limited mainly by
+its incompetence. What the Belgians got up to in the Congo doesn’t
+bear much thinking about either.

+

But the Germans, despite nasty spots like the Herero massacres,
+weren’t too awful. Nor the French; they, like the British, believed
+in a mission civilatrice and usually behaved
+accordingly. Another objective check on this is that France still has
+overseas departments in the Third World that are in no hurry to get
+out from under the supposed yoke of European domination.

+

I think Niall Ferguson is correct when he argues that what made the
+British Empire mostly a good thing was the presence of a strong
+classical-liberal critique of empire from within itself. The effect
+was that the British were unable to resist demands for autonomy and
+liberty from their subject peoples once those subjects had become
+civilized enough to make those demands in the language of classical
+liberalism.

+

What was true of the British is even more true of the U.S., as (for
+example) the independence of the Phillippines demonstrates. In Iraq,
+which opponents of the U.S. repesent as an imperial adventure, there
+has never been any question that the Iraqis would swiftly form their
+own government and have political independence from the U.S.; the
+option of ruling the country through proconsuls as we did for years
+after WWII in Germany and Japan wasn’t even on the table.

+

A kinder, gentler, imperialism? Yes, actually; but, as Ferguson
+and I have pointed out, the U.S.’s behavior is still continuous with
+the entire history of Western imperialism, with all the promises and perils
+that implies. Which means that, rather than accepting the simple
+“imperialism = evil” equation dinned into us us by the Soviets and
+their apologists, we need to learn from that history and, as much as
+possible, try to avoid the bad parts and replicate the good.

diff --git a/20060306095515.blog b/20060306095515.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e3454b4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060306095515.blog @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +“How To Become A Hacker” updated +

Just a minor edit. Correcting some translation URLs and removing C# from the bad-languages shitlist now that Mono has made it portable. Read it here.

diff --git a/20060306155416.blog b/20060306155416.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1823bdf --- /dev/null +++ b/20060306155416.blog @@ -0,0 +1,73 @@ +If Hollywood Were Really Brave +

The Oscar night of 2006 brought us the unedifying spectacle of
+George Clooney (whom I must say I truly admire when he shuts his yap
+and acts) celebrating Hollywood’s bravery for being willing
+to make movies like Brokeback Mountain and Good Night
+and Good Luck.

+

Conservative commentators have already pointed out
+how hollow and laughable it is to suppose that left-wing political
+correctness is in any way ‘brave’ in today’s Hollywood, so I won’t
+re-plow that ground. Instead, I’ll propose eight movies I think
+Hollywood would make if it were really brave.

+

+

############################################################

+

The Crescent’s Edge

+

This thinly fictionalized version of Salman Rushdie’s life on the
+run stars Ben Kingsley as a beleaguered leftist intellectual forced to
+question his own multiculturalist assumptions as he evades fanatical
+mujahedeen who seek to kill him for having defamed the Prophet.

+

A Nightmare South of Market

+

Ray Liotta stars as an idealistic young doctor determined to halt
+the spread of AIDS who crusades against the promiscuity and
+needle-drug abuse endemic in San Francisco’s gay bathhouse scene.
+Don’t miss Gary Oldman’s cameo as a homosexual Scoutmaster.

+

The Thin Green Line

+

Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson star in a gritty war film celebrating
+U.S. special forces in Afghanistan, the men who took down the barbaric
+Taliban regime. Audiences at Cannes and Sundance were deeply shocked
+by its sympathetic portrayal of the modern American military.

+

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

+

This faithful adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s 1966 SF classic,
+starring Nicholas Cage as Manuel Garcia O’Kelly Davis and Mira Sorvino
+as Wyoming Knott, challenges viewers to imagine a libertarian future.
+Gripping SFX of meteoroid bombardment contrast with searching questions
+about the legitimacy of government as the Lunar nation struggles to be
+born. (Rumor has it that Paul Verhoeven was at one point forcibly
+ejected from the set of this film.)

+

Never Again

+

+

In this sprawling family epic, three generations of Israelis fight
+to preserve the Middle East’s only democracy from implacable and
+bloodthirsty enemies on every side. An ensemble cast of unknowns
+struggles with war, terrorism, and tragedy in a film that unflinchingly
+affirms Jewish identity and doesn’t fear to confront Nazi and
+Pan-Arabist atrocities.

+

A Tree Grows In Harlem

+

Morgan Freeman and Halle Berry star as a father/daughter team of
+neighborhood activists who decide blaming Whitey isn’t enough and
+challenge ghetto blacks to take responsibility for solving their own
+problems. Villains (and victims of this film’s wicked satirical edge) include
+recognizable takes on Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Louis Farrakhan,
+but the enemy the two must struggle hardest to defeat is the
+government bureaucracy set up to ‘help’ their people.

+

Unintended Conseqences

+

Roy Scheider stars as a dedicated sport shooter who vows to seek
+justice after his daughter is killed during a no-knock BATF/DEA raid
+on their home. This searing expose of contemporary American
+law-enforcement abuses takes on both the madness of the “War on Drugs”
+and the random but brutal persecution of civilian gun owners.

+

The Venona Diaries

+

Eric Bana stars as an Iraq-veteran-turned-academic who discovers
+that the shadowy networks of influence set up by the KGB during the
+Cold War are not only still active on U.S. college campuses but
+solidifying an alliance with Islamic terrorists. Heart-pounding
+action ensues as Bana races to head off the act of mass murder that
+will seal the Marxist/Islamist alliance in blood.

+

############################################################

+

When I say ‘brave’, I don’t mean ‘brave’ as in “it would lose
+money”. Any of these films could easily be a huge hit with actual,
+you know, audiences. No. I meant ‘brave’ as in “the
+self-congratulating limousine-liberal elitists who brought us this
+year’s Oscar nominees would be out for blood if any of these
+films ever got made”. It would be a fearless filmmaker indeed who’d
+court their wrath.

diff --git a/20060310035054.blog b/20060310035054.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9936449 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060310035054.blog @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +Out of the Frame +

Movie ticket receipts in North America dipped by six percent in
+2005 to nine billion dollars, comes today’s report on the status of
+the film industry.

+

The most hyped movie of 2005 was a depressing, pokey flick about
+gay sheepherders. The Oscar nominations were otherwise dominated by
+one movie that flogged us all for our supposed racism in a wearisomely
+familiar way, another that rehashed left-wing grievances against a
+minor and ineffective demagogue who’s been dead for pushing fifty
+years, and a thriller that made an Islamic suicide bomber out to be
+a saint and Americans parasitic villains.

+

Call me crazy, but I can’t help but think there might be some tenuous
+shred of a hint of a connection here…

+

+

Hollywood is still capable of producing a decent flick now and
+again (I think the last really good one I saw was
+Firefly). But if George Clooney was right when he said Hollywood should be
+proud to be out of touch, it’s got more and more to be proud of every
+year. I’m no conservative and no prude either, but I have not even
+the slightest interest in a movie about two sad losers with penises
+compulsively buggering while their lives and marriages fall apart
+around them. Cripes — if you held a contest to come up with a
+story concept that would repel the heterosexual 96% of males, and
+people of both sexes who go to the movies to be entertained,
+you couldn’t do better than that.

+

Don’t bother telling me what I’m supposed to feel about
+Brokeback Mountain or what a philistine I am for dismissing
+it out of hand, or why it would be good for me to see it. That’s exactly
+my point; I don’t want to pay $9.00 to see a movie because somebody else
+thought it would be good for me. I buy entertainment from Hollywood, not
+moral prescriptions, and if Hollywood now thinks its job is to improve
+my character it can just fuck off.

+

It happens that in America in 2006, Hollywood is trying to pound
+wacky left-wing political correctness down our throats, but my
+complaint would be identical if the movie industry were taken over by
+Christian evangelicals and persisted in cranking out edifying tales
+from the Bible. Fuck all that noise; the harder you try to
+‘uplift’ me in either direction, the more I’ll gravitate to the simple
+thalamic pleasures of gratuitous nudity and big explosions.

+

Actually, I expect Hollywood’s drift to get far worse. All
+indications are that the people who greenlight films live so deep
+inside the bubble world of elite bicoastal left-liberalism that
+they’re barely aware anything else exists. And to the limited extent
+the are aware, they feel little but contempt for people on the
+outside. This kind of problem tends to be self-reinforcing.

+

But it’s difficult to serve customers that you feel little other
+than contempt for. Sooner or later, they tend to notice the contempt.
+And go elsewhere. I expect those box-office receipts to keep falling;
+the interesting question, now, is when Hollywood’s narcissistic,
+dysfunctional culture will break under the resulting strain.

diff --git a/20060312023212.blog b/20060312023212.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..966f694 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060312023212.blog @@ -0,0 +1,69 @@ +When Hollywood Gets It Right +

My last two posts
+(If Hollywood Were Really Brave
+and Out of the Frame)
+have slammed Hollywood pretty hard for cranking out preachy, boring crap
+while congratulating itself on its bravery. I’ll make it a triptych by
+examining some recent movies that I found truly excellent.

+

+

Lord Of The Rings (2001-2004)

+

Tolkien fans went into these movies dreading a disappointment and
+came out stunned by the power and fidelity with which director Peter
+Jackson (himself a lifelong fan) brought Middle-Earth to life. It was
+a revelation that a fantasy film this good and this true to its
+materials could get made inside the Hollywood system at all. Most of
+the credit seems to go to Jackson, who insisted on doing it
+right; but kudos to everyone in the cast (except the
+inexplicably unconvincing Cate Blanchett) who clearly gave these movies
+everything they had and then some.

+

The Incredibles (2004)

+

If there’s anyone out there who still thinks animated film has to
+be trivial entertainment or just for children, this is the movie to
+nuke that misconception into vapor. What an amazing and wonderful
+work of art this was — entertaining, intelligent, emotionally
+rich, morally serious without being preachy, deeply humane. And with
+a tasty libertarian-verging-on-Objectivist subtext, too!

+

Serenity (2005)

+

And speaking of libertarian subtexts — this movie’s punchline
+is the hardest slam against coercive social engineering I’ve ever
+seen on film. Along the way to it we get plenty of action, the
+superb ensemble acting we’d come to expect from the TV series, humor,
+horrror and a lot of plain old visual gorgeousness. Extra points for
+the hot-chick-with-mad-kung-fu-skillz fight scene…

+

Open Range (2003)

+

I thought this was an underappreciated gem, a superb Western in the
+traditional style that even managed to extract a fine performance from
+within Kevin Costner’s excessive self-regard. Robert Duvall was even
+better as the tough old trail-boss Costner’s ex-gunfighter rides with.
+Annette Bening barely holds up her end as the female lead, but that’s
+OK; this is a film about men, and manhood, in the best sense of both
+terms. There’s one scene where she serves Costner’s and Duvall’s
+characters tea; the wordless moment when the two are trying to fit
+their work-gnarled fingers through delicate bone-china handles is one
+of the most complex and poignant bits I’ve ever seen in a movie.

+

The Last Samurai (2003)

+

I’ve reviewed this movie in a previous blog entry; go there. Alas, the trend
+towards better historicals I was so happy about in 2003 didn’t
+continue; instead, we got disappointments like Troy and
+the mega-craptacular Alexander.

+

Looney Toons: Back In Action (2003)

+

Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the whole Warner Brothers posse rock
+the house old-school style. But this was no mere gag-fest; the chase
+scenes running through famous paintings in the Louvre were art and
+satire and satire about art of a very high order (the chase through
+Dali’s The Persistence of Memory was particularly
+brilliant). Marvin the Martian gets more screen time than his entire
+previous career put together, especially during the slam-bang finish
+set in (animated) Earth orbit that wonderfully sends up the Star Wars
+movies and finally (finally!) lets Daffy be the hero.

+

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

+

This movie absolutely should not have worked. The plot was thin,
+the maguffin was a ridiculous lift from a Disney amusement-park ride,
+Orlando Bloom uttered a lifeless Errol Flynn imitation in lieu of a
+performance, and Keira Knightley forgot anything she might have known
+about acting (or possibly she was just stunned by the wooden quality of
+the script). It was all redeemed by Johnny Depp’s incandescently
+brilliant turn as Captain Jack Sparrow, proving that a good enough
+actor can bring life to even the most formulaic crap. Depp didn’t
+just carry this movie on his back, he spun it on one finger with an
+insouciant grin.

diff --git a/20060313132210.blog b/20060313132210.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1145e03 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060313132210.blog @@ -0,0 +1,73 @@ +Hotness in Hollywood +

I had planned my string of meditations on the movies to stop with
+three. But, having succumbed to the mischievous blandishments of my
+beloved wife Cathy, here’s a fourth. Today I shall consider hotness in
+Hollywood — some movies that at least partly sold me with
+sex, and how they did it.

+

+

So, without further ado, my personal tribute to the most
+incandescent lovelies in recent movies.

+

First, Kelly Ann Hu in The Scorpion King (2002). No
+swashbuckling sword-and-sorcery movie would be complete without a
+scantily-clad sorceress in it. Kelly Ann Hu fills her chainmail
+bikini in a way guaranteed to make any red-blooded geek fall to his
+knees and howl at the moon. This is your most traditional sort of
+starlet role, as a sexy arm decoration for the male lead. You
+feminist killjoys out there can grump all you want about all that
+exposed flesh, but oh…my…Goddess…she
+was fine. And I didn’t hear any of you gals complaining
+about The Rock running around in nothing but a loincloth, did I,
+hmmm?

+

Next, Liv Tyler as Arwen in the Lord Of The Rings movies
+(2001-2004). Another fantasy, another fetching wench. This one,
+however, displays much less skin and gets to kick butt occasionally
+— one of Jackson’s better plot changes was having her replace
+Gildor Inglorion Glorfindel in the rescue of the hobbits from Weathertop. Most
+erotic moments for me: the close-ups on Liv’s face and lips as
+she was speaking Elvish. This is surely the most beautiful woman
+on the planet.

+

No discussion of recent screen hotness can possibly be complete
+without a nod towards Angelina Jolie in the Tomb Raider movies
+(2001, 2003). Given Ms. Jolie’s luscious natural abundance of curves, I
+thought it silly and unnecessary that they padded her for this role.
+I admired her game efforts to perform something resembling acting in
+the first movie; I feel she she might even have succeeded but for the
+horrible dog of a script. In the second movie she gave up, but no
+blame attaches. My favorite moments were the homages to Diana Rigg
+playing Emma Peel back in the sixties.

+

Now we come to Kate Beckinsale in Van Helsing (2004).
+Much more active butt-kicking here, albeit conducted in an improbable
+leather corset vaguely recalling Frank’n’furter in the old Rocky
+Horror Picture Show. There is no question about Kate’s gender,
+however, and her sexiness is only enhanced by the array of exotic
+weapons and martial-arts moves she wields. Made me want to spar with her,
+then bed her, then spar with her again…

+

Halle Berry in Die Another Day (2002) gets plenty of
+alpha-female things to do and ought to have been more convincing at
+them than Kate Beckinsale or Angelina Jolie, if only because she isn’t
+trapped in as absurd a setting. But Halle has a problem, which is that
+she’s as dumb as a box of hammers and it shows. Even Kelly Ann Hu
+playing an arm decoration looked more involved and alert.
+Still…still…Berry was so exotically gorgeous and graceful
+that I forgave her for sleepwalking through her role. On some women,
+still photography just works better. Hollywood, take the hint!

+

In Troy (2004) Rose Byrne managed to out-hottie the
+lead. The way she did it is instructive — where Diane Kruger
+settled for playing Helen as the lacquered blonde bombshell to end all
+lacquered blonde bombshells, Rose’s Briseis seems warm and human and
+touchable. Sometimes, personality matters even when all you’re really
+supposed to be is an object of desire.

+

Reaching back a little, Sigourney Weaver re-confirmed the proposition
+that smart can be sexy in Galaxy Quest (1999). Her comic
+turn as a bright woman pretending to be a dumb blonde and chafing at it
+was wonderful — now there’s a female lead you could talk
+with the next morning. I heard a rumor that Weaver was equipped with an
+inflatable device that gradually pushed up her breasts to make them
+appear larger even as her costume disintegrated during the course
+of the movie. If so, this was funny but just as superflous as
+padding Angelina Jolie — some women have the knack
+of being delicious without a centerfold figure, and our Sigourney
+is one of them.

+

And here’s one I’ve added for gender balance:

+

Daniel Radcliffe in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005). I have it on good authority that the sight of young master Radcliffe with his shirt off can make a woman weak in the
+knees. I’d solicit some more detailed analysis of this phenomenon, but Cathy tends to drool and mumble incoherently when the subject comes up. I’d rather look at Cho Chang, myself.

diff --git a/20060314190104.blog b/20060314190104.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0bbde44 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060314190104.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +The Rape Exception +

Logicians know that when you deduce a contradiction, your premises are broken. When human beings express a contradiction, it usually means their true beliefs are not their stated or conscious ones; they’re rationalizing a position which they may not be fully aware of.

+

+

The ‘pro-life’ right has a very simple story about abortion. Human life is sacred, and begins at conception. Killing a fetus is murder and should be prohibited. But almost all ‘pro-lifers’ will admit, when pressed, that they’d allow abortion when the mother was raped.

+

Excuse me? If all human life is sacred, why is the child of rape an exception? It’s not like any fetus chooses to have a rapist as its father. Pro-lifers say all fetal life is sacred, but they don’t follow through as they would if they actually believed that. So they must actually believe something else.

+

Rape is sex the woman didn’t want. Therefore, the obvious candidate for something else is “Women who want sex (and only women who want sex) must be forced to bear children whether or not they want to.” Gee, that doesn’t sound as appealing or noble as “All human life is sacred”, does it? It’s not about the fetus at all.

+

This is why I put the term ‘pro-life’ in sarcasm quotes. The core issue revealed in the actual behavioral prescriptions of ‘pro-life’ types (as opposed to their rhetoric) has nothing to do with the fetus itself and everything to do with the belief that sexual desire is a sin and should have heavy consequences.

+

Alternatively, what pro-lifers may be be most afraid of is the thought of people having sex just to satisfy desire, without the intention or potential result of childbirth. The Catholic Church follows this premise through to its conclusion explicitly, rejecting all forms of contraception.

+

I’m going to surprise a lot of my readers now by observing that being afraid of conscupiscience is not crazy. In fact, this kind of fear, and the suppression of non-procreative sex, may be an evolutionary advantage. Most of the developed world outside the U.S. is on a fast train to demographic collapse because the populations of Europe and Japan are not breeding at replacement levels.

+

The trouble with standing athwart this particular tide the way the Catholic Church is doing isn’t so much that they’re wrong, it’s that the attempt is failing. Catholics everywhere have refused to comply with the prescription and the reasoning. Evidently, if we want populations that reproduce under modern conditions, we have to find a more effective form of behavior modification than trying to moralize people out of having sex for pleasure.

+

But the standard form of ‘pro-life’ rhetoric is worse than merely ineffective, because it’s dishonest; the people uttering it won’t or can’t admit what their real issue is. Instead, they dress up their desire to control others in religious clothing.

+

By contrast, the “keep your laws off my body” rhetoric of the pro-choice side looks far more consistent and reasonable, even though it leads to the repugnant conclusion that there is no moral issue with killing an infant that has humanlike brain activity but happens not to be due to exit the womb for another five minutes.

+

(I sometimes think, by the way, that the whole abortion debate would change radically if Le Boyer birth were normal in our culture and people could see babies being born with their eyes open, smiling, aware of what is happening.)

+

Voltaire said, “If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.” He was right, and both extremes in the abortion controversy demonstrate that. But the ‘pro-life’ side has a worse case of absurdity than the pro-choicers, and that won’t change until (at a minimum) they face up to what they really want.

diff --git a/20060317130928.blog b/20060317130928.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8d87b4d --- /dev/null +++ b/20060317130928.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +The End of Faith +

Sam Harris’s The End of Faith is a well-executed polemic of a kind that, in retrospect, has been curiously absent in the West over the last fifty years. Not since I read Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian in the early 1970s have I seen an attack on organized religion as clear, uncompromising, and compelling as this one — and Russell’s book was expanded from a lecture he gave in 1927.

+

Why, in a supposedly secular and modernist society that is heir to the anti-religious Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th century, do we not see more outright attacks on particular religions, or religion as an institution in general? Mr. Harris supplies a surprising answer: he thinks ‘tolerance’ is a problem, that the modern West has agreed to accept almost any form of unsanity or fanaticism as long as it is labeled ‘religion’.

+

+

Harris barely mentions Russell (and never cites earlier militants in the same line like Voltaire or Robert Ingersoll), but following his logic we would conclude that critiques like Russell’s are now rare because even intellectuals inclined to believe them deem them a violation of the ethos of tolerance, the tacit agreement not to dispute matters of religion that is the closest Western secularism has come to solving the problem of faith.

+

The trouble with ‘tolerance’ is that it only works as a cultural compact when all parties are civilized and have in practice largely agreed to abandon the more inconvenient claims of the religions they theoretically profess. Bertrand Russell, in his time, could set against Christianity’s moral account mainly the fact that it had committed massacres and atrocities in the past and might do so in the future. Sam Harris began writing this book on September 12th, 2001; he is reacting to the vary real atrocities being perpetrated now in the name of militant Islam.

+

The End of Faith begins with a description of the last hour of a suicide-bomber’s life. Beginning with this vivid image, Harris argues that tolerance of religious fanaticism is now a liability that a nuclear-armed world can no longer afford. If we do not make an end to faith, he warns, it will make an end of us.

+

Apologists for the now-dominant Christianity of the West will object that this is too sweeping. “Surely, at worst,” they will argue, “only some kinds of faith are toxic; conveniently for us, the wrong kinds.” Harris neatly scotches that argument by quoting passages from both Old and New Testaments that require killing for apostasy. There is no doubt that Christian scripture tells its adherents to kill those who turn away from faith, even members of their own families. There is no doubt that Christians have behaved that way in the past; there is no doubt that Christianity only refrains from this now because most Christians have agreed to ignore inconveniently harsh passages from the Bible; and, given that the fastest-growing Christian denominations profess Biblical literalism, there is every reason to suspect that agreement is fragile and temporary.

+

Harris’s central case is continuous with arguments I have made before, notably in my essays Islamofascism and the Rage of Augustine and Toxic Christianity, round two. I will spend much of the rest of this essay critiquing various aspects of this book not because I disagree with his conclusions, but because I think some important aspects of the problem he is tackling are not quite adequately addressed in his argument.

+

Most of what is missing is readily explicable from Harris’s background; he is someone primarily trained as neuroscientist writing in an area where comparative religion and some aspects of philosophy (most notably epistemology, confirmation theory, and the philosophy of language) are more directly applicable. As a result there are places where, while his conclusions are sound, his arguments are roundabout, a bit naive, and subject to spoiler attacks on the details. And there are arguments he should make that he doesn’t.

+

One obvious error in the early part of Harris’s exposition is a tendency to speak as though all religions make faith claims in the same way that Christianity and Islam do, and are thus all equally dangerous in potential. This is not true, and later in the book Harris makes clear that he knows better — or at least, that he knows Buddhism (when properly understood) doesn’t make faith claims. But he displays no understanding of other kinds of religion (shamanism, polytheisms, animism) even where references to it would strongly bolster his case against Judeo-Christian-Islamic particularism.

+

Harris’s Chapter 2 (The Nature of Belief) is the first major demonstration that he knows too little about analytical philosophy. Thus, he spends that chapter wading through ontological thickets that he could have avoided had he availed himself early on of the operationalist criterion: a belief or theory is true to the extent it permits successful prediction of observables. Lacking this tool, he has to do a lot of gear-grinding about the relation between “statements” and “reality” before getting anywhere useful. While putting the ontological cart before the confirmational horse in this way remains a common error even among philosophers, seeing Harris repeat it is disappointing in a book otherwise so lucid.

+

A similar error dogs his discussion of “pragmatism” vs. “realism” in Chapter 6 (A Science of Good and Evil). Harris doesn’t seem to realize that modern versions of “pragmatism” such as Richard Rorty’s are largely self-crippled by their advocates’ political commitments (notably, to multiculturalism and against objective normative truth). Early pragmatists like C.S. Peirce actually had a better handle on the relation of usefulness to “reality” than their successors today do. One might summarize it by observing that a pragmatist who does not arrive at an independently causal “reality” as the most useful hypothesis has failed, but a realist who justifies his ontology on any grounds other than strictly pragmatic ones is just fantasizing.

+

Harris’s forays into ethical philosophy are in some ways even more unfortunate. There is some excellent reasoning about the use of force here (Harris’s account of pacifism is especially telling), but the worst moment in the book arrives when he makes a complete hash of the controversy between deontic and consequentialist ethics, annotating the statement “Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything” with a footnote that flatly contradicts it! He is far too quick to usher adaptationist accounts of ethics offstage, and he seems completely unaware of the contributions ethical-egoist critiques of faith (such as, for example, Ayn Rand’s) could make to his argument.

+

In terms of Harris’s own objectives, the book’s most serious failure is that he does a poor job of connecting faith-based religion to the murderous secular irrationalisms of the 20th century, notably Communism and Naziism. The problem here is one that shows up elsewhere in the book; connections that seem obvious to Harris are alluded to rather than nailed down with explicit argument, creating the appearance that his case is weaker than it actually is.

+

Harris could have made much of the connection between ‘faith’ and authoritarianism, and the psychological mechanism I have elsewhere described as the sin/guilt/thoughtcrime monitor. But he never gets there, which is a curious failing in someone who understands meditation and mysticism so well.

+

But these are comparatively minor defects in a sustained argument that is remarkable in its clarity, penetration, and wit. The most unfortunate thing about this book is that the people who need it most are the ones least likely to read it.

+

The best we can hope for is that it is the beginning of a conversation that will galvanize the unbelievers, the sane people, into rejecting suicidal tolerance of fanaticism and standing up against ‘faith’ and for rationality. Because Harris is right — this isn’t a parlor game any more. If we let them, the fanatics will use our ‘tolerance’ as a weapon against us. And they will use it to kill.

diff --git a/20060327100204.blog b/20060327100204.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c87628f --- /dev/null +++ b/20060327100204.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +HOWTO updates +

I’ve just upgraded to Fedora Core 5. As a consequence, I’ve updated the following HOWTOs

+ diff --git a/20060327105718.blog b/20060327105718.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..00282df --- /dev/null +++ b/20060327105718.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Open Letter to Steve Lohr & John Markoff +

You’ve described only symptoms in Windows Is So Slow, but Why?, not the underlying problem. Closed-source software development has a scaling limit, a maximum complexity above which it collapses under its own weight.

+

+

Microsoft hit this wall six years ago, arguably longer; it’s why they’ve had to cancel several strategic projects in favor of superficial patches on the same old codebase. But it’s not a Microsoft-specific problem, just one that’s hitting them the worst because they’re the largest closed-source developer in existence. Management changes won’t address it any more than reshuffling the deck chairs could have kept the Titanic from sinking.

+

Apple has been able to ship four new versions in the last five years because its OS core is open-source code. Linux, entirely open-source, has bucketed along even faster. Open source evades the scaling limit by decentralizing development, replacing top-heavy monoliths with loosely-coupled peer networks at both the level of the code itself and the organizations that produce it.

+

You finger backward compatibility as a millstone around Microsoft’s neck, but experience with Linux and other open-source operating systems suggests this is not the real problem. Over the same six-year period Linux has maintained backwards binary compatibility as good as (arguably better than) that of Windows without bloating.

+

Microsoft’s problems cannot be fixed — indeed, they are doomed to get progressively worse — as long as they’re stuck to a development model premised on centralization, hierarchical control, and secrecy. Open-source operating systems will continue to gain at their expense for many of the same reasons free markets outcompeted centrally-planned economies.

+

The interesting question is whether we will ever see a Microsoft equivalent of glasnost and perestroika.

diff --git a/20060327170709.blog b/20060327170709.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2a3cb92 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060327170709.blog @@ -0,0 +1,57 @@ +Islam Is At War With Us +

I’ve been warning since 2002 that the West really is in a war to
+defend civilization against Islamic barbarians, and had better face up
+to that fact before the consequences of whitewashing Islam as
+a “religion of peace” get worse.

+

Comes now Fjordman, a blogger from Norway who tells us that Moslem
+immigrants to Sweden report themselves to be
+at war with Swedes. See also his earlier post about how Swedish
+society is disintegrating — not despite its commitment to
+‘multiculturalism’, ‘tolerance’, and the welfare state, but because
+that commitment is being ruthlessly gamed by Islamofascists who see
+themselves as the conquering vanguard of the Dar al-Islam.

+

+

“The Swedes don’t do anything, they just give us the stuff.” is a
+telling quote from the interviews in “Vi krigar mot svenskarna” (“We
+are at war with the Swedes”). The most chilling revelation is that
+young Islamists’ contempt for native Swedes is not self-inflating
+propaganda, but soberly justified by the the facts of Swedish
+behavior. The rest of the Swedish population has been systematically
+disarmed both physically and psychologically, taught that the only
+proper attitude towards criminals and barbarians is one of cowardice
+and appeasement.

+

The result? 85% of Sweden’s rapes are committed by immigrants or
+their unassimilated first-generation offspring. Most of the rapists,
+like most of those immigrants, are Moslems. The Moslems boast of
+Swedish society’s lack of will to stop them. And the Swedish
+establishment averts its eyes.

+

If more evidence is needed, consider Abdul Rahman’s narrow escape
+from execution for apostasy in Afghanistan. The charge, which carries
+a death penalty under Islamic shari’a law, has been dropped “for lack
+of evidence”, but could be revived at any time. We have failed to
+confront the central problem: shari’a law is not compatible with
+Western civilization. One of the two must go. The Islamists
+understand this very clearly, even if too many Westerners are still in
+denial about it.

+

If the elites of the West — academics, journalists,
+politicians — persist in that denial in the face of evidence,
+our near future will be a descent into hell. Conditions in Sweden are
+ripe for the rise of a neo-fascist/racialist movement in reaction to
+the Islamic threat. In the 1930s, Hitler rose to power in Germany on
+the back of a “Jewish threat” that was wholly fictional; dare we
+assume that today’s fascists will fail to exploit an Islamic threat
+that is all too chillingly real, and gleefully announced by the
+Islamists themselves?

+

Here
+is one of its victims:

+

+

Sweden has long held itself out as the cutting edge of social
+progress, exhorting the rest of the world to the virtues of
+multiculturalism, open immigration, and an indulgent welfare state.
+The blood on that rape victim’s face is the visible sign of one end of
+the road down which Sweden has tried to lead the West; the other
+possible end, even more horrifying but daily more likely, is the
+swastika.

+

Either way, any society that can summon neither the means nor the
+will to protect its young women from forcible rape by barbarian
+invaders will have failed in the most basic possible way.

diff --git a/20060406152324.blog b/20060406152324.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..589d13c --- /dev/null +++ b/20060406152324.blog @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Dan Simmons’s message from the future +

I very seldom post just to forward my readers to someone else’s writing, but SF author Dan Simmons has earned it with this potent warning. Read the whole thing. Because it is indeed our future, unless we wake up.

diff --git a/20060410102025.blog b/20060410102025.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3bffe22 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060410102025.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +My Comment Policy +

I deleted a coment this morning.

+

This is not something I normally do, except for comments that are both anonymous and content-free — abuse and invective do not count as ‘content’ for this purpose. The comment I deleted this morning was not anonymous, and it could be argued that there was some content in it.

+

However, the content (if any) was drowned in a sewer-main’s worth of crude insults hurled by one respondent at another. I will not tolerate this, even when the insult-hurler is nominally on ‘my’ side of an issue.

+

Armed And Dangerous is not a public square and “free speech” standards do not apply here. If you have nothing to contribute to debate over the things I write about, I can and will cut you off at the knees. This applies to those who broadly agree with me as well as those who disagree. (If anything, I give my opponents a little more leeway than my allies.)

+

In my own small way, I’m trying to defend civilization here. So keep it civil. Or else.

diff --git a/20060414082056.blog b/20060414082056.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..47ee3cd --- /dev/null +++ b/20060414082056.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +Apologists for Islam +

Since I posted Dan Simmons’s
+Message From The Future, I’ve had a couple of Muslims show up on this
+blog protesting that I’ve got it all wrong, that Islam is a peaceful
+and tolerant religion and Islamic terror is an aberration not sanctioned
+by the Koran.

+

Here’s a challenge to all you apologists for Islam: stand up in
+your mosque and declaim, loudly, that religious violence is an
+abomination against Allah — that those who use terror in a
+program to restore the Caliphate, those who would execute ex-Muslims
+who convert to any other religion, those who would condone ‘honor
+killing’, and those who incite hatred against Jews and other Peoples
+of the Book have fallen from the Narrow Way and will burn in hell with
+the sons of Iblis.

+

If you are unwilling to do this for religious reasons, or fear to
+do it because of the reaction of your fellow Muslims, then shut the
+fuck up about your so-called ‘religion of peace’, because you
+are a liar and a hypocrite.

+

That is all.

diff --git a/20060417114345.blog b/20060417114345.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0944ca3 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060417114345.blog @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +In the Belly of the Beast +

In the beautiful-irony department, I have just learned that my name
+and copyright now appears in the EULA (End-User License Agreement) of
+a Microsoft product. A vector-graphics editor called “Microsoft
+Expressions”, apparently — thanks to Martin Dawson for the
+tip.

+

+

The history behind this is that GIFLIB is open-source software for
+hacking GIF images — the direct ancestor of libungif, which is
+the name under which the codebase is more widely known these days.
+The original software was by Gershon Elber for DOS; around 1987 I
+ported it to Unix, cleaned up the architecture, added numerous new
+features, and wrote documentation. When Unisys started to jump salty
+about the GIF patents in the mid-1990s, I handed the project off to a
+maintainer outside U.S. jurisdiction, Toshio Kuratomi.

+

I have no idea why the copyright on this EULA is dated 1997, I
+think that is a couple of years after I passed the baton to Toshio
+Kuratomi.

+

Subsequently I did a lot of work on libpng, implementing 6 of the
+14 chunk types in the PNG standard and designing a new more
+object-oriented interface for that library. So if you use open-source
+software that handles either of the two most popular raster-image
+formats, it is rather likely that you rely on my code every day. Yes,
+that includes all you Firefox and Netscape and Konq and Safari users
+out there.

+

And now, my code is in a Microsoft product. This may not be the
+first time; in fact, thinking about all the other places it would
+have been silly for Microsoft to pass up using libpng and giflib,
+it probably isn’t even the dozenth time.

+

I’m OK with this, actually. I write my code for anyone to use, and
+‘anyone’ includes evil megacorporate monopolists pretty much by
+definition. I wouldn’t change those terms retroactively if I could,
+because I think empowering everyone is a far more powerful
+statement than empowering only those I agree with. By doing so, I
+express my confidence that my ideas will win even when my opponents
+get the benefit of my code.

+

Besides…now, when Microsoft claims open source is inferior or not
+innovative enough or dangerous to incorporate in your products or
+whatever the FUD is this week, I get to laugh and point. Hypocrites.
+Losers. You have refuted yourselves.

diff --git a/20060430105230.blog b/20060430105230.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..68cbf58 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060430105230.blog @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +Memetic Success +

Bwahahaha! My sinister master plan for world domination is
+working. Straight from the pages of the highest-quality general-news
+magazine in English, check
+this out! The money ‘graf is the last one:

+

+Moreover, the ease with which the internet spreads
+wrong-headedness–to say nothing of lies and slander–is offset by the
+ease with which it spreads insights and ideas. To regret the glorious
+fecundity of new media is to choose the hushed reverence of the
+cathedral over the din of the bazaar. +

+

There’s an old saw to the effect that there’s no limit to what you
+can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit. More precisely,
+when your signature memes start showing up as generative metaphors in
+elite and popular usage with your name stripped off them, you
+know you’re winning.

+

Winning, that is, at the only game that is really interesting —
+changing the world.

+

(Hat tip to my blogson Walter Hunt over at Stone of Remembrance,
+though I’d have seen it anyway in my weekly Economist and
+later did.)

diff --git a/20060504233713.blog b/20060504233713.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..415d3fe --- /dev/null +++ b/20060504233713.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +The Eurogame Phenomenon +

I enjoy strategy games. I’ve been playing them since the heyday of the elaborate hundreds-of-tiny-counters hex-map historical-simulation wargames in the 1970s and early 1980s. But those games don’t get played much any more, largely because they took so long to set up and
+learn; after 1985 or so younger gamers moved to computer simulations instead, and as the hex-wargame genre stagnated many old-school gamers eventually abandoned it in favor of military-miniatures gaming.

+

+

Ace game designer Greg Costikyan (coincidentally, an old friend of mine) has a different theory about what killed old-school wargames. He tells a lurid tale of mismanagement and blunder; I have little doubt it’s true, but I also think he understimates the impact of computer gaming.

+

Be that as it may…in the late 1990s we started to see a new wave of fresh, innovative game designs in a different style. Settlers of Catan in 1995 was the harbinger. This game of trade and civilization-building featured an elegant combination of simple mechanics with tricky, relatively deep strategy. There are several possible routes to victory in Settlers, all requiring both positional tactics and careful management of constrained resources. The game is made more attractive by colorful, high-quality physical furniture and tasteful artwork. It can be played lightly and socially or in an intense minimaxing mode, and (importantly) is really designed for three or four players though it can be played one-on-one. It rewards repeated playing.

+

These became signature traits of a huge freshet of new games that hit the U.S. market in the new century. Other standouts have included Puerto Rico, Domaine, Power Grid, Alhambra, Shadows Over Camelot, and Ticket To Ride. Most of these games are imports from Germany, republished in English; the style is generically known as “German games” or “Eurogames” and I’ve heard it alleged that in Germany these games are a mass-market form of family entertainment rather than being confined to gamer-hobbyists, science-fiction fans, and technogeeks as they still mostly are in the U.S.

+

I’ve long thought that the Eurogame is in part a response to competition from computer games. Computers do the detail-crammed historical-simulation game better than you can with counters and a board, so they got steamrollered. Eurogames, on the other hand, do something computer games are poor at — face-to-face multiplayer games — and they do it with furniture that’s pleasant to look at and handle. Silly as it sounds, Puerto Rico would lose some of its play value without the colorful wooden barrel-tokens it uses for commodities.

+

The newest wave is Eurogame-like designs that are aiming to retake some of the territory the old-school games lost to computers. I got to play two of these recently, Commands and Colors: Ancients and its sibling Memoir ’44, and was favorably impressed.

+

Commands and Colors: Ancients does what old-school ancients games like the old SPI PRESTAGS (Pre-Seventeenth Century Tactical Game System) aimed to do — reward players with a good feel for ancient-period tactics. If you know how Alexander or Scipio Africanus used missile troops and skirmishers; if you know how Hannibal used cavalry differently from infantry, and why; if you understand the difference between phalanx and manipular tactics — then these games will give you the sorts of results period commanders got.

+

In C&C Ancients, for example, I was able to use bowmen to disrupt my opponent’s formations and goad him into entering the engagement range of my heavy infantry just as a period commander would have done. I used to do stuff like that in PRESTAGS too — the difference is that C&C Ancients gets the feel right with far simpler and cleverer mechanics. Two bits of business that stand out are the use of multiple blocks per unit to simulate attrition steps, and the special symbol-marked dice (rolled in groups varying in size with the unit’s combat strength) to replace lookups on a combat results table.

+

Simpler makes a difference. It made the game faster to learn and play; and, because I wasn’t spending as much mental effort on the mechanics, I could think about tactics more (and that’s the fun part). Overall, I’d say this game is an excellent design and a clear improvement over the old-school ancients games I remember.

+

I wasn’t quite as impressed with Memoir ’44, a variant of the same system applied to WWII-era gaming. I don’t think the C&C mechanics work as well for modern warfare. Still, it’s a respectable effort; I’ve played many WWII games that weren’t as good. And if your figure of merit is how much realistic tactical feel one can get per paragraph of rules text, it scores pretty high.

+

Some of these differences are down to technology. In the old days, thick rulebooks full of tables full of numbers were the only kind of presentation we could imagine. But the kind of manufacturing and printing needed to produce Eurogame-style pretty pieces and custom dice is far less expensive than it was, and that suggests possibilities that are just beginning to be exploited.

+

I hope these are the beginning of a trend. I miss the old-style hex wargames almost as much as Greg Costikyan does. Is it too much to hope that that experience might be coming back, with simpler rules, in brighter colors?

+

I sure hope so. I’d never give up the railroad games and the colonization games and the trading games I’ve learned to enjoy. But they’re…bloodless. Sometimes you want to send your panzers rumbling forward on a misty morning north of Kursk, trade broadsides with the French fleet off Trincomalee, or orbital-insert your drop troopers on an Arachnid hive-city. Eurogames, as we’ve known them, wouldn’t get you there. Maybe, now, they’re growing into a genre that will.

diff --git a/20060509165152.blog b/20060509165152.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e574627 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060509165152.blog @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +Animal imagination? +

About a month ago, one of my regular respondents asked me to blog about self-awareness in animals. I’m doing so now because it will be useful for an essay I’m planning to write about ethical and legal definitions of humanity.

+

+

Let’s start by defining a slightly more abstract category, what science-fiction fans call a ‘sophont’. A being or animal is fully sophont if it:

+
    +
  • Shows behavioral evidence of self-awareness, e.g knows it has a mind.
    • +
  • Shows awareness of the existence of other minds.
    • +
  • Communicates abstractions using language.
    • +
  • Invents and uses tools.
    • +
  • Can reason about counterfactual hypotheticals, e.g. can answer questions of the form “What would things be like if a fact I am now observing to be true were not true?”
    • +
+

(That last one may seem odd to those of you not familiar with primate ethology, but bear with me…)

+

Normal human beings pass all these tests. Few animals are known to even come close to passing all of them — but the “are known” is necessary, because in some cases animals might pass all of the tests other than tool use without being able to communicate that to humans.

+

Some people feel quite strongly about animal rights. Their position does not, however, generally spring from an assertion that animals are sophonts; rather, it seems to come down to an unwillingness, or inability, to distinguish between sophont status and sentience — that is, being able to feel. In practice, while theoretically even insects can feel, even PETA members tend to ascribe sentience only to animals that can exchange recognizable emotional signals with us — which is to say, basically, mammals.

+

The mamalian repertoire of behaviors for communicating states like fear, affection, anger, boredom, and playfulness is remarkably conservative. So much so that humans can have meaningful emotional communication with cats, dogs, and raccoons, a datum that would be astonishing if we weren’t so used to it! Some mammals are so good at this that we routinely keep them around for pleasure.

+

Even dogs and cats exhibit little evidence of sophont behavior, though. They can learn tricks by reinforcement, but they don’t use tools, they show only very weak problem-solving intelligence and even less evidence that they have a theory of mind or self-awareness. One test animal behaviorists use for self-awareness is whether the animal will try to remove a smudge from its face when it sees itself in the
+mirrors; cats and dogs generally fail this. Sentience is less than sophont status.

+

There are, however, interesting borderline cases among the animals. Chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orang-utans, dolphins, whales, seals, otters, elephants, a few species of birds, and even octopi and squid have all displayed not merely sentience but suspiciously sophont-like behaviors. Here are some data:

+
    +
  • Great apes can learn sign language and use it in original ways, including coining new terms and making puns; they also make and use tools and have complex social patterns recognizably akin to human ones. Some apes can pass the mirror test. Some handle abstractions tolerably well, and there is a famous incident in which a gorilla named Koko speculated to its trainers about an afterlife after its pet kitten died.
    • +
  • There is some, disputed, evidence that dolphins can in fact learn to use iconic languages. Nobody who has interacted with dolphins at any length is in any doubt that they have minds, recognize human beings as having minds, and have a lively sense of humor (not infrquently they try to include humans in their play). They can count and have at least a limited ability to handle abstractions. Claims that they are sophont at human level are not established by evidence, but nobody who has studied the evidence would be much surprised if
    +they turned out to be.
    • +
  • Elephants use tools, engage in complex vocal communication (parts of which are infrasonic, entertainingly enough), have elaborate social behaviors, play jokes on their trainers, and apparently grieve for their dead. They pass the mirror test. And they really do have long memories; they’ve been known to wait years for a chance to take revenge an abusive human. New evidence suggests they may be very close to human in intelligence and self-awareness.
    • +
  • Some parrots and crows can count. Some talking birds appear to graduate from mimicry to using learned words to express emotional states, and a few seem to make the jump to talking about the emotional states of humans.
    • +
  • Mediterranean squid have a very high brain-mass-to-body-mass ratio (this correlates with various indicators of intelligence in mammals). They been observed to solve mechanical problems (how to extract the tasty food fish from the corked bottle) by examining their environment, thinking for a while, then acting quickly and correctly. Octopi and squid appear to communicate within groups using color flashes made with chromatophores in their skins; nobody know what they’re communicating, exactly, but the potential bandwidth of that channel is extremely high. There is even some evidence of observational learning in octopi.
    • +
+

Significantly, the birds who seem to be using speech, and the apes who handle abstractions best, are animals that have lived with humans for a long time. Even cats and dogs, though not very bright compared to elephants or dolphins or chimps, accasionally show flashes of self-awareness (for example, by recognizing themselves in a mirror).

+

Given all this animal data, what’s left as a unqiquely human capability? Though interpretation of the experimental results is controversial, one thing even the cleverest nonhuman primates seem to have problems with are counterfactual hypotheticals.

+

Imagine a table with two red balls, three green balls, and an upright paper screen large enough to hide a sixth ball behind it. To human beings, the following two questions are both easy and nearly indistinguishable:

+
    +
  • How many green balls would be in the room if there were a green ball behind the screen?
    • +
  • How many green balls would you be able to see if the leftmost green ball were red?
    • +
+

But these two questions are subtly different. The first is a what-if that is consistent with all visible facts: the second is a what-if that contradicts a visible fact (thus ‘counterfactual’).

+

The brightest non-human primates handle questions like the first one pretty well, but questions like the second one rather poorly. They don’t seem to have have the capacity to construct a full-blown hypothetical universe in their heads and reason about it despite what observable reality is telling them.

+

(This test has only been done with primates. You need to have a language in common with your subject(s) to do it; primates can use sign language or symbol tiles, but communication with other possible quasi-sophonts is far more limited so far.)

+

If this test is to be believed, what distinguishes humans from other higher primates is not reasoning ability but imagination!

diff --git a/20060512142119.blog b/20060512142119.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0482f7f --- /dev/null +++ b/20060512142119.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Testosterone makes people stupid +

Yes, testosterone makes people stupid. No, I’m not talking about the men who secrete and metabolize it, I’m talking about the nervous old women of both sexes who pronounce upon it as though it were some sort of demonic drug.

+

+

Latest in this parade of absurdity is a study of the effect of handling guns on male testosterone. Lurking behind the study is a clear agenda — the designers wanted to show that guns cause violence. Jonah Goldberg rightly slams this nonsense in National Review Online, reminding us that conservatives may after all be good for something.

+

I read Jonah’s column while a shreddin’ track from Joe Satriani’s new album Super Colossal poured out my speakers. Hearing what Satch does on a fretboard definitely raises my testosterone level. Should we be banning electric guitars for their aggression-inciting effects, now?

+

The study involved hot sauce, which I’m pretty sure raises mens’ testosterone levels too. Are we to forbid the import of capsicum peppers on this account?

+

There’s no end to this sort of silliness, short of recognizing that the people who propagate it are self-panickers who, if the entire planet turned into a brightly colored and harmless Nerf-world tomorrow, would fear their own shadows.

+

The fault lies not in guitars or hot sauces or testosterone or firearms but in the self-panickers’ tendermindedness and moral infantilism. It’s “Mommy! Mommy! The bad thing made me do it!” amplified and projected on everyone else.

+

To which the only counter is two words: Grow up!.

diff --git a/20060521221130.blog b/20060521221130.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b566e78 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060521221130.blog @@ -0,0 +1,65 @@ +I have received a death threat +

Well, this is novel. I’ve just received a terroristic death threat. From
+an idiot who failed to obscure his return path. Here it is, precisely as
+I received it mere minutes ago:

+
+From salehizadeh_atc@yahoo.com  Sun May 21 22:44:42 2006
+Return-Path: 
+X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.1.1 (2006-03-10) on snark.thyrsus.com
+X-Spam-Level: 
+X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.0 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,DNS_FROM_RFC_ABUSE,
+	DNS_FROM_RFC_WHOIS,UPPERCASE_25_50 autolearn=no version=3.1.1
+Received: from snark.thyrsus.com (localhost [127.0.0.1])
+	by snark.thyrsus.com (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id k4M2igAJ026952
+	for ; Sun, 21 May 2006 22:44:42 -0400
+Received: from grelber.thyrsus.com [192.168.1.31]
+	by snark.thyrsus.com with IMAP (fetchmail-6.3.4)
+	for  (single-drop); Sun, 21 May 2006 22:44:42 -0400 (EDT)
+Received: from web30106.mail.mud.yahoo.com (web30106.mail.mud.yahoo.com [68.142.200.79])
+	by grelber.thyrsus.com (8.13.4/8.13.4) with SMTP id k4M4Y51D023721
+	for ; Mon, 22 May 2006 00:34:05 -0400
+Received: (qmail 18608 invoked by uid 60001); 22 May 2006 02:43:29 -0000
+DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws;
+  s=s1024; d=yahoo.com;
+  h=Message-ID:Received:Date:From:Subject:To:MIME-Version:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding;
+  b=lFrB0rAPphpP3Q0wd5pQF1rMjBCYJ5O8pKh0risWlb2KbzXBMfqKQpx/SHq/s1DUJvPATn8XDECDCawxtzr1TokVZPGtbEfmV1BFHO3w6sr83VgcpMPrpf0fxSS6G2rCdMcSm2Xe0c45olKryo3zHIKz8Rygdu1xdES2rK/90Bk=  ;
+Message-ID: <20060522024329.18606.qmail@web30106.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
+Received: from [217.219.56.65] by web30106.mail.mud.yahoo.com via HTTP; Sun, 21 May 2006 19:43:29 PDT
+Date: Sun, 21 May 2006 19:43:29 -0700 (PDT)
+From: hhh hyftyf 
+Subject: Islam
+To: esr@thyrsus.com
+MIME-Version: 1.0
+Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
+Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
+X-UID: 24454
+X-Keywords:                                                                                                    
+Status: RO
+Content-Length: 343
+Lines: 12
+
+We have your address.
+
+               YOU WILLBE KILLED
+               YOU WILLBE KILLED
+               YOU WILLBE KILLED
+               YOU WILLBE KILLED
+               YOU WILLBE KILLED
+
+__________________________________________________
+Do You Yahoo!?
+Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
+
+http://mail.yahoo.com
+
+
+

I will report this threat to the appropriate authorities. I guess
+all my writings about terrorism and Islam struck a nerve somewhere.

+

Here’s a message to whoever is behind this threat: Maybe you think
+you can intimidate me, or that threats like this will stop other
+bloggers from speaking the truth about your barbaric mass-murdering
+death-cult. Well, screw you and the camel you rode in. I will not
+be silenced, and we will not be silenced. All you do
+with terroristic threats is to demonstrate your evil nature,
+confirm our resolve to resist you, and speed the day when your
+diseased ideology will be wiped from the face of the Earth.

diff --git a/20060605233352.blog b/20060605233352.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8ad2767 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060605233352.blog @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Commands and Colors: Ancients +

I’ve put a new page up on my website about the excellent Commands & Colors: Ancients game. It’s just couple of variant rules and some scenario results now, but may grow in the future.

diff --git a/20060608154007.blog b/20060608154007.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..228cd3d --- /dev/null +++ b/20060608154007.blog @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Massive Intelligence Raids Follow Zarqawi’s Death + diff --git a/20060612124320.blog b/20060612124320.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6a78985 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060612124320.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Monkey feces and other forms of communication +

I have extremely strong convictions about free speech and robust debate. Thus, I was rather unhappy the first time that I decided it was necessary to delete a comment on this blog. The rule I published at that time was that comments that were both (a) anonymous, and (b) content-free vitriol, would be subject to deletion.

+

Unfortunately, as this blog has become more popular, some semi-regular commenters have descended to the level of monkeys throwing feces. Often the feces are flung in my direction, but that bothers me very little. What concerns me more is that an increasing percentage of comments are not about ideas but solely about the personalities and motives of other commenters. That is not a useful direction for the blog, even when the accusations being hurled are justified ones originating from sensible people. The entire tone of the blog is being lowered.

+

Therefore, with great regret, I must announce that I am considering banning commenters who are persistently and virulently disruptive. This would not be from any particular desire to control the wrongdoers’ behavior, rather it would be to relieve more civilized persons from the temptation to get into slanging matches with the wrongdoers. I hope not to have to actually take this step; I hope this announcement will serve as a warning to those who need it that they must moderate their behavior or begone.

+

Bannings, if any, will not take place in the dark of night; my notion of honor forbids this. Should I ban anyone, I will do so publicly with an accounting of my reasons in each case, and accept any criticism that ensues.

diff --git a/20060612182401.blog b/20060612182401.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c61b842 --- /dev/null +++ b/20060612182401.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Oderint, dum metuant +

In Nablus, a young man is kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists — who then set him free on learning he is an American because they don’t want to end up like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi so recently did.

+

I am irresistibly reminded of a piece of cynical wisdom from the mouth of the mad Roman emperor Caligula, born of experience in dealing with the barbarians of his day: Oderint, dum metuant: “Let them hate, so long as they fear”.

+

+

It is best of all to be loved, of course. But Islamists will never love the khufr; not even the most self-abasing of the postmodern Left’s bootlickers can make that happen. The next best thing is that jihadis should crap their pants when they think about the death-from-above consequences of molesting Americans.

+

I would actually prefer to have them fear molesting “all civilized people”, rather than just “Americans”. Unfortunately, I don’t see the will to instill the required level of fear anywhere but in the U.S., and I don’t consistently see it here. Not a single Democrat is willing to talk about making the active enemies of our civilization fear its wrath, which is one of several reasons I can no longer consider voting Democrat.

+

Then there are the practicalities. The U.S. military is implicitly defending all civilized people whenever it waxes a jihadi, but in our world of nation-states it would be a bit much to require it to explicitly retaliate for the death of (say) a Frenchman.

+

Still…having even bush-league terrorists fear harming Americans is a good start, and as neat a vindication of George Bush’s foreign policy and the war in Iraq as anyone could ask for. The war is not, after all, breeding terrorists; it’s killing the leaders and frightening the small fry into letting go their victims.

+

Caligula may have been a mad bastard, but understood the barbarian mind and the stringency necessary to deal with it better than most of today’s politicians. Since they will not love us, let them be afraid. Very, very afraid.

diff --git a/20080626152346.blog b/20080626152346.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..217e920 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080626152346.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +I’m unstealthing +

Yes,. there is a good reason that I disappeared for two years. As soon as a certain lawsuit now in court wraps up, I’ll even be able to explain it in detail.

+

But I’m back to blogging. Starting now.

diff --git a/20080626153414.blog b/20080626153414.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..97e046b --- /dev/null +++ b/20080626153414.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +A victory for civil rights +

I’ve just read the Supreme Court’s opinion in the Heller handgun-ban case, issued this morning. It’s a somewhat better result than I was expecting.

+

+

The good news: The ruling declares the District of Columbia’s ban on the possession of handguns facially unconstitutional. It also voids the trigger-lock requirement.

+

The better news: The majority opinion comes down firmly on the side of an individual-rights interpretation of the Second Amendment, thoroughly demolishing the “militia” and “collective-rights” theories with a detailed historical analysis that confirms the Standard Model. The language is very strong on this point.

+

The bad news: The Justices declined to specify the standard of judicial review appropriate for firearms legislation, and declined to rule on whether incorporation of the Second Amendment via the 14th Amendment constrains state firearms laws.

+

The worse news: it was a 5-4 split along predictable liberal-conservative lines. Scalia wrote the majority opinion.

+

Future implications…

+

The majority opinion suggests strongly that the Court will rule for incorporation when a case reaches it from the state courts (D.C, being a district directly under Federal jurisdiction, is an odd special case). The opinion also signaled a willingness to hear cases bearing on state regulation — and I’m told the NRA launched lawsuits today in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. (Turns out I misheard on the last one.)

+

I think it is now virtually certain that possession bans such as New York City’s will not stand longer than it takes a case to make its way through the appeals process. That is, unless the composition of the Court changes between now and then.

+

Accordingly, this ruling may have an impact on the 2008 elections. Most observers were expecting a pro-individual-rights finding, and the conventional wisdom had been that this would help Democrats by taking the whole issue of gun bans out of play. But I think the 5-4 split is going to reverse that and help Republicans — it has already been pointed out in public that McCain would be smart to campaign for votes among the 67% of Americans who agree with the individual-rights interpretation by pointing out that one more anti-gun Supreme court justice could swing the Court the other way.

+

UPDATE: Nice potshot by McCain: “Unlike the elitist view that believes Americans cling to guns out of bitterness, today’s ruling recognizes that gun ownership is a fundamental right — sacred, just as the right to free speech and assembly,” Uh huh. Obama supporters may be hoping this issue is going to go away, but it’s not going to if McCain is smart enough to keep hammering on the links between Obama’s anti-gun record, his stated contempt for small-town America, and his ties to radical-left terrorists like Bill Ayers.

+

UPDATE**2: Blogger Sayuncle writes: “In other news, 5-4 was bit too close for comfort in my opinion. I was figuring on 6-3 or 7-2, honestly. Sure, this quiz was pass/fail but we were only one heart attack away, my friends. I hate to say it but that one reason is why I’ll hold my nose, get good and hammered, and pull the lever for John McCain. And I’d have to shower after that too.” I think a lot of pro-gun swing voters who loathe McCain for various reasons (mine is the McCain-Feingold rape of the First Amendment) are going to reason the same way.

+

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have expected the Court to rule on the incorporation issue until the facts of a pending case required it. My main remaining disappointment is therefore that I was hoping for the Court to set a strict-scrutiny standard as with the First Amendment. This will doubtless be decided in a future case, since the Court has clearly indicated a willingness to grant certiorari on related issues.

+

The struggle to reassert firearms owners’ civil rights is far from over, but this is a major victory.

diff --git a/20080626161335.blog b/20080626161335.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f184625 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080626161335.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Civil Disobedience +

This morning I read the entire majority opinion from the Supreme Court striking down the D.C. gun ban. Then I walked over to the Malvern Police station and asked for a few minutes with my town’s Chief of Police.

+

+

The local cops know who I am; they haven’t forgotten that I installed some of the computers they use, and my wife is the Vice-President of Malvern’s borough council. Yeah, I know, politician married to an anarchist – it’s a running joke at my house.

+

Pleasantries completed, I explained to Chief McCann my history as a freedom activist. Notably, my role in helping defeat the Communication Decency Act back in 1996.

+

I told him that I had been intending to speak with him for several weeks, to inform him that I intend to begin exercising my right to open carry of a firearm (quite legal in Pennsylvania and in most other states as well). I explained that I thought it best he and the local police knew of this in advance in order to avoid any unfortunate misunderstandings. See opencarry.org for background on this fast-growing form of civil-rights activism.

+

I also told him that, in the wake of the Heller ruling, I intend at some future point to deliberately violate the Pennsylvania state law forbidding concealed carry without a state-issued permit. The Heller ruling does not enumerate those among permissible restrictions, and I would be happy to be PA’s test case on this point. As a citizen of the United States (I explained) I believe I have not only the right but the affirmative duty to challenge unjust and unconstitutional laws; and that since the founders of the U.S. pledged their lives and fortunes and sacred honor to sign the Declaration of Independence, merely risking imprisonment to challenge this law seems to me no more than my duty.

+

I was not entirely sure what Chief McCann’s response would be. In the event, it was to smile and shake my hand. This cop may arrest me for breaking PA’s gun laws someday, but at least he will do so knowing that civilian firearms are a solution rather than a problem and that those laws are ineffective and unjust — and looking forward to their annulment

+

Whatever comes of this, I will blog it here.

diff --git a/20080627031342.blog b/20080627031342.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9cc3605 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080627031342.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +The Heller ruling and the 2008 elections +

I’ve had time to think about the impact of the Heller ruling on the 2008 elections now, and I’m concluding that a pro-gun-rights ruling with a 5-4 split was absolutely the worst possible outcome for Barack Obama’s campaign.

+

+

Before the ruling, the conventional wisdom was that Obama would be hurt worst by an anti-gun-rights finding. According to this theory, such a ruling would have frightened and angered the Republican base into lining up behind McCain, a candidate who arouses deep misgivings among movement conservatives and won the primaries on his ability to attract more centrist voters. On the other hand (it was supposed) a ruling affirming the unconstitutionality of gun bans would make Obama’s anti-gun record less frightening by removing firearms confiscation from a President Obama’s list of policy options. Gun-rights voters might, in that scenario, feel freer to vote for him — or at least stay home.

+

If the ruling had been a 6-3, 7-2 or more lopsided split, I think that analysis might have held good. The 5-4 split, though, serves Republican rhetorical purposes nearly as well as an adverse ruling would have. Earlier I quoted a blogger calling himself SayUncle:

+

+“In other news, 5-4 was bit too close for comfort in my opinion. I was figuring on 6-3 or 7-2, honestly. Sure, this quiz was pass/fail but we were only one heart attack away, my friends. I hate to say it but that one reason is why I’ll hold my nose, get good and hammered, and pull the lever for John McCain. And I’d have to shower after that too.” +

+

I think a lot of the red-state Republican base who have been very leery of McCain are likely to be making that calculation right now, and McCain has already shown he’s not going to be slow to exploit the opening it gives him. That means Obama isn’t going to get the pass on his anti-gun record that most commentators were expecting a ban on gun bans would give him.

+

Nor is that effect likely to be confined to the conservative base. Gun owners who are (like me) libertarians and swing voters are in the same fix as SayUncle. Many of us have good reasons to loathe McCain; mine, as I’ve previously mentioned, is that I think BCRA (the McCain-Feingold campaign finance “reform” act) was an atrocious assault on First Amendment liberties. Others can’t stand McCain’s position on immigration, or the idiotic blather he tends to spew on economics-related subjects. But for those of us who think Second Amendment rights are fundamentally important, voting for anyone who would appoint more anti-firearms judges (a certainty from Obama given his past views) is just not an option.

+

That translates into votes for McCain. Probably including (though I shudder and retch at the thought) my vote. It’s not like there’s any chance Obama’s going to push for the repeal of BCRA. So I’m left with a choice between a candidate hostile to both my First and Second Amendment rights and one that supports the Second Amendment. (Normally I’d vote Libertarian, but the LP’s isolationist foreign-policy stance seems so batty after 9/11 that I can’t stomach that option in this cycle.)

+

But Obama’s problem is actually worse than this, because he responded to Heller on the same day with a mealy-mouthed recantation of his earlier public statement that the D.C gun ban was constitutional. It’s tactically understandable why he did so; he didn’t want to go into the general election stuck with a position that both the Supreme Court and (according to current Gallup polling) 70% of the electorate have rejected.

+

Unfortunately, given his record and his long association with outfits like the Joyce Foundation, there is no plausible way to interpret this recantation that makes Obama look good, whether you’re pro-2A or anti. Pro-gunners are going to believe (rightly, I think) that the recantation is a flat-out lie. Anti-gunners will either agree and approve of the lie (hoping it fools the mouth-breathing red-state clodhoppers just long enough to allow him to slide into the White House) or believe he’s telling the truth and be furious with him for changing sides.

+

Either way, it looks like just another insincere flip-flop for transient political advantage — and, like Obama’s self-reversal on accepting public campaign funding, it is so embarrassingly unconvincing that it is likely to do noticeable damage to his “new politics” Teflon coating even among his erstwhile cheerleaders in the MSM.

+

Barack Obama has demonstrated, at least, great tactical cunning in his campaign. Therefore, I’m certain that right now he’s wishing the Heller ruling had come down 7-2 or better and he didn’t have to deal with what McCain is going to do to him over this issue.

+

I’ll finish by re-quoting McCain’s delicious, deadly zinger:

+

“Unlike the elitist view that believes Americans cling to guns out of bitterness, today’s ruling recognizes that gun ownership is a fundamental right — sacred, just as the right to free speech and assembly,”

+

The sting here isn’t just McCain’s “sacred right” appeal to gun owners, it’s the way he links Obama’s anti-firearms record to the sense of elitism, entitlement and disdain for traditional American values that radiate from the man. These traits play well in Berkeley and on the Upper West Side, but they lose national elections.

+

Like John Kerry in the last election cycle, Obama increasingly looks like a man who knows the price of arugula but the value of nothing. And if John McCain can convince voters of that, he’ll not just win the general election — he’ll actually deserve to.

diff --git a/20080628164942.blog b/20080628164942.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..84127be --- /dev/null +++ b/20080628164942.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +If you don’t see your comment, despair not… +

As part of reactivating my blog, I’ve had to grovel through over 160,000 back comments over 99% of which were blog spam. I’ve been doing this by skimming 500-comment chunks of the back list (it’s normally 20, but I know where to hack the WordPress code to change that). In the process, I have almost certainly made some errors.

+

So if you submitted a comment recently and have not seen it published, don’t assume that you’ve hit a mechanical spam filter or that I’m purposely deleting your posts. I may have deleted some by accident while skimming. I apologize, and devoutly hope you will never find yourself having to filter that much spam by eyeball.

+

(And before you ask: Yes, WordPress’s tools for the job are both weak when they work and buggy in crucial spots. WordPress looks nice but the more I get to know the PHP codebase the less I like what I see.)

diff --git a/20080630133445.blog b/20080630133445.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bd0c0ff --- /dev/null +++ b/20080630133445.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Male-bashing kills children +

Listen. This news story (which I meant to blog about two years ago) is the sound of cultural suicide happening…

+

+A bricklayer who passed a toddler walking alone in a village shortly before her fatal fall into a pond said yesterday he did not stop to help in case people thought he was trying to abduct her. +

+

Ideas have consequences. Toxic ideas have toxic consequences. Feminism’s toxic idea that all men are barely restrained sexual predators killed that little girl. This probably wasn’t the first time it happened, and almost certainly won’t be the last.

+

I think this is worth blogging about, even two years after the fact, because it’s another indicator of a huge and horrible thing that Western culture has been doing to men for most of my lifetime. Men are designed to protect women and children, specialized for it; in a very basic biological sense it’s what we’re for. But the modern West bombards men with the message that their specialty isn’t needed, isn’t wanted, and that they’re assumed to want to prey on and abuse women and children.

+

Is it any wonder, then, that young men are increasingly opting out of college, that the percentage of adult males never married is also rising, and that in the 21st century many men seem to want to opt out of responsibility altogether? When our instititions equate feminization with virtue and masculinity with evil, this is exactly the outcome we should expect.

+

And it kills children. It kills children.

+

If I were a praying sort, I’d pray that Scottish bricklayer’s warning cry has not come too late.

diff --git a/20080630230935.blog b/20080630230935.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6733e12 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080630230935.blog @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +Why Barack Obama sets off my “Never Again!” alarms +

OK, I’ll admit it: six months ago I was very near buying into the whole Obama thing. That was when he was in his post-racial phase — before Jeremiah Wright, back when voting for Obama seemed like a way of putting an end to the unhealthy obsessiveness about race that disfigures liberal politics.

+

+

I was even willing to swallow hard and give Obama a pass on his left-wing populist rhetoric. That got more difficult when the connection with Bill Ayers, unrepentant Communist bombthrower, came to light — but I might have managed to choke down even that.

+

Why, you ask? Because John McCain was no prize. The political-speech restrictions that came with McCain-Feingold “reform” have stuck in my craw from the day it was enacted. I found Matt Welch’s dissection of McCain as an authoritarian maverick all too convincing in light of what I knew about the man. Once you get past his determination to win the Iraq war there is very little I can find praiseworthy in McCain.

+

(Anyone who finds this suprising may need a reminder that, despite my strong pro-Second-Amendment and pro-Iraq-War stance, I am not and have never been a conservative. Much less a “neocon”, whatever that means.)

+

Of course, my extreme dubiousness about McCain made Barack Obama more tempting. I suppose that attraction might have survived flip-flop after flip-flop, advisors and old friends thrown under the bus, and the increasing whiff of arrogant elitism coming off Obama and his appalling wife. I could have made excuses to myself about these things; Goddess knows enough other well-meaning people have been doing so.

+

No, what really put me off Barack Obama was the increasingly creepy and pathological tenor of the relationship between him and his fans. I think it was in mid-February, a bit before the Jeremiah Wright story got really ugly, that I started to notice my “Never Again!” nerves tingling.

+

I’m not Jewish. But I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich at an impressionable age. Years later, what I learned in that book made me into an anarchist. What it did much sooner than that was to instill in me the same sense of the Holocaust as the central moral disaster of the 20th century that the Jews feel. It left me with the same burning determination: Never again! Ever since, I have studied carefully the forms of political pathology behind that horror and attended even more carefully for any signs that they might be taking root in the West once again.

+

So, yes, I worried about Jörg Haider and Jean-Marie Le Pen; twitched a little at reports of a resurgence by the British National Front. But there was nothing in my country that whispered of resurgent fascism. Well, nothing outside hard-left-wing rhetoric, anyway.

+

(One of the minor things that cheeses me off about leftists is the loose way they throw around “fascist” as a term of abuse for anything they don’t like. This is at best naive and at worst dangerously stupid.)

+

Fascism has many structural characteristics that distinguish it from even the worst sorts of authoritarianism in the mainstream of U.S.’s political spectrum. One of these is the identification of a godlike Maximum Leader with the will of the people. A fascist society demands not just obedience but the surrender of the self to an ecstatic collective consciousness embodied in flesh by the Leader.

+

George Bush, whatever his faults — and I could list ‘em from here to next Tuesday — is not a fascist, does not behave like a fascist, and (most importantly for my argument) does not elicit that kind of ecstatic identification from his supporters. Thus, calling Bush a fascist confuses run-of-the-mill authoritarian tendencies with a degree of power and evil of which he will never be capable.

+

Here’s where it gets more frightening. Fascisms happen because people begin by projecting their own fears, hope and desires on the Maximum Leader, and end by submerging themselves in the Leader’s will. Neither George Bush nor John McCain has ever inspired this kind of response. But Barack Obama…does. More effectively than any American politician in my lifetime. And that is a frightening thing to see.

+

Note: I am absolutely not accusing Barack Obama of being a fascist or of having the goals of a fascist demagogue. I am saying that the psychological dynamic between him and his fans resembles the way fascist leaders and their people relate. The famous tingle that ran up Chris Matthew’s leg. the swooning chanting crowds, the speeches full of grand we-can-do-it rhetoric, the vagueness about policy in favor of reinforcing that intoxicating sense of emotional identification…how can anyone fail to notice where this points?

+

There are hints of grandiosity and arrogance in Obama’s behavior now. As the bond between him and his followers become more intense, though, it is quite possible they will not remain mere traces. I’m not panicked yet, because Obama is still a long way off from behaving like a megalomaniacal nut-job. But if the lives of people like Napoleon, Mussolini, or Hitler show us anything it’s that the road from Obama’s flavor of charismatic leader to nut-job tyrant is open, and dangerously seductive to the leader himself.

+

There is one more historical detail that worries me, in this connection. There is a pattern in the lives of the really dangerous charismatic tyrants that they tend to have originated on the geographical and cultural fringes of the societies they came to dominate, outsiders seeking ultimate insiderhood by remaking the “inside” in their own image. Hitler, the border Austrian who ruled Germany; Napoleon, the Corsican who seized France; and Stalin, the Georgian who tyrannized Sovet Russia. And, could it be…Obama, the half-black kid from Hawaii?

+

Again, I am not accusing Barack Obama of being a monster. But when I watch videos of his campaign, I see a potential monster in embryo. Most especially do I see that potential monster in the shining faces of his supporters, who may yet seduce Obama into believing that he is as special and godlike as they think he is.

+

That, if it ever happens, will be the moment at which Barack Obama becomes truly dangerous.

+

I will not be part of encouraging Barack Obama — or our country — down that road to evil.

diff --git a/20080701033903.blog b/20080701033903.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..be12336 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080701033903.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +From a small town in Pennsylvania +

A reader asks asks: “Just what about Obama is so damned elitist?”

+

I realize I’m a bit late to the party, but a bit of unpacking of the now-infamous “bitter and clinging” quote should serve to explain this nicely.

+

+
+

“So it’s not surprising then that [small-town Pennsylvanians] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their [economic] frustrations.

+
+

Reading the context of this quote makes it worse, not better. In Obama’s universe, small-town Pennsylvanians are too thick to recognize the actual cause of their problems, which is government’s failure to wave some kind of redistributionist magic wand and make it 1955 again. Instead of doing what they should be doing, which is — oh, I dunno, he never actually specifies, but one may guess that it involves voting for nationalized health care and against Republicans — they “cling” to bad, baad things like religion and guns. And “antipathy”, which I’m pretty sure unpacks as “I don’t want to actually out and out call them all redneck racist bigots but wink-wink nudge nudge, know what I mean?”.

+

There is no possibility in Obamaworld that these people may “cling” to religion because religion is an integral part of their traditions in a way that has nothing to do with cultural-Marxist notions of economic determinism. I am certainly more hostile to small-town Pennsylvania’s favorite religions than Obama is and even I can see that this account is condescending and absurd.

+

There is also no possibility in Obamaworld that they “cling” to guns because they enjoy hunting or shooting, or because they hold a principled position about the role of civilian arms in a free society. No, the only possible explanation is that their guns are a form of fetishistic compensation for their depressed, powerless situation.

+

It’s the denial of moral agency that is really insulting here, the glib ascription of behavioral choices to überpolitical causes their supposed victims are too ignorant or stupid to grapple with. But never fear! The benign condescension of goo-goo liberals can save them! Can re-educate them! Can give them jobs (or, more likely, dole checks) and restore meaning to their sordid, petty lives! Can make them better!

+

As it happens, I live in a small town in Pennsylvania. Malvern is a bit too wealthy and connected to metro Philadelphia to be the kind of place Obama is talking about, but I know what those towns are like. My father grew up in one and my wife in another. I wouldn’t live in either place by choice, but Obama’s take on the people who live there is trivializing, insulting, and — yes — elitist.

+

UPDATE: Obama also said the people he had in mind “don’t vote on economic issues, because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them.”. It’s true that they don’t expect anyone to help them; that’s because, in general, they’ve learned to equate “government help” with “fucking things up worse than they are already”. Obama thinks he knows better than this. I think they’re rignt and he’s wrong.

diff --git a/20080703134131.blog b/20080703134131.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..50a6318 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080703134131.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Converging curves +

The newspaper industry’s death spiral is accelerating. The “increasingly rapid and broad decline in the newspaper business in recent months has surprised even the most pessimistic financial analysts.” In related news, the average age of TV viewers has reached 50 and is still rising. The networks are losing their audience.

+

+

The long-term trends hurting the newspaper and TV industry are fairly well understood at this point. At the bottom of most of them is displacement of newspaper-reading and TV-viewing time by Internet browsing. But this, and its consequences (a big one is the collapse of classified-ad revenues; Craigslist and eBay have hit the newspapers where they hurt) has long since been factored into analyst projections. The puzzle is that recently, within the last six to nine months, old-media channels are hemhoraging subscribers even faster than the long-term trend models can explain.

+

This worse-than-expected performance is happening as the mainstream media is becoming increasingly unable to obscure a fact that Americans following on-the-spot bloggers in Iraq already know; the surge worked, and we’re winning the second phase of the war in Iraq. Political and military conditions are steadily improving, Al Qaeda in Iraq is on the ropes, control of Basra has been wrested from Iranian-backed militias, and security in the former terrorist haven of Anbar province has been handed off to Iraqi forces who are handling it competently.

+

The recent acceleration in the decline of old media mirrors the recently accelerating success of the Iraqi counterinsurgency. I do not think this is coincidence; in fact, I believe these trends are feeding each other.

+

Success in Iraq, relayed home through blogs and new media, damages the reputation of an industry that has routinely made itself a willing conduit for anti-Iraq-war and anti-U.S. propaganda (long-term trend discussed here; egregious recent example here). But as the obvious disconnect between reality and the media’s preferred narrative of incompetence, defeat, and disaster has become wider, circulation has dropped proportionately.

+

The newspaper circulation crash, in turn, damages the ability of the Islamists and their apologists in the U.S. to influence the political framing of both the Iraq war and the larger effort to smash the Islamist terror network and its allies. The best evidence of their decline in influence is how rapidly “bringing the troops home” has receded from its early importance as an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign, replaced by gas prices and the subprime-mortgage mess.

+

We can be certain that an easing of domestic pressure to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq is not the outcome the Islamists or their domestic allies desired. That easing stiffens the resolve of our allies on the ground in Iraq — the national government, the Kurds, the “awakened” Sunni sheiks, and plain ordinary Iraqis who can see the improvement around them.

+

The hypothesis that these trends are driving each other leads to a prediction about observables. Newspapers that take a pro-Iraq-war position, and Fox News among the networks, should be faring better than competitors in similar markets, and the divergence should have increased markedly in the last six to nine months.

+

I don’t know whether this is actually true. If it’s not, and that can be documented, I’m certain an angry left-winger will trumpet the facts in the comment thread on this post. Let’s see, shall we?

diff --git a/20080703194344.blog b/20080703194344.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..866ad9d --- /dev/null +++ b/20080703194344.blog @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +Five Myths of New Media, Revisited +

A reader suggested that I should take a look at an article I wrote back in 1997, Five Myths of New Media, and consider how those predictions panned out. Good idea, here goes…

+

+

1. Business use is driving the growth of the Internet

+

That myth is long since busted — I called it right. The action, and most of the traffic volume, are in social networking and P2P and other on-line communities not tied to someone’s line of business. Personal use dominates even in measures as simple as tallies of broadband connections; “home” accounts vastly outnumber “business” accounts.

+

Note: I’m not claiming business use is unimportant, but then I wasn’t claiming that in my original article either. It’s just not the main driver of volume growth today, and probably never has been.

+

In truth, I think I was actually more prescient than almost anyone else about this, at least anyone else who was willing to speak up in public.

+

The Internet is the future of mass entertainment and news.

+

In my prediction I was being derisive of video-on-demand services and the notion that old-media moguls could shoehorn the Internet into a dumb, centralized broadcast medium, issuing entertainment and news over an essentially one-way pipe. Busted: that hasn’t happened either, my negative prediction was correct.

+

Eleven years later the Internet looks like the future of news, but in a different way than I anticipated in 1997. What it’s done instead is turned everyone who wants to be into a publisher. I didn’t make that positive prediction, but then nobody else did either.

+

So I’d say I got this half right; I was correct in terms of the questions we knew how to ask in 1997, but I didn’t quite foresee a more radical development that would change the questions.

+

The techno-literacy problem can be solved in isolation.

+

Despite the more general title, I was mostly talking about the broadband-deployment problem in my original prediction. But I don’t think anyone would even argue the more general claim in 2008.

+

Notice that you don’t hear much squawking from the “digital divide” crowd any more? As I correctly predicted, attempts at grandiose government interventions came to nothing and markets mostly solved the Internet deployment problem. Free wireless Internet provided by private citizens and businesses has spread like crazy.

+

The big remaining deployment issue isn’t rich vs. poor, which is what the do-gooders were obsessing about in 1997; it’s urban vs. rural. Below a certain population density it’s difficult for anyone thinking about dropping in cable or fibre to recover their infrastructure costs. I expect mesh networking and WiMAX to solve this problem during the next five years.

+

I think I got this one entirely right.

+

On-line magazines can make money.

+

…by subscription. If anyone has actually managed this yet, I have yet to hear about it. All the “successful” operations I know of are cross-subsidized by a print business or float on advertising revenue. So I was right as far as that went.

+

I’m going to concede half of this one, however, because I was wrong in the more general sense. Slate, my example of 1997, started making money in 2007 after the Washington Post bought it from Microsoft. The advertising revenue did it.

+

And it’s still the case that even specialized devices like ebook readers “cannot replace the experience of leafing through a magazine with your feet up.”

+

Paper will be history soon.

+

+

Busted. Obviously it isn’t, and won’t be in the foreseeable future. Displays aren’t good enough or cheap enough, or light enough, not by an order of magnitude. The technology to make them better than paper is now realistically imaginable — that’s a change from 1997, when high-resolution color CRTs were still pretty novel — but only barely so. It will be a long way off yet.

+

I wrote: “Internet (like other media) has a natural ecological/economic niche which it fills better than its competitors,
+but that said niche is different from any of its competitors. We won’t serve anyone by trying to fit the Internet on a Procrustean bed of old-media forms, nor by assuming any of them is inevitably going to be completely subsumed by the Internet.

+

One thing we can see a little more clearly ten years later is which old-media forms do look most likely to be replaced. My post on Converging curves cites long-term trends suggesting that general-circulation newspapers look like being one of them.

+

The learning process continues. I was solid on predictions 3 and 5. I got 2 and 4 at least half-right. And I was ahead of almost everyone on prediction 1. That’s at least an an 80% hit rate, which is pretty good in the prognostication business.

diff --git a/20080704031000.blog b/20080704031000.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7736d8b --- /dev/null +++ b/20080704031000.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +Channeling InstaPundit +

Che’ Shirts, Fake Rebels, Acting Class Helped Free Betancourt

+

All I can say is “Heh”.

diff --git a/20080704045909.blog b/20080704045909.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3e69ae1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080704045909.blog @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Apologies to recent commenters +

Due to a fat-finger error on my part, the comments for several posts back were deleted a few minutes ago. Apologies to all commenters; those threads were of rather high quality and I’m sorry to lose them.

diff --git a/20080705034234.blog b/20080705034234.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..068679c --- /dev/null +++ b/20080705034234.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Dangerous Sons +

Some time back I blogged on Hotness in Hollywood. In it I gave Angeline Jolie props for making a game effort at acting in a a movie with a script so execrable that her best effort was doomed, the original Tomb Raider movie. I also praised Liv Tyler playing Arwen, who became my personal all-time favorite example of screen sexiness in the Lord Of The Rings movies. And yes, I know this means I’m a geek; that’s not news to anybody.

+

My wife Cathy and I saw Wanted last night. Avoid it if you can’t stand the sight of people being shot through the head; otherwise it’s a fun popcorn movie with lots of implausible but extremely well-choreographed ultraviolence. (Well, OK, I started to giggle during the last knife fight a few minutes before the ending, because with the Marine knife-fighting technique my swordmaster taught my wife and I last year either of us could have filleted those two pirouetting idiots in short order.)

+

+

There was a moment in this movie at which Liv Tyler got toppled off her perch as my ultimate icon of cinematic sexiness. It was Angelina Jolie playing Fox the assassin, in tight clothing, standing alert and challenging, with a pistol slung low on her hip, looking like she damn well knew how to use it.

+

That went straight to my hypothalamus — bells ringing, lights flashing, rrrowwwrrr!. And, you know, the pistol was important. It trumped Arwen’s sword.

+

For me, at least, sexy women are sexier when they are obviously lethally dangerous. But Lara Croft didn’t affect me as strongly as Fox, despite being twice as heavily armed. I think it’s because Lara Croft was more of a cartoon, obviously bust-padded and stuck in a premise and script I had much more trouble believing. I got the stronger charge from a woman who seemed sexy, and lethal, and (at that moment) real.

+

OK, so why am I going on about my sexual quirks? Because I think there’s some sort of more general point here, and I think the politics and sociobiology of it is kind of interesting. The filmmakers were obviously working hard at maximizing the joint sexiness and dangerousness of Jolie’s character, and it is doubtful they’d have bothered without a pretty clear notion that a lot of men would respond to it the same way I did. At the very least they had to believe it’s a majority preference, otherwise Jolie getting seriously jiggy with firearms would repel more men than it attracted and depress their audience share.

+

This is implicitly a rebuke to a certain kind of feminist — the kind that believes in a vast male conspiracy to keep women disempowered. If a man of quality is defined by his not feeling threatened by a woman’s equality ability to blow his fucking head off, the filmmakers were clearly betting money on the proposition that more than 50% of their male audience would likely fit that bill.

+

And this actually makes evolutionary sense, I think. I’m reminded of what sociobiologists call the Sexy Son hypothesis. According to this one, women are attracted to handsome sexy men because they believe those men will give them handsome sexy sons with an above-average ability to pass on mama’s genes.

+

Contemplating Angeline Jolie as Fox in this movie, I propose the Dangerous Sons hypothesis. That is: more than 50% of men want to jump lethally dangerous women because they think those women will give them dangerous sons with an above-average ability to pass on papa’s genes.

+

“But wait…” I hear you say. “Why not a Dangerous Daughters hypothesis? Could our instincts be aimed at making women better fighters and hunters too?”

+

Er, probably not. In the ancestral environment, female reproductive capacity was way too scarce a resource to be hazarded in combat. Short lifespans, the minimum of nine months between pregnancies, and a high rate of death in childbirth made sure of that. Furthermore, womens’ lighter build and lesser upper body strength meant that (with very rare exceptions at the top end of the female bell curve) women could simply never expect to win a serious fight against a male of even average strength.

+

(Pre-gunpowder weapons like swords could reduce the disparity some but not eliminate it. Gunpowder weapons eliminate it almost entirely. But in the ancestral environment that shaped human mating instincts, we had neither.)

+

So the sexiest possible presentation for a woman is to appear capable of bearing dangerous sons while also being smart and cautious enough that her daughters are unlikely to habitually take the sorts of stupid chances that more expendable males can.

+

I think this explains why Fox is sexier than Lara Croft. A dangerous man can take the kind of crazy, cartoony chances Lara Croft did without his genetic predispositions tipping over into being a net liability for his genetic line (close kin), but a dangerous woman has to be cooler. More measured. More competent. More real.

+

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to go kiss my wife…

diff --git a/20080706163709.blog b/20080706163709.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1cad7d8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080706163709.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +Inconvenient facts +

Comes word from Iraq that the Maliki government has just shipped to Canada 550 tons of yellowcake uranium that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled.

+

One wonders what the anti-war left thinks Hussein had been planning to do with it. Make cupcakes, perhaps?

diff --git a/20080707024358.blog b/20080707024358.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..888db09 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080707024358.blog @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +SPAT: How to Save the Music Industry +

I think I know how to save the music business. There’s a dead-simple business model that will funnel money to talent, work with the Internet’s capability for zero-cost distribution rather than fighting it, and allow the record companies a role without “intellectual property” protection or DRM.

+

I call it SPAT for short. This can have either of two expansions: “Strike Price And Timeout” or “Street Performer And Teaser”.

+

Here’s how it should work:

+

1: You front the money to produce a song. Or an album. Or whatever marketable unit of music you think you can sell. (It’s the 21st century. Production equipment is cheap. You can do better sound engineering in a basement today than a million-dollar production outfit could have during most of the 20th century.)

+

2: You make a teaser clip. If you’re selling a single, maybe it’s 15 seconds out of 3:05. If you’re selling an album, maybe it’s a 3-minute audio montage sampled from the album tracks. Maybe it’s a video. Maybe it has voiceovers by the performers on it.

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3: Throw the teaser on the Internet. Within months after this model is generally understood, there will be aggregation sites that do nothing but host teasers. Some will make money by selling advertising to people who want to reach music consumers. Others will be fan/hobbyist suites with a mission. Still others will be run by record companies — see below for discussion.

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4: The teaser clip has a pitch at the end. “Free this music! When we get X dollars in the tip jar at the specified URL on our fulfillment site URL, we’ll throw the music on the Internet as a free download. Offer expires at time T.”

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5: On the fulfillment site, the pledge jar shows how full it is when you look at it. You can add a pledge to the jar there.

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6: The payment system on the fulfilment site has to deal gracefully with three cases:

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6(a): The timeout expires before the pledge jar is full (“It busted!”). All pledges are returned. All parties lose.

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6(b): The timeout expires after the pledge jar is full (“It boomed!”). The pledge jar is emptied and a free download link to the work appears beside it. Subsequently, anybody can do what they like with it — throwing it on a bunch of BitTorrent trackers will probably be a popular option.

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6(c): The payment system must fail safely — that is, if the pledge jar fills, but the work does not ship, consumers don’t lose money.

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All three cases are important! A large part of the point of this model is to eliminate from consumers’ thinking any perceived risk that they might throw money down a hole.

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8. Assuming 6(b), use your profits to produce the next work. Now you can afford more studio time, better equipment, side players, and maybe some extra marketing. You can probably also set a higher pledge threshold, and/or a longer timeout.

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For an artist, the single key business decision is what strike price to set for a given work — career-building will consist of earning a reputation that allows you to set a higher strike price than your previous ones. Because consumers are probably less sensitive to the timeout length tan to price , I’m expecting there will be convergence on a fairly small set of standard timeout periods.

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Various interesting reputation games could be attached to SPAT to make the pledge jar fill faster. For example, large pledges might earn buyers perks like their name in lights near the download point for the work, or even a mention in some credits.

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Record companies still have a role, if only because somebody has to be trusted to refund the pledges if the jar doesn’t fill and to actually ship the album if it does. Of course, they can continue doing conventional record-company stuff; branding, marketing, A&R, running studios. But there will be three big differences. One is bad: the
+upside is bounded (you don’t collect ‘extra’ revenue from an unexpectedly successful work).

+

On the other hand, the other consequences are good. Distribution expenses go as near zero as makes no difference. There is no requirement in the model for DRM or IP protection of any sort; the record companies get to stop spending lots of money on lawyers and lobbyists and (more importantly) get to stop being hated by the people they most want as customers.

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There’s no intrinsic reason SPAT couldn’t work for movies and other content as well as music, but it’s better adapted to media where the money you need to front to produce as saleable work is relatively low.

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SPAT is, of course, a variant of the well-known Street Performer protocol (SPP). The key difference is that the teaser operates as both marketing and as a plausible promise that the artist already has a deliverable work, changing consumers’ risk assessments and making them more likely to buy. This addresses the most serious weakness of other forms of SPP, which is that the large information asymmetry between buyer and seller acts as a disincentive to buyers.

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SPAT could be substantially improved with one piece of technical infrastructure. That is a pledge instrument which would give the receiver the right to a given chunk of the payer’s money, but only if called after a specified future date. Such an instrument would further reduce buyer risk.

diff --git a/20080707230627.blog b/20080707230627.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c616c7e --- /dev/null +++ b/20080707230627.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Author of “The Genocides” commits suicide +

Thomas Disch committed suicide on July 4th. I wouldn’t bother writing about this, except that offing himself was a perfect correspondence to what he tried to do to science fiction (the art form with which he was most associated).

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+

Disch was bitchy, clever, and depressive — Oscar Wilde in the gutter but without the looking-at-the-stars part. His SF writing was bitchy, clever, and depressive too — much of it to the point of near unreadability even for me, a scholar of the field with a strong stomach. To actually enjoy it would have required a specialized form of masochism rare in any population other than English Lit majors.

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Disch was very nearly a walking paint-by-numbers picture of the Western literary intellectual in a state of decadence: hard-left politics, check; critical essays politely described as ‘acerbic’ but often better characterized as petty and venomous, check; nihilistic self-pitying bitterness, check; rambling self-indulgent free-verse poetry, check. I’d be surprised if there weren’t a drug or alcohol problem in there somewhere.

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It sucked to be Thomas Disch; even his admirers used words like “bitter”, “mean”, and “curmudgeon” to describe him. Unfortunately for the rest of us, it sucked to be affected or influenced by him, too. He was one of the stars of the “New Wave”, a movement of the 1960s and early 1970s that tried to “reform” SF from the superficialities of its pulp-genre origins. If you weren’t there, you may safely guess that these “superficialities” included most of what made SF appealing, then and to this day. The agenda of Disch’s writing and criticism was clear; he wanted SF to be just as incapable of joy and innocence and optimism as he was himself, and confused this bleakness with “maturity”

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The SF field recovered from the New Wave in the early 1980s. Disch did not. As Patrick Nielsen Hayden observes, “Disch played the game of literary politics hard and sometimes lost badly.”

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I would predict a swift descent into well-deserved obscurity for Disch’s work, except that the arts intelligentsia fetishizes people like him — now that he’s safely dead, he may well undergo the same sort of entirely undeserved canonization as (say) Philip K. Dick.

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I risk uttering a cliche by observing that Thomas M. Disch died a broken man. The truth behind that is that he was never whole.

diff --git a/20080709141636.blog b/20080709141636.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a0eaba0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080709141636.blog @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +Patriotism And Its Pathologies +

Once upon a time, patriotism was a fairly simple thing. It was tribal identification writ large, an emotional attachment to a people and their land. In most of the world, where patriotism exists at all it’s still like this — tribal patriotism, blood-and-soil emotionalism.

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A different kind of patriotism emerged from the American and French revolutions. While American patriotism sometimes taps into tribal emotion, it is not fundamentally of that kind. Far more American is the sentiment Benjamin Franklin expressed: “Where liberty dwells, there is my country”

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Thus, most Americans love their country in a more conditional way — not as a thing in itself, but insofar as it embodies core ideas about liberty. It is in the same spirit that our Presidents and miltary officers and naturalizing citizens swear to defend, not the land or people of the United States but its Constitution — a political compact. This is adaptive in many ways; one of them is that tribal patriotism is difficult to nourish in a nation of immigrants.

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In France, the ideology of the Revolution displaced tribal patriotism, just as it did in the U.S. But the French, roiled by political instability and war, have never settled on a political unifying idea or constitutional touchstone. Instead, French patriotism expresses a loyalty to French language and culture and history. It replaces tribalism not with idealism but with culturism.

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America and France are a marked contrast with, say, Denmark. I chose Denmark at random from the class of civilized countries in which patriotism is still fundamentally tribal. You don’t become a Danish patriot by revering the constitution or culture of Denmark; you become one by being a Dane. Which partly means being a tribesman, connected to the Danish genepool, and partly means identifying with stories of past Danish heroism.

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It hasn’t been easy to find a fire-breathing Danish patriot for at least fifty years, though. One of the effects of the terrible convulsions of the 20th century has been to discredit tribal patriotism. Many people in Europe, not unreasonably, associate it with racism and Naziism and are suspicious of anything that smacks of immoderate patriotism.

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This is less true in the U.S. and France, precisely to to the extent that their patriotism does not depend on tribal feeling. Intense patriotism remains respectable in the United States precisely because it is primarily an ideological phenomenon not tied to blood and soil. At its best (a best which Americans achieve rather more often than most non-Americans understand) it manifests as a high-minded determination to secure the blessings of liberty not just for tribal Americans but for every human being.

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All this is fairly generally understood in the United States, and not controversial. But American-style ideological patriotism has pathologies of its own. These are less well understood, and at the bottom of some serious fissures in American political culture.

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The left-wing American historian Howard Zinn once asserted that “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” It is telling that this quote is often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson, the author of our Declaration of Independence, because it does sound like something Jefferson (who famously opined that he thought the infant U.S. might require periodic revolutions every twenty years or so) might actually have said — even though it is not in much doubt that he would reject almost every other feature of Zinn’s politics.

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Embedded deep in the American model of patriotism is the notion that it may be expressed by a passionate determination to reform or even completely upend American institutions in service to the ideals behind them. This is not, as far as I can tell, true anywhere else in the world. It would seem an alien idea even in modern France, where the excesses of the Jacobins irreversibly tainted that sort of fervor with blood.

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I respect that tradition of patriotism by dissent because I am part of it. I’m both an American patriot and a libertarian anarchist. I both love my country and would cheerfully abolish its government and many of its laws as soon as practically possible, in service of a higher loyalty to individual liberty; “Where liberty dwells, there is my country”. Even Americans who disagree strongly with my political stance have no real difficulty understanding how it is compatible with American patriotism.

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But patriotism by dissent can take a much stranger turn. An influential minority of Americans now behave as though loving their country as it might be in the imagined future, where everything they don’t like about it is fixed, excludes loving their country as it actually is!

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There was a flap in October 2007 when would-be Presidential candidate Barack Obama said that he stopped wearing an American-flag pin after 9/11 because he thought doing so had become a “substitute for…true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security.” In doing so, Obama (who founded his candidacy on opposition to U.S. war policy in Iraq) was clearly equating “true patriotism” with the patriotism of dissent.

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Many Americans bridled at this, feeling that the real subtext of Obama’s refusal to wear a flag pin expressed a lack of love for America as it actually is. Matters were not helped when his wife Michelle responded to a string of primary victories by saying “for the first time in my life, I’m proud of my country” (emphasis added). There was widespread feeling that one of the qualifications for anyone aspiring to live in the White House should be a rather less conditional love of country than this.

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The question Barack and Michelle Obama’s behavior raised is not a new one. Can one reasonably be called an American patriot if, even recognizing its imperfections, one doesn’t love America as it is? Obama, for his part, must have concluded that most Americans would answer “no”. At least, I think that’s what we can deduce from the fact that he started wearing a flag pin again — and whatever else can or cannot be said about Obama, he is extremely good at reading and reflecting the expectations of his audiences.

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At its extreme, patriotism by dissent becomes a kind of anti-patriotism in which dedication to an imagined America-that-might-be produces actual, destructive hatred of America as it is and has been. Unreasoning, extreme patriotism is sometimes called “chauvinism”, after the Napoleonic French officer Nicolas Chauvin; for this kind of anti-patriotism I shall analogously coin the label “chomskyism”, after a well-known U.S. radical who appears to embody it.

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Chomskyism is not a phenomenon entirely exclusive to left-wingers. It can be found in the darker corners of the hard right as well, especially in the fever swamps that begin near Pat Buchanan and extend towards the “white nationalist” movement. These people remain, however, distinct from actual neo-Nazis or fascists, who fail to be patriots of dissent because they have no investment at all in the American ideal of liberty.

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But my choice of Noam Chomsky as an icon does reflect the fact that chomskyism is far more a phenomenon of the American left than of the American right. It is near impossible to imagine a conservative presidential aspirant refusing to wear a flag pin, or explaining that refusal as Obama did.

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On the other hand, what one might call a sub-clinical version of chomskyism is extremely common among mainstream left-liberals. Many seem embarrassed by the symbols of patriotism, or incapable of expressing love for their country without feeling obligated to engage in a great deal of semi-ritualized breast-beating about its past and present flaws.

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One may reasonably ask why this matters. Is patriotism important? Supposing it is, to what extent is chomskyism really a problem?

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I will tackle those questions in a future post focused less on history and observation, and more on questions of ethics and values.

diff --git a/20080716061437.blog b/20080716061437.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1096077 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080716061437.blog @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +Deism and the Founding Fathers +

There is a belief abroad in many conservative circles that the U.S. is “a Christian nation”. This belief is found in perhaps its most extreme form in the Mormon doctrine that the Constitution of the United States is a divinely inspired document. Less extreme versions hold that Christian piety was an shaping influence on the thinking and writing of the Founding Fathers, and Christianity therefore has (or ought to have) a privileged position in the political and cultural life of the U.S.

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The Mormon doctrine is unfalsifiable. But claims about the beliefs and intentions of the Founding Fathers are not, and the record is clear: they explicitly rejected the establishment of Christianity as the preferred or natural religion of their infant nation.

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This is implied by the part of the First Amendment that has come to be known as the “Establishment clause”:

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+Congress shall make NO law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof +

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Article 6 contains this language:

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+“The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” +

+

These are the only mentions of religion in the Constitution, which is otherwise completely devoid of religious terminology or references. The point is made much more explicit in the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, which states:

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+[T]he Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion +

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Religious conservatives are fond of replying by pointing excitedly at the references to “Nature’s God”, “Divine Providence”, and the “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence. Let’s look at these in full:

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When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

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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;

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And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

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These phrasings do, at first blush, sound rather like Christian piety. But in interpreting them, we need to bear in mind several other quotes by Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence.

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(1787) Question with boldness even the existence of a God;

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(1787) I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.

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(1800) [The clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man”

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(1814) In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.

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(1823) The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.

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It is very clear from these that Jefferson was hostile to Christianity and to religious authority in general. However, that phrase “on the altar of God” rings oddly with the rest. Of what “God”, if not the Christian one, was Jefferson speaking?

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The answer to this question — which also explains the references in the Declaration of Independence — is that Jefferson, like many intellectuals of his time, was a Deist. The “Creator” and “Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence, and the God of Jefferson’s altar, is not the intervening Christian God but the God of Deism.

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Deism was an early attempt to reconcile the mechanistic world-view arising from experimental science with religion. Deists believed in a remote sort of clockmaker-God who created the universe but then refrained from meddling in it afterwards. Deists explicitly rejected faith, revelation, religious doctrine, religious authority, and all existing religions. They held that humans could know the mind of God only through the study of nature; in many versions of Deist thinking, the mind of God was explicitly identified with the laws of nature.

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Thus “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God”; in Deist thought these concepts blurred together. The phrase “endowed by their Creator” could be rendered accurately as “endowed by Nature”. In modern terms, this is an entirely naturalistic account of human rights.

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Jefferson was not an exception and he was not pulling a textual fast one on the other signers. The summary of Deism here observes “Many of the leaders of the French and American revolutions followed this belief system, including John Quincy Adams, Ethan Allen, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine, and George Washington.” Many direct quotes from these Founders substantiate this claim.

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At its height, Deist thought influenced and was influenced by the theology and practices of liberal Protestant sects, especially those of the more individualist kind and most especially the Quakers (a very large and influential faction during the Revolutionary period). Thus, even though some of the Founding Fathers were not explicitly Deist, all found Deist language in the Declaration acceptable.

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“Divine Providence” is a Christian Protestant term of art, not really a Deist one. But it could be read in a Deist way, as the essentially mechanical unfolding of the clockmaker-God’s design, and often was at the time. Benjamin Franklin, a leading Deist who imitated Quaker customs and dress, would have found it appealing.

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It is also relevant that many of the Founders were Freemasons. The “Great Architect” God of Masonry is more readily identifiable with the Deist clockmaker-God than with Jehovah or Allah or any conventional intervening deity. In fact, it is arguable that Masonic theology is essentially a fossil relic of 18th-century Deism. In period, not only were most of the signers of the Declaration and framers of the Constitution Masons, but most of the Committees of Correspondence (the communications and propaganda apparatus of the Revolution) were attached to Masonic lodges. This connection, despite having given impetus to a great deal of paranoid conspiracy literature, remains rather important for understanding the Founders’ “God”.

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Jefferson’s “altar of God” quote and the references in the Declaration of Independence are easy to misconstrue today because Deism did not long outlive the Founding Fathers. In their time it functioned as a sort of halfway house for intellectuals who rejected traditional religion but were unwilling to declare themselves atheists or agnostics. As the social risk of taking these positions decreased, Deism waned.

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Deism’s detached clockmaker-God had even less appeal to the less intellectual, and was swamped by a wave of Christian revivalism (the so-called “Second Great Awakening”) in the early 1800s.

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Later generations, ignorant of Deism, mistakenly interpreted the references we’ve been discussing as evidence of Christian piety. But this is what they were explicitly not; the quotes from Jefferson above show that he was violently anti-clerical, and most of his colleagues professed Deism precisely because they agreed with him in regarding Christianity as a vulgar and bloody superstition. Their confident predictions that it would wither away before the Enlightenment were, unfortunately, not to be fulfilled.

diff --git a/20080717012350.blog b/20080717012350.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0cf03ad --- /dev/null +++ b/20080717012350.blog @@ -0,0 +1,57 @@ +Slang for the Galaxy +

It’s no news to any serious strategy gamer that Race For The Galaxy has rapidly become one of the most popular and frequently played designs of recent years. My gaming group plays it often enough that we’ve developed our own slang terms for certain frequently-occurring tactics and situations. In the hope that other players may find these enjoyable and useful, here they are:

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sniping
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The act of choosing the +5 Explore option, as opposed to the +1 +1 Explore. So called because of its use to snipe for a single key card that you need, as popposed to generally gathering resources.

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pumping
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Playing nothing but alternating IV(2xVP) and V phases. A smart thing to do if you have good VP consume powers and planets or developments that will pull cards into your hand during a Produce phase. This tactic may rely on other players choosing phases II and III so you don’t have to, or you may count on pumping more points per turn than anyone else can make by playing their planets and developments. There are three major variants of this:

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blue pump
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A pump with blue planets using Consumer Markets.

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brown pump
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A pump with brown planets using Mining Conglomerate and possibly Mining League.

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gray pump
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A pump based on gray worlds with consume powers, especially Tourist World and Galactic Trendsetters. This term is seldom used because it’s unusual to win with a pure gray pump; more commonly you’ll see a combination like a blue-gray pump or a brown-gray pump.

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build out
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To build out is to end the game by reaching the 12-card limit in your tableau. This term implies that you’re doing this deliberately early in order to shut down the game before someone else’s pump can outscore you.

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fast build
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A class of whole-game strategies that depend on building out before other players can get their own strategies in gear. This has variants:

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military fast-build
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This strategy relies on the combination of a military homeworld and an early Space Marines or Drop Ships to set up a situation in which every succeeding world you buy is paid for with military power rather than discards.

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civilian fast-build
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This strategy is much less common, and so is the term. It may start with a combination like Replicant Robots and either Mining Robots or Alien Rosetta Stone World. +

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studge
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An opening hand that does not obviously lend itself to any particular strategy, requiring one to thrash around Exploring for a couple of rounds seeking key cards. Probably from filboid studge. The emphatic form is “utter studge”. In extreme cases, one might do a take on the Monty Python “spam” routine: “Studge, studge, studge, studge…Lovely studge, wonderful studge!”

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consumerator
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Fancifully, the elaborate mad-scientistic machine (doubtless equipped with arcing electrodes and many blinkylights) that performs point-pumping. Especially in the phrase “Fire up the consumerator!” +

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Other examples of usage:

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“Yeah, I had New Galactic Order in my opening hand and went for a military-alien fast-build, but he beat me with a brown pump and Tourist World.”

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A player in a two-hand game choosing I(+5) and III might say “Snipe and settle!”

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On seeing somebody with two or more blue production worlds play Consumer Markets: “Uh oh, blue pump a-comin’.

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On playing your first IV(2VP) + V in a two-hand game, it is appropriate to say “Engaging consumerator…NOW!” followed by your best Star Trek sound effect.

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Um, yes, since you ask, yes my gaming friends are complete geeks. And proud of it. If this surprises you, you have not been paying attention.

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(Also posted to the Race For The Galaxy:General forum on BoardGameGeek.)

diff --git a/20080719102844.blog b/20080719102844.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3f462f3 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080719102844.blog @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +A Brief History of Firearms Policy Fraud +

The Heller vs. D.C. ruling affirming that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms was a major civil-rights victory building on 15 years of constitutional scholarship. Accordingly, we owe a great deal of thanks to principled and dedicated legal academics including Don Kates, Dave Kopel, and the blogosphere’s own InstaPundit (aka Glenn Harlan Reynolds) for their work on the Standard Model of the Second Amendment.

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But there was another trend at work; the beginning of public recognition, after the year 2000, that anti-firearms activism has been founded on systematic errors and widespread fraud in the academic literature on gun policy.

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The scholar we have to thank most for this awakening is Michael Bellesiles, the author of Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (September 2000). In looking back on the public debate that led up to the Heller ruling, I can think of no other single person who did so much (even if inadvertently) to change the political climate around gun rights.

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Bellesiles sought to to show that the bearing of civilian firearms had not been a central feature of life in the first century of the U.S’s history; that American gun culture had been founded on a myth, and the “truth” denied it political legitimacy. His book got a favorable reception (the Bancroft Prize, glowing reviews, near-unanimous praise in the national press) because it told the media-political elite what most of it wanted to hear, that the Second Amendment was an anachronism being defended by dupes and frauds.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know the punchline: it was Bellesiles himself who was the fraud. His conclusions were unsupported; his ‘evidence’ was a tissue of deliberate misconstruction and outright fakery. His Bancroft prize was eventually withdrawn for “scholarly misconduct”

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The exposure of that fraud sent shock waves through academia and the media, gave the civil-rights advocates who took him down exposure and new legitimacy, demoralized anti-Second-Amendment propagandists, and destroyed the ability their side had previously developed to largely control the terms of the gun-policy debate.

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Thank you, Michael Bellesiles, for overreaching. The Heller ruling is the just reward of the skeptics (led by an uncredentialed amateur) who dug and thought and argued their way to a public hearing. But what the public doesn’t fully understand yet is that Arming America was no exception. Bellsisles was the visible end of a long and dishonorable history of manipulation, sloppy practice, and apparently deliberate deception in the anti-gun-rights literature, a pattern of flim-flam and axe-grinding that stretches back decades.

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Now that the Heller ruling has come down and administered another salutary shock to a lot of people who thought they could dismiss the Second Amendment and its defenders, I think it’s time that civil rights advocates follow up by exposing the history of junk science and dishonesty in anti-firearms studies before Bellesisles.

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Let’s hit a few high spots:

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Noel Perrin’s 1979 book Giving Up The Gun. Perrin argued that Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s 1543 ban on firearms was successful and a key factor in the Tokugawa pacification of Japan. Implicitly he proposed this as a model for emulation. But, as an eminent historian of Japan once explained to me, it is known for certain that the great daimyos continued to equip the retainers with firearms after the ban. The truth is that the shogunate merely pretended to abolish firearms and the daimyos pretended to obey, a very Japanese face-saving maneuver. To support his conclusion, Perrin must either have ignored or outright suppressed the most obvious kind of primary documentary evidence — the actual weapons inventories from the Tokugawa period.

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The 1986 Kellerman & Reay study Protection or peril? An analysis of firearm-related deaths in the home is the source of the widespread myth that home-defense weapons are 43 times more likely to kill or injure family members than a criminal. Dave Kopel’s refutation, devastating as it is, fails to mention that Kellerman has refused to disclose his entire primary data sets to peers so his statistical analysis could be checked. Kellerman was later a vocal defender of the Arming America fraud; perhaps his data sets are swimming with Bellesiles’ nonexistent probate records?

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Kellerman and Reay are nothing if not consistent. Two years later, their 1988 Handgun Regulations, Crime, Assaults, and Homicide: A Tale of Two Cities blatantly manipulated and misrepresented data from Seattle and Vancouver in an attempt to argue for the effectiveness of Vancouver’s firearms restrictions. Among other failings, it omitted to control for socioeconomic and ethnic differences between the cities, and it ignored the actual 25% increase in Vancouver murder rates after the law.

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Colin Loftin’s 1991 paper Effects of restrictive licensing of handguns on homicide and suicide in the District of Columbia failed to control for population changes between 1976 and 1987 and fraudulently ignored a doubling of D.C’s murder rate after 1978 that earned it the sobriquet “Murder Capital of the World” even as gun-ban advocates were citing the Loftin study as evidence of the success of their policy. Refutation here.

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The 1992 Koop and Lundberg paper, Violence in America: A Public Health Emergency advocated stringent gun control and registration with the claim that claim that “One million US inhabitants die prematurely each year as the result of intentional homicide or suicide”. This could not have been other than outright fraud; there is no honest interpretation of national mortality statistics that can come anywhere close to supporting this 35-fold exaggeration.

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Edgar Suter’s 1994 article Guns in the Medical Literature — A Failure of Peer Review documents a longstanding pattern of “the inflammatory use of aberrant and sculpted data to reach illogical conclusions”. It refutes both of the Kellerman & Reay papers cited above, the 1993 Koop & Lundberg paper, and notes flaws in several other less-well-known but equally biased and fraudulent studies.

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A 1983 review article, Willam Tonso Social Science and Sagecraft in the Debate over Gun Control, discussed a pattern of particularism, deception, and questionable methodology amounting to a form of class warfare against gun owners. While the authors refrain from making specific accusations, the paper valuably illuminates the context in which these frauds take place since as early as the late 1950s, and explains why they are so difficult to combat.

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I described the errors as “systematic” before the jump because there is a pattern of distortions in the anti-gun literature that have been repeated over decades even though they violate known good practice in the social and medical sciences. These include but are not limited to:

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    Failure to control for socioeconomic differences between star and control groups, even when the differences are known to correlate with large differences in per-capita rates of criminal deviance

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    Choice of study periods that ignore well-documented trends that run contrary to the study’s conclusions immediately before or after the period.

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    Selective use of suicide statistics, counting them only in star but not control groups and/or ignoring massive evidence that would-be suicides rapidly substitute other methods when firearms are not available.

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    Tendentious misapplication of Uniform Crime Report data, for example by ignoring the fact that UCR reports of homicides are entered before trial and therefore fail to account for an unknown but significant percentage of findings of misadventure and lawful self-defense.

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And I described this pattern as “fraud” before the jump because the magnitude of these errors would be too great and their direction too consistent for honest error, even if we did not in several prominent cases have direct evidence that the fraud must have been intended.

+A further and very disturbing pattern is that conventional academic peer review has largely failed to point out errors that were later readily apparent to uncredentialed amateurs. Arming America is only the most prominent such case; very often, the earliest and most forceful refutations of bad research have come from civil-rights defenders working nights and weekends. It is shameful that these refutations have been so frequently ignored by the academy.

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Civil-rights advocates have an opening to shape the terms of future debate now, but I think it needs to be exploited before the Heller ruling becomes old news and the Bellesisles fraud fades from public memory. We need a history of the flimflam more detailed than this one, we need it to be available on the Web, and we need it to be written in language accessible to journalists and the public.

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UPDATE: Thanks to ricketyclick for pointing out that the anti-Heller brief for the District of Columbia and Justice-Stevens’s dissent were both riddled with factual errors — see here and here. Honest error, or fraud? Either way, it is telling that the anti-Heller position relied on it.

+ diff --git a/20080721101053.blog b/20080721101053.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0762189 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080721101053.blog @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +What D&D character am I? +

Most what-kind-of-X-are-you quizzes are superficial jokes. I just found one that seems better constructed than the average, and as an old-time D&D fan I couldn’t resist it. Here’s the paste from my results, with a link:

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+I Am A: Neutral Good Human Wizard (7th Level)

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Ability Scores:
+Strength-14
+Dexterity-10
+Constitution-16
+Intelligence-15
+Wisdom-14
+Charisma-15

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Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment because it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

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Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

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Class:
Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard’s strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells.

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Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

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The stats seem pretty accurate on the whole, though I wonder which answers made them underestimate my Intelligence. And I’ve never been about limiting the actions of the truly capable.

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And here are my results from another interesting quiz auditing for Asperger’s Syndrome traits:

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No surprise there, I already knew I wasn’t an Asperger’s Syndrome case; if anything, my neurological bent resembles subclinical Tourette’s Syndrome. But here I come out as a neurotypical with a balance of intellectual and physical talents, which seems about right.

diff --git a/20080722063002.blog b/20080722063002.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6f7b8ee --- /dev/null +++ b/20080722063002.blog @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +Generative models and programming talent +

What, if anything, is the essential and unique talent of good programmers?

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The best account of this I’ve seen was written by one Stuart Reges in 1992. It has been interestingly corroborated by two more recent papers on CS education. I think Reges was onto something, but he was missing a couple of concepts he needed and therefore could not state his theory as concisely or effectively as he might have. I’m going to restate his idea here, and (I think) do a somewhat better job of tying it into other kinds of knowledge than he does.

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Reges tried to write an account of a skill that he called “CS IQ”. I observe that CS IQ has to do with the ability to construct what philosophers of science call “generative theories” (this is the concept Reges is missing).

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Here is Reges’s 1992 account, lightly edited for concision and readability (mainly by adding some paragraph breaks) and with my own analysis inserted:

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[Good] programmers are able to “play computer” in their head (sometimes requiring the aid of a scrap of paper). In other words, we have a model of exactly what the computer does when it executes each statement. For any given program, we have a mental picture of the state the computer is in when execution begins, and we can simulate how that state changes as each statement executes. This is rather abstract, so let me try to explain by giving a specific example.

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In the language of philosophy, Reges is saying that (good) programmers have a generative model of computing. That is, they have a model that is rich in internal causal connections. They can reason forward about how causal effects will ripple through the rest of the model when the state of some part of it changes. They can also reason backward about what sort of state change would be required to produce a specified effect.

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Let me tell a story that is typical of those I heard from the TAs who worked for me at the computing center. A student comes up to the TA and says that his program isn’t working. The numbers it prints out are all wrong. The first number is twice what it should be, the second is four times what it should be,and the others are even more screwed up. The student says, “Maybe I should divide this first number by 2 and the second by 4. That would help, right?”

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No, it wouldn’t, the TA explains. The problem is not in the printing routine. The problem is with the calculating routine. Modifying the printing routine will produce a program with TWO problems rather than one. But the student doesn’t understand this (I claim because he isn’t reasoning about what state his program should be in as it executes various parts of the program).

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The student goes away to work on it. He comes back half an hour later and says he’s closer, but the numbers are still wrong. The TA looks at it and seems puzzled by the fact that the first two numbers are right but the others don’t match. “Oh,” the student explains, “I added those 2 lines of code you suggested to divide the first number by 2 and the second by 4.” The TA points out that he didn’t suggest the lines of code, but the student just shrugs his shoulders and says, “Whatever.”

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The TA endeavors to get the student to think about what change is necessary, but the student obviously doesn’t get it. The TA has a long line of similarly confused students, so he suggests that the student go sit down and think through his calculating procedure and exactly what it’s supposed to be doing.

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Half an hour later the student is back again. “While I was looking over the calculating procedure, a friend of mine who is a CS major came by and said my loop was all screwed up. I fixed it the way he suggested, but the numbers are still wrong. The first number is half what it’s supposed to be and the second is one-fourth what it’s supposed to be, but the others are okay.”

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The TA considers for a moment whether he should bring up the student on an honor code charge for receiving inappropriate help, but decides that it isn’t worth it (especially since that line of similarly confused students is now twice what it was an hour ago). He asks the student whether he still has those lines of code in the printing routine that divide by 2 and 4 before printing. “Oh yeah,” the student exclaims, “those lines you said I should put in. That must be the problem.” The TA once more politely points out that he didn’t suggest the two lines of code, but the student again shrugs and says, “Whatever. Thanks, dude!”

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The student in my hypothetical displays the classic mistake of treating symptoms rather than solving problems. The student knows the program doesn’t work, so he tries to find a way to make it appear to work a little better. As in my example, without a proper model of computation, such fixes are likely to make the program worse rather than better. How can the student fix his program if he can’t reason in his head about what it is supposed to do versus what it is actually doing? He can’t.

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In the language of philosophy, the failing student does not have (or even seek) a generative model of computing, and therefore has very little ability to see how the facts about his particular program are causally connected. His ability to reason forward from causes like the construction of his loop to effects like the observed output is weak; his ability to reason backwards from desired output to the construction of the loop is nonexistent.

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But for many people (I dare say for most people), they simply do not think of their program the way a programmer does. As a result, it is impossible for a programmer to explain to such a person how to find the problem in their code. I’m convinced after years of patiently trying to explain this to novices that most are just not used to thinking this way while a small group of other students seem to think this way automatically, without me having to explain it to them.

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Reges later wrote up his account more formally as The Mystery of b := (b = false).

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What is missing from Reges’s account of a “model of computation” is what the model held in a good programmer’s mind actually consists of: a rich set of causal relationships between possible states of the model. (But I am pretty certain Reges would agree with this elaboration instantly.)

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Reges’s implicit theory is this: good programmers, and students who will become good programmers, have a generative model of computing. Poor programmers, and students who will become poor programmers, don’t. CS IQ consists of a talent for building generative models of computing.

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Some recent work on the teaching of programming reinforce Reges’s point. See, for example, Improving the Viability of Mental Models Held by Novice Programmers. The authors, llike Reges, lack the notion of a generative model. But in considering how students succeed and fail, they note that students may hold different causal theories about the assignment operator in Java — and of course, only one of these theories is correct.

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Another recent paper, The camel has two humps, draws a more general conclusion. In this one, two British researchers correlated responses on an exam used to filter incoming students aiming to study CS. They boldly claim to be able to predict a student’s success in CS courses before students have had any contact with any programming language.

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Their exam included several questions about how assignments in computer languages will change variables, with multiple-choice answers implying different theories about how assignment works. Theories included the correct one (a = b copies the value of b to a) and several incorrect ones (a = b moves the value of b to a, zeroing b; or a = b swaps the values of a and b).

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The result: The test-takers who went on to fail in the CS courses were the ones who applied different theories of assignment to different questions. The ones who succeeded applied the same theory to each question; whether it was the correct theory did not matter!

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In other words, the successful CS entrants were the ones who, before learning any CS, responded to the test questions by constructing a generative model of assignment in their heads. The failures did not. Whether the result was correct or incorrect, it was the predisposition to seek a generative theory that predicted success.

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I have not linked to Reges’s original post for a reason. It’s because Reges was using his argument about “CS IQ” as a stepping stone to a more contentious theory, which I’ll examine in a future post. In the meantime, Reges’s theory has a consequence; it is, itself, generative. It is exactly the consequence that the authors of The camel has two humps actually observed; successful CS students are those who, given a set of facts, will instinctively seek a consistent generative model to connect them.

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I’m going to coin a term. Successful CS students are “model-seekers”. Reges’s “CS IQ” is a measure of model-seeking tendency.

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UPDATE: Stuart Reges has not disappeared; he’s now a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington.

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UPDATE**2: Reges himself informs me that the authors of The camel has two humps have now withdrawn their strongest claims. More experimental results refuted the theory that model-seeking is the only predictor of success, but they still believe it is an important factor and are looking for possible confounding variables.

diff --git a/20080725075656.blog b/20080725075656.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c3e93c2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080725075656.blog @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +On the road in Michigan +

Blogging (and my responses to comments) will be light for the next two weeks. I’m on the road in Michigan, attending a week-long swordfighting intensive that starts tomorrow, then I’ll be at the World Boardgaming Championships for a week after that.

diff --git a/20080726081250.blog b/20080726081250.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c68bfda --- /dev/null +++ b/20080726081250.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Sword Camp 2008: And So, It Begins… +

OK, so imagine you could go on vacation with a bunch of your best friends, all of whom are either (a) science fiction fans, (b) software geeks, (c) advanced martial artists, or (d) usually, some combination of the above. Now imagine that you get to spend a solid week with these people learning stuff like how to fight with a sword, military tactical hand signals, pistolcraft, stealthy movement in wooded country, emergency field medicine, and how to improvise an incendiary mortar with soda cans and gasoline-soaked tennis balls.

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I don’t have to imagine this, because I get to live it. It’s Sword Camp 2008, my fourth, the morning of Day One. I am still happily digesting the marinated steak that Sal Sanfratello, the founder/head of the school grilled for all of us late last night over a campfire. That was probably one of my better ideas; Sal had turned his ankle a few days previous and when I suggested that some red meat would be good for accelerating the healing process his lovely and buxom lady Heather (also Chief Instructor) seized upon the plan with glee.and alacrity.

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Doug the Death Turtle, instructor and…ineffably strange person…is already here. Jordan Malokowski (aka “Captain Oblivious”) and his wife Karen and their precocious kid Cat materialized for the barbeque; as Karen did bellydance moves by the campfire light, Jordan and I plotted to set up some strategy gaming later in the week. Rob Landley (yes, the Busybox maintainer who’s been a principal in all those GPL lawsuits recently) and his wife Fade-the-Cat are expected but not due until early Saturday morning.

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Right at the moment we’re in our friend Scott Kennedy’s kitchen. He and his wife Diane live six miles from the site and generally lend us a place to stay. Scott is happily showing off his new swordfighting shirt, a tight black sleeveless number that is in the best assassin-chic tradition of Sword-Camp fashion. “It makes you look badass,” my wife Cathy acknowledges.

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Diane snorts. “I know him for real,” she says. Scott, grinning, says “Hey, I can be badass and still be afraid of you.” Which is very true; Scott is a fast, sneaky, and ruthless fighter, as I have cause to know.

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I myself am wearing a new pair of fighting pants I got from SWAT-gear catalogue. Black, of course. The special loops and pockets they carry for pistol gear are well adapted for carrying swords and daggers as well; I haven’t installed the kneepads yet. And yes, kneepads are functional; in this fighting style, if you take a lower-leg hit you’re expected to continue fighting from your knees.

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The school teaches a system that’s based on Sicilian cut-and-thrust swordfighting from c.1500 and incorporates several substyles including sword and shield, single-sword, sword and main gauche, two-sword Florentine, great-sword, and various polearms. But we’re not exactly just historical fencers. Sal is former military and more interested in teaching good combat reflexes than re-enactment, so our training incorporates the jujitsu he learned, and firearms, and various other bits and pieces from Asian martial arts.

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A few of those bits and pieces are mine. I’m the school’s only guest instructor; in previous years I’ve taught units on escrima (Philippine stick-fighting) and board-breaking, and this year I’m doing one on “Japanese Sword For Western Swordsmen”. That should be fun.

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Everyone is praying the weather holds. Michigan is extremely hot and wet in the summer; last year’s camp came perilously close to being shut down by brutal humidity, but we might get a break this year; it’s only supposed to hit the eighties Fahrenheit.

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Yeah. I’m ready. It’s time to fight.

diff --git a/20080726230030.blog b/20080726230030.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1d56a04 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080726230030.blog @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +Sword Camp 2008: Skills, Day One +

Saturday was designated Skills Day. The plan had been for the Basics — the beginner-level class — to be taken in hand and run through a compressed version of the first six months of training while the rest of us — Intermediate and Advanced students — got to choose from a casual smorgasbord of specials skills topics offered by the instructors.

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Said plans were slightly complicated by the absence of any actual Basics. The Sword Camp Basic class had at one point had eight signups; various family crises, work demands, and a motorcycle accident reduced it to five and, eventually to one. The one, Rob Landley, was believed to be somewhere on the road towards us from the Ottawa Linux Symposium.

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Half a dozen of us, including Cathy and me, started the day with Heather teaching advanced grounding. This is a set of techniques for maintaining good balance, aka “connection to ground”. They start with good stance and relaxation while stationary, then move up to good balance while running and jumping. Finally we did grounding in combat. I learned that I need to work on rotating to handle.multiple threat axes more effectively.

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Towards the end of this unit, Doug the Death Turtle wandered by, heading towards the compost heaps at the back edge of the property with a snowshovel-full of dog turds generated by Sal’s Malamutes. “I think I’ve found my preferred great-weapon!” he says, grinning maniacally.

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Next up, my unit on Japanese Sword for Western Swordsmen. Signed up were three of the instructors (Heather, Lynda, and Scott), advanced student Marcus, and Dan the lone Basic student. I talked about the historical context in which Japanese sword evolved, the transition from pre-Tokugawa battlefield-oriented techniques for horsemen to Tokugawa-era court styles primarily for dueling. Katanas became shorter and lighter, and the technique became more and more linear, stylized, and graceful. Technically, I covered the five basic cuts and three basic blocks, focusing on getting the whole body involved in and contributing power to each move.

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The class was lots of fun to teach, because everyone in it except Dan the Basic was an advanced swordsman who could pick up and integrate the Japanese techniques about as fast as I could explain them. And Dan the Basic was keeping up; as I’d gathered before the class, he is especially fixated on the myth and legend of Japanese sword and was motivated.

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After lunch, Heather taught Cathy and myself a refresher on basic Florentine. This is a two-sword technique where you keep the blades (either sword plus shortsword or two swords) in constant motion in order to interdict the opponent’s weapon. Doing it requires that you have fairly elaborate patterns of movement grooved into muscle memory so that you can do them without thinking, and vary the pattern into striking at your opponent when appropriate.

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The missing Rob and Fade arrived as our Florentine class was about halfway through; time out for greetings and hugs all around. There were other distractions too; right behind us, in the knife pit, Linda was running a board-breaking class. Every once in a while I’d hear a brisk crack from behind me as a happy camper executed a successful break.

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As often happens, there was one particularly resistant board that was defeating every effort to break it. Comes the end of the class period, Lynda-the-instructor is inquiring of her students if any of them wants another whack at it, and I see my chance.

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“Oooh! Oooh! Can I try it?” said I. Lynda, having a pretty good idea what to expect, gestured in the direction of student Mitch, who promptly assumed the holder position. Not too many milliseconds later I shattered the recalcitrant board with a palm strike and a delighted “YAAAAAAAAA!”. Mitch the student, who had known nothing about me or what was coming at him, reports that he would have jumped a foot in shock if he’d had time.

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Around 3:00PM a weapon-tossing circle developed on the Great Lawn. This is a dexterity and reaction-time exercise involving flying swords, daggers, and in this case one glaive (aka the big whacking polearm). I’m not very good at this, being a barely competent catcher. But I did manage to grab a flying glaive out of the air.

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Our next actual class was “Angles and Tricks in Single-Sword”. This was all about various sneaky things you can pull by either (a) stepping suddenly off line to change your angle of strike, or (b) binding the opponent’s weapon and then executing a second-beat strike or thrust from an unexpected angle.

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And then there was pudding, during the afternoon snack break. The break also featured in-depth discussion of the consequences of putting the makings for liquid-nitrogen ice cream in an industrial blender. You get a cold-gas explosion; Google for “liquid nitrogen ice-cream explosion” to find the YouTube video. This is the kind of afternoon-break conversation you get when your hovercraft is full of eels martial-arts camp is full of geeks.

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After the break, Cathy took Heather’s class in basic yoga and reported it good. I passed this one up, knowing full well the consequences of my pathetic lack of anything resembling physical flexibility. My repeated epic failures to achieve posture would merely have distracted the other students.

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The rest of us were short of instructors, as Doug the Death Turtle was occupied teaching the Basic class and Sal was up at the house taking a nap that he needed very seriously after two days of nonstop sword camp preparation and a turned ankle. So five of us went out on the Great Lawn and did pickup fighting in odd combinations, like two attackers against three stationary defenders and vice-versa.

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I am now about to articulate a position that will startle regular readers of this blog: Taking away peoples’ guns is fun.

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I learned this when I took Sal’s class on Pistol Disarms just before the dinner break. Any self-defense expert will tell you “Run from a knife; charge a gun.” You can avoid being stabbed or cut by keeping out of an attacker’s reach, but you can’t outrun a bullet. So the right thing to do is close and grapple for the disarm. And close fast, before the attacker can react and shoot you.

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This is easier than it sounds. At the 7 to 10-foot range of typical self-defense encounters, a trained fighter has a very good chance to close and execute before the shooter can fire. The specific disarm Sal taught involved a block and twist that winds up with the barrel pointed back at the shooter; at that point, with a bit of pressure, you can force him to shoot himself. Alternatively you can simply twist the gun out of his hands, probably breaking a finger or three of his in the process.

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I love this technique. It rewards (a) aggression and strength, (b) closing up on the opponent, and (c) putting truly vicious intention on the strike and twist. All three of these are things I am good at and happy doing in combat. I picked it up very quickly.

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Tacos for dinner. Beef. Hot sauces. Mmmmm.

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The Saturday night tournament was a triple bear pit. The bear pit holder fights each fighter in the queue until he takes a kill strike, then he goes to the end of the queue; the tournament ends when somebody makes a threshold number of kills, in this case 7. In this variant, you pick three weapons styles and fight bear pit in each one in turn; Winner is the fighter with the highest point total.

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I made a few kills, but was never really in contention. I chose sword plus shield, sword plus parrying dagger, and dagger as my styles. I learned that choosing a close-fighting weapon like a dagger in a format like this is probably a mistake; in my third round I got totally owned by fighters using Florentine two-sword and glaive.

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Afterwards, there was a campfire in which we ceremonially burned the pieces of the shattered breaking boards. There were milkshakes, and fight stories, and talk of many things.

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More on the morrow…

diff --git a/20080728021226.blog b/20080728021226.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..feb65e5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080728021226.blog @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +Sword Camp 2008: MacGyver Day, Day Two +

Tuesday was designated MacGyver Day — all about cleverness, improvisation, and thinking outside the box. This sounded like fun, right enough, but what I was really looking forward to was…holmgang.

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We opened our morning with a class in paired-partner conditioning exercises run by Lynda, who is capable and beautiful and smart and hires out as a personal trainer when she’s not teaching at the school (yes, that was a shameless plug for a friend). Many of these were familiar, pretty standard stuff you’d get at an Asian martial-arts school. One, a kind of reverse crunch in which you arch your back off the floor with your partner sitting on your calves to pin them, was new; Cathy and I both liked it and plan to incorporate it into our home workout.

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Then we did a survival exercise. The premise is this: Your team is the 4 or 5 survivors of an air crash in arctic Canada. It is 25 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, man-killing temperatures. The nearest town is about 20 miles away; you can see the sky-glow of the town lights, but the intervening country is taiga forest. You have the following salvage from the plane:

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  • Steel Wool
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  • Axe
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  • .45ACP, loaded with 7 rounds
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  • Crisco
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  • 4 newspapers
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  • Empty cigarette lighter
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  • 20×20 canvas tarp
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  • Plastic sectional air map
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  • 1 quart of whiskey
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  • Compass
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  • 4 chocolate bars
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  • A wrecked airplane
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The challenge was: come up with a survival plan.

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I’m not actually going to reveal what Sal told us afterwards was the key fact about the situation, because you might have to do the exercise yourself someday. I will, however, record that three of the four teams (including mine) failed to get it and were pronounced dead. The fourth was judged to have a slightly better than even chance of surviving.

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Funniest remark of the exercise: “Rose was cutting steaks off the pilot’s ass before the plane hit the ground.”

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Sal told us afterwards that he’d actually modified this from a survival challenge scenario he’d been presented once that involved a plane crash in the Arizona desert with a town 60 miles away. That one has an obvious optimum strategy; if Air Search and Rescue doesn’t show up within a few hours, you hike out, moving at night. There was general agreement that any of the 30 or so people present could deal with that one with relative ease.

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The next couple of exercise had to do with, of all things, improvisational comedy. They were intended to teach mental ability and the ability to improvise under stress. First, we did a game called “freeze”, in which pairs of players improvise comic scenes — but, at any point, any other player can call “Freeze!”, at which point the player can walk in, tap one of the players to leave, and start a new scene. You are expected to wait on calling a freeze until either funny has been achieved or it is clear the current scene is not working.

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Another game was Questions: we formed two lines. The people at the head of the line imrovise a dialog that must be all questions; when you utter any non-question, you go back to the rear of the queue. The object of this game (we were told) is to learn how to avoid making declarative statements that can be checked when you’re on an op and trying to deceive, say, a security guard. People got better at this over time, and there were some very funny moments;

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The funniest moment happened to involve me.I found myself facing Cathy.. I started a dialogue based on Zen koans — “Can you show me the face you had before you were born?”, “Does a dog have the Buddha-Nature” and that sort of thing. Cathy retreated in confusion fairly quickly, and then I found myself facing Matt, the class instructor.

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Matt forced me out of my script by asking “Do you think using scripted questions is going to help you in an actual infiltration exercise?” So I stopped quoting Zen sources, but continued asking questions in a rascal-guru style. And defeated the instructor when he became unable to summon up a coherent response! My classmates were amused.

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The afternoon also included an egg-drop challenge. Each team of two was expected to design and build, in an hour, a device that would enable a raw egg to survive an eight-foot drop to the ground uncracked. To make it difficult, Sal added two constraints. One: we could only use materials scrounged from outdoors — anything under a roof was off limits. Two: We only got to use two materials without penalty. For each additional material, four feet would be added to the drop distance.

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I was teamed with Marcus Watts, a luxuriantly bearded software geek fairly well known in Michigan SF fandom and known to me from previous Sword Camps. We succeeded in landing an uncracked egg by stuffing my T-shirt with weed foliage, nesting the egg inside, and putting a modest pile of more weed foliage on the landing spot. I suspect we could have done without the pile.

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That exercise was not very hard. Three of the four teams succeeded. The next was more difficult. Given just three 8-foot two-by-fours, 25 feet of rope, and an empty sealed 40-gallon drum. You need to get your team, and an unconscious injured comrade, across a 250-meter-wide lake.

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None of the solutions were super-convincing. My team, which again included Marcus, opted to try to build a raft from found materials around us (lots of deadwood and pine boughs) using the two-by-fours as transverse stringers and the drum for flotation. Alas, Sal was probably right about the raft having a high probability of falling apart. Another team came up with a sort of outrigger-boat design using the barrel as the main body; that was probably better.

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The tournament was three formats in sequence. The first was buzkashi on foot. This Afghani game, the ancestor of polo, is played between two mounted teams each attempting to knock a goat’s head through the opposite team’s goal; within historical memory this was ritualized combat and the head was human. The Aegis version is played on foot and is essentially a running melee battle in which a team can win by killing enough opponents to control a goat-head-sized rag bag through the goal.

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In general, I wasn’t very good at this. I seldom am in open-field battles where mobility and agility are at a premium. But I had a couple of good moments. One thing that worked well was posting Doug the Death Turtle and me as goalies. I’m pretty good at defending a fixed position; Doug is better. And we team well, especially in that tactical role, becoming more than the sum of the parts. Jordan Malokowski, one of the school’s most senior students and Sal’s long-time best friend, once said of us that we have “rocklike ki”, and it is true. When we take a defensive position together, the enemy just…doesn’t engage, not if they have any other targets available. It’s like we emit some kind of invisible don’t-fuck-with-us deflector shield — and so it proved in the buzkashi game.

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The next format was much kinder to me. It was a bridge battle. The bridge was a wooden platform perhaps two feet high, 4 feet wide and 8 feet long, with gentle ramps the same size each leading up to it on each side. If you fell off the bridge to either side, that was considered a kill. The objective: to win, a living fighter must have two feet on the ground on the land off the enemy side of the bridge.

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The fighting was a brutal, close-in scrum with ferocious charges and countercharges over short distances. My team commander figured out the exactly right way to use me, which was as a shieldman protecting the polearm shooters and then going into total shock-trooper mode fronting the charges. I liked this role and I was good at it; in fact in one round I was the survivor who met the victory conditions.

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Then…ah, then…the real fun of the evening: holmgang.

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Our holmgang ring is a roughly eight-foot circle marked out by tiki torches. Fighters form a line; current holder of the ring and the first in line fight, loser goes to the back of the queue. To win, score a kill strike or induce your opponent to step or fall out of the ring.

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I love this game. It’s fast, hard, short-range fighting. The constrained combat space makes my mobility problems a non-issue and puts a pretty high premium on my exceptional upper-body strength. Also, this is the format in which my hand-to-hand skills are most likely to be relevant. Normally, Intermediate-level students like myself are not permitted to kick-punch-grapple, but none of my instructors acted even a bit surprised when Sal qualified me for it. In this respect, if no other, I fight at Advanced level.

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The sum of all these factors gives me a significant edge in holmgang that I don’t have elsewhere. Some of our best fighters, senior students and instructors who effortlessly clean my clock in open-field fighting, will smile and admit they have good reason to be wary of me in this format. I don’t mind admitting I’m proud of this, because I’ve earned that pride with talent and sweat.

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Flickering torchlight, the watchers cheering and whistling, rap-metal blasting out of a boom-box, dust and the smell of lamp oil, and combat, combat, combat. Only sex is as good as this, and that not always. It was a damn fine three hours.

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Probably my best and funniest moment was in one of my fights with Doug Tobin, who I had felt roughly equal with last year but has since become one of the school’s strongest fighters and much more than a match for me. We were both using sword and shield and had gone close, each hunting an opening. Something happened and I dropped my sword…but I still had a right hand, and Tobin’s neck was exposed mere inches from me. With the “YAA! YAA! YAA! school form requires to announce such a move, I gave him three knife-hand strikes to the neck (stopping the power at skin contact, of course).

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Tobin called himself, quite properly, dead. Then somebody outside the ring, obviously aware of my Intermediate rank but not my history, said “Um…are you cleared to do that?” Before I could open my mouth several people said in near-chorus “Yes, he is!” Laughter ensued.

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As the night deepened and more rum was consumed, some (eventually all) of the men in the holmgang queue shed their shirts for that berserker look. I went along with this. Several onlookers opined that the women should follow suit. While this did not occur, Lynda-the-instructor (who can accurately be described as “seriously hot chick” as long as you also bear in mind that she can almost certainly kick your butt into next Tuesday if she so desires) did consent to have her spaghetti-strap top crudely hacked into a bikini-oid thing by Matt-the-Instructor’s penknife.

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After the holmgang came the traditional hosing down of the fighters, made more entertaining by the fact that the water coming out of that hose is damn cold. It is also traditional that Lynda is the first to, as it were, get the hose. She screams most entertainingly.

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Thus ended the holmgang. And it’s a damn frickin’ shame I’ll probably have to wait a whole ‘nother year before I can do it again.

diff --git a/20080728223815.blog b/20080728223815.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0dcb6c5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080728223815.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Sword Camp 2008: Firearms Day, Day Three +

Monday was the day things went bang. Firearms, basic and advanced. We began with safety instruction and refresher by the lovely Lynda, emphasizing three basic rules: (1) Always keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction, (2) Finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot, and (3) keep ammunition separated from weapons until you are at the firing line with the range hot. We were instructed in how to check and clear weapons.

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A walk down to the range and instruction in range safety protocols followed, including basics like safe direction and continuing to range commands Then Lynda took the Basic Firearms people off for more classroom instruction and the Advanced class (Marcus, Scott Kennedy, a gentleman named John Guest who I know and like from SF fandom, and myself) went off to the range to have fun shooting stuff.

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My first gun of the day was a CZ-52, a Czech-made semiautomatic firing 7.62mm ammo. Pleasant enough, but what I really liked was the CZ Rami. Same maker, but firing .40S&W; short frame, relatively heavy, and with a ride (recoil quality) a lot like the short-barrel .45ACP semis I favor. It was instant comfort zone.

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I also got to fire a Heckler & Koch CETME (G3) Battle Rifle. This is a semiautomatic assault rifle firing 7.62 rifle. Sal had done a trigger job on his that made the pull lighter than the recoil, so if you don’t ride the recoil just right you tend to get automatic fire in 2-to-4-shot bursts.

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The challenge with this particular gun, therefore, is to get off just one shot, which I actually managed on my third try. Thank you, exceptional upper-body strength; one of its uses is for handling recoil gracefully.

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After lunch we did fire and tactical-movement exercises in the woods with paintball guns. The mission was to double-tap every tree between approximately 4 and approximately 8 inches in diameter; this made target selection nontrivial. We did the exercise in pairs; twice in close formation with one shooter covering right and the other left, twice with ten-foot separation and each shooter covering a 90-degree frontal arc.

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About three minutes into the first run I dropped into a hyperesthetic flow state. My senses became extra acute and clear, and I dropped into a repeating loop of track-fire, track-fire, track-fire with almost no conscious thought involved at all. This probably will not surprise anyone familiar with such states: I don’t think I wasted more than three rounds out of probably 50 or 60 paintballs I fired in the whole run.

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My next three runs weren’t quite as sweet; I didn’t achieve continuous flow again and my accuracy dropped accordingly. Still, I was doing pretty well; point-shooting rapidly and with precision. Couldn’t do more than a walking pace, though, and had to stop and settle the few times I used the sights for a long-range target. I suck at rapid movement in rough country at the best of times, and if I had even tried it would have soaked up too much processing time that I needed for shooting.

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I haven’t described a lot of incidents in this report, but it was a long, hot, effortful day. The end-of-day tourney got changed from the original format because the instructors detected that most of the campers were fairly exhausted. We did four runs of a VIP Escort scenario: One team has a non-fighting principal they most protect, the other team can win by touching the principal with a weapon. The escort team wins by moving the VIP through some number of rally points without his getting tagged.

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Rob Landley played the principal in the first three runs. I was on his escort team for the first two, in which the attackers defeated us by using glaives and run-and-gun tactics. I dropped out, exhausted, after that; Lynda-the-instructor told us a few minutes later that all the instructors were pretty much expecting things to wrap up early as most of the attendees elected to recoup their scattered forces.

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I’ve seen this happen on the night of Day Three in previous Sword Camps; it seems to be a natural pause point in the seven-day schedule. Tomorrow is Tactics Day; that should be interesting.

diff --git a/20080730000809.blog b/20080730000809.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ac9a1a5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080730000809.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +Sword Camp 2008: Tactics Day, Day Four +

Tuesday was Tactics Day. It opened with a class on ground analysis; how to match your tactics to the ground you have to fight on. We analyzed a particular area of the site for access and escape routes, cover, concealment, impediments to movement, and the way all these affect possibilities for attack and defense.

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Then we did a tactical exercise. A running team was tasked to move between two particular points, and a blocking team to disrupt them and prevent the move. I ran the blocking team. Identifying a bottleneck on the route, between a clump of trees and the fence at the edge of the property, I set up an ambush with a group hidden on the far side of the trees and two demonstrators to draw the running team forward through the gap so they could be taken in flank.

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This was the right general idea (or a right idea, anyway) but through a first try I discovered that I had placed my demonstrators too far forward; they triggered suspicion in the runners, who could then break engagement before they committed to shooting the gap. Pulling them further back made the ambush work; I got to watch the flank charge I had planned come off perfectly.

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Heather segued this neatly into a discussion of how to design formations and subunits to fit tactical situations, This in turn led into a discussion of tactical roles — point, trail, line fighter, flanker, and scout. The most interesting part of the discussoion was when each of us did an evaluation of another student’s fighting style and psychology and evaluate how it would fit different tactical roles.

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Since I already know my tactical type, the analysis of me came as no surprise. I’m a line fighter with command ability and some shock-trooper tendencies — good at holding ground, steady in a clutch, particularly dangerous at close range, and good for a shock charge over short distances. This is pretty much the classic heavy infantry profile — not somebody you’d want to use as a scout, roving flanker, or point man, but the right guy to put at front and center of your battle line where the shit is seriously likely to hit the fan.

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My wife Cathy is a line fighter too, but with more mobility and no shock-trooper tendencies; in the tactical doctrine the school teaches, she belongs on the flank end of a battle line, positioned for an option to peel out and support the flankers if the tactical situation requires it.

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The afternoon was devoted to vehicular tactics. We learned how the U.S. military mans and equips a four-seat vehicle for convoys and thunder runs — driver, navigator riding shotgun, morale officer in the left rear seat, and reloader in the right rear. Each non-driver an arc of defense around the car they’re responsible for. And if you’re wondering why “morale officer”, it’s because part of third seat’s job is to run the music system. Sal says good choice of battle music is actually important; it helps the team mesh by giving them a cadence, a rhythm to track.

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We then experimented in stationary cars and real but unloaded guns. We practiced taking our team positions, managing the weapons, watching our arcs of fire, and bailing out of the car with weapons ready on command. Having sat second seat (the navigator position), I can say that bailing out in good order when you’ve started a shotgun in your hands, an assault rifle propped between your knees, and a .45 in a thigh pocket is not a trivial skill.

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It’s not doctrine for the navigator to carry a pistol, but it isdoctrine that within mission constraints each fighter should carry whatever personal weapon makes him feel comfortably armed, if only for psychological effect. For me that’s a heavy, short-barrel .45ACP 1911 pattern like the Colt Officer’s Model or Kimber Ultra II, though I’m almost equally happy shooting a .40 in a similar weight and form factor.

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(Yeah, I know. Long barrel, better accuracy. But I believe that tiny advantage is really only relevant for marksmen; I don’t think it matters a damn at typical self-defense engagement ranges, so I’d rather train with a concealable weapon that I can carry routinely.)

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We wrapped up the day’s classes with a live convoy exercise; no weapons this time, but following the protocols for movement, coordination, tactical signalling, vehicle spacing, and observation. Non-drivers practiced watching their firing arcs for unusual events.

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The night’s fight was a Dragon Tourney. Five of the most skilled fighters were roped together to form the dragon, somewhat decreasing their mobility. A glaive (the head), two single-swords (the claws), a belly (sword and shield) and a tail (spear). The dragon lives in a lair, which it cannot move outside. Fighters must come to face it, one at a time and must kill all parts to win. This is so difficult that Sal offered a prize of $300 put towards a battle-ready steel sword to anyone who could win it.

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The challenging fighters did a bit of plotting of their own, unknown to the dragon. When the start was announced, we took weapons and formed up out of sight of the lair. Rose (yes, steaks-off-the-pilot-Rose from MacGyver Day) fired up a set of bagpipes and we marched to the lair in formation, our front line of sword-and-shield men flanked by torches. I was the shieldman on the left end. The fighter behind us held aloft a bunch of the heraldic banners made by previous classes, and there was (for some reason nobody actually explained to me) a large inflatable sheep on a pole.

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Tobin, the guy I’d made my best holmgang kill on two days previous (and, incidentally, Rose’s boyfriend), actually defeated the dragon and copped the hero prize. For defeating five of the best fighters in the school single-handed, he earned it.

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Afterwards, Scott Kennedy and Matt-the-instructor showed me how to fight a glaivesman. The trick is to parry the glaive aside with your weapon after the opponent has committed to a thrust, then grab the shaft with your other hand and run up it at the enemy. Once you’re past the glaive head, he has no effective strike (but watch for a backup knife).

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Matt-the-instructor observed that I got the variation of this technique where you block with a dagger down very quickly, much faster than most students new to it. A few minutes later I figured out why, and told him. The windshield-wiper-like motion you need to do with the dagger is essentially the same as what empty-hand fighters call a soft outside block. I already had that some combat applications of that motion in muscle memory; adding a new one wasn’t hard. And recognizing points of congruence between different styles is fun.

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Tomorrow: The Zombie Apocalypse!

diff --git a/20080730232555.blog b/20080730232555.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bb32a61 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080730232555.blog @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +Sword Camp 2008: Zompocalypse, Day Five +

The first word of the Zombie Apocalypse reached us at approximately 10:30 this morning. Sal calls those of us who had driven to the site that morning into his office and informs us that the radio news is carrying reports of heavy rioting in Flint, spreading to northern Detroit. US123 and I75 are closed, I69 has been designated as an evacuation route. A news crew has been attacked and taken down by the mob; last footage to go out shows a boot coming at the camera. In the background: The Foo Fighters’ “No One Here Gets Out Alive” and White Zombie’s “Dracula”

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Meanwhile, I’m discovering that I can throw a bolas. Who knew?

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A bolas is three ropes knotted together at one end, with weights at the others (on this practice weapon, just knots in the rope; on a real bolas, weights or stones). To throw it, you whirl it around above your head, and release at the right moment so the weights hurtle towards your target. If you hit, the weights do impact damage and (if it’s small enough, like an animal’s legs) the ropes wrap around it.

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After breakfast I happened on Doug the Death Turtle prepping for his thrown-weapons class by throwing a bolas at one of the pells down by the knife pit. Asked him if I could try it. Hit the pell first try! Borrowed it, a few minutes later, and spent a while working the technique. At one point, Scott Kennedy volunteered to be a human target; I threw just short of him on the first try, then neatly wrapped the bolas around his legs on the second.

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To throw one of these, you whirl it horizontally above your head and release at the right moment for the weights to fly towards your target. The trick is timing the release right. You want to release just before the weight is in line between the center of spin and your target — the amount of just-before angle should correspond to about one-tenth of a second’s worth of rotation, apparently because that’s the time of your reflex arc.

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Yes, I know they ought to fly off on a tangent at the point of release. That model would predict an earlier release than you have to use in practice. I can’t explain the discrepancy, only describe it. It might have something to do with the fact that the overhead spin doesn’t actually trace a circular arc in uniform motion.

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Then we held a conference near the knife pit to decide what to do about the riot threat. We concluded that forting up here made sense; the school facility’s previous owner was Michigan Militia and, entertainingly, fortified the perimeter against armor. And the nearest violence is 60 miles away. In the background: Drowning Pool’s “Let The Bodies Hit The Floor”.

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Sal proceeds to give us a tutorial on military fortification practice, explaining how it changes according to the threat model; then he stepped out and left us to design a defense. When some of us talked about making a run to Pinckney to stock up on nonperishables, Sal taught us the fine points of looting. Some of these included: clean out the pharmacy first; you can hunt food but not medicine. Loot grocery stores through the rear entrance or loading dock, not the front; staples tend to be kept near the back, and you’re not exposed to view from the street. Don’t get in fights you have to; heavily armed but peaceful is effective.

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As I write, Scott Kennedy is reporting what he’s brought back from his place (where Cathy and I are staying, 6 miles away). Lots of weapons, an electric generator, two days’ worth of canned goods for our 12 defenders, a couple CB radios, boltcutters and various other useful things. In the background: Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life” and Madonna’s “Die Another Day”.

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CBC World News announces that the riots appear to be associated with an infectious virus of some sort to which there are no known antidote. They reassure us that there are no such things as zombies. In the background: Tom Petty & Stevie Nicks’s “Stop Dragging My Heart Around”. (Ouch.)

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Next up: After I note that we have too few effectives to defend all our building, let alone our perimeter. Sal teaches us how to make improvised mines from “Composition B”. I’m deliberately leaving out the recipe. In the background: The Cranberries, “Zombies”.

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Besides Composition B, jellied gasoline also makes a good filler for antipersonnel mines. I’m leaving out the recipe for safety reasons.

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I argue, however, that mines don’t really fit the zombie threat model. The problem is that they’re an expendable one-shot defense, good against a rioting mob which can be broken by prompt casualties but not likely to stop a zombie wave. Sal agrees; he describes mines as the third tier of a defense in depth, the first two tiers being riflemen on the walls and the walls themselves.

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Next up: We clarify the chain of command, assign everyone a fighting partner and serve out weapons. I get a Garand rifle and mourn the fact that we don’t have spare .45CAPs. Lynda plans our supply runs, to a local pharmacy and hardware and grocery stores. We assign sentry shifts, and start other people filling water and gasoline containers.

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At 1:30 we receive an announcement that the Governor has declared a state of emergency and closed the roads out of Wayne and the surrounding six counties. Mobs have been reported in Ann Arbor and Howell. One of our away teams describes an attack on the McDonalds in Pinckney; one zombie crashed a car outside it, went through the windshield, picked itself up off the ground and (apparently) lurched into the restaurant. By 2:30 the news reports are speaking openly of zombies. They have been reported in Howell, ten miles from here.

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After lunch Matt took command (Lynda had to teach Rob the Basic) we designed a mission to the Rite-Aid in Pinckney to grab as much in the way of prescription drugs as we can. I proposed that we should give them a secondary mission of determining if zombies can be taken down by gunfire. After some discussion we determined that while we needed to do this it should be a separate mission so that encountering a zombie could not cause an abort on the primary mission.

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The mission design then involved planning a route to and back, setting priorities (insulin to keep Cathy alive is one) and setting rules of engagement (that is, who is defined as the opposition and under what circumstances we fight). While the (simulated) mission was executing, Scott gave us a primer on radio communication, protocols, and language.

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However, Doug the Death Turtle reported by radio that while on the pharmacy mission he found a target of opportunity. Apparently a headshot from a .22 magnum will stop a zombie, but limb and torso shots will not. Heather gave us a tutorial on how to construct a concise radio message. She covered the basic identifiers for a message. Who, When What, Why, Where.

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At 4:08PM the power went out. I took initiative and switched on Scott’s generator. Doug reported an encounter with a rude, angry looter who shot at them, and stole his truck full of food. At 4:19 the Emergency Response Radio System interrupts all broadcasts. The President of the United States announces that there have been outbreaks in eight major metropolitan areas. Evidence is that the outbreak is related to an infectious pathogen which is containable by normal sterilization measures.

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We then started looking at larger-scale considerations. Most notably, ways to prevent us from being overrun by a million refugees flooding westward from Detroit. Basically this means there are a couple of bridges across the Huron River that we need to blow. Sal teaches us how to make thermite and the mechanics of bridge demolition. Note for any twitchy HSA types; we do not have the capability to actually do this, and do not have plans to develop such a capability.

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Sal also described potential improvements to the property, including a kind of firing tower called a Crossmalgen Tree that is very good for holding off rioters and human-wave attacks. Then we discussed improvising light artillery. This began with a description of how to improvise a stick grenade that can be thrown from a shotgun using a modified shotgun shell as a propellant.

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The next device is a light mortar made from three coke cans sealed together with duct tape. One can bottom gets left intact at one end, except you punch a small hole in it. Your munition is a tennis ball soaked in gasoline. You put a match near the hole, it ignites gas vapor coming off the tennis ball, and you are now throwing an incendiary munition up to 400 yards downrange. When it hits, it will splash burning gasoline over a fairly large area.

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Sal finished out the class day by describing how to Mad Max a car, that is armor and equip it for long-term operation in post-apocalyptic conditions.

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The night’s tourney was two different modes of zombie combat. Zombies were constrained to shamble slowly (going nnnngggguuurrrgghhh in the approved zombie fashion) and scored a kill by placing both hands on the victim. Zombies could be killed only by a head shot. All fights were in the confined area of the knife pit, a roughly circular blob of ground about 12 feet wide.

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In the first episode, “Master of Zombies”, each fighter first faced one zombie…then two zombies….then three, then four, then five. And the fifth zombie was permitted to move fast! Nobody killed all five; most managed four, though I failed after three because my sword got hung up on a string of lights hung around the area. In the second round all zombies were fast. The winner was Doug the Death Turtle with a total kill of seven zombies.

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In the second round, the knife pit was treated as a locked room with one door out. Each round begins with about a dozen players, all with weapons except one starting zombie. To win, the non-zombie players needed to protect one of them at the door long enough to pick the lock, and then get themselves out. before the zombie side converted all players (two hand touch rule). To make things a bit more difficult, zombies respawned every three seconds, and two fighters chosen at random (and unknown to the others) were zombie virus carriers who would convert spontaneously at 30 seconds and 60 seconds in. Hilarity ensued.

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Tomorrow: Live Steel Day…

diff --git a/20080801003634.blog b/20080801003634.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a5d5802 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080801003634.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +Sword Camp 2008: Live Steel Day, Day Six +

Live Steel Day arrived, and we spent the first half of the morning attacking a couch.

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This is a much less trivial exercise than it sounds. Couches are tough, full of padding and wood and springs and more difficult to cut than flesh. We had a tablefull of weapons — machetes, a parang, a couple of swords, a tire iron, a crowbar, miscellaneous stabbing and slicing knives, and a couple of axes. The objective: destroy. It was hard work, even for eight sword students who knew a lot about exerting force with a weapon.

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Then we sliced fruit — a couple of pineapples, a couple of coconuts, a watermelon, and a couple of canteloupes. This was more an aim-and-precision exercise than anything else. We ate some of the remains afterwards.

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Lynda-the-instructor had people toss chunks of pineapple at her so she could chop them up in midair with a machete. I made this work too; none of the other students were up for trying.

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Then the really interesting thing: a class in blade-catching. In this technique, you wait until a sword stroke at you passes the line of engagement into the opponent’s followthrough, then grab it in a particular way and take control of the blade. I had a lot of trouble getting the “particular way” until I realized that, in hand-to-hand language, it’s a palm block to the flat of the blade followed by curling your fingers over the trailing edge. (You do not want your fingers over the leading edge; that way, you lose fingers)

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Yes, we actually practiced this with live steel, at half-speed. Nobody lost fingers. Once you have the basic technique down, there are lots of ways to build on it, including at least three distinct ways to turn the move into a disarm.

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After lunch, thrown-weapons class. This gave us the opportunity to learn to throw lots of different things ranging from your basic lump of rock through various sorts of shuriken and throwing knives (including batarangs…yes, like the Batman movies) to a couple of different kinds of throwing axes and the bolas.

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I particularly liked the throwing axes and the batarangs. Other people seemed to be having the most fun throwing the bolas at the “Argentine cow”, which was actually a large cardboard box sitting on PVC-pipe legs. The idea was to tangle the bolas around a leg or two.

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Now we’re in present time. The thrown-weapons class kind of disssolves in late afternoon as we run out of enthusiasm for hurling things, and not only several students but the instructor are showing signs of accumulated fatigue. The weather is less scorching than it has been, but it’s Day Six and everyone is running close to empty.

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Cathy and I wander off to be coached in Florentine for a while. We make some progress but stall out on one of the wrist turnovers needed for the pattern; we can’t seem to get it smooth. Frustration levels near critical until Sal comes over, evaluates, and determines that the balance of our swords is off; they need the center of gravity moved a bit towards the hilt for this particular move to flow well.

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Chili and cornbread for dinner, nom nom nom. I give thanks to Shannon the Food Goddess, who has been doing an amazing job of providing tasty food for hungry swordsmen all week.

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After dinner, a capture-the-flag tourney, five players on a side. I sit this out, as I am saving myself for the bear-pit dueling scheduled for after dark. Again, in bear pit, fighters rotate in against the bear pit holder until he is killed, whereupon the victor takes his place.

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It’s a relaxed, happy tournament. With most people pretty fatigued, both shields and heavier weapons like glaives are mostly left out; there is a lot of single-sword and dagger play going on. I have a couple of very sweet dagger fights with Doug the Death Turtle, but mostly fight Florentino (sword and parrying dagger). And, by Ghu and Eris, I run the list!

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That is, I defeat all the other fighters in the queue (six, I think) before my wife Cathy comes back around and kills me. First time I’ve ever done this. It’s not easy, and a rare feat for anyone who’s not one of the elite in Upper Specialties. I am delighted; so are Sal and the senior instructors when I bring it to their attention.

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The night ends with the whole crew watching Goldeneye. (No, I don’t know why that particular movie.) It is properly silly and we have fun with it.

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Tomorrow, the Honor Tourney…

diff --git a/20080802015645.blog b/20080802015645.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..231cd02 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080802015645.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +Sword Camp 2008: Graduation Day, Day Seven +

The final day of Sword Camp. We spent our morning learning advanced field medical techniques, up to and including learning how to suture a wound by stitching together a slash through the skin of a banana with actual surgical sutures. We also learned how to use a trach tube for clearing an airway in cases of anaphylactic shock or gasoline inhalation or whatever.

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Afternoon was the Advanced Fighter’s Symposium, which is basically all the instructors and Intermediate or Advanced students doing a debriefing on how the various activities worked or didn’t, then brainstorming potential events for next year. I’m not going to write about this in more detail, as I think the former discussion would be of little interest to anyone outside the school and talking about the latter might raise expectations we don’t yet have the resources to fulfil.

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Meanwhile, Rob Landley (our lone sword-camp Basic, not to be confused with Dan-the-Basic who is in the regular classes) was doing his first fights and his Hundred, the ordeal of demonstrating one hundred reps of all the techniques he has learned. This is a no-shit serious test of body and spirit. And if you don’t think a hundred reps is serious, you try it at the end of a week of physically and mentally exhausting training. It is hard, and you graduate because you’ve earned it.

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Graduation was moving, as it usually is. Sal and the instructors wear modern formal clothing for this event, and steel swords that are both decorative and deadly personal weapons, and look like a romantic fusion of assassins and Old World noblemen. The language is formal and sonorous: “He may bear arms in our company without let or hindrance, and be known among us as a swordsman and practitioner of this ancient and honorable art”.

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Then came the Honor Tourney, and Sal’s table of (often rather silly) honor prizes from the dollar store.

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Lynda and Sean Lisse (a senior student who helped recruit me, four years ago, and according to Sal one of the school’s best hand-to-hand fighters) opened the Honor Tourney by fighting a 3/4ths speed demonstration bout with live steel. When Sal directed then to the prize table, they claimed the right to kill the inflatable sheep that had graced the dragon-fighters’ standard a few days previously. Matt and Doug The Death Turtle protested. After some confusion, it was determined that Doug should take up the challenge.

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And so it came to pass that Doug the Death Turtle defended the life of Molly the Inflatable Fuck Sheep. Full valiantly did he strive, and he did defeat them, and the pneumatic integrity of Molly was thus preserved.

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Later, I challenged all comers to fight with daggers, wounds retained, until I was defeated. I defeated Marcus (taking a wound to the chest muscles), then Lynda, then Matt-the-instructor entered the ring. He wounded me in one leg (cutting my mobility), then executed a neat slash to my forehead. When that happens we’re expected to simulate partial blindness due to blood flowing into the eyes, and I did. Matt pinked my forehead again, which would have completely blinded me, so I called myself dead.

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This wasn’t a bad way for it to end. I’m undoubtedly one of the school’s better knife fighters, but Matt is generally acknowledged.to be the best. Sal said “Well challenged” and told me to take a trip to the prize table.

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Other notable challenges included a blindfolded knife fight, two glaive players taking on all of the Basics and Intermediates, and a “Who’s Your Daddy?” gals-vs.-guys challenge (guys won, narrowly). Doug the Death Turtle challenged Matt for possession of Dolly the Inflatable Fuck Sheep, but lost.

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The most fun I had at the Honor Tourney, though, was when Scott Kennedy and Sean Lisse challenged me to empty-hand combat. Despite being officially permitted to do it, I had previously been reluctant to go anywhere near full speed with people at this school; I had feared that it might be too dangerous — not for me, but for them.

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But I’d been challenged, and it seemed like it was time. Those were good fights. I felt like a tiger. I pretty much dominated the encounter with Scott, who is a deadly glaivesman and single-sword fighter but (like many people at this school) loses a lot of his aggression and confidence at hand-to-hand range. Eventually I managed to close to grappling range, took him down, and dispatched him with a neck strike.

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The really key point was that I was at high adrenaline activation in the middle of full-on hand to hand and still maintained an ideal level of strike control, stopping the power right at Scott’s skin. I had not been entirely certain this would work and could be done safely.

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Sean was a different proposition — more skilled, more successfully defensive, and in particular better at range control. Wisely, he used his agility to keep me from closing and kicked at me. from longer range. After he landed the first one I paused and told him I’d call the fight his if he could land another one like that. A few seconds later, he did.

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I’ll feel a lot less inhibited about accepting, and issuing, empty-hand challenges in the future. This is a good thing; it’s a barrier I’ve been trying to cross for two years.

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The Honor Tourney eventually disolved into happy foolery (swing dancing was involved at one point). And so ended Sword Camp, the best vacation a geek could ask for.

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To find out more, visit the Aegis Consulting website.

diff --git a/20080804102119.blog b/20080804102119.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a510178 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080804102119.blog @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +On Enjoying a Fight – a Genetic Speculation +

Sword Camp 2008 reminded me how much I enjoy fighting. I’m not speaking abstractly, here; by “fighting” I mean physical hand-to-hand combat.

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Now, on one level, this revelation shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who knows what I do for fun. I’ve trained to black belt level in tae kwon do, studied aikido and wing chun kung fu, fought battle-line in the SCA, and achieved considerable proficiency in Sicilian cut-and-thrust swordfighting. One doesn’t do all that unless there’s some pretty hefty primary reward in there.

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But I’ve actually had quite an interior struggle with this. It used to bother me that I like fighting. I had internalized the idea that while combat may sometimes be an ethical necessity, enjoying it is wrong — or at least dubious.

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So I half-hid my delight from myself behind a screen of words about seeking self-perfection and focus and meditation in motion. Those words were all true; I do value the quasi-mystical aspects of the fighting arts very much. But the visceral reality underneath them, for me, was the joy of battle.

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In 2005 I finally came to understand why I enjoy fighting. And — I know this will sound corny — I’m much more at peace with myself now. I’m writing this explanation because I think I am not alone — I don’t think my confusion and struggle was unique. There may be lessons here for others as well as myself, and even an insight into evolutionary biology.

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I can talk about my joy in battle now without shame because of two very wise women; my grandmotherly friend Paula and her daughter Beth who’s about half my age. My wife Cathy and I are old friends of their whole family of six; we watched their kids grow up and maybe helped a little.

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In mid-2005 we were hanging out with them and I started to think out loud about this liking-to-fight thing. Paula is a psychologist by training and thus Beth was raised by one; they both asked intelligent questions.

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We disposed of some red herrings first. I don’t like hurting people; in fact I dislike that pretty strongly. I don’t like pain, either, though it’s fair to say I don’t mind it much when I’m in combat mode. And while I like winning, the thrill of victory is not what I’m trying to describe here.

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What Paula and Beth pulled out of me is that I like the way I feel when I fight. Sharp, focused, totally in the moment. The best is when is when time slows and stretches, pulls like taffy, and my senses become razor-sharp. It’s a high, almost as good as sex.

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Beth, who I shouldn’t think of as a preternaturally wise child these days but still sometimes do because she’s retained that kind of delighted innocence into adulthood, then said: “It’s obvious! You’re an adrenalin junkie!” Paula’s smile of agreement and pride in her daughter’s perceptiveness was eloquent. And my whole world lurched sideways for a moment as I realized that Beth was right.

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Because, once I realized that I’ve been fighting in order to self-induce a particular kind of pleasurable hormonal rush, I no longer had to fear that in some dark hidden corner of my brain, I really wanted to hurt or break or dominate people. I could have my joy of battle without guilt.

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I’m going to go into some more personal history now. Bear with me, because it’s aimed at bringing out a larger point about liking to fight that I think is applicable to many besides myself.

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In the fall of 2005, not long after Beth had her insight, I went for a week of intensive training at a swordfighting school. And I had a blast. I learned well, I fought well, and I made friends I’ll have for the rest of my life. I was forty-seven, but I powered through the course in a style that earned plaudits from the instructors and drew frank envy from some of the twentysomethings who were most of my fellow students.

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I think some of what was powering me through that week, at least psychologically, was the huge sense of relief I was still feeling from the realization that, truly, enjoying a fight doesn’t make me a bad person.

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But Sword Camp 2005 was not a fluke. I’m publishing this essay now because I’m just back from Sword Camp 2008. I’m 50 this year, and yet on one night I scored consecutive victories against six trained fighters, including two of the school’s top five most skilled and four other athletic young men and women averaging about half my age. And was reminded, in a way I seldom am because my lifestyle doesn’t involve a lot of physical exertion, of how exceptionally strong I actually am (this will become relevant in a bit).

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Now I have to make a brief detour to explain the concept of a “compensation monster”. You’ve probably heard or read somewhere that Napoleon conquered Europe because he couldn’t stand being short. Whether or not that’s true, it’s the archetypal story of the compensation monster — the man or woman who overachieves in order to overcome deep-seated feelings of inadequacy tied to a physical handicap.

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Before 2005, to the extent I allowed myself to think about my love of combat at all, I put it down to being a compensation monster. On that theory, all this fighter stuff was just me trying to get past the fact that I have a gimp left leg, reacting against feelings of deep-seated physical inadequacy and yadda yadda yadda; you can fill in the rest yourself.

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But after Beth enlightened me about my adrenaline-junkieness, I decided this theory just couldn’t fly alone any more. I had to start casting about for a better explanation.

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Now, it’s not that I have a problem with being a compensation monster. I absolutely am one and I know it full well; but I also know how I compensated as a child and young man, and it was by developing my brain. You can explain me becoming a famous übergeek that way; I’ll nod and agree and only ask you to notice that sometimes compensation actually works — you actually can get shut of feelings of inadequacy by overachieving.

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The trouble with the compensation-monster theory is that it doesn’t explain my body. Beth’s observation sort of kicked me into noticing some facts about my physiology that assembled into an interesting pattern. Here are some of them:

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  • I’m an adrenalin junkie. +
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  • I have both more muscle than most people and muscles of above-average efficiency (more oomph per cubic inch than most people). As a consequence, I am exceptionally strong.
    • +
  • My glandular response to intimidation is not to be afraid but to get angry. And it is reported by several friends that I’m pretty scary when I get angry, though I’ve never actually gone off on anyone as an adult. +
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  • I don’t lose a lot of muscle tone even when I’m sedentary for a long time, and I re-condition very fast when I take exercise. +
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  • I have a high pain tolerance. (This is the explicit evaluation of my swordmaster, who is former military from an elite branch and has high standards for toughness.) +
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  • I get steadier under real survival pressure. I can be as wobbly as anyone else in trivial crises — but if there’s a fire in the building or someone’s been badly injured, I’m likely to be the one who gets totally cold and clear and takes charge (and I’m not speculating, I’m remembering actual incidents). It’s like above a certain threat level a reflex kicks in, some sort of anti-panic clampdown.
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  • I don’t experience physical fear very strongly even in many situations where rationally speaking I probably should. In particular, I have little or no fear of hand-to-hand combat.
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On those last two points: I am not saying I’m brave about fighting or in clutch situations, because that’s having fear and mastering it. I know what ‘brave’ feels like; I hate needles and I have to do ‘brave’ whenever I get an injection. It takes effort, and I feel virtuous when I manage it. I also know what overwhelming fear feels like; heights and drop-offs do that to me.

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But my reaction to combat and survival-threat situations is not bravery, doesn’t require effort, and doesn’t feel like virtue; in fact, I can’t make it happen at all. It’s like a switch flips and the lizard-brain takes over. In particular, I simply don’t fear hand-to-hand, not even in situations my forebrain tells me are potentially dangerous. Instead, I groove on it. I feel joy. Even when I get hit, the pain registers as a sort of a mechanical signal without frightening me.

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I think I’m experiencing the same fight-or-flight reaction as other people do in combat situations, but something in my wiring turns what would otherwise be subjectively experienced as fear into a kind of bliss.

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The conclusion seems inescapable. Compensation monstrosity may be part of what made me a fighter, but it isn’t all or even most of the story. Beth kicked me into realizing that my physiology and my glands seem to be designed to make me like to fight and be good at it. I’m now pretty sure, as I wasn’t before, that I would have invested heavily in martial arts even had I not had palsy.

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And I’d have been much better at them, too, because with normally-developed legs I’d (a) be about 6’2″ rather than 5’7″ (judging by my torso length and how tall my brothers are), and (b) I’d have normal (or maybe above-normal) mobility.

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I think I make an especially interesting outlier because (a) I didn’t start serious training until I was 30, long after the adolescent/postadolescent phase when men are most aggressive and focused on physical achievement; and (b) I’m a geek, fer cripes’ sake. It didn’t fit anybody’s expectations, least of all mine, that I’d have a revelation about warrior bliss in the middle of my middle age.

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OK, now we’re done with the personal history. The point of it was to establish how I learned, by experiencing it in myself, that some men seem to be strongly physiologically wired for physical combat. Now I’m going to consider some larger implications.

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If the seven traits I mentioned are independent, it seems pretty long odds against me hitting the jackpot on all of them. No; I have to think there’s a single DNA trait cluster behind all or most of them that got hammered into shape under adaptive pressure in the Paleolithic and has been doing its best to shape some percentage of men into natural hand-to-hand fighters ever since.

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Clearly it isn’t all men. If that were so, the combination of those traits would not be exceptional. I think I understand why it isn’t; from an individual point of view the joy-of-battle reaction is probably counter-survival. On the other hand, having some men with warrior wiring was probably a big help for the survival of the hominid bands they were part of. Somebody had to shove that flaming branch in the sabertooth’s face when it came prowling for a baby-human snack, after all, and it would be adaptive for a man’s kin group (if not for himself) if he were enough of a combat junkie to glory in it.

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On the other hand, we should expect warrior wiring to be nearly nonexistent in females, or present only as a spandrel for the same reasons men have nipples. In the ancestral environment the limited reproductive capacity of women was just too precious to risk. And all the males having it would have been an equally bad idea; there’s got to be somebody left after battle to inseminate the females, and better it should be many somebodies or you get problems with drift and inbreeding.

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So, just thinking about the ancestral environment suggests that we should expect warrior wiring to remain present in a stable minority percentage of males even though it tends to interfere with individual reproductive success.

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My more on-the-ball readers will notice that this model resembles the traditional kin-selection theory of why homosexuality never got bred out of humans. These days I’m friendly to the gay germ theory, and there’s a newer theory that connects gayness to higher rates of reproduction in female relatives, but the traditional theory is interesting nevertheless. Basically, it’s that gays are sufficiently valuable to their close relatives as noncompetitive nurturers that the effect of their much lower reproductive rate still nets out to a positive for their genetic lines.

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If gayness is after all genetic, it might be worth investigating whether it’s mutually correlated with warrior physiology. This seems like a silly idea to moderns who are used to thinking of gay men as limp-wristed pansies, and I’m thoroughly heterosexual myself. But many martial cultures — ancient Greeks, pre-Meiji Japanese, and Afghanis are examples — have had traditions of homoeroticism in their warrior classes.

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More generally, I think it would be extremely interesting to do a large-population measurement study on the traits I’ve described above with a view to discovering whether they are cross-correlated and heritable. I suspect we might find there is some analogue of Spearman’s g that captures most of the variance in these traits even if we can’t yet identify what the underlying mechanism is.

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UPDATE: It may be significant that at least two of my direct-line ancestors were military officers who fell in battle. One was a Union cavalry lieutenant who died at Gettysburg in 1863; I’m told his name is on the monument, though I haven’t been there to check. Fifty years earlier his grandfather, an officer under Napoleon, had died leading his men in a charge against the walls of Moscow.

diff --git a/20080811010454.blog b/20080811010454.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e4cb167 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080811010454.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +George Lakoff Framed Himself +

I’ve been a fan of George Lakoff’s writings on cognitive linguistics since reading Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things around 1990. Later, I observed his foray into political advocacy with increasing concern for him as the trajectory from expected savior to derided scapegoat became increasingly obvious. Now, the Chronicle of Higher Education gives us a retrospective, Who Framed George Lakoff, on Lakoff’s failure and eventual flameout as a political philosopher.

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But the Chronicle stops short of the conclusion it could and should have reached, which is that George Lakoff framed himself. The man is a brilliant linguist, but never delivered better than an idiot’s travesty of his own best work when he tried to apply it to winning political campaigns.

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Really. How else is one to react to Lakoff’s central, signature contention that conservatives see government as a “strict father”, liberals see it as a “nurturant parent” , and that by re-framing political discourse to reinforce nurturant-parent images Democrats could win over swing voters and more elections?

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George Orwell once said “Some ideas are so ridiculous that only an intellectual can believe them”, and this struck me as a prime example; when I first heard my man Lakoff was pushing it, I found myself laughing in incredulous disbelief. Absent from Lakoff’s theory was any sense that for many people government does not fit the emotional frame of any kind of parent, being regarded instead in the way the framers of the U.S. Constitution intended — as (in George Washington’s words) “like fire, a dangerous servant and a terrible master”.

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To see how fragile Lakoff’s theory really was, consider that even if it actually described the entire Democratic and Republican voter bases effectively, taking the framers of the Constitution seriously (or a prevalence of any alternate frames about government) among even a bare majority of the minority of swing voters would render it useless.

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Lakoff’s assumption that the government-as-parent model pervaded the thinking of most voters was a comfortable prejudice projected on the entire political landscape from his own paternalistic and rather condescending brand of left-liberalism. Just as insidious was his belief that mere shifts in rhetoric could magically fill the vacuum that had opened up at the heart of Democratic Party ideology after Reagan, as not just the New Deal electoral coalition but New Deal redistributionist ideas ran out of steam.

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To the extent Lakoff succeeded in teaching other left-liberals these premises, he crippled them rather than helping them. This seemed obvious to me even in Lakoff’s rising-star days, and conservatives must have noticed something similar since they by and large never bothered to even laugh at Lakoff, much less refute him.

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The Democrats were dimmer. It took them a bit less than a decade of semi-idolizing Lakoff through two disastrous election cycles to notice that “reframing” wasn’t earning them anything much but mockery. And now his name is mud.

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This is a bit of a tragedy, because where Lakoff’s conclusions weren’t infected by his politics he was undoubtedly right about quite a number of things, including the limits of rationality in political thinking and campaigning. Never mind that he was partly recycling conclusions that had been reached much earlier by Georges Sorel and the founders of the U.S. itself, who designed a representative democracy in large part out in fear of the emotionalism and fickleness of mobs; Lakoff’s work might have served at least as a useful reminder in modern language of some of these basics.

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But Lakoff framed himself. Like many left-liberals, he lived (and probably still lives) in a sort of bubble world where intentions are everything, history has no place and economics is not permitted to intrude; there was no concept in his model of politics that political issues might have meanings for voters that could not be trumped by glib “reframing”. This was an academic’s sort of conceit, and reality repaid it in the usual way.

diff --git a/20080813221934.blog b/20080813221934.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..38047cc --- /dev/null +++ b/20080813221934.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +The Great Skank Question +

Monica Lewinsky. Rielle Hunter. I’d haul out the tired old Marx quote about history repeating itself as farce, but l’affaire Lewinsky was pretty farcical to begin with. As I looked at images of Hunter and Lewinsky, though, I was struck by a question:

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If power is, as is so often claimed, the ultimate aphrodisiac, why aren’t these women sexier?

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I’m not being gratuitously nasty, this genuinely puzzles me. And I don’t think it’s a trivial question, either. Evolutionary bio says women ought to be competing to mate with high-status males who can afford to support even the offspring from the casual fucks. Fine, I believe that — but in this game women compete mainly on good looks because that’s a fitness-to-bear signal, and you’d expect the ones who get caught in flagrante with powerful politicians to be successful competitors. That is, generally pretty hot.

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But they’re not. And in the last half century the quality of politicians’ bimbos seems to have been steadily degrading, at least in the U.S. Compare Marilyn Monroe (c.1962) with Donna Rice (1984) with Monica Lewinsky (c.1996) with Reille Hunter (2008). The trend line runs from archetypal sex goddess (Monroe) to outright skank (Hunter) with, in the middle, stops at a fairly attractive woman (Rice) and a pudgy girl-child (Lewinsky) who might have had a good moment or three before way too many trips to the refrigerator.

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Is there something wrong with the conventional theory of sexual selection? I’m inclined to doubt it, because there are plenty of examples that actually fit the theory. For a recent one, consider the Prime Minister President of France: bagging, extramaritally, the smokin’ hot Carla Bruni. He later chucked his wife and married Bruni, of course, but that if anything makes the bodacious Bruni a better example of a more successful competitor. Bruni even one-upped Lola Montez; I think we have not quite seen her like since the Empress Theodora.

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So, what, is it just American politicians who let skanky women get at them? And why has the trend gotten worse over time?

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My wife Cathy thinks it might be that American politicians tend to be prudes who boff ugly women as an expression of their conflicts about sex, but I’m not buying it; if that were the driver, you’d expect these women to have gotten better-looking over time as sexual Puritanism lost its hold, not worse.

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I don’t actually have any answers to propose, I’m blogging because I think the question is interesting. Perhaps one of my commenters will suggest a predictive theory.

diff --git a/20080814122630.blog b/20080814122630.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ee9fd46 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080814122630.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Deducing From What Isn’t Reported +

There are a couple of things we can deduce from what the national press is not reporting about the killing of Arkansas Democratic Party Chairman Bill Gwatney:

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    The killer has no particular ties to the Republican Party or any other right-wing political organization. How do we know this? Because that is without question what the national media went looking for before the corpse had cooled, desperately hoping they’d hit. If they’d found anything, they’d be screaming it from the rooftops now.

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  2. +

    The killer has no particular ties to the Democratic Party’s activist left or any other left-wing political organization. How do we know this? Because that is without question the second thing the national media went looking for, desperately hoping they’d miss. If they’d found anything, Gwatney’s death would be a non-story now. +

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Just another note in a series that probably should have included “How much sooner would the Hunter affair have been broken if John Edwards were a Republican?” Of course, such questions almost answer themselves.

diff --git a/20080815235856.blog b/20080815235856.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1aaaa25 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080815235856.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +A welcome outbreak of sanity +

Instapundit links to this interesting news story: Texas school district lets teachers, staff pack pistols. While this is a step in the right direction, I think it does not go far enough.

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I think all teachers, day-care staff, and other adults in loco parentis for groups of children should be required to carry firearms on the job. Maintaining continued proficiency at rapid-reaction tactical shooting should be a condition of their continued employment. Their job is to protect children; if they are not physically, mentally, and morally competent to do that job, they don’t belong in it.

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I doubt any explanation of the threat model is needed. But I will point out that the Israelis require schoolteachers to be armed – and the only successful terrorist attack in memory on a group of Israeli schoolkids happened after the teachers, on a field trip, allowed themselves to be disarmed at a Jordanian border post.

diff --git a/20080825163318.blog b/20080825163318.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..86ed01e --- /dev/null +++ b/20080825163318.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Why I hate identity politics +

I was born with a congenital defect. That’s a value-free statement that nobody can conceivably insult me by repeating. It is a fact that I have cerebral palsy, probably caused by neonatal oxygen deprivation. It is a fact that my central nervous system (specifically the motor-control areas of my right temporal lobe) does not function as in quite the same way as that of a a developmentally normal human being.

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It is not quite a fact, but a plausible inference based on statistics on other Persons Of Palsy, that I am significantly more intelligent than I would have been if un-palsied. It is not known how to permanently raise a human’s intelligence (some drugs can do it temporarily) but most people don’t drive their brains up to their personal genetic limit. Palsied people try harder; as a group, their mean intelligence is high relative to the general population.

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In fact, the compensation effect is strong enough that you could argue that the sum of my palsy impairments and the compensation effects has been a net benefit to me. Imagine an Eric who walks normally but isn’t quite capable of reinventing hacker culture and blowing up the software industry and you’ll begin to see what I mean.

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(It’s not necessary that you believe that; I’m not sure I do. Maybe I wasn’t required for open source to blow up the software industry, or maybe I’d have done it if I hadn’t had palsy. Doesn’t matter. It’s enough that you grasp the possibility that a congenital defect with an intelligence-boosting side effect can be a net positive.)

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I have never, ever, had any interest in constructing my identity around the fact that I am technically “handicapped”. That would just be damn silly. I didn’t choose to have palsy, it was a developmental accident with no more significance or meaning than the fact that I have blue eyes.

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Now let’s suppose that I had been born with a normal motor cortex system, but something else went just…slightly…wrong. I could, in that case, tell a very similar story. It would read something like this:

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I was born with a congenital defect. That’s a value-free statement that nobody can conceivably insult me by repeating. It is a fact that I am compulsively sexually attracted to other males, probably due to my prenatal brain being exposed to abnormally high levels of feminizing hormones. It is a fact that that my central nervous system (specifically the amygdala and portions of the cerebellum and thalamus involved in sexual behavior) does not function as in quite the same way as that of a a developmentally normal human being.

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It is not quite a fact, but a plausible inference based on statistics on other homosexuals, that I am significantly more intelligent than I would have been if I were straight. It is not known how to permanently raise a human’s intelligence (some drugs can do it temporarily) but most people don’t drive their brains up to their personal genetic limit. Gay people either try harder or gayness is allotropically linked to genes that set a high limit; as a group, their mean intelligence is high relative to the general population.

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In fact, the compensation effect is strong enough that you could argue that homosexuality has been a net benefit to me. Imagine an Eric who is at near-zero risk for contracting AIDS from anal sex, but isn’t quite capable of reinventing hacker culture and blowing up the software industry and you’ll begin to see what I mean.

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I have never, ever, had any interest in constructing my identity around the fact that I am “homosexual”. That would just be damn silly. I didn’t choose to be gay, it was a developmental accident with no more significance or meaning than the fact that I have blue eyes.

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(Those of you who are PC-twitchy are probably screaming “WHAT MAKES GAYNESS A DEFECT?” at the monitor right now. Why, exactly the same measure that makes palsy a defect: it reduces the affected individual’s odds of reproducing significantly. “Inclusive fitness” is what biologists call it. Your problem is that I have been writing “biologically defective” and you are reading “morally defective” or “inferior” or something. That is not a useful interpretation of either palsy or gayness, so please stop now. Thank you.)

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Back in observable reality, I’m heterosexual. But the point remains…

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My identity is not the accidents that have happened to me. It is what I choose. What I make of myself. It is irrelevant that I have palsy; it would be equally irrelevant if I were gay.

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People who construct themselves as professional victims because they have palsy disgust me. People who construct themselves as professional victims because they are gay disgust me. The choice to play professional victim is in fact a defect of character and morals, leading to self-sabotaging behavior in individuals and their societies.

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Identity politics, whether it’s about the “identity” of being palsied, or gay, or white, or black, or anything else, is a symptom of deep failure at choosing for yourself, at becoming a fully individuated and fully functioning human being.

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And that is why I hate identity politics.

diff --git a/20080829113305.blog b/20080829113305.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f52f965 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080829113305.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +McCain makes a bold move +

Picking Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential nominee was a clever and gutsy thing for John McCain to do. I think he has just wrong-footed the Democrats on several levels.

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First, this choice looks bold and change-making in exactly the way Obama’s choice of Biden did not. Instead of a tired old pol with a history of scandal and gaffe (not to mention the bad hairplugs), McCain chose a fresh-faced frontier girl married to an Inuit Yup’ik Indian. And one with a history of whistleblowing on corrupt Republicans.

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Second, this tells us something about McCain’s relationship to the Republican base: either he figures the more reactionary end of the red-meat Right has no place else to go, or he thinks they don’t actually care what shape a President’s gonads are any more, or the color of the person the President sleeps with.

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Third, it puts the PUMAs further in play. The most obvious message here is that McCain wants all those disgruntled Hillary-voting older women out there voting for him. Just going on her tough-babe bio, I think Palin has a pretty good chance of drawing them, too, especially if she’s any good as a stump speaker.

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Fourth, McCain just put a helluva spoke in Hillary Clinton’s wheels if she’s got ambitions for 2012. I’ll see your fake working-class-woman persona and raise you with the real deal, he says. There’s no way a Wellesley and Yale Law grad can win an authenticity competition with a woman who shoots moose and pilots her own float plane.

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It’s a pass-the-popcorn moment for sure. How many politicians can both play the “diversity” card and brandish a lifetime membership in the NRA? And just to put the cherry on top for Republicans, this move might upstage all the hope-and-change posturing at the DNC.

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All in all, a very clever choice — and not in isolation. The McCain campaign is starting to punch seriously just as Obama’s seems to be losing momentum; the choice of Biden was a hard stall, and their attempt to suppress an issues ad tying Obama to terrorist Bill Ayers via lawsuit threats isn’t winning them any friends. Couple these with the dead-heat poll numbers at a moment when on historical patterns Obama ought to have a huge lead, and I see trouble for the Democrats.

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I’ve begun to wonder in the last week if the epitaph on Obama’s political grave will read “He peaked too early.” I’m thinking that looks increasingly likely now.

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Update: Heh. And there’s already a picture circulating of Palin aiming a a scope-sighted M-4 like she knows how. In Iraq. That’s gonna cause heartburn in all the right places.

diff --git a/20080908023436.blog b/20080908023436.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0a754c7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080908023436.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Oh, those bitter clingers! +

News flash: Presidential candidate Barack Obama says I’m not going to take your guns away in front of a hand-picked crowd of Democratic supporters in Duryea, Pennsylvania — and they don’t believe him.

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No, that was not a hook for an anti-Obama rant. Obama’s unbelievability on this issue is only partly his own individual fault. The infamous clanger he dropped last April in San Francisco (“And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”) didn’t help, but it wouldn’t have become one of the defining memes of the 2008 campaign without a broader context that is what I’m more interested in exploring.

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After the 2004 elections I proposed that “[The Democrats] have serious problems. Ronald Reagan peeled away the (private-sector) union vote after 1980; today they’re losing the blacks over gay marriage and the Jews over Israel and the Terror War. Their voter base is increasingly limited to public-employee unions and brie-nibbling urban elites — they’re no longer the party of the common man but of the DMV, Hollywood and the Upper West Side.” On this model I made a prediction about county-by-county polling numbers which proved correct.

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Four years later, one of the underreported facts about Obama’s campaign is how thin and lukewarm his support is among blacks. He’s got Reverend Wright’s angry, hating minority of a minority behind him, but suffers from the double whammy that his domestic-policy positions are too far left for most blacks and many perceive him as “too white”, an inauthentic mixed-race carpetbagger who knows too much about arugula and nothing about collard greens. The take-away is that the Democrats have been having unexpected difficulty delivering the black vote for a black candidate. This is right in line with my 2004 prediction that blacks might be the next group to wander out of the Democratic coalition.

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That, in isolation, might not matter much for the Democrats; the black share of the U.S. electorate is only 12% and declining. But the steady erosion of Democratic credibility among blue-collar and rural whites since the Reagan years has hit them in the other 88%, and the effect is magnified in Presidential elections because the Electoral College over-weights rural and small-state voters. And Obama’s debacle in Duryea is a perfect paradigm for their troubles. A Democratic presidential candidate tells a picked crowd of small-town Democrats that he’s safe on firearms rights, and they disbelieve him to his face. How did this happen? What’s the matter with Duryea?

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I live in Pennsylvania and I’ve got family roots in a little central-PA town not far from Duryea, and I think I know the answer to that question. Those folks looked at Obama on stage, equipped with his sharp suit and his Harvard Law polish, and saw yet another member of those brie-nibbling urban elites. And that, my friends, gave Obama exactly the credibility problem with them that his skin color hadn’t.

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Blue-collar and small-town America believes, with considerable justification, that urban elites despise them. Firearms rights are emotively loaded for these people for many reasons, and not least among them is because they see “gun control” as a form of class and culture warfare waged against them by urban sophisticates. Obama’s “bitter, clinging to their guns” description six months ago hit about every wrong note possible to aggravate this feeling — elitism, smarmy condescension, and belittling ignorance in one neat brie-flavored package.

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Note: these aren’t my reasons for being a firearms-rights advocate. I’m not a rural prole, I’m a city boy with an upper-middle-class background and an Ivy League education and a lot of childhood experience living overseas — rather like Obama, in fact. Even so, it would be difficult for me not to notice that the rural proles who read anti-firearms activism in that hostile class-loaded way have a point — gun-control boosters are very prone to caricaturing all gun owners as baccy-chewing hee-hawing rednecks in the obvious belief that each category discredits the other.

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But let’s put Obama as an individual aside for the moment, because this rant isn’t about Obama. It’s about the political culture and the political party that produced him. The truth is that in 2008 that could have been just about any Democrat on stage in Duryea, white or black or polka-dotted, and if he’d said the same thing he’d have gotten the exact same reaction: We don’t believe you.

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This comes as no surprise to me. As far back as 2003 I noted that the Democrats had developed negative credibility on gun rights. That is, when a Democratic politician says he supports gun rights — or even merely does not oppose them — firearms owners simply assume as a matter of course that he is lying to conceal a gun-grabbing agenda. Even if they’re Democrats themselves — and that’s what happened to Barack Obama in Duryea.

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The larger context is that the Democrats are losing, or have already lost, their claim to represent a populist national coalition that includes blue-collar and rural whites as a matter of course. Gun rights are the canary in this coal mine. Bill Clinton understands this, and has repeatedly told the Democrats straight up that their kulturkampf against guns has been losing them national elections since 1994. The folks in Duryea — and Thomas Frank’s what’s-the-matter-with-Kansas — understand the larger disconnect at gut level. And the Democrats just confirmed it by rejecting Hillary Clinton, who at least faked her heartlander populism well enough to fool anyone who really wanted to be fooled by it, in favor of a candidate who is above even being bothered to pretend.

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And that’s why, even with the media establishment shamelessly worshiping at the shrine of Obama, the McCain/Palin ticket is showing a four-point-lead in current polls. Sarah Palin successfully presents herself as everything to the folks in Duryea that Obama is not. But the deeper and longer-term problem for the Democrats has little to do with individuals like Obama or Palin and everything to do with the fact that, while the Democrats of forty years ago could find politicians with Palin’s star appeal to people outside the urban elites and the media, today’s can’t do it. Their politico-cultural base has become too narrow.

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That, I think, is the real message from Duryea. And if the McCain/Palin ticket wins this election, that will be why.

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UPDATE: Over at the Financial Times, Clive Crook makes essentially the same point.

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UPDATE: 24 hours after I wrote this, the McCain/Palin ticket’s lead is increasing, with new polls finding large swings among independent voters and women. The Obama campaign is beginning to sound panicked.

diff --git a/20080910025622.blog b/20080910025622.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..eded6d5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080910025622.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +The Vanishing Consumption Gap +

There’s an often-quoted statistic that the ratio between the average incomes of the richest and poorest quintiles of Americans is 15 to 1. Earlier this year I stumbled over some research (“You Are What You Spend”) indicating that there is less to that difference than meets the eye. According to the authors, the difference in actual annual spending (as opposed to annual income) falls to 4:1, apparently because lots of people have sources of spendable cash that don’t show up as annual income (asset sales, securities not subject to capital gains taxes, insurance policy redemptions, and so forth).

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But it gets better. If you adjust for size of household, the consumption ratio between richest and poorest quintiles drops to 2.1:1. They note that the average person in the middle income quintile consumes just 29% more than the average person in the lowest quintile. American spending patterns look dramatically more egalitarian than the raw numbers on income distribution would suggest. What the heck is going on here?

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On these numbers, it doesn’t sound like being rich actually buys you a lot. OK, you get to save a lot of money for the future, while poor people live paycheck to paycheck and spend a significant fraction of their income on debt service. That’s significant. There are other ways to quarrel with this analysis, too; averaging over quintiles arguably underweights inequality at the extreme top and bottom ends of the distribution.

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Still, that 2.1:1 figure is pretty startling. That gives us a factor of 6 difference between income spread and consumption spread over at least 80% of the income distribution, which suggests that something is operating that drastically equalizes Americans’ consumption power. And some other papers that I found by googling for “consumption inequality” actually back this up with different lines of evidence. The second and third I read noted that while U.S. wage inequality has increased significantly since 1970, consumption inequality has not. Both attribute this to the buffering effect of consumer credit on wage volatility.

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I think the authors of “You Are What You Spend” are on to something more basic, though. There simply isn’t much stuff left that is so expensive that rich people can buy it but poor people can’t. This is true even for classic rich-person luxury goods. Proles buy wedding diamonds in strip malls. Caviar is no big deal; I know a woman who has carried it as backpack rations becuse the food-value-to-weight ratio was so good, which might sound like a rich-kid story until I tell you she’s a calligrapher who makes a somewhat precarious living doing piecework. And I know a non-wealthy programmer who recently bought himself an airplane.

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More prosaically, look at what “poor” people have. Refrigerators. Cars. Televisions. Cell phones. Computers. I wrote about this in 2003 in an essay Mobilizing the Poor and Other Delusions. In that essay I was arguing that the goods consumption of all Americans above homeless drug addicts on the SES scale is so high as to make “poverty” a term that cannot meaningfully be applied in the U.S. Not if you’ve lived, as I have, in places where they have the real thing.

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The data on consumption spreads demonstrate something else: not just that “poverty” is a silly word to use in the U.S., but that the degree of “inequality” we have here barely moves the needle off the peg on the historical misery meter.

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The authors of “You Are What You Spend” explain this mainly by noticing that consumer goods have plummeted in price while rocketing in quality. Basically, everything is cheap now. Even with the recent spike in the price of oil, for example, Americans spend less on gasoline in constant dollars than they did in 1971. Food, clothing, housing, and other basics also cost drastically less than they did as recently as my teenage years, continuing a 150-year trend. Rates of home ownership are at an all-time high, and can be expected to continue increasing despite the current mortgage flap.

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Heck, in 1928 food was so expensive that “a chicken in every pot” was a presidential campaign slogan. That’s right: chicken was a luxury good. If you find that bizarre and hard to believe, wake up. You just learned something about how wealthy you are.

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The authors of “You Are What You Spend” get the first-order consequences right; the cheaper consumer goods get, the more the consumption gap between rich and poor will tend to vanish even if income inequality is flat or rising. Having lots of pictures of dead presidents matters less when you only need a relative few of them to live comfortably.

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A more interesting question is: why is this happening, and can it be expected to continue?

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At this point the authors of “You Are What You Spend” handwave vaguely in the direction of free markets. They’re not wrong — of course the reason we can buy cheap food and clothes and electronics is because of market-driven innovation, price competition rewarding efficiency of production, economies of scale, yadda yadda yadda.

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But I think there’s a more fundamental and often missed cause, one that leads to strong predictions once you notice it. It’s what Bucky Fuller called “ephemeralization”, the substitution of design information for material and energy costs. Consider, for example, the difference between a computer in 1950 — a multi-ton behemoth — and a laptop today. The laptop uses design information to substitute ounces of silicon and plastic for thousands of pounds of steel, glass, and rare earths. This substitution has a ripple effect through all the transport, energy, and opportunity costs associated with producing and using computers.

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This suggests that we can expect the consumption gap between rich and poor to continue closing — regardless of what income inequality does — as long as we can continue finding cleverer ways to arrange atoms. Or optimize supply chains. Or write risk-spreading financial instruments. Or, to anticipate one objection, find cheaper ways to make synthetic fuel from genetically tailored algae (algae genomes are design information, too).

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The vanishing consumption gap has political consequences as well, but I’ll save those for another post.

diff --git a/20080910183134.blog b/20080910183134.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b19c961 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080910183134.blog @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +Kansas and the Vanishing Gap +

In my last essay, The Vanishing Consumption Gap, I presented several lines of evidence leading to the conclusion that the consumption disparity between rich and poor in the U.S. is drastically less than the income disparity, and seems to be decreasing even as income disparity rises. This continues a historical trend, and there are causal reasons (ephemeralization and the efficiency-seeking effects of markets) to believe it’s happening everywhere on earth.

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I concluded the essay by observing that the vanishing consumption gap has political consequences. Among other things (as I hinted in a comment on Oh, those bitter clingers!) it explains what’s the matter with Kansas.

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Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter With Kansas? bears the standard for a common complaint by left-wing redistributionists. “Why”, Frank asks, “do middle and lower-income Americans keep voting for Republicans when Democrats better serve their economic interests? Why do they let ‘values’ issues trump pocketbook issues?”

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In fact, only a little study of public-choice economics is required to show with near certainty that the major premise of Frank’s question is wrong — that more redistributionism would not wind up serving the economic interests of anyone outside the political class itself. But let’s agree for this discussion to ignore everything we know about about rent-seeking and capture effects and address Frank’s question in terms of his own limiting assumptions.

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Redistributionists like Frank reason and argue as though (a) Republicans represent the interests of the top income quintile only, (b) Kansans are all lowest-quintile, and (c) they are therefore looking from the bottom up at the 15:1 disparity in quality of life that income statistics suggests. Under those assumptions, Frank’s question would indeed be quite difficult to answer.

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I think Frank’s assumption (a) is false; it takes very little research to show that the Democratic Party is actually more reliant on rich donors (notably from the entertainment industry and tort lawyers) than the Republicans are. But I’ll let him keep this premise, too, because I don’t need it to refute his model. Moving on…

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Premise (b): Bureau of the Census statistics on states ranked by median income put Kansas squarely in the middle quintile. This suggests that the raw income disparity between the average Kansans and Frank’s hypothetical bloated Republican plutocrats is about half the extreme case, maybe 7:1. Remember, when we get to consumption spreads, that Kansas vs. the hypothetical fat cats only captures the difference between the top and the middle of the distribution, not the top and bottom.

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Premise (c) is where things get interesting. I think the real answer to Frank’s question, in his own terms, is that he’s looking at income disparity when he should be looking at consumption disparity. This leads him to grossly overestimate the degree of economic envy that should reasonably be expected to motivate Kansans.

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In my last essay I reported that after adjusting for household size, individual consumption disparity between quintiles 1 and 5 is about 2.1:1, an approximately 6:1 compression relative to income disparity. To model Frank’s case, we only have to make two assumptions; (1) consumption, like income, obeys a Gaussian distribution, and (2) the deviation of that distribution is about the same. Both seem easily defensible.

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Under these assumptions, the consumption gap between the average Kansan and the average top-quintile Republican drops to…1.05:1. And that would explain a lot. Kansans don’t behave politically like they’re motivated by economic envy because, in fact, they aren’t. They don’t have to be; their actual consumption volume is so close to that of the “wealthy” that the difference might be lost in statistical noise.

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Because the upper limit of 2.1:1 on individual consumption spread is so small, this conclusion is not very sensitive to the way you interpolate the particular case of Kansas. And it matches our eyeball evidence. OK, WalMart may seem rather tacky and depressing to an upper-middle-class Ivy League urbanite like Barack Obama or myself, but after they’re out of the store neither of us would have an easy time telling WalMart clothes from the stuff we might buy at Nordstrom’s. And so on. American society looks, dresses and eats in its egalitarian way because, across the 80% represented by the three middle quintiles and a half each of the top and bottom ones, consumption differences are the next thing to nonexistent.

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And, really, where’s the surprise here? If consumption weren’t pretty near flat across the SES scale, American society would have to look far more stratified than it does. The rich might be able to pass by underspending, but the poor wouldn’t have the symmetrical option. They’d look, dress, and eat enough differently from the rest of us to stand out a mile. That remained generally true as recently as World War II, and in some of the most rural and backwards areas of Appalachia it continued to be true until the 1970s. But those days are gone, and good riddance.

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This leaves redistributionists like Thomas Frank in a hole. It would leave them in a worse one if they recognized that most of todays’s lifetime poor are stuck in a poverty culture created by previous rounds of redistributionism, but they’re blind to that. Never mind; even in terms of the facts they allow themselves to see, they have a problem.

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The problem is this: how do you generate mass support for more redistributionist policies when economic envy no longer motivates voters? That is the question What’s the Matter With Kansas? is really asking, underneath.

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The answer is, basically, that you can’t. Kansans have jumped up a level on the Maslovian hierarchy; freed of the necessity to vote their pocketbook interests, they choose sides in culture wars instead. When this happens, Thomas Frank’s political allies almost always lose, for reasons I discussed directly in Oh, those bitter clingers!.

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Historically this is is not unlike the problem the Left faced after World War II, when it became apparent that Marx’s industrial proletariat, far from being “immiserized”, had actually disappeared rather cheerfully into the petty bourgeoisie. They didn’t cope so well then, either; in retrospect, the money and organizational armature secretly provided by Stalin’s Soviet Union is probably the only thing that kept the socialist Left any more relevant than the Free Silver movement or the Henry Georgists.

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Today, the first-level response by America’s would-be socialists is to heatedly deny that the consumption gap is in fact vanishing. That is, to construct a rhetorical fantasy world in which domestic poverty and inequality remain Huge, Crushing Problems That Must Be Dealt With and their preferred solutions are still relevant. Sadly for them, this doesn’t work; Americans signaled that they’d stopped buying it in the 1990s when they voted for the effective abolition of Federal welfare and against Hillary Clinton’s health-care takeover. And Kansas keeps right on voting Republican.

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The second-level response seems to be to invest heavily in disaster scenarios. “Nice late capitalism you’ve got there,” goes this line “…be a shame if something happened to it.” Like a peak oil collapse, or global warming. Nature isn’t cooperating, though; market incentives are improving solar-energy and synthetic-fuel technology right on schedule, and global average temperature is dropping like a brick.

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As Kansas goes, so goes the U.S. And as the U.S, the world. The forces tending to narrow the consumption gap are broad, deep, and no respecters of national borders. It’s hard to see how they could be even slowed down by anything shy of a major war or a killer pandemic. And the political consequences (voters jumping up a level on the Maslovian hierarchy to non-economic concerns) are likely to be similar everywhere. The Left seems in for a rough time and dwindling influence, unless they get the slate-wiping disaster they seem to crave so keenly these days.

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Not all of the consequences of the vanishing gap will be so benign. One of the games humans play when they’re not worried about food and shelter is “hate the other”. Yugoslavia’s welter of tribal animosities didn’t blow up until after Communism fell and they jumped up a Maslovian level. Islamofascist terrorism is a movement of millionaires and the tiny Arab middle class, not the subsistence-level poor. In general I think we might see quite a lot of uncorking of old resentments, and not a few invented new ones.

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Still, the general trends accompanying the flattening of consumption have certainly been positive up to now. Lots of people get decent food and clothes and houses and even toys like games consoles. It may not be quite true that democracies never war on each other, but there may well be a threshold consumption spread below which they never do.

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But what about the further future?

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One of my commenters has proposed that a society with perfectly (or near-perfectly) flat consumption would be one that wouldn’t care about capitalism versus socialism, and approximated the “gift culture” I described in Homesteading the Noosphere. I doubt it.

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I agree that in that future almost nobody will care about capitalism versus socialism, and it will be for the same reason nobody cares about Henry Georgism or the Free Silver movement now. Deprived of poverty and inequality as issues, socialism will be moribund; the ugly authoritarian impulses that drive it will have to find other forms of rationalization.

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Capitalism, on the other hand will not be dead. The reason is that material things aren’t like software. The gift culture is a superb adaptation for producing software because the limiting factor of production is human attention and the marginal cost per unit of goods is zero. Unfortunately, neither of these things, is true of goods that consist even partly of atoms. There are inescapable costs to shoving atoms around, and we will need capital to meet those costs and markets to clear them.

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As usual, utopia is not an option. But a much wealthier and happier human species is. In fact, it seems almost inevitable.

diff --git a/20080911074143.blog b/20080911074143.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6436fc5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080911074143.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Blog site defacement +

Sometime shortly after 6AM this morning, my blog site and home page were defaced, replaced with a message reading “Happy 9/11 LOL” and a very ugly image.

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I happened to be up and working and discovered the damage quickly, probably within minutes of the attack. Less than ten minutes later I had received three pieces of email and a phone call alerting me; apparently, I have enough friendly readers that even if I had not been on line I would have been informed of such vandalism within a half hour.

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I have undone the damage, taken some appropriate security measures, and reported full details of the crack to the ibiblio site admins. The pinhead behind this attack is very likely to be tracked down, and had better hope the ibiblio site people find him before I do.

diff --git a/20080912060332.blog b/20080912060332.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9d3dfef --- /dev/null +++ b/20080912060332.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +The Obama campaign smells of defeat +

My normal style on this blog is to write think pieces. I post when I have an idea I need to grapple with; the process of writing and researching helps me organize and sharpen my thinking. Sometimes, the process changes my mind about an issue.

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This once, I’m posting to report a gut feeling I’ve been getting more and more strongly in the last two weeks. It started with Barack Obama’s VP choice of Joe Biden, got stronger when McCain tapped Sarah Palin, and has become overwhelming in the last two days. My feeling is this: Barack Obama is toast. He’s done, stick a fork in him. It’s not that I think the McCain/Palin ticket is going to win, it’s that I feel strongly that the Obama/Biden ticket is going to lose.

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Note: This is not partisan cheering I’m doing. I’m not a McCain fan: I’ve never forgiven him for the the McCain-Feingold “campaign finance reform” bill, which I consider the most atrocious rape-job on the First Amendment in my lifetime. And I agree with Matt Welch’s portrait of an authoritarian maverick; McCain’s is in many ways a frighteningly authoritarian personality. I have, at best, very mixed feelings about seeing him in the White House.

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No, what I’m reacting to is a gut sense that the wheels are coming off the Obama bandwagon and it’s headed for a big, ugly crackup. I would no longer be surprised if Obama melted down in a serious way during the debates, though I don’t think keeping his cool will save him from being trounced. I don’t even think the election’s going to be close anymore.

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Why? Lots of things. Poll numbers. Sarah Palin. The hysterically vituperative reaction to Sarah Palin from the left and the media (which I think is a gift beyond price to the Republicans). The way Obama himself seems to be fraying around the edges, losing his cool, gaffe frequency increasing. Democratic supporters dissing him in Duryea. I smell desperation and failure; I see the Democratic party, yet again, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

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OK, I’ve said it on the record. When the votes are counted, I’ll take the kudos or the lumps for it.

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UPDATE: Democrats’ polling league in a generic contest has collapsed. Control of Congress is in play. Wow. Just wow. Considering how hard the Republicans have been fucking up and alienating their base, this is astonishing. EPIC FAIL.

diff --git a/20080912233457.blog b/20080912233457.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e3740df --- /dev/null +++ b/20080912233457.blog @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +Timing the Entitlements Crash +

Investor’s Business Daily ran a story recently, Tax To The Max, on a Congressional Budget Office study of the U.S. finances.What it says is that spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlement programs is unsustainably high. The study projects tax increases of 150%, with the lowest income-tax bracket going from 10% to 25% and top rates going from 35% to 88%.

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The IBD correctly notes: “Allowed to grind on without real reform, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will do what no invading army or cabal of terrorists has done or will ever do: bring this mighty republic to its knees. Increasing federal taxes by 150% will strangle economic growth.”

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I think the IBD is too optimistic. Even pushing tax rates to 100% confiscation wouldn’t finance the entitlements black hole at the rate we can expect the client population’s needs to grow — especially not after 2050, when the demographics of the U.S. will tilt in a distinctly less favorable direction. A mere 150% increase in current rates certainly won’t do it. One way or another, the Federal entitlements system seems headed for a terminal crash. The only question is when it will happen.

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Raising taxes can delay this, but not prevent it. And might, actually, trigger it sooner; the historical evidence suggests that current tax rates may already be at above the minimum level where, by suppressing and unhealthily redirecting economic activity, they actually reduce total revenue. (One reason to believe this is that the much-derided “Bush tax cuts” actually increased revenues despite the effects of the dot.com bust.) But even if this isn’t true yet, diminishing returns will set in at some point as rates go up.

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The only alternative to raising taxes (or deliberately inflating the currency, which in this context has similar effects) is to buy debt and pay entitlements out of that, pushing the unsustainability problem into the future.

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The fundamental problem is that income-transfer programs (and the interest service on the debt purchased to keep them running) are spending wealth in higher volumes than the economy can actually generate, and demand for that spending is rising faster than the economy is growing. Thus, raising tax rates is no longer a way out, if it ever was.

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At some point, the U.S. government is going to lose both the ability to increase revenues and the ability to sell bonds. At that point the entitlements system will crash. Transfer checks will either stop issuing or become meaningless because the government has, like some banana republic, hyperinflated the currency in order to get out from under its debt obligations.

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Unlike the oncoming European demographic crash, the entitlements crash will be survivable in that there will still be people around to make things and trade things with. But it’s going to be ugly. probably rioting-in-the-streets ugly. People dependent on income transfers will starve or die of preventable diseases in large numbers, unless they can find work or private charity. Since many of those people will be old, work will be unlikely unless they are exceptionally capable at something. Families will have to re-assume the burden of caring for their elderly; retirees without children will be in especially severe jeopardy.

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Violent revolutions have been fought over less wrenching economic changes than this one promises to be.

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The next questions to ask are (a) when will it happen?, and (b) how can the pain be minimized?

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There are good reasons to believe the crash could happen as early as 2012, with the trigger being the mass retirement of the Baby-Boom demographic bulge. That is, it will happen that soon if we are lucky.

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If we are unlucky, the Federal government will concoct some sort of accounting flimflam (like Al Gore’s infamous lockbox full of IOUs from one part of the government to another) that will push back the day of reckoning out past 2020 — making the numbers and demographic profile of the stranded dependents worse every year it’s delayed. I think this is the most likely scenario, though I’d love to be wrong.

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In the rest of this essay I am going to make, against my best judgment, the optimistic choice of a near-term crash; bear in mind that if I’m actually correct in my pessimism the devastation will be worse…

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The pain-minimizing strategy, from an economic and human-misery point of view, would be to voluntarily crash those programs now. Learning the adaptations required to live without them would be easier in today’s strong economy than it’s going to be in the world after an uncontrolled crash. This is impossible, however, as it would create immediate grief for the political and bureaucratic class that runs them and for various powerful interest groups allied to it. At present, this coalition is certainly powerful enough to block abolition.

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My friend Ken Burnside argues for the near-term crash as follows: “The dinosaur killer on the economy is the 53 trillion dollars of accumulated debt on Social Security/Medicaid, which starts coming due around 2013, when revenues for the program are less than its obligations, and all those ‘IOUs’ that Congress has been writing against the trust fund start coming due.”

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My best guess is that 2013 will fall in President Palin’s first term, after McCain steps down and she clobbers the living crap out of an aging and bitter Hillary Clinton. There’s still a possibility, though, that the economy-killer could strike early in an Obama second term. If it goes down that way, I think the chances of Federal flim-flam and hyperinflation go up considerably. Whatever his personal good intentions might be, Obama is heavily tied to interest groups for whom admitting that federal income transfers have to effectively end would be ideological and electoral suicide. Palin isn’t, and thus might — might — be able to administer the harsh medicine required to pull us through with minimum dislocation.

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One of my commenters posted, in the thread attached to The Obama campaign smells of defeat, “I think the worst case scenario will be averted when the decision is made to cut benefits. One of the unspoken secrets is that the 30-and-under generation is fairly confident this is going to happen anyhow, which will help it happen.”

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His second sentence is quite true. Unfortunately it has been true for at least fifteen years; that is, sensible 30-and-unders had as I recall already written off their old-age entitlements by the early 1990s (when I was in my mid-30s), but this produced no slowdown in the growth of those entitlements at all.

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In any case, the crisis could be averted only if the sum of entitlement payouts and debt service were to be cut to a level the tax base could sustain indefinitely. But the government has been buying debt to fund entitlements rather than covering them with year-over-year revenues since the 1960s, which suggests that entitlements would have to be cut to pre-Great-Society levels before they would be sustainable again. No Medicare. No Medicaid. No AFDC. Social Security might survive, but only as the income-banking program it was originally intended to be.

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In other words, the political and economic pain from a managed reduction to sustainability would be as broad and nearly as severe as voluntarily crashing the programs entirely. Therefore, it won’t happen until the economy-killer hits, for the same reasons abolition is politically impossible today.

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Ken Burnside also writes: “If you want to know what the sound of a bullet whipping by your ear is for an economy, the recent broaching of the subject of certain [U.S. Treasury] bond issues being dropped from AAA to AA was one. To paraphrase Alec Guinness, ‘I sensed the clenching of a hundred thousand sphincters on K-street, all in unison.'”

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He’s right. The day U.S. sovereign debt doesn’t have a platinum-plated rating, world investors will bail out of U.S. bonds and related dollar assets so fast your head will spin. Since their purchases are, in effect, financing our entitlements system (and the rest of Federal deficit spending), the entitlements crash would follow shortly thereafter.

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The general point is that the entitlements system is so heavily dependent on debt finance that it is already vulnerable to external shocks, even before 2013. The next bullet might not miss. Sooner or later, one is certain to hit.

diff --git a/20080914021336.blog b/20080914021336.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9ed9a3d --- /dev/null +++ b/20080914021336.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Heh — “Read My Lipstick” +

I am slack-jawed with admiration tonight.

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The source of my amazement is reports that female McCain/Palin supporters have started making and distributing T-shirts that say “Read My Lipstick: MCain/Palin 2008″. And wearing them in large numbers.

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This is deployment of multi-leveled irony as an offensive weapon. They are taking Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” remark and slugging him in the face with it. They are taking the MSM’s vile smears and insinuations about Palin’s sex life and sexual presence and slugging them in the face with that. They are kicking Gloria Steinem and every desexualized “Palin isn’t a woman” harridan in their collective teeth. Yes, they’re saying, you can be a former beauty queen who looks good in stockings and makeup and a pit bull at the same time, and we love you for it.

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“Lipstick”, on pit bulls, on pigs, and on women, has been bouncing around as a loaded signifier in this campaign ever since the Palin nomination (was that only a couple of weeks ago?). With this move, the Palin supporters have appropriated it for their own. I predict that their opponents are not going to get it back; that every reference to lipstick from now on is going to remind everyone of the merciless, scurrilous rumor-mongering about Palin and how she has survived it with style just by unapologetically being who she is.

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Whatever Sarah Palin’s substantive qualifications for VP may or may not be, I am an aficionado of political mockery and this is the sweetest, sharpest bit of street theater I have seen in decades. It’s a satirical body-slam of every dismissive talking head who has tried to declare Palin unqualified and unserious. It’s worthy of the Yippies in their heyday.

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It’s not mainly Sarah Palin I’m admiring tonight, it’s her supporters, for cleverness and sheer brass. But OK, Palin deserves admiration too, for being the kind of person who can survive the most disgusting farrago of baseless shit I’ve ever seen flung at a politician, and for being the kind of person about whom this slogan can be such a devastating counterpunch.

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Poor Obama. You have been so quickly and utterly outclassed at the charisma game. And by a gun-toting rural hick from a state nobody trendy ever goes to. That’s gotta hurt.

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Of course, for Palin supporters that’s the final turn of the screw. Obama has already been responding to Palin’s presence in the race more than is tactically smart; that’s how he wound up uttering the “lipstick on a pig” gaffe they’re playing off of. He’s fraying, losing his cool. This is a shot — and a shrewd one, I’d say — at driving Obama completely bugfuck, increasing the odds he will melt down with a national audience watching.

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None of it has anything to do with substance or issues of course. But considered purely as mindfuck it is beautiful. The Discordian in me bows in awe and respect.

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I’m also a bit puzzled. When did conservatives — of all people — learn how to play this sort of game? Obviously while I wasn’t looking…

diff --git a/20080915171716.blog b/20080915171716.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a98370a --- /dev/null +++ b/20080915171716.blog @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +The Post-Racial Hall of Mirrors +

Two days ago, while on a quest to find one of the vanishing breed of waterbed stores, my wife and I had to drive through a slum section of Wilmington, Delaware. The streets were full of black people, and I had a strong “Ugh! Don’t want this kind anywhere near me!” reaction. Only it wasn’t to their blackness. It was because, with a few teenage exceptions, they were graceless and ugly and fat. Women wearing sack dresses in garish floral prints that would look bad even on a mattress liner, men in wife-beater T-shirts, rolling oceans of sloppy adipose tissue, not a smidgen of self-respect or good taste in sight. Awful…

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I might not have written about this, except that later in the day I was reading a blog discussion of the Bradley Effect and its possible impact on the 2008 presidential race, and someone’s comment noted that it could be caused not only by hidden racism but by fear of seeming a racist even if one is opposed to Obama but knows oneself to be innocent of actual racist sentiment.

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Then I flashed back to my experience in the Delaware slums a few hours previously and realized there is a third and subtler possibility. If I were a left-liberal rather than a libertarian, might I have confused my own reaction to the black people in that slum with racism, and felt eager to expiate it with displays of pro-blackness like telling posters I’m an Obama fan? Is it possible the Bradley effect is largely a rebound phenomenon driven not by “hidden racism” but by unjustified white guilt?

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The more I thought about this, the more likely it seemed.

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I have a very simple definition of anti-black racism: an anti-black racist is one whose behavior towards individual blacks is prejudiced by unjustified beliefs about blacks as a racial group. Let’s call this “I-racism”.

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There are much broader definitions of racism floating around. Notably, something I’ll call “PC-racism”. It works a lot like the Catholic concept of sin. In the PC-racist belief system, all whites are, if not born racist, presumed to have absorbed racism from their early environment. It lurks in white brainpains, ineradicable, ready to leap out at any moment. Believing you are not racist is not only false, but in itself evidence of racism. Individual whites can atone for it only by ritual displays of confession, humility, and self-abasement. They are required to cringe before accusations of racism and can only demonstrate good intentions by zealously cooperating in the detection and persecution of racism in other whites.

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Individual absolution from PC-racism, even for the most anti-racist whites, is always conditional and temporary and can be revoked at any time by any black person, or any white person more zealous in the eradication of racism, on the basis of any behavior these privileged ones choose to define as “racist”. Collectively, whites can never be freed of the stain of racism.

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I’m not an I-racist. In order to be clear how strong a statement this is, you need to know that I have at least one factually-justified negative belief about blacks as a group, namely that the average IQ of self-identified blacks is about a standard deviation lower than for self-identified whites — and since IQ is a predictor of important things such as rates of school graduation and criminal deviance, this actually matters. But while this belief has consequences for how I expect blacks to behave en masse, it has no consequences for my dealings with black individuals. The individual is not the mass, and I’m not stupid enough to confuse them.

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Note that I also believe, on similar factual grounds, that East Asians and Ashkenazic Jews have significantly higher average IQ than whites and that this matters for exactly the same reasons. So if I am a “racist” in any sense, I am also a racist against my own putative interest, that is against non-Jewish whites. See how silly it gets when “racism” gets used for any belief about racial group differences, whether justified or not?

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Many years ago, I was with a girl named Eve for a while. This was before anybody had the concept of ‘geekgirl’ but she was one, all right. Computer programmer, very bright, very funny; wrote software for missile-control systems. And she was black; not just what blacks call a high-yaller, but a broad-hipped, kinky-haired, full-lipped African-looking woman with dark skin. I liked her for her brains and her poise and her sense of humor and her precise, considered way of speaking, but I thought she was beautiful, too.

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(Having said “many years ago”, I’ll also note that neither of us was being particularly brave or transgressive. Our peer group, science-fiction fans, had no taboo against interracial dating, and none of us gave a damn what the mundanes might have thought about it.)

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One night we were happily tangled up with each other and I said to her “Eve…I’ve decided that the fact that you’re black does make one significant difference to our relationship.” I felt her tense up. “Oh?…” she said. “Yes,” I said, peering at her owl-eyed in the dim light. “It makes you more difficult to see in the dark.”

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She paused for a long moment, giggled, and jumped me, and I mean “jumped” in a good way. Well, of course; that was exactly the intended short-term result. But Eve also got the message that I had enough confidence in both her and myself to tease her like that. When we parted, we stayed friends. Years later, I bought a couple of very tasteful pieces of jewelry she’d made as a birthday present for my wife.

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I’ve described Eve and my dealings with her in some detail partly to make a point about the underappreciated difference between racism and classism. My bad reaction to the slumdwellers in Wilmington was, basically, because they were lumpenproles. Eve, on the other hand, was a product of about the same level of family affluence and education as myself, and jammed up the same end of the IQ bell curve as me. These qualities mattered in exactly the way her skin color didn’t.

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OK, it may be in some absolute egalitarian sense unfair of me that I choose my friends that way, but we all do it and it’s not racism. Joseph Biden got slammed for describing Barack Obama as “clean”, but he wasn’t hounded out of public life for it because even the racial-grievance crowd knew that what he meant by it was a sort of class description rather than an implied slur on other blacks. That was an unusual moment of sanity, unfortunately; all too often, Americans confuse classist reactions with racist ones just because a lot of the relatively poor are also black. That’s the mistake I might have made, but didn’t, in Wilmington.

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Most Americans don’t have anything like the basis of fact I do about group differences in IQ, criminal deviance, sports performance, etc.; attempts to talk about these things in public tend to be met with frenzied downshouting and denial. So most Americans actually fail the I-racist test the other way than I do; they might incorrectly jump from facts about the mass to prejudices about individuals, but they don’t have the politically-incorrect facts to start with.

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I don’t think there are many white Americans left who are I-racists; the rest of us condemn them, and rightly so. But I also think very few of the rest of us could summon up the nerve to make the joke I did to Eve in those circumstances; I almost didn’t dare do it myself, and certainly wouldn’t have if she weren’t so ferociously intelligent. The social stigma attached to racism is too great, even when we don’t fear directly offending a lover or friend. White Americans today are in general too terrified of being seen as racists to go near that kind of humor.

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But it goes deeper than that. Most of us, especially left-liberals, have been successfully indoctrinated in the PC-racism of perpetual and collective white guilt. We believe simultaneously that we must atone and can never really atone enough. We’ve been taught to look in the mirror and see a racist even if we ourselves are innocent of any desire to oppress blacks; still more, we’ve been taught to look at other whites and see racists even though we know nothing about their intentions or their behavior towards individual blacks.

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Publicly, PC-racism has become an entire hall of mirrors, everyone pointing publicly at racism that has become increasingly imaginary, and whites too often believing each other guilty merely because decent people are supposed to believe that and atone, atone, atone. And this is what brings us back to the Bradley Effect and the 2008 elections. Because the hall-of-mirrors model may not change the frequency with which pollsters hear lies, but utterly changes the meaning of that number.

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If most Americans are “hidden racists”, then the Bradley effect will be stubborn and negative and completely pretty much independent of any individual qualities Obama has or proposals he makes.

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On the other hand, if most Americans already live in the post-racial hall of mirrors, Obama can in fact gain much by positioning himself as a bargainer with whites, trading redemption for votes. In this scenario, the Bradley effect is susceptible to sudden collapse or even reversal as whites realize they can be what they have wished to seem.

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It’s pretty obvious that Obama himself has counted on the hall-of-mirrors model being the correct one; none of his rhetoric about race would make sense otherwise. This would explain neatly why as his poll numbers have dropped to parity with and then below McCain’s in the last week, he has ignored Democratic heavyweights (the news story I saw didn’t specify who, so I’m not chasing down the link) warning him that the Bradley effect is putting him in severe danger of losing. In Obama’s world, he’s not going to be sunk by white anxiety but rather elevated by white desire for redemption (thus the savior-like imagery his campaign trades in).

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As far as that goes, I think Obama’s instincts are right on this and the unnamed Democratic heavyweights are wrong. He is in severe danger of losing — in fact, I now think he’s going to lose — but he’s right that the Bradley effect isn’t his big problem. That one lies closer to home.

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Obama probably thinks his big problem is that Americans aren’t ready for his policy prescriptions, or that the damned surge actually worked, or that the Republican attack machine is getting traction. I think it’s that he’s shown extremely poor judgment in his choice of friends (Ayers, Dohrn, Wright, Rezko), the management of his campaign (Joseph “The Plagiarist” Biden?), and his response to the Palin phenomenon. And, as I suggested some time ago, that he peaked too early. Mass worship is a fickle thing; you’re a messiah one week, then next week they’re all off chasing a shoe or gourd or something.

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But whatever my other differences with Barack Obama, I agree with him on one thing; the hall of mirrors is a trap. It’s time to shatter them all and banish the guilt. So we can actually see each other.

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And, Eve…if you happen to read this? I still think of you fondly. Drop me a line sometime.

diff --git a/20080917035943.blog b/20080917035943.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e9e8a7f --- /dev/null +++ b/20080917035943.blog @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +Sarah Palin, American Centrist +

In the fusillade of accusations that has been flung at Sarah Palin since McCain chose her as VP-nominee, there is one thread in common; that Palin is an extreme right-winger. There are several possible reasons for an accuser to take this position, but it occurred to me yesterday that the most important one may be accusers who are honestly confused about where the American center actually is.

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Of course, the political map is not neatly describable as a one-dimensional spectrum. I myself, as an anarcho-capitalist radical quite willing to dump on both Left and Right, am an existence proof of that. Nevertheless, we actually have a lot of psephological information on where the “center” falls, in the sense that if you choose polar “Left” and “Right” stands on particular issues, polling can locate the position between them held by the median number of Americans.

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One can then at least ask the question “Where is Palin with respect to that median?” I’m in an interesting position to address that question, because on pretty much all of the hot-button “culture wars” issues I have radical positions opposed to Palin’s but nevertheless believe on good evidence that her position is closer to the median than mine.

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Let’s start with the blob of accusations around religion and creationism. I’ll make my position on these clear: I think conventional faith-based religions (including Christianity and Islam) are forms of contagious insanity more damaging than any ideology except socialism. Creationism is not just a doctrine for blithering idiots, it cannot be maintained against evidence without an active and perverse desire to remain a blithering idiot.

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So when I tell you that I think Sarah Palin’s religious position is pretty near dead center in the American spectrum, you can be pretty sure I’m not fudging to make that position look good. Let’s see… raised Catholic until her family took up one of the Pentecostal denominations, left that because it was too weird, and now attends an independent church where, according to the not-exactly-Right-leaning magazine Newsweek, “The sermons of its ministers steer clear of politics and hot-button social issues and dwell instead on scripture”.

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Now, if you have anything like my violent loathing for the type, the name Wasilla Bible Church and that stuff about dwelling on scripture will raise the not-unreasonable suspicion that the outfit is Biblical-literalist — you know, the kind of wackjobs who think π must actually be three because otherwise that passage in 1 Kings would be wrong. Bzzzt! False alarm. Pastor Kroon says “the task of believers [includes] scrutiny, he said, for errors and mistranslations over the centuries that may have obscured the original intent.”

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OK. During 50 years of contemplating a religious landscape containing Inerrantists, Dominionists, Christian Identity yahoos, and Pat Robertson, this Wiccan has felt more than a few moments of Christians-wanna-burn-me fear. But my paranoia-meter isn’t even twitching off the peg here. This is normal. This is mainstream-Protestant. This is boring. Yes, I’d be happier if Palin were a Unitarian or a Quaker, but anyone who thinks her church affilations are “extreme right” or evidence of religious mania is suffering from a serious lack of perspective and really needs to get out more.

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But the really good news is Palin’s statement that she does not allow her religious convictions to dictate her political positions. Observers in Alaska (including one I know personally) agree that she lived up to this one as Mayor and governor, showing no appetite for hitting any of the religious-conservative hot-button issues. That is what definitely puts her in the American center, separating her from both right-wing Dominionism and left-wing liberation theology.

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Now let’s talk about Creationism. If Palin had ever proclaimed her support for it, I’d have to consider her either a liar trolling for the yahoo vote or aming the aforementioned blithering idiots. In fact, however, the entire “Palin is a creationist” meme seems to be spun out of one ambiguous sentence in a 1996 debate, which she later backed away from. The sentence was “Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.”

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I’ll start by noting that this quote smells to me awfully like a deft avoidance maneuver preferable from an ass-covering perspective to saying something more honest, like “Bletch. Creationists are a bunch of ignorant pinheads but I need their votes.” Palin is a politician. But since I can’t actually read her mind to verify this interpretation, let’s take her at her word for the rest of the discussion.

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I disagree with the stated position. I don’t think the schools ought to give Creationism any more respect than they give Flat-Earth theory. But, again, extreme-right this is not. The extreme-right position is that evolutionary theory is an evil plot to contaminate our vital bodily fluids and shouldn’t be taught in schools. And Sarah Palin has, dammit, uttered a compromise formula that is probably much closer to the median or mean U.S. position than I am.

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Abortion. Again, I’m on the other side from Palin on this one. I’m pro-choice. I think the notion that “life begins at conception” is absurd; the fertilized gamete doesn’t have anywhere near the informational complexity required to be considered human. While I’m not a big fan of killing fetuses in the third trimester, I oppose abortion restrictions for the same practical reason I’m opposed to so-called “reasonable” gun controls; because I don’t trust the agenda or the intentions of the groups pushing either, and think they are both pursuing salami-slicing strategies that threaten fundamental liberties.

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Palin is “pro-life”. This is not an extreme position; most Americans see far more merit in the “pro-life” argument than I do, if only because conservative propagandists have done a masterful job of confusing the categories life-like-bacteria and life-like-sapient-human. Again, Palin is (regrettably) closer to the median than I am.

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Palin refuses to make an exception for rape or incest. This is, in fact, the only position of hers I’ve discovered that puts her a significant distance from the U.S. median. The rape-or-incest exception has very wide support even among those who self-describe as “pro-life”.

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While I disagree with Palin on the general issue, I actually consider her stance against the exception is an indication of sounder moral reasoning than most pro-lifers employ. I’ve written before that I think the exception reveals a nasty, fundamental disconnection between what pro-lifers want and what they say they want; if you’re going to be “pro-life” at all, Palin’s is the honest and consistent place to come down. So, personally, I have to actually give her points for integrity here.

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On other sex-related issues Palin has governed as a moderate. She supports comprehensive sex education in schools and supports birth control use. I agree with her support for comprehensive sex education, and note that it may actually put her somewhat to the left of dead center (though not as much as her position on the rape-or-incest exception pulls right).

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Palin’s record on gay marriage is mixed; she is on record both as opposing it and as blocking a prohibition on gay benefits. On this one the median American belief seems to be an unhappy muddle of opposition to formal government-sanctioned recognition of gay marriage with a refusal to condemn gays for coming out and desiring it. Palin is right on top of that position, making her far more mainstream than my libertarian proposal that we kick the government out of the business of recognizing marriage altogether and let people form whatever communes they want.

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Does this picture add up to a frothing theocrat or hot-eyed right-wing culture warrior? Um…no. Not at all. On issue after issue (with the single exception of the rape-and-incest exception), what I discover about Palin seems to put her right smack in the broad middle. Far closer to it than me, usually, even with respect to issues we’re on opposite sides of.

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Furthermore, the sense I get from her speech and presentation is that she really is like that; she doesn’t display the kinds of equivocation you see in a politician who is constantly trimming sail to the electoral wind and delays making a in issue commitment until he’s backed into a corner. Though I suspect the “Teach both” quote is that kind of waffle, I could well be wrong, and have yet to encounter a more definite example in her public statements.

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And a note to all you anti-Palin left-liberals: on every major issue I’ve discussed, I hold what you’d consider the left or extreme-left position and have described Palin as closer to center despite the fact that this tends to legitimize a position further right than you (or I) would prefer. This is what a lawyer would call “an admission against interest”, like Bill Clinton ‘fessing up that left-wing anti-gun measures lose elections for Democrats, or the Anglican Church announcing earlier today that it owes Darwin an apology.

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Accordingly, you should treat my estimates of where the center is as a best case from a Left point of view; if I’ve been engaging in wishful thinking, it’s likely that the results are worse news for the Left rather than better. And you should pay careful attention to my finale about preference falsification, because otherwise you may be in for a very rude shock.

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Finally: the attempt to paint Palin as a hard-right nutjob says much more about the prejudices of her accusers than it does about her. It could say that they’re cynically promulgating a smear they know to be untrue. But the degree of nutty shrillness I’m hearing doesn’t sound like cynical calculation. That makes it seem more likely to me that the Democratic left genuinely doesn’t know where the medians of opinion in the U.S. are and genuinely doesn’t grasp how squarely Palin is sitting on them.

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This isn’t a new idea; I’ve read some studies suggesting with evidence that left-wing ideological control of the mainstream media and universities has led to a gigantic case of preference falsification under which not only the Left itself but the entire population (including most conservatives!) believes the medians on many issues are fairly far left of their actual locations. (Thus, for example, both pro-and anti-Second-Amendment Americans tend to seriously overestimate the actual level of support for gun control.)

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To the extent this is true, Sarah Barracuda Palin is a larger threat — and a larger promise — than anyone has figured out yet. She may be uniquely positioned to pop the preference-falsification bubble. If that happens, the distribution of political opinion might not change much, but popular perception of that distribution would shift dramatically rightward, and democratic legitimacy with it.

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My opposition to Palin on the key issues I’ve described above means this would change the political environment in many ways I don’t like. But if her national political career is anything more than a flash in the pan, brace yourself, because there may be serious changes coming.

diff --git a/20080918043358.blog b/20080918043358.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..07e0e35 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080918043358.blog @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +The Obama campaign smells of defeat: II +

On September 12th, six days ago, I wrote The Obama campaign smells of defeat. Since then, if you’re a Republican (unlike me) or just enjoy watching Democrats squirm (very much like me), things have only gotten more entertaining.

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It’s been a gaffe-licious week. Joe Biden admits in public that Hillary might well have been a better nominee than him. The Obama campaign puts out an ad slamming McCain for being old and crusty and out of touch because he doesn’t use email, then learns what 5 minutes of Google research by a staffer would have turned up: he can’t type because of injuries he sustained under torture by the North Vietnamese. Nice going — way to make yourselves look like vicious assholes and remind voters of your opponent’s strongest narrative.

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Meanwhile, Obama himself continues to fumblemouth any time he’s off a teleprompter, notably in delivering a “lipstick on a pig” simile that is either a gross sexist slam on Palin or far too incompetently confusable with same for anyone who’s supposed to be a great speaker. This gaffe makes a huge number of women mad and spawns a popular T-shirt. And what the hell could Obama have been thinking, anyway, diminishing himself by stepping up to a slanging match with his opponent’s VP?

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Somehere, John McCain is smiling. He has gotten inside Obama’s OODA loop. He knows that defeat is an event that happens in the mind of the enemy, and he has hurled his unconventional VP pick at Obama’s weaknesses with the accuracy of a heat-seeking missile.

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That pick, Sarah Palin, continues to be the game-changer. So much so that if McCain wins, I’m afraid I’m going to be insufferable about the fact that I smelled the rot in Obama’s campaign before she was tapped — the day of the Biden nomination, actually.

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The attempt to smear, discredit and delegitimize Palin has steadily become more intense and more damaging — to the Democrats. She’s become the Road Runner to the Democrats’ Wile E. Coyote; they keep devising ever more ingenious and elaborate traps for their proxies in the MSM to spring on her, only to wind up having them blow up spectacularly and autodestructively.

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Poll after poll has reported double-digit swings among women away from Obama/Biden to McCain/Palin. Also, Palin seems to be achieving the remarkable quadruple play of simultaneously (a) energizing the conservative base, (b) reaching moderate independents, (c) enlisting Hillary-backing Democrats, and even (d) stimulating cautious optimism in libertarians like myself. Meanwhile, over in the land of the left-media-Democratic axis:

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Doo-dee-doo-dee-doo… now where did I put that protractor? Ahh, here it is! Let me see… if the hypotenuse of the parabola of a pregnant teenager… is inversely proportional to the approval ratings of the religious Right… then if I set the azimuth of the baby scandal catapult to 72.415 degrees, she’ll be crushed as flat as her barren Alaskan tundra. Muwahahaha!

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…Egads! I must say, sometimes I astonish even myself with my own genius!

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You just know there’s another humiliating KA-BOOM!!! in the MSM’s near future. Thank, you, Iowahawk. Pass that popcorn…

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And the beat goes on…not only does Obama lose his lead in the national polls, the Republicans are beginning to look competitive in the down-ticket congressional races! In the swing states, Florida looks like a McCain lock, Obama lost the Ohio lead in August and hasn’t recovered, and I’ve thought he was going to lose Pennsylvania (where I live) since he was dissed in Duryea. (Current polls make it a statistical dead heat).

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But wait! Did I say battleground states? Even New York, that left-liberal bastion of blue-stateness, in play! This, for a Democratic candidate at this point in the 2008 race, is epic fail. It puts a 50-state stomping within the range of possibilities they won’t give you Thorazine for considering. Or even a 57-state one, in Obama’s case :-)

+

How the fleeping frack did we get here? This was supposed to be the year Democrats kicked the ever-loving shit out of a tired, out-of-touch, deeply unpopular GOP. Instead, the GOP is roaring back, the Obama campaign looks increasingly inept, their candidate is visibly fraying under pressure, and the “who lost 2008?” recriminations among the Democrats are already starting.

+

Superficially, the answer looks like the Palin pick. This is why I’m going to be insufferable right now about having noticed the smell of Democratic defeat in the air pre-Palin, because I think the real problems have been much longer a-building. This takes nothing from Palin, who is wielding a talent for the game the likes of which we haven’t seen since Bill Clinton was on his best game — but Palin is exploiting Democratic weaknesses that go way further back.

+

Yesterday I dug into Palin’s record and described her, from my point of view as a Wiccan anarchist who opposes her on most “values” issues, as an American centrist. I suggested that the Democratic left has lost any notion of where the center in American politics is. I’ll unpack that in a slightly different direction today; even in a year when conservative ideology is in the doghouse, it left them terribly vulnerable to being blindsided by a genuine centrist with populist appeal. Enter Sarah Barracuda; just by being who she is, she is perfectly positioned to exploit this vulnerability. Because that’s where the voters are!

+

Wait. Did I say “conservative ideology in the doghouse”? Even that, as it turns out, may not be true. Sure, it’s the mainstream-media narrative — but the Democrats write the MSM narrative to an extent their proxies don’t even try to hide very effectively any more (remember the famous tingle running up Chris Matthews’s leg?). Against it, there’s that troubling statistic that the Democratic-controlled congress has been approval-polling weaker than Bush and the administration for more than a year (last figure I saw was 32% vs. 21%). Something is wrong here, and I think it’s that the Democrats have been caught up in their own propaganda. Their ideological control of the MSM and show-biz and the universities has trapped them in a bubble world they can’t see out of.

+

(And yet, they call themselves the “reality-based community”. This makes me laugh so hard my sides hurt; as unintentional humor it’s right up there with the social conservatives’ fond delusion that they can fix our problems by magically restoring the taboos and norms of 1957.)

+

Here’s a big. topical example of how this works: the success of the troop surge in Iraq. It’s been impossible to misconstrue the evidence for months now, but that hasn’t stopped the left and the Democrats and their increasingly-unashamed media shills from diving into deep denial. Which hurts them, because — on the polling evidence — the voters have actually noticed both the success and the intensity of that denial. (The blogosphere had a lot to do with this, I think.)

+

There’s no way for the Democrats to cope with this as long as the echo chamber they’ve constructed for themselves keeps reassuring them that the war is lost, and if it’s not looking lost right now it’s unwinnable, and if by some freaky fluke in the dialectic of history we win it voters will…uh, yeah, they’ll understand that we shouldn’t have fought it and surely, surely the ultimate American defeat that will make us look wise and prescient will be secured when the Iraqis oblige us by fucking up badly (this is the stage Obama is at right now).

+

Really. Leaving aside the argument over rights and wrongs, how desperately out of touch with Jacksonian middle America do you have to be before this line looks like sound practical politics? Well, that’s exactly the distance the left/media/Democrat axis has rammed its head up its own rectum. They can’t blame the Republicans or the hicks in flyover country for this; they entirely did it to themselves.

+

That’s the trouble with cocooning. There always comes a point at which reality stops cooperating and you have to deal with what is rather than what you wish were so — the surge, and the Sarahcuda. That’s what happening to the Democrats. And they’re not coping well, not at all. They don’t have a lot of time left to recover before voting day.

+

UPDATE: Now, this is interesting. Poll: GOP brand making comeback. Dems and GOP now have equally favorable ratings among independents, erasing an 18-point Democratic advantage as recently as August.

diff --git a/20080920063125.blog b/20080920063125.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..88f0527 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080920063125.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +The Limits of Open Source +

A mailing list I frequent has been discussing the current financial meltdown, specifically a news story claiming that Wall Street foooled its own computers by feeding them risk assumptions the users knew were over-optimistic.

+
+

This is also a very strong case for F/OSS software. Had such software been in use, I strongly feel that the inherent biases programmed in would have been found.

+

But then, that’s also true for voting machine software.

+
+

As the original begetter of the kind of argument you’re making, I’d certainly like to think so…but no, not in either case.

+

+

You’re making an error in the same class as believing that the design of security systems is just a matter of getting the algorithms and protocols right. Bruce Schneier could set you straight on that one real fast. Perhaps he will [Schneier is on the list].

+

Open source is great for verifying the integrity of the software itself, but doesn’t necessarily give you any purchase on auditing the software’s assumptions. Suppose the software is modeling physics: it’s not too difficult under open source to verify that (say) it’s using the textbook value of G, in the Newtonian Law of Gravity, but verifying that the textbook value of G is physically correct is a different and far more difficult problem.

+

Similarly, if you’re looking the source code of complex risk-modeling software, it’s relatively easy to know that the model logic is being implemented correctly. But this gives you no purchase on whether the model is correctly descriptive of real markets. Or real climate systems, or whatever.

+

How you find the right coefficients for the partial differential equations (and whether you’re using the right PDEs at all) is not a software problem and cannot be addressed by software engineering methods. How you verify those coefficients are correct isn’t a software-engineering problem either. Usually it involves running your model on old data and seeing if it retrodicts correctly. Usually the big problem there is whether you can find that data at all, or trust it when you find it.

+

None of the special risks in voting-machine software are addressed by open source either. Yes, it’s a good idea for the same software-engineering reasons open source is a good idea for all software, but! Open sourcing the software cannot guarantee that the voting machine is actually running the correct software that you think it is, rather than a version that has been maliciously corrupted. Open source cannot guarantee that the data the software reports is not tampered with in transit or at the receiving end.

+

These problems can be addressed, but it takes sound design of the overall system at so many higher levels that open source is really only a minor part of the toolkit.

diff --git a/20080922123717.blog b/20080922123717.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ff374d1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080922123717.blog @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +Why Alternative Energy Isn’t +

As oil prices recede from all-time dollar highs and some of the hot air gets let out of energy policy debates, it’s a good time to remember that here’s a key concept missing from almost every popular discussion of the subject: energy density. Specialist economists get it, but almost nobody else does. It is important to understanding why most forms of “alternative energy” are mirages, and what a sane energy policy would actually look like.

+

+

The background to this is that the few technologies we have for storing electricity (batteries, pump-fed ponds above hydroelectric turbines) are lossy and don’t scale well. Worse, power transmission is significantly lossy as well. These mean several things, all of them bad.

+

Absence of a decent storage technology means we can’t really time-shift electricity demand. When more electricity is needed (for example, to run air conditioning during the day in the American Southwest) more power plants have to be running and feeding power to the grid in real time. There’s no way to run plants at night and store the generated power for daytime use.

+

Transmission losses mean our ability to space-shift demand is limited, too, though not as severely. Electricity-intensive industries (the classic example is aluminum smelting) need their own dedicated power plants nearby.

+

The combination of these problems means that household energy conservation is mainly a way for wealthy Westerners to feel virtuous rather than an actual attack on energy costs. Household conservation slightly decreases the maximum capacity needed locally where the conservation is being practiced, but has little impact further away, where demand has to be supplied by different plants. Industrial efficiency gains are far less visible; but, because the scale of industrial energy use is so much larger, they matter a lot more.

+

The combination of these problems also means we cannot, practically speaking, aggregate lots of very small flows of electricity into one big one. It’s not just total volume of energy production that matters, but the energy density available to high-volume consumers at a given place at and at a given time. This may sound like a dry technical point, but it has huge and nasty implications.

+

One is that the most touted forms of so-called “alternative energy” and are largely (though not entirely) useless. Solar and wind power are both time-variable and low-density. Lacking good ways to time-shift and aggregate electricity, this means you can’t count on them to run factories and hospitals and computer server farms. The best you can hope for is that they can partially address low-density usage, running climate control and appliances for homes and some purpose-designed office buildings.

+

Biomass (including processed forms like ethanol) seems more promising because, like fossil fuels, you can burn it when and where you choose in order to to match your electricity production to demand. The problem is that biomass has much lower practial energy density than coal or oil. This means you have to transport and burn a lot more of it, with much larger pollution and life-cycle costs. One of those is much higher CO2 emissions, which are a significant problem for other reasons even if (like me) you don’t believe they’re driving global warming.

+

Hydroelectric power is, in most respects, ideal — nonpolluting, renewable, all those good things. The trouble is that, at least in the U.S. and elsewhere in the developed world, we’re not going to get any more of it. All the good sites for high-density hydropower are taken. There’s some potential for low-density hydropower, especially in rural areas to run farms.

+

Geothermal is like hydropower, economically speaking, but requires unusual geology. Basically the only place it can work on a large scale is in Iceland, home of a full third of the world’s active volcanoes.

+

Accordingly, hydropower and geothermal are not going to support any larger share of what energy economists call the industrial base load — the day-in, day-out demand for high-density power from all those factories and hospitals and server farms — and printing presses, and food-processing operations, and everything else.

+

+

The industrial base load is the life blood of technological civilization; without it, we’d have a hideous global population crash, and then revert to pre-1750 conditions in which the economy is almost entirely subsistence farming and life is nasty, brutish, and short. The first question any energy-policy proposal has to address is how to sustain an industrial base load equivalent to today’s — much higher than today’s actually, if we don’t want to condemn the Third World to perpetual poverty. But most advocates of “alternative energy” evade this question, because they don’t like the answers they get when they look at it squarely.

+

In the real world, there are only three base load sources that matter: coal, oil, and nuclear (hydropower would be a fourth if it weren’t already maxed out). What they have in common is that you can get lots of energy per gram out of the fuel, thus lots of both energy volume and energy density out of one power plant.

+

Of these three, nuclear has the highest density, then oil, then coal. Both economic arguments and historical evidence tell us that you can’t have an industrial civilization without a fuel that has an energy density at least as high (and thus a cost per unit of energy as low as) coal. Higher density is better, because it means lower cost.

+

Those costs are not denominated just in money; low-density energy sources are more labor-intensive to operate and that causes more illness and death. Compare annual deaths from coal mining to annual deaths in the petroleum industry to the annual deaths associated with nuclear power; the trend is dramatic and favors higher-density sources, even if you ignore chemical air pollution entirely.

+

Nothing on offer from advocates of low-density “alternative energy” even comes close to coal as an industrial baseload source. let alone oil or nuclear. Ethanol and hydrogen look like it, until you consider life-cycle costs; basically, making either costs a lot more than mining coal, both in money and in input energy.

+

Another key point is that, for transportation, oil is basically the only thing we have that will do. For fixed-location power plants, the energy yield per gram of fuel matters a lot and the weight of the plant machinery only a very little. On the other hand, for automobiles and ships and airplanes, power-to-weight ratio matters a lot. Nuclear and coal basically cannot make that cut, cost-insensitive military applications of nuclear notwithstanding.

+

For fixed-location power plants, however, nuclear is the clear winner. Coal and oil have lower density and serious pollution costs. They are also much less safe. Yes, I said less safe; the historical evidence is extremely clear on this.

+

There are some kinds of non-polluting fixed-location plants that might become available in the future: notably tidal generators and atmosphere towers. They will probably be good replacements for nuclear down the road, but they’re not an answer to the transportation problem. Oil is non-renewable; the price is rising and eventually (though not in the near term and not as rapidly as predicted by peak-oil-collapse hysterics) it will run out.

+

And no, electric cars aren’t the answer either; the power to run them has to come from somewhere. The best case is that people will charge them off the grid at night. This will require power plants to be burning just as much additional fuel as if the cars themselves were doing it, perhaps more given transmission losses. What electric cars can do, at best, is give us fuel flexibility, replacing direct oil-burning with nuclear plants and coal. But that’s not going to net out to lower pollution and lower costs unless we build a lot of nuclear plants very quickly. Thanks to decades of scare-mongering and NIMBYism, this probably isn’t possible in the U.S.

+

The pressing question, then, remains: What’s going to replace oil?

+

Let’s draw up a specification for the ideal replacement. We’d like a fuel with the energy density of oil, or better. We’d like the only per-unit cost to be sunlight, because that’s the only thing that’s 100% renewable and (unlike tidal, hydropower, and geothermal) available everywhere. Ideally, we’d like the stuff to not require a huge, expensive conversion job on our energy infrastructure.

+

Happily, I think this spec can be filled. There are demonstration plants making synthetic oil from algae at a per-unit cost not far above that of oil, and plenty of venture capital looking to fund more. As this technology scales up, algal-synfuel costs will drop below that of oil. At that point, the free market will have solved the problem.

+

It’s largely forgotten now, but we’ve actually been through a similar transition before. In the mid-19th century whale oil was heavily used for lighting and as an industrial feedstock. Prices rose as whales were hunted to near-extinction; fortunately, the stuff proved to be replaceable by petroleum. Yes, that’s right; big oil saved the whales. A century and a half later, pond scum looks likely to save civilization.

diff --git a/20080925154516.blog b/20080925154516.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2eaa319 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080925154516.blog @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +C++ Considered Harmful +

My blogging will be sporadic to nonexistent for a while, as my friend Rob Landley and I are concentrating heavily on writing a paper together. The working (and probably final) title is “Why C++ is Not Our Favorite Programming Language”. It begins:

+

+C++ is an overcomplexity generator. It was designed to solve what
+turned out to be the wrong problems; as a result, it lives in an
+unhappy valley between two utility peaks in language-design space,
+with neither the austere elegance of C nor the expressiveness and
+capability of modern interpreted languages. The layers, patches, and
+added features designed to lift it out of that valley have failed to
+do so, resulting in a language that is bloated, obfuscated, unwieldy,
+rigid, and brittle. Programs written in C++ tend to inherit all
+these qualities.

+

In the remainder of this paper we will develop this charge into
+a detailed critique of C++ and the style it encourages. While we
+do not intend to insult the designers of C++, we will not make
+excuses for them either. They repeatedly made design choices that
+were well-intentioned, understandable in context, and wrong. We
+think it is long past time for the rest of us to stop suffering
+for those mistakes. +

+

Yes, we are attempting to harpoon the Great White Whale of modern programming languages. I’m announcing this here to give my commenters the opportunity to contribute. If you know of a particularly good critical analysis of C++, or technically detailed horror story around it, please cite. Superb apologetics for the language would also be interesting.

+

The paper is developing primarily from a software-engineering perspective rather than out of formal language theory. I’m particularly looking for empirical studies on the importance of manual memory management as a defect attractor (I have the Prechelt paper from the year 2000). I’m also interested in any empirical studies comparing the productivity impact of nominative vs. structural vs. duck typing.

+

After about 3 days of work our draft is over 600 lines of clean narrative text in asciidoc. It’s going well.

diff --git a/20080930035724.blog b/20080930035724.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9533282 --- /dev/null +++ b/20080930035724.blog @@ -0,0 +1,97 @@ +The Unix Hater’s Handbook, Reconsidered +

A commenter on my post pre-announcing Why C++ Is Not Our Favorite Programming Language asked “esr, from the perspective of a graybeard, which chapters did you consider good and which chapters did you consider bad?”

+

(Technical note: I do not in fact have a beard, and if I did it would not be gray.)

+

Good question, and worthy of a blog entry. I was the first technical reviewer for the manuscript of this book back when it was in preparation — IDG published it, but I think it was passed to me through MIT Press. As I noted in the same comment thread, I worked hard at trying to persuade the authors to tone down the spleen level in favor of making a stronger technical case, but didn’t have much success. They wanted to rant, and by Ghod they were gonna rant, and no mere reviewer was gonna stop ‘em.

+

I’ve thought this was a shame ever since. I am, of course, a long-time Unix fan; I’d hardly have written The Art of Unix Programming otherwise. I thought a book that soberly administered some salutary and well-directed shocks to the Unix community would be a good thing; instead, many of their good points were obscured by surrounding drifts of misdirected snark.

+

You can browse the Handbook itself here. What follows is my appraisal of how it reads 14 years later, written in real-time as I reread it. After the chapter-by-chapter re-review I’ll sum up and make some general remarks.

+

+

Introduction

+

I have a lot of respect for Don Norman, but he did not write this on one of his better days. The attempts at intentional humor mostly fall flat. And “…now that’s an oxymoron, a graphical user interface for Unix” looks unintentionally humorous in 2008. Otherwise there’s very little content here.

+

Preface

+

Similarly unfortunate. Sets the tone for too much of the rest of the book, being mostly hyperbolic snark when it could have been useful criticism. Very dated snark, too, in today’s environment of Linuxes wrapped in rather slick GUIs. The anecdotes about terminal sessions on Sun hardware from 1987 look pretty creaky and crabby today.

+

The authors write: “It’s tempting to write us off as envious malcontents, romantic keepers of memories of systems put to pasture by the commercial success of Unix, but it would be an error to do so: our judgments are keen, our sense of the possible pure, and our outrage authentic.” I know and rather like some of the authors, so it actually makes me a little sad to report that fourteen years later, writing them off this way is easier than ever.

+

Anti-Foreword:

+

Dennis Ritchie’s rejoinder is still funny, and his opening and concluding words are still an accurate judgment on the book as a whole:

+

+I have succumbed to the temptation you offered in your preface: I do write you off as envious malcontents and romantic keepers of memories. The systems you remember so fondly [...] are not just out to pasture, they are fertilizing it from below. [... Y]our book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy. +

+

Chapter 1 – Unix: The World’s First Computer Virus

+

About equal parts of history and polemic, history not new, polemic cleverly written but not very interesting once you get through chuckling at the verbal pyrotechnics. The stuff on the standards wars is really dated now.

+

And no mention of Linux, which had just acquired TCP/IP support the year this was written and already had a thriving community. No one can blame the authors for not foreseeing 2008, but it’s as though they were mentally stuck in the 1980s, oblivious to the reality of 1994.

+

Chapter 2 – Welcome, New User!

+

There is some fair criticism in here. Yes, Unix command names are cryptic and this is a UI issue — mitigated a lot in 2008 by the presence of GUIs that no longer suck, but still an issue.

+

Quality of documentation still ain’t so great, and comprehensible and useful feedback when commands fail is something Linux applications could stand to be a lot better at. But these are problems almost everywhere, not just in Unix-land; it seems a bit unfair to reproach Unix for special sinfulness on their account.

+

On other points they do less well. “Consistency and predictability in how commands behave and in how they interpret their options and arguments” sounds very nice, but the first part is impossible (different commands have to behave differently because they solve different problems) and the second is more a gripe about shell wildcard expansion than anything else. Sorry, no sale; it’s too useful. If you don’t like the way rm * works, go fire up a GUI file manager.

+

Then there’s a lot of flamage about Unix developers being supposedly content to write shoddy programs. Neither true nor interesting, just more hyperbolic snark obscuring the points on which they have a point.

+

There are some good nuggets in this chapter, but on balance digging through the excrement to find them does not seem worth it.

+

Chapter 3 – Documentation? What Documentation?

+

Yes, man(1) is still clunky and man pages are still references, not tutorials. This isn’t news in 2008, and wasn’t in 1994, either. The difference is that in 2008 the man pages style they’re excoriating is less of a blocker; we have the Web and search engines now.

+

Their fling at “the source code is the documentation” has got some unintentional irony since open source happened. Gripes about obsolete shells don’t add much, if anything, to the discussion.

+

Much that’s true in this chapter, but almost nothing that’s still useful or novel in 2008.

+

Mail: Don’t Talk to Me, I’m Not a Typewriter

+

This is mostly a rant against sendmail. Most of the criticism is justified. A lot of Linux distributions default to using Postfix these days, and the percentage is increasing; end of story.

+

Chapter 5 – Snoozenet: I Post, Therefore I Am

+

USENET is not exactly dead, but these days it’s mainly a relay channel for p2p media sharing and porn. There’s some stuff in this chapter of interest to historians of hackerdom, but nothing relevant to current conditions.

+

Chapter 6 – Terminal Insanity:

+

This chapter has dated really badly. To a good first approximation there simply aren’t any actual VDTs any more; one sees a few on obsolete point-of-sale systems, but that’s about it. It’s all terminal emulators or the OS console driver, they all speak VT100/ANSI, end of story, end of problem.

+

There’s an attempt at an architectural point buried in the snark. Yes, it would have been really nice if Unix kernels had presented a uniform screen-painting API rather than leaving the job to a userspace library like curses(3). But — and I speak as an expert here, having implemented large parts of ncurses, the open-source emulation of it — moving all that complexity to kernel level would basically have solved nothing. The fundamental problem was that Unix (unlike the earlier systems these guys were romantically pining for) needed to talk to lots of VDTs that didn’t identify themselves to the system (so you couldn’t autoconfigure them) and the different VDT types had complicatedly different command sets. The stuff that curses did had to exist somewhere, and its capability databases; putting it in a service library in userspace at least guaranteed that bugs in this rather tricky code would not crash the system.

+

But this is yesterday’s issue; the VDT is dead, and the problems they’re griping about dead along with it.

+

Chapter 7 – The X-Windows Disaster

+

This chapter begins unfortunately, with complaints about X’s performance and memory usage that seem rather quaint when comparing it to the applications of 14 years later. It continues with a fling at the sparseness of X applications circa 1990 which is unintentionally funny when read from within evince on a Linux desktop also hosting the Emacs instance I’m writing in, a toolbar with about a dozen applets on it, and a Web browser.

+

I judge that the authors’ rejection of mechanism/policy separation as a guiding principle of X was foundationally mistaken. I argued in The Art of Unix Programming that this principle gives X an ability to adapt to new technologies and new thinking about UI that no competitor has ever matched. I still think that’s true.

+

But not all the feces flung in this chapter is misdirected; Motif really did suck pretty badly, it’s a good thing it’s dead. ICCCM is about as horrible as the authors describe, but that’s hard to notice these days because modern toolkits and window managers do a pretty good job of hiding the ugliness from applications.

+

Though it’s not explicitly credited, I’m fairly sure most of this chapter was written by Don Hopkins. Don is a wizard hacker and a good man who got caught on the wrong side of history, investing a lot of effort in Sun’s NeWS just before it got steamrollered by X, and this chapter is best read as the same bitter lament for NeWS I heard from him face to face in the late 1980s.

+

Don may have been right, architecturally speaking. But X did not win by accident; it clobbered NeWS essentially because it was open source while NeWS was not. In the 20 years after 1987 that meant enough people put in enough work that X got un-broken, notably when Keith Packard came back after 2001 and completely rewrote the rendering core. The nasty resources system is pretty much bypassed by modern toolkits. X-extension hell and the device portability problems the authors were so aggrieved by turned out to be a temporary phenomenon while people were still working on understanding the 2D-graphics problem space.

+

That having been said, Olin Shivers’s rant about xauth is still pretty funny and I’m glad I haven’t had to use it in years.

+

Chapter 8 – csh, pipes, and find: Power Tools for Power Fools

+

Of the “plethora of incompatible shells” they anatomize in the first part of this chapter (including the csh in the chapter title), most are basically dead; the bash shell won. Accordingly, a lot of this chapter is just archaeology, known to old farts like me but about as relevant to present-day Linux or Unix users as Ptolemaic epicycles.

+

The portability problem in shell programming is almost, though not quite, as historical now. Languages like Perl and Python have replaced the kind of fragile shell scripting the authors fling at — in fact, that’s why they’re called scripting languages. The authors anticipated this development:

+

+At the risk of sounding like a hopeless dream keeper of the intergalactic space, we submit that the correct model is procedure call (either local or remote) in a language that allows first-class structures (which C gained during its adolescence) and functional composition. +

+

I give them credit, they were right about this. It seems curious, though, that they exhibited no knowledge of Perl; it had already been supplying exactly this sort of thing in public view for some years in 1994.

+

The end-of-chapter rant on find(1) is still funny.

+

Chapter 9 – Programming: Hold Still, This Won’t Hurt a Bit

+

It is a shame that the authors are so quick to dismiss the Unix toolkit as a primitive toybox in this chapter, because that jaundiced error gives Unix programmers an excellent excuse to ignore the parts the authors got right. To point out a first and relatively minor example, the use of tabs in make really was a botch that ought to serve as a horripilating example to tool designers.

+

More generally, many of their points about C and its associated assumptions and toolchains are well taken. Yes, all those fixed-length-buffer assumptions are an indictment of weak tools and bad habits formed by them. Yes, LISP would have been a better alternative. Yes, exception-catching is an important thing to have.

+

We didn’t get LISP. We got Python, though. I could have cited Perl and Tcl, too, but they aren’t as close to being LISP (see Peter Norvig’s detailed argument that Python is Scheme with funky syntax.) My point here is not to advocate Python, it’s to observe that the Unix community noticed that C was inadequate and addressed the problem. If the statistics on Freshmeat are to be believed, more new projects now get started in scripting languages than in C.

+

Gradually, in a messy and evolutionary way, the Unix community is teaching itself the lesson that the authors of this chapter wanted to give it. I agree with them that it could have happened faster and should have happened sooner.

+

I’d say this chapter had dated the least badly of anything in the book, if not for the next one.

+

Chapter 10 – C++: The COBOL of the 90s

+

Though out of date in minor respects (C++ got namespaces after 1994, and the authors couldn’t address templates because templates hadn’t been added yet) this chapter remains wickedly on target. The only major error in it is the assumptions that C++ is in the mainline of Unix tradition, was gleefully adopted by Unix programmers en masse, and is therefore an indictment of Unix. Language usage statistics on open-source hosting sites like SourceForge and Freshmeat convincingly demonstrate otherwise.

+

Chapter 11 – System Administration: Unix’s Hidden Cost

+

This chapter is a remembrance of things past. When it was written, people still actually used magnetic tape for backups. It is probably the most dated chapter in the book.

+

In 2008 my septaguinarian mother uses a Linux machine and, after a handful of calls during the getting-used-to-it period, I’ve gotten used to not hearing about it for months at a time. Enough said.

+

Chapter 12 – Security

+

Many of the technical criticisms in this chapter remain valid, in the sense that Unix systems still exhibit these behaviors and have these vulnerabilities. But on another level the chapter is suspended in a curious vacuum; the authors could not point to an operating system with a better security model or a better security record. They didn’t even try to write about what they imagined such a system would be like.

+

The contrast with Chapters 9 and 10 is instructive. Many of the authors come from a tradition of computer languages (LISP, Scheme, and friends) that were in many and significant ways superior to Unix’s native languages as they existed in 1994 (the gap has since closed somewhat). They knew what comparative excellence looked like, and could therefore criticize from a grounding in reality.

+

There is no corresponding way in which the authors can suggest Unix’s security model and tools could be fundamentally improved. That’s because, despite all its flaws, nobody has ever both found and successfully deployed a better model. Laboratory exercises like capability-based OSes remain tantalizing but not solutions.

+

The correct rejoinder to this chapter is: “You’re right. Now what?”.

+

Chapter 13 – The File System

+

Most of the sniping about the performance and reliability of Unix filesystems that is in this chapter is long obsolete. We’ve learned about hardening and journaling; the day of the nightmare fsck session is gone. The gripes about unreliable and duplicative locking facilities have also passed their sell-by date; the standards committees did some good work in this area.

+

The authors’ critique of the unadorned bag-of-bytes model is not completely without point, however; as with languages, some of the authors had real-world experience with systems supporting richer semantics and knew what they were talking about.

+

Some Linux filesystem hackers seem to be groping towards a model in which files are units of transportability that can be streamed, but internally have filesystem-like structure with the ability to embed metadata and multiple data forks. Others have experimented with database views a la BeOS.

+

There is probably progress to be made here. Alas, it won’t be helped by the authors’ persistent habit of burying an ounce of insight in a pound of flamage.

+

Chapter 14 – NFS: Nightmare File System

+

Some of the specific bugs described in this chapter have been fixed, but many of the architectural criticisms of NFS made here remain valid (or at least were still valid the last time I looked closely at NFS). This chapter is still instructive.

+

Summing Up: What’s Still Valid Here?

+

The original question was: “which chapters did you consider good and which chapters did you consider bad?”. Let’s categorize them.

+

+

The worst chapters in the book, at least in the sense of being the most dated and content-free for a modern reader, are probably 11 (Administration), 5 (Snoozenet), 6 (Terminal Insanity), 4 (Mail), and 1 (Unix: The World’s First Computer Virus) in about that order of worst worst to least worst.

+

The chapter with the soundest exposition and the most lessons still to teach is certainly 10 (C++), followed closely by 14 (NFS).

+

A few chapters are mostly flamage or obsolete but have a good lesson or two buried in them. In rough order of descending merit:

+
    +
  • +

    The authors were right to argue in chapter 8 that classic shell scripting is fragile and rebarbative, and should be replaced with languages supporting data structures and real procedural composition; this has in fact largely come to pass.

    +
    • +
  • +

    The knocks on C in Chapter 9 (Programming) were justified.

    +
    • +
  • +

    The objections to the pure bag-of-bytes model in Chapter 13 (The File System) should provoke a non-dismissive thought or two.

    +
    • +
  • At the bottom of this heap are the few nuggets in Chapter 2 (Welcome, New User!) about spiky command names and proliferated options.
    • +
+

Some chapters tell us things that are true and negative about Unix, but merely rehearse problems that are (a) well known in the Unix community, and (b) haven’t been solved outside it, either. It may have made the authors feel better to vent about them, but their doing so hasn’t contributed to a solution. I’d definitely put 12 (Security) and 3 (Documentation? What Documentation) in that category.

+

Chapter 7 (The X-Windows Disaster) is the hardest for me to categorize. There’s still ugliness under the covers in some places they mention, but I think they’re mistaken both in asserting that the whole system is functionally horrible and in slamming the architecture and design philosophy of the system.

+

More than ever I see this book as a missed opportunity. The 14 years since 1994 has been enough time for useful lessons to be absorbed and integrated; if all the chapters had been up to the level of 10 or 14, we might have better Unixes than we do today. Alas that the authors were more interested in parading some inflammatory rhetoric than starting a constructive conversation.

diff --git a/20081001162737.blog b/20081001162737.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4b76c5b --- /dev/null +++ b/20081001162737.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +Why I Hate Proprietary Software +

I’ve spent a lot of time writing arguments for why open-source software is a good idea and everyone should do it. On the evidence, I’m pretty good at this. I achieved that goodness through a strategy of making rational, technical, utility-maximization arguments in which I explicitly disclaimed having any normative or moralizing agenda.

+

While I’m happy with the results I’ve gotten from that strategy, it means there are people in the world who think they can persuade me to give proprietary software a second look by making rational, utility-maximizing arguments of their own. One of my regular commenters wrote this recently: “Eric, you may want to give MSDN, Windows, and their developer tools a second, unprejudiced look; they really are better than what Linux has to offer.”

+

It’s not going to happen. Ever. And the fact that anyone could say that to me, and believe for a nanosecond they might get any other answer, means that I need to explain something in public: why I hate proprietary software.

+

+

More precisely, I hate the proprietary software system of production. Not at the artisan level; I’ve defended the right of programmers to issue work under proprietary licenses because I think that if a programmer wants to write a program and sell it, it’s neither my business nor anyone else’s but his customer’s what the terms of sale are.

+

No, what I hate is when that system scales up into what left-wingers call soulless corporate machines. Unlike them, I’m OK with soulless corporate machines in general; they’re positively good for you compared to the things governments get up to. It’s the specific things that happen when the management of programming gets separated from the art of programming that I hate.

+

And yes, the emotionally-loaded word ‘hate’ is the rignt word to use, in contrast to all the cool rational-maximizer reasons I like open source. It’s not a lofty idealistic loathing like Richard Stallman’s; it’s a bitter, gut-clenching personal hatred. I’m not a moralist, and am not arguing that everyone should share my feelings about the matter at peril of being damned. Still, I’m going to put my feelings on the record so that the next time some idiot feeds me a similar line, I can point him at that record.

+

I’ll start with a deliberately melodramatic simile, then explain it. When you tell me I should give proprietary software a fair technical evaluation because its features are so nice, what you are actually doing is saying “Look at the shine on those manacles!” to someone who remembers feeling like a slave.

+

From 1979 to 1985, and then briefly in 1988-89, I was a component in the proprietary-software system of production. In that world, the working programmer’s normal experience includes being forced to use broken tools for political reasons, insane specifications, and impossible deadlines. It means living in Dilbert-land, only without the irony. It means sweating blood through the forehead to do sound work only to have it trashed, mangled, or buried by people who couldn’t write a line of code to save their lives.

+

If you love programming, trying to do work you can be proud of in this situation is heartbreaking. You know you could do better work if they’d just goddamn give you room to breathe. But there’s never time to do it right, and always another brain-dead idea for a feature nobody will ever actually use coming at you from a marketing department who thinks it will look good on the checklist. Long days, long nights and at the end of it all some guy in a suit owns all that work, owns the children of your mind, owns a piece of you.

+

And you know what? Comparatively, I know I had it good. Truly incompetent or evil bosses abused some of my peers far worse. Mine weren’t a bad lot, as these things go. All of us were ensnared in a system of production that could only rarely rise above shitty code and shitty outcomes because the logic of the system trapped us in dysfunctional roles. I’m not naming companies and people because the dysfunction was, in a horrifying but undeniable way, nobody’s fault.

+

Some of us, including me, dreamed of completely “free” software environments before the public launch of FSF not for abstract moral reasons or because of some soi-disant social problem, but because the conditions of our craft were intolerable to us. We were suffocating, being ground down into unfeeling cogs taught by repeated pain that we must not care about our art because to care was to lose.

+

The stupid and the timeservers were lucky. It was the really bright, creative people among my peers that hurt the most. And we were all very young and malleable and eager to please; it took me years after I’d escaped to understand that I had a right to feel angry about how I had been used, and many of my peers never figured that out at all.

+

Yes, I’ve written a lot of intellectual arguments for open source. And they’re both true and sufficient. But now hear the emotional subtext — what lights the fire beneath me, personally, when I make those arguments. And that is this: nobody, ever again, should have to eat that kind of shit. Never again! If it takes seizing control of the craft of programming back from the suits, that’s what it it takes. If it takes blowing the entire system of production to smithereens…well, then it’s long past time.

+

I have all the usual reasons open-source fans give for refusing to have anything to do with Microsoft or any other proprietary tools: I don’t trust their reliability, I don’t want to be in a single-vendor jail, I won’t have my data locked in closed file formats, I refuse to write in languages that aren’t cross-platform portable…and so on. Those are rational reasons, and I have rational flexibility on them. On that level, it is possible in principle that I could be persuaded by cool features and a winning cost-benefit ratio. Or even if somebody offered me a sufficiently huge pile of money — enough, say, to finance a space program run from a Bond-supervillain-style fortress on my own Caribbean island.

+

But it doesn’t matter. Because there’s an emotional place where I have no give, and that is in is my visceral, steaming hatred of the production system that Microsoft exemplifies. I refuse to support it in any way, no matter how shiny the products look to other people. I will have no part of helping it do to the young, malleable, innocent programmers of today and tomorrow what was done to me and my peers.

+

Because two decades later, my scars still ache.

diff --git a/20081026001032.blog b/20081026001032.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..40dae19 --- /dev/null +++ b/20081026001032.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +I have an Android phone, and its name is “moogly”. +

I have acquired a Googlephone — a brand-new T-Mobile G1 to replace my eight year old and on-its-last-legs Sprint phone.

+

+

I’d say I had to get one of these because it’s got some of my software in it, but as a one-time maintainer of GIFLIB (not to mention named contributor to libpng) just about every cellphone has some of my software in it. (And every browser. And the Microsoft X-box. I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds ubiquitous and omnipresent.) No, this one is special because it’s got Linux inside. And open source is part of the branding, though the look of polite incomprehension on the face of the perky blonde T-mobile salesbeing I dealt with suggests that there is no danger of imminent mass enlightenment from this campaign, alas.

+

First impressions: Pretty good, stacked up against the iPhone better than I expected. Well-designed user interface, I was flying through it within three hours of familiarization and think less technical users would too.

+

Hardware: The keyboard, predictably, sucks — zero-travel chiclet keys. Display very nice, crisp 320×480 with good luminance contrasts. Charges from any USB port — what a cool idea, I might never actually use a dedicated charger again. Speakers suck too but no blame attaches; in an enclosure this size, non-suck is not a physical possibility. Wider and longer than the decrepit Samsung 660 it’s replacing but thinner; it fits comfortably in a pocket. The trackball works nicely but worries me a bit because it feels fragile, a potential failure point.

+

Interface bugs: In the Favorites editing screen, the entry for “Name” stops accepting characters well before you get to the end of the box — screwed-up font metrics, or a silly length limit, or both. You can choose from a palette of icons for your five favorites, but contacts outside that group have to be iconfied with a picture. Why is that?

+

Other bugs: The OS apparently crashed and rebooted once in my first four hours of operation. Hasn’t done so since.

+

Omissions: Where is my fetch-ringtone-from URL function? Where is my fetch-wallpaper-from URL function? I wanted to make my default ringtone the Star Trek communicator sound; had the MP3, needed to figure out how to get it onto the phone’s ringtone list.

+

This turns out to be easy by a slightly different route. Plug the G1 into your Linux system; it (or rather the SD card in it) will present as a removable disk with a subdirectory. Drop your sound file in there; open your music player; click Menu and select “Set as Ringtone”. Voila! Oddly, you may have to unplug the USB cable to make the music file visible in the phone.

+

Setting wallpapers isn’t too tricky either. The SD will have a directory called dcim/Camera; drop the image in there, and it will become visible as a Picture under Settings->Wallpaper. My G1 now shows a nice astronomical photograph of M33. 640×480 images work nicely as all it has to do is a 2:1 scaledown in the Y direction; to save space on your SD card you may want to pre-shrink them.

+

Finally, a cellphone I can hack! Just superficial stuff, so far, of course, but the relative ease with which I sussed all this out within a few hours of acquiring the device is very promising. I like it. And apparently a lot of other people do, too; we had to canvas three T-Mobile stores to get one, they’ve apparently been selling like crazy

+

Overall: No, this isn’t quite as polished as the iPhone and lacks the cool multitouch gestures. But it’s seriously cheaper, almost as good already from a purely functional perspective, and the open-source stack will mean it gets better fast and will add value from third-party apps at a rate Apple’s walled garden won’t be able to match. Especially given that multiple cellphone vendors will be shipping Android phones; this means a broad-based, stable market sure to attract lots of developers and service providers.

+

Even the first-out-the-gate G1 seems perfectly designed and positioned to disrupt the iPhone’s market from below. If successors feature hardware with an even slightly slicker presentation, Apple better watch its ass.

+

Bonus karma points to the first commenter to correctly explain why, when I figure out how to telnet/ssh into the underlying Linux, the only possible thing for me to change the hostname to will be “moogly”.

+

UPDATE: and here’s an astronomical wallpaper I made which happens to fit the default placement of the clock and icons perfectly; NGC7331 gets the unoccupied center of the display.

diff --git a/20081105033141.blog b/20081105033141.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4cb098c --- /dev/null +++ b/20081105033141.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Obama won it +

The crackup I thought I was seeing in the Obama campaign didn’t happen. I underestimated the ability of the mainstream media to cover for Obama’s weaknesses. We may all have underestimated the effectiveness of ACORN’s vote-fraud machine.

+

I’m glad we’ve elected a black man president; I’m sorry it’s one who looks quite so much like a sort of latter-day Manchurian Candidate programmed by his hard-left associates to hate his own country.

+

I hope we don’t all come to regret this day horribly. We can only hope that Obama is a better man than his influences.

+

UPDATE: At least one response to this post went way over the top. Who ever it was who started spouting about concentration camps… I don’t think there’s any way Obama is that evil. Bill Ayers or whatzisname the firebreathing black pastor Obama threw under the bus might be, but fortunately neither of them got elected. Obama is not a demon; at worst, he’s an idealist who’s been taught to hate his country until it’s made over in the transnational-Left’s image.

+

Worrying about an Obama administration trashing the economy, reinstituting the grossly misnamed “Fairness Doctrine”, and nationalizing health care is justified. Talk of concentration camps as if they were a near-term prospect isn’t, and I do not welcome that sort of fear-mongering here.

diff --git a/20081105195821.blog b/20081105195821.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8e75fd9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20081105195821.blog @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +Open Source — Can It Innovate? +

There’s an argument commonly heard these days that open-source software is all very well for infrastructure or commodity software where the requirements are well-established, but that it can’t really innovate. I laugh when I hear this, because I remember when the common wisdom was exactly the opposite — that we hackers were great for exploratory, cutting-edge stuff but couldn’t deliver reliable product.

+

How quickly people forget. We built the World Wide Web, fer cripessakes! The original browser and the original webservers were built by a hacker at CERN, not in some closed-door corporate shop. Before that, years before we got Linux and our own T-shirts, people who would later identify their own behavior correctly as open-source hacking built the Internet. (I was part of the tail end of that process myself; sometime I’ll blog about how and why the domain-name gold-rush is arguably my fault.)

+

+

It seems to me that bringing the Internet and the World Wide Web into being ought to count as enough “innovation” for any one geological era. But it didn’t start or stop there. Nobody even conceived of cross-platform graphics engines before the X window system. The entire group of modern scripting languages descends from open-source Perl, and almost all draw critical strengths and innovative drive from the size and diversity of their open-source communities.

+

Even in user-interface design, much of the most innovative work going on today is in open source. Consider for example the Facades system. Or just the astonishing, eye-popping visual experimentalism of Compiz/Fusion under Linux.

+

It’s actually corporations who have trouble innovating. Innovation is too disruptive of established business models and practices; it’s risky, and it involves coping with those annoying prima donnas at the R&D lab. Consequently, even well-intentioned big companies like Xerox that are smart enough to fund real research centers like Xerox PARC often reject the truly groundbreaking ideas from their own researchers. Today you’d be extremely hard pressed to find any of the really cool ideas from Microsoft R&D being deployed in actual Microsoft products.

+

The process of innovation and deployment in open source is of course not friction-free, but it certainly looks that way when compared to the corporate world. One of my favorite current examples is the way Guido van Rossum and the Python community are gearing up to re-invent their language for its 3.0 release. Their “Python Enhancement Proposal” process for fostering and filtering novel ideas by individual contributors repays careful study; like the Internet RFC process (on which it’s clearly modeled) it produces a combination of innovative pace and successful deployment that even Bell Labs in its heyday could not have dreamed of sustaining.

+

Yet, somehow we still see earnest screeds like this one by Christophe de Dinechin:

+
+

What I’d like to see happen is genuine open-source innovation. But I’m
+afraid this cannot happen, because real innovation requires a lot of
+money, and corporations remain the best way to fund such innovation,
+in general with high hopes to make even more money in return.

+
+

The easy, cheap reply would be to write the author off as a blithering idiot who has failed to notice that his entire environment has been drastically reshaped by open-source innovation, and the proof slaps him in the face every time he looks at a browser. But, in fact, I think he (and others like him) are not idiots; they are reasonably bright people making a couple of serious and identifiable errors in their reasoning about open source, closed source, and innovation.

+

Error the first: ignoring the present value of open-source innovations in the recent past when projecting the difference in expected returns between open-source and closed-source innovation strategies. This is what M’sieu de Dinechin is doing when he fails to notice that Tim Berners-Lee was a hacker operating in open source, and his successors mostly likewise.

+

Error the second: discounting innovations that are not user-visible and salable by a marketing department. OK, the latest piece of eye candy from Apple is very nice, but if you ask me how it compares to the present value of (say) the open-source BIND daemon, the answer is “no contest”; one just looks pretty, the other is fundamental to the entire frickin’ web-centered economy.

+

Error the third: ignoring work like Metisse/Facades because it isn’t yet deployed on enough machines to show up on a marketing survey. The problem here is that people like de Dinechin wind up erroneously taking the ability of corporations to sell incremental improvements into an established marketplace as their major proxy for measuring the ability to originate innovations in the first place. This makes their view of what constitutes ‘innovation’ nearsighted even where it’s not altogether blind.

+

Error the zeroth: confusing two issues, one of which is “which strategy globally maximizes innovation?” and the other one of which is “how do I, the hungry would-be innovator, get paid?” This is the big one; I’m numbering it Error Zero because I think it’s at the bottom of almost all the other systematic mistakes de Dinechin and people like him are prone to, including errors One through Three.

+

de Dinechin, and people like him, have a simple and linear model of how innovation works. Pay a bright guy like de Dinechin, stand back, and watch the brilliant stuff come out and change the world. In this model, if you don’t pay bright guys like de Dinechin, innovative stuff doesn’t come out because they’re too busy grinding out COBOL or something so they can eat — no world-changes, so sad.

+

This model is very appealing to people like de Dinechin, who have an understandably strong desire to be paid for being smart and creative. Heck, it appeals to me for exactly the same reason. Unfortunately, and unlike de Dinechin, I know that it is seriously false-to-fact.

+

I have a very different model of how innovation, at least in software, actually works. One of its premises can be expressed by what I shall now dub the Iron Law of Software R&D: If you are a programmer developing innovative software, the odds that you will be permitted to finish it and it will actually be deplayed are, other things being equal, inversely proportional to the product of your depth of innovation and your job security.

+

That is, the cushier your corporate sinecure is, the less likely it is that you will make a difference. The more innovative your software is, the less likely it is that you will actually be supported all the way to deployment.

+

The reason for this is dead simple. Corporations exist to mitigate investment risk. The large and more stable a corporation is, the more resistant it is to disruption in its practices and business model including the unvoidable short-term disruptions from what might be long-term innovative gain. Net-present-value accounting therefore almost always leads to the conclusion that innovation is a mistake.

+

“But what about Bell Labs?” I hear you sputter. Ah, yes, that archetype of the halcyon days of corporate research. Well, for one, Bell Labs is dead; pressure for short-term returns has made the kind of empire-building it represented effectively impossible today. And even in its heyday, Ken Thompson had to write Unix as an after-hours project on a piece of salvaged junk, then sneak Unix tapes out the back door to deploy it.

+

The Iron Law explains neatly why most of the research that came out of Xerox PARC was eventually deployed by other corporations, mostly startups with no preexisting business model in jeopardy. And why you get the most actual, deployed innovation in open source — because the people whose revenue streams we’re jeopardizing (if any) aren’t the same people who are funding us (if any).

diff --git a/20081109195937.blog b/20081109195937.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0c9fa24 --- /dev/null +++ b/20081109195937.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Why “open source” is not mere marketese +

Every once in a while I hear it alleged that “open source” is just a marketing device for a practice that would be just as well off without it. This is seriously wrong, but it’s a confusion I’m partly to blame for because I have emphasized the marketing utility of the term in the past.

+

+

Yes, the term “open source” is partly a marketing device. I proposed the adoption of the term in 1998 because I felt we needed a term for the practice of the hacker community less ideologically loaded than “free software” in order to sell the idea to the mainstream. It was a pretty successful marketing device; we passed out of early-adopter stage around 2003 five years later, which compares well with 20 years of failure by the FSF to make a similar breakthrough in the public perception of the “free software” brand.

+

However, “open source” was never just a marketing label. Marketing labels usually only have feel-good emotive content. On rare occasions they may weakly imply a descriptive theory of the merits of the product; consider “workstation”, for example. What marketing labels never contain is a generative theory of how to improve the product — because their purpose is to make you believe it’s already as good as it can get and you should buy, buy, buy, now, now, now.

+

But the term “open source” does entail an entire generative theory of how to improve the process. If you are calling what you are doing “open source”, you know (for example) that your process will be improved by changes which (a) shorten the feedback loop between software changes and public testing of those changes, (b) reduce the difficulty of making casual contributions, and (c) increase the size and variety of your developer group.

+

In this respect, “open source” escapes being mere marketese and is like a normal engineering term of art for a methodology; compare, for example, “agile programming” which is also both a marketing term and a methodological one associated with similar process ideas. (The similarity is probably not accidental; several of the founders of the agile movement cheerfully admit to having been influenced by my work.) This is one reason I have always insisted it should not be capitalized: “Open Source” looks like puffery from someone’s ad campaign, but “open source” does not.

+

As always when the history of this term comes up, I like to give credit where credit is due. I did not invent it. That honor goes to my long-time friend Christine Peterson, futurist and nanotechnology advocate. What I did was (a) attach her term to the generative theory I had developed in 1996-1997 (in The Cathedral and the Bazaar), and (b) successfully persuade most of the rest of the community to use it.

+

As usual in open source, the most important skill involved was at being egoless enough to recognize someone else’s good idea. Both I and the larger community managed to do that with respect to Chris’s “open source” label, and all have benefitted greatly as a result.

diff --git a/20081111233826.blog b/20081111233826.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c526e54 --- /dev/null +++ b/20081111233826.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Great googly-moogly, the sequel +

A few posts back, I described my good early experience with the T-Mobile G1, the first Android phone. It’s now two weeks later; I’ve learned the phone thoroughly and developed a stable usage pattern. That makes it a good time for a more considered verdict on the device.

+

+

My more considered verdict is this: HELL YEAH! The iPhone should be feeling teeth in its ass right…about…now.

+

It’s not any one feature that makes me say this. It’s that the gestalt, the entire experience, is so comfortable and pleasant. I enjoy using my phone. After two weeks, I think the biggest single reason is that the haptic responsiveness of the touchscreen is tuned just right – the flick-and-pick gesture (drag a selection list to start it spinning, touch it to stop) feels very natural.

+

The quality of the display is also a big factor. It’s not grainy or glary or tiring to look at; it’s good enough that I even find the browser usable, not the peering-through-a-grainy-porthole trial I’ve experienced with previous mobile devices, and much better than on my wife’s Blackberry. The Blackberry, however, still has a better keyboard; I’ve gotten used to mine, but I don’t like it at all and still consider it the weakest point of the G1 design.

+

I like being able to attach my own MP3s to events. I’ve been showing off my custom default ringtone, the Star Trek communicator chirp, to my geek and hacker friends; their reaction, unanimously, combines laughter with mild envy. I like being able to GIMP my own contact icons. I like having a beautiful glowing astrophotograph of the Andromeda Galaxy as my wallpaper. This is coolness.

+

Leaving aside these sexy superficialities: the big good thing to say about the Android UI itself after two weeks is that I have nothing to say about it, really. It neither hinders me nor gets in my face with how stylish it is. The few weak points are all near the T-Mobile “Faves” feature, which is pretty obviously a late and not terribly well integrated patch on the Android superstructure. (A clue to that is that Faves icons aren’t available for use on Android’s main contacts list; I noted this in my earlier post but hadn’t yet figured out what it meant.)

+

Thinking about it, I suppose there are two aspects of the UI that merit a mention: the status bar and the pull-down notification area. The main screen of the Android UI has a thing like a task bar at the top; it includes a clock, a battery-charge display, the familiar signal-strength indicator, and one or more status icons. The status icons are condition alerts: they tell you if you’ve had a missed call, or have voicemail, whether or not your GPS is active and has lock, that sort of thing. This is pretty normal, my old Samsung 660 had a status bar too.

+

One difference, though, is that the Android icons are…witty, is the best way I can put it. Not obtrusively clever or showy, but the designers made skilled use of the relatively high display resolution. My favorite example: the icon for “You have voicemail” is a stencil image of an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder. I love that. I’d like to shake the hand of whoever invented that combination of representation, gentle irony, and retro respect.

+

When there is more information attached to an alert, the status bar grows a visual feature with a touch-me-and-drag affordance. Drag that down and the status bar turns into a windowshade-like object, taking up just as much of the main screen as it needs to display its event-message queue. Of course, each event message can be touched, starting your response actions.

+

Friends, this is the right thing. I checked with an iPhone-owning friend, and this feature actually out-Apples Apple in its utter appropriateness and quiet style. It’s so natural, and such a smooth transposition of pull-down menus into the key of gestures, that it took me a while to notice how clever and innovative it actually is. Besides being easy to operate, the notification pulldown implies a particular model of the phone’s behavior space; it is your unitary monitor of the information stream, helpfully aggregating events you need to watch for in one place.

+

Compare this with an alternate model we see on computers, where you often have separate apps open to watch for email, IM, system notifications, etc.; on a phone, that would be a mess. Also compare it with older cellphones, which had notification icons but no hooks to a message queue
+that is implicitly a set of action buttons as well. As was once said of Robert Heinlein’s writing, the Android’s windowshade is the art that conceals art – no ostentation, but lots of understated effectiveness.

+

There’s been some criticism of the G1 that it’s bar-of-soap clunky, almost dowdy compared to the slick industrial-design sleekness of an iPhone. I now wonder, seriously, if this wasn’t a subtle and rather clever positioning strategy. Rather than proclaiming “I’mmmm so fahhhshionable, dahlink!” the G1/Android combination is unobstrusively effective. Nothing looks tacky faster than yesterday’s overcontrived hip hotness; the designers may have gambled that their more functionalist aesthetic would outlast the iPhone’s slick presentation.

+

I’ve seen one firmware update, on 3 November. It actually did something that I noticed: there’s now a status-bar icon for USB connection active, and if you pull down on that one you get an option to dismount the SD card from being used as the G1’s storage and offer a USB-I’m-here notification to your computer so it will mount the SD. This is better than the old way of handing off control of the SD card, which involved burrowing into a relatively obscure system settings menu.

+

So, yes, this is just Android 1.0, and yes, they are actively improving it even as we speak. I think it’s going to win.

diff --git a/20081112075230.blog b/20081112075230.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f28f184 --- /dev/null +++ b/20081112075230.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Why Android matters +

I’ve posted a couple of times about how kewl I think my Android G1 is. But I’m not jazzed about a mere gadget; the really exciting thing about Android is going to be the second- and third-order effects of the software, and how these tie into Google’s strategic interests and the future of open source.

+

+

I’m going to start with the relatively far future, like five or even possibly ten years out, because I’m pretty sure my projections for it are very similar to Sergei and Larry’s and that they are what is actually driving Google’s corporate strategy.

+

Cellphone descendants are going to eat the PC. There will come a day when you carry your primary computer with you in your pocket as a matter of course — but not your primary display/keyboard/mouse. Those will be Bluetooth or son-of-Bluetooth devices (don’t hassle me about video bandwidth, okay? — I know what the issues are) that people leave lying around like we leave notepads and pencils; you will network with them by walking up to one, at which point your cell will do a crypto exchange and attach the device. When you’re done, you walk away. Of course, Internet will be ubiquitous. These devices will never be off-net unless you tell them to be.

+

Now. You are Google. You make your money by selling ads on the most successful search engine in the world. One of your strategic imperatives is therefore this: you cannot allow anyone to operate a technological or regulatory chokepoint between you and people doing searches, otherwise they’ll stunt your earnings growth and siphon off your revenues. That’s why you ran a politico-financial hack on the Federal auction of radio spectrum to ensure a certain minimum level of openness. And that’s why you are, very quietly, the single most determined and effective advocate of network neutrality.

+

Now, combine these two visions and you’ll understand why Google is doing Android. Their goal is to create the business conditions that will maximize their ad revenue not just two years out but ten years out. Those business conditions are, basically, an Internet that is as friction-free, cheap, and difficult to lock down as the underlying technology can make it.

+

Under this strategy, Android wins in multiple ways. In the longer term, it gives Google a strong shot at defining the next generation of dominant computing platforms in such a way that nothing but customer demand will be able to control those platforms.

+

In the shorter term, it outflanks the Baby Bells. As web traffic shifts to Googlephones (and things like them), telco efforts to double-dip carriage charges by extracting quality-of-service fees from Google and other content providers will become both technologically more difficult and politically impossible. By depriving them of the ability to lock in customers to gated and proprietary services, Android will hammer both the wire-line and wireless telcos into being nothing but low-margin bit-haulage providers, exactly where Google wants them. (A leading indicator will be the collapse of the blatant absurdity that is the ring-tones market, doomed when anyone can hook MP3s of their choosing to phone events.)

+

As bad as this sounds for the telcos, Microsoft gets outflanked and screwed far worse. As web traffic shifts to Googlephones (and things like them), IE7 and Windows will be about as effective at market control as a buggy whip at a Formula One race — how does it matter that you have most of the PC browser market when a steadily increasing proportion of browsing is done from phones? Microsoft’s efforts to move to a cloud-centric software-as-service strategy will also be severely and probably terminally damaged, because they’ll face a very painful choice. They can stay PC-only and hemhorrage users defecting to cellphone-based services, or they can deploy on Android only to face increasing pressure from business customers who will, quite reasonably, wonder why the service clients and protocols aren’t as open as the rest of the Android platform. (Another leading indicator is what pervasive Gmail will do to Outlook.)

+

One of the coolest things about this chain of dominoes is that Google itself doesn’t have to win or end up with control of anything for the future to play out as described. It’s not even necessary that Android itself be the eventual dominant cellphone platform. All they have to do is force the competitive conditions so that whatever does end up dominating is as open as Android is. Given that one of the largest handset makers is already being forced to open source their stack for other reasons (Nokia figured out that they can’t afford to hire enough developers to do all their device ports in-house) this outcome seems certain.

+

For the open-source community, it’s all good. The things Google needs to do with Android for selfish business-strategic reasons are exactly what we want, too. This isn’t an accident, because we’re both pulling in the direction of reducing the effects of market friction, transaction costs, and asymmetries of power and information. If Google didn’t exist, the open-source community would need to invent it.

+

Oh. Wait. We did invent them. Where do you suppose Sergei and Larry came from? Why do you suppose they’ve been running Summer of Code and hiring a noticeable fraction of the most capable open-source developers on the planet? Well, here’s a flare-lit clue: before those two guys were famous, they sent me fan mail once.

+

That’s why I think those two know exactly what they’re doing. And that, if it’s true that their business strategy requires them to be open source’s ally, I think I can be allowed a guess that they chose their business strategy so that would be true. “Don’t be evil”; they’re not angels, but they’re trying.

+

And, from where I sit? All I can say is this: Bwahahaha. The sinister master plan for world domination – it is working!

diff --git a/20081113015832.blog b/20081113015832.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f30b5db --- /dev/null +++ b/20081113015832.blog @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +Net neutrality: what’s a libertarian to do? +

One of my commenters asked, rather plaintively:

+

+You mentioned net neutrality. I’ve read about this, and the opposition to it. I’ve read about this, and the opposition to it. As far as I can tell, net neutrality is more supported by liberals/democrats, while the opposition is made up more of conservatives/republicans. But for the life of me I can’t figure out which is the the more libertarian position. +

+

Your confusion is entirely reasonable. I’ve hung out with network-neutrality activists and tried to give them what I thought was useful advice. Their political fixations didn’t permit them to hear me. Here’s a summary of the issues and one libertarian’s take on them.

+

+

Here’s where it starts: the wire-line telcos want to use their control of the copper and fiber that runs to your house to double-dip, not only charging consumers for bandwidth but also hitting up large content providers (Google, Amazon, etc.) for quality-of-service fees. There’s another question that gets folded into the debate, too: under what circumstances the telcos can legitimately traffic-shape, e.g. by blocking or slowing the protocols used for p2p filesharing.

+

It is not clear that the regulatory regime under which the telcos operate allows them to do either thing. They haven’t tried to implement double-dipping yet, and they’re traffic-shaping by stealth and lying about it when they get caught. What they want is a political green light to do both.

+

Let it be clear from the outset that the telcos are putting their case for being allowed to do these things with breathtaking hypocrisy. They honk about how awful it is that regulation keeps them from setting their own terms, blithely ignoring the fact that their last-mile monopoly is entirely a creature of regulation. In effect, Theodore Vail and the old Bell System bribed the Feds to steal the last mile out from under the public’s nose between 1878 and 1920; the wireline telcos have been squatting on that unnatural monopoly ever since as if they actually had some legitimate property right to it.

+

But the telcos’ crimes aren’t merely historical. They have repeatedly bargained for the right to exclude competitors from their networks on the grounds that if the regulators would let them do that, they’d be able to generate enough capital to deploy broadband everywhere. That promise has been repeatedly, egregiously broken. Instead, they’ve creamed off that monopoly rent as profit or used it to cross-subsidize competition in businesses with higher rates of return. (Oh, and of course, to bribe legislators and buy regulators.)

+

Mistake #1 for libertarians to avoid is falling for the telcos’ “we’re pro-free market” bullshit. They’re anything but; what they really want is a politically sheltered monopoly in which they have captured the regulators and created business conditions that fetter everyone but them.

+

OK, so if the telcos are such villainous scum, the pro-network-neutrality activists must be the heroes of this story, right?

+

Unfortunately, no.

+

Your typical network-neutrality activist is a good-government left-liberal who is instinctively hostile to market-based approaches. These people think, rather, that if they can somehow come up with the right regulatory formula, they can jawbone the government into making the telcos play nice. They’re ideologically incapable of questioning the assumption that bandwidth is a scarce “public good” that has to be regulated. They don’t get it that complicated regulations favor the incumbent who can afford to darken the sky with lawyers, and they really don’t get it about outright regulatory capture, a game at which the telcos are past masters.

+

I’ve spent endless hours trying to point out to these people that their assumptions are fundamentally wrong, and that the only way to break the telco monopoly is to break the scarcity assumptions it’s based on. That the telecoms regulatorium, far from being what holds the telcos in check, is actually their instrument of control. And that the only battle that actually matters is the one to carve out enough unlicensed spectrum so we can use technologies like ad-hoc networking with UWB to end-run the whole mess until it collapses under its own weight.

+

They don’t get it. They refuse to get it. I’ve been on a mailing list for something called the “Open Infrastructure Alliance” that consisted of three network engineers and a couple dozen “organizers”; the engineers (even the non-libertarian engineers) all patiently trying to explain why the political attack is a non-starter, and the organizers endlessly rehashing political strategies anyway. Because, well, that’s all they know how to do.

+

In short, the “network neutrality” crowd is mainly composed of well-meaning fools blinded by their own statism, and consequently serving mainly as useful idiots for the telcos’ program of ever-more labyrinthine and manipulable regulation. If I were a telco executive, I’d be on my knees every night thanking my god(s) for this “opposition”. Mistake #2 for any libertarian to avoid is backing these clowns.

+

So, what are libertarians to do?

+

We can start by remembering a simple truth: The only substantive threat to the telco monopoly is bandwidth that has been removed from the reach of both the telcos and their political catspaws in the regulatorium. Keep your eye on that ball; the telcos know it’s the important one and will try to distract you from it, while the “network neutrality” crowd doesn’t know it and wastes most of its energy self-defeatingly wrestling with the telcos over how to re-slice the existing pie.

+

Go active whenever there’s a political debate about “unlicensed spectrum”. More of it is good. Oppose any efforts to make UWB (or any other technology that doesn’t cause destructive interference) require a license anywhere on the spectrum. If you are capable, contribute to the development of mesh networking, especially wireless mesh networking.

+

Oh, and buy an Android phone. As I noted in my immediately previous post, Google is our ally in this.

+

UPDATE: I’ve summarized the history of the Bell System’s theft of the last mile here.

diff --git a/20081114095547.blog b/20081114095547.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c4c59c6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20081114095547.blog @@ -0,0 +1,59 @@ +Linux-Hater’s Blog, considered +

One of the advantages of having helped found the open-source movement that I cherish most is that nobody can criticize me when I criticize it. I’m a gadfly by nature, disgusted by cant even (actually, especially!) when it’s my own insights being reflected back at me as dogma. Anyone who actually does that is likely to flip me into full Discordian rascal-guru mode.

+

So I was actually pleased to learn of the existence of Linux-Hater’s Blog. I rather looked forward to winnowing through it for nuggets with which I could shock the more fanboyish members of my community by agreeing. Alas: when I finally went there with intent to read, I discovered that the never-actually-identified author of the blog had ended the project. I read the entire archives anway.

+

+

A lot of it is just off-target flamage. The very first substantive entry, for example, is a flame about copy-paste behavior that applies to all Unixes running X, not just Linux and not just open-source systems. Linux-Hating Blogger’s bile is further undercut when the discussion of standards he links to includes a reasoned (and, I think. correct) decision to make Linux implementations behave more like the way Macs and Windows do it.

+

I’m also going to just ignore entries at the lameness level of Linux won’t get you hot chicks (which is to my certain knowledge untrue) and Linux sucks.. for watching Porn. That knocks out, oh, at least 60% of the content. But then there’s this, in Use Linux to lower your customer’s expectations:

+

+You know, cuz it’s totally acceptable to ship a busted battery meter,
+or something that you have to type some crazy hexadecimal key in every
+time you want to get on the interweb. It ships Linux, so we can
+forgive it, right? Fuck no. +

+

Fuck no, indeed. The point of open source is supposed to be better software quality; LHB is quite right that we ought to given vendors who ship slovenly builds a sound kicking.

+

And then there’s this: You don’t pay me, so I don’t care what you want. LHB is right; a lot of open source is developed by developers for developers and underweights – or completely fails to connect with – the needs of actual users. In fact, the situation is actually worse than LHB describes; his belief that “When you’re small, you’ll do a bunch of stuff to try to get more users.” is, generally, false. Small open-source projects aren’t normally focused on getting more users at all; usually, they happen because some hacker thought a particular program would be fun or useful to write, and whatever number of users show up in his in-box is fine with him.

+

It’s no bad thing to have LHB remind us that inattention to end-users’ needs is a serious problem; it’s a point I’ve made in public more than once myself. Nor is he wrong to point out that formal project management can’t actually solve this; the developers themselves have to care. I actually like his last line: “And besides, open source projects already have product management. It’s called a bug tracker.” Spoken in jest or snarkiness, perhaps, but they really do function that way.

+

So, is there a solution? Interestingly, LHB is too smart to actually commit himself to the position that monetary incentives can make developers care; one suspects he’s been a programmer at a closed-source shop, and knows exactly how often the whole self-congratulatory apparat of paid managers and marketing departments produces botches just as awful, if not worse, than development-by-geeks-for-geeks.

+

In Release cycles are for lusers, LHB actually manages to say something useful and constructive and even admit to good reasons for respecting Mark Shuttleworth. Zounds! You could almost think LHB were a secret Linux fan!

+

I got remarkably far into the archives before I found something that I disagreed with at a more fundamental level than “Dude, you’re just flaming.” It was here: Good Software isn’t really free. LHB writes:

+
+

Projects like the kernel and firefox are exceptions in a sea full of
+shitty projects. They are how open source projects should be
+run. They’ve figured out how to create value that people will pay
+for. They have paid people working on them, producing valuable code,
+solving real problems, and are usually shipped in usable, tested ways.

+

Rarely, and I mean rarely (i.e. hard enough to find that it’s not
+worth trying out 3000 different apt-get installs for programs that do
+the same thing), you find a project that has a really good developer
+writing really good code, but it’s not backed by a sustainable
+model.

+
+

But LHB is wrong. Bearing in mind Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is crap”) finding projects that produce quality code without what LHB thinks of as a “sustainable model” isn’t actually hard. One effective way to filter out the real crap is to ignore projects that aren’t packaged by a major distro. There are an awful lot of projects good enough for (say) Ubuntu to feel it can package and ship without jeopardizing its reputation; of these, only a vanishingly small percentage have paid developers.

+

Within that set, there will as usual be a power-law distribution of quality. There are ways to make sure you’re at the good end. One I find pretty reliable is to look at the number of people in the credits or authors file; more is better, and I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a real dog with more than a half-dozen names on it. What you’re doing here is evaluating a proxy for the number of people who found the code sound enough to invest time in improving it.

+

You can actually apply more filters than this: does it have a website that has recently been updated? Is there documentation that looks useful at first glance? The point is that however many of these you apply, however high you set the quality bar, you’re still not going to get to where any but a tiny fraction of what’s left has what LHB thinks is a “sustainable model”.

+

And…oops…LHB says: “The vast majority of the rest is crap. Not too unlike commercial softare you say? No shit.” That’s right; he actually knows, when he thinks about it, that “sustainable model” doesn’t really do sweet fuck-all for your error statistics, and the power-law quality distribution applies to all software, on and off Linux and whether it’s open or closed.

+

Beneath the profanity and the flamage, LHB actually has a clue. When he allows himself one, that is — something the blog’s stated mission often prevents.

+

Occasionally he’s dead on target. As in The Registry is dead…long live…the registry!? Tell it, brother! This old Unix hand thinks gconf is indeed a botch, a frightening piece of overengineering. Give me a $HOME full of old-school dotfiles any day; they’re far easier to read and modify without fearing that a change to one thing will break everyting.

+

How to Write a KDE Application is both funny and seems disturbingly true. To be fair, so does How to write a Gnome Application. Well, except for the cloning part; there are plenty of original apps using both toolkits. But otherwise…I laughed. I winced. Then I laughed again.

+

How to Create a Linux distro is not quite as good, though the last item (“Write tons of documentation on complicated procedures to make things work, instead of making things work.”) has a bit of sting in it. These three satires probably represent the high point of LHB’s oeuvre; any Linux fan who doesn’t wince and take at least one lesson from them definitely needs to get out more.

+

Catastraphont is kind of interesting. You have to ignore the first paragraph, which was easy for me since LHB’s pages don’t in fact render in Deja Vu Sans on my Linux box. His description of the layers of historical cruft around X fonts is pretty accurate. It’s also shared with almost every modern Unix, including the closed-source ones. (Yes, MacOS X is an exception because Apple obsesses about these things.)

+

Perhaps this should have been Unix-Hater’s Blog; LHB admits at one point that he’s emulating the style of the Unix-Hater’s Handbook. But then he wouldn’t get to throw around cute epithets like “freetard”. Like the Handbook, too much of LHB reads like bile looking for an excuse.

+

That affects LHB’s prose style, too. There is a certain entertainment value in phrasings like “more tangled than Paris Hilton’s semen-encrusted hair after her cameo in a Brazilian vomit porn tape”, but if that’s the only note you hit in your writing…you could be more effective. And LHB is in fact much more effective when he forgets to cop his attitude and writes something like this:

+
+

Y’all seem to not realize that most people don’t google for answers to computer issues in the first place. To these people, it either works or it doesn’t. If nothing happens when they plug their camera into their computer, they assume their computer just doesn’t work with their camera. Or they call up their lame-ass grandson who installed some weird thing called youbuntube on their computer. They don’t give a flying fuck if some forum user gph0t04ever on gphoto-rulez.org has a 10-step procedure that will make it work.

+

+

Besides, to actually use google effectively, you already have to 1) kinda know what you’re talking about, 2) know what keywords to use, and 3) know how to use the results to fix your problem. When’s the last time that someone typed “my screen looks big” into google, and got to your newbie-proof instructions of how to replace the “nv” in your xorg.conf with “nvidia”? Oh, that’s right. Never.

+
+

This is a worthwhile reality check. Or, as I sometimes put it, “Documentation is an admission of UI design failure.” For most users, procedures that need to be documented might as well not exist.

+

But he continues to be really uneven. His Stupidity Formula, for example; even if you buy the notion that stupidity increases with number of developers, agency and communication problems certainly mean it doesn’t decrease reliably with the amount of money thrown at the problem. There needs to be a multiplier proportionate to the square of the funding organization’s size in there.

+

Then there’s Feel the Source, where LHB, apparently seriously, proposes that upstream Linux projects should ship production binaries. That is, rather than shipping tarballs and letting packagers and distro builders make the binaries.

+

If I were writing in LHB’s style, I’d be sputtering scornful profanity right about now. Yeah, like every open-source project can have a build farm in its basement, with servers for every possible arcane combination of hardware, distro, and release level. The concept is just nuts. We’ve evolved a three-tier system (upstream projects to packagers to distro repositories) for excellent reasons; it’s the minimal-complexity adaptation to our deployment issues. This is probably the most foolish thing LHB wrote, if we’re leaving out the pure Beavis-and-Butthead flamage.

+

Sometimes LHB just seems confused. In my experience, when a Linux user or advocate says “Linux gives me choices”, it actually means “My choices aren’t dictated by a single-vendor monopoly or a locked proprietary data format.” But, in The fallacy of choice LHB argues as though Linux advocates actually relish having lots of competing choices for each applications niche as a virtue in itself.

+

This is an odd position that seems not to actually match observed behavior; we don’t normally see people building competitors to an established program unless there are specific reasons to do it. So, for example, nobody seems to be trying to build direct competitors to the GIMP, but we do have Scribus and Inkscape that work from different imaging models.

+

It’s too bad LHB goes down this garden path, because he might have had some properly trenchant things to say about (for example) the GNOME/KDE split. That had a reason, but a case could be made that it was a bogus one.

+

And after that post, LHB gradually runs out of momentum. There’s one last and mildly good rant at Pulse my audio; sound has never been broken for me, but the plethora of Linux sound APIs and servers is undoubtedly a mess for people with more complex requirements. Once again, though, it seems a little off to blame this on “freetard” attitudes; really, it sounds to me like the mess was more due to design problems that were intrinsically difficult to get right without a couple of (software) generations of experience.

+

This is how it ends:

+

+So in true open source fashion, as the maintainer of this project, I am going to arbitrarily drop off the face off the of this earth for purely selfish reasons, and leave the entire cause in limbo. That is how open source projects truly die. But hey, all the material is out there for y’all to see (it’s “open source” in it’s own way), so maybe someone else will take up the cause. Carry on, lusers! +

+

That kind of embodies all of LHB’s contradictions right there – trashing open source in one breath, expressing a sort of stifled backhand respect for it in the next. As though even he, the Linux hater, can’t stand aside from what Linux has taught him.

diff --git a/20081116082311.blog b/20081116082311.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..51e4230 --- /dev/null +++ b/20081116082311.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +moogly pwns the iPhone!?! +

I got a chance last night to play with my friend Beth Matuszek’s iPhone, while she played with my G1. I’ve been blogging that I think the G1 is serious competition for the iPhone, but I must say I expected the iPhone to look better than the G1 when Beth and I did side-to-side testing of parallel functions, like browsing the Instapundit blog page.

+

It doesn’t. In theory the G1 and iPhone have the same resolution, but the cruel truth is that the G1’s display is superior – stronger luminance contrasts, better colors, generally crisper. It’s not a subtle difference, it really jumped out at both of us.

+

That’s not the shocking part, though. Beth has a first-generation iPhone that’s about a year old; some of the above differences might be simple phosphor decay. The shocking part is that Android does font rasterization and anti-aliasing better. The difference is really noticeable on small fonts; compared to the G1 the iPhone has an obtrusive case of jaggies. Hello? Hello? Apple? You’re supposed to be the world-beaters at this sort of thing; what have you been smoking lately?

+

UPDATE: Mystery partly and perhaps entirely solved. The physical sizes of the G1 and iPhone display are different. The iPhone’s is substantially larger, which means it has lower DPI. At the same font size in millimeters, therefore, the edges of a font glyph on the iPhone are doomed to look grainier unless the antialiasing is really dramatically better — which apparently it isn’t.

diff --git a/20081120220343.blog b/20081120220343.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..763ddaa --- /dev/null +++ b/20081120220343.blog @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ +The sound of empire falling +

I predicted years ago that what would eventually do Microsoft in was white-box PC makers defecting because they needed to claw back profit margin as the Windows license became the largest single item in their bills of material.

+

And here’s the confirmation I’ve been awaiting: Microsoft Missing Netbook Growth as Linux Wins Sales. The boring biz-journalism headline is guarding some startling facts.

+

+

+Nov. 6 (Bloomberg) — Small laptops are becoming a big problem for
+Microsoft Corp.’s Windows business. [...] Acer Inc. and Asustek
+Computer Inc., which together account for 90 percent of the netbook
+market, are using the rival Linux software on about 30 percent of
+their low-cost notebooks. +

+

30% is significant share, well above the single-digit range that desktop Linux has been stuck in for the last decade and larger than ISVs can afford to ignore. And it’s hitting Microsoft’s bottom line:

+

+The devices, which usually cost less than $500, are the
+fastest-growing segment of the personal-computer industry — a trend
+that’s eating into Microsoft’s revenue. Windows sales fell short of
+forecasts last quarter and the company cut growth projections for the
+year, citing the lower revenue it gets from netbooks. +

+

The phrase “sales fell short of forecasts” is deadlier than it sounds. The profitability of Microsoft’a businesses is consistently poor outside of the core OS and office products; their ability to sustain a broad product strategy and frequent acquisitions against investor pressure has been dependent on their ability to deliver figures indicating smooth sales and revenue growth in the core business. If investors stop trusting that guidance, Microsoft’s room to maneuver (for example, by moving further into software-as-a-service businesses) will be sharply limited.

+

Later in the article we learn that Microsoft has cut its forecasts of Windows growth for the rest of 2008 to 2% from 9%, effectively flat. Investors had already been taking a warning:

+

+The stock has declined 41 percent this year. +

+

Microsoft has fought back against the tide of netbooks by talking netbook manufacturers into making XP available on products initially designed to run Linux. But it has fallen far short of its obvious goal, which is to drive Linux netbooks off the market entirely. This in turn suggests that waving the big stick didn’t work and Microsoft had to settle for dangling carrots, probably buying share with
+discounts.

+

+Linux, equipped in 30 percent to 40 percent of Eee PCs sold, will
+probably sustain a market share of about 30 percent, said Samson Hu, a
+general manager at Asustek. The company estimates it will ship at
+least 5 million Eee PCs in 2008 after selling about 4 million since
+the product’s debut. [...] Acer, which is aiming to sell 5 million to 6
+million AspireOne laptops this year, estimates that Linux-equipped
+models account for about 20 percent of its shipments, +

+

That will be at least four million netbooks running Linux by year’s end. The truly deadly news, however, is at the end of the article:

+

+Equipping Linux on a computer costs about $5, compared with $40 to $50
+for XP and about $100 for Vista, according to estimates by Jenny Lai,
+a Taipei-based analyst at CLSA Ltd. [...] “The engineers designing
+computers understand that if they want to cut costs, the only way to
+do so is to get rid of Microsoft,” IDC’s Chang said. +

+

When even financial analysts are figuring this out, you can bet Microsoft is already in deep trouble.

+

Among other things, it is effectively certain that the netbook makers have already used the threat of Linux to bargain Microsoft down to price parity with Linux, though each one doubtless has a signed-in blood agreement not to discuss it in public and the price drop may be disguised as bulk discounts or rebates for marketing support. The initial threat to Redmond’s monopoly from Linux-only products put Microsoft’s nuts in a vise; there is no way the netbook makers, operating on the tight margins they do, would miss the opportunity to extract equally favorable terms of business.

+

This means that Microsoft’s per-sale revenue on netbook XP licenses has probably dropped by at least a factor of 10 relative to what it makes on PCs. That’s a hell of a margin hit, and as netbooks displace a larger slice of traditional PC sales it’s going to get worse. And we can count on that happening; what we’re seeing here is a classic disruption-from-below of the PC market, just as PCs disrupted workstations and minis in the early 1990s.

+

There’s another problem. Vista is so dead that Microsoft is already touting its successor “Windows 7″. Not end-of-lifing XP on schedule means they’ll actually have to support three different operating systems for at least the years until Windows 7 ships, and some time afterward. Even Microsoft is going to feel the strain, and ISVs are likely to play safe by writing to the minimum (XP) specification.

+

Netbooks also put Microsoft in a strategic bind about its future product direction. For System 7 to be lean enough to run on netbooks, it will have to give up backward compatibility with Vista and many of Vista’s features. That means that at the same time Microsoft’s profit margins are being hammered, it will lose a significant portion of its application base.

+

Fundamentally, what’s going on here is that Microsoft, long used to effective monopoly and to the profit margins and strategic maneuvering room monopoly brings, is losing all three of those. Microsoft is no longer a price-maker; the hardware manufacturers hold the whip hand now, and all they have to do to beat Redmond into making ever less money per sale is to push Linux harder.

+

Until relatively recently, Microsoft had good prospects for buying itself maneuvering room simply due to cash hoard in the neighborhood of 60 gigabucks; Bill Gates used to boast that he could run Microsoft for five years of zero revenue with the money in his piggybank. But that’s gone, now; they spent it on acquisitions and stock buybacks. Which still haven’t kept the stock from dropping 41% in 2008. So they’re running out of options.

+

There are only two ways for this game to end. One is with the visible collapse of Microsoft’s monopoly in new systems, but allowing it to retain price levels on a niche market of PCs running legacy applications. The other is with Microsoft bargaining its own margins away to retain netbook market share and collapsing when its reduced run rate can no longer sustain new-product development.

diff --git a/20081122230259.blog b/20081122230259.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a095b35 --- /dev/null +++ b/20081122230259.blog @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Victory in Iraq Day +

It’s Victory in Iraq day today. The good guys – Western civilization, the Coalition of the Willing, the United States, and the people of Iraq – won this war. The bad guys – Saddam Hussein’s regime, al-Qaeda’s jihadis, all their allies and enablers – lost it. The entire world will be a better place because of this victory. And that is a proper thing to celebrate.

diff --git a/20081203130821.blog b/20081203130821.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..75d9d77 --- /dev/null +++ b/20081203130821.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Open Source: Your Expectations are Broken +

In Open Source: The Model Is Broken, Stuart Cohen complains that the business model based on selling support and services around open-source software is “not meeting the expectations of investors”. In related news, the sky is failing to meet my expectations by not raining tasty soup.

+

+

Mr. Cohen notices that “Some have succeeded. Many others have failed or will falter, and their ranks may swell as the economy worsens.” Congratulations, Captain Obvious! Because, of course, there is no other economic sector in which the vast majority of business ventures fail.

+

I have to wonder what planet Mr. Cohen has been living on, and how he managed to miss it eight years ago when I warned everyone (in The Magic Cauldron) that the day of the high-investor-multiple software startup was over. Service businesses simply don’t have multiples as high as capital-intensive manufacturing businesses; not only was the decline in expected returns from startups completely predictable once they stopped being able to charge secrecy rent, I actually did predict it. Repeatedly and loudly.

+

Mr. Cohen also brings us the news that running a telephone support desk is a thin, low-margin business; and that successful companies like Red Hat find other ways to add value to their open-source codebases. Zounds! Captain Obvious strikes again! How does he do it?

+

Mr. Cohen is actually missing the biggest news, which is that “failing to meet investor expectations” is a good thing. Investors thrive on arbitrage — capital arbitrage, location arbitrage, time arbitrage, IP arbitrage. As markets and production systems get more efficient, they compete inefficiencies out of the system and both risk and opportunities for arbitrage decrease. This is why mature industries have the steadiest but lowest returns on investment.

+

Investor expectations about software-company multiples were formed in the industry’s squalling infancy and lusty adolescence. The “failure” to meet these is nothing more than a sign that, with open source, the software industry is finally growing up.

diff --git a/20081208002022.blog b/20081208002022.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e642c52 --- /dev/null +++ b/20081208002022.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +A fragment from Wesnoth +

I did some writing I’m feeling rather proud of today. It is storyline text from a Battle For Wesnoth campaign I’m working on. I’ve decided to post it here as a teaser and let my readers have the fun of deducing the kind of context in which it makes sense.

+

+

“WHO ENTERS THE TOMB OF AN-USRUKHAR?”

+

“I..I am Delfador, a mage of Wesnoth.”

+

“I am the will of An-Usrukhar, greatest of mages, he who bestrode Irdya in the morning of time, who sleeps now in a death beyond death until the unmaking of the world.”

+

“I am only a man, a living man seeking a way home from the house of the dead.”

+

“Living? …I see that it is so. Your breath stirs dust that has lain untouched since the Primal Aeon. And it was foretold that one like you would come.”

+

“Foretold?”

+

“Foretold in the Primal Aeon, years past beyond your counting. An-Usrukhar the Great, he of whom I am but the tiniest shade and fragment, foresaw in the Mirror of Evanescent Time that a living man would come here to be tested. AND I AM THE TEST!”

+

“I have felt the coils of prophecy on me before. I am beginning to dislike them.”

+

“It is only given to the small not to feel the hand of fate on their shoulder; the great must suffer its weight whether they will or no. Delfador, mage of Wesnoth, ARE YOU A SERVANT OF THE LIGHT?”

+

“I serve my king and my kingdom.”

+

“Your king will die in an eyeblink and your kingdom in the drawing of a breath. Delfador, I ask you again, ARE YOU A SERVANT OF THE LIGHT?”

+

“I serve my people and my land.”

+

“Peoples vanish and lands wither under the pitiless gaze of eternity; the true matter of the world is deeper. Delfador, I ask you a third time, and on your answer hangs your life: ARE YOU A SERVANT OF THE LIGHT?”

+

“I…I serve life against death. Love against fear. Light against darkness.”

+

(There is a momentary, brilliant flash of light.)

+

“IT IS WELL. Take up, O servant of light, the Staff of An-Usrukhar. The trials before you will be great. So is its power.”

diff --git a/20081215121540.blog b/20081215121540.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f983843 --- /dev/null +++ b/20081215121540.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +And they’re complaining why, exactly? +

Scary news stories are beginning to make the rounds of the blogosphere about endocrine disruptors – synthetic chemical pollutents that mimic the effects of estrogen and have supposedly already created a generation of feminized young men and boys with shrunken genitals and preferences shifted towards girls’ toys.

+

+

This viewing-with-alarm is, of course, brought to you by the same set of enviro-lefties that brought us the anthropogenic-global-warming panic. The wheels have been falling off that fraud for about a year now, as we’ve watched the extended solar minimum wipe out the entire warming trend since 1900 and make it pellucidly clear that variations in solar activity swamp whatever minor marginal effects atmospheric CO2 may have. I’ve actually been predicting for years that endocrine disruptors would be the next crisis manufactured by the professional doomsayers, and the time seems now to have arrived.

+

But this time I really have to wonder why they’re complaining. Feminized men? Lowered fertility? I’ve spent my entire life hearing the same crowd insist that these would be good things, that humans are a burden on the ecosphere and that all the evil in the world is caused by testosterone-driven male aggression. You’d think these bien pensants would be cheering the prospect that we’re endocrine-disrupting our way to a better world.

+

Funny enough yet? Oh, it gets better. The major source of estrogenizing compounds in the environment seems to be…wait for it…birth-control pills. Not all the estrogen in them is broken down by the body; women piss it into the sewage stream and it goes on to wreak havoc in fish populations. For real; the science suggesting effects on land animals and humans is poorly confirmed and hath the smell of junk about it, but it seems beyond doubt that freshwater and marine ecologies are being severely affected.

+

But banning the Pill would be unthinkable anti-feminist heresy even if it were possible. This guarantees that nothing effective will be done about the problem. We’ll hear a lot of screaming about organochlorines and phthalates in plastics instead; it will be like a reprise of CO2 vs. water vapor in the climate models, where the latter has six times the heat-trapping effect of the former but only CO2 gets headlines.

+

Focusing on water vapor, or the Pill, would interfere with the enviro-lefties’ real agenda: smashing consumer capitalism in our lifetime, or – more realistically – smothering it to death with regulation. For that, they’re even willing to be alarmed in favor of (gulp) masculinity. It would be the Devil’s own irony if, this time, they were actually talking up a real threat.

diff --git a/20081215221605.blog b/20081215221605.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b7245cb --- /dev/null +++ b/20081215221605.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Where the men are +

A commenter wrote:

+

+Think about it: guys like Leo Dicaprio or Owen Wilson for example.
+These guys are not exactly manly men but seem more like teen boys. +

+

There’s no need to invoke exotic theories like endocrine disruptors; they’re just reflecting the zeitgeist. I just turned 51, and a disturbingly large percentage of men in their twenties and thirties seem like spoiled narcissistic man-children to me. I thought for a while that this might mean I was turning into the sort of crusty old fart I laughed at when I was twenty-five, until I noticed that the percentage of man-children varied a great deal depending on my social context.

+

+

At the martial-arts school where I’m training, zero to not much. Even the teenage boys there are pretty manly, on the whole – not surprising, since manliness is very nearly defined by stoicism and grace under pressure, and a martial-arts school should teach those things if it teaches nothing else. Anywhere firearms are worn or displayed openly, ditto — go to a tactical-shooting match, for example, and you’ll see even prepubescent boys (and, though rarely, some girls) exemplifying quiet manliness in a very heartening degree.

+

On the other hand…when I go to places where people are talking rather than doing, the percentage of man-children rises. Occasionally my wife Cathy and I go to screenings at the Bryn Mawr Film institute, most recently to see Sergei Bodrov’s The Mongol; it’s pretty much wall-to-wall man-children there, at least in the space not occupied by middle-aged women. If our sample is representative, my wife is manlier than the average male art-film buff.

+

How does one tell? The man-child projects a simultaneous sense of not being comfortable in his own skin and perpetually on display to others. He’s twitchy, approval-seeking, and doesn’t know when to shut up. He’s never been tested to anywhere near the limits of his physical or moral courage, and deep within himself he knows that because of this he is weak. Unproven. Not really a man. And it shows in a lot of little ways – posture, gaze patterns, that sort of thing. He’ll overreact to small challenges and freeze or crumble under big ones.

+

One of the things this culture badly needs is a set of manhood ordeals. Unlike the tribal societies of the past, we’re too various for one size to fit all — but to reliably turn boys into men (or, to put it in more fashionable terms, to help them become mature and inner-directed) you need to put them under stress in a way that, except for the small percentage that go through military boot camps, we basically don’t any more.

+

Instead, we prolong adolescence into the twenties and thirties. With dolorous consequences for everyone…

diff --git a/20081216191631.blog b/20081216191631.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..43280c7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20081216191631.blog @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +Eric and the Quantum Experts: A Cautionary Tale +

On my favorite mailing list, it was written:

+
+> Anyway, if you think someone who lives and breathes some field is missing
+> some obvious point, they're probably right and you're probably wrong.
+
+
+

Generally I think this is true. However, I hereby submit the story of Eric and the Quantum Experts as a cautionary tale for all bright children.

+

+

Once, long ago in the 1970s, there was a bright young sprout named Eric who was exposed to the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment. There was explained to him the standard account of what happens.

+

Eric’s reaction was that the standard account seemed like obvious nonsense. His initial objection was that the account seemed to make mystifying, ungrounded assumptions about “observation”. Eric had learned about operational definitions from Alfred Korzybski and C.S. Peirce and Bertrand Russell, and he asked: What is operationally special about opening the box?

+

Eric pestered physics-literate people about this, and read some books. It did not take him long to discover that essentially the same objection had been raised (in a slightly disguised form) by a physicist named Wigner, who – alas – launched from it to land at an interpretation that seemed even crazier and less grounded than the standard one.

+

Try as he might, Eric could elicit no sense from what the “experts” had to say on the matter, just a load of snottiness about how you have to understand the math. However, Eric was, at the time, in training to become a theoretical mathematician and knew that sort of bullshit when he smelled it.

+

Eventually Eric managed to corner an unusually bright and lucid physicist who said, essentially: “There’s nothing special about observation. You ‘observe’ a quantum system whenever you bounce a photon off it. The key thing about Schrodinger’s box is that it’s a closed system until the experimenter opens it.”

+

This greatly relieved Eric, because it disposed of all the mystifying nonsense about human observers and consciousness that had somehow accreted around the physics. Eric, you see, was also an experimental mystic – a student (though not follower) of Zen and a third-degree Wiccan of anti-religious type – and he knew that kind of bullshit by its smell, too.

+

However, operationally equating “observation” with “any interaction between previously separate wave functions” did not solve Eric’s problem. It simply moved the problem to a different level.

+

Eric’s new question was: “OK, then. Why don’t the walls of the box observe the cat? It’s like, emitting thermal radiation, yes? Why doesn’t the cat’s hindquarters observe the cat’s forequarters?”

+

The question Eric was really getting at is this: If “observation” is some mystically special moment not captured in wave-function interactions, we’re not doing science any more but miracles; we might as well collapse into an occasionalist theology in which God makes every sparrow fall by observing its wave function. Game over.

+

To be doing science – that is to construct confirmable causal accounts with predictive value – we must assume that “observation” is not special. But under this assumption, Eric sees no reason to believe that “mixed states” (e.g. quantum superpositions of multiple classical states) ever persist for more than time epsilon even in small ensembles of particles. Even Schrödinger’s bacterium would be way too large to ever be in a mixed state, let alone his cat!

+

Either way, there appears to Eric to be a big fucking hole in the Schrödinger’s Box thought experiment. A dumb, obvious hole. It amazes Eric – it completely confounds and gobsmacks him – that physicists do not seem to get this.

+

When he presses the issue, the response is essentially “Shut up, kid. It’s a thought experiment; you’re not supposed to ask these questions.” Either that, or the perennial favorite “You have to understand the math.” Eric has become a programmer rather than a mathematician-in-training at this point in the story, but the smell of that bullshit has changed not at all.

+

Eric is deeply frustrated. Eventually, reluctantly, he concludes that there must in fact be some flaw in his reasoning invisible to him. It seems beyond the bounds of plausibility that every quantum physicist in the world is wrong and he is right. They have Nobel prizes: all he has is dreams and some interesting friends and a one-room walkup on Sansom Street. It is about 1978 or 1979.

+

Many years pass. Eric becomes rather successful in his field; in fact, in the late 1990s he develops something of a reputation for asking simple but devastating questions that can up-end entire disciplines. A certain measure of fame duly follows upon this. But he still has no answer to his Schrödinger’s-cat question, and occasionally it still bothers him.

+

Then, one day shortly after the century changes, Eric is reading a science magazine and stumbles over an account of decoherence theory:

+

+ The effect of decoherence on density matrices is essentially the decay
+ or rapid vanishing of the off-diagonal elements of the partial trace
+ of the joint system’s density matrix, i.e. the trace, with respect to
+ any environmental basis, of the density matrix of the combined system
+ and its environment. The decoherence irreversibly converts the
+ “averaged” or “environmentally traced over”[4] density matrix from a
+ pure state to a reduced mixture; it is this that gives the appearance
+ of wavefunction collapse. Again this is called
+ “environmentally-induced-superselection”, or einselection.[4] The
+ advantage of taking the partial trace is that this procedure is
+ indifferent to the environmental basis chosen. +

+

Eric reads something quite similar to this in his pre-Wikipedia paper source, his jaw drops open, and he realizes “Holy leaping fuck, I was right all along!”. That phrase “indifferent to the environmental basis chosen” means, exactly, that it doesn’t matter whether you choose an account in which the walls of the box observe the cat or in which the cat’s hindquarters observe the cat’s forequarters; the off-diagonal elements of the matrix still vanish rapidly, the mixed state doesn’t last for more than time epsilon.

+

Upon further investigation, Eric learns that the groundbreaking work on this theory was done in the early 1980s, shortly after young-sprout-Eric had given up on the question in frustration. It will not actually reach popular accounts until Penrose’s 2004 book Road to Reality, a few years after Eric’s moment of jaw-drop.

+

Eric realizes that if he’d had a bit more courage and self-discipline, and moved from mathematics into physics rather than programming, he would have been rather likely to have invented decoherence theory himself and become a physicist renowned for kicking the props out from under the Copenhagen Interpretation. Which would have been, all things considered, much niftier and more fundamental than becoming a hacker renowned for kicking the props out from under closed source.

+

What is our lesson for today, children?

+

If you think you have spotted something fundamental that all the experts missed, don’t ignore it. Because, after all, you might be right.

diff --git a/20081217185657.blog b/20081217185657.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b90bd63 --- /dev/null +++ b/20081217185657.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Old physicists fade away +

A commenter writes, replying to my previous post on Eric and the Quantum Experts:

+

+>Eric, you may still have a chance to revolutionize physics, since decoherence by itself may not completely solve the problem. +

+

Alas, I am probably too old now. There is a way outside chance I could do it, yes, but,…hmm…how to explain this…

+

+

There’s an observed pattern in math and physics that most people do their best work very young. The brighter you are, the longer you get before you’re useless for anything but teaching, but it’s rare to see real breakthroughs from people past their early thirties. Only a very few exceptionally talented workers get to be creatively productive over their entire lifetimes; in physics that means being at the Einstein or Hawking level. (A few people slightly less talented seem to get a second wind – as synthesizers, rather than innovators – in their sixties.)

+

It’s almost as though creativity in these fields is an isotope with a half-life that varies by field and rises with individual level of IQ or native talent or something. Nobody understands this very well, it’s all unquantified folk knowledge.

+

The half-life of programming talent seems to be longer than for physics talent, which in turn seems to be longer than for pure math – but still, I used to worry that I’d become a useless lump as a programmer after forty. This does not seem to have occurred; in fact, I’m more productive now than I was at twenty-five (and I was pretty damn good then). It’s an interesting question whether the half-life for programming is longer than I thought or whether I’m in the tiny lucky minority of supertalents that jump off the exponential decay curve entirely. I don’t know the answer, and don’t even have a guess I’m confident about.

+

Unfortunately, because the half-life of physics creativity seems to be shorter than for programming, my success in the field I’m in does not predict that I’d still be able to do original physics.

+

I just turned 51. That means, in order to believe that I could do really strong and original physics work now, I’d have to start with a justified belief that I’m as talented as Hawking or Einstein. This is almost certainly not the case. I would say “certainly”, except that my general track record of creativity and insight is far enough off the mean to raise just the tiniest smidgen of realistic doubt about this. And I was, after all, ahead of the physics literature on something conceptually important at least once – even a lot of physicists never manage that.

+

Rationally, though, it’s not enough of a doubt for me to gamble on, at this point. I like what I do, and I’m good at it, and it has made me as famous as any sane person would want to be. I don’t have any great need to go off and try to conquer physics as well.

+

Though I will admit, semi-relatedly, that I feel a continuing temptation to try to write a disruptive, field-upending outsider book on the application of analytical philosophy. The tools I used to spot the hole in the Schrödinger’s Cat story are way underutilized.

diff --git a/20081219132840.blog b/20081219132840.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..861f181 --- /dev/null +++ b/20081219132840.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +From Scythia to Camelot with Thud and Blunder +

I am not sure when or where I first encountered it, but the theory that the Arthurian cycle of legends might be rooted in the mythology of Scythia and the Sarmathians instantly struck me as not only plausible but almost certainly correct. The Sarmatians (and the closely-related or identical tribe of Alans) introduced armored heavy cavalry using the shock charge with lance to Europe: the Sarmatian hypothesis would neatly explain several otherwise very peculiar features of the Arthurian material, including the fact that even very early versions insistently describe a style of war gear and knightly combat with slashing swords on horseback that would not become actually typical in Europe until the later Middle Ages.

+

+

The Sarmatian Hypothesis reads, in outline, like this: The Arthurian material developed around a large unit of Sarmatian heavy cavalry (about 5500) known to have been deployed to Britain as military colonists in the early second century CE, attached to the Legion VI Victrix. The Arthur legends are largely a composite of Sarmatian mythology with a distorted version of VI Victrix’s actual history, also with some later inclusions from Celtic mythology. King Arthur himself is a three-layer composite: the oldest layer was the Sarmatian/Alan/Ossetian folk hero Batraz, the intermediate one a Roman officer named Lucius Artorius Castus who became conflated with Batraz, and the most recent was an attested historical King of the Britons remembered as “Riothamus” of the late 5th century (the period of the Saxon invasions) who became conflated with Castus.

+

Having picked up this outline from other sources, I eagerly anticipated the most in-depth treatment of the Sarmatian Hypothesis yet: From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reassessment of the Legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail, by C. Scott Littleton and Linda Malcor. I opened this book expecting to like it and predisposed by my own, independent reading of the evidence to agree with the authors’ conclusions.

+

The book, alas, proved a severe disappointment. It is probably the worst-argued case for a strong and attractive idea I have ever seen. I would be unsurprised if it throws the Sarmatian Hypothesis into disrepute for decades, which I would consider very unfortunate because (despite the authors) I still believe the hypothesis to be essentially true.

+

The problem is not that the authors fail to present good evidence. There is plenty of that: once the basic Sarmatian Hypothesis is in the mind, lots of otherwise peculiar facts fall into a simple and compelling pattern. I mentioned one such group of facts earlier that weighs heavily with me because I know a lot about the development of war-gear and tactics in period. When the authors observe that European elite warriors enter the Middle Ages c. 500 looking like Roman manipular infantry and exit them c.1500 looking like Sarmatian shock cavalry – and that the Arthurian legends anticipate this development rather than following on it – they are powerfully correct. The case that the Arthurian legends served as a sort of dye marker for the Sarmatianization of the European feudal elite is not just strong, but seems to me about as incontrovertible as an argument of this sort ever gets.

+

Another area where the authors do good work is in exhibiting structural and symbolic parallels between the Arthurian material and Alano-Sarmatian mythology, as preserved in the Nart sagas of Ossetia in the Caucasus. Their clarity on the difference between parallels at the general Indo-European level (e.g. with the Rig-Veda) and at the specific Arthurian/Sarmatian level is very welcome. Their arguments based on specifics of iconography are often telling; for example, once the similarities have been pointed out, it is indeed difficult not to connect the peculiar uses of dragon motifs in the Arthurian cycle with the dragon standards used by the Sarmatians and adopted from them by late Roman cavalry alae.

+

Where the authors go wrong is in severely overplaying their hand. The sinews of a sound case are surrounded by what to all appearances is a load of shoddy, meretricious junk. Good arguments are barely given a moment on stage before being drowned in pages and pages of muddled, vaporous speculation. The best fifth of this book is wonderful, groundbreaking, thought-provoking stuff; the rest of it is a sorry mess in which a first-rate idea is dreadfully abused by third-rate minds.

+

The worst of it is the pages upon pages upon pages of unconvincing speculative etymology. I cringed when the authors glossed “Lancelot” as “Alanus á Lot” to connect him to the tribe of Alans; the book is stuffed full with even more embarrassing examples of this sort of thing. The authors should be deeply ashamed of themselves for leaning on this sort of garbage-in-garbage-out so heavily, especially when they often have better lines of evidence available for the conclusions they want to support.

+

A closely related flaw is that, having pointed out good evidence of Alano-Sarmatian cultural diffusion into early post-Roman Europe, the authors don’t know when to stop. They seek out Alans under every medieval leaf and bush with a dogged persistence that resembles a bad grade of political conspiracy theory.

+

Then there are all the babies being thrown out with the bathwater. The authors believe that a great many elements of the Arthurian legends previously attributed solely to Celtic influence are Alano-Sarmatian, and that general case seems valid. The trouble is that in their eagerness they throw away many connections to Celtic mythology that I strongly suspect are genuine and important. A good example is their attempt to sever the Grail from Celtic traditions about magic cauldrons of plenty; I find it unconvincing. A more syncretic account, in which native Celtic and imported Alano-Sarmatian elements both derived from a common Indo-European base and blended together at the edges between 200-1200CE, would probably be closer to what actually happened.

+

There is a good, incisive, small book struggling to get out from inside this overdone, over-argued, over-speculative mess. Someday I’d love to read it.

diff --git a/20081223184511.blog b/20081223184511.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..35f6e4a --- /dev/null +++ b/20081223184511.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Alzheimer’s and Herpes +

There’s been a major breakthrough in the understanding of Alzheimer’s disease. Every face-to-face friend I’ve told about this has found it fascinating, and one of my regulars has rightly suggested I should blog it. It seems many cases of Alzheimer’s may be due to brain infection by the herpes simplex Type I virus — the one that gives you cold sores. Researchers at the University of Manchester have found herpes-simplex DNA in the abnormal beta-amyloid plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. The implications are huge.

+

+

First, this means that the etiology of Alzheimer’s is probably pretty simple. Herpes simplex type I is dirt-common — most people have asymptomatic infection by it in their peripheral nervous systems. When you get old and your immune system loses some oomph, the virus can cross the blood-brain barrier and start doing damage. The plaques seem to be the result of virus-induced cell death.

+

Second, this suggests a treatment strategy for people with Alzheimer’s-like symptoms — dose ‘em with antivirals. This might slow or stop the disease progression.

+

This result continues a trend. In recent years, several chronic diseases once thought to be much more complex and obscure have turned out to very likely be slow infections. Ulcers, congestive heart failure, and arthritis are among them. Control of infectious pathogens has been receding from the medical limelight since the victories over polio and tuberculosis in my childhood; for this, and other reasons (including the disturbing increase in antibiotic-resistent bacteria) it may now be poised for a comeback.

diff --git a/20090109071912.blog b/20090109071912.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d69ff17 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090109071912.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +My comment to the FCC on DRM +

This comment is not confidential; I grant unconditional permission to republish it in full.

+

DRM is a disaster for everyone involved with it, because it cannot do what it claims but imposes large costs in the process of failing. The people who have sold DRM technologies to Big Media are frauds playing on the ignorance of media executives, and both the media companies and the consumer have suffered greatly and unnecessarily as a result.

+

DRM cannot do what it claims for at least three reasons. First, pirates readily bypass it by duplicating physical media. Second, DRM algorithms cannot “see” any data that the host device does not present to them; thus, they can always be spoofed by a computer emulating an environment in which the DRM algorithm thinks release is authorized. Third, for humans to view or hear the content it must at some point exit the digital realm of DRM to a screen and speakers; re-capturing the data stream at that point bypasses any possible protections.

+

DRM can make casual copying difficult, but cannot thwart any determined attack. Piracy operations operating on a scale sufficient to affect the revenue streams of media companies laugh at DRM. They know it is sucker bait, injuring ordinary consumers but impeding piracy not one bit.

+

In the process of failing, the DRM fraud imposes large costs. DRM makes consumer electronics substantially more expensive, failure-prone, and subject to interoperability failures than it would otherwise be. It makes media content less valuable to honest consumers by making that content difficult to back up, time-shift, or play on “unauthorized” devices. All too commonly, technical failures somewhere in a chain of DRM-equipped hardware lock consumers out of access to content they have paid for even in the manner the vendor originally intended to support.

+

But the worst effect of the DRM fraud is that it generates pressure to cripple general-purpose computers in an attempt to foil emulation attacks. As a society, we can live with silly restrictions on device-shifting the latest blockbuster movie, but we cannot tolerate (for example) attempts to prevent PCs from running software not certified in advance by a consortium of Big Media companies. Yet that – and even more draconian restrictions – is where the logic of the DRM fraud inexorably leads. Such measures have already been advocated under the misleading banner “trusted computing”, and half-attempts at them routinely injure today’s computer users.

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I would not ask the FCC to ban DRM, even if that were within its remit. Markets will teach the media companies that DRM is folly, just as markets taught software companies that “copy protection” was a losing game back in the 1980s. What the federal government can and should do is decline to prop up the DRM fraud with laws or mandates.

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Specifically, if the “broadcast flag” or any other similar measure is again proposed, the FCC should reject it. To the extent that FCC regulatory or administrative action can mitigate the damage and chilling effects caused by the DMCA’s so-called “anti-circumvention” provisions, that should be attempted. Most generally, the FCC should make policy with the understanding that when media companies claim that DRM is useful and effective, they are not only misleading the FCC but deluding themselves.

diff --git a/20090110163711.blog b/20090110163711.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a2d1dd1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090110163711.blog @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +The Politics of Lexicography, or How To Become Normative Without Really Trying +

One of many hats I wear is that of a lexicographer. In 1990 I began maintaining the Jargon File, still available on my website and released as three paper editions in 1991, 1993, and 1996. At the time, I was a bit nervous about what I might learn if a “real” lexicographer ever showed up to critique the work. Would I be told that my efforts were amateurish, shoddy, and marred by methodological error?

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Somewhat to my own surprise, the answer turned out to be not just “no”, but “hell, no!”. As professional lexicographers became aware of my work, not only was it never panned but they actually praised it and adopted it. Rather than tediously multiply examples I’ll jump straight to the top of the lexicographic food chain; I have been assured by editors of no less an authority than the Oxford English Dictionary that they consider the Jargon File a high-quality and reliable source.

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One one level I found this praise a bit disturbing. What kind of parlous shape was the field in that a rank amateur like myself could make such an impression? It seemed to me in some vague way that standards ought to be higher. But as I learned more about the behavior and working methods of actual lexicographers, and how they evaluate work like mine, I began to understand in more detail why they considered the Jargon File authoritative, and that evaluation began to make sense in a larger context.

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Furthermore, I learned that the question of linguistic authority has interesting nuances that most non-lexicographers don’t appreciate — and which, for complicated historical/political reasons, often go unadmitted by lexicographers themselves.

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The question at the bottom of everything I’m going to write about in the rest of this essay is “Who controls the norms of language?”. That is, how do we judge whether a lexical or grammatical usage is correct or incorrect?

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There is a belief, widespread among non-lexicographers, that this sort of question is archaic and disreputable: that lexicographers have abandoned making normative claims and merely survey the drift and trend of popular usage in a completely non-judgmental way.

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This belief is false. It does not describe the actual behavior of lexicographers when they make dictionaries. Rather, it corresponds to an extreme of one position about the source of linguistic authority, which I’ll call the populist position: correct language is what a perceived majority of speakers is using.

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For contrast, I will now describe the other major positions about linguistic authority. Some of these are, for English-speakers anyway, mainly of historical interest. Others are still very much alive among lexicographers, though often semi-covertly for reasons I’ll describe later in the essay. The history of lexicography can be modeled as a sort of tug-of-war between these positions about linguistic authority.

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Please note that in some cases I’ve had to invent terminology for this discussion. All lexicographers would recognize these positions, but not necessarily label them exactly as I do. They tend to show more as revealed preferences than conscious, articulated theory.

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For starters, there’s the elitist position: correct usage is what the King and his court, or more generally the wealthy upper class of the language’s speaking population, is speaking.

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Related, but distinct, is the academic position; correct usage is defined by elite grammarians and lexicographers. In some languages this elite is formally constituted as a language academy; in English, it’s a looser network of communicating scholars that now includes, in a minor and particular way, myself.

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Finally, there is the functionalist position; correct usage is that which increases (or, at least, fails to decrease) the language’s utility as a functional tool of communication.

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Now let’s consider the justifications attached to these positions.

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The elitist position is justified very simply: in a society with a really dominating power elite, you’d bloody well better consider their language “correct” unless you want to spend your life on the outside looking in, on your knees eating mud. The elitist position in this crude a form tends not to survive the impact of industrial revolution and political democratization on language groups.

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In the history of English, however, the elitist position retained a lot of appeal until relatively recently, because it gave the middle classes a way to better themselves, an aspirational target along with upper-class clothes and manners. One might think of this as the Pygmalion effect after George Bernard Shaw’s play (later recast as the musical “My Fair Lady”) which both affirmed and satirized the aspirational use of elite language through the interaction between Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle. Until well into the twentieth century it was quite powerful and retains some force even in the anti-elitist climate of roughly 1960 to the present day.

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The justification for the functionalist position is just as simple: language is a tool for conveying meaning. Changes that increase its capacity to convey useful distinctions are good. Changes that decrease its capacity to convey useful distinctions are bad. Changes that have neither effect are neutral.

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The justification for the academic position is somewhat mixed. In many societies at many times, academic grammarians and lexicographers have viewed it as their job to codify and explain elite speech, both to outsiders and (even more importantly) to the children of the elite itself. Their job was to be maintainers of the elite language construct and even to reinforce its differences from common speech.

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As the prestige of elite speech has fallen, academic grammarians and lexicographers have justified normative control in different ways. One that is still important in (for example) French is a program of purging the language of foreign elements. In English, with its egalitarian societies and tradition of gleefully mugging other languages for their vocabulary items, academic grammarians have fallen back on essentially functionalist arguments for their normative privileges.

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A near archetype for this sort of thinking in English is Strunk & White’s “Elements of Style”: all their prescriptions about speech are justified by arguments about concision, efficiency, and clarity that are functionalist rather than elitist. Significantly, this book premiered in 1918, two years after “Pygmalion”. Both the book and the play were reactions to the fact that the the elite/aspirational rationale for language norms was losing its force.

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The justification for the populist position is even more mixed. At the bottom of it, for most people, is the belief that popular usage always wins in the end, so why fight it? But this isn’t actually even remotely true; as far back as Middle English, academic grammarians imported Latin and French words into English wholesale, and they often displaced more popular “native” words. The anti-populist effect of class stratification has been taken over in our time by mass media, especially television and movies, which have enormous power to ratify minority usages and pronunciations and make them normative.

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The widespread belief that the populists not only do always win but should always win — that no other sources of linguistic authority are legitimate — is essentially a political fashion of the late 20th century, a reaction against earlier elitist thinking. It is, at bottom, also rather fraudulent!

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Crowds don’t write dictionaries, editors do — or, at least editors filter them in critical ways. And yes, this is even true of wiktionaries and works like the Jargon File, not to speak of the really authoritative traditional sources like Oxford’s or Webster’s. Linguistic populism often reduces to a sort of cowardly academicism in which grammarians and the compilers of dictionaries suppress their own, inevitable normative role. In extreme cases they may suppress it from their model even of their own behavior.

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What, then, is an honest lexicographer to do? And how is he to represent what he does?

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The answer, in the early 21st century, is simple: Most grammarians and lexicographers are functionalists pretending (sometimes even to themselves) to be populists. The functionalist prescriptivism of Strunk & White rules actual behavior in making dictionaries and grammars, even as the rhetoric of descriptivism owns the public relations about how the dictionaries are made. And almost everyone else falls for the pretense.

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I am unusual only in that I refuse to pretend, either to myself or to others — and I take heat for it, notably in discussions of loaded terms like “hacker” and “cracker” where I consistently maintain that a usage can be both popular and incorrect. I do so on the functionalist grounds that confusing these terms destroys a useful distinction and violates the norms of the speech community that invented “hacker”.

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To a working lexicographer, these are both excellent arguments. However, lexicographers often, perversely, refuse to cop in public to the fact that they give weight to such arguments, because it’s politically difficult and involves them in distracting disputes with loud and clueless people.

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Now, it would be oversimplifying to say that all lexicographers are closet functionalists and nothing but. In fact, what they tend to use is a weighted sum of all the sources of linguistic authority which varies in interestingly contingent ways. Here’s an example:

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In most dialects of English, the pronouns of second-person plural and second-person singular address are both “you”. There are dialects in which “you” is used as a second-person singular and “you-all” or “y’all” is used as a second-person plural. In a third category of dialects, “you-all” or “y’all” is used for both singular and plural second person.

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A truly extreme functionalist would say that the you-y’all usage should be preferred over both others because it makes a useful speech distinction that is otherwise unavailable. In fact, for this reason I myself often use “y’all” in informal contexts despite the fact that my birth dialect (educated East Coast Middle American) rejects this usage.

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Most lexicographers and grammarians would not go so far as to call this “preferred” or “correct” — the fact that you-you is both majority and elite usage prevents them. However, the functionalist program become clearer when you compare their reactions to the other two; y’all-y’all is more likely to be ignored and condemned when noticed than you-y’all.

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For a simpler example of where functionalism completely overrides populism, consider that the aggressively populist culture of Internet email and forums still repeatedly slams people who confuse “lose” and “loose”, or put apostrophes in plural forms with terminal s. There is a widespread sense that no amount of popular adoption can make these usages correct, and that sense is justified.

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Now we’ll return to the question of why the OED editors consider the Jargon File authoritative. It took me a while to figure this one out, but the answer turns out to start from the following question: supposing you are in fact a lexicographer with a primarily functionalist program, how do you know which distinctions are important?

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Part of the answer turns out to be this: for technical jargon and slang, you consider the purposes and behaviors of the originating speech communities to be normative. Geometers own the meaning of the term “trapezoid”, surfers own the meaning of the term “hang ten”, and people setting themselves in opposition to these meanings, whether deliberately or by mistake, are simply screwing up no matter how popular the erroneous usage may become elsewhere. The application of this principle to the terms “hacker” and “open source” is left as an easy exercise for the reader.

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But even if you have this as a rule, it’s difficult to interrogate an entire speech community about what distinctions and lexical items it considers important. It’s especially difficult when you know that you lack the technical competence to do the interrogation, even if you could round up enough suspects.

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So, when a core member of a specialist community drops a lexicon in your lap, and it exhibits signs of even minimal scholarly care for documenting facts and being up-front about things the editor(s) don’t know, and it becomes clear that the members of the speech community themselves largely consider it correctly descriptive, that’s actually about as good as it ever gets; you are likely to seize on it with glad cries of glee.

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And that’s how I first became an authority…

diff --git a/20090111090505.blog b/20090111090505.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d630f83 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090111090505.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Master Foo and the Nervous Novice +

There was a novice who learned much at the Master’s feet, but felt something to be missing. After meditating on his doubts for some time, he found the courage to approach Master Foo about his problem.

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“Master Foo,” he asked “why do Unix users not employ antivirus programs? And defragmentors? And malware cleaners?”

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Master Foo smiled, and said “When your house is well constructed, there is no need to add pillars to keep the roof in place.”

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The novice replied “Would it not be better to use these things anyway, just to be certain?”

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Master Foo reached for a nearby ball of string, and began wrapping it around the novice’s feet.

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“What are you doing?” the novice asked in surprise.

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Master Foo replied simply: “Tying your shoes.”

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Upon hearing this, the novice was enlightened.

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(Other koans here.)

diff --git a/20090113230931.blog b/20090113230931.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5d22abf --- /dev/null +++ b/20090113230931.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Scenes from Mixed Martial Arts +

There’s a classic Warner Brothers cartoon from 1951 1948 in which Bugs Bunny takes on a huge, evil bruiser of a fighter called the Crusher. One of the funniest bits is a scene where Bugs is grunting and straining in an attempt to shift one of the Crusher’s legs. The viewpoint pans back and we se the Crusher completely ignoring this feeble effort, playing solitaire on the wrestling mat.

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I was in Mixed Martial Arts class tonight, doing the five-minute wrestle for submission (joint lock or choke hold) with an intermediate-level student, and found myself unexpectedly thinking of the Crusher. It happened when the guy I was wrestling with (20-something, good technique, taller than me but a good twenty or thirty pounds lighter) tried to put an arm bar on me.

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In MMA the classic way to work this is to isolate the arm by getting a leg on either side of it, pull the arm towards your head with both hands along your straightened torso, lock the elbow joint and then press down with one forearm while arching your body to put maximum pressure on the joint. My opponent saw the opening went for it, and got his arm bar all nicely set up in the approved manner…

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…and I thought “Where’s my solitaire deck? :-)

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There’s the guy gamely huffing and straining away, thinking he’s accomplishing something. I let him work on it for a bit, thinking tranquil thoughts. Eventually he got my arm twisted around just enough to actually lock the joint, so I took it away from him. No big deal, I just postured up a bit and pulled. There was no way his grip strength, even two-handed, was going to be able to fight my arm and shoulder strength any longer than I let it happen, even if I weren’t using my body weight.

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Heh. Being spastically partially paralyzed in my legs sucks, but there are compensations. This is one of them. There are probably people who can make that move work on me when I’m not cooperating for training purposes, but I haven’t met any of them yet; it would take exceptional skill or strength or (probably) both. That’s a nice tactical advantage to take into the ring.

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He tried it again about thirty seconds later; same result. I was fine with that; any time you can get your opponent to expend energy to no purpose it’s a win. I’ve found that, especially in fighting younger guys filled with testosterone and a need to prove something, it’s good strategy to deadweight on them — let them expend energy, let them pull moves that don’t actually get a submission, and use my torso mass as much as possible to drag on them and make them tired.

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You don’t necessarily get physical submission that way, but you can get psychological collapse of the will to fight surprisingly often. The younger they are, the faster that tends to happen. Post-adolescents have good wind and physical stamina but, as a rule, their will is weak. Or perhaps “brittle” would be a better adjective; they lack mental toughness, what chessplayers call sitzfleisch.

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I’ve observed this before when doing striking arts, but the effect seems to be amplified in close-contact styles. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe there’s an evolved mechanism that encourages submission to older males?

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Anyway, it was all good clean fun. And this guy didn’t collapse, bless him; he eventually figured out he wasn’t going to out-power me until hell had been frozen over for at least three days and switched to trying to out-speed me. Good move — he managed to work a light choke hold just before the (figurative) bell rang.

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Later update: One of my regular commenters observes that is sounds like I dominated this guy for 4:30 and then let him win. Nope, he won fair and square by getting inside my OODA loop. I’d say I learned a lesson from this, except I didn’t; I already know from experience in other styles that I can be defeated that way by someone with significantly better technique or speed. And I’ve only been fighting in this style for six weeks, so it’s more or less how I expect people to beat me. Six months from now I’ll have muscle memory for basic moves and counters, and I’ll be much harder to take that way.

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I like this style. When I get enough clues about technique I believe I’m going to be very good at it.

diff --git a/20090119110507.blog b/20090119110507.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..52ef6b1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090119110507.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +The present war in Gaza +

Some commenters have asked me to express a position on the war in Gaza.

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My position is this: if there’s an archetype of a “just war”, this is damn close to it. The Israelis are responding to a clear, present, and lethal danger to the mass of their citizenry – rockets fired indiscriminately at their civilian population. Hamas’s statements and behavior (including more firing of rockets at civilians during humanitarian truces) give Israel every reason to believe that no means short of a war to destroy Hamas can end the threat. Israel’s tactics are appropriate to the objective of the war – there is no pattern of intentional killing of civilians.

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The behavior of Hamas has been as vile as we might expect, hiding command bunkers under hospitals and siting mortars in residences and schools. Under the Geneva Convention and the customary laws of war, civilian casualties from Israeli fire missions to neutralize these sites are war crimes, all right, but they are war crimes by Hamas and not by Israel. Indeed, under the customary law of war the Israelis have behaved with commendable restraint.

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The behavior of the international press has also been as vile as we might expect, in general uncritically retailing the Hamas propaganda line. The U.N. has, unusually, failed to descend to quite as wretched a depth, probably because Israel has the tacit backing of most of the Arab countries and Fatah.

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I wish the Israelis all good fortune in smashing Hamas utterly. The world will be improved by it, both because the destruction of any violent Islamic fundamentalist group is a service to peace and for the message it will send to fundamentalists less violent. The lesson Islam needs in order to learn moderation is simple: to wage jihad against the West is to be defeated and to die. Let us hope it is learned before they get nuclear weapons and the stakes become genocidal.

diff --git a/20090126151158.blog b/20090126151158.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..72ce713 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090126151158.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +The sound of empire falling, episode 2 +

From “200 Laptops Break a Business Model” in the pages of the New York Times:

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+So who’s up, who’s down and who’s out this time around? Microsoft’s valuable Windows franchise appears vulnerable after two decades of dominance. Revenue for the company’s Windows operating system fell for the first time in history in the last quarter of 2008. The popularity of Linux, a free operating system installed on many netbooks instead of Windows, forced Microsoft to lower the prices on its operating system to compete. +

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Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin!

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Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma concluded six years ago that Linux and open source seemed to be executing a classic low-end disruption on Windows and closed-source technology. But it hardly took the man who formulated the concept of “disruptive technology” to notice this; it seemed obvious to me as well on reading his book, and not in the least controversial to the many business audiences I later exposed to the idea.

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What Christensen could have added, but didn’t, is that the crisis moment when an incumbent’s market collapses is more likely to occur during an economic downturn when all potential buyers are feeling increasing pressure to cut costs. The NYT article marshals the evidence that, for Microsoft (and possibly for other tech companies like Intel dependent on high-margin flagship products with low-margin competitors), that moment may be arriving now.

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In normal or boom conditions, the Vista debacle might have mattered much less to Microsoft. In the days when the company was sitting on a $60 billion dollar cash reserve Bill Gates used to boast that he could run the company for five years with zero revenue. That would have been enough coding time to write a new OS core from scratch, if need be. But that hoard is now mostly gone, spent on stock buybacks and acquisitions that have proved uniformly unsuccessful and a net drag on the company’s core Windows and Office business. Thus, MSFT is running out of room to maneuver.

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If today were still normal or boom conditions, a collapse in Microsoft’s market share might benefit Apple as much or more than the open-source community. But downturns hurt high-cost, high-margin products more than commodity equivalents. Apple is paying the price for its luxury-good positioning now as it reports that revenue from its desktop line fell 31 percent this last year, and its laptop share is being hurt by cheap netbooks.

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The one benefit of recessions is that they squeeze inefficiencies out of the market. As cost pressures mount, paying the license fees to shoehorn Vista or XP onto netbooks is going to look less attractive to the vendors and Linux will probably regain much of the the 100% share of that segment it had when this class of machines was first introduced. Microsoft will only be able to forestall this the way it pried loose the netbook market a year ago, by subsidizing the netbook vendors to the point where the net cost of an XP or Vista license is effectively zero. But that tactic can only be sustained for as long as Microsoft can afford to make no actual profit on the only market segment that is actually showing growth.

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Extrapolating from Gates’s implication of about a $12B-per-year burn rate, MSFT’s cash reserve gives it about 20 months of burn time at this point. Adding what it can make on per-seat corporate licenses and the Vista-boggle during that time obviously isn’t coming up with a figure that makes the company’s financial mandarins happy, or MSFT wouldn’t have announced its first round of layoffs ever – and, of course, it missed their earnings-per-share target for the first time, too. I know how these people are trained to think and what kind of discount on future outcomes they apply, having been a director of a publicly-held company myself, so I’m pretty certain from their recent behavior that Microsoft’s own planners aren’t giving the company more than 30 months to live without one of (a) a major product success, (b) a return to market conditions that make customers much less price sensitive, or (c) a harsh restructuring of MSFT to cut its costs and run rate.

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Right now, there is absolutely nobody who thinks the IT or consumer market is going to be back to anything like boom conditions in 30 months – and even if it did, price ceilings would have been reset by the expectation consumers are re-forming around $200 netbooks. There’s simply not enough room in a $200 bill of materials to sustain Microsoft’s business model. as I’ve been pointing out for nearly a decade and the NYT has just noticed.

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Therefore, the scenario MSFT has to pin their hopes on combines major success for Windows 7 with a drastic downsizing of Microsoft so it can run on the seriously compressed revenue stream that is all netbook-land will afford. Viewed from this angle, Microsoft’s recent behavior makes complete sense. But there is no certainty that this strategy will land MSFT with a sustainable business model within its burnout time. And, even if we assume that it can, there is zero margin for error on the way there. Even one serious shock, such as a Vista-like failure of Windows 7 to gain traction, will sink them.

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It’s also worth bearing in mind that if my model is wrong it’s likely to be because MSFT’s cash reserve and sustaining revenue streams both continued to erode after the most recent date for which I have solid information (November 2008). Under plausible but less optimistic assumptions (e.g. assuming their cash hoard has continued to decline since November at the same rate it did over the last two years, they keep missing earnings targets, and cutting operating costs proves difficult) they may not have 30 months to recover but as little as 18.

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This is how empires fall. Until the last minute it is difficult to see what’s coming, because they tend to hollow out from within long before the damage becomes obvious from outside. Microsoft lost its battle of the Teutoburger Wald when it failed to prevent Linux from going mainstream in enterprise computing around 2003. Now, with the layoffs and the first-time fall in Windows revenues, we’re seeing the retreat from the Antonine Wall to Hadrian’s.

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As the final collapse nears, each successive retrenchment will come faster. If history repeats itself exactly, the splitting of the eagle into a Western (Windows) and an Eastern (Office) empire may be the next major step, with the Western Empire collapsing shortly afterwards and periodic attempts by Easterners to recapture the OS market coming to nothing. But here I veer off into fancy…

diff --git a/20090131140742.blog b/20090131140742.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d496b60 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090131140742.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Warmed-over Vista +

OK, it’s now definite. Windows 7 is gonna suck, and suck hard.

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The plausible suspicion all along has been that it’s the Vista codebase with a superficial paint job. Now it appears there are holes in the paint; the public Windows 7 beta describes itself as Vista.

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A Slashdot article parses the hints that there will be no beta 2, nor a release candidate 2 – they’re going to go straight to a full production release within a few months. There is no possible way for Microsoft to address architecture-level problems, fix the driver model, or claw back their lost application compatibility in that time. In effect, Windows 7 will be a Vista service pack with a fancy new brand on it.

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Microsoft is behaving as though it believes that Vista’s problems were nothing but PR, and that by rebranding and spinning up the hype engines they can overcome those. The results when this strategy collides with reality should be … entertaining, to say the least.

diff --git a/20090206125414.blog b/20090206125414.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3d7f051 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090206125414.blog @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +What I do for Wesnoth +

Several of my regular commenters have expressed interest in Battle For Wesnoth and my role in it. I’ll give a narrative summary of my role in the project, expanding on a comment I uttered a while back.

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For the narrative to make sense, you need to know that Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game with a fantasy setting. It has elements of both traditional hex wargame and role-playing game in it; a “campaign” is a collection of tactical puzzles knit together by a prose plot. There is also support for multiplayer-networked battles, but I’m mainly interested in the campaign game.

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Campaigns are written in a domain-specific language called WML, Wesnoth Markup Language. The game engine is, essentially, a WML interpreter. WML supports designing maps, setting up army lists, and connecting the battles with a prose narrative (which need not be strictly linear — it’s common for campaigns to have multiple narrative paths dependent on player choices). Additional flavor is provided by animated sprite graphics for combat and background music of remarkably high quality, neo-classical orchestral pieces that will remind you of the better grade of movie soundtrack rather than the mediocre electronica you usually get in games.

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It’s all open source., with ports for OS X and Windows as well as Linux.

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I’ve been a dev for a bit less than two years. My first project was helping prepare the “Northern Rebirth” campaign to be mainlined (e.g shipped with the game as opposed to unofficial user-maintained content). I did a lot of prose-doctoring on NR, enough that I was declared a co-author by its originator. He’s retired from Wesnoth stuff and I maintain it now.

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A major focus of my early work on the project was mainlining more campaigns. When I joined we shipped only six, and I went through them pretty rapidly – I felt like the amount of content Wesnoth had was really underutilizing the game engine. I quickly discovered that the other devs were resistent to mainlining more campaigns mainly because each one imposed continuing maintenance overhead, if only because the WML they’re written in evolves gradually as the devs extend it to do more things.

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Consequently, I got heavily into writing tools to mechanize routine WML maintenance tasks. A cross-referencer, to check for dangling reference (nonexistent graphics and other resource files referred to in WML). An indenter — there was a confusion of different indenting styles in mainline, making the code harder to read. Most importantly, I wrote a lint-like tool that could both perform extensive semantic sanity checks on WML and lift constructs from older dialects of it into newer versions.

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The effect of these tools was pretty dramatic. They reduced WML maintenance overhead by an order of magnitude or so, making it easy for us to ship a lot more campaigns – I successfully mainlined no fewer than seven written by other people and eventually wrote and mainlined an original one of my own, The Hammer of Thursagan. They also made it possible to evolve WML more rapidly, because I could be counted on to write lifting logic in my lint tool that would carry forward old campaigns mechanically, rather than requiring painful and error-prone hand-work .when the language or the layout of the game data tree changed.

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As my original surge of work on these tools trailed off, I took on a very different task – improving the prose quality in the game. Though the working language of the project is English, most of the devs and campaign designs are not native speakers and the quality of their prose is highly variable. Then, too, the appropriate style for a game like this is not all that easy to generate even for literate native speakers.

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I felt strongly that playing a Wesnoth campaign ought to be like reading an epic-fantasy novel in miniature. I say “miniature” because the campaign format doesn’t really allow paragraph upon paragraph of voluminous scene-setting and character development – you have to do a lot with a really low word-count, rather like building a ship in a bottle. It’s even more of a challenge if you think (as I do) that the prose ought to have a preceptible flavor of Tolkien, Eddison, and Dunsany about it. Or, if one can’t manage that, at least Robert E. Howard…

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Revising the mainline prose content to meet my standards was an immense amount of work and isn’t quite finished yet even for the older content. Fortunately, the other devs and our campaign designers quickly noticed that this project was a Good Thing and were, in general, actively helpful and not at all territorial about having their prose rewritten. As a side-effect, I became the project’s go-to guy for all English-related issues — I help non-native speakers with vocabulary and have been asked to write the announcement for the upcoming major 1.6 release.

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Along the way I’ve done some writing I’m rather proud of. Kalenz’s and Cleodil’s love scene in Legend of Wesmere; the final confrontation between the mage Delfador and arch-villain Ihiah-Malal, also in LoW; the Elven lady Ethiliel’s horrifying reunion with her former mentor, the mad undead sage Mal M’Brin, in The South Guard; the death of Mal-Ravanal in Eastern Invasion and the Epilogue that follows; Mal Keshar’s monologue about how he got expelled from the Academy on Alduin in Descent Into Darkness; and, most recently the scene at the tomb of An-Usrukhar from the not-yet-mainlined Delfador’s Memoirs.

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(I am, however, only the second-best writer the project has had available. The best was the author of The Rise of Wesnoth. He actually made successful, fluid transitions between archaized high-fantasy prose and humorous snarkiness expressed in modern slang, something I’m not at all sure I could do gracefully and have been too chicken to try. He also wrote what I think is the single creepiest line in the entire corpus, in A Final Spring, from the undead Fool Prince: “”Fath-er! Join… us…” Brrr….)

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A third hat I eventually took on was bug triage. While all the senior devs do a bit of this, I’m the person who does most of the filtering and dispatching of tracker issues to developers. I’ve also organized at least three major bug-stomping runs and personally nailed a count of bugs running well into three digits. I did the forensic analysis and organized the recovery a few month ago when now-vanished developer seriously broke the game’s AI.

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At one point I overhauled the game’s visible UI pretty seriously. The translucent dialogue windows with lightweight click-to-next behavior were my doing. I’m also responsible for the review mode you enter when you finish a battle, which lets you review the end state and change settings before committing to go to the next scenario.

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More recently I’ve been more or less dubbed the keeper of the history and geography of the Wesnoth setting. Some of this is because I’m unusually willing to sweat the details of getting an imaginary setting consistent, but a surprisingly large part of it is that I’m good at generating plausible names — the Estmarks, the Forest of Lintanir, the Heart Mountains, Bitterhold, and the River Listra were among mine. Campaign designers have learned to use me as a name generator for their characters and places.

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Now for the things I don’t do:

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Though I’ve my share of coding in the C++ core (I have to in order to chase bugs, and there was the UI overhaul, and then there was refactoring the map editor…), I avoid it as much as possible because I’ve grown to violently dislike C++ during my time on this project. Wesnoth has many virtues, but the core codebase is a pile of OO scar tissue with way too many deeply intertwingled classes. I know the developers and I blame the language; it seems as difficult to avoid this kind of excess in C++ as it is to write readable code in Perl.

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Though I’ve contributed one terrain-tile graphic (the snow-covered stone hut) following an enjoyable frankensteining session with the GIMP, I’m not skilled enough as a visual artist or composer to contribute that stuff regularly.

diff --git a/20090209044610.blog b/20090209044610.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1e34065 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090209044610.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Return of the Hex Wargame? +

Some months ago I wrote about the death of the hex-wargame hobby and the subsequent evolution of the Eurogame. In that posting, I expressed the hope that the popularity of Commands and Colors: Ancients and Memoir ’44 might herald a revival of the hex wargame.

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There have been some encouraging signs since.One, local to where I live, is that CC:A has become quite popular at my local Friday night gaming group. I bring in my tacklebox full of the base game and all three expansions every week and can generally count on a game with at least one of four people I’ve turned on to it. This is in a group that had been pretty strongly focused on non-combat Eurogames.

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Another is that GMT Games, the publishers of CC:A, shows every sign of prospering. While they produce some games at the low-complexity, “family” end of the market, the bulk of their line is crunchy, historically rich games like CC:A. The fact that they have a viable business selling these at $40 and up a pop seems an indication of a lot of pent-up demand for high-quality wargames.

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I was introduced to another of their games last week: Maneuver, themed on the set-piece battles of the Napoleonic wars. Like CC:A it’s a clever, minimalist design that uses simple card-driven mechanics, leadership rules, and variable maps to capture the feel of its era rather effectively. Stratego for grown-ups, one might say.

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But one healthy company does not an industry make, so it’s good to know that they’ve got competition from the likes of Decision Games. If anything, DG seems even more focused on hex-gamer grognards than GMT is. It even appears they’ve resurrected Strategy & Tactics, the wargames magazine with a game in every issue whose rise and fall was almost synonymous with the health of the entire genre in the 1970s and 1980s.

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Some readers may be wondering…in a world full of computer games that can simulate in greater detail, and MMORPGs that can offer a richer social experience, why games like these still have a place. In truth, nothing quite matches the contest of minds you get in face-to-face play with single opponent. Old-school hex wargames peserve some of the virtues of playing chess. And, like chess, they can have a depth and richness that more elaborate simulations don’t, necessarily. There is virtue in the fact that you and the opponent are running the simulation yourselves, and can see all the way down to the bottom of the game’s simulation model.

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The remarkable thing about 21st-century wargames, compared to the old-school ones I cut my teeth on 30 years ago, is how much simpler they manage to be to play while preserving a sense of period verismilitude. Part of this has been enabled by huge decreases in the cost of producing custom components. Whereas back in the old days it was all black-and-white printing and cascades of result tables for 6-sided dice, modern designers can express a similar degree of simulation complexity with a much wider range of playing aids that package it in a simpler user interface – polyhedral dice for differing normal distribution curves, custom dice like CC:A’s with the results right on the faces, big decks of tactics cards as in CC:A and Maneuver.

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At the extreme of this is games like my friend Ken Burnside’s Attack Vector: Tactical, a space-combat game that manages to package 3D Newtonian kinematics in such a way that players can simulate physically realistic spaceship movement without mathematics! But most of the new-school games owe more to the mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons than to Newton; in Maneuver, for example, the combat power of a group is represented by a number of polyhedral dice to roll – more dice for more power, larger dice for an increase in variation between best possible and worst possible results.

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The most prevalent theme in the new games, however, may be card-driven mechanics. Where old-school wargames resolved actions by comparing dice rolls, new-school ones are likely to supplement or replace this with mechanics involving action cards – attack cards, defense cards, instant modifiers that can be played after a combat has been declared to change the odds, etc. This style of course owes much to Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games, but games like CC:A and Maneuver show that wargame designers have naturalized the idea.

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One significant effect of the new-school mechanics is that today’s wargames tend to play significantly faster than their ancestors. Typical playing time for an SPI game from days of yore was in the 2-3 hour range; modern equivalents often speed by in 90 minutes. And it’s not that they involve fewer turns per game, either, but that the turns take on average about half the time they would have in older games. Since humans haven’t changed their thinking speed, what this means is that setup and combat resolution have become much faster.

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It’s an interesting question whether the new-school wargames will ever achieve the kind of mass-market traction some of the old ones did. At the height of the first wave around 1977, Squad Leader could sell 200K copies. It is doubtful any of the new-school wargames have yet sold at even a tenth of that volume, and there are many more forms of entertainment competing for discretionary dollars today. Still, it makes me glad that outfits like GMT Games and Decision Games are trying.

diff --git a/20090212050301.blog b/20090212050301.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4e1eb8d --- /dev/null +++ b/20090212050301.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Translation Errors +

God Wants You Dead is an entertaining and subversive little book that reminded me of a well-known controversy in the translation of the Judeo-Christian Bible. Most educated people probably know that in Isaiah 7:14 it is prophesied that the Messiah will be born of an ‘almah’ of the House of David — and thereby hangs an ambiguity over which much ink and blood have been spilled.

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Reading this, I was reminded of something most people don’t know — that a similar translation problem lurks even nearer the root of Christian theology…

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The word ‘almah’ in Hebrew is ambiguous in much the same way ‘maiden’ is in English; it can mean “young woman” or it can mean “virgin”. Christian translations render it as ‘virgin’, interpreting it as a prophecy of the birth of Yeshua bar-Yosif, later called Jesus the Christ. This prophecy, is, in effect, conjured up out of what might be a translation error.

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Here are two more facts known to many educated people:

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1. The Christians did not begin to arrive at a settlement of the question of the divinity of Jesus until surprisingly late – the council of Nicaea in AD 325, and important controversies remained live until the Third Council of Constantinople in 680.

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2. The original Aramaic-speaking Christians of Palestine having been effectively wiped out in the aftermath of the Bar Kokba revolt in AD 70, Christianity was re-founded by Paul of Tarsus among speakers of Koine Greek. The entire New Testament is written in Koine Greek.

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Now here are two facts generally known only among a handful of specialist scholars. I picked them up through omnivorous reading and did not fully realize their significance for a long time.

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3. In other Aramaic sources roughly contemporary with the New Testament, the phrase “Son of God” occurs as an idiom for “guru” or “holy man”. Thus, if Jesus refers to himself as “the son of God”, the Aramaic sense is arguably “the boss holy man”.

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4. The Koine Greek of the period, on the other hand, did not have this idiom.

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Now, imagine a Koine speaker reading the lost Aramaic source documents of which the Gospels are redactions, with only an indifferent command of the latter language He does not know that “Son of God” is an idiom…

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Yes, that’s right. I’m suggesting that Jesus got deified by a translation error!

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(Correction: The Bar Kokba revolt was AD 132; I was confusing it with the revolt of AD 70 in which the Temple at Jerusalem was destroyed.)

diff --git a/20090223072138.blog b/20090223072138.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9db5f94 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090223072138.blog @@ -0,0 +1,94 @@ +Why GPSes suck, and what to do about it +

I’m the lead of the GPSD project, a service daemon that monitors GPS receivers on serial or USB ports and provides TPV (time-position-velocity) reports in a simple format on on a well-known Internet port. GPSD makes this job looks easy. But it’s not — oh, it’s decidedly not — and thereby hangs an entertaining tale of hacker ingenuity versus multiple layers of suck.

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Away back in the dark and backward abysm of time when GPS technology was first being made generally available (1993), only military-grade receivers were sensitive enough to use it where there were things like buildings and trees partly blocking the sky view. The first civilian customers to actually find a use for it were people messing about in boats. Thus it came to pass that the manufacturers of marine navigation systems were the first civilians to grapple with the question of how a GPS receiver should report TPV information over a wire to a navigational computer.

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Our first layer of suck begins with the National Marine Electronics Association, or NMEA. They wrote a standard describing a protocol for GPSes reporting over serial ports called NMEA 0183 which, despite being a technical expert in the field, I’ve never dared to look at. The reason is that they made it proprietary and expensive, and their lawyers have been known to threaten legal action against people who quote it on the net.

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To add injury to insult, NMEA 0183 was (and still is) a crappy standard. How crappy? Well, before I get into that, let’s note that there is one thing NMEA did right that later attempts to replace it got wrong. Each NMEA report is a text packet, or sentence, that begins with a dollar sign and ends with a carriage-return and line feed. The data elements in in NMEA sentences are just text fields separated by commas, like this:

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   $GPRMC,225446.33,A,4916.45,N,12311.12,W,000.5,054.7,191194,020.3,E,A*68
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This means that log files of collected NMEA sentences are easy to read and edit. And that number on the right-hand end, after the “*” but before the CRLF? A data checksum, so you can tell whether you have a valid sentence or just line noise (and this is important: we’ll come back to it later). A GPS speaking NMEA emits sentences like this onto the wire, usually in once-per-second bursts.

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The first layer of suck actually begins with what NMEA 0183 has you put in those packets. If you are a mathematician, you have a pretty good notion of what a TPV report is. It’s a 7-tuple describing your position in four dimensions and your velocity in three. If you are an engineer or the more practical sort of physicist, you want to add expected-error estimates at some fixed confidence level, usually 50% or 95%, and return 14 numbers .

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Internally, this is what a GPS sensor computes from the signal times to GPS satellites. Actually, to be pedantic, it doesn’t compute the error bars in exactly this form; rather, you get scale factors for the errors derived from the geometry of the satellites when the fix was taken, and have to multiply that by an experimentally-derived bugger factor dependent on things like how turbulent the radio-reflecting layer in the ionosphere is.

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Now let’s look at what NMEA 0183 tells GPS devices to actually report. Here is a breakdown of the data in our sample sentence, which is in fact the most commonly used GPS reporting format for TPV:

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+1     225446.33   Time of fix 22:54:46 UTC
+2     A           Status of Fix: A = Autonomous, valid; 
+                  D = Differential, valid; V = invalid
+3,4   4916.45,N   Latitude 49 deg. 16.45 min North
+5,6   12311.12,W  Longitude 123 deg. 11.12 min West
+7     000.5       Speed over ground, Knots
+8     054.7       Course Made Good, True north
+9     181194      Date of fix  18 November 1994
+10,11 020.3,E     Magnetic variation 20.3 deg East
+12    A           FAA mode indicator (NMEA 2.3 and later)
+                   A=autonomous, D=differential, E=Estimated,
+                   N=not valid, S=Simulator, M=Manual input mode
+13   *68          Mandatory NMEA checksum
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Alert readers will notice what’s missing here. Altitude, for starters — we’ve got no Z! People in boats, remember? They think they don’t need no steenking altitude. And no error estimates at all. And the T report is incomplete, giving only a two-digit year. Yup, that one got annoying real fast when the millennium turned. And it’s not like the designers couldn’t see that coming in 1993.

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Eventually, NMEA wised up about the altitude thing. The sane way to proceed would have been to define a new sentence containing all the GPRMC information, plus altitude, plus a real four-digit year, even if error bars had to remain suppressed for some inexplicable reason. Here’s what we got instead:

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+$GPGGA,123519,4807.038,N,01131.324,E,1,08,0.9,545.4,M,46.9,M, , *42
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+1     123519       Fix taken at 12:35:19 UTC
+2,3   4807.038,N   Latitude 48 deg 07.038' N
+4,5   01131.324,E  Longitude 11 deg 31.324' E
+6     1            Fix quality: 0 = invalid, 1 = GPS, 2 = DGPS,
+                     3=PPS (Precise Position Service),
+                     4=RTK (Real Time Kinematic) with fixed integers,
+                     5=Float RTK, 6=Estimated, 7=Manual, 8=Simulator
+7     08           Number of satellites being tracked
+8     0.9          HDOP = Horizontal dilution of position
+9,10  545.4,M      Altitude, Metres above mean sea level
+11,12 46.9,M       Height of geoid (mean sea level) above WGS84
+                   ellipsoid, in Meters
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Now we’ve got X, Y, and Z…but T is even more damaged! You get a time of day, no month, no year, no century. No velocity report at all. We’ve got one number, HDOP, that tangles EDX and EDY together to give a circular horizontal error. And despite the fact that this sentence reports an altitude (Z), there’s an EDX/EDY and no report of EDZ!

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For some inexplicable reason, NMEA also describes a GPGLL sentence that has all the brain-damage of GPGGA, but without the altitude. And a GPVTG that gives only a velocity report – no position, and naturally no error bars. Do I need to add that both have missing or incomplete timestamps? And oh, yes, there are actually two different incompatible variants of GPVTG.

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Remember I said GPS receivers emit bursts of NMEA packets once a second? Well, the bursts typically consist of a GPRMC, followed by a GGA, possibly followed by a GPGLL and/or GPVTG. Er, no, I’m lying, they could be in a different order. The sentences in the burst have overlapping, incomplete information. The NMEA standard doesn’t specify even which ones must be sent, let alone the order they’re sent in.

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Some NMEA GPSes part-repair the timestamp damage by shipping a sentence called GPZDA that gives you a full UTC timestamp with century. But the standard doesn’t require it, and most don’t, so you can’t count on it.

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The first layer of suck was about what NMEA 0183 specifies. We are now passing into the second layer of suck, which is what it doesn’t specify. Like, the minimum set of sentences that have to be sent per reporting cycle. Oh, and nothing in the standard stops a GPS from simply omitting fields it doesn’t feel like reporting. It’s fairly common, for example, for receivers to not report magnetic variation or geoid separation (the geoid is an imaginary surface representing the difference between mean sea level and local sea level, which varies because the earth’s mass is not uniformly distributed.). GPS designers can save some absurdly tiny fraction of a penny per unit by not having these data tables in ROM, and they’re generally more than willing to shaft their customers to do it.

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A mob of crack-smoking rhesus monkeys could have designed a better standard than NMEA 0183. It means that if you want to assemble a proper TPV report from NMEA sentences, you actually need to wait until you’ve seen an entire reporting cycle. Only…you can’t tell without knowing the type and firmware version of the GPS which sentences start and end the cycle! And even if you did know, buffering the partial data introduces latency that may be unacceptable for some applications.

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A very practical way this manifests is that if you have a GPS client faithfully reporting the NMEA sentences coming over the wire, your altitude will typically flicker from known to unknown and back twice a second as it gets hit by alternating GPRMC and GPGGA sentences. That is, unless you buffer, in which case the altitude you see could be up to one second stale and associated with a previous fix.

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The incomplete timestamps mean various sorts of lossage can bite you if you have a GPS client active at midnight. Unless your software is actually watching for the moment when the GGA timestamp goes to 00:00:00 and can compensate, it’s going to look like you’ve dropped back in time 24 hours until the GPRMC next comes in. Human eyes can just reject this, but what if you’re logging telemetry and try to graph against time? Similar anomalies lurk at the edges of years and centuries.

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Yes, and if you want to report true altitude over ground correctly and consistently across devices, you better have your own geoidal separation table in software somewhere.

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And I have nowhere near plumbed the stygian depths of the NMEA standard’s top two layers of suck. To spare the reader’s sanity, we shall lightly draw a veil over the spiky, vague, ill-documented horror that is NMEA error and status reporting and pass directly to the third layer of NMEA suck, the complete absence of any standardization of GPS control codes.

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Here are some of the more important things there is no NMEA-standard way to tell a GPS to do:

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  1. Report its vendor, model, and firmware version.
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  2. Change the set of sentences it ships per cycle.
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  3. Change the baud rate at which it reports.
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  4. Change the number of samples it reports per second.
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Of these, (1) is the most harmless-looking, but actually the deadliest. Many GPSes have vendor-defined commands to do (2) and (3), but it is far from trivial to figure out which set of vendor-defined commands might apply. If you are a GPS-using application, and you are handed the name of a port with a GPS on it, you have to either settle for the minimum common subset of GPS behaviors, or throw all the vendor-specific ID probes you know of at the device hoping it will respond to one of them. Hint: too often, it won’t.

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But wait. Things get worse!

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There are, broadly speaking, three major different ways that GPS vendors could have responded to the admitted fact that NMEA 0183, as given, is a festering pile of rancid camel vomit.

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  1. They could have pressured NMEA into cleaning up the damn standard.
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  2. They could have de-facto standardized on a decent set of extensions using the NMEA sentence packet format – a sentence that reports all 14 location parameters, a probe-for-ID query, a standard baud-rate change, etc.
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  3. Or…they could invent a dozen mutually incompatible and poorly documented proprietary binary protocols, all of which throw away the transparency advantages of the NMEA textual packet format and each one of which introduces unique and special brain-damage of its own!
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Guess which alternative most of them chose. Just guess…

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You are now in a twisty maze of GPS reporting protocols, all different. Many devices have two different operating modes, one in which they emit NMEA packets and one in which they emit a vendor binary protocol that looks like nothing so much as line noise. At least one major vendor has dropped NMEA support entirely. If your location-sensitive application is naively expecting NMEA, you lose.

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To be fair, one things the vendor binary protocols generally get right that NMEA doesn’t is shipping something close to a full TPV in one sentence per cycle. This at least avoids the nasty problems associated with integrating partial NMEA reports and worries about where the start of cycle is. However, I had to say “something close”; not one protocol ships the full and correct TPV 14-tuple. Usually one or more velocity components and error estimates are missing and have to be computed.

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Let’s back off at this point and consider how people who use GPS sensors would, ideally, like their GPS sensors to behave. You plug it in, your software figures out what protocol it’s using, autoconfigures to match it, and starts collecting TPV reports and using them.

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If “your software” is a GPSD-enabled application on a system with gpsd installed, it actually works this way. Those of you who have been following our descent into this fourth major layer of suck can be excused for wondering how in the flipping hell GPSD ever managed this trick in the twisty maze of vendor protocols, all different.

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Certainly the vendors aren’t being much help here. Many of them (I’m looking at you, Garmin!) are cheerfully willing to assume that you will never use anything but their one idiosyncratic piece of GPS hardware, and that it will only talk to a limited, vendor-controlled selection of closed-source binary blobs provided by them or their business partners. Hello, vendor lock-in; goodbye, customer choice.

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There is an Ariadne’s thread through this maze. It’s this: All the vendor protocols, like NMEA 0183, use packets with checksums and fixed header/trailer bytes. The intention is that they’re an integrity check so you don’t get fooled by line-noise-induced glitches. The side effect is that, if you’re sufficiently clever, you can do GPS protocol autodetection on the fly. It takes a fairly complex state machine that tangles together structural knowledge about every packet protocol in your supported set, but it can be done. In GPSD-land we call this piece of code the packet sniffer.

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There’s something else the packet-sniffer does: it autobauds. Again, this is only possible because packet checksumming gives you a way to know for sure when you’re looking at valid data. When a serial GPS device is presented to gpsd, the packet sniffer doesn’t have to be told the baud rate the device is shipping at – it cycles through all possible combinations of speed, parity and stop bits looking for a combination under which it sees valid packets of some type. Normally this takes less than a second.

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The packet sniffer is the real reason for the existence of gpsd — and I’d add “other programs like it”, except that there aren’t any others that I know of. Long ago, all the gpsd daemon did was serve as a multiplexer that read and buffered TPV reports from a single serial device so that several GPSD-aware applications could get simultaneous access to them. That’s all GPSD’s closest competitors today, like Gypsy, can do; they’re NMEA multiplexers. They typically can’t cope with non-NMEA devices at all; no packet sniffer.

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The gpsd daemon also copes with the data management problems surrounding NMEA partial TPV reports, doing everything from supplying missing geoidal separation for altitude to computing and reporting error estimates from the geometry of the satellite skyview if the GPS doesn’t supply them.

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Most of the suck surrounding GPSes can be summed up by “all this cleverness is actually necessary if you want to get clean TPV data out of more than one different kind of device”, or even out of just one kind of device that fails to supply a complete TPV. And, as we’ve noted, all of them fail in a dizzying variety of ways.

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It’s true that in theory, every single GPS-aware application could include its own packet sniffer, the matrix algebra needed to compute missing error estimates, its own geoidal separation table, and all the other random logic needed to cope even with GPSes that are working nominally correctly. But have we mentioned yet that some…don’t? We know of at least three circumstances under which popular GPS chipsets return un-obviously corrupted NMEA – detectable, but you actually have to know how. Then there’s one chipset we know of that returns incorrect packet checksums when it doesn’t have a fix.

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And we’re not done yet, because there at least two other sets of issues about extracting sense from these devices. One set is an artifact of the way USB GPSes are put together. Now, USB is generally a good thing in this context; unlike old-school serial ports, USB devices raise notification events on connect and disconnect, which clever GPS software can listen for and use to automatically hook up and sync to GPS sensors when they’re available.

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However…naked GPS chips report serial data at TTL levels. The standard way to build a USB GPS is to hook up your GPS chip with a serial-to-USB bridge; there’s one in particular called a Prolific Logic 2303 that tends to show up on about 70% of the USB GPSes out there. There are two problems with this kind of design, one obvious and one subtle.

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The subtle one is that both the bridge and the UART on the GPS chip have their own data buffers. Under most circumstances this doesn’t matter because the introduced latency from both together is very small – but some control operations (notably the serial-speed changes you’re going to be doing while you try to sync up with the device) need an amount of delay sufficient to flush both, otherwise you get odd race conditions that can result in garbage data coming back up the wire or your control operation silently failing.

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The right combinations of OS-level buffer flushes and delays will avoid this problem, but clumsy ways to do it cause fix latency and application slowdown. The comment explaining these issues in the GPSD code leads off with “Serious black magic begins here.” and continues for 48 lines — because it needs to.

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(This isn’t the worst thing you have to be careful of while hunting, though. Some Bluetooth GPSes with defective firmware will actually go so badly catatonic if you try to change their baud rate that you actually have to crack the case and unsolder the battery to unbrick them!).

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Here’s the more obvious USB problem: there is no USB device class for GPSes. A USB GPS will present the vendor/product ID of the serial-to-USB converter. This means that, even if you’re fortunate enough to have an operating system that can do something reasonable with hotplug events, you can’t just tell it to watch for GPS devices going live and connect them to your software; you have to know which bridge-chipset IDs are likely to have GPSes behind them, sniff the data, and let go of the device if it’s not shipping GPS packets! Otherwise you might eat events from non-GPS serial devices that some other application badly needs to see.

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And so on, and so on. Dealing with all this crap is further complicated by vendor documentation that is scanty if you can get it at all, and often written in rather broken English when you can. Part of of the problem is the structure of the GPS sensor market, which largely consists of dozens of tiny Pacific-Rim companies – each popping up out of nowhere, shipping the cheapest possible spin on one of about a half-dozen reference designs, and disappearing six to eighteen months later.

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A friend who works in embedded systems tells me these little outfits aren’t even intended to last long; they’re actually run by giant electronics combines through several layers of shell companies as a way of providing deniability in case of lawsuits by patent trolls. They spin up, they ship, they funnel money back to daddy…and before there’s time for a process-server to show up, they disappear. All the engineers get rehired by a different sock puppet a week later. Lather, rinse, repeat. And…er…product support? What’s that?

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It’s messy. Really messy. Those who love the law, sausage, or GPS devices really shouldn’t watch any of them being made.

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Expecting GPS-aware applications to keep track of all this stuff would be just nuts. The best way to cope is to have a dedicated service layer that specializes in knowing about GPS idiosyncracies, hides all that ugliness, and presents a simple TPV-reporting interface to the application layer above. Ideally, the service layer should have a sharp crew of developers who are specialist GPS experts so that nobody else has to be.

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And that’s exactly what the GPSD project is. It looks like a simple job…but it’s not.
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diff --git a/20090227065305.blog b/20090227065305.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..11c2098 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090227065305.blog @@ -0,0 +1,73 @@ +The Microsoft patent attack +

Steven Shankland from CNET sent OSI some questions yesterday about the Microsoft patent lawsuit against TomTom involving the use of Linux in their GPS devices. Here’s what I told him by email:

+

+
+> Looking at the two complaints, it appears Microsoft is finally asserting
+> patent infringement against a product based on Linux, specifically
+> involving the file system technology--"A Common Namespace for Long and
+> Short Filenames" and "Method and System for File System Management Using
+> a Flash-Erasable, Programmable Read-Only Memory." Another implicated
+> patent is "Vehicle Computer System With Open Platform Architecture."
+> 
+> Copies of the U.S. District Court and International Trade Commission
+> complaints are here: 
+> 
+> http://news.cnet.com/i/ne/pg/fd_2009/Complaint.pdf
+> http://news.cnet.com/i/ne/pg/fd_2009/2009.02.25_Public_ITC_Complaint_MSFT_TomTom.pdf
+
+
+

I read the Federal complaint this morning [the day the suit was announced]. It’s not very informative, basically just legal boilerplate around a list of patents. The ITC complaint gives a few more hints about their legal posture, but not much.

+
+> --Does this make you rethink any of the intellectual property
+> considerations around Linux and open-source software?
+
+
+

Not really. We’ve been expecting Microsoft to mount some kind of patent attack on Linux for years; they’ve certainly rattled that saber often enough.

+
+> --What are the immediate and long-term effects of this on the
+> open-source software world?
+
+
+

Too early to say. One thing we can be pretty sure of, however, is that it’s not going to stop Linux from shipping. That would be an extremely difficult thing to manage, since there’s no single throat Microsoft can ask a court to choke.

+
+> --Do you think the Microsoft patents have merit?
+
+
+

We think Microsoft is probably asking itself that same question. Personally, I read this move as a test of the waters in the wake of the Bilski ruling. They’ve picked a small, weak target in order to find out whether software patents still actually work, which is a bit questionable at this point.

+

Much depends on how the in re Bilski language about association with a machine and “transformation” is construed in this and future cases. At one extreme, it’s quite possible that software above the level of device firmware in ROM is no longer patentable in the U.S., and I’m sure Microsoft wants to know before they commit their money and prestige against a major defendant.

+
+> --Do you think this case will expand beyond just TomTom and Microsoft to
+> affect other companies, organizations, or programmers--for example
+> discovery reaching out to various programmers?
+
+
+

I’m sure Microsoft will try to make it as big, messy, and scary as they can. But…the subject matter of the complaint is embedded Linux on a GPS; it’s likely TomTom rolled their own lightweight Linux-based firmware build from publicly available sources, so the distribution makers like Red Hat and Ubuntu aren’t in the line of fire.

+

It’s actually not easy to imagine anyone besides TomTom that Microsoft could fruitfully target with these claims. The only logical possibility, on what’s publicly known at the moment, is the developers of the FAT filesystem code TomTom is using. But there are certainly copies of that code outside U.S. jurisdiction, and plenty of hackers a U.S. court can’t reach who would be delighted to take over development just for the pleasure of poking a finger in Microsoft’s eye.

+
+> --Do you think the filename issue has any repercussions beyond
+> Linux--Samba springs to mind?
+
+
+

Oh, lots. For one thing, pretty much every manufacturer of a consumer-electronics device that uses mountable storage like thumb drives or SD cards uses FAT as their media filesystem – digital cameras, for starters. Legal departments all over that industry will be going on high alert right about now.

+
+> --What repercussions does this have for non-embedded Linux companies,
+> e.g. Red Hat or IBM?
+
+
+

See above. The short answer is “probably none”, but I’m sure their legal departments have gone to high alert too.

+
+> --What can we expect next in the legal process?
+
+
+

Ask a lawyer, I’m not one. Mark Radcliffe [OSI's lawyer] might comment on the procedural
+aspects if you ask him nicely.

+
+> --Any other thoughts?
+
+
+

Here’s one: FAT is no longer essential technology for anybody. It’s an easy, lowest-common-denominator option for device makers, but there’s nothing about it that’s essential to the functioning of a GPS or any other device. File systems for devices at that small a scale aren’t hard to write; there are quite a few available in open source already.

+

One of the risks Microsoft takes with this move is that the consumer electronics industry will get off its butt and standardize on something open – the flash-memory and thumb-drive manufactures, in particular, have huge business incentives to drive this move if they think Microsoft might target them or their customers.

+

If so, the long-term effect could hurt Windows pretty badly — because, of course, Linux could fully deploy support for such a standard within a few months from a cold standing start. Suddenly, Windows systems wouldn’t be able to read thumb drives and Linux systems would.

+

So, strategically, this is a move with huge risks for Microsoft. They could wind up with the entire patent threat neutered by an aggressive reading of in re Bilski, or with the consumer-electronics industry abandoning FAT and handing Linux a huge market advantage. I’m sure these scenarios were discussed within Microsoft before they sued.

+

Ultimately, the message here may be that, with its Windows profits dropping and Vista a failure, Microsoft is running out of strategic options and desperate. It’s like the second coming of their sock-puppet SCO, and not likely to end any better for them.

+

UPDATE: While several commenters have ridiculed the possibility that the consumer-electronics crowd could abandon FAT, there is a solution…UDF. Supported by all major operating systems and already in use for large flash media.

diff --git a/20090301015949.blog b/20090301015949.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..90360c9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090301015949.blog @@ -0,0 +1,95 @@ +Clubbing the Tom-Tom +

I’ve been doing some research on the issues in Microsoft’s lawsuit against Tom-Tom. Here’s what I’ve found about the patents are at issue in the case:

+

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
PatentIssuedExpiresReexamined?Title
Car Navigation Systems
6,175,789Jan 16 20012018-Vehicle Computer System with Open Platform Architecture
7,054,745May 30 20062023- Method and System For Generating Driving Directions
7,117,286Oct 3 20062023-Portable Computing Device-integrated Appliance
6,202,008Mar 13 20012018-Vehicle Computer System with Wireless Internet Connectivity
User Interface Model
6,704,032Mar 9 20042021-Methods and Arrangements for Interacting with Controllable Objects within a Graphical User Interface Environment Using Various Input Mechanisms
FAT
5,579,517Nov 26 19962013Nov 28 2006Common Name Space for Long and Short Filenames
5,758,352May 26 19982015Oct 10 2006Common Name Space for Long and Short Filenames
Flash Memory Management
6,256,642Jul 30 20012018-Method and System for File System Management Using a Flash-Erasable, Programmable, Read-only Memory
+

First, some discussion of scope…

+

As you read through these, the first thing that will become apparent is that the first four, the car navigation system patents, are no threat to Linux whatsoever. They’re very specifically about certain particular combinations of hardware and software features. I’m not going to discuss them much further except to note with amusement the amount of bare-faced gall anyone from Microsoft would have to muster to pretend that their technology is “open platform”.

+

The content of the UI-model patent (‘032, as Microsoft’s lawyers nicknamed it in the brief) is a little more troubling. Press reports have tended to lump it in with the car-navigation patents, but it could be read to apply to lots of other types of systems; note for example the references to keyboards and joysticks. The language is dense and vague, but I read it as attempting to cover any situation is used to control the way that (other) hardware input devices are connected to pieces of software and/or configurable hardware in the system. I don’t see any aim at Linux here, but I think the game-console manufacturers should consider this one a threat.

+

Most of the public attention has focused on the two FAT patents. Interestingly, these are not patents on FAT itself. Rather, they have to do with methods for translating between long filenames and the DOS-style 8+3 names that FAT still uses internally. They’ll read on any implementation of FAT that wants to present long names to the user, including open-source ones.

+

The flash-memory one could be the biggest worry in the bunch. It seems to be claiming things that any flash file system needs to do to manage its hardware. No threat to Linux on its own hardware, but it might be deployable, if upheld, to block anyone from shipping in the U.S. a Linux filesystem that manages flash devices, whether it’s FAT-compatible or not.

+

Defenses:

+

I’m sorry to say that I don’t think any of these patents can be struck on grounds of obviousness. There might be an outside chance of successfully attacking 032 that way, but the PTO’s application of the “obviousness” test is notoriously likely to be fooled by claims language that sounds more complex and arcane than the techniques it actually describes. Besides, two of the important ones have been rexamined, pre-Bilski; if the PTO were going to find obviousness in these at all it would likely have happened then.

+

Previously undiscovered prior art could come out of nowhere and scupper any of these, of course, but my best best judgment as an engineer in related fields is that this attack is most likely to be effective where it isn’t very helpful, in the car-navigation patents. I see a slightly better chance of attacking 032 from this direction; configuration of specialized input devices through settings in a GUI is something X programs do all the time. The problem would be convincing a court that the similarity is strong enough.

+

UPDATE: Harald Weite claims that the FAT patents have been invalidated in some jurisdictions by prior art. I knew they had been struck down in Germany, which is doubtless the jurisdiction Weite speaks of; he claims the prior art in question was the Rock Ridge extensions to the ISO9660 standard, supporting long names on CD-ROM filesystems. This is plausible.

+

In the present situation, the interesting question to ask is whether these would pass the Bilski filter. For those of you who have better things to do than follow developments in IP law, “In re Bilski” is a recent decision by United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in a lawsuit challenging a business-method patent. The Court invalidated the patent, ruling that for an idea to be patentable, it must “(1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing.” (direct quote from the decision).

+

The judges in Bilski declined to rule on the patentability of software (the case was over a business-method patent, and judges generally prefer to rule narrowly rather than broadly lest they be reversed) but they did cite a decision indicating that simply running a program on a general-purpose computer is not a patentable process. These is now a vigorous debate going on over what those two tests actually mean for software parents.

+

It seems to me that 032 and 642 are highly likely to fail whatever version of the Bilski test emerges from that debate; the claims are pretty abstract, and it’s hard to see how they can be considered tied to a machine or a transformation of material objects without an interpretation of those requirements that would render Bilski meaningless. (Microsoft, of course, has already argued for such an interpretation in an amicus brief on that case.)

+

By contrast, the car-navigation patents seem the most likely to survive in re Bilski precisely because they’re the most closely tied to a specific hardware context. But the open-source community has no reason (other than generalized hostility to software patents) that it should care.

+

The FAT patents fall in between. They certainly fail the transformation test — the only things transformed are the (non-material) names of files in a filesystem. Whether they’re defensible therefore depends on what courts construe the language about being “tied to a machine” to mean. The stakes are high, because any version of the Bilski test that neuters these patents would probably render most software other than device firmware unpatentable.

+

UPDATE: Good analysis by Steve Vaughn-Nichols here.

diff --git a/20090314222040.blog b/20090314222040.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a6ddf99 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090314222040.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +Sugar and the Bathroom Demon +

I am now going to blog about my cat.

+

No, I have not succumbed to the form of endemic Internet illness in which someone believes the cuteness of his or her feline surpasses all bounds and must therefore be shared with the entire universe. But my cat’s behavior raises some interesting questions about animal (and human!) ethology, which seem worth a little thinking time. There are three things that puzzle me in particular: the nature of the bathroom demon, some aspects of her nurturing behavior, and the mystery of the purr.

+

+

First, our subject. Sugar is a female American housecat of no particular pedigree, about 15 years old but still very healthy. She has green eyes, short fur in a mainly black-on-gray tabby pattern with a few touches of brown, and a white underbelly and socks. She’s a largish cat, about 13 pounds, and rather cobby-bodied. We strongly suspect some Maine Coon in her ancestry; she has a Coon-like double undercoat, uses the wide range of trilling vocalizations associated with the breed, and has a typical Coon personality — extremely affectionate and sociable, gentle, friendly to strangers and children. She charms humans so effectively that we have two different sets of cat-sitters eager to look after her when we travel, and would have a third but for allergies.

+

Now, it must be said (because it’s relevant to the questions I’m going to raise) that Sugar is not overly bright even by cat standards. I’ve had intelligent cats and they tend to be a pain in the tuchis; they can be unpleasantly creative about expressing discontent. Been there, done that, and prefer Sugar’s sweet-natured-but-dumb style. She’s never had any behavior problems worse than an occasional spin of the toilet-paper roll.

+

Sugar has exactly one real behavioral quirk; she becomes quite agitated if a human is in a bathroom and she can’t get in, and will meow piteously and scratch for admittance until she gets it. She does not have this trait about other closed doors; though she likes human company a lot, she’ll generally mind her own business until a human chooses to open up. Except for bathrooms.

+

What makes this more interesting is that we think we know roughly why that is. We inherited Sugar in 1994; she was about eighteen months old then, and the surrounding events included my wife’s stepfather dropping dead of a heart attack. In a bathroom. We think the cat found the body. My wife’s mother was in intensive care with pleural cancer at the time, and died a few days later. Her last request to Cathy was “Please take care of my cat…” and we did. We were very fortunate; Sugar adopted us as her humans immediately.

+

The inference that Sugar learned to think of bathrooms as places where people beloved by her die seems unavoidable. If stuck outside one with a human inside she shows unmistakable signs of extreme anxiety, followed by equally extreme relief when she’s let in. At which point she shows no particular inclination to interact with the human — well, no more than normal for her, anyway; she’s quite affectionate at all times. She’ll sit quietly on the rug while a human showers, but she seems to need to be there. As if she’s watching for something…and our running joke is that Sugar behaves exactly as though she believes that humans are in constant danger of being killed by an invisible bathroom demon, but it can’t get them if she is there to scare it away.

+

This is ridiculous, of course. It’s the way a brave human child might think, but Sugar is not a human, nor even one of a member of one of the handful of borderline-sophont species outside the higher primates (dolphins, seals, elephants, squids, parrots, corvids) who have demonstrated some ability to reason causally. Which makes the question of what is going on in her head, exactly, all the more interesting. What kind of representation of the world – what kind of threat model – does she have that makes her believe bathrooms are a specific, identifiable danger that she can protect humans from?

+

I don’t have an answer, but I think it’s an interesting question. Too bad she doesn’t have an organ of Broca so we can ask her. Whatever tiny spark of mammalian proto-intelligence lives inside that walnut-sized brain is definitely pre-linguistic. Though she does have a two-word vocabulary; she recognizes and responds to her name, and she knows that “hello” is a friendly greeting sound. She even uses a greeting vocalization that sounds as much like “hello” as a cat vocal tract can manage (and is very distinct from the normal feline greeting trill, which she also uses). I think this implies a rudimentary theory of mind, but this is not hugely interesting because I’ve met lots of animals with stronger ones. My swordmaster’s Malamute dogs have distinct vocalizations for calling individual humans known to them by name. I’ve been nose-to-trunk with an elephant in semi-wild conditions, too, and I’ll be damned if I don’t think he had a theory of mind nearly as elaborated as mine.

+

Here’s another another interesting behavior. When either of her humans is ill, Sugar will not leave his or her side, except for minimum litterbox and feeding breaks, pretty much for the duration. Well, this is very nice, and I have no doubt that it helps us get well faster, but…how does she know? Do ill humans smell wrong? Do our kinesics change in a way she picks up?

+

Finally, the mystery of the purr. This is not a question about cat behavior but about humans. What is it that makes a cat’s purr such a pleasurable sound for us? It’s obvious why it would be pleasurable to another cat; it evolved as an I’m-feeling-sociable signal among felines. It’s even obvious why they purr at humans; they don’t know that we’re so phyletically distant from them that their inter-species sociability signal shouldn’t actually work.

+

What isn’t obvious is why it actually does work. Purring evolved well after the last common ancestor of hominidae and felinidae diverged, so there must be some other response trained by human species history that cat-purrs stimulate. I’d love to know what it was. Um, has anyone ever recorded normal noise from within a human womb?

+

Yes, these are the sorts of things I think about when I look at my cat, as opposed I mean to “Awww, she’s so cute and fuzzy.” Well, not that she isn’t cute and fuzzy, she is. But I refuse to post a picture. On principle.

+

diff --git a/20090318113359.blog b/20090318113359.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..32ca569 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090318113359.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +Doug McIlroy makes my day +

Yeah, that’d be the Doug McIlroy. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie’s boss when they were inventing Unix, himself one of its early co-designers, and the inventor of the Unix pipe.

+

He was very helpful when I was doing The Art of Unix Programming in 2003. Hadn’t heard from him since then until he emailed me out of the blue today to say good things about the manual I wrote for GNU PIC. Good Web rendering here; googling may turn up other copies.

+

He said:

+

+I just read your manual for gnu pic. It’s a great job.
+I’ve found that almost invariably follow-on descriptions of
+Unix are either (1) too verbose or (2) too incomplete. When I
+saw the page count I instinctively assigned this document to
+category 1. But I had to read it, for man pic on Linux is
+category 2. Only after I had finished and revised my opinion
+to “this is a real keeper” did I go back to the title page to
+see who wrote it. +

+

Praise from the master is praise indeed. I am a happy Eric today.

+

I haven’t felt quite like this since Donald Knuth emailed me a bug fix for INTERCAL…

diff --git a/20090326231241.blog b/20090326231241.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..40c388b --- /dev/null +++ b/20090326231241.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Please forget to FLOSS +

In email to a third party, copied to me, Linux activist and long-time friend Rick Moen comments on the acronym FLOSS (usually explanded “Free, Libré, and Open Source”.

+

+I continue to find it difficult to take seriously anyone who adopts an excruciatingly bad, haplessly obscure acronym associated with dental hygiene aids. We learned in the late 1990s a number of lessons about how not to market free / open source, and the idiots who keep coming up with bad ideas like “FLOSS” and “FOSS” are determined to rush, like urban-legend lemmings, off the very cliff of PR incompetence that we so painfully learned to finally avoid, a decade ago. I’m sorry, but those people need to be cluebombed and routed around until they stop shooting at everyone’s feet. +

+

I couldn’t have put it better myself, so I’m not going to try.

+

Near as I can figure, the only appeal this term has is a sort of lily-livered political correctness, as though people think they’d be making an ideological commitment that will cause petulant screaming from a million basements if they pick “open source” or “free software”.

+

Well, speaking as the guy who promulgated “open source” to abolish the colossal marketing blunders that were associated with the term “free software”, I think “free software” is less bad than “FLOSS”. Somebody, please, shoot this pitiful acronym through the head and put it out of our misery.

+

Rick adds:

+

+The problem with [FOSS and FLOSS] isn’t merely that that they sound like goofy nutjob organisation investigated by Emma Peel and John Steed. Worse, it is that neither term can be understood without first understanding both free software and open source, as prerequisite study.

+

That isn’t merely gross marketing failure; it’s a semantic black hole that sucks marketing into it, never to be seen again. It’s a finely executed study in nomenclature incompetence – and I can’t help noticing it’s promoted by, among others, the same crowd who were doing such a masterful job of keeping free software an obscure ideology prior to 1998. +

+

Er. Yes. Quite…

diff --git a/20090329000258.blog b/20090329000258.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..92d247f --- /dev/null +++ b/20090329000258.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +Freeing technical standards +

I grew up on Internet RFCs, so technical standards issued under licenses that forbid free redistribution offend me. Every such document, whether intentionally or not, is a device for hindering open-source software projects and privileging closed-source developers with big budgets and lawyers to hand.

+

They offend me even more when (as, for example, when the GPS reporting standard NMEA 0183) the proprietary “standard” is so badly designed that a mob of crack-addled rhesus monkeys could have done a better job – and for this they want me to pay? They offend me the absolute most when the “standard” is distribution-restricted, expensive, badly written, and its topic is a safety-critical technology – so that people could actually die because some jerk wants to collect a trivial amount of secrecy rent on a standard that was crappy to begin with.

+

Fortunately, there is a way to monkeywrench the organizations that perpetrate this sort of thing – and I’ve spent a substantial part of the last couple of weeks doing exactly that. I’m writing about it here to encourage others to do likewise.

+

+

In connection with my ongoing work on GPSD I’ve recently been studying AIS, the marine Automatic Identification System. Since about 2004, maritime authorities worldwide have required every passenger vessel and every cargo ship of more than 300 tons displacement to carry a transmitter that periodically squawks navigational information about the vessel. AIS receivers in the vicinity can pick up this information and make it available for useful things like collision-avoidance systems.

+

A few AIS receivers have integral map displays meant to be read by a human, but these are largely toys for casual boaters. Most behave a lot like shipboard GPS sensors; they ship AIS sentences out a serial or USB port to be read by navigational systems that will do something useful with them…like, say, automated collision avoidance.

+

Well…you can do something useful with these sentences if you can read them. And why is that a problem? Because distribution of the core standard for the AIS reporting format (ITU-R 1371) is, you guessed it, restricted under terms that are proprietary and evil. Just like NMEA 0183. But what’s even worse, in this case, is that the International Telecommunications Union is charging secrecy rent on a standard that appears to have been designed mostly by the U.S. Coast Guard. So, a organization that is (a) private, and (b) foreign is charging Americans secrecy rent on a design built with U.S. taxpayer dollars.

+

When I learned this, I decided I was going to (a) do the open-source world a service, and (b) break their secrecy any way I could. Yeah, I know, some of you are going to tell me this sort of thing is pretty normal in every area of technical standardization other than the Internet; I even knew that, having run into it occasionally before. But this time I reached the “mad as hell and not gonna take-it any more” stage. I’m pushing back.

+

Here’s what I’ve done. Without looking at the two proprietary standards that bear on AIS (NMEA 4.0 and ITU-R 1371), I’ve collected all the public information on AIS messages and reporting formats into a document which essentially blows the lid off their secrecy. The “without looking” is important; at this point, I don’t want to see them so that I can”t be gigged for copyright infringement over my document. Here it is: AIVDM/AIVDO protocol decoding.

+

And how do I know this describes reality? Because it describes the masses of AIS sentences helpful people have been sending me. I have a working decoder in the GPSD suite now; it’s not integrated into gpsd itself yet, but you can use it to filter logs full of armored/encoded AIS sentences into readable text. Full support, and test clients that do cool stuff, will follow soon.

+

Actually, this thing wouldn’t have been trivial to put together even without the legal barriers. The public sources, and conversations with people who have seen NMEA 4.00 and ITU1371, reveal that these documents have been through multiple revisions with substantial changes in them – and the latter one is so densely and badly written that I was able to gather much of what I needed from technical corrigenda published by the U.S. Coast Guard. Also, I document common practice that the official standard doesn’t.

+

OK, so you should now go and do likewise with some other evil, locked-up-behind-a-paywall standard. We need to teach the ITU and other organizations like it that they will get p0wned and scorned every time they try to collect secrecy rent on these things, so they’ll stop trying.

+

And don’t worry that you’ll stop good standards from issuing; these groups are generally funded by vendor consortia and governments heavily enough that I can’t see the document fees they collect making any actual difference to them. And that, really, is the final turn of the screw – not only are they locking out open-source projects, they’re doing so for an amount of rent that’s tiny in comparison to the rest of their funding base.

+

How do I know this? Simple – because it has to be; after all, the Internet Engineering Task Force successfully organizes the same sort of standards work without charging one thin dime for viewing RFCs. So screw you, ITU and NMEA both; your paywalls aren’t just greedy, they’re stupid greedy.

+

(Oh, and anyone who’s got test sets pairing armored AIVDM sentences with text decodings of same should send them to me so I can add them to my regression test. Don’t bother if it’s just messages types 1-5, though, I’ve got plenty of test sets for those.)

diff --git a/20090401015648.blog b/20090401015648.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d5885ed --- /dev/null +++ b/20090401015648.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Beyond the rhetorical fictions about “free software” +

A friend directed me to a comment thread over at the Volokh Conspiracy, a blog I occasionally read and considerably respect. The response I ended up writing is substantial enough that I think it’s worth posting here.

+

+

I am the person who promulgated the term “open source”, and the senior founder of the OSI. As it happens, I’m also a semi-regular Volokh Conspiracy reader.

+

Alas, there is a fair amount of misinformation in this thread. Beginning with the misuse of “open source” to mean code with source that is available for inspection but not freely redistributable and modifiable; this is incorrect, and everyone who self-describes as an “open source” or “free software” programmer knows it’s incorrect. There is no universal term for accessible/non-redistributable/non-modifiable code, but I like to use “source under glass”.

+

“Open source” means code with a license that complies with the Open Source Definition (OSD). If you try launching a source-under-glass project on any of the community project-hosting sites such as SourceForge, Berlios, Alioth, gna, or Savannah, they will reject it. Even Microsoft — which is, to put it mildly, no friend of open source and would love to see the term neutered– recognizes the OSD as authoritative, having submitted licenses to OSI for approval.

+

As to whether “open source” and “free software” are synonymous: If you’re talking about software, the answer is “yes, for all practical purposes”; ever since Apple revised the APSL ten years ago, the exceptions have been minor and technical, involving licenses that are very little used.

+

Furthermore, there is no boundary in the developer community. No “open source” advocate refuses to work on “free software” projects, or vice-versa. RMS insists that the free software community is separate unto itself, but the actual behavior of hackers falsifies this claim.

+

If you’re talking developer philosophy, the difference is mainly one of marketing – what kind of arguments you use to evangelize to people who are not yet part of the community. “Free software” advocates tend to follow RMS’s lead and argue in a prescriptive, moralist vein. “Open source” advocates tend to follow my lead in arguing in a consequentialist, pragmatic way.

+

However, the situation is not quite as symmetrical as that might seem to imply. RMS claims (rightly) to be the founder and sole ideologue of “free software”. I make no corresponding claim; I consider myself part of a hacker tradition of open source that long predates “free software”, and only one of a collegium of leaders, theorists, and culture heroes which, in fact, *includes* RMS. I neither have nor want the normative authority over that larger tradition that he does over his faction, and in fact have spent a considerable amount of energy *avoiding* becoming the larger movement’s “indispensible man”.

+

RMS likes to maintain that there is an “open source” camp opposed to his “free software” movement. I think it is more accurate to describe his “free software” movement as a purist faction within the larger open-source community. This description better covers the actual working behavior of the people who self-describe with these labels.

+

In conclusion, I will note that the “open source”/”free software” distinction, to the extent it’s actually meaningful at all, matters a great deal more to the “free software” advocates than it does to the “open source” advocates. People outside the community may safely write it off as the standard sort of zealot-vs.-pragmatist hoo-hah that you see in reform movements of all kinds; as usual with such things, it is under most circumstances a dispute that can safely be ignored by everyone else.

diff --git a/20090402210852.blog b/20090402210852.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fe6b441 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090402210852.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +Hyperpower and high finance +

In a 2002 blog entry, Imperialists by necessity?, I wrote:

+

+There is precedent [for civilizing barbarians by force]; the British did a pretty good job of civilizing India and we did a spectacularly effective one on Japan. And the U.S. would be well equipped to do it again; our economy is now so large that we could run a globe-spanning empire from the petty-cash drawer. Seriously. The U.S, a hyperpower so dominant that no imaginable coalition of other nations could defeat it at conventional warfare, spends a ridiculously low percentage of GNP (6%, if I recall correctly) on its military.” +

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A commenter ask how the financial crisis in the U.S. (and elsewhere) changes this, and others brought up the possibility that the U.S. could be starved of critical resources . My answers are: it changes less than you might think, and a hearty guffaw. There are a couple of facts on the ground that it’s easy to lose sight of during the political panic of the week.

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Fact #1: Finance is marks on paper chasing each other around. The U.S. has a combined stock of real wealth — physical capital, population, and talent — that is not far from parity with the rest of the world combined. It is often noted that if just one of our states (California) were counted separately, it would be the sixth largest national economy in the world.

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Fact #2: The U.S.’s demographics are still improving, and will continue to improve until 2050, while the rest of the developed world is in demographic freefall. I described the situation in Europe in Demographics and the Dustbin of History; it has since become clear that Japan is in even more desperate shape, anticipating a population collapse so severe that they’re researching robot caregivers for the elderly because there won’t be enough younger people alive to do those jobs.

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Fact #3: The U.S. still has an ability to project military power that cannot be matched by any even remotely conceivable coalition of opponents. How the marks on the paper change is not actually very relevant to that; we have the soldiers, and the tanks, and the warplanes, and the ships. We have the stuff, and the people to use it. The recent victory in Iraq is yet another demonstration that our military can cash just about any check our political class is capable of deciding to write.

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These strengths are fundamental, and they constrain anything the U.S.’s rivals or opponents might like to do to it pretty seriously. Among other things, it means that resource blackmail of the U.S. on any level nearing an actual survival threat would be a Really Bad Idea for whatever J. Random Foreigner tried it, because we’d just send troops to kill J. Random Foreigner and take his stuff. That, after all, is what nation-states are for. There is no realistic prospect that anyone could prevent this, which (for example) has to be giving Hugo Chavez serious pause for thought. That is, on the optimistic assumption that he’s not already committably insane.

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Is this the world I’d prefer to be living in? No, I’m an anarchist. So don’t tell me I’m advocating violence and warfare; I’m simply recognizing the brute facts of reality for what they are. The U.S.’s ability to kill you and take your stuff is barely affected, if at all, by marks on bankers’ papers.

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Those marks have meaning only as long as no party with over 50% of the guns refuses to play the game. So let’s consider another possibility. What if the U.S. were to default on its debt? I actually think this is a fairly likely outcome at some point; as I’ve written in Timing the Entitlements Crash, the private-debt crisis is only a prologue to what’s going to happen when it becomes obvious that the U.S. government’s finances are fucked up beyond repair. At that point, hyperinflation or default will be the only options.

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There is no doubt the consequences of default would be pretty ugly all around — millions of investors wiped out, widows and orphans in the streets, and so forth. But let’s consider what all that T-bond debt to people like the Communist Chinese actually means. It means they took marks on paper that were promises to be paid back in dollars at a future date in exchange for other pieces of paper which the U.S. Government used to buy stuff. If we default, they have the marks on paper and we still have the stuff.

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So, however bad the consequences in the U.S., the geopolitical effect of a default would be to inflict a larger aggregate loss of wealth on the rest of the world. The net effect would probably be that the U.S. would re-emerge as an even more dominant hyperpower afterwards. First, because we’ve still got all that military we bought with borrowed money; and second, because, really, where else are investors going to take their money for stable returns? There’s only so much you can do with camel-futures markets in Uzbekistan.

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Of course it would be more difficult for the U.S. government to borrow money after a default. Er, but, how exactly would that be a bad thing?

diff --git a/20090410062257.blog b/20090410062257.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6a9e43f --- /dev/null +++ b/20090410062257.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Human ingenuity beats the neo-Malthusians yet again +

OK, this is big news. A research team has worked out a way to nearly triple the efficiency of the Fischer-Tropsch process.

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This means cheap synthetic hydrocarbons from coal are on the horizon. It probably sinks shale oil and biofuels for good – which is a good thing, as biofuel demand has been driving food prices higher. Potentially, it could make the U.S. – which has huge coal reserves – independent of foreign oil sources for the forseeable future.

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Now watch for it: I [predict that the so-called “environmental movement” will scream in horror at this prospect, and we will learn yet again that they are mostly about enforcing eco-puritan poverty on us all rather than doing anything actually useful about actual ecological problems.

diff --git a/20090424134159.blog b/20090424134159.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2965314 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090424134159.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +How to get banned from my blog +

It is quite difficult to get banned from commenting on my blog, but some – I think a grand total of about four out of a number of commenters well into the thousands over the last seven years – have managed it. With sufficient hard work and dedication, you too can join this select group.

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I blog in part because I have a belief, justified by my comment volume and estimate of visitor numbers, that many people are interested in what I have to say. But I mainly do it because I enjoy writing and enjoy the stimulation and challenge of regular comment on it, including critical comment. That’s what makes blogging a good use of my time. You will not be banned for disagreeing with me, but you will be banned if you waste my time.

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I repeat: You will be banned if you waste my time. You will not necessarily be wasting my time if you are critical, obnoxious, or insulting – I have plenty of regulars who are all three. You will be wasting my time if you bring no content to the discussion other than insults and advance only arguments I have heard and discounted before. Arguments I have heard before have value only if they are accompanied by new evidence, and I am strict about what constitutes new evidence.

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While you will not be banned for insulting me, you may be banned for rudeness to other commenters. This blog attracts an exceptionally articulate and intelligent crowd of regulars; I prize the fact that someone once described it as the only place he’d ever seen a civilized debate over abortion, and I will not tolerate behavior that I view as damaging to that quality.

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I have banned people for attempting to masquerade as other commenters. I will ban for sock-puppeting if I discover it. But I will not be more specific about the sorts of things I will or will not ban for, because I have discovered this: when I try to be open, fair, judicious, and balanced, there is a category of troll that will constantly push my limits and attempt to use my own scruples, sense of fair play, and respect for the norms of civilized debate as a weapon against me and against the health of the community around this blog. Coping with this sort of thing is a waste of my time.

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Therefore, remember that this blog exists for my purposes and not anyone else’s. I reserve the right to be unfair, obnoxious, arbitrary, tyrannical, and ban people at my whim. Protesting this will get you banned, because I will interpret it as yet another attempt to jerk me around by my sense of fair play.

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If you have been warned that you are trolling or that you are in danger of being banned, you can move back towards good standing in one of two ways: (a) By making me think, or (b) by making me laugh. Don’t repeat yourself, that won’t help. Flattery won’t help either, as I find fanboys nearly as annoying as haters.

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Finally, I note that if you ever succeed in changing my mind about something, I will cut you large amounts of slack for a long time afterwards even for behavior that would otherwise get you banned. Not many people ever manage this, and I value the few that have accomplished it quite highly.

diff --git a/20090426210040.blog b/20090426210040.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ddd9cef --- /dev/null +++ b/20090426210040.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +The Economic Case Against the GPL +

Is open-source development a more efficient system of software production than the closed-source system? I think the answer is probably “yes”, and that it follows the GNU GPL is probably doing us more harm than good.

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I mean “efficiency” here in the precise sense economists use it. Of two systems of production, the more efficient is the one which produces more units of output for a given input of factors of production. Now, let’s divide up all possible worlds according to whether the answer to our question is “yes” or “no”.

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In all worlds, markets seek efficiency, because investors are constantly seeking the best return on capital. Thus guarantees the most efficient system will win, eventually. The flip side of this is that markets will punish those who adopt the less efficient mode. They’ll be outcompeted. Capital will flow away from them.

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If we live in “Type A” a universe where closed source is more efficient, markets will eventually punish people who take closed source code open. Markets will correspondingly reward people who take open source closed. In this kind of universe, open source is doomed; the GPL will be subverted or routed around by efficiency-seeking investors as surely as water flows downhill.

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If we live in a “Type B” universe where open source is more efficient, markets will eventually punish people who take open source code closed. Markets will correspondingly reward people who take closed source open. In such a universe closed source is its own punishment; open source will capture ever-larger swathes of industry as investors chase efficiency gains.

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In a Type A universe, reciprocal licensing is futile. In a Type B universe, reciprocal licensing is unnecessary. In neither universe can the GPL’s attempts to punish what we regard as misbehavior have more than short-term, temporary effects. At most it can speed or slow movement on the efficiency gradient, not reverse it.

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For the GPL to actually determine the mode of software production, we would have to live in a universe where the difference in efficiency between open and closed-source development is so vanishingly close to zero that over typical project lifetimes it is less than the cost of an enforcement lawsuit. This seems as wildly unlikely as flipping a coin and having it land standing on an edge.

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I think we live in a type B universe – that is, one in which the GPL is unnecessary rather than futile. Mind you, I am not claiming the GPL is entirely useless. It’s a signaling behavior, like wearing a crucifix or yarmulke or pentagram – it helps build trust groups. But it has costs, too — it creates a lot of needless fear from potential allies and users who suspect they won’t be able to control their exposure if they let it in.

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This fear is only exacerbated when we actually sue to enforce it. It’s obvious to pretty much everyone in the open-source community that the RIAA is slitting its own throat by suing music downloaders, alienating future customers wholesale. It’s not obvious why the Software Freedom Law Center’s current lawsuit against Cisco is any smarter – we stand to lose not only Cisco as an ally, but any corporation that estimates (rightly or wrongly) that their own potential exposure to an SFLC lawsuit might be greater than their potential efficiency gains from open-sourcing.

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So the correct question to ask is this: Is the GPL’s utility as a form of in-group signaling worth the degree to which fear and uncertainty about it slows down open-source adoption? Increasingly I think the answer is “no”.

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The GPL may be a community-building signalling device, but it is also a confession of fear and weakness. To believe that it matters, you have to believe that you live in a Type A universe where closed-source development is such an attractive proposition that you have to punish people for trying to move to it.

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So maybe an even more fundamental question to ask is this: Does the open-source community believe in itself, genuinely believe it has a more efficient system of production? And if it does, does it make sense to choose a license that implies the opposite?

diff --git a/20090427110224.blog b/20090427110224.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7b8ef98 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090427110224.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +RMS issues ukase against Software as a Service – and I agree it’s an iffy idea +

In a recent O’Reilly interview, Richard Stallman utters an anathema against software-as-a-service arrangements, calling them “non-free” and saying “you must not use it!” It would be easy to parody RMS’s style of uttering grave moralistic sonorities as though he were the Pope speaking ex-cathedra, but I’m going to resist the temptation because I think in this case his concerns are quite valid.

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Richard says “If you do your computing on someone else’s server, you hand over control of your computing to whoever controls the server. It is like running binary-only software, only worse: it’s even harder for you to patch the program that’s running on someone else’s server than it is to patch a binary copy of a program running on your own computer.”

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He’s quite right about this. The connotations of “free” and “non-free” are rather beside the real point, which is a pragmatic one. It can be risky to give up control of your data, and becoming dependent on a SaaS or cloud service is not something to do casually. I wouldn’t say you “must not”, that’s too moralistic for me, but I would say doing so is not wise or prudent.

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In general, I don’t allow myself to rely on such services. And I have a rule: unless I can get all my data back through some sort of export or dump function in a non-obfuscated format, I won’t go there. I recommend this rule to others as well.

diff --git a/20090428155715.blog b/20090428155715.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a319457 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090428155715.blog @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +IntenseDebate plugin is being installed diff --git a/20090430145136.blog b/20090430145136.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b179866 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090430145136.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Irrational Expectations +

The reactions to my posting on the economic case against the GPL reminded me yet again why failure to understand basic economics often becomes more toxic in people who think they understand a bit about the subject. In this mini-essay, I’ll take a look at the most important (and misleading) of the superficially clever arguments I saw in responses.

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Here it is: Markets don’t seek efficiency because investors aren’t rational. Yeah, well, gas molecules aren’t rational either, but they obey very simple regularities in large numbers. Rational-expectations theory doesn’t actually require individual investors to be rational, it merely predicts that en masse they will behave as if they are rational.

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Reality backs this up; if investors weren’t good at rapidly folding information into prices, it would be possible for humans to beat the stock market by applying an algorithm – but, in fact, even the savviest professional money managers notoriously do no better than chance over long periods.

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“Over long periods” – timescale is important. Computerized trading can, in some specialized ways, beat the stock market, but only because it can react faster than a market mostly composed of humans can equilibrate. Speculative bubbles affecting the entire market are random excursions obeying a sort of power law – the more irrational they are, the more quickly they pop.

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Unless, that is, the bubble is being continuously pumped by a political failure. The debt crisis that has spun the U.S. into recession is often portrayed as a sort of inevitable comeuppance of free-market capitalism and speculative greed, but it doesn’t take a lot of digging to discover that massive policy errors underlie it. Many of these are mistakes that neoclassical and Austrian economists have been sounding warnings about for decades to no avail.

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Here’s one: the Fed held real interest rates artificially low for decades before the CDO collapse, pumping the speculative bubble in real estate. Here’s another: an unknown but probably large percentage of those non-performing mortgages were issued by banks under political pressure to make enough loans to poor people (especially poor people who weren’t white) through regulations like the Community Reinvestment Act. Here’s third: Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac were operated as a campaign-cash cow and fountain of patronage jobs by a coterie of powerful politicians. Mainly, though not exclusively, Democratic politicians, which is why the Obama administration has no interest in investigating the corruption and self-dealing that went on there.

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Here’s a safe rule: whenever you hear a politician huffing and puffing about market failure, make the largest bet you can that he is covering for a regulatory or political intervention that actually created the problem, usually one he was personally involved in perpetrating. You are extremely unlikely to lose.

diff --git a/20090502065417.blog b/20090502065417.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..15e8192 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090502065417.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +I may have to disable IntenseDebate +

I may have to disable IntenseDebate. The interface for approving/deleting/spam-flagging posts seems broken since sometime yesterday; I suspect some sort of database problem at intensedebate.com, as my local Javascript hasn’t changed.

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If you have left a comment which has not appeared, have patience. I will try untangling the mess from my home machine Sunday night when I get home from my current road trip.

diff --git a/20090505225939.blog b/20090505225939.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..55db3cc --- /dev/null +++ b/20090505225939.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +IntenseDebate is deactivated +

I have deactivated IntenseDebate. Its maintainers tell me there is no way to disable pagination of comments, a feature several of my regulars justifiably complained about and I loathed.

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I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

diff --git a/20090506231951.blog b/20090506231951.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a44f766 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090506231951.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +What I have learned from science fiction +

I began reading science fiction almost exactly 40 years ago, when my family was passing through Orly airport in Paris while moving from London to Rome. My parents liked to encourage all five of their kids to read; we were told we could have one magazine of our choice from the newsstand. I picked a copy of Analog, a magazine I’d never seen before. It had a gorgeous Kelly Freas cover featuring a man being menaced by a dinosaur-like creature with gorgeous polychrome scales. I have it still.

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Science fiction has given me entertainment and escapism, for sure – but it has given me ever so much more than just that. It has given me puzzles to chew on, examples to admire, philosophical questions to mull over. By thinking about fictional worlds, I learned a perhaps surprising amount about the real one – not so much facts as useful habits of thought, perspectives, fruitful ways of asking questions.

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Here are some of them…

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SF taught me to seek adaptationist and functionalist accounts of behavior – to see individual action as coping patterns for environmental pressures, to see societies as adaptive machines, to see species as situated within entire ecologies and causally linked to the entire ecosphere.

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By speculating on alien nature, SF taught me that there is such thing as human nature, that it is biologically grounded and rooted in the evolutionary history of our species. When sociobiology and evolutionary psychology began to emerge from the scientific study of human and animal behavior, only a few details surprised me; SF had already trained me to think in that direction years before.

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SF taught me that the universe has neither malice nor pity. It is what it is. Its laws are inexorable; but clever sophonts can learn to use them rather than be used by them.

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SF taught me a particular kind of duty to ourselves, to our neighbors, to all intelligent life: to be rational. To seek truth and face it squarely, because clear understanding of how things actually work is the most powerful tool and the sharpest weapon and the greatest wealth.

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Philosophy taught my forebrain that I should never stop questioning my premises – that rigidified belief systems are more dangerous and limiting that mere ignorance, and that evidence always wins over theory. SF taught me to live that kind of rational skepticism with my whole self, not just my forebrain; it taught my gut and my reflexes, too.

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Science taught me to know intellectually the immense scale of space and time, the myriad levels of complexity between subatomic particle and universe. SF taught me to feel these things.

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SF taught me to value intelligence and competence and honest dealing wherever I might find it. SF taught me not to care even about the number of limbs on a sophont, or whether it breathes oxygen or fluorine, or whether it runs on a carbon or silicon substrate. After that, how could I hold any prejudices based on silly trivia like skin color or the shape of genitals?

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I didn’t need SF to teach me to love and value freedom, but it reinforced that value by showing me that political power is the natural enemy of the future.

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In his poem Little Gidding T. S. Eliot famously wrote: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” SF taught me what Eliot meant by that, long before I actually read it.

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SF taught me to collect skills and competence rather than possessions. SF taught me to want to be a polymath, showed me significant parts of how to achieve that goal, and helped me decide that the only interesting game for polymaths to play is “change the world”.

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Most importantly, SF taught me what is variously called “systems thinking” or “holistic perspective” – to be suspicious of neat monocausal models, to always be looking for the next and more inclusive level of explanation, to be unsurprised by emergent behaviors, to favor cross-disciplinary approaches and unusual perspectives.

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Most of what is good in my life has proceeded from these habits of thought.

diff --git a/20090507223612.blog b/20090507223612.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a019d8e --- /dev/null +++ b/20090507223612.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Engage the balonium generator, Scotty! +

I enjoy a game called “Commands and Colors: Ancients”, which I’ve blogged about here before. It’s a simulation of tactical ancient warfare that uses special dice to resolve battles. In any given battle you can consider each six-sided die to have faces labeled with the symbols Miss, Miss, Hit, Sword, Helmet, Flag. To improve my play, I decided to generate and study a table of the odds of getting a specified number of hits when a specified number of dice is rolled. I set out to write a Python program to do this.

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There are special circumstances under which flags and helmets convert to hits, so the program actually needs to print out several tables and is not entirely trivial. Still, it is computing on a mathematically simple model with strictly bounded computational cost – except for war elephants. These units have the special ability that when they roll a sword, the sword is counted as a hit and then rerolled. (This may make more sense if you think of a sword roll as representing impact damage.) You keep rolling and marking hits as long as the die keeps coming up swords.

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To calculate the non-elephant probabilities I enumerated eight entire state spaces for each of 1 to 8 dice (the most you can ever roll under the rules – takes Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar leading a Heavy unit with the the Clash of Shields +2 bonus active), then counted up instances of each distinct outcome (so many misses, hits, swords, flags, banners) to assign a probability mass to each.

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(Statisticians often think in terms of probability mass or probability weight, which has to be conserved as a distribution changes. It’s analogous to thinking of electricity as a fluid.)

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I then had to write code to mutate a copy of each distribution according to the elephants’ sword-reroll rule. To do this, each outcome containing a sword hit needs its probability mass divided by six and reallocated to itself and five other outcomes with one fewer sword apiece; you stop reallocating when the probability mass on a sword-containing outcome drops below a very low noise level.

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That particular piece of code gave me more trouble than the rest of the program put together. At one point I grumbled to a friend who had been following the project “I’m having persistent bugs in my probability mass reallocator.”

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He looked right back at me and said, with a perfectly straight face, “Have you considered reversing the polarity of the neutron flow?”

diff --git a/20090511121011.blog b/20090511121011.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7eba7a7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090511121011.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +The Trek Movie: TOS rides again +

I saw the new Star Trek movie last night, and it answers a question I wasn’t sure anyone would ever ask (or want to) – namely, could they find a young actor who could effectively clone William Shatner’s performance in TOS (The Original Series) as the alpha asshole of the future galaxy. The answer is yes.

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The script and the new actors do a remarkably good job of replicating the chemistry of the TOS crew. The young Spock is as cerebral outside and volcanic inside as the original, and Bones overdramatizes everything in classic McCoy style and cheerfully slams injectors into people at every opportunity. Entertainingly, Scotty is not quite TOS Scotty but the more jester-like figure of the post-TOS movies; I had breakfast with Jimmy Doohan once, and I felt it was an echo of Doohan himself (and not so much his TOS character) that I was seeing on the screen. We do get thrown one wicked curveball in the person of Lieutenant Uhura, who spends much of her screen time vamping a character whose name I won’t spoil the fun by revealing.

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Alas, the movie also inherits TOS’s blithe disregard for trivia like continuity and plot logic and its propensity for menacing villains constructed from flimsiest cardboard. Astronomical distances are treated as random variables pegged to zero when convenience requires it and then widened to AUs or lightyears seconds later. Absurd coincidences abound, as in when Bad Guy’s planetary-core drill just happens to be visible from the Starfleet Academy grounds. The script is, it must be said, deeply silly.

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Still, the movie is worth seeing – if only so you can share the almost indecent amount of enjoyment Leonard Nimoy clearly derives from reprising his role as an older Spock from a different history. The actor playing Captain Christopher Pike also turns in a remarkably strong and authoritative performance. We get to see cadet Kirk’s often-alluded-to subversion of the Kobayashi Maru test, which is fun even if he does behave like an intolerable snot throughout. And, oh, yes, Cadet Sulu gets a swordfighting scene.

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The set and effects designers also get props for pulling off a difficult trick. The 1960s visuals of TOS look very, very dated today; the actual technology of 2009 actually exceeds, in some relevant ways, anything Gene Roddenbery could have imagined. Nevertheless, they managed to update the look of the future in a way that remains pretty faithful to the original.

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Structurally, this movie reboots the Trek universe. Bad Guy’s time jaunt changes Kirk’s back story and sends causal ripples through the lives of the other main characters, giving future scriptwriters a free hand with the next N movies. It remains to be seen what they will do with it.

diff --git a/20090517225054.blog b/20090517225054.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ff3f29b --- /dev/null +++ b/20090517225054.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +Is Danish Dying? +

Some years ago I did a speaking tour in Scandinavia that involved staying in Denmark for a couple of days. Denmark, like the other Scandinavian nations I’ve visited, is a tidy little country full of intelligent, civilized, and agreeable people. As long as you can get along with gray sub-arctic weather and gray, characterless food these are interesting places to be – well, at least for someone with my strong interest in history and archeology. Historical museums, here I come!

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But while I was in Denmark I kept tripping over odd facts that pointed to a possibly disturbing conclusion: though the Danes don’t seem to notice it themselves, their native language appears to me to be dying. Here are some of the facts that disturbed me:

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  1. I was told that Danish phonology has been mutating so rapidly over the last 50 years that it is often possible to tell by the accent of an emigre returning to Denmark what decade they left in.
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  2. The Dane with whom I was staying remarked that, having absorbed spoken Danish as a child, he found learning written English easier than learning written Danish.
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  3. Modern Danish is not spoken so much as it is mumbled. Norwegians and Swedes say that Danes talk like they’ve constantly got potatoes in their mouths, and it’s true. Most of the phonemic distinctions you’d think ought to be there from looking at the orthography of written Danish (and which actually are there in Norwegian and Swedish) collapse into a sort of glottalized mud in contemporary spoken Danish.
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  4. At least half the advertising signs in Denmark – and a not inconsiderable percentage of street signs – are in English. Danes usually speak passable English; many routinely code-switch to English even when there are no foreigners involved, in particular for technical discussions.
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The overall picture I got of Danish was of a language in an extreme stage of phonological degeneration, extremely divergent from its written form, and functionally unnecessary to many of its younger speakers.

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I contemplated all this and thought of Maltese.

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Maltese originated as a creole fusing Arabic grammar and structure with loanwords from French and Italian. I have read that since 1800 (and especially since WWII) Maltese has been so heavily influenced by bilingual English and Maltese speakers that much of what is now called “Maltese” is actually “Maltenglish”, rather more like a Maltese-English fusion, with “pure” Maltese only spoken by a dwindling cohort of the very old and very rural. Analysis of this phenomenon is complicated by the fact that the Maltese themselves tend to deny it, insisting for reasons of ethno-tribal identity that they speak more Maltese and less Maltenglish than they actually do.

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Based on what I saw and heard in Denmark, I think Danish may be headed down a similar diglossic road, with “pure” Danish preserved as an ethno-tribal museum artifact and common Danish increasingly blending with English until its identity is essentially lost except as a source of picturesque dialect words. For a look at a late stage in this sort of process, consider Lallans, the lowland Scots fusion of Scots Gaelic and English.

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I’m blogging about this because I don’t know who to ask for an expert opinion about my suspicions. Most linguists think it’s Just Not Done to say that a speaker population is evolving its own language out of existence, if for no reason than that doing so might embroil them in identity-politics issues of which they want no part and value judgments they’ve been trained to avoid.

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So, um, is there a fearless Danish linguist in my audience? If Danish isn’t in terminal collapse, what the heck is actually going on instead?

diff --git a/20090520183748.blog b/20090520183748.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..38f6215 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090520183748.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +California Dreamin’ +

If it is impossible for something to continue indefinitely, it will eventually stop.

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The politics of the modern redistributionist state is founded on the assumption that politicians can buy votes by promising voters ever more munificent entitlements – from federal deposit insurance against bank failures to government-subsidized medical care – with the money for these things always somehow being painlessly extracted from somebody else.

+

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Once voters have agreed to forget that every single dollar of tax revenue is extracted from the productive economy by threat of force (including corporate taxes, which are then passed along as higher prices), there is no incentive for any politically favored interest group to do anything but eat subsidies as fast as it can, before all those less deserving other interest groups get a snout in. The demand for entitlements, income transfers, and subsidies will, accordingly, rise without limit. And why not, when “somebody else” is paying?

+

For this con game to continue working on the suckers voters who buy it, there always has to be a “somebody else” from which more money can be painlessly extracted. It’s “the rich” or “corporations” or (when governments borrow money against future tax revenues) ourselves in the future.

+

But what happens when there is no “somebody else” left? California’s voters posed that question today when they rejected six referenda designed to raise taxes or borrowing, all of it allegedly intended to pull the state out of a $21-billion-dollar hole. Exit polling made the voters’ reasoning clear; they don’t believe that allowing taxes to rise will produce anything but ever larger deficits as politicians recklessly overspend on behalf of those politically favored interest groups. The state of California is now facing imminent bankruptcy.

+

The U.S. as a whole will almost certainly face the same problem before the end of Barack Obama’s administration in 2012. Social Security obligations were due to exceed collections in 2013; even before Obama quadrupled the federal deficit this meant a giant blazing meteorite was already hurtling straight at the heart of the Feds’ dinosaurian finances. And the second-order effects of Obama’s socialism-lite economic policy are pushing tax revenues rapidly downwards as investors cut back economic activity in order to avoid being skinned (that is, skinned worse than they already are – the top 1% of earners already pay 39% of all income taxes).

+

The underlying problem is that in any democratic system, the political demand for redistribution of wealth rises faster that the economy’s ability to generate wealth to be redistributed. Even if none of the money ever stuck to our political class’s fingers on its way through, the structural trend would be to ever-increasing deficits; moral outrage about corruption, while justified, is a distraction from the real problem, which is redistributionism itself.

+

But. If it is impossible for something to continue indefinitely, it will eventually stop.

+

Soon – very soon, in historical time – it will become clear that democratic redistributionism cannot deliver on its promises. All such systems, not just California’s and the U.S’s, are running headlong towards a terminal state of moral, political, demographic, and financial bankruptcy.

+

Then, the question will become: what happens afterwards? And it is a serious one, because the crisis could resolve either through the end of democracy or the end of redistributionism. On one path, we learn that we must live within our means and reject the delusion that redistribution can solve more problems than it causes; down the other path lies Peronism on steroids.

+

I am not in doubt which of those I will choose. If I am given any choice…

diff --git a/20090522001911.blog b/20090522001911.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..27645d6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090522001911.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +News from the Linux-adoption front +

Well, now. This is interesting: A study of corporate Linux adoption polling 1,275 IT professionals says:

+

+Linux desktop roll out is easier than expected for properly targeted end-user groups

+

Those with experience are much more likely to regard non-technical users as primary targets for Linux. The message here is that in practice, Linux is easier to deploy to end users than many imagine before they try it.

+
+

It’s become fashionable lately to be pessimistic about Linux’s future on the desktop, but I have to say this matches my experience pretty well. The handful of Ubuntu deployments I’ve done in the last couple years for end-users have indeed been easier than one might have expected.

+

+

The study further notes that most respondents have only deployed Linux to approximately 20% of their users, so the pressure on Microsoft is likely to increase as planned rollouts shift a cohort of the userbase literally 5 times larger than today’s. The study also notes “Desktop Linux adoption is primarily driven by cost reduction”, which is especially interesting given our second news item…

+

Here it is: Linux to regain 50% market share. And cost reduction is what the oncoming shift to low-power ARM processors in netbooks is about, a move that will lock Windows 7 out of the fastest-growing segment of the hardware market.

+

All this perfectly fits the prediction I made in January that Linux would regain netbook market share from Windows as purchasers seek out small, cheap, light machines and netbook makers drop Windows in order to claw back profit margin. Microsoft can delay the latter trend only by kicking back what would otherwise be profits to the netbook makers…and when your earnings are dropping for the first time ever it is a very bad time to be giving up profits. As ARM chips displace Intel processors, even the bribery option won’t keep Microsoft from hemhorraging market share.

+

When the final collapse of the monopoly happens, it’s going to happen fast…

diff --git a/20090525211632.blog b/20090525211632.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e47f260 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090525211632.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Objective Evidence +

This weekend, at Balticon (the Baltimore Science Fiction Convention) I got to play a bit with an infrared-sensing webcam. These turn out not to be very difficult to construct, because CCDs are sensitive well into the IR range. The normal filter blocks IR but passes visible light; by replacing it with fully exposed film stock, which is opaque to visible light but transparent to IR, you get infrared imaging.

+

+

The output was rendered live on a laptop as a mostly black-and-white image with occasional pale pseudocolors. The camera-builder explained that under daylight or artificial-light conditions, most of what you see is actually reflected rather than emitted IR; these light sources emit plenty of heat. (Someone demonstrated by pointing an IR remote control at the webcam that you can in fact see emitted IR. Hold that thought, it will be important when we reach our punchline.)

+

In fact, he claimed that human retinas have some sensitivity to IR that is normally swamped by the response to visible light; with the same film-stock trick done on a pair of welding goggles (he claimed) you can go outside on a bright sunny day and see in infrared without electronic amplification or frequency-shifting.

+

It’s a different world, though, because IR reflectance and color don’t correspond well to visible-light reflectance and color. My black T-shirt, the one one with the mock MPAA rating on it reading “XYZZY – WARNING: FULL FRONTAL NERDITY – Tech-Challenged Persons Strongly Cautioned”, appeared pale green. A bystander commented “That’s how you tell the real Goths from the fake Goths.” I of course rounded in him in mock indigation, because what self-respecting geek would want to fake being a Goth?

+

Then we turned the camera on my wife Cathy, who was elegantly turned out in a black cami tank top, a black blazer, and a titillating amount of visible skin. The tank-top looked dark in the image, but the blazer was a shade of white a few degrees blue-shifted from her skin tone, and seemed to glow as though by specular reflection or emission rather than diffuse reflection.

+

“Hmm. I wonder why my jacket looks like that?” asked she.

+

I saw my moment. “Because,” I intoned, “you are a hot chick.”

diff --git a/20090527183630.blog b/20090527183630.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5a88ecc --- /dev/null +++ b/20090527183630.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Some Iron Laws of Political Economics +

Mancur Olson, in his book The Logic Of Collective Action, highlighted the central problem of politics in a democracy. The benefits of political market-rigging can be concentrated to benefit particular special interest groups, while the costs (in higher taxes, slower economic growth, and many other second-order effects) are diffused through the entire population.

+

The result is a scramble in which individual interest groups perpetually seek to corner more and more rent from the system, while the incremental costs of this behavior rise slowly enough that it is difficult to sustain broad political opposition to the overall system of political privilege and rent-seeking.

+

+

When you add to Olson’s model the fact that the professional political class is itself a special interest group which collects concentrated benefits from encouraging rent-seeking behavior in others, it becomes clear why, as Olson pointed out, “good government” is a public good subject to exactly the same underproduction problems as other public goods. Furthermore, as democracies evolve, government activity that might produce “good government” tends to be crowded out by coalitions of rent-seekers and their tribunes.

+

This general model has consequences. Here are some of them:

+

There is no form of market failure, however egregious, which is not eventually made worse by the political interventions intended to fix it.

+

Political demand for income transfers, entitlements and subsidies always rises faster than the economy can generate increased wealth to supply them from.

+

Although some taxes genuinely begin by being levied for the benefit of the taxed, all taxes end up being levied for the benefit of the political class.

+

The equilibrium state of a regulatory agency is to have been captured by the entities it is supposed to regulate.

+

The probability that the actual effects of a political agency or program will bear any relationship to the intentions under which it was designed falls exponentially with the amount of time since it was founded.

+

The only important class distinction in any advanced democracy is between those who are net producers of tax revenues and those who are net consumers of them.

+

Corruption is not the exceptional condition of politics, it is the normal one.

diff --git a/20090530102849.blog b/20090530102849.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..acc8215 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090530102849.blog @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +Computer Language Trends in 2009 +

Six years ago, in The Art of Unix Programming, I observed some interesting trends in the deployment of programming languages. One Christer Nyfält mailed me this morning reporting that he had followed up by collecting the analogous statistics from SourceForge for present time. Here’s what he said (lightly copy-edited as his English is a bit shaky):

+

+

+I took data from Freshmeat, but its interface has changed recently, so I had to search for how many projects were tagged with the name of each language. My data is from 2009-05-27, a little over six years since you wrote that chapter.

+

My observations:

+

C: from 4845 to 8944, 184%
+C++: from 2098 to 4824, 230%
+Emacs Lisp: from 31 to 60, 194%

+

These are the language you claimed have reached stability, so let’s call a doubling of projects a stable growth rate.

+

Perl: from 2508 to 3730, 149%

+

Here we see the noted stagnation of Perl, only 50% growth instead of doubling expected.

+

Tcl: from 328 to 480, 146%

+

Same situation as Perl. Also, Ruby has reached similar numbers (469) as Tcl.

+

Python: from 948 to 3161, 333%

+

A tripling. We can start to expect Python to pass Perl in a couple of years.

+

Java: from 1900 to 5316, 280%

+

Also a big growth, and it has passed both C++ and Perl in numbers.

+

Shell: from 487 to 1064, 218%

+

Normal growth here.

+

So, the losers are Perl and Tcl, and the winners are Java and Python. Two losers that you predicted, one winner that you predicted, and one winner that’s probably due to policy changes by Sun.

+

I’m interested in your take on this subject. A blog entry from you on it would be interesting. Are there any other trends caused by new languages? Anything surprising? Would Tcl still be listed as a major language in second edition? Will Perl survive in the long run? +

+

Your wish is my command, Christer, especially when you’re making me look prescient. Not that it took a lot of clue to foresee these trends; I’d been watching since ’97 and there was a lot of momentum on them. In answer to your questions…

+

1. Ruby is probably the biggest disruptor since 2003. For a while there I thought it might do to Python what Python did to Perl, but it didn’t sustain its initial growth surge and seems to be having trouble getting design wins nowadays outside a small community of very hard-core supporters. I’m not knocking the language, mind you – it has some attractive features – but it looks like Ruby is turning out not to be quite enough stronger than Python to take share away from it.

+

2. Tcl looks to me like it’s on life-support at this point, with the twin iron lungs being Expect and Tkinter. I bet if you dug deep you’d find that’s what most of the new “Tcl” projects are actually using it for.

+

3. Yeah, Perl will survive – because there’s huge dark masses of legacy out there that we’ll be dealing with for decades. Perl has become the COBOL of web design.

diff --git a/20090531000751.blog b/20090531000751.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..382f152 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090531000751.blog @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +The Economist: Open-source software has won the argument +

Well, yes. I’m kind of wondering why they didn’t figure that out sooner. They had the data; I’ve probably been quoted in The Economist more often than any other single magazine. Except maybe Linux Journal.

diff --git a/20090601164429.blog b/20090601164429.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1382c5e --- /dev/null +++ b/20090601164429.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Extreme punctuation pedantry +

Most people don’t know that there are two different philosophical camps that differ about how to do correct punctuation in English. This has been on my mind lately because of some questions I have been asked by non-native speakers on the Battle for Wesnoth development list, where I am the resident English pedant.

+

The rules we’re taught in school are the syntactic ones; in these, punctuation is a part of the grammar of written English and the rules for where you put it are derived from grammatical phrase structure and pretty strict. Lynne Truss of Eats, Shoots & Leaves fame is an exponent of this school. But there is another…

+

+

Punctuation marks originated from notations used to mark pauses for breath in oral recitations, but 17-to-19th-century grammarians tied them ever more tightly to grammar. There remains a minority position that language pedants call “elocutionary” – that punctuation is properly viewed as markers of speech cadence and intonation. Top-flight copy editors know this: the best one I ever worked with was a syntactic punctuationist on her own hook who noted that I’m an elocutionary punctuationist and then copy-edited in my preferred style rather than hers. (That, my friends, is real professionalism.)

+

And why am I an elocutionary punctuationist? Because I pay careful attention to speech rhythm and try to convey it in my prose. Not all skilled writers do this, but elocutionary punctuation survives in English because it keeps getting rediscovered for stylistic reasons. Consider Rudyard Kipling or Damon Runyon – two masters of conveying the cadences of spoken English in written form; both used elocutionary punctuation, though perhaps not as a conscious choice.

+

To an elocutionary punctuationist, the common marks represent speech pauses of increasing length in roughly this order: comma, semicolon, colon, dash, ellipsis, period. Parentheses suggest a vocal aside at lower volume; exclamation point is a volume/emphasis indicator, and question mark means rising tone.

+

In normal usage, most of the differences between the schools show up in comma placement. But in less usual circumstances, elocutionary punctuationists will cheerfully countenance written utterances that a grammarian would consider technically ill-formed. Here’s an example: “Stop – right – now!” The dashes don’t correspond to phrase boundaries, they’re purely vocal pause markers.

+

I haven’t written this mini-rant to argue that syntactic punctuation is wrong and should be abolished, but I do think more writers and editors should be aware that the elocutionary style exists, has a sound historical pedigree, and remains a valid choice, at least in English (my Wesnoth informants tell me there is no analog of it in German or Russian). Personally, I think it is more supple and expressive than the syntactic style.

+

.

diff --git a/20090604121957.blog b/20090604121957.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3d1a271 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090604121957.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +We are not sheep +

I had a breakthrough moment last night. It was on the IRC channel for one of my projects. The developers, and the IRC’s regulars, are a small and tight-knit group. By a coincidence completely unrelated to the nature of the project, we’re all firearms fanciers who take a firm line on Second Amendment rights. Occasionally the IRC chat will turn from project-related technical matters to topics like the relative merits of various pistol calibers.

+

Occasionally people will show up on the channel looking for project-related help. Some of them become semi-regulars on the channel because they’re often working technical problems for which the project is part of the solution. One of these guys hopped on the channel last night while we happened to be in the middle of a firearms digression, listened for a bit, and then started to spout.

+

+

“Why do you guys think you need firearms?” “Criminals will just take them from you and use them against you.” “They’re useless for anything but killing.” “You can’t seriously think they’re a deterrent against overreaching governments, the cops will just come for you you first.” And on and on and on, the same factually and historically ignorant babble civilian firearms owners are wearily used to hearing – as if civilian firearms had not been culturally and politically decisive in hundreds of struggles for freedom, from the American Revolution clear down to short-stopping Communist counter-coups in Russia and the Baltic States as recently as the 1990s.

+

I listened to the others on the channel offer polite, reasoned, factually correct counterarguments to this guy, and get nowhere. And suddenly…suddenly, I understood why. It was because the beliefs the ignoramus was spouting were only surface structure; refuting them one-by-one could do no good without directly confronting the substructure, the emotional underpinnings that made ignoramus unable to consider or evaluate counter-evidence.

+

The need, here, was to undermine that substructure. And I saw the way to do it. This is what I said:

+

“You speak, but I hear only the bleating of a sheep. Your fear gives power to your enemies.”

+

Ignoramus typed another sentence of historical ignorance. My reply was “Baa! Baa! Baaaaa!”

+

And another. My reply was more sheep noises, more deliberate mockery. And you know what? A few rounds of this actually worked. Ignoramus protested that he wasn’t a sheep. At which point I asked him “Then why are you disarmed?”

+

*CRACK*

+

The conversation afterwards was completely different, and ended up with ignoramus speculating about meeting with one of our regulars in his area to do things with firearms.

+

I learned a valuable lesson last night. I’m not normally a fan of mockery and attacks on a man’s character over reasoned argument. But when the real issue is in fact the man’s character – specifically, when the issue is where he fits in terms of Dave Grossman’s seminal essay on sheep, wolves and sheepdogs – then that’s the level on which the argument has to be conducted.

+

I think, now, that gun owners need to be replying more often to hoplophobes simply by echoing their “Baaa! Baaa! Baaaa!” back at them. Because only that reaches the actual fundamentals of the thinly-rationalized anti-firearms prejudice we so often encounter.

+

And besides being more effective, it’s in a sense a more honest kind of argument, too. Because for many of us the fundamental emotional issue is the same, seen from the other side. Yes, rational consideration of costs and benefits on both individual and social levels amply justifies firearms rights, but for many firearms owners that is surface structure. The substructure is more like this:

+

We are not sheep. We will not behave as sheep. We are armed because we refuse to be sheep.

+

Very few of us are ever likely to be at a place and time when civilian firearms change the course of history. Ordinary crime prevention is a far more likely outcome, but still…for most people, most of the time, the most important thing about bearing arms (or its inverse, being willfully self-disarmed) is not what it enables you to do to the other guy, but what it signifies and reinforces about yourself.

+

Will you be a sheep, a peasant, a subject, an endless means for anyone willing to use more force than you? Or not?

+

You never know – someday, history might turn on your answer…

diff --git a/20090608054321.blog b/20090608054321.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e6d1600 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090608054321.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Protective camouflage and holy victims +

Today I’m going to repeat a story from the blog Alas! and discuss it, because…well, the author does not seem to have grasped the actual implications of what he wrote. It’s what I think of as a “holy victim” narrative, but the actual lesson is not, perhaps, what the author intended.

+

+

+There was one girl I spent a lot of time with. A pixie-like joy of a person, Dawna, who wore her blonde hair almost totally shaved, and strung chains on her jeans. People who saw her knew there was something unusual about her. They didn’t take joy in her oddness, in her willingness to sing in the middle of the street, in her humor, in her desire to leave strange and beautiful things in public places for strangers to find and puzzle over. They shouted “dyke!” at her from car windows; they deployed store guards to follow her around; they sneered and snarled.

+

When I was 17 and Dawna was 15, she went out with me and started acting very strange. “Is she on meth or something?” a friend of mine asked. I said, “I’m sure she isn’t” — but I was wrong. She was on meth. She called me that night, crying. She’d been taking a lot of drugs for a long time — to try to deal with the pain of her isolation, the pain of how people pricked and pained her, and othered her, and told her she was nothing.

+

I told her I’d help. I arranged for her to be transferred to my high school and set her up with the teachers who’d been best for me. Nothing worked; the teachers who were more than happy to deal with my casual attitude toward authority had no tools in their kits to handle a girl who was too depressed to go to class. I’d thought they would recognize in her, as they had in me, independence and intelligence. I suppose they did. But even if they wanted to, there was nothing they could do.

+

I always worried Dawna would die. I thought she would overdose or commit suicide. When I read a few years ago that she was dead, and the obituary hinted at a cause of death that couldn’t be announced to potentially scandalized ears, I knew I was right.

+

She was twenty-two.

+

Dawna lived twenty-two years in the toxic hatred of our homophobic, gender policing, joy-killing world. And then it murdered her. +

+

We are supposed to react to this story with pity and loathing at the death of the holy victim. Sorry, but my reaction was that Dawna was clearly asking for what she got. If she didn’t want the local monkeys to “other” her, why did she dress funny?

+

Important rule of living: you can be weird, or you can look weird, but you can’t usually get away with both.

+

Clever deviants – like, for example, myself – make a point of not looking like an obvious threat to the mores of their time. I’m a neo-pagan anarcho-capitalist gun-nut who talks about my way-out-of-the-mainstream beliefs and often gets the press to cover them sympathetically. I fill auditoriums! I am much more successively subversive than J. Random Punker in his chains and studs exactly because I don’t look weird. I could be as gay as a treeful of parrots and it wouldn’t slow me down a bit.

+

The world did not kill Dawna. Dawna’s bad choices killed Dawna. Bad choice #1: taking a visibly oppositional stance without having the inner strength not to buckle. Bad choice #2: taking nasty drugs to cope with bad choice #1.

+

It’s going to sound harsh, but I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the girl. She played stupid and lost – wasted her potential on mere display. If she had really wanted to change the world, rather than staying stuck in shock-your-parents mode until she died, she would have dialed back on the presentation and been an articulate but relatively normal-looking advocate for sexual freedom, or whatever.

+

Costume or substance. Posturing or efficiency. Looking like a threat to “the system” or actually being it. Choose exactly one….

diff --git a/20090612124043.blog b/20090612124043.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7cc0865 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090612124043.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +How to Type with a Foreign Accent +

I spend a lot of time on IRC channels and discussion forums where many of the users are not native speakers of English. Recently one of these expressed surprise when I observed: “You type with a foreign accent. What is your birth language?” He knew, of course, about speaking English with an accent, but he hadn’t encountered before the possibility that the same cues could be observable in written English.

+

Herewith , some instructions on how to type with an accent. All the examples I will give are utterances I have observed in the wild.

+

+

To sound generally foreign, omit elisions and contractions normally used by native speakers. Type “I do not think I have the time” rather than “I don’t think I have time”.

+

To sound German, put commas in places that do not correspond to speech pauses in English. “I do not know, how he could have believed that.”

+

To sound Russian, omit definite or indefinite articles. “No, you cannot have cheeseburger.”

+

To sound like a speaker of Hindi or Urdu or one of the related languages, emit wordy run-on sentences that begin with “Esteemed sir”, like: “Esteemed sir, I would be grateful if you could direct me towards a good book on Python because I am attempting to learn programming.”

+

Understand, none of these errors actually interferes with comprehension. I’ve found that these second-language speakers are often more worried about the quality of their English than they need to be.

diff --git a/20090617225658.blog b/20090617225658.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ff14026 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090617225658.blog @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +Reinventing Homosexuality +

I’ve recently been reviewing what I know about the historical evidence for how homosexuality has been viewed in other times and places, and doing a bit of additional research into the area. This, which is partly a response to comments by my regulars on some recent essays here, has led me to an interesting perspective on modern debates about homosexuality and sexual liberty.

+

+

First, let me be clear that I’m deriving my tentative conclusions from considering (translated) primary sources – graffitti preserved in Pompeii, descriptions of the penalties for cross-dressing in Norse sagas, the lampoons of Catullus, and Japanese accounts of homoeroticism among the samurai are among those I’m familiiar with. Closer to the present day, I have read ethnological sources on homosexuality among the Afghans and in the modern Arab world, and made at least one relevant observation first-hand a few years back, in the red-light district of Bangkok.

+

I’m emphasizing primary sources because this is one of many, many areas where contemporary scholarship is severely corrupted by politics; it is probably no longer possible to achieve tenure at a major American university after giving offense to the homosexual-activist lobby. Fortunately, I don’t have that sort of career issue to worry about, and can therefore speak without fear.

+

Most educated people in the U.S. and Europe have a default model or construction of homosexual behavior which I will call “romantic homosexuality”. Romantic homosexuality is homoeroticism between equals; men or women of roughly the same age and social position, with the relationship having affective elements similar to the emotional range in heterosexual relationships (from one-night stand through lifetime marriage).

+

At one opposite extreme from romantic homosexuality is what I’ll call deprivation homosexuality – homoerotic behavior by men or women who are normally heterosexual but isolated from contact with the opposite sex for long periods of time. I won’t discuss this further in this essay except to note that for good analysis of what goes on in (for example) prisons, the difference between deprivation homosexuality and other kinds is significant.

+

We are generally aware of two other types of homosexual behavior. One is pederasty: homosexuality between adult men and adolescent or prepubescent boys in which the older partner is always, or nearly always, the one doing the penetrating. It is a significant datum, to which I’ll return later, that neither modern Western culture nor any other that I am aware of has a well-defined category equivalent to pederasty among women.

+

The last category I’ll discuss here is what I’ll call domination sex. In this kind of homoeroticism, penetration is equated with dominating or humiliating an inferior, the slave, the prisoner, the catamite, the helpless object. It is in this spirit that Sioux Indians threatened to rape the corpses of their defeated enemies, and gangsta rappers speak of “making him my bitch”. It provides the threat and the hostile charge when someone says “Fuck you.”

+

When we examine the behavior of humans in the large, over a broad sweep of history and culture, and compare it with homoerotic behavior in nonhuman primates closely related to us, a startling pattern emerges. Romantic homosexuality is almost all of what we see in homosexual human and higher-primate females, but almost none of what we see in homosexual human and higher-primate males.

+

Over and over again, the pattern of male homosexual behavior in pre-modern sources is overwhelmingly one of pederasty and domination sex. And not just in pre-modern sources but in most of the present-day world as well. When I tried to brush off a pimp in the red-light district of Bangkok who waved a brochure full of naked women in my face, he didn’t ask me if I wanted to fuck another man instead – he tried to rent me a boy. (I refrained from punching him out, because I recognized that from his point of view it was a reasonable next question.)

+

We may further note that there are, broadly speaking, two contending models of “normal” — acceptable or semi-acceptable male homosexual behavior — observable in human cultures. In one model, that of the modern West, romantic homosexuality is relatively tolerated, while pederasty and domination sex are considered far more deviant. I’ll call this the homophilic construction. It’s what most of my readers accept as normal.

+

But in the other, older model, pederasty and domination sex are considered more “normal” than romantic homosexuality. In cultures with this model, the “top” in an episode of pederasty or domination sex is not necessarily considered homosexual or deviant at all; any stigma attaches to the passive partner. Romantic homosexuality is considered far more perverse, because it feminizes both partners. I think of this as the “classical” construction of homosexuality, as it describes the attitudes of ancient Rome – but it persists in cultures as near to our own as South America and the Mediterranean littoral.

+

It’s the classical construction that is the rule in human cultures. The homophilic one is the exception; in fact, I am not able to identify any culture which held to it until after the Industrial Revolution in Europe. And not all of Europe has acquired it yet. Even in the English-speaking countries, where the homophilic construction is most entrenched, the connotations of sexual insults and threats in our language still reflect the older model.

+

To put it another way, the male homosexuals of the last two centuries in our culture have engaged in a massive reinvention of homosexuality that is still underway. Specifically the male homosexuals; lesbians began the game with romantic homosexuality as their dominant mode. I have not identified any culture in which it was considered more normal for lesbians to have sex with prepubescent girls or with dominated inferiors.

+

Why this asymmetry? I suspect, ultimately, it can be traced back to a tragic flaw in mammalian neural architecture – the fact that the limbic system handles sexual arousal and the anger/fear arousal involved in dominance transactions among social animals with adjacent circuitry that can relatively easily become cross-wired

+

Only this can really account for the observed fact that some (mercifully, only relatively few) human beings derive visceral sexual satisfaction from killing. The use of anal penetration as an expression of dominance, and of accepting it as a submission ritual, probably has the same source. It is phyletically old enough to be found not only in primates but in other mammalian lines as well. And, in the nature of things, it is not a threat females can make; thus, while thrill-killing is neurologically possible to females (and there have in fact been female serial kllers), domination sex has been pretty much outside of the repertoire.

+

This analysis raises two interesting questions. The first one is about the past: what changed? That is, how did the homophilic construction replace the classical one, where it did? I’m only speculating here, but I think the proximate cause may have been the sentimentalization of family life around the turn of the 19th century in Europe, which in turn was enabled by a sharp fall in infant mortality rates. Both processes started earlier and moved faster in England and the Anglosphere than they did elsewhere.

+

The other interesting question is whether this reinvention is sustainable in the longer term. If my analysis is correct, modern homosexuals are bucking a pretty strong biological headwind. How strong can be judged by a chilling little statistic I picked up years ago from a how-to manual written by homosexual SM practitioners for newbies, er, learning the ropes; it noted that, adjusted for population size, male homosexuals murder each other at a rate 26 times that of the general population.

+

That suggests to me that a tendency for male homosexuals to drift into the darker corners of domination sex is still wired in beneath the modern homophilic construction. It might take actual genetic engineering, of a kind we don’t yet have, to fix that wiring. Until then, I wish them luck. Because (and here I make the first and only value claim in this essay) whatever one’s opinion of homophilic homosexuals might be, the behaviors associated with the pederastic/dominating classical style are entangled with abuse and degradation in a way that can only be described as evil. Modern homosexuals deserve praise for their attempt to get shut of them.

diff --git a/20090619121336.blog b/20090619121336.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cc9d062 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090619121336.blog @@ -0,0 +1,64 @@ +Responding to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “Overcoming Bias” +

This was originally email to Eliezer Yudkowsky about his excellent and thought-provoking blog Overcoming Bias (actually, the links here are to the older newer Less Wrong, which has been re-indexed at Overcoming Bias). Eliezer encouraged me to publish this commentary; I have provided HTML markup and fixed some typos. Warning: the following may be heavy sledding if you are not philosophically literate.

+

+

Comments on OB posts up to #252. I’d have done the whole set, but I need to go fight a fire on one of my coding projects.

+

These are going to sound far more negative about your writing and thinking than I actually am, because I generally won’t need to comment on the majority of stuff I agree on unless I can say something funny or illuminating about it. Often this is not the case.

+

The Simple Truth is funny, but takes an awful lot of time and effort to work its way around to a position equivalent to the Peircean fallibilist formulation of operationalism. I think you should have chosen a more direct route to avoid fatiguing the reader.

+

I’ve noticed before, e.g. in your expositions of Bayesian theory that you have a tendency to run too long and beat the point to death. Alas, this is still true of An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem upon rereading. It is formally correct but a pedagogical disaster.

+

The Twelve Virtues of Rationality was still damn impressive the second time I read it. Possibly your best piece of writing.

+

In Why truth? And… you overcomplicate the exposition. All the motives you cite can be explained in a simple and unified way: we are truth-seeking animals because we are prediction-seeking animals because we are control-seeking animals because we are goal-seeking animals. Or, to go at it from the other end: we want things, so we seek to control our environment, which we can only do by correctly predicting what it will do if we kick it. The conscious feeling of curiosity and the belief that truth is morally important are just the normal operating noises of our adaptive machinery.

+

In …What’s a bias, again?, you appear to be missing an important perspective about why we have cognitive biases. Normally, “bias” generally turns out to be an evaluative shortcut that was useful in the environment of ancestral adaptation, but is now misapplied by brains trying to cope with far more complex and varied challenges.

+

In The Proper Use of Humility you write: “The temptation is always to claim the most points with the least effort. The temptation is to carefully integrate all incoming news in a way that lets us change our beliefs, and above all our actions, as little as possible.” Alas, you are so busy knocking over that bad social-status reasons for belief inertia that you slight a good one: Changing beliefs is not costless, and may commit you to a decision procedure that is too heavyweight to be worth some very marginal gain in utility. Physics example: if I am doing ballistics under conditions normal near the Earth’s surface, it is instrumentally rational for me to believe Newton’s laws rather than Einstein’s.

+

Here, and elsewhere, I observe in your thinking a kind of predisposition that is common in analytical philosophers. You underweight the degree to which computational costs are a factor in theory formation and selection; more seriously, you also underweight the role of motivation in theory-building. It is not that you are unaware of these factors, it is that you tend to miss predictive hypotheses that lean heavily on them in favor of more elaborate
+constructions that are no more predictive.

+

In Some Claims Are Just Too Extraordinary you write: “What about the claim that 2 + 2 = 5? What about journals that claim to publish replicated reports of ESP?”. Bad move. These claims are epistemically of two very different kinds. You should have omitted the first.

+

In Inductive Bias, you write: “A more general view of inductive bias would identify it with a Bayesian’s prior over sequences of observations…” Ding! You should be this pithy more often.

+

In Your Rationality is My Business, you write ‘The syllogism we desire to avoid runs: “I think Susie said a bad thing, therefore, Susie should be set on fire.”‘ Many years ago, I observed an implicit premise in the way many humans reason which I call the “Pressure Principle”. It goes like this: “The truth of the claim ‘I have a duty to do X’ justifies others in using force to coerce me to do X.” I reject this principle. Sometimes, pointing out that it is the implicit ground of an argument can persuade people to reject that argument

+

In Universal Fire, you write “If a match stops working, so do you. You can’t change just one thing.” Indeed. My favorite example of this isn’t deCamp’s match, but E.E. “Doc” Smith’s “inertialess drive”. Instant death…

+

In Think Like Reality: “You have the absolutely bizarre idea that reality ought to consist of little billiard balls bopping around, when in fact reality is a perfectly normal cloud of complex amplitude in configuration space. This is your problem, not reality’s, and you are the one who needs to change.” Thanks for that; I haven’t laughed so hard in weeks

+

Ibid., “Surprise exists in the map, not in the territory.” Yes. Many years ago I published a similar maxim: “Paradoxes only exist in language, not reality.”

+

The Third Alternative: “The last thing a Santa-ist wants to hear is that praise works better than bribes, or that spaceships can be as inspiring as flying reindeer.” … or that the result of attempting to ‘correct’ market failure with political intervention is almost always a worse failure.

+

In Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences) you choose an amazingly circuitous and vague way of getting to a conclusion that is as correct as possible while being seriously misleading. The correct answer to the question “If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” is another question: “Why are you asking?” That is: what kind of prediction does your goal-seeking require?

+

You get the prediction part more or less right, but because your gut instinct is to tend to think of theories as cathedrals motivated only by the desire for Pure Truth (choose one per physical system, perfect correspondence required) you miss the fact that the appropriate microtheory of what “sound” is may differ depending on the goals of the theorizer. Instead, you hare off into a lot of fairly unnecessary pseudo-ontology and a random bash at postmodernism.

+

Note carefully that I am not arguing subjectivism or some sort of Feyerabendian conceptual anarchism here. The different microtheories of “sound” are commensurable, and can readily be fit into a consilient macrotheory; but any clear account of why we might choose either (an answer to the parable) requires an account of the chooser’s motivation.

+

In Professing and Cheering. you write “That’s why it mattered to her that what she was saying was beyond ridiculous. If she’d tried to make it sound more plausible, it would have been like putting on clothes.” I found it extremely odd that you did not fully understand what you were seeing, but perhaps that is only because I am a neopagan myself and used to pulling similar maneuvers. Or maybe you have borderline Aspergers or something and are poorly equipped to process some kinds of neurotypical interaction, including this one (that’s my wife Cathy’s guess, and not a hostile one; she rather likes you).

+

Your lady panelist was performing a mindfuck. The intent of her speech acts was not to persuade anyone that she believed the Norse creation myth, it was to hold up a funhouse mirror to the religious cognitive style. The question her provocation was implicitly posing to the audience is “If you reject this as absurd, on what basis do you maintain your own equally poetic and absurd creation myth?”

+

I speak from the authority of direct personal experience here, as I have done the same sort of thing for the same reasons in pretty much the same way.

+

In Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable you write: “Back in the old days, saying the local religion ‘could not be proven’ would have gotten you burned at the stake. This is not true in general. Actually, excepting political special cases like the Roman state cult of the Emperor as Sol Invictus, it is weakly true only of monotheisms and strongly true only of one family of monotheisms descended from or strongly influenced by Zoroastrianism (notably including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).

+

Most religions outside this group don’t give a flying crap about the state of your beliefs or “proof” or objective correlatives as long as you maintain ritual cleanliness and do what is socially expected –
+religion as attire, in your terms.

+

In Fake Causality you write about phlogiston as a paradigmatic example. Here’s a story about that:

+

In 1992 I was an invited speaker at the Institute for Advanced Study. Yes, this was five years before I was famous; what I was doing there was a seminar on advanced Emacsing. My sponsor, the astrophycist Piet Hut, took me around to meet a number of the stellar eminences at the Institute.

+

One of them was a cosmologist whose name I don’t remember. We chatted for a while – he was doing interesting work on the apparent quantization of red-shift distributions. Then I said to him: “Oh, by the way, I know what dark matter is made from.”

+

Eying me dubiously, he said “What?”

+

I said “Phlogiston.”

+

He damn near fell out of his chair laughing.

+

I disagree with The Futility of Emergence. There is a semantic difference between saying “Human intelligence is an emergent product of neurons firing” and “Human intelligence is an product of neurons firing.” The word “emergent” is a signal that we believe a very specific thing about the relationship between “neurons firing” and “intelligence”, which is that there is no possible account of intelligence in which the only explanatory units are neurons or subsystems of neurons.

+

Planning Fallacy is the first post in which you have showed me something (reliable predictive superiority of the “outside view”) that I had no clue about before I read it. Well done.

+

In Einstein’s Arrogance, you write: “But from a Bayesian perspective, you need an amount of evidence roughly equivalent to the complexity of the hypothesis just to locate the hypothesis in theory-space.” Wow. Now that I think of it, there’s probably a law here: no theory can be confirmed (even in the loose, semi-definite fallibilist sense) by a communication with less Kolmgorov complexity than the theory itself.

+

In A Priori you wander around the mulberry bush discussing justifications of Occam’s Razor, and inexplicably miss the obvious and simple one: computation has a cost. Whenever we multiply entities beyond necessity. we commit ourselves to a decision procedure that is wasteful and will be outcompeted by actors who spend the resources we waste on solving other problems. You continue to have a very curious blind spot towards analysis like this.

+

In Do We Believe Everything We’re Told?…sure. I had never actually encountered Spinoza’s account before, but it now seems obvious to me that it must be true. For, how else can we evaluate a proposition other than plugging it into the rest of our prediction generators and running them forward to see if there are inconsistencies? Descartes’s neutral “consider” is a classic mysterious answer to a mysterious question; he never unpacks it.

+

In Self-Anchoring, you write “We can put our feet in other minds’ shoes, but we keep our own socks on.” It would be astonishing only if this were not true. We solve the other-minds problem by mirroring our own; really, how else could we do it?

+

In Expecting Short Inferential Distances you replicate part of my own thinking about the EEA basis of cognitive bias.

+

Beware of Stephen J. Gould. I think it is relevant that Gould seems to have been a believing Marxist who took some pains not to bruit about that fact (the evidence is not entirely unequivocal but pretty strong). At least part of what he was doing with his dishonesty was waging a kulturkampf (virtuous in Marxist terms) against hereditarian thinking.

+

In Purpose and Pragmatism you write: “You find yourself in an unheard-falling-tree dilemma, only when you become curious about a question with no pragmatic use, and no predictive consequences. Which suggests that you may be playing loose with your purposes.” Well, yeah. Why didn’t you get here the first time you analyzed this parable?

+

In Evaluability (And Cheap Holiday Shopping) you write: “If you have a fixed amount of money to spend – and your goal is to display your friendship, rather than to actually help the recipient – you’ll be better off deliberately not shopping for value. Decide how much money you want to spend on impressing the recipient, then find the most worthless object which costs that amount. The cheaper the class of objects, the more expensive a particular object will appear, given that you spend a fixed amount.” How delightfully evil. Now, the interesting utility-maximization question, given that we do our holiday shopping together, is: should I tell my wife this heuristic or not? The answer is not obvious…

+

In Uncritical Supercriticality, you write “Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.” I think there is a good general rule, but it is vulnerable to misinterpretation. Buzz Aldrin was right: the correct response to the person who gravely insulted him was to smack the sorry little fucker a good one, even though the insult was superficially framed as an argument. Similarly, the correct response to a person who says “You do not own yourself, but are owned by society (or the state), and I am society (or the state) speaking.” is to injure him as gravely as you think you can get away with — because though this is formally framed as an argument, it is an assertion of a right to control you that is properly met with violence. (In fact, I think if you do not do violence in that situation you are failing in a significant ethical duty.)

+

Re When None Dare Urge Restraint: I am among those who fear (yes, “fear” is the correct and carefully chosen word) that the U.S. response to 9/11 was not nearly as violent and brutal as it needed to be. To prevent future acts of this kind, it is probably necessary that those who consider them should shit their pants with fear at the mere thought of the U.S.’s reaction. We did not achieve this, and I fear we are likely to pay for that failure in otherwise preventable mass deaths.

+

In Guardians of Ayn Rand. you write “Actually, I think Shermer’s falling prey to correspondence bias by supposing that there’s any particular correlation between Rand’s philosophy and the way her followers formed a cult.” I don’t agree. There are specific features of the awful mess called “Randian epistemology” that are conducive to map/territory confusion, specifically the notion that the Law of the Excluded Middle is ontologically fundamental rather than a premise valid only for certain classes of reasoning.

+

The Litany Against Gurus reminds me of this:

+

+ To follow the path:
+ look to the master,
+ follow the master,
+ walk with the master,
+ see through the master,
+ become the master. +

+

From “How To Become A Hacker”. (Yes, I wrote it.)

+

Two Cult Koans: Dang, you’re good at the Zen-pastiche thing. Have you read these?

+

In Zen and the Art of Rationality you write “And yet it oftimes seems to me that my thoughts are expressed in conceptual language that owes a great deal to the inspiration of Eastern philosophy.” Well, sure: and the reason you’re attracted to that is because the good parts of Eastern philosophy that we’ve imported are all about something that is very important to you, but about which Western traditions lack language that is quite as precise and evocative: namely directed change in the style of consciousness.

+

In To Lead, You Must Stand Up, you write: ‘I briefly thought to myself: “I bet most people would be experiencing ‘stage fright’ about now. But that wouldn’t be helpful, so I’m not going to go there.”‘ Yup. Me too. But I think your exhortations here are nearly useless. Experience I’ve collected over the last ten years suggests to me that the kind of immunity to stage fright you and I have is a function of basic personality type at the neurotransmitter-balance level, and not really learnable by most people.

+

In Extensions and Intensions – er, I hope you are aware that you are restating basic General Semantics here.

+

In Disguised Queries, you write: “The question “Is this object a blegg?” may stand in for different queries on different occasions.” Or, to put it more precisely, the correct microtheory depends on the motivation of the theorizer. We’ve been here before.

+

To be continued…

diff --git a/20090621112837.blog b/20090621112837.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..61acffc --- /dev/null +++ b/20090621112837.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +A plea from Iran +

I received an email that deeply moved me a few moments ago. I’m going to reproduce it here exactly, except that (as requested) I am omitting the name of the sender. Because I think I’m going to need a term of reference for him, I am substituting the name of a legendary Persian hero.

+
+

My name is [Rostam] , an open source fan and your blog regular commenter …

+

Regarding to security consideration, PLEASE KEEP MY IDENTITY SECRET !!

+

I wanted to inform you about what’s happening in Iran , but the the wildness circle of Iran’s religious and dictatorship regime is so that I can just invite you to check this two link in youtube :

+

http://www.youtube.com/results?&search_type=&search_query=neda+protest

+

http://www.youtube.com/results?&search_type=&search_query=iran+protest

+

Eric, I know that I will maybe face the deadly threats by sending this email. But, I do this because I do believe in freedom.

+

Inasmuch as, you are one of the most influent persons in one of the most talented community (Hackers) in the world, I humbly ask you write about Iran and what’s going on there.

+

Please tell the world that Persian people are fight for freedom . Our fight is “weapon less” against a full armored enemy . Our weapon is our great civilization , is our will of freedom and is our prior experience over the history.

+

PLEASE tell the world that there is no doubt at all that we will see freedom as you saw it after destroying Hitler’s nightmare …

+

Sincerely Yours , [Rostam] +

+

Rostam, I will indeed blog about this. I begin by publishing your plea, which despite its somewhat broken English is probably as eloquent as anything I could write on the matter. You have my promise of secrecy. I will have more to say in coming days.

+

And, an interesting contrast with my last email from Iran…

diff --git a/20090622042756.blog b/20090622042756.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0327563 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090622042756.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Dispatches from the Iranian cyberfront +

I’ve spent the last seventeen hours living inside a cyberpunk novel. A libertarian cyberpunk novel. It’s been a weird and awesome experience.

+

Within an hour after I received a plea for help from Iran, a regular commenter on this blog recruited me into a hacker network that has been forming to support the democratic Iranian revolutionaries by providing them with proxy servers, Tor anonymizers, and any other technologies needed
+for them to communicate over channels the Iranian regime cannot censor or control.

+

I know this network has contacts on the ground among the revolutionaries. I don’t know who they
+are, and don’t want to know. Most of the other network members are just names on an IRC channel. But we’re putting together a stealth network at amazing speed. Nothing matters as much as the courage and determination of the Iranians on the ground, but we aim to make a difference in our own way and we have the tools to do it.

+

This disorganization has only been forming for a very short time. It doesn’t really have leaders. It didn’t have even a name when I joined it, though I’ve given it one that looks like it might stick. Until and unless somebody else steps up to the job, I’m our public contact.

+

This role carries a non-zero risk that I will be targeted for assassination, or interrogation followed by execution, by agents of the Iranian regime – we’ve had more than one death threat against core members already. I take this risk with eyes open because we need somebody to be public, and I know I’ve already been a jihadi target since 2006; at least I can keep some other poor bastard out of the line of fire. I now expect to remain continuously armed for the duration of the Iranian crisis.

+

Rostam, this is how I’m answering your plea. We’ll do what we can for your people. For freedom.

+

To learn more about NedaNet and how you can help, go here.

+

UPDATE: Actual death threat received. I have taken appropriate precautions.

diff --git a/20090625160309.blog b/20090625160309.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..240e1ef --- /dev/null +++ b/20090625160309.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +“This is massacre…this is genocide…this is Hitler!” +

Listen to this CNN interview with an eyewitness to the Baharestan Square Massacre. If it does not freeze your blood, you are no longer part of any community of human feeling I can recognize.

+

I am, as of now, DONE with people who say we shouldn’t “impose American values” or “promote democracy” in the Middle East. They are morally bankrupt. As of 24 June 2009 they have slip-slid into the category of apologists for genocide.

+

That woman is shattered. She has witnessed atrocities no human being should even have to imagine, let alone watch being wreaked on their friends and neighbors and countrymen. She is pleading with us, screaming for the world to intervene.

+

Will we flagellate ourselves over our imagined sins, or act? This is cause for war – not on behalf of the U.S.’s particular
+interests, but on behalf of all humanity against a cabal of tyrants and butchers unequaled in evil since Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.

+

To know of this degree of radical evil, and have the power to act against it but fail to do so, is to become accomplice to the evil. The time for the overthrow of the Iranian regime, by any feasible means up to and including full-scale war, has come.

+

Free Iran!

diff --git a/20090629063444.blog b/20090629063444.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..df10504 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090629063444.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Misconstruing Mussolini +

I’ve been reviewing the history of fascism recently, because the Republic of Iran has many structural features in common with fascism and I think the history of fascism in Europe holds lessons about its future. And recently I ran across a quote beloved of American leftists in an email signature:

+

From Benito Mussolini: “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

+

This quote is often misconstrued nowadays by leftists who view profit-making corporations under capitalism (especially multinational corporations) as instruments of the devil. They love the implied image of capitalist fat-cats and fascist dictators conspiring in gilded opulence. Alas for them that this quote actually doesn’t imply anything like that; the terminological ground under it has shifted.

+

+

The “corporatism” Mussolini to which was referring had, actually, nothing to do with corporations, joint-stock or otherwise (in the 1920s the word “corporation” did not yet have its modern sense, either in English or Italian). His use of the word had to do with a feature of fascist theory forgotten by almost everybody but specialist historians.

+

In fascist theory, “corporations” were bodies like unions, craft guilds, professional societies, and grange associations. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism for discussion; see especially the section “Italian fascist corporativism”.

+

What Mussolini was actually enunciating was a sort of organic statism in which the state would bless or admit representatives of various “corporations” into its governing councils — and no, that didn’t mean Fiat or Beretta but (say) the Abruzzo Building Trades Association, or the Society of University Professors.

+

While corporations-in-the-modern sense were not outright excluded from being legitimized “corporations” in the fascist sense, neither did they have any special status or power in the system. Actually, it was rather the reverse…

+

It’s worth remembering that the founders of fascism were mainly Leninists like Mussolini with a sprinkling of anarcho-syndicalists (George Sorel being the best known of those). Actual fascism retained the founders’ doctrinal hostility to what modern leftists would call “corporate power”, never renouncing its state-socialist roots and being (in fact) hostile to all centers of power other than the state itself.

+

The modern idea that German and Italian fascism were conservative or pro-business ideologies is essentially a fantasy constructed by pro-Soviet propagandists during and after World War II. In fact, classical fascism never wandered very far from its left-wing origins; corporatism can be seen as an elaboration of the theoretical role of worker’s soviets in Leninist theory.

diff --git a/20090630104004.blog b/20090630104004.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2650b77 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090630104004.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +RFI on 1911-pattern carry guns +

This is a bleg for information on 1911-pattern handguns optimized for concealed carry.

+

Since receiving my most recent death threat, I’ve been carrying a Glock .40 pretty continuously. The .40 is an excellent weapon, but has two drawbacks from my point of view. One is that it has a 5-inch barrel and a relatively wide frame, it’s really designed for external holster carry rather than concealment, and while it can be hidden on a person my size it’s not really comfortable for continuous wear.

+

The other problem is that it’s not a 1911-pattern .45. Yes, I know, there are arguments for double-action and smaller calibers, but 1911 is what I like and thoroughly understand. That feeling of comfort and confidence is a valuable asset and could make a life-or-death difference in a clutch situation.

+

Therefore I’m soliciting information on 1911-pattern carry guns. The search specification is this: 1911-pattern .45 with a three-inch barrel, optimized for concealed carry with as few projecting parts to snag clothing as possible. I know of one weapon fitting this spec, the Kimber Ultra II Carry. I’m interested in pointers to functionally similar weapons, reviews, personal experiences, and recommendations. I will entertain offers of sale and would not turn up my nose at used guns in good condition.

+

Attacks on gun ownership and other philosophical/political diatribes will be considered off-topic for this comment thread and deleted. Yes, I have notified the FBI (which is taking the threat seriously) and the police have my house on elevated watch, but “when seconds count, the police are only minutes away”. If you have nothing concrete to contribute to helping me keep myself alive, keep your lip zipped.

+

UPDATE: Thanks to all who responded. I found a used, excellent-condition Kimber Ultra Carry II on gunbroker.com for $740, which is a steal considering that all the quotes I’ve heard locally are for $1299 and up. This is the exact thing I decided I wanted, so I am happy.

diff --git a/20090701233615.blog b/20090701233615.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cb55881 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090701233615.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +The Hand-Reared Cat +

In a recent comment, I wrote:

+
+

Oddly enough, our cat often does come when called, and is rather good at figuring out what humans want and doing it. A few days ago a photographer came out here to take snaps of me for an AP story on NedaNet and was quite startled when I asked the cat to turn around so her head would face the camera, and she did it.

+

Our cat’s behavior is not doglike servility, though. She pays careful attention to human hands because she associates them with being petted, and she’s a total friction slut. As a result, you can often fetch her, or get her to move, with hand gestures. I made one that directed her attention towards the photographer.

+
+

By an odd coincidence, my wife Cathy insisted less than an hour later that I should watch a video of the Moscow Cats Theater (I’d post a link, but I haven’t found that exact one from here). And we both noticed something; as the cats are walking tightropes and so forth, the human trainers are using encouraging, guiding gestures that seem…familiar to us. And, in fact, the cats often seem visually fixated on the trainers’ hands.

+

+

Wild! It looks very much as though Cathy and I have accidentally trained into our cat one of the same responses the Moscow Cats Theater people use to program their far more elaborate tricks.

+

I am reminded of something I heard a lion-tamer say once; training big cats is not about dominance, it cannot be; it’s about pleasure and reward. Nor does it seem irrelevant that the cats in the video looked happy. I think what we were seeing was not work to them, it was guided play – motivated not by fear of doing poorly but by love of their trainers.

+

Our cat behaves the same way; she walks towards a gesturing human hand because she loves getting attention from her humans and believes the hand will pet and cherish her. Everything in her experience confirms this. (On the rare occasions we have to discipline, we do it with a shout or a squirt bottle.)

+

More cat ethology: some time back, I examined the mystery of the purr. My commenters and I never arrived at an explanation of why the cat’s purr is so appealing to humans that I found entirely satisfactory. Now, science may have provided one.

+

It seems there’s a woman named Elizabeth von Muggenthaler (wonderful name, so redolent of mad science and gothic castles!) who has discovered that cats purr in a range of acoustic frequencies that are widely known in the medical literature to stimulate tissue healing, especially of bone and connective tissue.

+

Ms. Muggenthaler does not propose to junk the conventional account that cats purr to express sociability and/or contentment, but she suggests that cats purr as a form of self-healing as well, and has designed various clever experiments that appear to confirm this.

+

She may also have explained why humans enjoy the sound. Like purring itself, the healing effects of gentle vibrations in those particular frequency ranges have probably been significant in the mammalian line long enough for humans to inherit a mild instinctive tropism for them. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the human ability to become fond of certain varieties of repetitive mechanical noises has a similar ground.

diff --git a/20090707174651.blog b/20090707174651.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..65b4bb6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090707174651.blog @@ -0,0 +1,153 @@ +Political Economics 101: A Dialog +

Attached is a slightly cleaned-up transcript of an IRC conversation I had last night during which I tried to teach political economics 101 to a well-intentioned person I know who describes himself as a “socialist” (though, from the way he reacted, perhaps not for much longer). It went better than one might have expected.

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I think this transcript is interesting on at least two levels. First, it was very constructive, with lessons about how intelligent people who don’t know economics perceive the issues around it as well as a short course in public-choice theory embedded in it. But also…there’s tradition running from Plato’s Dialogues to the Renaissance of teaching philosophy through dialog. It’s interesting, I think, to see how this modulates into the key of IRC.

+

+

I am “esr”, of course, and the well-intentioned socialist is “emsenn”. Regular Armed & Dangerous commenter Daniel Franke puts in an appearance as “dfranke”. Also appearing is “Rowan”, who has serious health problems, and “citizen”, who is listening and learning.

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This is only very lightly edited. I have fixed typos, removed some extraneous comments by others, reordered a few lines where responses crossed each other, and joined some adjacent IRC lines where that makes it flow better. Material added after the fact is bracketed with [], paraphrasing something said in discussion outside the span of the transcript.

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emsenn: esr, why does having social programs mean having a heavy hand in the economy?

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esr: Because the more of the GDP that goes through political allocation, the more you crowd out market signals. Um, do you know about the “calculation problem”?

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emsenn: Nope

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emsenn: I’m not knowledgeable in what I’m talking about, if you haven’t noticed. ;) I just know that here sucks, and places with more social services tend to seem better.

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emsenn: I’d rather things seem nice and safe than have them be blatantly trashed. I’d rather have our infrastructure seem to be up to date, our streets seem to be in proper repair, our water seem to be drinkable.

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esr: (Er, “seem” is the operative word.)

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esr: OK, let me explain. Note that I am not making a political argument here; this is value-free economics.

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* esr gathers his thoughts.

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esr: OK. You have an economy. Some of the resource allocation is through markets. Some of it is through politics. For the moment we’re deliberately ignoring political labels.

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emsenn: Mmkay.

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esr: The “political” side may be called socialism or communism or just “welfare state”; it doesn’t matter.

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esr: The problem is this: in the absence of market [demand] signals, you can’t put capital where it will produce the most benefit to the most people. The information you need to maximize joint utility is only elicited by market transactions.

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esr: Hayek noticed in 1938 that even assuming an angelically benevolent political class, this problem is unsolvable.

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emsenn: And when the government is heavily involved in economics, it reduces the number of transactions?

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esr: Right, but that’s only part of it. [It's not just raw volume of transactions that's significant, but the quality of the demand information in them. Political allocation creates noise - distortion - that degrades that information.]

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emsenn: I don’t get why the two are tied. How come government involvement reduces transactions (trade?)

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esr: Because capital that would otherwise go into market transactions is getting diverted into political allocation.

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emsenn: Gotcha.

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esr: But that’s actually not the worst.

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esr: The worst is that political allocation quickly gets captured by rent-seekers. So, for example, welfare programs get captured by welfare service providers.

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emsenn: Lobbyists, basically?

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esr: Yes, and their parasites.

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Rowan As far as the social services goes, I’d really, really actually like proper single payer healthcare.

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dfranke: Rowan: Health care is vastly overconsumed when consumers don’t have to pay market rate for it, and it ends up making them sicker.

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esr: dfranke is correct.

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Rowan: Yes. But it’s also vastly unaffordable for people who DO NEED IT.

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emsenn nods at dfranke. Isn’t it something like those with health insurance of any sort spend 9x more on health care than those who don’t?

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esr: The reason for the capture effect is that the rent-seekers have concentrated incentives to game the system, whereas everyone else has only diffused ones

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Rowan: I have disability. I cannot generally afford the healthcare services I need, such as the referral to the pain specialist to see if we can get me proper pain management. I can’t afford the physical therapy twice a week, etc.

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dfranke: Rowan: whether in a socialist system or a capitalist one, health care has to be rationed. We’re not at the post-scarcity level for it yet. Capitalism will ration it far more efficiently.

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emsenn has no incentives and is still trying to game the system.

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emsenn: Well, game it to actually pay attention to what it’s doing and spend money correctly

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esr: Yes, but you’re at a competitive disadvantage – you will always lose out to rent-seekers who can hire lawyers and lobbyists.

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emsenn: Nuh-uh. I’m friends with their lawyers and lobbyists.

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esr: (Note that I’m still not making value-loaded “political” claims. I’m explaining some of the basics of what’s called “public-choice economics”.)

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* emsenn nods

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Rowan: I have a crap POS healthcare plan right now, and even this I can barely afford.

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esr: OK, so you’ll lose out to the people who can hire *more* lawyers and lobbyists than you…

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emsenn: Yes.

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Rowan: Luckily for maybe the next six months, I can afford the out of pocket premiums that I have to pay for the basic things my insurance doesn’t.

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Rowan: I can afford new crutches, and thirty bucks for a prescription. But really, I usually can’t.

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Rowan: I don’t care if single payer isn’t the system that works best. I just want a system that is affordable and works.

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esr: OK, now I can explain why publicly funded health-care is a disaster.

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esr: Basically, it means there are no market signals in health care. This leads straight to accelerating malinvestment — too many CAT scanners, not enough primary-care clinics.

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Rowan: Right. I can see how that works, yeah.

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esr: It locks in a ruinously high rate of cost inflation. The more heavily you subsidize, the worse it gets.

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emsenn: esr, what about the fact that your clients, the patients, require these things. Can’t you just take metrics based on that?

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esr: Been tried. Look at the NHS in Britain, or the Veteran’s Administration hospitals in the U.S. *shudder* What you end up with is the worst of both worlds; bureacratic allocation and ruinously high costs.

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* emsenn nods, fucking VA.

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emsenn: (My grandma moved my grandpa out of a private hospice to a VA for some unknown reason, it was horrible)

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Rowan: esr: I did say working single payer care. NOOOOOOT the current disasters.

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esr: But the theory that any single-payer system can work better is a delusion. The problems are intrinsic and all ground out in the absence of market signals.

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emsenn: esr, so what system would work? Please keep in mind that people tend to be stupid, selfish, and mean.

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Rowan: Or hell, I’ll be happy if I can get good health insurance if I get a job, but fact is, I’m uninsurable as to most standards. Chronic conditions and a history of complications.

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esr: What would work better is a totally free-market system. No subsidies. Without the subsidies, medical price levels would crash – they’re being sustained where they are by the fact that effectively no one in the system is really cost-sensitive.

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Rowan: esr: I would definitely support that.

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esr: All the medical-services people are, in effect, being told that subsidy programs will support their inefficiencies forever. No wonder they gold-plate everything! You would too!

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esr: It’s not that anyone is stupid or evil, it’s that the incentives are all wrong.

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emsenn: esr, free market health care would be cheaper? What about, say, IP rights on medication, companies charging huge amounts for helpful medicines that they own sole rights to?

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esr: Well, there are several possible solutions to IP blockades. One would be to junk the patent system.

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emsenn: So then what’s the incentive for companies to do expensive research if they can’t get insane profits?

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esr: emsenn: What is the incentive for computer-chip manufacturers? Drugs are no more IP-intensive than that, and we manage to have a competitive market there. Actually, chip fabs cost more than researching and certifying a drug.

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emsenn: Is it? Most chip types have like 2-3 producers

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esr: Yes. Keep going, you’re on the right track there…

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emsenn: Uhh… the track I’m on is a monopoly on the market.

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esr: (Wow. I explain economics and a self-described “socialist” actually listens. This is unprecedented…)

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esr: (That was a compliment, emsenn…)

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emsenn: esr, I’m only socialist because from what I’ve seen it seems to be best. You’re more than welcome to change my mind. Just don’t expect it to happen in a night

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emsenn: Also, omnomnom donuts.

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Rowan: Want donuts.

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esr: OK, good. You understand that monopolies are a serious problem.

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emsenn: They’re like governments without the public accountability :(

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esr: I’m not back to politics yet. That involves value commitments like (in my case) “freedom is more important than equality”.

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esr: I’m willing to talk in those terms, but I don’t need to right now.

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emsenn: Mmkay

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citizen: This is the most mature political online discussion I have seen in a while

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emsenn: So, we’ve got 2-3 producers of medicine, all in competition with each other. This is, so far, good. What prevents one from buying the others, or just over time one taking a firm lead over the others?

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esr: So, the question of how we avoid market failures almost (not entirely, but close enough for right now) reduces to the question of how we avoid monopolies. You figured that out yourself.

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* emsenn gives himself a gold star. Wait no, fuck gold stars, I have donuts. Again, omnomnom.

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emsenn: So far we haven’t been very good at stopping monopolies – they tend to end up fucking themselves over.

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esr: YES! You’ve noticed that! Good!

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emsenn: Mhm. Problem is they tend to set back advancement in the field.

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esr: OK, now we got to an empirical question: how is the half-life of monopolies (that is, the time after achieving monopoly status that 50% will crack) related to the amount of political allocation in the economy?

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esr: And the answer is….

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Rowan: Now we’re beyond Rowan’s understanding of this stuff. So Rowan is going to idle.

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* emsenn drumrolls

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* emsenn thinks Rowan doesn’t give himself enough credit.

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esr: They’re directly correlated. That is, more political allocation -> more persistent monopolies. Freer markets -> less persistent monopolies. Here’s why…

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esr: A monopoly is a rent seeeker. A very rich, powerful rent seeker. A monopoly is in the ideal position to buy the regulators!

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emsenn: I get what you mean. They can – right. To help ensure ideal conditions for them.

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esr: Exactly.

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esr: The solution to the monopoly problem, and to market failures in general, is to reduce the amount of political allocation in the system until the monopolies have a short enough half-life to be tolerable.

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emsenn: How tolerable is that half life when you’re dealing with lives, as with our health system?

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dfranke: emsenn: The question isn’t so much whether it’s tolerable as whether you can do any better.

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esr: Thus endeth Public Choice Economics 101.

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emsenn nods at esr. Sound logic.

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emsenn: And it takes into account the fact that people can be assholes.

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Rowan: esr: Next time can we do it in layman’s terms? :) I understood most of that but.

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emsenn: So… uh. Explain more sometime. I’m hard-put to find fault with it.

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esr: I will. There’s other stuff, like Coase’s Theorem on externalities, that is just as interesting.

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emsenn: Externalities?

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* Rowan nods.

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dfranke: emsenn: an externality is basically any effect of a transaction, be it positive or negative, that falls on people not involved in it.

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emsenn: Aha.

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esr: Warning, however: If you really get this stuff, to the point where you can do analysis in these terms, you will be at severe risk of turning into a libertarian.

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Rowan chuckles.

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emsenn: esr, I’ve got no problem with that if I agree with it. :P

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esr: Coase’s theorem is especially deadly that way.

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esr: (Coase’s Theorem is the Killer Joke of political economics.)

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emsenn: So like if I paid you to fix my street, an externality of it would be the fact that the people on the street are shit out of luck when it comes to leaving their homes for the duration?

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Rowan whimpers. Pain, and an hour until pain pill.

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dfranke: emsenn: well, the canonical example is lighthouses.

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emsenn: But I want my street fixed :(

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dfranke: emsenn: suppose if you build a lighthouse, it creates a benefit far in excess of the cost, and all sailors agree on this.

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dfranke: emsenn: but how do you get someone to pay for it?

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esr knows where dfranke is going and bows in his direction.

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emsenn: Hrm.

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dfranke: emsenn: if you build it, then there’s no way to deprive any sailor of its benefit, whether they paid to help build it or not.

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emsenn: Could you tax the ships that go that route?

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dfranke: emsenn: this is among the most common rationalizations for coercive taxation.

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emsenn: I picked the wrong answer didn’t I?

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dfranke: emsenn: Coase’s Theorem, on which I am not an expert and esr will probably have to pick up the slack for me, demonstrates that this ends up not really being a problem; that no matter what resource allocation you start out with, there will be some series of possible transactions that people will consent to that ends up getting you where you want to go.

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emsenn: Could tax the nearby town too, I guess, since they get benefit from the trade, which will pick up now that the ships are at less risk of crashing.

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dfranke tags esr. Your turn.

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emsenn: There’s always a way to get someone to foot the bill even if they aren’t directly benefited, you mean?

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esr: Not quite. What Coase’s Theorem actually says is this: “If transaction costs are sufficiently low, all externalities will be internalized” – that is, turned into market transactions between the participants. Almost what emsenn said, but more precise.

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emsenn: Hah, cool.

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esr: The kicker is that some externalities are hard – pollution, for example. You have to drive transaction costs to infinitesimal or zero before they internalize.

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emsenn: Htm…can you look at long term costs? Like “solar costs X more now, but over 20 years the cost is nil compared to spending on coal”.

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esr: Right, that’s just net-present-value accounting; it’s easy.

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esr: And now you know the real reason the Internet is important.

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dfranke: esr: Huh?

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dfranke: esr: Oh…reducing transaction costs?

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esr: The Internet is the most potent reducer of transaction costs since the invention of money.

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emsenn: Aha.

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dfranke: esr: Hmm, hadn’t thought of it that way before.

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dfranke: esr: But you’re self-evidently correct.

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esr: So, here’s how you internalize pollution costs in a really free market…

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esr: You treat pollution as a form of tortious assault for which individuals can collect damages. Mercury or dioxin in my water table sucks, man!

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emsenn: esr, so… treat pollution as an expense, in a way?

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esr: Now, you create a futures market in shares of class-action lawsuits.

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esr: QED.

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emsenn: Who will the lawsuits be against?

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esr: The polluters.

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emsenn: So, everyone? Or just the major polluters?

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esr: This only works to the extent you can identify sources of pollution.

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esr: The better your sensor technology gets, and the better your ecological modeling is, the lower the threshold of pollution you can internalize.

diff --git a/20090710053842.blog b/20090710053842.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..91e693f --- /dev/null +++ b/20090710053842.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +In which I am thankful for Barack Obama’s election +

I’ve been trying to buy a gun recently, a better carry weapon (and by “better” I mean more concealable than what I have now and in my favorite caliber). My friends, I am here to tell you that this is an awful time to be in the market for a firearm; they are scarce and teeth-jarringly expensive because demand for them has gone through the roof. On reflection, though this is deucedly inconvenient for me at the moment, I think it implies some excellent news for the longer term and is one of a very few reasons I can think of to be grateful that Barack Obama is in the White House today.

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I’ve talked with over a dozen gun dealers in the last two weeks and they’re all singing minor variations on the same song. “They’re back-ordered for five or six months out.” “I could sell fifty of those if I could get them from the manufacturer.” “Kimber is about forty thousand guns behind.” “I’ve been in this business thirty years and I’ve never seen supplies so tight.”

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What I’m hearing from every single one of them is that demand for firearms – especially pistols – surged in November of last year and hasn’t un-surged since; gunmakers are scrambling like mad to catch up. Alas, a firearm is not an injection-molded gewgaw; they have to be made from high-quality metal machined to fairly close tolerances, and ramping up production capacity on such hard goods is not something you can do quickly, especially in the middle of a credit crunch.

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Why last November? Because though Barack Obama worked hard at it, he didn’t lie convincingly enough to cover his record of hostility to civilian firearms and Second Amendment rights. The day he won the Presidency of the United States, a significant fraction of the population of this country apparently decided they’d better get theirs while the getting was still possible. A similar demand ripple has been triggered often enough in the past by the election of Democratic presidents that it’s been a running joke among firearms fans for decades; what’s unprecedented is the tsunami-like magnitude of this one.

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Americans are still out there eight months later buying firearms like mad – and I think this can be nothing but good in the longer term. Let me count the ways:

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1. More firearms in civilian hands means a larger constituency to oppose restrictive firearms laws and regulations.

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2. More firearms in civilian hands means more people carrying concealed, depressing crime rates.

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3. More firearms in civilian hands means the balance of coercive power shifts in favor of the people and against government, making some of our nastier potential futures just that much less likely.

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4. Higher demand means more firearms-manufacturing capacity in the future, leading to lower prices and a likelihood that the previous three virtuous effects will be sustained.

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My most serious concern about this situation is that the manufacturers might overinvest themselves into a capacity glut and get badly hammered when and if the market saturates. But that’s a worry for another day.

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Thank you, Barack Obama. You didn’t intend this good result, but then I suspect that pretty much all of whatever little good you end up doing will have been unintentional. I’m grateful for it anyway.

diff --git a/20090728094254.blog b/20090728094254.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e25f07f --- /dev/null +++ b/20090728094254.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +A Midsummer’s Light Posting +

I’ve not been blogging much lately for two reasons. One: vacation. I went to sword camp (formally, “Polaris Summer Weapons Retreat”) again this year, had great time with friends, learned how to fight using a glaive (a form of bladed polearm). Two: heavy technical work. I’ve been designing and implementing a new protocol for GPSD; my next major post may be about some interesting issues that have come up during this process.

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It-increases-my-paranoia news: Massive protests continue in Iran, some news about them leaking out through the news blockade, more reaching me through my NedaNet contacts. My Pennsylvania CCW arrived, so I now carry concealed legally – I had had plans to carry concealed illegally and make a Constitutional issue of it, but I’ve decided I don’t need to be in trouble with both the U.S. legal system and potential Iranian assassins at the same time.

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I’m looking into upgrading my pistol competence level via IDPA tactical shooting; there’s a match at a gun club not far from here August 22nd and I’ll probably be at it. I did IPSC, which is similar, once back in 1998: you can read about it here. Then I got busy and famous and stuff, dangit.

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Light blogging may continue for a while: World Boardgaming Championships is next week, and I’m playing a lot of on-line games in training for that; my goal is to at least make the finals in the Commands & Colors Ancients tournament.

diff --git a/20090730213629.blog b/20090730213629.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0aacc17 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090730213629.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +GPSD-NG: A Case Study in Application Protocol Evolution +

I’ve been doing some serious redesign work on GPSD recently. I had planned to do a blog posting about lessons learned, but the result grew enough length and structure to turn into an actual technical paper. You can read it here; comments and criticism will be welcomed.

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Note, everything described in the paper has already been implemented in gpsd. There’s work still to be done; for those of you familiar with the software, I still need to do equivalents of the old–protocol commands B C J N R Z $. I do not expect these to pose any significant difficulties.

diff --git a/20090813023005.blog b/20090813023005.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cd1603d --- /dev/null +++ b/20090813023005.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Dr. William Short’s “Viking Weapons and Combat”: A Review +

I expected to enjoy Dr. William Short’s Viking Weapons and Combat Techniques (Westholme Publishing, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59416-076-9), and I was not disappointed. I am a historical fencer and martial artist who has spent many hours sparring with weapons very similar to those Dr. Short describes, and I have long had an active interest in the Viking era. I had previously read many of the primary saga sources (such as Njal’s Saga Egil’s Saga, and the Saga of Grettir the Strong) that Dr. Short mines for information on Viking weaponscraft, but I had not realized how informative they can be when the many descriptions of fights in them are set beside each other and correlated with the archeological evidence.

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For those who don’t regularly follow my blog, my wife Cathy and I train in a fighting tradition based around sword and shield, rooted in southern Italian cut-and-thrust fencing from around 1500. It is a battlefield rather than a dueling style. Our training weapons simulate cut-and-thrust swords similar in weight and length to Viking-era weapons, usually cross-hilted but occasionally basket-hilted after the manner of a schiavona; our shields are round, bossless, and slightly smaller than Viking-era shields. We also learn to fight single-sword, two-sword, and with polearms and spears. The swordmaster’s family descended from Sicilo-Norman nobles; when some obvious Renaissance Italian overlays such as the basket hilts are lain aside, the continuity of our weapons with well-attested Norman patterns and with pre-Norman Viking weapons is clear and obvious. Thus my close interest in the subject matter of Dr. Short’s book.

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Dr. Short provides an invaluable service by gathering all this literary evidence and juxtaposing it with pictures and reconstructions of Viking-age weapons, and with sequences of re-enactors experimenting with replicas. He is careful and scholarly in his approach, emphasizing the limits of the evidence and the occasional flat-out contradictions between saga and archeological evidence. I was pleased that he does not shy from citing his own and his colleagues’ direct physical experience with replica weapons as evidence; indeed, at many points in the text, .the techniques they found by exploring the affordances of these weapons struck me as instantly familiar from my own fighting experience.

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Though Dr. Short attempts to draw some support for his reconstructions of techniques from the earliest surviving European manuals of arms, such as the Talhoffer book and Joachim Meyer’s Art of Combat, his own warnings that these are from a much later period and addressing very different weapons are apposite. Only the most tentative sort of guesses can be justified from them, and I frankly think Dr. Short’s book would have been as strong if those references were entirely omitted. I suspect they were added mostly as a gesture aimed at mollifying academics suspicious of combat re-enactment as an investigative technique, by giving them a more conventional sort of scholarship to mull over.

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Indeed, if this book has any continuing flaw, I think it’s that Dr. Short ought to trust his martial-arts experience more. He puzzles, for example, at what I consider excessive length over the question of whether Vikings used “thumb-leader” cuts with the back edge of a sword. Based on my own martial-arts experience, I think we may take it for granted that a warrior culture will explore and routinely use every affordance of its weapons. The Vikings were, by all accounts, brutally pragmatic fighters; the limits of their technique were, I am certain, set only by the limits of their weapons. Thus, the right question, in my opinion, is less “What can we prove they did?” than “What affordances are implied by the most accurate possible reconstructions of the tools they fought with?”.

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As an example of this sort of thinking, I don’t think there is any room for doubt that the Viking shield was used aggressively, with an active parrying technique and to bind opponents’ weapons. To see this, compare it to the wall shields used by Roman legionaries and also in the later Renaissance along with longswords, or with the “heater”-style jousting shields of the High Medieval period. Compared to these, everything about the Viking design – the relatively light weight, the boss, the style of the handgrip – says it was designed to move. Dr. Short documents the fact that his crew of experimental re-enactors found themselves using active shield guards (indistinguishable, by the way from my school’s); I wish he had felt the confidence to assert flat-out that this is what the Vikings did with the shield because this is what the shield clearly wants to do..

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There are one or two curious lapses in the book. On page 177 Dr. Short speculates on the nature of a weapon called a “fleinn” or “heftisax” attested in Grettir’s Saga. Since the saga describes it as equally suited for cutting and thrusting, Dr. Short is obviously correct to deprecate the usual translation of “pike”. But he stops there, missing an obvious etymological cue: “sax” is the Old Norse word for a single-bladed knife, and “heft” is a transparent cognate of Old High German “heft” and the English word “haft”, both commonly used of spear and polearm shafts. Beyond reasonable doubt the “heftisax” is what is called in English a “glaive”, a bladed polearm – probably with a relatively short (5- to 7-foot) shaft (Asian-martial-arts types can think “naginata” and not be far off). Having fought duels in holmgang with this weapon myself, I can attest from experience that this weapon is well suited to the sort of fight described in the saga.

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Dr. Short parses some fragmentary evidence that the Vikings may have known of and occasionally used Central-Asian-style composite bows in addition to the European-style self-bow and longbow. He appears to be unaware of an important fact bearing on this debate, namely that the animal-tendon-derived glues in composite bows degraded fairly rapidly in humid climates. Thus, these bows dominated warfare in the hot dry Central Asian steppes for more than a thousand years but never gained a serious foothold in the cooler and moister climate of Europe. As far north as Scandinavia and Iceland, they would have been ruined after a few winters.

+

Despite these minor nits, this is an excellent book certain to be interesting to any martial artist or historian of weaponscraft with even a glancing interest in the Viking period. One could wish it were thicker, but that would be possible only if we had more primary evidence than we do. The combination of careful textual analysis with consideration of archeological evidence and a healthy dose of experimentation with replica weapons could, I think, serve as a model of its kind. This book suggests, along with some costume histories my wife has been reading, a recent tendency to take the lessons of re-enactment more seriously than historians have in the past; I think this is a positive trend that will lead to a deeper understanding of how our ancestors actually lived.

diff --git a/20090820191659.blog b/20090820191659.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5a6b3fa --- /dev/null +++ b/20090820191659.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Quiddity has a qualia all its own +

I changed my mind about a significant philosophical issue today, and in the process parted ways with a thinker I’ve been a serious fan of for a couple of decades now. The issue is raised by a thought experiment, of which I was previously unaware, called Mary’s Room. The simplest way of getting involved the dispute is to ask “How can I know that my experience of (say) the color ‘red’ is the same as yours? Is it even possible to have such knowledge?”

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+

The deeper question this gets at is whether physicalist theories of mind are sufficient; read the Wikipedia article linked above for the argument, I won’t rehash it here. Until a few hours ago I would have, somewhat reluctantly, agreed with Daniel Dennett’s position that Mary doesn’t learn anything when she steps into the world of color. I’ve long been a fan of Dennett’s bracing, unapologetic physicalism; I’ve especially enjoyed his witty takedowns of mysterian positions in the philosophy of mind.

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My reluctance would have stemmed only from this: whether or not Mary actually learned anything when she first saw the color red, it seems certain to me that Mary would feel she had learned something. Dennett argues that with complete knowledge of the physics of light, the range of red wavelengths, the history and significance of the color “red” to other human beings, Mary wouldn’t know anything about the world that she hadn’t known before.

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Under an operationalist, fallibilist account of “truth” – which I think is the only sane one – it’s at first hard to see how to argue with Dennet’s position. The Mary’s Room experiment conveys the assumption that Mary knows so much about “red” by indirection that she can make predictions about events involving “red” as accurately as anyone else. So if Mary says “Wow!” upon first actually seeing the color red, what does the “Wow!” mean?

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Dennet insists that Mary’s “Wow!” is meaningless – he seems to think he has to maintain that in order to defend physicalism against the mysterians. This is where I now part company with him. It certainly means something to Mary. Any theory of mind that can’t support questions about that meaning to Mary is dangerously impoverished – Mary won’t buy it, for starters, and why should she? Dennett thinks he’s robustly defending physicalism, but I think he’s surrendering the high ground to the mysterians.

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The Wikipedia article offers an alternative answer based on some experimental work by two cognitive scientists working with a color-blind synesthete. I think the Ramachandran-Hubbard answer (Mary will have blindsight about color distinctions) is as mistaken as Dennett’s, because Mary (by hypothesis) is not color-blind. But they did provide me with a vital clue.

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The human brain actually includes two semi-separated signal-processing pathways for vision. One is luminance-oriented and good at picking up fine details: it “sees” in black and white, but very sharply. The other is good at color distinctions but poor at processing shape details. The take from these two pathways is integrated at a late stage in processing, a fact on which depend several classic “optical illusions” and the continuing niche appeal of black-and-white photography in a world of cheap color film.

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Ramachandran-Hubbard’s color-blind synesthete is in the extremely odd position that he can have activations of his color-vision pathway from two different sources (his retina and the abnormal synesthesia pathways) which give him disjoint sets of color qualia. Ack! There! I’ve said it: the dread word “qualia”, which in Dennett’s universe no self-respecting physicalist is supposed to utter without firmly insisting that it is meaningless!

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Have I, too, surrendered to the mysterians? No. In fact, not.

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Here is my physicalist account of Mary’s “Wow!” What she learns is what it feels like to have the color-processing pathways of her brain light up. This is an objective fact about her subjectivity; with a sufficiently good MRI we could actually see the difference in patterns of occipital-lobe activity. And that will probably be a world-changing experience for Mary, fully worthy of a “Wow!”, even if we concede the Mary’s-Room premise that she has not learned anything about the world outside her own skull.

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To see this, imagine being a precocious, prepubescent scientist who knows (objectively) everything all other human have reported about sex. Now the hormonal switch flips, and you feel it…and nothing is the same, is it?

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What I’m really arguing here is that Dennett, and thinkers like him, are stuck hard enough in a theoretical set of distinctions about “objective” vs. “subjective” to have ignored an important part of the phenomenology. One’s own mental life – or, to put it physicalist terms, one’s perception of one’s own brain states – is part of the phenomenal field just as genuinely as Husserl’s copper ashtray is.

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I’m proposing that, contra Dennett, there is a sense of the word “qualia” that is meaningful in physicalist terms. A “quale” (singular form) is a brain state with the following properties: (a) like the abnormal activation of a colorblind synesthete’s color pathways in the occipital lobe, or like the first-ever feeling of sexual desire, it is in principle an objectively measurable event with detectable correlates in brain and body, and (b) it’s incommunicable.

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That is, I can learn to anticipate the phenomenal experience I will have when I look at something you have previously told me is “red”, but I can’t tell you what that experience is. Arguably, all brain states are incommunicable in that sense – but that’s actually part of my point; language and art and mathematics and music and so forth are all, in important ways, too narrow to shove our phenomenology through.

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The last laugh goes to Alfred Korzybski: the map is not the territory, the word is not the thing defined. We can communicate linguistic and para-linguistic maps, but not the phenomenological territory – the qualia – from which we abstracted them.

diff --git a/20090827095458.blog b/20090827095458.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dea15a4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090827095458.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +In which I learn that I am vindicated… +

This morning I had the delightful “I was right all along!” experience of learning that the one grammatical bugaboo in my life is probably bogus. The next time a copy-editor invokes it on me I shall gleefully kick him or her in the snout…

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I am an exceptionally skilled grammarian in English. Only rarely do I make even spelling errors, and my syntax and usage are normally impeccable. This is not to say that I follow every remonstrance in the strictest style guides – there are some rules which I regard as empty scholasticism imposed on the language by compulsive Latinists and view with contempt, such as those against splitting infinitives or putting a preposition at the end of a sentence. I am also quite willing to deliberately violate strict canons of usage for stylistic effect. That said, copy editors working on my stuff usually find that about all they have to do is fix typos; I give them almost nothing to complain about. In fact I am rather more likely to correct their grammar than they are to correct mine.

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However, there is one exception that has been irritating me for years – the only usage rule of “correct” English I routinely get gigged with. It’s the rule for whether to use “that” or “which” heading a demonstrative phrase. I use the two more or less interchangeably. I didn’t internalize any real distinction between them as a child and have not succeeded in learning one as an adult – I’ve had two editors try to explain the “restrictive” vs. “nonrestrictive” distinction to me and give up.

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But now I learn that this rule is probably bogus!. That is, it was proposed in one influential style guide (Fowler’s “The King’s English”) without historical foundation, and no less an author than Mark Twain has been cited as a counterexample.

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I feel quite empowered by this revelation; I’ll choose Twain’s fluid, expressive Americanism over British stuffiness any day of the week. (It is not unlikely that my native writing style was significantly shaped by early exposure to him.) Take that rule and shove it!

diff --git a/20090828164809.blog b/20090828164809.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ac222d4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090828164809.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +“The new literacy” ain’t so new +

Today, Wired magazine gives us an article, Clive Thompson on the New Literacy, busting the supposedly conventional wisdom that cellphones, social networking, and the Internet in general have accelerated the decline of writing skills. The author says we’re actually in an age of rising literacy unparalleled since classical Greece. Er, what?

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The article retails some interesting facts. The study on which Thompson mainly leans says college students do a whopping 38% of their writing on computers and cellphones for an audience of their peers. It’s nice to have the word “kairos” for the rhetorical skill of fitting one’s communication style to expected audience, and the observation that today’s Internet-experienced younger people are remarkably good at this is astute. Of course they are – they’ve had to adapt to a dizzying array of communications channels, in all of which writing is a critical skill but each of which has its own peculiar forms and constraints.

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But…but…why is this news? I’ve been writing that computers were nourishing an explosion of literacy, writing craft and wordplay since USENET days in the 1980s. I was pretty emphatic about it in The New Hacker’s Dictionary in the early 1990s. It wasn’t exactly difficult even then to predict that if hundreds of thousands of people spent lots of time at keyboards their writing was probably going to improve…if sometimes from a dismal base.

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I also think that Wired is failing at historical perspective. The author credits texting and twittering with encouraging haiku-like precision, and there’s something to that – but ain’t he ever heard of a telegraph? We’ve been here before; as in so many other ways, the “Victorian Internet” of telegraph lines anticipated social phenomena we’re prone to think of as uniquely modern. The difference, I suppose, is that in 1870 it was less easy to get paid for breathless writing on the topic. (Rising average wealth levels matter.)

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As communication costs fall, people invest more time in communication, and the expected value of good communication skills rises. And you get the kind of behavior your technologies reward. From that perspective, it’s pretty clear that the value of communication skills has been rising steadily since at least the Black Death, the last serious episode of depopulation in the Western world. Consequently, there has probably never been a generation since in which average skill level at this didn’t rise – at least, not outside the imaginations of grumpy old people who always think the kids are going to hell.

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“Ah,” you say, “but now you’ve changed the subject. Yes, that’s a good economic argument for total communications skills improving on average over time. But we were talking about writing!” Right you are, there. I’ll even agree that the invention of the telephone, by displacing letters and telegraphs, may have caused a century-long anomaly during which people budgeted most of their communications skill points away from writing even as general communication skill was still being more rewarded over time, and thus still tending to rise.

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Still, the point is that the era of Big Telephone was an anomaly. It probably won’t be repeated; we’ve learned, culturally, that there are lots of communication tasks that point-to-point voice doesn’t handle well. Thus, writing is back — and the Internet, far from being a break with the past, puts us back on the historical tend curve of rising literacy.

diff --git a/20090829085928.blog b/20090829085928.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2a5a87f --- /dev/null +++ b/20090829085928.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +From radical evil to farce in two generations +

There just isn’t any better marker for the fundamental narcissism of today’s left-wing politics that this:

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That’s Che Guevara’s granddaughter, Lydia, We are told that she posed semi-nude to promote vegetarianism and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

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There are so many levels of wrongness and unintended irony here that it’s hard to know where to begin…

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Let’s quickly dispose of the most obvious snark. Granddad murdered political opponents by the truckload, built gulags, and starred in the creation of the Western hemisphere’s only genuine Communist shit-hole; granddaughter is promoting…vegetarianism. OK, in this case regression to the mean is a good thing — but it’s still kind of pathetic. “Yeah, sure, you were a charismatic blood-soaked monster, but look at me, I’ve got breasts. And hair! And I’m really toned!”

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The not-so-subtle message here is that vegetarianism is revolution is sex; you too can fight the power and score hot naked rebel chicks by, er, eating tofu. Yeah. Forget all that whining about the objectification of women, one just like Lydia will serve herself up on a platter if you just strike the right clenched-fist poses and munch your beansprouts; we promise. (Well, it sort of has to read that way, doesn’t it? Otherwise what would be the point of the ad campaign?)

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I suppose if you’re female, the implied promise might be that you get to be the hot naked rebel chick. Which, if you’re one of the anorexic daddy-issues gothgirls or overweight lumpy-sweater lesbians who tend to flock to PETA events, must actually seem like a pretty good trade.

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But this is just the surface of the presentation. Let’s read a little deeper…

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Vegetarianism is virtue because meat is murder, so our mascot is going to wear bandoliers of honkin’ big…bullets. So, right, violence against animals is wrong, but violence against humans is dead sexy. Got it.

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Either totalitarianism is just a fashion accessory for PETA’s hip vegetarian lifestyle, or PETA is promising that come the revolution all those meat-eating motherfuckers are going up against the wall. Narcissism or Naziism, take your pick.

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If you’re morally confused enough not to find this photograph ludicrous on its face and gape at it in disbelief, wondering “What was PETA thinking?” you’ve entered the state of doublethink required for left-wing politics. Next, you can believe that you’re fighting for freedom and “the people” by advocating an ever-larger and more intrusive state apparat. Hey, it worked for Che!

diff --git a/20090902133510.blog b/20090902133510.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4bd3cad --- /dev/null +++ b/20090902133510.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +Let these two asses be set to grind corn! +

In The Book of Lies, the diabolically brilliant occultist Alesteir Crowley once wrote:

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+“Explain this happening!”

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“It must have a natural cause!”
+“It must have a supernatural cause!”

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Let these two asses be set to grind corn! +

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In the original, there is a sort of grouping bracket connecting the second and third lines lines and pointing at the fourth. Crowley was asserting, in both lucid and poetic terms, that to the understanding mind the distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” is meaningless, an argument conducted about language categories with no predictive value.

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Alfred Korzybski would have agreed with him. The founder of General Semantics built his powerful discipline on the insight that “The map is not the territory; the word is not the thing defined”. This matters because, too often, we fall into dispute over features of our maps, blithely ignoring the territory underneath.

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Ever since reading the Book of Lies, I have considered “Let these two asses be set to grind corn!” to be the most appropriate thing to say when two people or factions have fallen into an argument that is strictly about map rather than territory. It does the job just as well as a more reasoned argument, I find. The imagery makes both sides look absurd, which can be a much more effective way than logic to jolt them out of their fixed categories.

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I was reminded of this recently in connection with the longstanding argument between natural-law and consequentialist libertarians. Like the more general and historically much older argument between virtue ethicists and utilitarians, the dispute is interminable because it rests upon a false distinction from which nonsense follows. Utilitarians don’t get that virtue ethics is an evolved tactic to prevent destructive short-termism in one’s utility calculations; virtue ethicists don’t get that without a consequential check on the outcomes of “virtue” it rapidly becomes sterile or perverse.

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Similarly, “human rights” is properly understood not as some mystical intrinsic property of humans ordained by God or natural law or whatever, but as the minimum set of premises from which it is possible to construct a society that isn’t consequentially hell on earth. But carving those in stone – using the language of rights and absolutes — is functional, too; it’s a way of protecting them from erosion by short-term expediency. For the best outcome, we must reason like consequentialists but speak and legislate like natural-law thinkers.

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The universe doesn’t care about the human distinction between a-priori and consequentialist arguments; that’s all map. The territory is what people do, the actual choices they express in action. Thus…

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“Human rights are founded on natural law!”
+“Human rights are justified by consequential considerations!”
+Let these two asses be set to grind corn!

diff --git a/20090910064717.blog b/20090910064717.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..014b587 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090910064717.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +This blog got wormed +

This blog is one of many that got hit late last week by a particularly nasty and invasive worm targeting WordPress sites. (No, it wasn’t a botched upgrade, as I saw at least one commenter speculate.) The first symptoms showed up either late Thursday or early Friday of last week, when links from the main page became garbled. What was going on was an attempt to insert pharmaceutical-spam malware into the site permalinks.

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This injection attack actually corrupted the mysql database behind the blog, and some fairly serious surgery (which the ibiblio site admins were reluctant to try on a Friday) was required to fix it. All posts and coments from Thursday evening or previous should now be restored. The blog is now running WordPress 2.8.4, the very latest version which was rush-released to foil the worm.

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A big hand to Ken Chestnutt, the ibiblio site administrator who did the actual repair. Regular posting will resume shortly.

diff --git a/20090922142119.blog b/20090922142119.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..78f67a3 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090922142119.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Not long before the end +

In California Dreamin’ I wrote:

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+The U.S. as a whole will almost certainly face [California's structural deficit] problem before the end of Barack Obama’s administration in 2012. Social Security obligations were due to exceed collections in 2013; even before Obama quadrupled the federal deficit this meant a giant blazing meteorite was already hurtling straight at the heart of the Feds’ dinosaurian finances. +

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It turns out the end is coming even sooner than I thought. The Congressional Budget Office now says Social Security will start running a deficit in 2010. And there is no money in Social Security’s so-called “trust fund” just bonds issued by the Federal Government itself. This means that in 2010, the Obama administration is going to face tough choices. It can (a) cut SS benefits, (b) raise taxes, or (c) kick the can down the road by borrowing more money to keep paying them.

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I think we can rule out cutting SS benefits; given that even Republicans couldn’t muster the political will for that when they were in power, it’s certainly not going to happen under an administration as ideologically wedded to redistributionism as Obama’s is. I have no doubt that Obama’s preferred solution would be to raise taxes – but this choice runs headlong into two serious problems. The more obvious one is that raising taxes during a recession will prolong the recession by suppressing employment and investment, handing the 2010 midterms to the Republicans.

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The less obvious one is that raising taxes might not raise revenues even if it could be sold politically. There are several reasons to suspect this, one of which is the extremely skewed distribution of who pays taxes. Turns out that, as in California, the Federal budget has become disproportionately dependent on soaking the rich; taxpayers below median income supply only 3% of federal revenues, and the top 1% supply a whopping 38%. Soak-the-rich taxation is winning politics in a democracy because it means over 50% of the population gets to vote that the cost of government will be mostly paid by somebody else, but recent events in California demonstrate with brutal force how vulnerable this policy is to economic downturns. California’s tax revenues have crashed, and Federal tax revenues are headed in the same direction. Tinkering with rates won’t address this problem, and may well make it worse.

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This leaves borrowing money – and that well has nearly run dry. There are already whispers that the soundness rating of U.S. Treasury bonds may be downgraded from AAA, and government borrowing is now so obviously unsustainable that it has triggered a populist insurgency of a kind never before seen in the U.S.

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In Timing the Entitlements Crash I wrote:

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+At some point, the U.S. government is going to lose both the ability to increase revenues and the ability to sell bonds. At that point the entitlements system will crash. Transfer checks will either stop issuing or become meaningless because the government has, like some banana republic, hyperinflated the currency in order to get out from under its debt obligations. +

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I’m now evaluating over a 50% chance that this point will be reached before the end of the first Obama administration in 2012.

diff --git a/20090924112259.blog b/20090924112259.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0f9e41b --- /dev/null +++ b/20090924112259.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Uncivil society and the collapse of the nomenklatura +

A few moments ago, I read a review of a new book, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, and the following sentences jumped out at me:

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+This is less a story of dissidents, so-called civil society, than of the bankruptcy of a ruling class–communism’s establishment, or “uncivil society.” The Communists borrowed from the West like drunken sailors to buy mass consumer goods, then were unable to pay back the hard-currency debts and so borrowed even more. In Eastern Europe, communism came to resemble a Ponzi scheme, one whose implosion carries enduring lessons. +

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I found myself wondering “And this differs from our political class…how?”

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The U.S.’s very own nomenklatura, our permanent political class and its parasitic allies, has been on a borrowing binge since the Great Society programs of the 1960s. Just like the pre-1989 Communist elites, they’ve been piling up debt in order to buy the consent of the governed with ever-more-generous entitlement programs. It took another twenty years, but the insolvency of California is bringing those chickens home to roost here as well. With the CBO now projecting that Social Security will go cash-flow-negative next year, an equally cataclysmic collapse of the federal government’s finances won’t be long in coming — in fact, I now give it over 50% odds of happening before Obama’s first term ends in 2012.

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I think the answer to Mancur Olson’s great question may be heaving itself into view. In The Logic Of Collective Action and later works, Olson developed the thesis that democratic politics must more or less inevitably degenerate into a mad scramble among interest groups seeking to corner ever-higher rents from their ability to swing votes; see my previous post Some Iron Laws of Political Economics for discussion. So, where does it end? Increasingly, it looks like the answer is “when the creditors of the resulting Ponzi scheme decide they’ve had enough”.

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Under today’s conditions, given who’s holding the biggest wad of T-bonds, that decision will probably be made in Peking.

diff --git a/20090928005112.blog b/20090928005112.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..02755e5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090928005112.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Mighty aches from little ACORN’s fall +

In all the foofaraw surrounding the ACORN scandals, there is a huge important consequence of them understood – but not spoken – by everyone who follows politics as a blood sport. This story describing conditions in Michigan and tallying up some recent ACORN convictions for electoral fraud is an indicator. And, on top of Obama’s plummet in the polls, the attention now being focused on ACORN has got to have any thinking Democratic strategist deeply worried about the 2010 midterms.

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No, I’m not talking about the mere aura of scandal, the prospect that some of the smell coming off of ACORN might cling to the general run of Democratic politicians. That’s not going to happen, not while most of the mainstream media seems ever more intent on operating as an unpaid auxiliary for the Democratic National Committee. No stench will be allowed to adhere, not even if the stalwart partisans of the Fourth Estate have to lick it off with their own tongues. No, the real problem is this: ACORN was the linchpin of the Democratic electoral-fraud machine. Without it, the party’s position going into the next round of elections may be seriously weakened.

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Three years ago I wrote a mini-essay on Game Theory and Vote Fraud, explaining the psephological logic behind the observed fact that vote fraud is in recent U.S. history primarily a crime associated with urban Democratic political machines; simple risk-benefit analysis explains why a national minority party operating in densely populated districts should be the most likely to systematize the practice. What I didn’t write at the time (but could have, as the fact was quite well known to anyone who pays attention to retail politics) is that ACORN has long been the Democrats’ single most important source for legions of deniable fraudsters.

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The “deniable” part is important. The Democratic party is (probably) not yet so corrupt an organization that most of its members want to know about the dirty-tricks side of winning elections — but those tactics are more important every year as the Democratic minority gets smaller, older, and more regionally concentrated. (Another dangerous corollary of this trend is that the Democrats depend more on wealthy individual donors than the Republicans do; objectively, the Democrats have been the “party of the rich” for more than fifteen years now.) Thus, the symbiosis between ACORN and the Democrats served both organizations well; the Democrats got a vote-fraud operation their more honest members could could avert their eyes from, while ACORN got funding and political top cover.

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That’s probably over now. It seems unlikely that ACORN’s effectiveness as a vote-fraud engine can be saved even if its local affiliates reorganize under different names – too many LEOs, from ambitious local DAs up to the FBI, are smelling blood in the water now, and the few Democratic apparatchiks who have tried to defend the organization have gotten badly stung in the polls. Having former ACORN organizers on staff will be a political and possibly legal liability for some years to come, which is going to hinder any efforts to rebuild the network.

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As bad as that is, the Democrats are going to be preoccupied with damage control against even worse possibilities. One is political: Barack Obama is not “the general run” of Democratic politician; as a former attorney and staff trainer for ACORN he was far more intimately involved with the organization. Republicans could yet succeed in using that association to damage him.

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The other problem is that the legal disruptions to the Democrats’ street-level network may not stop with ACORN. It is becoming clear that SEIU (the Service Employees International Union, closely tied to ACORN by interlocking directorates), is just as corrupt and even more prone to public thuggery (this was the organization responsible for the brutal beating of an elderly black protester at a town-hall meeting a few weeks back). If LEOs follow the money trails into and out of ACORN with any thoroughness, it is quite likely that SEIU’s brass will find itself under criminal investigation, with the Democrats obliged to cut ties with them as well. From there, who knows? Republican zealots think that ACORN is the street end of a criminal conspiracy subject to prosecution under the RICO statutes that extends all the way to DNC headquarters. They may not be wrong.

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Anybody who thinks politics ought to at least be a game played cleanly should welcome having this whole swamp drained. But cheering for that cleanup won’t come easy for Democrats. In a society as relatively law-governed as the U.S.’s, electoral fraud is not a risk any political network can take lightly; the natural and logical suspicion is that if Democrats have been complicit in large-scale vote fraud through organizations like ACORN and SEIU it’s because without it they could not win national elections at all. Thirty years ago, when they were still the majority party, that would have been a fairly ridiculous charge. Today…it isn’t.

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UPDATE: I had misremembered Ken Gladney’s age. “Elderly” struck.

diff --git a/20090929153615.blog b/20090929153615.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..feb33e5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090929153615.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Why artists defend Roman Polanski +

In 1977, Roman Polanski drugged, raped, and sodomized a 13-year-old girl. When he believed a sort-of-plea-bargain was about to come unstuck, he took it on the lam. He lived the high life in this self-imposed exile for thirty years, until busted in Switzerland recently. Now various of the usual suspects on the right wing’s enemies list are campaigning to block his extradition.

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There’s a good deal of perplexity being expressed about this, and some predictable chuntering from right-wingers about lefties being moral degenerates. But this flap isn’t really about politics at all — it’s much simpler than that. It’s about people who think of themselves as “artistes” reserving themselves a get-out-of-jail card when they feel like behaving like repellent scum of the earth, too.

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I could claim to be an “artiste” myself, even leaving out the computer programming and the writing; I’m a capable musician who’s done session work on two records, and I’ve composed songs that other people have sung. So I understand the temptation artists feel to position themselves as a breed apart to whom ordinary rules should not apply by reason of their specialness. Who wouldn’t want some of that immunity, if they could claim it?

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If you want to make that argument, Roman Polanski makes a great stake in the ground — not in spite of the heinousness of his crime, but because of it. If even a child-raper can invoke the all-purpose artiste excuse for scumminess, than the merely ordinary transgressions of artistes become trivia to be airily dismissed. And if the Polanski case becomes a “teachable moment” whereby people can be talked into feeling like boors or philistines for even thinking that artistes should be held to civilized standards of behavior, so much the better!

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None of this is more than tenuously connected to leftism, and I have to say the the right-wing efforts to gin up indignation on that score sound quite contrived and stupid to me. This dispute isn’t about politics, it’s about privilege — not just whether Roman Polanski is above the law, but about whether his defenders can claim to be too.

diff --git a/20090930212643.blog b/20090930212643.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5d845b3 --- /dev/null +++ b/20090930212643.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Raymond & Polanski vs. “Mr. Society” +

In my previous post, Why Artists Defend Roman Polanki, I analyzed the flap over the Roman Polanski arrest as a case of artists arguing for a privilege to behave like shitheels without being held to account for it. I advanced this as an explanation because I think it covers the facts better than some of the culture-war political narratives being bandied about, especially by conservatives, but I deliberately did not take a position on the rights and wrongs of the arrest or whether I think Polanski should be prosecuted at this late date.

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Now I’ll do so. I expect it will startle almost all of my regulars and offend a good many of them, but I think Polanki should be let go.

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Yes, Polanski is a contemptible scumbag, and no, I don’t buy the notion that artists should be exempt from civilized standards of behavior, and no, I’m not basing my evaluation on some legal technicality or the rumors of judicial misprison around his 1977 trial. No; my position is that Polanski should be let go because that’s what Samantha Gailey says she wants — and, as the victim of his rape, hers is the only choice that I think should matter a damn.

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If Gailey were calling for Polanski to be chemically castrated or executed, my position would be identical. In fact, if she were calling for him to be executed, I’d cheerfully shoot the bastard myself, and not be too concerned about sparing any of the slimy Hollywood apologists for him who might happen to be in the line of fire.

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What I am specifically concerned to deny is that “society” has any legitimate interest in punishing Polanski. There are at least two dangerous fallacies in that theory, one implied by the word “society” and one bound up in our notions about punishment. It is really to address the first issue that I am writing this mini-essay; I’ll attack the second one some other time.

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The problem with asserting that “society” has an interest in punishing Polanski is that “society” as people want to use it in claims like these doesn’t exist – it’s a semantic spook, a floating abstraction with no actual referent. Samantha Gailey exists; she’s a real person with a real grievance against Polanski. But no matter how hard you hunt for “society”, all you’ll ever find is individuals practicing ventriloquism – invoking the spook to justify what they want to do or think they have to do.

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This is why there are no ethical claims in which the term “society” appears as a meaningful referent. You’ll find, if you try inventing some, that they fall into two categories: (a) disguised claims about the rights and duties of each and every individual in the society, or (b) vague and ominous nonsense.

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This notion, that “society” actually exists as a sort of huge fictive person with rights, needs, and wants that are separate from and supersede those of individuals, is — and I’m choosing my words carefully here — evil and dangerous. It’s a way for power-seekers and parasites to cow others into submission, arrogating for themselves privileges nobody would grant them if they admitted wanting to meddle in order to gratify merely their own desires.

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We’ve learned, painfully, over the last 400 years, that raisons d’etat is too dangerous and sweeping a pretext to let stand — that whenever you treat the authority of “government” as a solvent that trumps individual rights and claims, you are no more than a breath away from odious and grinding tyranny. The fictive personhood of “society” needs to be shot through the head for precisely the same reason.

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That’s why I reject any argument that Polanski should be imprisoned after his victim has said she wants the matter dropped — because allowing anyone the privilege to coerce Polanski on behalf of “society” is a threat to everyone far more severe than one superannuated jailbait-jumper could ever be.

diff --git a/20091008135749.blog b/20091008135749.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d612eeb --- /dev/null +++ b/20091008135749.blog @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +Three Systemic Problems with Open-Source Hosting Sites +

I’ve been off the air for several days due to a hosting-site failure last Friday. After several months of deteriorating performance and various services being sporadically inaccessible, Berlios’s webspace went 404 and the Subversion repositories stopped working…taking my GPSD project down with them. I had every reason to fear this might be permanent, and spent the next two days reconstructing as much as possible of the project state so we could migrate to another site.

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Berlios came back up on Monday. But I don’t trust it will stay that way. This weekend rubbed my nose in some systemic vulnerabilities in the open-source development infrastructure that we need to fix. Rant follows.

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1. Hosting Sites Are Data Jails

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The worst problem with almost all current hosting sites is that they’re data jails. You can put data (the source code revision history, mailing list address lists, bug reports) into them, but getting a complete snapshot of that data back out often ranges from painful to impossible.

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Why is this an issue? Very practically, because hosting sites, even well-established ones, sometimes go off the air. Any prudent project lead should be thinking about how to recover if that happens, and how to take periodic backups of critical project data. But more generally, it’s your data. You should own it. If you can’t push a button and get a snapshot of your project state out of the site whenever you want, you don’t own it.

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When berlios.de crashed on me, I was lucky; I had been preparing to migrate GPSD off the site due to deteriorating performance; I had a Subversion dump file that was less than two weeks old. I was able to bring that up to date by translating commits from an unofficial git mirror. I was doubly lucky in that the Mailman adminstrative pages remained accessible even when the project webspace and repositories had been 404 for two days.

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But actually retrieving my mailing-list data was a hideous process that involved screen-scraping HTML by hand, and I had no hope at all of retrieving the bug tracker state.

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This anecdote illustrates the most serious manifestations of the data-jail problem. Third-generation version-control (hg, git, bzr, etc.) systems pretty much solve it for code repositories; every checkout is a mirror. But most projects have two other critical data collections: their mailing-list state and their bug-tracker state. And, on all sites I know of in late 2009, those are seriously jailed.

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This is a problem that goes straight to the design of the software subsystems used by these sites. Some are generic: of these, the most frequent single offender is 2.x versions of Mailman, the most widely used mailing-list manager (the Mailman maintainers claim to have fixed this in 3.0). Bug-trackers tend to be tightly tied to individual hosting engines, and are even harder to dig data out of. They also illustrate the second major failing…

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2. Hosting Sites have Poor Scriptability

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All hosting-site suites are Web-centric, operated primarily or entirely through a browser. This solves many problems, but creates a few as well. One is that browsers, like GUIs in general, are badly suited for stereotyped and repetitive tasks. Another is that they have poor accessibility for people with visual or motor-control issues.

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Here again the issues with version-control systems are relatively minor, because all those in common use are driven by CLI tools that are easy to script. Mailing lists don’t present serious issues either; the only operation on them that normally goes through the web is moderation of submissions, and the demands of that operation are fairly well matched to a browser-style interface.

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But there are other common operations that need to be scriptable and are generally not. A representative one is getting a list of open bug reports to work on later – say, somewhere that your net connection is spotty. There is no reason this couldn’t be handled by an email autoresponder robot connected to the bug-tracker database, a feature which would also improve tracker accessibility for the blind.

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Another is shipping a software release. This normally consists of uploading product files in various shipping formats (source tarballs, debs, RPMs, and the like) to the hosting site’s download area, and associating with them a bunch of metadata including such things as a short-form release announcement, file-type or architecture tags for the binary packages, MD5 signatures, and the like.

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With the exception of the release announcement, there is really no reason a human being should be sitting at a web browser to type in this sort of thing. In fact there is an excellent reason a human shouldn’t do it by hand – it’s exactly the sort of fiddly, tedious semi-mechanical chore at which humans tend to make (and then miss)finger errors because the brain is not fully engaged.

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It would be better for the hosting system’s release-registration logic to accept a job card via email, said job card including all the release metadata and URLs pointing to the product files it should gather for the release. Each job card could be generated by a project-specific script that would take the parts that really need human attention from a human and mechanically fill in the rest. This would both minimize human error and improve accessibility.

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In general, a good question for hosting-system designers to be asking themselves about each operation of the system would be “Do I provide a way to remote-script this through an email robot or XML-RPC interface or the like?” When the answer is “no”, that’s a bug that needs to be fixed.

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3. Hosting Sites Have Inadequate Support for Immigration

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The first (and in my opinion, most serious) failing I identified is poor support for snapshotting and if necessary out-migrating a project. Most hosting systems do almost as badly at in-migrating a project that already has a history, as opposed to one started from nothing on the site.

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Even uploading an existing source code repository at start of a project (as opposed to starting with an empty one) is only spottily supported. Just try, for example, to find a site that will let you upload a mailbox full of archives from a pre-existing development list in order to re-home it at the project’s new development site.

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This is the flip side of the data-jail problem. It has some of the same causes, and many of the same consequences too. Because it makes re-homing projects unnecessarily difficult, it means that project leads cannot respond effectively to hosting-site problems. This creates a systemic brittleness in our development infrastructure.

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Addressing the Problems

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I believe in underpromising and overperforming, so I’m not going to talk up any grand plans to fix this. Yet. But I will say that I intend to do more than talk. And two days ago the project leaders of Savane, the hosting system that powers gna.org and Savanna, read this and invited me to join their project team.

diff --git a/20091009180953.blog b/20091009180953.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..87508ac --- /dev/null +++ b/20091009180953.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Looking Deeper into Forges, And Not Liking What I See +

In my previous post, Three Systemic Problems With Open-Source Hosting Sites I identified some missing features that create serious brittleness in or project-hosting infrastructure. The question naturally arises, why don’t existing hosting systems already have these facilities? I have looked into this question, actually examining the codebases of Savane and GForge/FusionForge, and the answer appears to go back to the original SourceForge. It offered such exciting, cutting-edge capabilities that nobody noticed its internal architecture was a tar-pit full of nasty kluges. The descendants — Savane, GForge, and FusionForge — inherited that bad architecture.

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The central problem is implied by the implementation. It’s PHP pages doing SQL queries to a MySQL database. The query logic is inextricably tangled up with the UI. There is no separation of function! Now I understand why, back when I was a director at VA Linux, the original SourceForge team promised me a scriptable release process but never delivered. They couldn’t have done it without either (a) duplicating a significant number of SQL queries in some kind of ad-hoc tool (begging for maintenance problems as the SQL schema changed) or (b) prying the SQL queries loose from the GUI and isolating them in some kind of service broker, either an Apache plugin or a service daemon, that both the web interface and a scripting tool could call on.

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Approach (b) would have been the right thing, but would have required re-architecting the entire system. It never happened. When, in my problem statement, I complained of forge systems being excessively tied to Web interfaces, I did not yet know how horribly true that was.

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The rottenness of the architecture also accounts, indirectly, for some other features of these systems that have long puzzled me – like the reliance on cron jobs to do things like actually creating new project instances. The cron jobs are a half-assed substitute for a real service broker.

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I conclude that the SourceForge/GForge/FusionForge architecture, as it is now, is an evolutionary dead end — overspecialized for webbiness. To tackle challenges like fixing the data-jail problem, scripting, and seamless project migration, one of these systems will need to be rebuilt from the inside out. The surface appearance of the GUI might survive at one end, and the SQL schema at the other, but everything — everything — between them needs to change.

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As one of my regulars pointed out in commenting on the previous post, what we see here is a massive failure to apply the Unix philosophy. It needs to be fixed. I’m not sure what the best way to go about it is, though. I’d love to start with a clean sheet of paper; our tools are ten years better now, and with Python and Django I could probably have a proof-of-concept within weeks and deliver a forge system functionally superior to anything now deployed in a couple of months tops. The problem is, if I do that I have a serious political barrier to climb getting it deployed. The alternative would be for me to rebuild an existing forge system from the inside – much more difficult, because I’d be dragging around a lot of legacy, but I’d get to keep the userbase and the brand.

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One of these things looks likely to happen. I’m not sure which, yet.

diff --git a/20091012224403.blog b/20091012224403.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3b786b2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20091012224403.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +How Not To Tackle the Mess around Forges +

In my previous two posts I have diagnosed a significant weakness in the open-source infrastructure. The architecture of the code behind the major SourceForge-descended hosting sites is rotten, with all kinds of nasty consequences — data seriously jailed, poor or completely absent capabilities near scripting and project migration. I said I was going to do something about it, and I’m working the problem now — actually writing code.

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The rest of this post is not an announcement, because it will be mostly about things I’ have figured out I should not try to do. Yet. But it is a teaser. I see a path forward, and shortly I expect to have some working code to exhibit that shows the way. Actually, I have working code that attacks the problem in an interesting way now, but I’m still adding capabilities to make it a more impressive demonstration.

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Here are some approaches I’ve considered, or had suggested to me by others, and rejected:

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1. Write a new forge system, focused on import/export and scriptability, from scratch. Tempting, but no. That would divert my energy for many months while the problem that originally exercised me — the data-jail effect — went unsolved. The first priority has to be jailbreaking the data in existing systems,

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2. Rebuild Savane from the inside. Also tempting, and theoretically possible; I have developer privileges on that project, and it’s moribund – no commits in like two years. If I wanted to take it over, I probably could. Between gna.org and Savanna it has a pretty large userbase, enough to give a functional rewrite serious cred. But, again, it would divert me from my original gripe, which was the data-jail problem. Also, Savane’s architecture inherits the curse of SourceForge; trying to fix it while preserving its exact appearance and functionality would be painful in the extreme.

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3. Finish the SOAP API in FusionForge, the most widely deployed ‘modern’ descendant of SourceForge. I’m a now project member there, though they haven’t given me commit privileges yet. I could fix their SOAP services API. The trouble is, their code is a disaster area worse than Savane’s — layers upon layers of cruft, so poorly integrated and maintained that their source tree doesn’t even have a working “make install”! I was told with a straight face that the preferred way to set up a running instance from source is to build a Debian binary package file from it and install the package. Oh, and just to put the cherry on top, something is broken in their repository — I couldn’t check out a complete source copy without running into some bizarre permissions-related error that hung my Subversion client, eating 100% of my processor. These failures cause me to doubt that the project is sufficiently well run to be a good investment of my time.

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4. Write a data-interchange standard, then jawbone existing forges into implementing exporters that speak it. This is what the crowd of research types around COCLICO in France wants to do. I think it’s a doomed effort; if the ‘existing systems’ had a strong enough architecture to support export capabilities that don’t suck we probably wouldn’t have this problem in the first place. On top of that there’s the problems that writing an exporter for an existing forge requires intimate knowledge of the festering crap behind the web interfaces, and deploying it would require install privileges on the forge site. Ain’t going to happen — the site admins will, quite justifiably, wonder what the point of disturbing their running installations and accepting the inevitable security risks is when nothing yet exists that can read the exports! COCLICO’s is a typical over-ambitious academic approach in which you have to solve everything before it solves anything….

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If these approaches won’t work, what will?

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It’s too soon to try to prescribe a standard data-interchange format for forges, but it’s not too soon to write tools that jailbreak the data out of forges and dump it in formats that are forge-type-specific but human-readable — self-describing JSON or XML dumps, rather than binary blobs.

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Also, an ugly fact has to be faced — because of the PHP+SQL mess inside these things, the only viable approach to extracting the data out of them is to use the same web interfaces humans do. Once you’ve faced that fact, though, and realized you’re going to have to build a very smart robotic web scraper, the approach solves a significant set of problems. Most notably, it requires neither cooperation nor competence from any forge site administrators, anywhere.

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That’s enough hints. You’ll hear from me on this next when I announce some working tools.

diff --git a/20091019033905.blog b/20091019033905.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8e45420 --- /dev/null +++ b/20091019033905.blog @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +Condemning Censorship, Even of Werewolves +

Thomas Paine once wrote: “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” Paine’s truth is not idealistic handwaving, it is brutal pragmatism. Justifications for censorship, even the best-intentioned kind, have a way of expanding until they become instruments of abuse. Therefore, if we truly care about freedom of speech, it is not sufficient to defend that freedom when it is comfortable to do so — when the censors are ugly and the victim is appealing. It is necessary, sometimes, to speak up in defense of ugly victims of censorship.

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I have found myself placed under that necessity in the last week. A member in good standing of the open-source community, one Beth Lynn Eicher, had sought and achieved the suppression of public speech by one Mikhail Kvaratskhelia, aka ‘mikeeeUSA’, aka serveral other aliases. When I first approached her privately on the matter, she refused to apologize or retract. In my judgment, she was committing a crime against our community’s future by setting a precedent which might one day reach to all of us.

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This put me in a difficult position. I had received an explicit appeal for redress in my capacity as one of our tribal elders, and I felt the appeal was in the right and Ms. Eicher in the wrong. But I knew — for various reasons which will become very clear — that making that case would involve me in a batter and divisive wrangle. I was prepared to do it anyway, because my conscience would not permit otherwise, but I knew it was going to be hell.

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Fortunately, after several days of debate among myself and some friends of mine who leapt to Ms. Eicher’s defense, Ms. Eicher proved to be cleverer than either them or me. While Ms. Eicher’s defenders were still flaming me for intransigence on the free-speech issue, she designed a solution which I consider totally appropriate, and which I actually hope will set a precedent.

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Mikhail Kvaratskhelia is what constitutional lawyers sometimes call a werewolf – the most unappealing possible victim. He is a creepy, repellent, misogynistic crank, given to uttering threats of violent death against female Linux hackers, and quite possibly clinically insane. I first became aware of his existence last week when he sent a long letter of complaint to Richard Stallman, Linus, Bruce Perens, and myself asserting that his speech rights had been trampled on and linking to blog entries by Ms. Eicher and one other person. The letter was disturbing – intelligent in a feral way, but unhinged.

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I was eyeball-deep in a new coding project; I read both blog posts, finding the story therein sad and troubling. Kvaratskhelia had posted level maps for a first-person-shooter game called Nexuiz on SourceForge; possibly also executable code, the accounts are unclear. The accounts concur that the maps contained violent imagery and slogans attacking women’s rights, and this creep’s ugly and hate-filled letter leaves me in no doubt that the maps were ugly and hate-filled as well.

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I did not pursue the matter until RMS replied on 15 October asking whether Kvaratskhelia had made backups of the censored material. I thought this was a sensible question; it was the first one that had occurred to me, anyway. Following this, I searched the web for relevant material (I had deleted Kvaratskhelia’s letter rather quickly – my eyeballs felt soiled by it) and found Ms. Eicher’s original blog entry. I felt, at that point, the pricking of my conscience for not having responded to Kvaratskhelia’s earlier complaint immediately. I wrote Ms. Eicher an email condemning the suppression of speech and expressing my judgment that she owed Kvaratskhelia an apology for her suppressive conduct – which she refused to do.

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This is not, at first blush, a situation in which the law offers much guidance. Censorship in the strictest sense is not involved, as no government force or threat of force was involved in the suppression. SourceForge was within its property rights and terms of service to delete the offensive material, and there was certainly no law barring Ms. Eicher from asking that they do so. My position was nevertheless that Ms. Eicher’s specific request for suppression of Kvaratskhelia’s public speech was, though within the law, consequentially and ethically wrong, because it set a precedent legitimizing suppression of public speech as a political tool.

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Ms. Eicher, and her friends, maintained that her action was justified by the death threats that Kvaratskhelia has been uttering since 2005. Taking them at their word about the facts, I agree that those threats were gravely wrong, injurious, and probably criminal. But the material on SourceForge that was actually censored is not represented to have constituted a death threat, merely a political argument that Ms. Eicher and her friends found obnoxious. I am pretty sure I’d have found it obnoxious myself…but on this, law and ethics are both clear. Nazis threaten death to Jews, but they can march in Skokie anyway – the mere fact that one has an ideology that is crazed and bigoted and potentially violent does nothing to dissolve or abrogate one’s free-speech rights. Nor should it. The rules of engagement that protect mikeeeUSA’s right to utter controversial political speech are the same rules that protect Ms. Eicher’s; we cannot deny one without the other.

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And as for violent misogyny in games – I remember what side most of the hacker community was on in the running PR and legal battles over Grand Theft Auto. I think that was the right side to be on, and any of us who would choose the side of the censor now, simply because it’s one of our people demanding suppression instead of some grandstanding redneck DA, would be at best succumbing to special pleading and at worst an outright hypocrite.

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I was (and am) not happy about appearing to defend Kvaratskhelia. To judge by the letter and the reports of his past behavior, he is a vile piece of scum; if he were to threaten harm to Ms. Eicher in my presence, I would cheerfully shoot him. But the way to deal with death threats is to (a) report them to law enforcement, and (b) be prepared to defend yourself against the very likely contingency that the authorities won’t be around when you need them. It is not to seek suppression of the threatener’s public speech. By doing that, Ms. Eicher put herself in the wrong; worse, she put this odious character — at that moment, and on this issue — in the right.

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For, if we deem suppressing his speech acceptable, where does it stop? Today it’s tirades against sexual equality that are supposed to accept as bad enough to warrant booting someone off a hosting site. But tomorrow, what will it be? Advocating restrictions on abortion? Denying global warming? Dissing vegetarians? Wearing fur? The precedent Ms. Eicher apparently wanted us to accept, whether she intended it or not, would have been unacceptably dangerous to liberty in general and our community in particular.

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The hacker culture is more delicately dependent on the unfettered flow of creativity and conversation, more functionally threatened by the possibility of systematic censorship, than any other I can think of in human history. Thus, our need and our responsibility to defend freedom of expression — even when we find it uncomfortable, even when it’s being exercised by werewolves — becomes greater rather than less. We cannot hold ourselves to lower standards than a court interpreting the First Amendment would apply; if the Nazis can march in Skokie, we must respect mikeeeUSA’s right to make vile political arguments in our public spaces. Ms. Eicher’s blog is not a public space, but SourceForge was intentionally designed to function as one and our community uses it in that way; thus, the rules of the public square apply.

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I was very concerned that Ms. Eicher’s original action not become a precedent for how we deal with trolls and nutjobs in the future. For if we censor public speech in aid of our own political positions, we forfeit the right to object when others censor our public speech in aid of theirs. There is only one place that road can end, and it’s not anywhere we want to be.

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That was why I might have ended up in a very ugly, very public fight over this. But while others where flaming, Ms. Eicher was listening. And thinking, to far better effect than the flamers. Just a few few hours ago, without consulting me, she undertook to host the offending material herself. This is what I had to say when I learned of this:

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+Ms. Eicher, *well done*! A creative and even brilliant solution!

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Hosting the creep’s stuff with a loud warning that it is vile and possiblly criminal attached to it is *exactly* the correct response! *Exactly*!

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The best remedy for hate speech is not suppression of that speech but counterpropaganda that makes the hater look both vile and ridiculous. The fact that you publicly held yourself out as an offended party gives the act of turning around to host his stuff even more force as a gesture of both contempt for him and principled opposition to censorship than it would have had otherwise.

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Yes, host his stuff. And, I advise, mock him mercilessly. Don’t dignify the filth on your disks with sober hatred; *laugh* at the poisonous fuckwit. Your choice makes you larger than him; grind that in mercilessly.

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I can live with a community rule that if you successfully have someone’s stuff booted from a public space for vileness, custom requires you to carry it yourself. But don’t drop the ball. Honor now demands that you host it as reliably as your own content.

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Now I will post about this, but instead of condemning you for setting a bad precedent, I will praise you for setting a good one. It is ethically, rhetorically, and pragmatically perfect; the only tiny cloud on my happiness is that I wasn’t imaginative enough to think of it myself. +

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I’ll add one point to that now. In an ironic and lovely way, Ms. Eicher’s sacrifice of her own disks and bandwidth to carry Kvaratskhelia’s misogynist crud is exactly the apology and retraction I originally hoped for — but delivered in a way that will give the creep no comfort in the end. I really could not ask for a better outcome.

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Ms. Eicher has earned my respect for avoiding the harm of censorship, and my personal gratitude for navigating us both out of a collision neither of us wanted. And I hope her solution will indeed set a precedent that will enable us to never, ever advocate the suppression of public political speech, no matter how vile we find it.

diff --git a/20091021001441.blog b/20091021001441.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5003bc8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20091021001441.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +Public Space in Cyberspace +

Following my post Condemning Censorship, Even of Werewolves, a great many people took me for task for trying to make a principled distinction between public space and private space, and tangled that up with a lot of confusion about the distinction between “public” and “state-owned” space. Here I’ll attempt to shed some light on the matter. In doing so, I will not actually be retailing a private theory of mine, but touching on principles with a long history in ethics and Anglo-American common law.

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Suppose I privately own a road which is the only access to your property. Can I bar you from using it? My principles say no. Ancient common law says no. Current U.S. law says no. I may charge a fee, but it must be reasonable in light of my maintainance costs and local market conditions, and it must be waived in emergencies.

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A lot of people interpret this doctrine as an assertion of social ownership of the roads, but there is a different ethical basis for it shared by libertarians and Anglo-American common law. That is: the law should not be interpreted to further privilege power relationships that are already asymmetrical. Where they conflict, we should be more scrupulous about the rights of weak parties than of strong ones.

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If you own a private club, should you be permiitted to bar blacks or women? Current U.S. law says no. Ancient common law is silent. I say, yes, you should be so permitted, even though I consider such discrimination odious. The difference is, that kind of law intrudes into your personal choices in ways that allowing someone to use your road does not.

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Can you bar individuals from your residence because they are black or female? Yes. Current U.S. law, ancient common law, and I all agree that a homeowner has a right to control personal space that trumps other claims.

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Now let’s go to cyberspace. How do these principles apply to defining public space there? In particular, how can we distinguish in a principled way between blogs, public forums, and project-hosting sites such as SourceForge?

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The right decision procedure here is to think about what the power relationships are, and which choices avoid infringing personal space while also avoiding placing further burdens on weak parties. Matters are simplified by the absence of state ownership, so no confusion between public space and government-controlled space is at issue.

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A blog is like a private home controlled by a single owner. Treating it as private space imposes no undue burden on guests, because their investment in the content is minimal. They may of course, leave comments, but the comments have value primarily as a reflection of or comment on the owner’s posts. Little or no harm is associated with being banned. In this case it is easy to say “private space”.

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A forum is like a club. Some are private and specialized, others more open. The value of the posts in a forum is a joint creation of the members; no individual member normally contributes more than a small fraction. Harm from being banned varies from none to significant, depending on the value of the forum social network. I could do a more extended analysis of how different forums with different traditions imply different rights analyses, but I’m going to pass over that to get to what I think is the interesting case. I’ll say as a placeholder that I think the public-or-private answer depends contingently on the history and social norms of the forum community and can go either way.

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A project-hosting or forge site is very different from either case. The most important difference is that the site acts, in effect, as a gatekeeper for access to the user’s own property – the source-code repositories and other project data. The user’s investment is high, and harn from being banned can be severe – in the worst case, even a diligent user may lose work that is backed up nowhere else (e.g. commits since the last backup, project mailing lists, etc.). The analogy of a private road controlling access to a weaker party’s property is strong, and the same remedy applies, which is to restrict the putative owners from taking actions which further burden the weaker party.

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If I were running a hosting site like SourceForge, I would make sure that my ban procedure included burning copies of the user’s content onto CD-ROMs and shipping them to his/her contact address. Otherwise, I think I could be sued successfully for destroying property that is not mine. My wife the attorney agrees this would be fair and prudent.

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The social expectations around a hosting site also matter. These are, normally, chartered to a particular community. SourceForge’s, for example, is held forth as being open to all projects with licenses conforming to the Open Source definition; Alioth is for Debian developers; Savannah primarily for FSF and FSF-approved projects. Such representations have ethical weight, and courts do not ignore them when a dispute goes to law. If I were running any of these sites, I would consider violation of the traditional norms of my user community to be not just a public-image problem but a multiplier to my risks in the event of a lawsuit.

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There are also relevant precedents with respect to community bulletin boards hung in supermarkets, which I know about because I was an individial amicus in the Supreme Court’s hearing on the Communications Decency Act back in 1996. If you are a supermarket and hold forth the bulletin board as being for community use, you are essentially barred from censoring in a content-sensitive way except as required by laws relating to obscenity, felonious threats, and other criminal speech.

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I trust it is now clear why I have asserted that forge sites are not private space within the meaning the term has in common law and reasoning about speech rights. This does not mean the owners can’t shut them down, but it does mean that while they are running, the rules of public space – or, perhaps more specifically, the public thoroughfare — apply.

diff --git a/20091023153627.blog b/20091023153627.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6710b7d --- /dev/null +++ b/20091023153627.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Fearing what might be true +

I am not generally unhappy with my model of how the universe works. Yes, it would be pleasant if there really were a beneficient creator-god and an afterlife; it would be nice if “good government” were actually a sustainable possibility rather than a fond but deluded hope in the minds of statists; it would be just peachy if wishes were horses and everybody could be happy and rich. But I’m reconciled to these things being not true because it seems to me they are necessarily not true – that is, for example, I cannot imagine a universe in which the actual existence of an intervening creator-god is actually compatible with the observed regularity of natural law, nor a universe in which scarcity and agency problems do not imply that governments are subject to the iron laws of political economics.

+

Other people can imagine theism or statism to be true, and so could I at one time – before I understood enough to grok the contradictions they would entail. But I’m not actually writing to argue for anarchism or atheism today; I brought those up as examples to make a more subtle point. It seems to me it’s actually more difficult to deal with unpleasant possible truths that are only contingent, because you can imagine how things could be different if you lived in a universe that was slightly different but recognizable.

+

I’ll give two examples of this that I’m still struggling with. One: I fear feminism may be dangerously wrong. Two: I fear that the crowd calling for the abolition of all forms of intellectual property may be dangerously right.

+

+

I like living in a society where women are, generally speaking, as free to choose their own path in life as I am. I like strong women, women who are confident and look me in the eye and see themselves as my equals. But I wonder, sometimes, if sexual equality isn’t doomed by biology. The relevant facts are (a) men and women have different optimal reproductive strategies because of the asymmetry in energy investment – being pregnant and giving birth is a lot more costly and risky than ejaculating, and (b) a woman’s fertile period is a relatively short portion of her lifetime. Following the logic out, it may be that the consequence of sexual equality is demographic collapse — nasty cultures which treat women like brood mares are the future simply because the nice cultures that don’t do that stop breeding at replacement rates.

+

I’ve written before about how property rights are underpinned by Schelling points — places where the cost of rights enforcement rises discontinuously, creating boundaries that rival claimants can agree on even if they can’t signal each other reliably. I’m disturbed by the fact that even though I’ve been thinking about the matter for years, I haven’t found any Schelling points in the theory of IP rights that look really stable. This suggests that the IP abolitionists may win the argument in the end. That could be very bad, because there are important kinds of creative work I don’t see how to fund without IP rights that allow creaters to capture positive externalities. I’m not worried about software, because that can be funded from its value as an intermediate good; I’m worried about music and novels and artistic goods with economics like those.

+

The difference between these two cases and my first two is this: I know nothing about the universe that makes it impossible that women should have longer fertile periods. And there might be Schelling points in IP that I haven’t found yet because I’m looking in the wrong places. I hope so, anyway.

+

I haven’t gone into depth about any of these arguments because the specific beliefs I’m examining are not really the point of this essay, and you can’t address my issue by attacking them (that’s a hint to commenters, yes indeed it is!). What I’m actually poking at here is the nexus among belief, emotion, and imagination. The question I would like to hear from commenters about is this: If there is something that you don’t want to be true, but fear might be, and (like me) you’re pretty compulsive about following the evidence and the logic even if it leads you to unpleasant conclusions — how do you cope?

+

Am I alone in feeling like unpleasant but necessary truths are easier to live with than unpleasant but contingent ones, or does this tell us something general and interesting about the psychology of belief maintainence?

+

UPDATE: Some people have gotten the wrong impression. I didn’t ask “How do you cope?” because I’m having an existential crisis or anything, it’s that I’m curious about the range of cognitive and emotional strategies involved. I’m an engineer, I cope by finding the largest problem I can wrap my head around and attacking it with vigor; if we all do that, maybe we’ll win. It could be said that my strategy for emotional coping is “don’t be passive”.

diff --git a/20091026085152.blog b/20091026085152.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2a29647 --- /dev/null +++ b/20091026085152.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Hacker superstitions about software licensing +

Hackers have a lot of odd superstitions about software licensing. I was reminded of this recently when a project maintainer asked me whether he needed to get a sign-off from each and every one of his contributors before switching from Apache v1 to Apache v2. Here’s what I told him:

+

My opinion is this. Under U.S. law — and I believe European codes are not different in this respect, because both are controlled by the Berne convention — a license change on a collection is grounds for protest or legal action only if the rights of the contributors are materially affected by the change. That is, a court would have to be persuaded that the change caused a monetary loss or at least damage to a contributor’s public reputation. If there is no such possibility, then there is no harm and no grounds for complaint.

+

+

It is clear that there is such a claim when a license is changed from open source to proprietary, or from proprietary to open source, without the author’s consent (the legal categories that apply are “unjust enrichment” and perhaps “conversion”). But no such claim can plausibly be made about Apache v1 to v2. A court would laugh at you if you tried. The applicable rule in English and American common law is called “De minimis non curat lex” – “The law does not concern itself with trifles.”

+

I think the closest an open-source license change might come to meeting the “materially-affected” test would be a change from an infectious license like GPL to a non-infectious one. Even that, I think, is doubtful.

+

Hackers have some weird superstitions in this area – they behave as though they think modifying a license even trivially is some sort of soul-stealing evil voodoo against the person who attached it, and they think the law treats license attachments as sacred and immutable. It doesn’t – certainly not for collective works.

+

So I’m telling you that you may have gone beyond what the law requires by asking about the GPL-to-Apache-v1 license change, and you are certainly beyond it in worrying about Apache v1 to v2,

+

I think you did right in respecting hacker customs by going beyond the law in the first case, but to worry about the second would be excessive.

+

UPDATE: Yes, the maintainer had previously changed the project from GPL to Apache v1. Then, another project that he wanted to amalgamate code with switched to Apache v2.

diff --git a/20091029203942.blog b/20091029203942.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..410069f --- /dev/null +++ b/20091029203942.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +The future of software forges +

I’m still not going to talk about my attack on the forge infrastructure problems quite yet; the software is coming along nicely, but I intend to announce only after it handles its fourth forge type (yes, that was a tease). But I will say this: I now think I know what the future of forges looks like. It’s called Roundup, and it is astonishingly elegant and potentially more powerful than anything out there. Anything, not excluding the clever decentralized systems like Fossil or Bugs Everywhere.

+

Here are the big wins:

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1. Mailing lists, issue trackers, and online forums unify into *one* message queue that can be filtered in various ways.

+

2. Scriptable via XML-RPC or an email responder ‘bot.

+

3. Small base system with good extensibility – just three base classes (User. Msg, File) and the ability to define new classes. ‘Issue’ is a class built on top of these.

+

4. Arbitrary attributes per issue is basically free, with baked-in support for defining controlled vocabularies.

+

5. There’s a uniform way, called “designators”, for messages and other objects to refer to each other in text.

+

6. Small, clean implementation written in Python.

+

There are some things it needs, though… (Read the Roundup design document before continuing.)

+

+

First, namespaces. A namespace is a set of User, Msg, and File objects that belong together. Each namespace gets its own hyperdatabase blob. Each namespace numbers objects separately. Each namespace has a unique name used as a prefix in designators. Thus, if I say [gpsd/msg23], I’m asking for the 23rd msg object in namespace gpsd. Everyone talking to a system system has, at all times, a current namespace. If I just say [msg23], I am designating the 23rd message object in my current namespace.

+

Why the slash? because, in the most general case, designators will be URIs – as, for example, [https://developer.berlios.de/gpsd/msg23]. Presto! There is now an internet-wide namespace of Roundup objects all of which can refer to each other!

+

No prize for guessing that a namespace is a project. I’ve actually done two things above – I’ve defined all the required semantics for multiple projects to coexist in a forgelike system, and I’ve created a way for projects to refer to each others’ data even if they’re not on the same machine. Both features will be sources of power.

+

The subtler thing about namespaces is that they are perfectly orthogonal to the system’s other primitive concepts. This will pay off huge in some ways I can already foresee and many that I cannot yet.

+

I think the design also needs a primitive object class to encapsulate repositories. But I may be wrong about that; I’m still considering it.

diff --git a/20091104225059.blog b/20091104225059.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1ae6b05 --- /dev/null +++ b/20091104225059.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Announcing ForgePlucker +

I’ve been strongly hinting in recent blog entries that I planned to do something concrete about the data-jail problems of present open-source hosting sites. Because I believe in underpromising and overperforming, I decided at the outset not to announce a project until I could not only show working code, but code with wide enough coverage to make it crystal-clear that the project goals are achievable with a relatively modest amount of effort.

+

That time has arrived. I am very pleased to announce ForgePlucker, a project aimed at developing project-state extractor software for backup, offline analysis, and (eventually) re-importation. The proof-of-concept code can extract complete issue-tracker state from Berlios, Gna!, or Savane — and issue trackers are probably the hardest part of the job. I expect extraction of repository histories and developer permissions tables to be easier. Extraction of mailing-list state is probably a bit trickier than either of those, but doable.

+

+

The code as it exists now is just 1100-odd lines of pure Python; it can dump tracker state in either JSON or an XML format. Notice that this is already a production-ready tool for, among other things, examining bug lists offline. One of the goals in the project plan is: useful tools at every step of the way. This is not going to be a project where the developers toil in obscurity for years until releasing Epic Code That Changes Everything; the project plan lays out smaller deliverables that can be used to build cooperation with forge-system designers and other people interested in some of the data-transport problems associated with forges.

+

Accordingly, I’ve actually put as much effort into documentation than I have into code – there’s a project plan, a HOWTO on writing forge handler classes, and even a draft ontology of forge state we can use to translate among the data models of different forges.

+

Yes, I’m looking for co-developers. What the project especially needs is people interested in taking responsibility for developing and maintaining the handler classes associated with different forge types. Presently, I own the Savane and Berlios handlers; I’d like to give those away so I can concentrate on the framework code, and I hope to recruit owners for SourceForge, GForge/FusionForge, Launchpad, and Trac.

+

There’s lots of interesting work to be done here. Much of it will be code, some of it will be standards and documentation. Relevant skills and technologies include Python, JSON, RDF, HTTP forms, web-scraping, test-driven development. As always, being highly motivated to address the problem is more important than knowing any specific toolset at the outset. I expect this project to be genuine fun; it breaks naturally into small substeps on which you get rapid feedback at each stage, and testing for correctness will be relatively easy.

+

Once we field a forgeplucker that can pull complete project state off a suitably wide variety of forges, it will be time to think about tackling the re-import problem. We may solve that by bolting importers onto existing forge systems one by one, or by launching a forge-development project that builds on our extractor tools. Another direction we might go in is supporting scripted interaction with these systems. At every stage, useful tools!

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To participate, get an account on Gna! and apply to join ForgePlucker. You can also examine the source-code repository and llist of open tasks. You will probably want to join the mailing list. I’m planning to set up an IRC channel as well.

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(Yes, I’d rather have used a distributed VCS; I did my proof-of concept in Mercurial. But Subversion is the best we can do on Gna!, where I have the advantage of being a site administrator.)

diff --git a/20091105104221.blog b/20091105104221.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..88920de --- /dev/null +++ b/20091105104221.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Structure Is Not Meaning +

So, I announce ForgePlucker, and within a day I’ve got some guy from Y Combinator sneering at me for using regular expressions to parse HTML. Says it’s “crappy code”. The poor fool…he has fallen victim to a conceptual trap which I, fortunately, learned to avoid decades ago. I could spout a freshet of theory about it, but instead I’m just going to utter a maxim: Never confuse structure with meaning.

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+

When you parse an XML or HTML document into a DOM, you’re not getting meaning. You’re only getting structure. The DOM structure. And by doing that, you add a kind of dependency to your code that it didn’t have before – you become vulnarable to changes in the document’s parse structure that don’t change the meaning and wouldn’t have bitten you if you had stuck to doing local pattern-matching.

+

That may be an acceptable or even necessary risk if the meaning you’re trying to extract is closely tied to the structure of the document. If what you’re looking at is pure high-church XML, that’s often the case. But HTML? It’s tag soup. The structure the DOM tries to capture may not be well-formed at all. Even if it is, some UI designer fiddling with presentation-level tags can easily mutate the structure in a way that that points your beautiful theoretically-neat XPath queries off into la-la land.

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Yes, sometimes lxml or BeautifulSoup is the right thing. I’ll probably use lxml when I get around to writing the parser for the XML state-dump format I’ve started to define. That will be appropriate, because the generators for that format can guarantee well-formedness and aren’t going to be changed casually by UI designers who innocently believe they’re doing no harm.

+

But that’s a rather different use case from HTML generated by someone else’s code. It still could be that DOM-based parsing is the smart thing, if the HTML is stable and the generator was designed by somebody fastidious. Best not to count on it, though. Here’s an example of why…

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At one point in my code, I have to parse HTML that presents as a two-column table on a bug index page. First column is bug IDs, wrapped in anchor markup so they hotlink to bug detail pages. Second column is the bug summary. This table is embedded in huge amounts of gorp – page headers, page footers, a sidebar, various text annotations. All I care about is the bug IDs, though. I just want a list of them.

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If I did what my unwise critic says is right, I’d take a parse tree of the entire page and then write a path query down to the table cell and the embedded link. Which would be cute, and I could do that, and I’m sure code like that got him an A in college – but would leave me shit out of luck the second after, say, anything in the page’s top-level structure changed.

+

So instead, I walk through the page looking for anything that looks like a hotlink wrapping literal text of the form #[0-9]*. Actually, that oversimplifies; I look for a hotlink with a specific pattern of URL in a hotlink that I know points into the site bugtracker.

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Now, ask yourself: what’s more likely to remain stable: the tag soup on the page, or the path structure of the forge site? Which is the more reliable cue to the data I actually want to extract?

+

Never confuse structure with meaning.

+

Sometimes, the brute-force hack-at-it-with-regexps approach really is best. It looks stupid, but it gets the job done.

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CORRECTION: The snotty kid (or snotty-kid soundalike) isn’t from Y Combinator. That’s actually a relief – I know Paul Graham, I like Paul Graham, and the crew around him usually has more sense. Anyway, this post was supposed to be about the critic’s mistake, not the critic.

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UPDATE: I’ve had more to say on this topic in The Pragmatics of Webscraping.

diff --git a/20091105201024.blog b/20091105201024.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2bc5880 --- /dev/null +++ b/20091105201024.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Maybe if moral cowardice cost money, it would be less common? +

Heh. State representative Fred Maslack of Vermont has proposed a bill under which non-gun-owners would have to register and pay a fee. Entertainingly enough, there is actual justification for this in a careful reading of the Vermont state constitution.

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The Hon. Rep. Maslack is joking. I think. And I’m against requiring people who don’t want to bear arms to do so. But gad, how tempting – because underlying his argument is a truth that the drafters of the Vermont and U.S. constitutions understood. People who refuse to take arms in defense of themselves and their neighbors are inflicting a cost on their communities far more certainly than healthy people who refuse to buy medical insurance (and yes, I do think that proposed mandate is an intended target of Maslack’s jab). That externality is measured in higher crime rates, higher law-enforcement and prison budgets, and all the (dis)opportunity costs associated with increased crime. And that’s before you get to the political consequences…

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I’ve never made a secret of my evaluation that refusal to bear arms is a form of moral cowardice masquerading as virtue. Real adults know how precious human life is, when they are ethically required to risk it on behalf of others, and when killing is both necessary and justified. Real adults know that there is no magic about wearing a police or military uniform; those decisions are just as hard, and just as necessary, when we deny we’re making them by delegating them to others. Real adults do not shirk the responsibility that this knowledge implies. And the wistful thought Rep Maslack’s proposal leaves me with is…maybe if moral cowardice cost money and humiliation, there would be less of it.

diff --git a/20091109232714.blog b/20091109232714.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2d24f5a --- /dev/null +++ b/20091109232714.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +Ego is for little people +

When I got really famous and started to hang out with people at the top of the game in computer science and other fields, one of the first things I noticed is that the real A-list types almost never have a major territorial/ego thing going on in their behavior. The B-list people, the bright second-raters, may be all sharp elbows and ego assertion, but there’s a calm space at the top that the absolutely most capable ones get to and tend to stay in.

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I’m going to be specific about what I mean by “ego” now, because otherwise much of this essay may seem vague or wrongheaded. I specifically mean psychologial egotism, not (for example) ethical egoism as a philosophical position. The main indicators of egotism as I intend it here are are loud self-display, insecurity, constant approval-seeking, overinflating one’s accomplishments, touchiness about slights, and territorial twitchiness about one’s expertise. My claim is that egotism is a disease of the incapable, and vanishes or nearly vanishes among the super-capable.

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It’s not only scientific fields where this is true. For various reasons (none of which, fortunately, have been legal troubles of my own) I’ve had to work with a lot of lawyers. I’m legally literate, so a pattern I quickly noticed is this: the B-list lawyers are the ones who get all huffy about a non-attorney expressing opinions and judgments about the law. The one time I worked with a stratospherically supercompetent A-list firm (I won’t name them, but I will note they have their own skyscraper in New York City) they were so relaxed about recognizing capability in a non-lawyer that some language I wrote went straight into their court filings in a lawsuit with multibillion-dollar stakes.

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This sort of thing has been noted before by other people and is almost a commonplace. I’m bringing it up to note why that’s true, speaking from my own experience. It’s not that people at the top of their fields are more virtuous. Well…actually I think people at the top of their fields do tend to be more virtuous, for the same reason they tend to be be more intelligent, less neurotic, longer-lived, better-looking, and physically healthier than the B-listers and below. Human capability does not come in nearly divisible chunks; almost every individual way that humans can excel is tangled up with other ways at a purely physiological level, with immune-system capability lurking behind a surprisingly large chunk of the surface measures. But I don’t think the mean difference in “virtue”, however you think that can actually be defined, explains what I’m pointing at.

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No. It’s more that ego games have a diminishing return. The farther you are up the ability and achievement bell curve, the less psychological gain you get from asserting or demonstrating your superiority over the merely average, and the more prone you are to welcome discovering new peers because there are so damn few of them that it gets lonely. There comes a point past which winning more ego contests becomes so pointless that even the most ambitious, suspicious, external-validation-fixated strivers tend to notice that it’s no fun any more and stop.

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I’m not speaking abstractly here. I’ve always been more interested in doing the right thing than doing what would make me popular, to the point where I generally figure that if I’m not routinely pissing off a sizable minority of people I should be pushing harder. In the language of psychology, my need for external validation is low; the standards I try hardest to live up to are those I’ve set for myself. But one of the differences I can see between myself at 25 and myself at 52 is that my limited need for external validation has decreased. And it’s not age or maturity or virtue that shrunk it; it’s having nothing left to prove.

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+

I’m going to use myself as an example now, mainly because I don’t know anyone else’s story well enough to make the point I want to with it. I’m the crippled kid who became a black-belt martial artist and teacher of martial artists. I’ve made the New York Times bestseller list as a writer. You can hardly use a browser, a cellphone, or a game console without relying on my code. I’ve been a session musician on two records. I’ve blown up the software industry once, reinvented the hacker culture twice, and am without doubt one of the dozen most famous geeks alive. Investment bankers pay me $300 an hour to yak at them because I have a track record as a shrewd business analyst. I don’t even have a BS, yet there’s been an entire academic cottage industry devoted to writing exegeses of my work. I could do nothing but speaking tours for the rest of my life and still be overbooked. Earnest people have struggled their whole lives to change the world less than I routinely do when I’m not even really trying. Here’s the point: In what way would it make sense for me to be in ego or status competition with anybody?

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And yet, there are people out there who are going to read the previous paragraph and think “Oh, that’s Eric’s ego again. The blowhard.” I’ve had a lot of time to get used to such reactions over the last decade, but it’s still hard for me not to collapse in helpless laughter at the implied degree of Not Getting It. Now (limiting myself to a small random sample of the A-listers I’ve actually met and taken the measure of) Alan Kay or Terry Pratchett or David Friedman or Freeman Dyson…they would understand why I was laughing. Because real A-listers are sui generis, and usually polymaths; they tend to have constellations of talent so extreme and idiosyncratic that they couldn’t even really be in ego competition with each other, let alone with those much less capable. That’s supposing they wanted to be.

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And generally they don’t want to be. If you’re the kind of person who can make it to the top even in a single field (law or CS or whatever) you may not have started out with better things to do than compete for attention and glory, but by the time you make the A-list you’ve almost certainly discovered subtler games to play that are much more fun. You’ll maintain a reputation because a reputation is a useful tool, but it’s not the point any more. If it ever was. In my experience this is even more true of polymaths, possibly because their self-images as competent people.have broader and more stable bases.

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I think there are a couple of different reasons people tend to falsely attribute pathological, oversensitive egos to A-listers. Each reason is in its own way worth taking a look at.

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The first and most obvious reason is projection. “Wow, if I were as talented as Terry Pratchett, I know I’d have a huge ego about it, so I guess he must.” Heh. Trust me on this; he doesn’t. This kind of thinking reveals a a lot about somebody’s ego and insecurity, alright, but not Terry’s.

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There’s a flip side to projection that I think of as the “Asimov game”. I met Isaac Asimov just a few months before he died. Isaac had long been notorious for broadly egotistical behavior and a kind of cheerful bombast that got up a lot of peoples’ noses. But if you ever met him, and you were at all perceptive, you might see that it was all a sort of joke. Isaac was laughing inside at everyone who took his “egotism” seriously – and, at the same time, watching hungrily for people who could see through the self-parody, because they might – might – actually be among the vanishingly tiny minority that constituted his actual peers. The Asimov game is a constant temptation to extroverted A-listers; I’ve been known to fall into it myself. It’s not really anybody’s fault that a lot of people are fooled by it.

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Another confusing fact is that though A-listers may not be about ego or status competition, they will often play such games ruthlessly and effectively when that gets them something they actually want. The something might be more money from a gig, or a night in the hay with an attractive wench, or whatever; the point is, if you catch an A-lister in that mode, you might well mistake for egotism some kinds of display behavior that actually serve much more immediate and instrumental purposes. Your typical A-lister in that situation (and this includes me, now) is blithely unconcerned that a bystander might think he’s egotistical; the money or the wench or the whatever is the goal, not the approval or disapproval of bystanders.

+

Finally, a lot of people confuse arrogance with ego. A-listers (and I am including myself, again, this time) are, as a rule, colossally arrogant. That is, they have utter confidence in their ability to meet challenges that would humble or break most people. Do not be fooled by the self-deprecating manner that many A-listers cultivate; it is a mask adopted for social purposes, mostly to avoid freaking out the normal monkeys. But this arrogance is not the same as egotism; in fact, in many ways it is the opposite. It is possible to be arrogant about one’s abilities compared to the statistically average human being and the range of challenges one is likely to encounter, but deeply and genuinely humble when dealing with peers or contemplating the vastness of one’s own ignorance and incapability relative to what one could imagine being. In fact, this combination of attitudes is completely typical of the A-listers I have known.

+

The behaviors most people think of as “egotism” tend to be driven out by arrogance rather than motivated by it. If you really believe bone-deep that you are superior, you don’t act insecure and twitchy and approval-seeking, because you just aren’t! Arrogance doesn’t even have to be justified to drive out egotism – it just has to be there. It’s all the more powerful an egotism-banisher when the arrogance is actually well-justified by the A-lister’s track record. Thus, egotists are usually people who have not yet established their capability to themselves, or who had that confidence in the past but are beginning to doubt it.

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Finally, I think a lot of people need to believe that A-listers invariably have flaws in proportion to their capabilities in order not to feel dwarfed by them. Thus the widely cherished belief that geniuses are commonly mentally unstable; it’s not true (admissions to mental hospitals per thousand drop with increasing IQ and in professions that select for intelligence, with the lowest numbers among mathematicians and theoretical physicists) but if you don’t happen to be a genius yourself it’s very comforting. Similarly, a dullard who believes A-listers are all flaky temperamental egotists can console himself that, though he may not be smarter than them, he is better. And so it goes.

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Ego is for little people. I wish I could finish by saying something anodyne about how we’re all little when you come down to it, but I’d be fibbing. Yeah, we’re all little compared to a supernova, but that’s beside the point. And yeah, the most capable people in the world are routinely humbled by what they don’t know and can’t do, but that is beside the point too. If you look at how humans relate to other humans – and in particular, how they manage self-image and “ego” and evaluate their status with respect to others…it really is different near the top end of the human capability range. Better. Calmer. Sorry, but it’ s true.

diff --git a/20091115172417.blog b/20091115172417.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d557c00 --- /dev/null +++ b/20091115172417.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +The pragmatics of webscraping +

Here’s an amplification of my previous post, Structure Is Not Meaning. It’s an except from the ForgePlucker HOWTO on writing code to web-scrape project data out of forge systems.

+

+Your handler class’s job is to extract project data. If you are lucky, your target forge already has an export feature that will dump everything to you in clean XML or JSON; in that case, you have a fairly trivial exercise using BeautifulStoneSoup or the Python-library JSON parser and can skip the rest of this section.

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Usually, however, you’re going to need to extract the data from the same pages that humans use. This is a problem, because these pages are cluttered with all kinds of presentation-level markup, headers, footers, sidebars, and site-navigation gorp — any of which is highly likely to mutate any time the UI gets tweaked.

+

Here are the tactics we use to try to stay out of trouble:

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1. When you don’t see what you expect, use the framework’s self.error() call to abort with a message. And put in lots of expect checks; it’s better for a handler to break loudly and soon than to return bad data. Fixing the handler to track a page mutation won’t usually be hard once you know you need to – and knowing you need to is why we have regression tests.

+

2. Use peephole analysis with regexps (as opposed to HTML parsing of the whole page) as much as possible. Every time you get away with matching on strictly local patterns, like special URLs, you avoid a dependency on larger areas of page structure which can mutate.

+

3. Throw away as many irrelevant parts of the page as you can before attempting either regexp matching or HTML parsing. (The most mutation-prone parts of ppsages are headers, footers, and sidebars; that’s where the decorative elements and navigation stuff tend to cluster.) If you can identify fixed end strings for headers or fixed start strings for footers, use those to trim (and error out if they’re not there); that way you’ll be safe even if the headers and footers mutate. This is what the narrow() method in the framework code is for.

+

4. Rely on forms. You can assume you’ll be logged in with authentication and permissions to modify project data, which means the forge will display forms for editing things like issue data and project-member permissions. Use the forms structure, as it is much less likely to be casually mutated than the page decorations.

+

5. When you must parse HTML, BeautifulSoup is available to handler classes. Use it, rather than hand-rolling a parser, unless you have to cope with markup so badly malformed that it cannot cope.

+
+

Actual field experience shows that throwing out portions of a page that are highly susceptible to mutation is a valuable tactic. Also, think about where in the site a page lives. Entry pages and other highly visible ones tend to get tweaked the most often, so the tradeoffs push you towards peephole methods and not relying on DOM structure. Deeper in the site , especially on pages that are heavily tabular and mostly consist of one big form, relying on DOM structure is less risky.

diff --git a/20091116155358.blog b/20091116155358.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c58f5a7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20091116155358.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Barbecue kings! +

John Birmingham writes from Australia:

+

+Even, and this is gonna hurt, the Americans have it all over us when it comes to cooking with fire, iron and tongs. In fact it’s arguable the American barbecue, or rather its plethora of regional variations on barbecue, set the gold standard worldwide for applying heat to meat while out of doors. While the popular image of American cooking, at least as practised by average Americans, involves squeezing a plastic sauce packet over something nasty in a chain restaurant, the truth is their barbecue specialists would put ours to shame. Undying, unutterable shame. +

+

Alas, John, it is so. I have eaten barbecue all over the U.S. and the world, and the kings of the genre are in this country. Not in my part of it; I’m a Boston-born northerner and most barbecue where I live is as bland and bad as you describe. As a general rule in the U.S. the further south you go the better the barbeque gets, with the acme reached in south Texas. (Though the area around Memphis, further north, is a contender.)

+

Internationally, almost nobody even competes with the Southern U.S. for the barbecue crown. Brazilian churrasco is the one exception I can think of – that stuff can give good ol’ Texas ‘cue a run for its money. But you ex-British-Empire types aren’t even properly in the running. I’ve been to a backyard braai in South Africa and, while the spirit was there, the seasoning and cooking technique was sadly lacking, much like what you describe.

+

American cooking in general gets a bad rap internationally that it doesn’t deserve. It’s as though foreigners think it’s still 1965 here or something. I can remember a time in my childhood when the slams were richly deserved — heck, I remember returning here from Europe in 1971 and having to wait more than a decade before I saw a decent piece of bread! But Americans got a clue about food in the 1980s and haven’t lost it since. I learned this when I was traveling intensively around the turn of the century; most places I visited, even the “high-quality” food was inferior to what I ate at home.

+

UPDATE: I suppose it’s worth noting that Brazilian-style churrascarias have become the most recent high-end restaurant fad in the U.S., suggesting that other Americans generally agree with me that the style competes well with native ‘cue. Sadly, Korean barbecue failed to become naturalized here when that was tried in the 1990s.

diff --git a/20091121181232.blog b/20091121181232.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2f08873 --- /dev/null +++ b/20091121181232.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Hiding the Decline: Prologue +

According to the summaries I’ve seen, the 61 megabytes of email and documents net-jacked from the Climate Research Unit a few days ago do not — quite — reify conservatives’ darkest fantasies about “the team” (as the network of professional anthropogenic-global-warming alarmists communicating through CRU likes to style itself). To do that, they’d have to contain marching orders from the Socialist International.

+

However, the excerpts I’ve seen are already quite damning enough; among other things, they are evidence of criminal conspiracy to violate the Freedom Of Information act. And I no longer have to speculate about the rest; I’ve downloaded the documents from Pirate Bay and will study them myself.

+

For those of you who have been stigmatizing AGW skeptics as “deniers” and dismissing their charges that the whole enterprise is fraudulent? Hope you like the taste of crow, because I do believe there’s a buttload of it coming at you. Piping hot.

+

Am I going to blog about it? Heh…try to stop me…

+

UPDATE: I’ve read about 10% of the material and started a file of notes on it, but been delayed by preparing for a major release on one of my projects. In the meantime, read this excellent summary with links to the original emails.

diff --git a/20091123205620.blog b/20091123205620.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..269b89c --- /dev/null +++ b/20091123205620.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Open-Sourcing the Global Warming Debate +

The email and documents recently netjacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia raise serious questions about the quality of the research being used to underpin major public-policy decisions.

+

In the open-source software community, we understand about human error and sloppiness and the tendency to get too caught up in a pet theory. We know that the most effective way way to combat these tendencies is transparency of process — letting the code speak for itself, and opening the sources to skeptical peer review by anyone.

+

There is only one way to cut through all of the conflicting claims and agendas about the CRU’s research: open-source it all. Publish the primary data sets, publish the programs used to interpret them and create graphs like the well-known global-temperature “hockey stick”, publish everything. Let the code and the data speak for itself; let the facts trump speculation and interpretation.

+

We know, from experience with software, that secrecy is the enemy of quality — that software bugs, like cockroaches, shun light and flourish in darkness. So, too. with mistakes in the interpretation of scientific data; neither deliberate fraud nor inadvertent error can long survive the skeptical scrutiny of millions. The same remedy we have found in the open-source community applies – unsurprisingly, since we learned it from science in the first place. Abolish the secrecy, let in the sunlight.

+

AGW true believers and “denialists” should be able to agree on this: the data get the last word, because without them theory is groundless. The only way for the CRU researchers to clear themselves of the imputation of serious error or fraud is full disclosure of the measurement techniques, the raw primary data sets, the code used to reduce them, and of their decisions during the process of interpretation. They should have nothing to hide; let them so demonstrate by hiding nothing.

+

The open-source community has many project-hosting sites that are well adapted for this sort of disclosure. If they require assistance in choosing one and learning how to create and manage an open-source project, I and many others in the open-source community will be happy to provide it.

+

For the future, we need to restore the basic standards of science. No secrecy: no secrecy of data, no secrecy of experimental methods, no secrecy of data-reduction or modeling code. Such transparency and accountability are especially vital when the public-policy stakes are large. This is among the excellent reasons that both the US and UK have Freedom of Information Acts, and the logic of those acts has perhaps never applied more pressingly than it does here.

diff --git a/20091124084039.blog b/20091124084039.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7c507a1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20091124084039.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +Data Against Demagogues +

Ken Burnside, a regular commenter here, has launched his own blog. Data Against Demagogues is about methodological integrity, the use and abuses of data visualization, and how to tell junk science by its smell.

+

Ken hopes the CRU flap will become a teachable moment on these issues. So do I. More power to him!

diff --git a/20091124213531.blog b/20091124213531.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..973c616 --- /dev/null +++ b/20091124213531.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +Hiding the Decline: Part 1 – The Adventure Begins +

From the CRU code file osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro , used to prepare a graph purported to be of Northern Hemisphere temperatures and reconstructions.

+
+;
+; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
+;
+yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
+valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
+2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
+if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
+;
+yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
+
+

This, people, is blatant data-cooking, with no pretense otherwise. It flattens a period of warm temperatures in the 1940s 1930s — see those negative coefficients? Then, later on, it applies a positive multiplier so you get a nice dramatic hockey stick at the end of the century.

+

All you apologists weakly protesting that this is research business as usual and there are plausible explanations for everything in the emails? Sackcloth and ashes time for you. This isn’t just a smoking gun, it’s a siege cannon with the barrel still hot.

+

UPDATE2: Now the data is 0.75 scaled. I think I interpreted the yrloc entry incorrectly last time, introducing an off-by-one. The 1400 point (same as the 1904) is omitted as it confuses gnuplot. These are details; the basic hockey-stick shape is unaltered.

+

+

UPDATE3: Graphic is tenmporily unavailable due to a server glitch. I’m contacting the site admins about this.

diff --git a/20091125204756.blog b/20091125204756.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d85a5e3 --- /dev/null +++ b/20091125204756.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Will the AGW fraud discredit science? +

In response to the mounting evidence of fraud, data falsification, and criminal conspiracy by the “hockey team” clique of climatologists pushing anthropogenic-global-warming (AGW) theory, there has been serious and concerned speculation that the collapse of this scam may damage the credibility of science in general.

+

This is a reasonable thing to be concerned about, given that the species of toxic slime mold known as “creationists” have been oozing all over the blogosphere with suggestions that evolutionary biology is just as bogus. I think there are three important lessons to be drawn here: one is some reassurance from the history of major scientific frauds, another is a heuristic about when we should be suspicious of “science”, and a third is the importance of transparency.

+

+

There have been major scientific frauds before. You have to go back a ways to match the AGW fraud in scale and audacity, but the nearest parallel example — Lysenkoism — is instructive in several ways.

+

The good news, for those inclined to worry, is that Lysenkoism did no permanent damage to science or its reputation. It failed to cast biology into disrepute because it became understood as a political creation serving political ends. Not that non-politicized frauds have been more damaging — Piltdown Man, anyone? — but the example of Lysenkoism is reassuring. It suggests that the political angle of AGW (that is, its close association with environmental statism) will mitigate the long-term consequences of its collapse.

+

Lysenkoism is also instructive in another way. It teaches us a lesson which, if heeded, might have accelerated the exposure of the AGW fraud — or, perhaps, prevented it from getting traction in the first place. The lesson is this: always, always, always distrust the “science” that accompanies a political power grab.

+

This is actually a narrower category than politicized science. To see how, contrast creationism with AGW. Creationism is certainly politicized science, but it is marginally less noxious than AGW because it is not cannot effectively be used as a rationalization of control by the permanent political class, a weapon against free markets and individual liberty.

+

For many AGW boosters, as with previous environmentalist scares, rationalizing coercive control was precisely the point. If it saves just one polar bear…and this was our lesson from Lysenko, too. When science becomes the instrument of political ambitions, science is either already corrupted or will be as soon as makes no difference.

+

Therefore…the next time we hear a ginned-up panic over some vast environmental crisis, the prudent thing to do will be to remember Mencken: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” It will be prudent to suspect that the science is probably already corrupted and demand extra-stringent scrutiny of it under that assumption.

+

(My bet is that the next bogeyman will be “environmental estrogens”. Watch for it…and remember that I called AGW bullshit back when that was a genuinely prescient and difficult position to take.)

+

And that brings us to process transparency. I discussed this with particular reference in Open-Sourcing the Global Warming Debate, but there’s another point that deserves attention. Strictly speaking, the rules of science require complete disclosure of all experimental methods, data, and analysis tools so that others can peer-review and replicate the work. We may find it an acceptable to relax those full-disclosure rules to some extent for corporations doing commercially-focused R&D. But that IPR exception should never be granted to scientists whose research touches public policy. Because the stakes are so much higher, disclosure standards must be as well.

+

If the “hockey team” had been required to make their primary datasets and modeling code available for unrestricted inspection, the AGW fraud could never have turned into a political monster. If Michael Bellesisles had been required to make all his primary data open for inspection, the fraud that was Arming America would never have won a Bancroft Prize. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and full disclosure is the final and deadliest enemy of junk science.

diff --git a/20091126155522.blog b/20091126155522.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..31b1162 --- /dev/null +++ b/20091126155522.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Facts to fit the theory +

On 12 Oct 2009, climatologist and “hockey-team” member Kevin Trenberth wrote:

+

+The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. +

+

Eyebrows have quite rightly been raised over this quote. It is indeed a travesty that AGW theory cannot account for the lack of warming, and bears out what I and other AGW critics have been saying for years about the fallaciousness and lack of predictive power of AGW models.

+

But the second sentence is actually far more damning. “The data is surely wrong.” This is how and where most scientific fraud begins.

+

Scientific fraudsters are not, in general, people pushing theories they know to be false. Outright charlatanism is not actually common, because it’s relatively easy to detect. Humans are evolved for a social competitive environernt
+ and are rather good at spotting lies, except when they’re fooling themselves because they want to believe.

+

In general, scientific fraudsters are people who are overinvested in a theory that they believe. Because they know it must be true, they interpret predictive failures as “The data is surely wrong”. It is only a short step from “The data is surely wrong” to fixing the pesky data until it looks right — see my previous post for an immediate example.

+

It’s only slightly longer step after that to destroying the inconvenient data that fails to fit your theory — something one of the hockey-teamers actually called for and there is strong reason to suspect they actually did.

+

Sometimes, actually, the data is wrong. Occasionally, experimental error will appear to falsify a theory that is actually correct. But research groups are entitled to the benefit of that doubt only when they meet the most rigorous standards of full disclosure about the “wrong” data. Not when their reaction is to conceal and destroy it.

diff --git a/20091128153650.blog b/20091128153650.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f5057e8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20091128153650.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +AGW fraud unravels at an accelerating pace +

AGW alarmists, led by the “hockey team”, have dismissed criticisms that urban heat-island effects have been distorting surface temperature measurements upwards. Now Vincent Gray, a reviewer of the 2007 IPCC report, says this: not only is the single paper on which this dismissal is based fraudulent, the hockey team knows it’s fraudulent and keeps citing it anyway!

+

Paleoclimatologist Eduardo Zorita writes: “I may confirm what has been written in other places: research in some areas of climate science has been and is full of machination, conspiracies, and collusion, as any reader can interpret from the CRU-files.”

+

A Franco-Russian geomagnetics research group who was rebuffed when it tried to get primary temperature datasets from the CRU has assembled its own series of average temperature efforts by going back to ground-station measurements that the hockey team has never had an opportunity to “correct”. The result?

+

+Aside from a very cold spell in 1940, temperatures were flat for most of the 20th century, showing no warming while fossil fuel use grew. Then in 1987 they shot up by about 1 C and have not shown any warming since. This pattern cannot be explained by rising carbon dioxide concentrations, unless some critical threshold was reached in 1987; nor can it be explained by climate models. +

+

The report on this is well worth reading, as it goes into some detail on how the geomagneticians’ statistical methods produced a different — and much higher quality — result than the IPCC did. Among other things, they used daily rather than monthly averaging and avoided suspect techniques for statistically inferring temperature at places it hadn’t actually been measured.

+

Interestingly, their calculation of average temperature in the U.S. says “The warmest period was in 1930, slightly above the temperatures at the end of the 20th century. “. Could this inconvenient warm spell be what the VERY ARTIFICAL correction was intended to suppress?

+

I can almost pity the poor AGW spinmeisters. Perhaps they still think they can put a political fix in to limit the damage from the CRU leak. But what’s happening now is that other scientists who have seen the business end of the hockey team’s fraud, stonewalling, and bullying are beginning to speak out. The rate of collapse is accelerating.

diff --git a/20091129170059.blog b/20091129170059.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..87dfabf --- /dev/null +++ b/20091129170059.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Facts to fit the theory? Actually, no facts at all! +

It just keeps getting better and better. Now we learn that the CRU has admitted to throwing away the primary data on which their climate models were based. I quote: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

+

This means that even the CRU itself has no idea how accidentally corrupt or fraudulently altered its data might be. And the IPCC reports used the CRU’s temperature reconstructions as a gold standard. So did other climatologists all over the world. And now they can’t be verified! Without a chain of provenance tieing them back to actual measurements, every single figure and trendline in the CRU reconstructions might as well be PDOOMA, a fine old engineering acronym expanding to “Pulled Directly Out Of My Ass”.

+

Words don’t often fail me, but this is beyond ridiculous. How could anyone who calls himself a scientist allow the primary data and metadata to be destroyed? I’ve long thought the AGW case was built on sand, but it’s worse – it’s built on utter vacuum. Somebody will have to do the work of collating raw historical data from the weather stations and time periods the CRU mined all over again before we will know anything about the quality of their results. A significant portion of the climatological literature — everything that used CRU reconstructions or models as an input — will have to be outright scrapped.

+

While I still think the leaked emails and code make a strong case for active fraud, the scale of this disclosure makes that almost irrelevant. It is, at the very least, procedural incompetence on a breathtaking scale — the most astounding case of my lifetime, and I’m hard-put to think of a parallel in the entire history of science.

+

UPDATE: High drama! There’s a strong argument, based on the CRU dump, that the CRU’s claim to have lost the data in the 1980s has to be a falsehood. If so, we’ve moved from an incompetence-centered explanation back to a fraud-centered one. But then, a counterclaim that the reporting was bad and they’ve only destroyed 5% of their data. Pass the popcorn…

diff --git a/20091204021914.blog b/20091204021914.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7cd2f6b --- /dev/null +++ b/20091204021914.blog @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +GPSD and Code Excellence +

There’s a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek project called the The Alliance for Code Excellence (“Building a better tomorrow — one line of code at a time.”) that sells Bad Code Offset certificates. They fund open source projects to produce good code that will, in theory, offset all the bad code out there and mitigate the environmental harm it does. They’ve asked software authors to write essays on how their projects drive out bad code, offering $500 dollar prizes.

+

I sat down to write an essay about GPSD in the same vein of high drollery as the Alliance’s site, then realized that GPSD actually has a serious case to make. We really do drive out bad code, in both direct and indirect ways, and we supply examples of good practice for emulation.

+

+

GPSD is a service daemon and device multiplexer that is the open-source world’s basic piece of infrastructure for communicating with GPS receivers, and it’s everywhere Linux is – running on PCs, on embedded systems, and on both OpenMoko and the entire line of Maemo cellphones. We’re directly relied on by dozens of applications, including pyGPS, Kismet, GPSdrive, gpeGPS, position, roadmap, roadnav, navit, viking, and gaia. If you’re doing anything with GPSes on an open-source operating system, GPSD is your indispensible tool.

+

GPSD’s quality is up to the standard required when you’re that ubiquitous. In March 2007 a Coverity scan turned up only two errors in over 22,000 LLOC. In more detail: it flagged only 4 potential problems, and two of those were false positives. This is three orders of magnitude cleaner than typical commercial software, and about half the defect density of the Linux kernel itself at the time.

+

We get, on average, about one defect report every 90 days, and there are just five on our tracker as I write. Given what we know about the size of our userbase, our low rate of incoming bug reports tells us we’ve maintained a similar level of code quality since the Coverity audit. This hasn’t happened by accident. Good practice matters, and I’ll describe how we systematize ours in a bit.

+

First, though, I want to explain how we drive out bad code. The reporting protocols used by GPS sensors are a hideous mess — the kind of mess that tends to nucleate layers of bad code around it as programmers with insufficient domain knowledge try to compensate for the deficiencies at application level and wind up snarling themselves up in ever-nastier hairballs. Part of what GPSD does is firewall all this stuff away; we know everything about the mess so you don’t have to, and we present clean data on a well-known port in a well-documented wire format. We then provide client-side service libraries that will unpack GPS reports into native C, C++, Python, or Perl structures so you don’t even have to know about our wire format.

+

If our client applications had to deal with the back-end mess of poorly-specified NMEA 0183 and seventeen different vendor-specific binary protocols, I for dead certain guarantee that the total community bug load from GPS-related problems would go up by an order of magnitude. And I’d bet more than any of the $500 prizes the Alliance is offering on the bug count going up by two orders of magnitude.

+

We also try to drive out bad code indirectly in the same way we keep our defect level low — by providing an example of good practice that extends all the way up from our development habits to the zero-configuration design of the gpsd daemon.

+

The most important thing we do to ensure code quality is maintain a rigorous test suite. Our “make testregress” runs about fifty-five regression and unit tests. Forty-four of those exercise the daemon’s logic for recognizing and processing device reports; the remaining ten to a dozen exercise the rest of the code, all the way out to the application service libraries.

+

We actively collect device logs and metadata from users through this form, which we use to update a device-capability database and our collection of test logs. Almost every time a user fills out one of these, the number of devices for which we can guarantee good performance in the future goes up. Currently it’s 87 devices from 39 vendors.

+

We also routinely audit our code with splint. Not many people do this, because splint is very finicky and a pain in the ass to use and requires you to litter your code with cryptic annotations. But I believe accepting that discipline is the main reason the Coverity scan went so well. After hacking through the underbrush of false positives, I generally find that splint heads off about two potentially serious bugs per release cycle, averaging out to about one every 17 weeks.

+

We have a policy of not using C where a scripting language will do. Python is what we mostly use, but not the actual point here (though I do like it a lot and use it in preference to other scripting languages). The point is to get away from the fertile source of bugs that is memory-management in a fixed-extent language. The core daemon is written in C because it has to be; a significant part of our customer base is embedded and SBC developers who need to run lean and mean. But our test tools and some of our test clients are Python, and we’re gradually working to retire as much of the C as possible from outside the daemon in favor of scripting languages.

+

We have copious documentation, not just of the interfaces to the code and the wire protocol but also to the internals and of our project practices. We have a Hacker’s Guide to the project philosophy, design, and code internals. We have Notes on Writing a GPSD Driver by someone who did it. Because everything is documented, the project doesn’t forget things even if the individual members do.

+

No account of good practice can leave out the human element. In the best open-source tradition, GPSD combines the benefits of a small, highly capable core group (three developers: Chris Kuethe, Gary Miller, and myself) with about a half dozen other semi-regular contributors and a halo of casual contributors numbering in the hundreds. GPSD teaches by example about the kinds of specialization that produce good code. Here is what the core group looks like…

+

Chris Kuethe is our GPS domain expert. He knows the devices, the mathematics of geodisy, and where all the bodies are buried in this application area to a nearly insane level of detail. I am the systems architect — I neither match Chris’s depth of domain knowledge nor want to, but it’s my been my role to give the GPSD codebase a strong modular architecture, design and implement our test suites and tools, design and implement our wire protocols, and push autoconfiguration as far as it could go. Gary Miller is more of a generalist who owns some particularly tricky areas of the core code and device drivers, and is extremely good at detecting bad smells in other code; he backstops Chris and myself admirably.

+

If this sounds like a description of a classic “surgical team” organization straight out of Fred Brooks, that’s because it is. Open source changes a lot of things, and the outer circle of contributors brings huge value to the GPSD project — but some things about software development never change, and the power of teams that include a domain expert, a master architect, and a bogon detector is one of them. GPSD reinforces a lesson that is old but never stale; if you want the kind of good code that improves the whole software ecology around it, that kind of human constellation is a great place to start.

+

Finally, we drive out a lot of potentially bad code by eliminating configuration options. The gpsd daemon is designed to autobaud and recognize GPS or AIS reporting packets on any serial or USB device that it’s handed, no questions asked. And normally, at least on Linux systems, those devices are handed to it by udev when a hotplug event fires. Though arranging this took a lot of work, there are many fewer combinations of code paths in gpsd to test (and to accumulate bugs) than there would be if the daemon had the usual semi-infinite array of knobs, switches, and config files. Because client applications don’t have to give users any access to those nonexistent knobs and switches, thousands of lines of application code have never had to be written either; the simplifying effects of autoconfiguration ripple through dozens of application-development groups and all the way up the software stack to the end-user.

+

The RFP for these essays asked software authors to explain what they’d do with a $500 prize. That’s easy; we’d use it to buy test hardware. Because GPSes are wacky, idiosyncratic devices with poorly documented interfaces, testing on real hardware is vital to fully learn their quirks.

+

UPDATE: I’ve added two more GPS regression tests in the few hours since I write this, and we’ve shipped release 2.90. The new JSON-based protocol I’ve blogged about before is now deployed.

+

UPDATE2: Wow! We won!

diff --git a/20091206184304.blog b/20091206184304.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3af3186 --- /dev/null +++ b/20091206184304.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +“The scientists have been tied up and gagged in the back room” +

The unravelling of the AGW fraud continues to provide an entertaining mix of high drama and low comedy. My favorite recent entry on the CRU mob is a screed from a professor of mathematics in Canada: “All of my colleagues have had to endure these bullies and criminals for a very long time.”

+

Then there’s David Bellamy’s tale of being canned from a very successful science-popularizer gig on the BBC because he dared to speak anti-AGW heresy.

+

That’s a theme in a lot of recent revelations. As long as the lid was on the CRU’s fraud, nobody dared speak up about for fear of being dismissed as a crank. Now that the AGW crowd’s power to suppress dissent has been broken, expect to hear a lot more actual scientists — not politicians, but scientists — coming forward to confirm that the emperor has no clothes.

+

For the “low comedy” part, return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear when Time Magazine was predicting catastrophic global cooling. And Newsweek, too. It’s hilarious how easy it is to substitute “warning” for “cooling” and have an article that could have been written last week.

+

For more low comedy, at least one news story alleges that the IPCC intends to investigate the allegations of CRU misconduct. Yup, I’m sure; the kleptocrats in our permanent political class don’t like it when their plans for a power grab go awry, and the U.N.’s contingent doubtless wants to know who’s to blame for this debacle. For some reason, the phrase “the prisoner was shot while attempting to escape” keeps running through my head.

diff --git a/20091214061423.blog b/20091214061423.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f82732b --- /dev/null +++ b/20091214061423.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Hiding the facts in plain sight +

OK, this is lovely. Remember Phil Jones of the CRU saying they had retained only “homogenized, value-added” data rather than raw measurements? It seems that well before the CRU leak there was strong circumstantial evidence that much (perhaps all) of the supposed global-warming signal is accounted for by “adjustments” made to the data.

+

+

Get a load of this graphic:

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+

This is the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) telling us itself what the “adjustments” do to the U.S historical temperature record. If you look over at the scale on the left, you’ll see that these “adjustments” explain about 80% 50% of the supposed global-warming signal between 1900 and 2000.

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Gee, does that shape look…familiar? Why, yes. Yes it does. The Climate Skeptic post I lifted this from reproduces my plot of the “VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!”. It’s possible to make too much of the similarity, I think; the “decline” that VERY ARTIFICAL was “correcting” for was in tree-ring proxies for temperature, not measured ground temperature.

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Still…isn’t it curious that every time we dig into the supposedly “value added, homogenized” data, we find a similar pattern of “adjustments” in that oh-so-familiar hockey-stick shape?

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Why, it’s almost as if the people doing the “adjusting” imposed their preconceptions on the data, fixing it to conform to pet theories that just happen to be lucrative funding sources as well. But, no, that could never happen, could it?

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UPDATE: Estimate of error changed from 80% to 50% because the scale is Fahrenheit. I waited to do this until I could get an AGW alarmist to commit to a specific correction, so I couldn’t be accused of shading the number to favor a skeptical position.

diff --git a/20091216143351.blog b/20091216143351.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e0a1b35 --- /dev/null +++ b/20091216143351.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Crazy in Copenhagen +

Two days before the deadline for an agreement at the 2009 Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change, Mother Nature is demonstrating the same sly sense of humor that Al Gore, el jefe of the global-warming bloviators, often seems to elicit from the old gal. That is to say, it’s snowing like a a sonovabitch and there’s no hiding the decline in temperatures…

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While the weather outside is frightful, the prospect inside is delightful: it looks as though the negotiations are going to collapse in a welter of incompatible agendas, mutual finger-pointing, and much talk of high-handedness and betrayal. If we are really lucky, the wreck will cause such lasting bitterness that nothing like this three-ring circus of purblind idiocy will ever be seriously attempted again.

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But wait…difficult though it may be to credit from the news coverage, there’s at least one person in Copenhagen today who sounds like neither an unctuous Orwellian gusher of transnational-progressive newspeak nor an outright spluttering loon. And who might that be?

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Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to make known to you Christopher yeah-I’m-a-Viscount Monckton, who delivers the smackdown to AGW alarmists better than anyone else I’ve ever seen — specializes in it, the way I do in open-source advocacy. He deftly weaves between devastating facts and figures about what the actual climate has actually been doing and an unflinching catalogue of the AGW promoters’ wrongdoing.

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It’s nice to see someone who can get media attention calling out the high crimes and misdemeanors for what they are. The only shot I wish he hadn’t taken is the jibe about a lot of the AGW cabal being of the “stoplight tendency”, that is “calling themselves Greens because they’re too yellow to admit they’re Reds.” I laughed, and it’s true, but it wasn’t necessary to the rest of his argument and it will give a lot of people the excuse they want to ignore him.

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I speak from successful experience when I say that the first necessity of a successful propagandist is to know exactly how far you can push your audience. I’ve worked pretty hard at separating my politics from my open-source advocacy – I’m up-front about being a libertarian, and then I explain to my audiences exactly why buying my politics is not necessary to get good use out of my insights about software development.

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Lord Monckton still needs to learn better tactics about this. It’s much smarter to let your audience figure out some things for themselves than it is to overstimulate them with truths they’re not yet ready to hear.

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But, other than that…go, Viscount baby, go! Freedom needs more advocates with your ability to work an audience. Because, well, I can’t be everywhere at once.

diff --git a/20091217105602.blog b/20091217105602.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7d74f1f --- /dev/null +++ b/20091217105602.blog @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +From Russia, with love +

Oh, it just keeps getting better. As the Copenhagen conference collapses, word comes from Russia that the Moscow-based Institute for Economic Analysis has found evidence of skulduggery and fraud in the CRU’s treatment of Russian climate data.

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+

This story from Kommersant, via Novosti, seems to be a close to a primary source as we can get in English. Here is the relevant part (emphases mine):

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+Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

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The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory.

+

Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports.

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Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

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The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

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The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.

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On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.

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IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

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The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.

+

Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research. +

+

For those coming in late, we’re not talking about tree-ring measurements and paleioclimate here. These are the surface-temperature measurements that the IPCC relied on most heavily in its apocalyptic we’re-all-gonna-fry projections.

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And now it looks like the “team” and their allies have been caught playing fraudulent games with that data. No surprise to me; reports of cherrypicking and suspiciously convenient “adjustments” have been coming in from Australia, New Zealand, and China over the last week.

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Climategate isn’t over. Oh, no indeed – these reports strongly suggest the most damaging revelations are still to come, when people start doing serious auditing of the “homogenized, value-added” data in comparison with raw datasets from real stations.

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I think we’re going to find that the scale of active fraud by the AGW-alarmist crowd will dumbfound almost everybody. Well, almost everybody except me. I’ll be the guy cackling madly and yelling “I told you so!”

diff --git a/20091219005735.blog b/20091219005735.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7f544ef --- /dev/null +++ b/20091219005735.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Copenhagen Conference Crashes +

Well, it’s happened. The Copenhagen climate conference has concluded with a three-page fig-leaf over its naked failure that even the New York Times can’t spin as good news for the AGW alarmists. It’s kind of entertaining to watch them try, actually, but the glum tone of the report is palpable.

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The best laugh line from the article is that President Obama left before the vote on the document because he wanted to get back to Washington ahead of a major snowstorm. Yeah, I know, weather not climate, but it’s still funny. Good thing Al Gore cancelled or they’d probably be trying to dig out from under record accumulation.

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I won’t say this was the best possible outcome from Copenhagen; the best possible outcome would have been an outright PR disaster that wrecked the careers of everyone even remotely connected with this boondoggle. And yes, on a sane planet the fact that they invited Robert Mugabe, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez to speak would have been that PR disaster; cripes, were they trying for the thug-tyrant trifecta? But having all that sound and fury add up to a big fat nothing is excellent.

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It’s excellent because, by the time the kleptocrat gang at the UN can wind up for another try, the likelihood is that the “scientific” support for their AGW scam will have been entirely exposed as a tissue of fraud. That’s the way things seem to be heading, anyway. Faster, please!

diff --git a/20091222233845.blog b/20091222233845.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7e050a6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20091222233845.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +‘Twas the Chinese did the deed +

Now, this is interesting. Mark Lynas writes this: Copenhagen climate conference How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room.

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I had a strong hunch that it was going to turn out that the Chinese had trashed any hope of an agreement in Copenhagen, and Mr. Lynas mostly duplicates my reasoning — well, except for the part where I’m inclined to feel grateful to the Chinese for their obstructionism; he isn’t.

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Yes, the Chinese are too busy industrializing to want to put up with crap about carbon limits. That’s obvious, and it’s why I was expecting them to torpedo the proceedings. But I think Mr. Lynas is missing the other elephant in the room — the CRU leak. I think we’re seeing the first geopolitical impact of the East Anglia emails.

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Put yourself in the Chinese leadership’s shoes for a moment, and imagine Hu Jintao reading an intelligence precis of the leaked documents. I imagine his reaction would be something much like this: “Foreign devils want us to slow down our GDP growth for a fraud? Fuck that and the dragon it rode in on.”

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Savor the irony. Reds pretending to be green have been scuppered by mercantilists pretending to be Reds. OK, that’s oversimplifying grossly; the Chinese have managed to retain most of the worst traits of communism on their capitalist road, and not all the heavies in the AGW crowd are scheming socialists. It’s still true enough to be funny.

diff --git a/20091228124521.blog b/20091228124521.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a84cc4a --- /dev/null +++ b/20091228124521.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Terrorism and the militia obligation +

Section 311 of US Code Title 10, entitled, “Militia: composition and classes” reads:

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+“(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.

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(b) The classes of the militia are —

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(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and

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(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.” +

+

That is, all males of military age who are or intend to become citizens of the United States are under federal statute the “unorganized militia”, and have the duty of the militia to defend the Constitution of the United States against enemies foreign and domestic (as both naturalizing citizens and members of the armed forces swear to do).

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This is always worth remembering, but never more than when prompt and violent action by civilians has recently prevented the murder by bombing of an entire planeload of passengers, as occurred on December 25th 2009 on Northwest flight 253.

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The police and military cannot be everywhere, and any society in which they could be would not be fit to live in. They weren’t there when Umar Farouk Abdulmutalib tried to set off his bomb. The passengers who responded proved once again that the militia obligation is more relevant than ever in an age of asymmetric warfare and terrorism.

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In january 2008 the Supreme Court affirmed that the individual right to bear arms is guaranteed to individual citizens of the United States under the Second Amendment of the Contitution. The first sentence of that Amendment reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”. The court recognized that “well-regulated” in that clause is often misunderstood; it means “well-drilled” or “well-trained”, as we say a clock is regulated. The court also recognized that the “Militia” of the Second Amendment includes — indeed, primarily refers to — the unorganized militia. That is, the entire citizenry; the nation in arms.

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The clear message of flight 253 is the same one conveyed by Todd Beemer and the heroes of Flight 93 on the day of 9/11. Citizens need to be physically, mentally, and morally equipped to fulfill their obligation as members of the unorganized militia. The eternal vigilance of a nation in arms is both our last and our first defense against enemies foreign and domestic.

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And yes, by “in arms” I mean armed. The men who wrote the Second Amendment into the Constitution understood that when our enemies come to subdue and destroy us, they will not be trying it on with stuffed toys, candyfloss, and uplifting affirmations. They will attack us with instruments of force, and we will need to be “well-regulated” — better at using the instruments of force — to stop them.

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Flight 253 reminds us once again that “we” is not and cannot be just the police and the military. Every member of the unorganized militia shares that obligation, every minute of every day.

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Accordingly, I have this to say to all American citizens: Train yourselves. Arm yourselves. Prepare yourselves mentally and morally. You may pray that the moment never comes when your duty requires you to use violence against enemies foreign and domestic; but under the Constitution, the law, and the custom of the United States that is your duty. Be ready to meet it.

diff --git a/20091230153751.blog b/20091230153751.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..354444d --- /dev/null +++ b/20091230153751.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +A no-shit Sherlock +

Instapundit and John Nolte are quite right: the new Sherlock Holmes movie was better than we had a right to expect from the trailers. We were led to anticipate a fun, mindless action comedy – a sort of reprise of Iron Man in Victorian drag, with Robert Downey Jr. in full scenery-chewing mode.

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I would have enjoyed watching that movie just fine, thank you. I’ve read the entire Holmes canon, but I don’t worship it any more than Arthur Conan Doyle did, and having Guy Ritchie reprocess it into a mere popcorn flick wouldn’t particularly have bothered me. But…to my pleased surprise, Ritchie aimed for — and achieved — something much better.

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Let’s get the negatives out of the way first. The script was heavyhanded and stupid in spots, though no worse than par for an action movie and light-years better than the crap James Cameron was shoveling in Avatar. Rachel McAdams was, as another reviewer noted, only poorly integrated into the main plotline. Ritchie overdid the sepia-and-grime thing a bit in the cinematogaphy. And there was barely a line of the villain’s dialogue you couldn’t see coming.

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Still. These are minor defects compared to what the movie gets right, and how it challenges Holmesians to rethink their comfortable and somewhat stultified image of the great detective.

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This movie goes back to canon and presents Doyle’s original Holmes from a different angle than the Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett performances. The Holmes we have become used to from later interpretations is sort of Holmes-as-Vulcan, the Mr. Spock of the gaslight era; cool, cerebral, controlled, a bit disdainful. Forgotten in the Holmes-as-Vulcan version is that the original Holmes was an eccentric drug addict who went to pieces in the absence of a degree of mental stimulation ordinary life could not afford him. Also forgotten is that he was written as a man of tremendous physical energy, a boxer and martial artist who relished describing his victory in a brawl (The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist).

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I would bet serious money that Robert Downey Jr. read the entire canon, or at least most of it, in preparing for this role. I would bet more serious money that Ritchie gave him wide interpretive latitude and that some of the best lines in the film were ad-libbed from deep within character. Because Downey’s performance is right. It is truthful to the original in a way that the Holmes-as-Vulcan version could not be.

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This was not, as in Iron Man, the actor drawing a thin layer of Tony Stark over his own personality and mugging outrageously at a camera we are at all times fully aware of; it is the actor fully inhabiting the character and, for all the surface showiness of the action, portraying that character with craft and subtlety and restraint. Downey demonstrates that he can act.

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All the positive reviews have noted, correctly, that Jude Law’s Watson is a tremendous asset to the film. As important as his own performance was that he enabled Holmes to be Holmes. The repartee and occasional friction between them propels the film as effectively as its plot. I want to also note that Kelly Reilly, as Watson’s intended, steals a couple of scenes not with her fragile physical beauty but with a steely mental toughness rather at odds with it.

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The negative reviews have been entertaining. Predictably, the New York Times reviewer sneered at the movie, dismissing it as “laddish”. The common objection from the naysayers seemed to be basically that Downey was somehow desecrating the canon by playing against the Holmes-as-Vulcan version of the character.

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I say that’s effete pseudo-intellectual snobbery and I say the hell with it. This movie wasn’t perfect, but it was far truer to its source than a lot of Holmes fans are apparently willing or even able to admit. I look forward to a sequel.

diff --git a/20100105183503.blog b/20100105183503.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9dd4994 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100105183503.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +Escalating Complexity and the Collapse of Elite Authority +

In yesterday’s New York Times, David Brooks wrote perceptively about the burgeoning populist revolt against the “educated classes”. Brooks was promptly slapped around by various blogosphere essayists such as Will Collier, who noted that Brooks’s column reads like a weaselly apologia for the dismal failures of the “educated classes” in the last couple of decades.

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Our “educated classes” cannot bring themselves to come to grips with the fact that fundamentalist Islam has proclaimed war on us. They have run the economy onto recessionary rocks with overly-clever financial speculation and ham-handed political interventions, and run up a government deficit of a magnitude that has never historically resulted in consequences less disastrous than hyperinflation. And I’m not taking conventional political sides when I say these things; Republicans have been scarcely less guilty than Democrats.

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In the first month of a new decade, unemployment among young Americans has cracked 52% and we’re being officially urged to believe that an Islamic suicide bomber trained by Al-Qaeda in Yemen was an “isolated extremist”.

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One shakes one’s head in disbelief. Is there anything our “educated classes” can’t fuck up, any reality they won’t deny? Will Collier fails, however to ask the next question: why did they fail?

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The obvious and most tempting hypothesis for a libertarian student of history like myself is that the Gramscian damage caught up with them. And I think there’s something to that argument, especially when the President of the U.S. more beloved of those “educated classes” than any other in my lifetime routinely behaves exactly as though he’d been successfully conditioned to believe the hoariest old anti-American tropes in the Soviet propaganda arsenal. And is praised for this by his adoring fans!

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I think there’s much more to it than that, though. When I look at the pattern of failures, I am reminded of something I learned from software engineering: planning fails when the complexity of the problem exceeds the capacity of the planners to reason about it. And the complexity of real-world planning problems almost never rises linearly; it tends to go up at least quadratically in the number of independent variables or problem elements.

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I think the complexifying financial and political environment of the last few decades has simply outstripped the capacity of our “educated classes”, our cognitive elite, to cope with it. The “wizards” in our financial system couldn’t reason effectively about derivatives risk and oversimplified their way into meltdown; regulators failed to foresee the consequences of requiring a quota of mortgage loans to insolvent minority customers; and politico-military strategists weaned on the relative simplicity of confronting nation-state adversaries thrashed pitifully when required to game against fuzzy coalitions of state and non-state actors.

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Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein argued tellingly in their 1994 book The Bell Curve that 20th-century American society had become a remarkably effective machine for spotting the cognitively gifted of all socioeconomic and racial backgrounds and tracking them into careers that would maximize their output. They pointed out, though, that the “educated class” produced by this machine was in danger of becoming self-separated from the mass of the population. I agree with both arguments, and I think David Brooks and Will Collier are pointing us at the results.

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In retrospect, I think race- and class-blind meritocracy bought us about 60 years (1945-2008) of tolerably good management by Western elites. The meritocracy developed as an adaptation to the escalating complexity of 20th-century life, but there was bound to be a point at which that adaptation would run out of steam. And I think we’ve reached it. The “educated classes” are adrift, lurching from blunder to blunder in a world that has out-complexified their ability to impose a unifying narrative on it, or even a small collection of rival but commensurable narratives. They’re in the exact position of old Soviet central planners, systemically locked into grinding out products nobody wants to buy.

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My readers might well ask, at this point, “Great. Does this mean we’re screwed?” If a meritocracy drawn from the brightest, best-educated people in history can’t cope with our future, what do we do next?

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The answer is, I think implied by three words: Adapt, decentralize, and harden. Levels of environmental complexity that defeat planning are readily handled by complex adaptive systems. A CAS doesn’t try to plan against the future; instead, the agents in it try lots of adaptive strategies and the successful ones propagate. This is true whether the CAS we’re speaking of is a human immune system, a free market, or an ecology.

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Since we can no longer count on being able to plan, we must adapt. When planning doesn’t work, centralization of authority is at best useless and usually harmful. And we must harden: that is, we need to build robustness and the capacity to self-heal and self-defend at every level of the system. I think the rising popular sense of this accounts for the prepper phenomenon. Unlike old-school survivalists, the preppers aren’t gearing up for apocalypse; they’re hedging against the sort of relatively transient failures in the power grid, food distribution, and even civil order that we can expect during the lag time between planning failures and CAS responses.

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CAS hardening of the financial system is, comparatively speaking, much easier. Almost trivial, actually. About all it requires is that we re-stigmatize the carrying of debt at more than a very small proportion of assets. By anybody. With that pressure, there would tend to be enough reserve at all levels of the financial system that it would avoid cascade failures in response to unpredictable shocks.

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Cycling back to terrorism, the elite planner’s response to threats like underwear bombs is to build elaborate but increasingly brittle security systems in which airline passengers are involved only as victims. The CAS response would be to arm the passengers, concentrate on fielding bomb-sniffers so cheap that hundreds of thousands of civilians can carry one, and pay bounties on dead terrorists.

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Yes, this circles back to my previous post about the militia obligation. I’m now arguing for this obligation to be seen as, actually, larger than arming for defense (although that’s a core, inescapable part of it). I’m arguing that we need to rediscover CAS behavior in politics and economics — not because financiers or bureaucrats are dangerous or evil, but because even with the best will in the world they can’t cope. The time when they could out-think and out-plan the challenges of the day operating as an elite has passed.

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The people who will resist the end of the engineered society, the managed economy and the paternalist state are, of course, the “educated classes” themselves. Having become accustomed to functioning as the aristocracy of our time, they will believe in anything except their own obsolescence as rulers. It remains to be seen how much longer events will permit their delusions to continue.

diff --git a/20100112000621.blog b/20100112000621.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..717b21d --- /dev/null +++ b/20100112000621.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +Beyond root causes +

One of the consequences of the Great Recession we’ve been in since 2008 may be the long-overdue death of the “root causes” theory of crime and criminality. In A Crime Theory Demolished Heather McDonald points out that crime rates are dropping to 50-year lows even as unemployment hits a 70-year high.

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While she is right to point out that this makes a joke of “root causes” theory, she doesn’t really propose an alternative to it, other than by waving a hand in the direction of rising incarceration rates. And I don’t believe that explanation; too many of our prisoners are nonviolent drug offenders. In fact that category alone seems to account for most of the prison population growth over the last couple of decades, which suggests that increased incarceration is suppressing other sorts of crime very little or not at all. (See the update below.)

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It’s also been noted recently that the trends in crime rates make nonsense of the notion that civilian firearms cause crime — even so reliable a bellwether of bland bien-pensant liberalism as the Christian Science Monitor has remarked upon this.

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Mind you, the continuing fall in crime also falsifies some of the pet theories of social conservatives. They’re prone to chunter on about “defining deviance down” and the coarsening of popular culture as though sales of Grand Theft Auto actually had something to do with rates of grand theft auto. Given that there has been no sign of pop culture reverting to the 1950s (or whatever other era they imagine to have been ideal), this too seems an unsustainable explanation.

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So what is actually going on here?

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I think we get a clue from the fact, observable in emergencies such as floods and hurricanes, that most people do not instantly become criminals even when social order collapses around them. It takes continuing survival stress comparable to battlefield conditions to beat sociability and mutual trust out of most human beings.

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However, I said “most”. Any criminologist will tell you that criminals as a group are also highly deviant in ways that are not criminal. They have very high rates of accidental injury, alcoholism, nicotine addiction, and involvement in automobile collisions. They have poor impulse control. They have high time preference (that is, they find it difficult to defer gratification or regulate their own behavior in light of distant future consequences). And they’re stupid, well below the whole-population average in IQ or whatever other measure of reasoning capacity you apply. I’m going to revive a term from early criminology and refer to these dysfunctional deviants as “jukes”.

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One clue to the long-term fall in crime rates may be that most of the juke traits I’ve just described are heritable. Note that this is not exactly the same thing as genetically transmitted; children may to a significant extent acquire them from their families by imitation and learning.

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The long-term fall in crime rates suggest that something may have been disrupting the generational transmission of traits associated with criminal deviance. Are there plausible candidates for that something? Are there selective pressures operating against jukeness that have become more pressing since the 1960s?

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I think I can name three: ready availability of intoxicants, contraception, and automobiles.

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Once I got this far in my thinking I realized that the authors of Freakonomics got there before me on one of these; they argued for a strong forward influence from availability of abortion to decreased crime rates two decades later. And yes, I know that a couple of conservative economists (Steve Sailer and John Lott) think they’ve found fatal flaws in the Levitt/Dubner argument; I’ve read the debate and I think Levitt/Dubner have done an effective job of defending their insight.

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But I’m arguing a more general case that subsumes Levitt/Dubner. That is, that modern life makes juke traits more dangerous to reproductive success than they used to be. Automobiles are a good example. Before they became ubiquitous, most people didn’t own anything that they used every single day and that so often rewarded a moment’s inattention with injury or death.

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Ready availability of cheap booze and powerful drugs means people with addictive personalities can kill themselves faster. Easy access to contraception and abortion means impulse fucks are less likely to actually produce offspring. More generally, as people gain more control over their lives and faster ways to screw up, the selective consequences from bad judgment and the selective premium on good judgment both increase.

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Now that we’ve got this far, maybe incarcerating a lot of nonviolent druggies has actually been somewhat helpful, to the degree that group oversamples jukes and thus suppresses their reproduction. I’m still opposed to it for lots of pragmatic reasons that I won’t go into because they would distract from my main argument here.

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This model inverts the traditional form of moralism according to which wealthy, libertine societies breed levels of vice, sloth, and degeneracy unknown to the struggling but virtuous poor. In fact, it suggests that jukes need the tight social controls of a conservative, tradition-bound society to minimize their disadvantages.

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This model is testable. I used to live in West Philadelphia, and left for other reasons right around the onset time of the crack-cocaine epidemic there in the early 1980s. Longitudinal studies of crime, addiction, and accident rates there before and after might show that the juke population had seriously thinned itself out by 1990. That would be a worthy investigation for some young social scientist.

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UPDATE: One of my regulars informs me that my source on incarceration figures was playing games with the statistics and shows evidence that most of the increase in incarcerations is not in drug offenses. This means that a study to test the adverse selection theory would need to be designed carefully to disentangle that effect from increased incarceration. I don’t know offhand, how to do that.

diff --git a/20100113010455.blog b/20100113010455.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d728266 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100113010455.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Twenty Four Million New Socialist Men = War +

A silly webzine posts some serious news:

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+A new study released Monday by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences found that more than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age are likely to find themselves unable to find women to marry come 2020. The reason? There just aren’t enough females to go around, because Chinese mothers often abort their baby girls. +

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This raises a question what do you do with 24 million excess New Socialist Men?

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I was going to suggest that Democratic party should import ‘em all as a last-ditch effort to avoid getting clobbered in the 2010 midterms, but even that might not work — these poor bastards have probably already had more Marxism and central economic planning than they’d be willing to vote for.

+

Unfortunately, the most likely end for these millions of surplus males is as fodder in a war. It’s the traditional way for totalitarian thugocracies to deal with this sort of problem, and China’s got no shortage of targets. The Sino-Indian war of 1962 did not actually resolve the disputes over Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh, the ensuing diplomacy has been inconclusive and tensions are increasing. The Ussuri River dispute with the Russians has been resolved, on paper, but it is unlikely the Chinese have forgotten that they have historical claims to oil-rich Sakhalin Island. And then of course there is always Taiwan.

+

The effects of the Great Recession we’re now undergoing amplify the likelihood of war. The export-led Chinese economy is vulnerable to demand fluctuations in its major trade partners, especially the U.S., and is already being pretty seriously hammered by the collapse in world trade volumes. It’s hard to tell just how seriously because Chinese statistics are notoriously opaque and subject to political manipulation, but you know the numbers can’t be good when Chinese government spokesmen start muttering that Peking may stop buying Treasury bonds.

+

If the U.S. slides into a double-dip recession, it is entirely possible the Chinese economy could crash with it, creating a pressing need for just the sort of distraction a war of conquest provides. Under that scenario, the war could begin as soon as 2011. Even if the U.S. recovers, it’s hard to see how the war can be delayed beyond 2020 or so without creating an unacceptable risk to internal stability. The longer Peking waits, the more likely it is that those excess males will start some serious aggro inside Chinese borders.

+

The only good news is that the Chinese military is basically incapable of operating anywhere it can’t walk to. They have negligible airlift capability. All their sealift capability is short-range, designed for a surge invasion of Taiwan and probably not adequate even for that. The Chinese Navy’s survival odds against American air and submarine assets would be grim. And the roads crossing China’s borders are inadequate for large troop movements (one reason the Sino-Indian war fizzled out is that it was a logistical nightmare for both sides).

+

Nevertheless, some major war within the next ten years seems almost certain. Because even if the Chinese government were composed of angels, I don”t think there’s any historical instance of coping with an excess of unmarriageable males that large without a war.

diff --git a/20100114002819.blog b/20100114002819.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d27e636 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100114002819.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +The Devil in Haiti +

There’s a great deal of ridicule being aimed at Pat Robertson for describing the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti as God’s retribution on the country for a deal with the Devil supposedly made by the leaders of the 1791 slave revolt in which they threw off French control. And Robertson is a foaming loon, to be sure…but when I dug for the source of the legend I found a curiously plausible account:

+

+

+It is a matter of well-documented historical fact that the nation of Haiti was dedicated to Satan 200 years ago. On August 14, 1791, a group of houngans (voodoo priests), led by a former slave houngan named Boukman, made a pact with the Devil at a place called Bois-Caiman. All present vowed to exterminate all of the white Frenchmen on the island. They sacrificed a black pig in a voodoo ritual at which hundreds of slaves drank the pig’s blood. In this ritual, Boukman asked Satan for his help in liberating Haiti from the French. In exchange, the voodoo priests offered to give the country to Satan for 200 years and swore to serve him. On January 1, 1804, the nation of Haiti was born and thus began a new demonic tyranny. +

+

The reason I describe this as plausible is that if you were to delete “Satan” and replace it with a name of any of the darker Voudun gods, it would be well within their tradition to do something like this. The question that sprang to my mind when I read this was, who were they actually invoking?

+

The Wikipedia article on Haitian Voudo has this to say:

+

+The most historically important Vodou ceremony in Haitian history was the Bwa Kayiman or Bois Caïman ceremony of August 1791 that began the Haitian Revolution, in which the spirit Ezili Dantor possessed a priestess and received a black pig as an offering, and all those present pledged themselves to the fight for freedom. This ceremony ultimately resulted in the liberation of the Haitian people from French colonial rule in 1804, and the establishment of the first black people’s republic in the history of the world and the second independent nation in the Americas. +

+

Just as the first account was clearly written by a Christian projecting his pantheon on Voudun, this one smells of apologism by a modern Voudun practitioner trying to sound unthreatening and New-Agey. For starters, “kill all the white Frenchmen” sounds like a more plausible objective for a bunch of illiterate, pissed-off black slaves to have chosen than the more abstract “fight for freedom”, especially in view of the fact that actually did massacre the white population pretty comprehensively (not that I’m objecting; under the circumstances, doing so was arguably justice). And it has its own corresponding implausibility about the focus of the ritual built in.

+

It is relevant here that I am a third-degree Wiccan, which means that I’m pretty experienced at designing rituals that invoke god-forms for specified purposes. Part of the art is choosing a god-form with attributes appropriate to the purpose of the rite. And I have to say that Ezilie Dantor is just not a very plausible choice here — not for a ritual intended to consecrate the participants to acts of bloody revolutionary mayhem.

+

It’s true that she’s “petwo”, one of the “hard” gods associated with aggression and violence, but she’s mainly associated with motherhood and fertility. But if I had been the houngan in charge, I’d have chosen either Baron Samedi (more or less the god of death) or Ogun (god of war, politics, fire, and smithing). And I won’t believe (well, not without evidence anyway) that the houngans were less capable ritual artists than I am.

+

Ogun would probably have been a better functional choice, but the theory that they invoked Baron Samedi gets a little support from the fact that Christian accounts finger Satan. The Baron is not actually very much like Satan, but he’s the closest you get in the Voudun gods and I could easily see someone with the impoverished theological categories of a Christian making that error of identification.

+

Now I’m writing in real time…googling for “Bois Cayman ceremony” reveals mainly disputes over whether it actually took place at all, and the information that the government of Haiti staged a 200th-anniversary re-enactment in which Ezilie Dantor was (re-)invoked. But no, I think I still don’t believe she was the original focus.

+

Aha! The Wikipedia article on Ogoun says: “It is Ogun who is said to have planted the idea, led and given power to the slaves for the Haitian Revolution of 1804.” That is rather more plausible.

+

To sum up, I strongly suspect that what actually happened was: a mass invocation of Ogun, Christian idiots hearing secondhand accounts mistaking it for Satanism, and the Haitians themselves later reinventing the story around Ezilie — possibly under the influence of the French and American “Lady Liberty”.

diff --git a/20100118073153.blog b/20100118073153.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b1c1bae --- /dev/null +++ b/20100118073153.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +Reading racism into pulp fiction +

I have a scholarly interest in the historical roots of science fiction and related genres. For this reason, I sometimes seek out and read late 19th and early 20th-century fiction, both classic and “pulp”, that I have reason to believe was formative for these genres. Nowadays I read such books critically, trying to understand what they reveal about the assumptions and world-views of the authors as well as appreciating what the authors were intending as artists.

+

My recent readings in this category have have included some rediscovery of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (which I read much less critically as a child). I’m presently reading for the first time the Cossack stories of Harold Lamb, rousing tales of battle and derring-do set in Russia and India and Northern Asia around the turn of the 17th century that are at least as well constructed as anything Robert Louis Stevenson or Alexandre Dumas ever wrote. As I’ve been reading, I’ve been comparing Burroughs and Lamb to Rudyard Kipling’s tales of India, and H. Rider Haggard’s lost-worlds tales of Africa, and to Talbot Mundy’s adventure stories also set in India.

+

One of the obligatory features of modern reactions to these books is to tut-tut at racist and colonialist stereotyping in them. This Wall Street Journal review of Lamb is typical, waxing a bit sententious about “brushes with anti-semitism” in the Cossack stories. But I’m learning to be critical about that sort of reaction, too — because, in rereading Burroughs, I began to understand that ascriptions of “racism” are an oversimplification of Burroughs every bit as crude as the stereotypes he’s often accused of trafficking in. And now, reading Lamb, I find that these “brushes with anti-Semitism” are raising more questions in my mind about the comfortable prejudices of my own time than they are about Harold Lamb’s.

+

+

The skepticism I’m now developing about ascriptions of racism in pulp fiction really began, I think, when I learned that it had become fashionable to denigrate Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and other India stories as racist. This is clearly sloppy thinking at work. Kim was deeply respectful of its non-European characters, especially the Pathan swashbuckler Mahbub Ali and Teshoo Lama. Indeed, the wisdom and compassion of Kipling’s lama impressed me so greatly as a child that I think it founded my lifelong interest in and sympathy with Buddhism.

+

But I didn’t begin thinking really critically about race in pulp fiction until I read Tarzan and the Castaways a few years ago and noticed something curious about the way Burroughs and his characters used the adjective “white” (applied to people). That is: while it appeared on the surface to be a racial distinction, it was actually a culturist one. In Burroughs’s terms of reference (at least as of 1939), “white” is actually code for “civilized”; the distinction between “civilized” and “savage” is actually more important than white/nonwhite, and non-Europeans can become constructively “white” by exhibiting civilized virtues.

+

Realizing this caused me to review my assumptions about racial attitudes in Burroughs’s time. I found myself asking whether the use of “white” as code for “civilized” was prejudice or pragmatism. Because there was this about Burrough’s European characters: (1) in their normal environments, the correlation between “civilized” and “white” would have been pretty strong, and (2) none of them seemed to have any trouble treating nonwhite but civilized characters with respect. In fact, in Burroughs’s fiction, fair dealing with characters who are black, brown, green, red, or gorilla-furred is the most consistent virtue of the white gentleman.

+

I concluded that, given the information available to a typical European in 1939, it might very well be that using “white” as code for “civilized” was pragmatically reasonable, and that the reflex we have today of ascribing all racially-correlated labels to actually racist beliefs is actually unfair to Burroughs and his characters!

+

And now we come to Harold Lamb. As with Kipling, he is routinely respectful of his Tatar, Indian, Afghani, and Chinese characters. Much of the overplot of his tales of Khlit the Cossack is concerned with his discovery that he is partly of Mongol blood, and his rise to become Ka Khan of the Jungars. Throughout his books, his characters form strong personal loyalties that cross racial and cultural lines. No good sword-arm is to be despised on account of the color of its skin.

+

Indeed, Lamb’s religious prejudices are more obtrusive than any racial ones. Christianity, Islam and to a lesser extent Hinduism get respect, but not so Mongol shamanism — and Lamb’s slant on Tibetan religion is so thoroughly nasty that it reads oddly to a modern eye. To be fair, Lamb was writing before the Western discovery of Buddhist thought in the 1930s, and his understanding of even the Bon/animist tradition is obviously minimal to nonexistent. He may simply not have had the information to do any better.

+

The “brushes with anti-Semitism” lie in Lamb’s portrayal of the Jewish merchants of the time. They sell the Cossacks clothes, weapons, food, and gunpowder and turn the freebooters’ loot into cash. They are depicted as avaricious, cowardly, mean, and quite willing to toady to the warriors and princes they serve. How are we to interpret this in light of Lamb’s sympathetic portrayals of a dozen other races and cultures?

+

Of course it’s possible Lamb was simply replaying anti-Semitic attitudes he had absorbed somewhere. But in reading these stories I had another moment like the one in which I understood that Burroughs was using “white” as culturist code for “civilized”. It was this: the behavior of Lamb’s Jewish merchants made adaptive sense. Maybe they were really like that!

+

Consider: The Jews of Lamb’s milieu lived under Christian and Islamic rulers who forbade them from carrying weapons, who despised them, who taxed and persecuted them with a heavy hand. If you were a Jew in that time and place, exhibiting courage and the warrior virtues that Lamb was so ready to recognize in a Mongol or an Afghani was likely to earn you a swift and ugly death.

+

Under those conditions, I’m thinking that being cowardly and avaricious and toadying would have been completely sensible; after all, what other options than flattering the authorities and getting rich enough to buy themselves out of trouble did Jews actually have?

+

Lamb seems to have have mined the historical sources pretty assiduously in his portrayals of other cultures and races. Rather than dismissing Lamb’s Jews as creatures of his prejudices, I think we need to at least consider the possibility that he was mostly replaying period beliefs about Jewish merchants, and that those beliefs were in fact fairly accurate. He certainly seems to have tried to do something similar with the other flavors of human being in his books.

+

Nowadays we tend to interpret Lamb’s Jewish merchants through assumptions that read something like this: (1) All racial labels are indications of racist thinking, and (2) all race-associated stereotypes are necessarily false, and (3) all racial labels and race-related stereotypes are malicious. But it seems to me that, at least as I read Burroughs and Lamb, all these assumptions are highly questionable. As long as you hold them, you can’t notice what “whiteness” in Burroughs really means, or account for the genuine multiculturalism of Lamb’s books.

+

I am not aiming to completely clear Kipling, Burroughs, or Lamb of every charge of racial or cultural particularism. What I am trying to show is that our modern, “enlightened” leap to judgment on these issues is itself a form of prejudice that oversimplifies the way these authors (and their characters, and their readers!) thought about race and culture. This prejudice enables us to feel comfortably superior to them and to our ancestors in general, but it is unjustified.

+

Consider Kipling’s famous lines: “But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!” It’s a sentiment that breathes from every page of the Lamb novels. If we persist in imputing racism to these authors, I suggest that is not their fears and faults and obsessions we are discovering, but rather our own.

diff --git a/20100119063618.blog b/20100119063618.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0ff692e --- /dev/null +++ b/20100119063618.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +Jews and the tragedy of universalism +

One of my commenters recently pointed me at the work of Kevin McDonald, and academic who has studied the adaptive strategies of diaspora Jewry in great historical depth, largely drawing from Jewish historians as his sources.

+

I have yet to read his actual books, but I’ve found a great deal of review and discussion and analysis of them on the Web, and he makes some interesting cases. Through reading about his work, I’ve found a possible answer to a historical question that has troubled me for a couple of decades. That answer implies a terrible, bloody irony near the heart of the last few centuries of Jewish history.

+

+

The question is this: why have Jewish intellectuals invested so heavily in socialism and communism, a movement that has repaid that investment with oppression and massacre of Jews on a huge scale?

+

I noticed and wrote, years ago, that Jewish thinkers from Spinoza onward have been attracted to a style of political and philosophical analysis that could be described as messianic secular rationalism. That is: if you look at reform movements that are anti-religious or a-religious in character, but that are organized around some notion of justice founded in abstractions that are supposed to be universal to all cultures, you’ll usually find Jews heavily represented among their foundational thinkers. This pattern is part of what’s behind the trope common in anti-semitic literature that the Jews are “rootless cosmopolitans”.

+

As a relatively minor but interesting case historically close to me, consider Richard M. Stallman’s free-software movement. RMS is a secular Jew; I’ve noted before that Stallman’s thinking reads like a sort of Jewish meliorism crossed with New England transcendentalism a la Thoreau. RMS’s insistence on an absolute standard of morality completely and aggressively decoupled from any religious ideas is diagnostic of the sort of thing I mean.

+

As a contrasting example, consider the “classical liberal” secular reformism of John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and the framers of the U.S. Constitution. That tradition is simultaneously less interested in completely divorcing itself from religious ideas and less interested in questions of absolute morality. The emphasis is not on “how should we live?” but “how can we coexist despite having different agendas?”

+

Some of the key differences between RMS’s thinking and mine — thus, some of the differences between “free software” and “open source” tendencies in the reform movement we have both shaped — trace directly to the fact that Gentile classical liberalism is my background tradition in much the same way that Jewish secular messianic rationalism is his.

+

As a much more important recent case, Jews have played a central role in the socialist left ever since Marx, who was himself Jewish by genetic and intellectual heritage even though his parents converted to Lutheranism as an assimilation move. Ever since, secularized Ashkenazic Jews have provided the left with most of its intellectual firepower and a disproportionately large share of its footsoldiers.

+

And I have long wondered why this is. I used to think the main reason was simply that Jews are on average brighter than gentiles; thus, we can expect to find them disproproportionately represented in the leadership of any reform movement that doesn’t actively exclude them. But I was never completely satisfied with that explanation; it seemed true but insufficient.

+

Kevin McDonald agrees with that explanation, but proposes another one as well. He thinks that the behavior of diaspora Jewry expresses an evolutionary strategy in which it competes collectively as a largely endogamous ethno-tribal group against other ethno-tribal groups. McDonald believes that one of the tactics proceeding from this strategy is to sell Gentiles ideas that weaken the cohesion of their ethno-tribal and nation-state groupings.

+

That is, the best outcome for the Jews as a cluster of related genetic lines is that Jews maintain ethno-tribal identity, but everyone else loses theirs. Thus, I think McDonald would interpret Jewish intellectuals’ tendency to promote what I have called “messianic secular rationalism” as a move in reproductive competition!

+

It’s an audacious idea. The only fault I can find in it is that, if true, it’s not clear how Jews learn and transmit this tactic. Neither McDonald nor I believe there’s some cabal of Elders of Zion orchestrating the behavior, so how is it maintained without anyone consciously intending it? I have some ideas about this, centered around the observed fact that cultures often learn useful adaptations without any understanding why they’re adaptive; Jews not eating pork is a relevant example. But pursuing that inquiry would wander away from my main point, to which I shall now return.

+

First, I think McDonald’s proposal does in fact answer the question I opened this essay with. That is: Jewish intellectuals invested heavily in socialism precisely because it is a universalizing theory that actively aims to disrupt, deprecate, and destroy ethno-tribal bonds. This was good for the Jews as long as the Jews themselves remained a mainly exclusive, endogamous ethno-tribal group.

+

Second: the tragedy. If you’re part of a stubbornly exclusive/endogamous ethno-tribal group, and you successfully invent and sell the world a universalist ideology that considers ethno-tribal loyalties regressive and dangerous, sooner or later that “success” is going to come back around and bite you hard.

+

This is what happened to the Jews in the 20th century. Their most successful, infectious form of messianic social rationalism (e.g. Communism) massacred them in ton lots, then mutated into an irrationalist ethno-tribalism (Naziism) that massacred them in more ton lots, then Communism took a third whack at them after WWII under Stalin and made the survivors’ lives so miserable that most of them decamped to ethno-tribal Israel.

+

There are a few obvious lessons here. One: Some tactics don’t scale well. Another: Be careful what you wish others to believe, because you might succeed.

diff --git a/20100122143113.blog b/20100122143113.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3daceea --- /dev/null +++ b/20100122143113.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Are political parties obsolete? +

There’s been a lot of punditry emitted in the wake of Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts special election to replace Teddy Kennedy. All of it that I’ve seen is aimed at making some partisan point in the Democratic vs. Republican tug of war. But the facts of the Brown victory seem to me to suggest something different and more radical: that political parties as we have known them for the last 200 years may be obsolete, or at least well on their way to becoming so.

+

+

Here are the two facts that have given me seriously to think about this:

+

1. More than 50% of the Massachusetts electorate is registered independent.

+

2. In the last week of the campaign, Scott Brown was able to raise over a million dollars by going direct to potential supporters via the Internet.

+

These data strike at the heart of the two essential functions of the political party: getting out the vote, and raising campaign funds for its candidates. Scott Brown proved that he could succeed, in a traditionally Democratic state and without significant backing from the national Republican party, pretty purely on grassroots enthusiasm and the leverage provided by Internet social media.

+

Nationally, the percentage of voters refusing to affiliate with a party isn’t over 50% yet, but it’s been heading steadily upwards. Straight-ticket voting has been in decline for decades.

+

Furthermore, both major parties are showing signs of disintegration as factions near their edges grow increasingly restive and (in part) bolt to form separate movements.

+

This is clearest on the Republican side. The Tea Party movement has an ambiguous relationship with the national Republicans, sometimes behaving like a fiscal-conservative party faction but often proclaiming itself a separate movement and opposing party-backed Republican candidates.

+

On the Democratic side, the “netroots” around sites like Daily Kos and Democratic Underground are putting increasing distance between themselves and the national Democrats. The left-wing revolt against the Pelosi/Reid/Obama health-care reform bill is a leading indicator here.

+

What the netroots and the Tea Partiers have in common, of course, is that they’re both virtual organizations that rely on the Internet for the reductions in internal coordination costs they would normally get from having offices and org charts.

+

Glen Reynolds and a few others have noticed this; there’s been some muttering in the blogosphere about “disintermediation”, but nobody until now seems to have thought seriously about the medium-to-long-term effects on the major parties.

+

The major parties have anyway been looking both battered and sclerotic for a while now. On the Democratic side, the party has had to rely increasingly on the personal charisma of adventurers (the Clintons, Obama) to draw voters who no longer have any loyalty to the party’s platform or history. On the Republican side, that party is so bereft of leadership that it has in effect outsourced that function to conservative talk-radio hosts.

+

Now, the political parties increasingly find that they have to compete with the Internet-mediated political networks — and the parties are losing.

diff --git a/20100123234703.blog b/20100123234703.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..588b730 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100123234703.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Some things are…priceless… +

Yesterday morning I learned that GPSD has been awarded the first Good Code Grant by the Alliance for Code Excellence.

+

This is how I think about it now:

+

Amount of test hardware you can now afford: $500

+

Being able to tell people that your project is funded by the sale of indulgences…priceless!

diff --git a/20100127212851.blog b/20100127212851.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f5397f8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100127212851.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Corrupted climatology +

The Times of London reports a determination from the Information Commissioner’s Office of the United Kingdom: members of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny.

+

+

The ICO says, however, that it cannot prosecute because of a 6-month timeout in the controlling legislation. It is launching an effort to have the timeout increased or abolished.

+

The Times, which has been doing a noticeably better job of reporting on the CRU disclosures and their aftermath than anyone in the American media, also reports that the chairman of the IPCC has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

+

Those predictions — trumpeted in the IPCC’s reports and a major theme in alarmist propaganda — turn out to have not to have been based peer-reviewed literature or anything as mundane as actual facts, and were inserted in the IPCC report purely to put pressure on world leaders.

+

Those of us who have been saying for a decade that the IPCC Assessment Reports were corrupt piles of political flimflam, and that AGW alarmism was built on criminal data fraud, and that its leading proponents are personally corrupt and complicit in the fraud, were right.

+

Of course, the mainstream media has learned its lesson and will now treat AGW claims with rational skepticism. And, chastened, it will apply more stringent standards of evidence to future environmental panics. And love is a thing that can never go wrong, and I am Marie of Romania.

diff --git a/20100128091327.blog b/20100128091327.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c64109b --- /dev/null +++ b/20100128091327.blog @@ -0,0 +1,88 @@ +Comment to USCG on NAIS policy +

These are comments on policy for sharing information from the
+U.S. Coast Goard’s NAIS, a network of 140 AIS receivers covering
+U.S. coastal waters, as solicited by Federal docket USCG-2009-0701.

+

(The docket request for comments is here.)

+

+

First, I declare my interest. I am a lead of the GPSD project, a set of open-source software tools for collecting and processing GPS and AIS data. GPSD is extremely widely deployed on Linux and Unix systems including navigational suites, SBC telemetry packages, and cellphones. In connection with this project, I am also the editor of the most complete publicly available description of AIS/AIVDM decoding.

+

One goal of my work is to make access to high-quality GIS information generally available for purposes of research, day-to-day navigation, and public safety.

+

NAIS data is collected with tax funds. Thus, policy formulation should begin from a presumption that, absent a showing of specific unmanageable risks, the general public is entitled to free access to the data. The burden of demonstration should fall on those advocating restrictions rather than openness.

+

The policy I advocate is complete openness: that all data collected by NAIS should be made available in real time as an AIVDM stream via a Internet public feed at a stable and documented address.

+

+1. How might providing real-time, near real-time, or historical NAIS information to the public impact maritime commerce? +

+

Accurate and timely information is the life-blood of commerce. In the past, increases in the information richess of the environment in which market actors make decisions have shown a strong tendency to promote economic activity of all kinds, help markets clear more rapidly, and increase average wealth levels.

+

I see no reason for general publication of NAIS information to be an exception. I cannot predict what specific business strategies or tactics it will enable, but I think the precedent of GPS provides strong reason for optimism.

+

+ 2. What would be the impact of providing this information, if any,
+on the following?
+ a. Safety of ships and passengers or crew,
+ b. Security of ships and their cargo, +

+

I do not anticipate a safety or security impact.

+

The substantial safety benefits of AIS in navigational and collision avoidance systems are readily collected by LOS (line-of-sight) use through local receivers. Ship velocities are low enough that non-LOS information over an Internet feed is not generally relevant in real time.

+

In the past, there has been some concern that Internet publication of AIS data might enable commerce-raiding, piracy or terrorism via non-LOS monitoring of ship locations. But in no conditions short of major war would commerce-raiding or piracy be an issue for the NAIS coverage area (U.S. coastal and inland waterways). And terrorists, unlike national governments, do not generally have the ability to throw cruise missiles over the horizon. Thus I conclude that the risk from publishing real-time ship locations in the NAIS coverage area is effectively nil in peacetime conditions.

+

+ c. Economic advantage or disadvantage to commercial stakeholders, +

+

I see no disadvantage to anyone in a policy of open publication. Because Internet access is unreliable and expensive at sea and AIS receivers are cheap, substitution of real-time NAIS data for local receivers seems unlikely.

+

UPDATE: Commercial AIS providers object to open publication of NAIS data, but it is no part of the USCG’s mission to protect their business models at taxpayer expense. If they can offer a substantial value-add over information collected with taxpayer dollars, let them survive; if they cannot, let them fail.

+

A policy of unrestricted public access ensures that any commercial advantages will be symmetrically distributed without favor. Conversely, restrictions on the data would advantage large players with the resources to jump through bureaucratic hoops and/or good political connections — not a good outcome.

+

+ d. Environmental impact on extractable resources or coastal activities. +

+

Difficult to call. On the one hand, open publication of NAIS data would probably increase general activity levels slightly, with concomitant slightly increased environmental risk. On the other hand, AIS is already being used for risk mitigation, e.g. by broadcasting whale pod locations. More general availability of such data might head off specific and serious environmental harms.

+

+ 3. Is information collected by the NAIS considered sensitive? +

+

I do not believe NAIS information should be considered sensitive in peacetime conditions.

+

+ a. Is real-time or near real-time information collected by the NAIS
+viewed differently than historical NAIS information, and if so, how? +

+

Historical NAIS information presents not even the minimal (wartime) risks of real-time informstion.

+

+ b. Does the sharing of information collected by the NAIS generate
+concern about unfair commercial advantage? If so, for which segments of
+the industry is this a concern? +

+

As previously noted, open access would make asymmetrical commercial advantage impossible.

+

+ c. Is there a timeframe within which real-time or historical
+information collected by the NAIS is considered sensitive or is no
+longer considered sensitive? +

+

See above.

+

+ d. Given that ships last for decades and that their capabilities
+and capacities are relatively stable, is there a concern that
+historical NAIS information might be analyzed to derive a competitive
+advantage? +

+

See above.

+

+ 4. What controls on sharing real-time, near real-time, or
+historical information collected by the NAIS with the public are
+suitable? +

+

General publication with no controls whatsoever would be the simplest, fairest, and least expensive policy.

+

+ a. Who should receive each type of NAIS information? +

+

In the absence of wartime threats to U.S. littoral waters, all NAIS information should be made generally available in real time on a stable public Internet feed.

+

+ b. What are appropriate uses of information collected by the NAIS? +

+

Research. Maritime traffic analysis. Robustness testing of AIS decoders.

+

+ c. Do message types matter? +

+

I see no reason to complicate policy or implementation by distinguishing among message types. Publish them all and let the applications sort it out.

+

+ d. Should addressed messages be handled differently from broadcast
+messages? Do addressed messages contain information significant to
+understanding maritime activity? Should addressed messages be shared
+with the public? +

+

I see no reason to restrict access to addressed messages. Though addressed, the technological substrate of AIS is such that they are public broadcasts with no expectation of privacy. Privacy concerns are properly addressed via message encryption, which AIS readily supports.

+

UPDATE: I have added, in my resubmission of 16 Feb, a paragraph on why the USCG should not shield commercial AIS providers

diff --git a/20100128162145.blog b/20100128162145.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..13fed11 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100128162145.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +“I forgot he was black tonight for an hour” +

In commentary following Barack Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address last night, MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews said “You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.”

+

It’s hard for me to even wrap my mind around racial prejudice that blind and entrenched. If I were black I think I’d be righteously pissed off — and yet, Matthews and his fans undoubtedly think of themselves as the enlightened ones who are leading the rest of us troglodytes to the sunny uplands of universal brotherhood.

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Mr. Matthews, I have news for you: some of us actually manage to forget that Obama is black for weeks at a time — that is, until we’re reminded of it by a self-righteous, pompous, race-obsessed idiot like you.

+

Why does this man still have a job this morning? Why is there not a universal howling for his blood from bien pensants everywhere?

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Oh, right. I forgot the rules. Only Republicans get that treatment.

diff --git a/20100203110811.blog b/20100203110811.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..adf5476 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100203110811.blog @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +Naming and shaming the AGW fraudsters +

James Delingpole, in Climategate: Time for the Tumbrils, noting the public collapse in credibility of AGW “science” utters a fine rant summed up in this wise (parochial references to British political figures and organizations omitted):

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+ I’m in no mood for being magnanimous in victory. I want the lying, cheating, fraudulent scientists prosecuted and fined or imprisoned. I want warmist politicians booted out and I want fellow-travellers who are still pushing this green con trick to be punished at the polls for their culpable idiocy.

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For years I’ve been made to feel a pariah for my views on AGW. Now it’s payback time and I take small satisfaction from seeing so many rats deserting their sinking ship. I don’t want them on my side. I want to see them in hell, reliving scenes from Hieronymus Bosch. +

+

I too long to see the frauds and the fellow-travellers in the hell they’ve earned for themselves. But revenge, while it’s a tasty dish that long-time public “deniers” like Delingpole and myself are now thoroughly enjoying, isn’t the best reason to hound them and their enabling organizations out of public life. The best reason not to relent, to name and shame the fraudsters and shatter their reputations and humilate them — ideally, to the point where there’s a rash of prominent suicides as a result — is this:

+

If we don’t destroy them, they’ll surely ramp up yet another colossal, politicized eco-fraud to plague us all.

+

+

To explain why I’m sure this is so, let me start by reprising a comment I wrote in late November in response to someone who asked whether I bought conservative Senator James Inhofe’s theory that the climate scientists are all involved in a monolithic AGW conspiracy. Here’s what I said at the time:

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If Inhofe actually believes that the entire scientific community is embroiled in monolithic AGW conspiracy, he’s an idiot; I agree with that. What I believe is actually going on is a lot more complicated and ambiguous than that. There are a lot of players in this dance. I’ll round up a few:.

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First, the scientists. Most are caught up in, or struggling against, an error cascade of humongous proportions. What’s an error cascade? Somebody gave one of the type examples upthread, over the mass of the electron. This is not conspiracy, it’s a result of a tendency to use seniority or authority as a shortcut when it’s technically difficult to evaluate evidence and socially difficult to be skeptical. All humans do this, even scientists.

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Next, the Gaianists: a term I made up for people in whom “Save the Earth!” has psychologically substituted for traditional religion (in more or less chiliastic forms). They mean well, they really do; they recycle as an act of virtue, they worry about composting and buying local produce – and they’re totally subject to being manipulated by the other players, which is important since most of the action is going on in democracies. They’re not usually manipulated directly by the scientists, except occasionally a very wealthy one (er, think dot.com millionaire) might get hit up for funding. The Gaianists aren’t a conspiracy; they’re not organized enough. There’s some overlap with the scientists at the non-chiliastic end of this group.

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Next, the green-shirts. These are political hacks of all varieties who just love the ideas of more carbon taxes, more regulation, and the general expansion of state power, especially if they can posture as virtuous eco-saviors while they’re arranging this. They’e not a conspiracy either, just a bunch of careerists who compete for the Gaianists as a voting bloc. They sometimes behave a bit like a conspiracy, but only because their behavioral incentives tend to push them all in the same direction. Er, they’re not scientists. They’re Al Gore, or they’d like to be, only with political power too.

+

Any conspiracies in sight? Yes, actually…

+

Conspiracy #1: Most of the environmental movement is composed of innocent Gaianists, but not all of it. There’s a hard core that’s sort of a zombie remnant of Soviet psyops. Their goals are political: trash capitalism, resurrect socialism from the dustbin of history. They’re actually more like what I have elsewhere called a prospiracy, having lost their proper conspiratorial armature when KGB Department V folded up in 1992. There aren’t a lot of them, but they’re very, very good at co-opting others and they drive the Gaianists like sheep. I don’t think there’s significant overlap with the scientists here; the zombies are concentrated in universities, all right, but mostly in the humanities and grievance-studies departments.

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Conspiracy #2: The hockey team itself. Read the emails. Small, tight-knit, cooperating through covert channels, very focused on destroying its enemies, using false fronts like realclimate.org. There’s your classic conspiracy profile.

+

My model of what’s been going on is basically this: The hockey team starts an error cascade that sweeps up a lot of scientists. The AGW meme awakens chiliastic emotional responses in a lot of Gaianists. The zombies and the green-shirts grab onto that quasi-religious wave as a political strategem (the difference is that the zombies actively want to trash capitalism, while the green-shirts just want to hobble and milk it). Pro-AGW scientists get more funding from the green-shirts within governments, which reinforces the error cascade – it’s easier not to question when your grant money would be at risk for doing so. After a few times around this cycle, the hockey team notices it’s riding a tiger and starts on the criminal-conspiracy stuff so it will never have to risk getting off.

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Overall, is this conspiracy? No. Mostly it’s just people responding to short-term incentives, unaware that they’re caught up in an error cascade and/or being politically fucked around. Nobody involved is what you could reasonably call evil – well, except for the zombies. It would be pretty evil if the hockey team had planned all this, but I’m not cynical enough to believe that. Not yet, anyway, but I haven’t read all the emails either.

+

OK, now it’s months later and I’ve read enough of the emails to be fairly sure that the “team” did not in fact plan all this. Nor, I’m pretty sure, did the green-shirts or the zombies; they merely exploited an opportunity to do what they wanted to do anyway. The key point — and the reason the AGW frauds need to be shamed and punished — is that the political background conditions favoring this kind of fraud are still in place.

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That is, the zombies and green-shirts still have a powerful interest in magnifying scientific errors that suit their agendas into politicized crusades that could produce error cascades just as huge. Somewhere out there, there are now-innocent scientific research groups who could become the next decade’s version of the “team”, degenerating into fraudulent conspiracies as careerism draws them in, the political villains cheer them on to rationalize the power-grab of the week, and the Gaianists gamely but stupidly try to do the right thing.

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I’m even prepared to hazard a guess where the next fraud would be ginned up from: environmental toxicology and what are called “endocrine disruptors”.

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The most effective way to prevent a recurrence is for there to be real penalties — political, social, and criminal — attached to playing the environmental-panic con game. It’s not a good outcome for any of us if the scientists who committed criminal data fraud and denied FOIA requests get a soft landing to positions elsewhere in academia. And the green-shirts who used that fraud as cover for their ambitions should absolutely be hounded out of public life so that politics in future will be a bit less toxic.

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As for the zombies — well, hanging them all from lamp-posts would be ideal, but distinguishing them from their more-or-less innocent dupes is difficult. At least, by destroying the reputations of everyone who promoted this fraud, we might impair the zombies’ past ability to operate Gaianist organizations like so many sock puppets.

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The most optimistic take on the long-term outcome is that the collapse of the AGW fraud might at least partially immunize us against future attacks of environmental junk science. I wish I were in fact that optimistic, but I’m not. In any case, a round of public excruciations of the villains in this one is certainly called for, pour encourager les autres.

+

UPDATE: I thought of killing myself, says climate scandal professor Phil Jones. Instead, this fraud and bully plays the tearful-victim card. The man truly has no shame.

diff --git a/20100204133156.blog b/20100204133156.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..badcf63 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100204133156.blog @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +Error cascade: a definition and examples +

I’ve used the term “error cascade” on this blog several times, notably in referring to AGW hysteria. A commenter has asked me to explain it, and I think that’s a good idea as (a) the web sources on the concept are a bit confusing, and (b) I’ll probably use the term again — error cascades are all too common where science meets public policy.

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In medical jargon, an “error cascade” is something very specific: a series of escalating errors in diagnosis or treatment, each one amplifying the effect of the previous one. This is a well established term in the medical literature: this abstract is quite revealing about the context of use.

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There’s a slightly different term, information cascade, which is used to describe the propagation of beliefs and attitudes through crowd psychology. Information cascades occur because humans are social animals and tend to follow the behavior of those around them. When the social incentives are right, humans will substitute the judgment of others for their own.

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A useful, related concept is preference falsification, the act of misrepresenting one’s desires or beliefs under perceived social pressures. Preference falsification amplifies informational cascades — humans don’t just substitute the judgment of others for their own, they talk themselves into beliefs most around them don’t actually hold but have become socially convinced they should claim to hold!

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I use the term “error cascade” in a meaning halfway between the restricted sense of the medical literature and “information cascade”, and I apply it specifically to a kind of bad science, especially bad science recruited in public-policy debates. A scientific error cascade happens when researchers substitute the reports or judgment of more senior and famous researchers for their own, and incorrectly conclude that their own work is erroneous or must be trimmed to fit a “consensus” view.

+

But it doesn’t stop there. What makes the term “cascade” appropriate is that those errors spawn other errors in the research they affect, which in turn spawn further errors. It’s exactly like a cascade from an incorrect medical diagnosis. The whole field surrounding the original error can become clogged with theory that has accreted around the error and is poorly predictive or over-complexified in order to cope with it.

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Here’s a classic example of missing what’s in front of your face (which, incidentally, I first learned of from James Blish’s Cities In Flight; never let anyone tell you reading SF isn’t useful). For a couple of decades, cell biologists ignored the evidence of their own eyes when counting human chromosomes. The correct number is 46, but a very respected researcher incorrectly “corrected” his early count of 46 to 48 and the error persisted. At least this one was relatively harmless; yes, the wrong number hung around in textbooks for while, but there wasn’t any generative theory that depended on it in a big way.

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For a cascade with wider theoretical consequences in its field, there’s the tale of Robert Andrews Millikan and the electron mass. The famed oil-drop experiment of 1909 demonstrated that electrical charge was quantized, and by implication proved the existence of subatomic particles. For this he deservedly got the physics Nobel in 1923 — but his value for the mass of the electron was significantly wrong. It was too low.

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Because Millikan was such an eminence, it took a long time and a lot of confusion and thrashing to correct this. If you get the mass of the electron wrong it has lots of consequences; all theories that use it have at least to include unphysical bugger factors to cancel the error. You end up with even applied science getting screwed up; if I recall correctly what I first read long ago about this debacle, it caused some problems for the then-new technique of spectroscopy.

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And yes, preference falsification distorts individuals’ models of what others around them actually believe even in hard science. I once tripped over this in an amusing way, when I volunteered to be on a panel on cosmology and dark matter at some SF convention (might have been Arisia 2004). I did this in the belief that I’d probably be the lone dark-matter skeptic on the panel — the stuff smells altogether too damned much like phlogiston to me. But all four of the other panelists (all of them working physicists or astronomers) also turned out to be dark-matter skeptics, surprising not only me but each other as well!

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For anybody who wonders, I favor the alternative explanation of why galaxies don’t fly apart that gravity departs from inverse square at sufficiently long distances (admittedly, this is a purely aesthetic difference, because that theory is not yet testable). But I digress. I didn’t tell that story to argue for this theory, but to illustrate how social pressure to falsify preferences scientists can lead scientists to get stuck in erroneous models of what their peers believe, as well as ignoring experimental evidence.

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In extreme cases, entire fields of inquiry can go down a rathole for years because almost everyone has preference-falsified almost everyone else into submission to a “scientific consensus” theory that is (a) widely but privately disbelieved, and (b) doesn’t predict or retrodict observed facts at all well. In the worst case, the field will become pathologized — scientific fraud will spread like dry rot among workers overinvested in the “consensus” view and scrambling to prop it up. Yes, anthropogenic global warming, I’m looking at you!

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But climatology is far from the only field to get stuck in a rathole. I have reason to suspect, for example, that Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar may have done something similar to comparative linguistics. I have spoken with linguists who will mutter, if no colleague can hear them, that Chomskian “universal grammar” has Indo-European biases and has to be chopped, diced, and bent out of shape to fit languages outside that group, to the point where it becomes vacuous (and effectively unfalsifiable). The gods alone know what distorting effects this rathole has had on analysis of language morphology (which would be like electron-mass measurements or chromosome counts in this case), but we’re not likely to be shut of them until Chomsky is dead.

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There an important difference between the AGW rathole and the others, though. Errors in the mass of the electron, or the human chromosome count, or structural analyses of obscure languages, don’t have political consequences (I chose Chomsky, who is definitely politically active, in part to sharpen this point). AGW theory most certainly does have political consequences; in fact, it becomes clearer by the day that the IPCC assessment reports were fraudulently designed to fit the desired political consequences rather than being based on anything so mundane and unhelpful as observed facts.

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When a field of science is co-opted for political ends, the stakes for diverging from the “consensus” point of view become much higher. If politicians have staked their prestige and/or hopes for advancement on being the ones to fix a crisis, they don’t like to hear that “Oops! There is no crisis!” — and where that preference leads, grant money follows. When politics co-opts a field that is in the grip of an error cascade, the effect is to tighten that grip to the strangling point.

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Consequently, scientific fields that have become entangled with public-policy debates are far more likely to pathologize — that is, to develop inner circles that collude in actual misconduct and suppression of refuting data rather than innocently perpetuating a mistake. The CRU “team” isn’t the only example of this. The sociological literature attacking civilian firearms possession has been rife with fraud for decades. In a more recent example, prominent sociologist Robert Putnam has admitted that he sat for years on data indicating that increases in ethnic diversity result in a net loss of trust and social capital, because he feared that publishing it would give aid and comfort to political tendencies he disliked.

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So…how do you tell when a research field is in the grip of an error cascade? The most general indicator I know is consilience failures. Eventually, one of the factoids generated by an error cascade is going to collide with a well-established piece of evidence from another research field that is not subject to the same groupthink.

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Here’s an example: Serious alarm bells rang for me about AGW when the “hockey team” edited the Medieval Warm Period out of existence. I knew about the MWP because I’d read Annalist-style histories that concentrated on things like crop-yield descriptions from primary historical sources, so I knew that in medieval times wine grapes — implying what we’d now call a Mediterranean climate — were grown as far north as southern England and the Lake Mälaren region of Sweden! When the primary historical evidence grossly failed to match the “hockey team’s” paleoclimate reconstructions, it wasn’t hard for me to figure which had to be wrong.

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Actually, my very favorite example of an error cascade revealed by consilience failure isn’t from climatology: it’s the the oceans of bogus theory and wilful misinterpretations of primary data generated by anthropology and sociology to protect the “tabula rasa” premise advanced by Franz Boas and other founders of the field in the early 20th century. Eventually this cascade collided with increasing evidence from biology and cognitive psychology that the human mind is not in fact a “blank slate” or completely general cognitive machine passively accepting acculturation. Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate is eloquent about the causes and the huge consequences of this error.

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Consilience failures offer a way to spot an error cascade at a relatively early stage, well before the field around it becomes seriously pathologized. At later stages, the disconnect between the observed reality in front of researchers’ noses and the bogus theory may increase enough to cause problems within the field. At that point, the amount of peer pressure required to keep researchers from breaking out of the error cascade increases, and the operation of social control becomes more visible.

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You are well into this late stage when anyone invokes “scientific consensus”. Science doesn’t work by consensus, it works by making and confirming predictions. Science is not democratic; there is only one vote, only Mother Nature gets to cast it, and the results are not subject to special pleading. When anyone attempts to end debate by insisting that a majority of scientists believe some specified position, this is the social mechanism of error cascades coming into the open and swinging a wrecking ball at actual scientific method right out where everyone can watch it happening.

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The best armor against error cascades is knowing how this failure mode works so you can spot the characteristic behaviors. Talk of “deniers” is another one; that, and the moralistic quasi-religious language that it goes with, is a leading indicator that scientific method has left the building. Sound theory doesn’t have to be buttressed by demonizing its opponents; it demonstrates itself with predictive success.

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UPDATE: Kudos to Bore Patch for pointing out a real humdinger of an example error cascade: canals on Mars.

diff --git a/20100206154815.blog b/20100206154815.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..60f2cdc --- /dev/null +++ b/20100206154815.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +The Great Blizzard of 2010 +

This is a bulletin for those of my regulars who know that I live smack-dab in the middle of the mid-Atlantic-coast region of the U.S. that’s just been hit by epic snowfall. We’re OK. It’s dangerous outside and we’re not planning on stirring out of sight of the house until the blizzard is over, but we’re OK.

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Yes, it’s bad out there. The mid-Atlantic region is snowed in from central Virginia north to just past not quite to New York City. Over much of that area weather conditions are extremely dangerous and authorities are recommending that nobody try to travel unless it’s an emergency.

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It was certainly full blizzard conditions here in southeastern Pennsylvania overnight; snow is roughly 30 inches (76 cm) deep with a lot of blowing and drifting. It’s still falling lightly and might reach the neighborhood of 3 feet (1m) by the time it’s expected to stop, around 1800 tonight.

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We’re near an edge of the peak-snowfall zone, about 50 miles north of the worst-hit areas in northern Maryland and the Delmarva peninsula. Washington DC, about 100 miles (roughly 160 km) southwest of us and close to the southern edge of the peak-snowfall zone, also has 30 inches on the ground and still rising. Life-threatening blizzard conditions extend east into most of PA and northern West Virginia, and there’s deep snow reported all the way east into Ohio and Indiana.

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For here and pretty much all points north of DC this is the most intense snow since the blizzard of 1978 shut down the northeast seaboard from southern PA north to Boston. For DC it’s all-time record accumulation — which may be timed just right to have a significant impact on U.S. politics. In a recession, and after the AGW fraud scandals that have been breaking continuously since November, carbon-cap legislation was always going to be a tough sell; this blizzard may be timed exactly right to put the last nail in its coffin.

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Yay! I know, weather not climate — still, anything that helps keep the AGW fraudsters from recovering their political clout in the U.S. is good news for all of us. Thank you, Gaia.

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Our power hasn’t been interrupted, and probably won’t be; if there were going to be downed lines it would have happened last night. Our gas lines are likewise OK, not that a blizzard would be likely to damage those.

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So all is well here. Cathy and I had a warm lazy intimate morning, the fridge is full of food, and the cat is fuzzy. I made a ginormous pancakes-and-bacon breakfast for both of us and we’ve been working it off by shoveling our way to the street. When I finish typing I’ll go tackle the huge sill of snow between our sidewalk and the road, and then Cathy has proposed that we reward ourselves with pumpkin pie and hot cocoa. Winter has its compensations.

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diff --git a/20100207174827.blog b/20100207174827.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..956fdb2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100207174827.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Opening Pandora’s Music box +

I’ve been meaning to experiment with Pandora Radio for a while, and finally got to it today. It’s based on something called the “Music Genome Project” that categorizes music by how it expresses a large number of “genes” — traits that describe features like song structure, instrumentation, genre influences, and so forth. According to Wikipedia these are used to construct a vector, and similarity between tunes is measured by a simple distance function. You give Pandora a seed artist; it then apparently random-walks you through tunes and artists similar to that artist’s style.

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Dang…it works pretty well. I seeded it with “Liquid Tension Experiment”, a John Petrucci side project that has produced one of my favorite albums of all time, Liquid Tension II. I’m now on about the twentieth track it’s chosen for me and it hasn’t picked a dud yet. Artists: Jadia, Citriniti, Vinnie Moore, Joe Satriani, Dream Theater, Flower Kings, Arena, Stuart Hamm, Jordan Rudess, Brand X, Annihilator, Derek Sherinian, Crime in Choir, Firewind, Greg Howe, Planet X. If you’ve never heard of these groups…I’m not a bit surprised. I only knew of about half of them myself — which is wonderful. My tastes are pretty recherché; they center in a poorly mapped no-man’s land between prog-rock, metal, and jazz. Finding more stuff I really like has not been easy in the past.

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But even more interesting is that if you ask Pandora why it chose a track for you, it will list the genes that were critical for its selection. Here are some that repeatedly show up for me: demanding instrumental part writing, great musicianship, intricate melodic structure, hard rock roots, jazz influences, instrumental arrangement, minor key tonality, variable tempo and time signatures, chromatic harmonic structure, electric guitar solo, mixed electric/acoustic instrumentation.

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Yup, they’ve got my tastes nailed with pinpoint accuracy. Which is especially interesting since I’m not completely at home in any of the genres that border on the stuff I like. I want more intelligence than metal usually offers, less obsessive self-regard than jazz is prone to, and more adrenal vigor than prog bands usually deliver. By analyzing music to the level of “genes”, much finer-grained than genres, Pandora is able to represent this pretty well.

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The only thing missing is that I’d like to be able to tweak my preference vector directly rather than by approving/disapproving tracks. I’d like to be able to tell it that I’m also interested in world-music influences and anything with polyrhythms in it, and to turn my preferences for “instrumental arrangement” and “demanding instrumental part writing” up to max. Oh yeah!

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But even without that, I’m sold. Pandora is a special boon for people like me whose tastes don’t fit the music industry’s marketing categories well. I’ll cheerfully listen to their commercials, because the payoff is that they discover stuff for me very, very effectively.

diff --git a/20100209092110.blog b/20100209092110.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..19c0809 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100209092110.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Don’t Dis the Wiccans, Tea-Partiers! +

A few minutes ago I read Bill Whittle sneering at “mass-produced members of bused-in wiccan nihilist anarcho-Maoist lesbian eco-weenie anti-war protestors”. I tried to leave a comment there; it went into moderation, and I lost my original in the browser shuffle. I can’t guarantee that the following is a word-for-word copy, but it’s pretty close.

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Hey! Hey! Don’t lump all Wiccans in with the left-wing rent-a-mob crowd. It’s true that some our more vocal people fit the stereotype, especially in the Dianic wing of the movement. But there are lots of quieter Wiccans who are gun-toting libertarians like me; for us, the rejection of monotheism and “faith” is continuous with the rejection of One-True-Wayism in all its forms. Thomas Jefferson might say of us that we have sworn on the altars of our gods eternal hostility towards every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

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Wiccans are potential allies for the Tea Party movement, as long as it remembers that America was founded on religious dissent and doesn’t fall into an unholy alliance with bigoted religious conservatives as the GOP did. That choice didn’t play well with the general population of independents and moderates, either; heed the lesson.

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Here’s the disturbing part. There are now two comments on that post, and mine isn’t either of them – suggesting that Bill Whittle did a moderation pass and shitcanned it. If true, that’s deeply disappointing news about both Bill Whittle and the movement in which he claims to be a principal figure. It puts some point on the left-liberal accusation that Tea Partiers are a bunch of reactionary know-nothings wearing fiscal conservatism as mere camouflage.

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Mr. Whittle, I’m making a noise about this because I think your attitude about Wiccans — whatever it actually is — is a good proxy for your movement’s ability to see beyond tired stereotypes and fratricidal culture wars. Are limited government and individual liberty your actual goals? If so, can you recognize potential allies from wherever they hail?

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Much — including the future of the Tea Party movement, and perhaps the future of our country — may turn on your answer.

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UPDATE: It now appears that the apparent disappearance of my comment was due to technical difficulties. I apologize to Bill Whittle for entertaining dark suspicions of him personally, and note that he disclaims being a spokesperson for the movement. The larger question about the willingness of the Tea Party movement to (sorry for the PC phrase…) embrace diversity, is still open.

diff --git a/20100210124527.blog b/20100210124527.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a3289c8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100210124527.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +If God is dead, is anything permissible? +

One of my regular commenters asked, in a previous thread, “If everyone was truly released from the shackles of religion, and got beyond the false moral codes imposed on them, would society collapse in a heap of nihilism?” This question needs a longer answer that will fit in a reply comment.

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The shortest summary is “No!”. The less short answer is: “No, because religious moral codes are epiphenomenal.” And it is on point to add that the question reveals serious ignorance of the actual traits of most religions over most of history.

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I’ll address the historical point first. The commenter’s question was framed from within the assumptions of one particular family of religions: the Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition, which are more succinctly describable as the bastard offspring of Zoroastrian dualism. In this family, “religion” bundles cosmology, theology, and morality into a single total system designed primarily to enforce norms by programming the believer with an internalized guilt machine.

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Because the dominant religions of the modern West are all derived from this group, it is difficult for Westerners to understand how bizarre and exceptional these religions are in a broader context. Most religions are not total systems. Most religions do not tie morality to cosmology. In fact, most religions have very little to say about morality at all!

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Consider, for example, an Altaic shaman. It’s not his job to pronounce on who should sleep with who, or to tell people that theft is wrong. It’s not even his job to tell people that they must worship Tengri or Kara-han; dealing with the gods is his specialty, thank you. His job combines aspects of psychologist and medic with a bit of divination. The closest analog of “morality”, in his culture, is a set of inherited customs and taboos which is reinforced by explanatory myths but not generated by them and not really dependent on them. The closest equivalent of religious structures about right and wrong is an elaborate set of rules about ritual purity and impurity. In the jargon of the field, his religion is an orthopraxy rather than an orthodoxy.

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Over most human cultures in most human history, “religion” has been much more like Altaic shamanism than like Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Er, so why didn’t these cultures “collapse in a heap of nihilism”? The same question actually applies to modern religions outside the post-Zoroastrian family. Buddhism and Hinduism, for example, are almost completely unconcerned with “morality”. Hinduism is organized around ritual purity and impurity; Buddhism’s quest for merit is about liberation of the self from attachments, not about duties one owes to God or others.

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Here’s another clue. One of the most pervasive taboos worldwide is against having sex with your near relatives. While religions almost never explicitly forbid this, you’d have a very hard time finding anyone who thinks it isn’t deeply wrong and icky. So: not only do lots of people have religions that don’t teach them any “morality” in the sense modern Westerners understand the term, there are near-univeral moral rules that religions don’t have a central role in propagating.

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The correct way to understand religious moral codes is as epiphenomena; they’re built on top of evolved adaptive responses that predate any particular religion, and probably predate religion itself. Those of our ancestors for whom incest was not taboo inbred themselves out. The Ten Commandments may say “Thou shall not bear false witness”, but it is likely that the minds of social primates have included a cheater-detection module for five thousand times longer than the Ten Commandments have existed.

+

Societies without religious morality don’t “collapse into nihilism” because religion isn’t the basis of morality. “Morality” is accumulated knowledge about how not to screw up your genetic line’s reproductive chances; this is almost though not quite the same as how not to screw up your kin-group’s or tribe’s reproductive success, and the difference can be safely ignored in this context. Religions come and go without changing more than the superficial details.

+

The collapse of religious authority could lead to nihilism only if moral rules were fundamentally arbitrary. But they aren’t. If you have sex with your near relatives, many of the children will have serious recessive defects. If you steal from others, sooner or later a posse’s going to come around to take back the stuff and beat the crap out of you. If you tell lies, people won’t trust you and won’t come through for you when you need them. None of these rules depend on which gods you worship, or whether you have any at all.

diff --git a/20100210174636.blog b/20100210174636.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..99abf46 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100210174636.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +The Great Blizzard of 2010: It’s Baaaack! +

So, if you entertained any thought the Great Blizzard of 2010 was Gaia dancing a mocking reel on the heads of the AGW crowd…she’s back to tread out a hornpipe, a polka, and a rigadoon. The mid-Atlantic coast is now experiencing a second record-setting snowstorm just five days after the first one. Once again: we are snowed in, we are OK, the fridge is still well supplied, and the cat is still fuzzy.

+

Washington D.C. is now long past seeing its seasonal record for snow shattered. City authorities appear to have plain given up. The Federal government is shut down. (Yay!) Philadelphia is pretty much shut down too and nobody thinks it’s going to be any better off tomorrow. As I write we’ve got three feet on the ground in Malvern and more coming down fast; the trench I dug from our door to the driveway this morning has already filled in.

+

Last time around Malvern was 30-50 miles north of the worst-hit areas. This time, if I can go by what I saw on the weather maps, we had the bull’s-eye painted on us. The wind’s not as stiff as it was in Round One, but I think the snow is actually accumulating faster this time. Between the weekend’s snow and the new stuff I think we might crack the five-foot mark here.

+

The serious-damage threshold has already been crossed. Some friends of ours about a mile and a half away own a hot tub that sits under a light wooden-and-plexiglass gazebo. Used to sit under it, I should say; the roof collapsed today. Internet service is getting slow and flaky; I’ve had a couple episodes of being unable to reach even Google today. Pandora Radio is, unsurprisingly and with no blame to them, dropping out a lot. I’m thinking some of the core routers in the D.C./Baltimore area have probably crapped out.

+

I made another ginormous pancakes-and-bacon breakfast for us this morning. Wasn’t as much fun this time. And had to do almost all the shovelling myself, as Cathy slightly pulled something in her right hip over the weekend and I was not about to let her re-injure herself. Not that shovelling’s done a lot of good, anyway; as I noted, the snow has filled already in this morning’s trench to the driveway, Getting all the way to the road isn’t going to be pleasant.

+

Overall, this is starting to suck. Not seriously, yet, but the trend is not good. Um, about that global warming, could I actually have some, please? The cocoa is holding out, but we’re down to our last slice of pumpkin pie here, man!

diff --git a/20100211140222.blog b/20100211140222.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6c25ba1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100211140222.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +Now I understand the Viking Era +

So I’m sitting here, looking out my window at the 3-foot snow and the 5-foot icicles, reverting to ancestral type. Thinking:

+

“Fuck this. Let’s go sack Miklagard.”

diff --git a/20100212110543.blog b/20100212110543.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3c6ae99 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100212110543.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +LORAN, we hardly knew ye +

There’s been some upset in the blogosphere over the shutdown of the LORAN system of radionavigation beacons. This post at Chicago Boyz is representative (hat tip to Instapundit). The author worries “I’m not totally sure that this was a good decision.” and various commenters are much more emphatic, bemoaning the lack of a backup for GPS.

+

In my capacity as lead of the GPSD project I’ve been required to become a topic expert on the strengths and weaknesses of GPS and various competitors to it, including LORAN. So here’s the straight scoop: yes, a backup for GPS would be a really good idea. No, LORAN was never plausible as that backup, so angsting about its passing on those grounds is just silly.

+

+

GPS is locally vulnerable to ground-based jamming, and globally vulnerable to attack by satellite-killers. Other than the U.S. and Russia, only the Communist Chinese are thought to have anywhere near the capacity for the latter, but that’s enough reason to worry; taking out GPS would be continuous with their strategic doctrine, which seems to puts high priority on unconventional warfare against enemy technological infrastructure. See for confirmation the recent rash of crack attacks against the Pentagon apparently originating in China.

+

The biggest problem with justifying a life extension for LORAN on this basis is that its area coverage was totally inadequate. The entire half of the world south of the Equator was a dead zone as far as LORAN-C was concerned; in fact coverage was never really good outside the land area and near coastal waters of U.S, Europe, and the Pacific Rim. A secondary issue was that LORAN accuracy was very poor – 60 to 300 feet, with significant multipath problems in night operation. The accuracy issue could have been addressed with a relatively cheap technology upgrade, but fixing the coverage issue would have required an expensive station-building program.

+

So, what would make sense as a backup for GPS?

+

For starters, multiple satellite constellations at different orbital altitudes; Galileo and GLONASS would be a good beginning, but only that. If I were the Pentagon I’d actually be putting money on the table to get the Europeans off their lazy bureaucratic butts about Galileo. (The first of those birds was supposed to go operational two years ago.) GLONASS doesn’t look like a good bet; it’s kind of a shambles, and Russia’s accelerating descent into the status of demographically-collapsed third-world pesthole doesn’t inspire confidence that the problems will ever be fixed, especially since more than half the engineers who used to run GLONASS are probably now living in Israel.

+

If I were designing a backup, it would be a fleet of solar-powered high-altitude aerostats. They’d use laser ranging to fix their position with respect to ground stations at known locations and each other, and broadcast microsecond-timed here-I-am signals that could be used the way GPS signals are. If a bad guy shot some down, launching more would be cheap.

+

The reason this wouldn’t have made sense even twenty years ago is that the local calculations to deduce a position from a network like this are a chrome-plated revolving bitch. Your aerostats will be moving unpredictably, remember, so they have to be recomputing their own position from observations in real time. It’s not like the satellite case where knowing your orbital elements and the time gives you your position to high accuracy; the aerostat net would need very powerful but dirt-cheap onboard computers, which was not a capability we could take for granted even as recently as the early 1990s.

+

Then, of course, your navigation receiver would have to do trigonometry to deduce its position from the positions and times shipped by the aerostats in view. Humans couldn’t perform these fast enough to be useful, but receiver firmware can; this is well tested in GPS receivers.

+

Actually, an aerostat-based system would have one significant advantage over GPS — no accuracy loss due to variable signal delay in the ionosphere. It might be worth building for that reason alone.

diff --git a/20100213095729.blog b/20100213095729.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bf3be73 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100213095729.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +When you see a heisenbug in C, suspect your compiler’s optimizer +

This is an attempt to throw a valuable debugging heuristic into the ether where future Google searches will see it.

+

Yesterday, my friend and regular A&D commenter Jay Maynard called me about a bug in Hercules, an IBM360 emulator that he maintains. It was segfaulting on interpretation of a particular 360 assembler instruction. But building the emulator with either -g for symbolic debugging or its own internal trace facility enabled made the bug go away.

+

This is thus a classic example of heisenbug, that goes away when you try to observe or probe it. When he first called, I couldn’t think of anything helpful. But there was a tickle in the back of my brain, some insight trying to break into full consciousness, and a few minutes later it succeeded.

+

I called Jay back and said “Turn off your compiler’s optimizer”.

+

Compiler optimizers take the output stream from some compiler stage and transform it to use fewer instructions. They may operate at the level of serialized expression trees, or of a compiler intermediate representation at a slightly later stage, or on the stream of assembler instructions emitted very late (just before assembly and linking). They look for patterns in the output and rewrite them into more economical patterns.

+

Optimizer pattern rewrites aren’t supposed to change the behavior of the code in any way other then making it faster and smaller. Unfortunately, proving the correctness of an optimization is excruciatingly difficult and mistakes are easy. Mistaken optimizations that almost always work are, though rare in absolute terms, among the most common compiler bugs.

+

Optimization bugs have a strong tendency to be heisenbugs. Enabling debugging symbols with -g can change the output stream just enough that the optimizer no longer sees the pattern that triggers the defective rule. So can enabling the conditioned-out code for a trace facility.

+

When I told Jay this, he reported that Hercules normally builds with -O3, which under GCC is a very aggressive (that is to say somewhat risky) optimization level.

+

“OK, set your optimizer to -O0,”, I told Jay, “and test. If it fails to segfault, you have an optimizer bug. Walk the optimization level upwards until the bug reproduces, then back off one.”

+

I knew of this technique because I’ve been in this kind of mess myself more than once – most recently the code for interpreting IS-GPS-200, the low-level bit-serial protocol used on GPS satellite-to-ground radio links. It was compromised by an optimizer heisenbug that was later fixed in GCC 4.0.

+

This morning Jay left a message in my voicemail confirming that my diagnosis was correct.

+

I said above that optimizer bugs have a strong tendency to be heisenbugs. If you are coding with an optimizing compiler, the reverse implication is also true, especially of segfault heisenbugs. The first thing to try when you trip over one of these is to turn off your optimizer.

+

You won’t hit this failure case very often — I’ve seen it maybe three or four times in nearly thirty years of C programming. But when you do, knowing this heuristic can save you many, many hours of grief.

diff --git a/20100214094855.blog b/20100214094855.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fe74a2a --- /dev/null +++ b/20100214094855.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Phil Jones blows the gaff +

The AGW true believers who determinedly reasserted their faith after the Climate Research Unit emails leaked have just been embarrassed by one of the high priests of the cult. Phil Jones, the former head of the CRU, now admits that there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995.

+

+

Reading this is an entertaining counterpoint to the sight of the five-foot-long icicles hanging from the eaves outside my office window. Dunno whether it means anything — probably doesn’t — but the last time I saw icicles this size was during the bizarre six-day-long ice storm that socked Philadelphia early in, I think, 1993.

+

Jones himself claims to still believe in AGW, but he’s also now conceding that temperatures in the Medieval Warm Period (Remember? That thing Mann and the Hockey Team tried to flimflam out of existence?) may have averaged higher than today’s. And he trots out the reliable old “the dog ate my primary data” excuse for another walk.

+

Stay tuned. As bad as it looks now, I’m pretty certain that the depths of embarrassment and disgrace waiting for AGW true believers have not been fully plumbed even yet.

diff --git a/20100216203606.blog b/20100216203606.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b3b9550 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100216203606.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Who bears the costs of moral vanity? +

A high-ranking Taliban commander is captured in Pakistan, and the (now entirely predictable) dance begins. Says the Guardian:

+

+Mullah Barader has been in Pakistani custody for several days, with US and Pakistani intelligence officials both taking part in interrogations, according to the officials. Though Barack Obama has banned US agencies from using forms of torture such as waterboarding, Pakistani questioning techniques are frequently brutal. +

+

That’s right. Because the American chattering classes have their panties in a bunch about acts of “torture” that don’t do any permanent damage to the victim, Barader is in the hands of Pakistanis who are likely to fuck his shit up the old-school way, with knives and cattle-prods and blowtorches. And yet, this is supposed to count as a moral victory.

+

+

All the manufactured indignation about Guantanamo Bay has similarly perverse effects. When you tell U.S. troops that every enemy combatant they accept a surrender from is going to be made into an international cause celebre that will be used to damage their war effort, the effect will be — count on it — that they stop accepting surrenders. This means that all the soi-disant “innocents” swept up in these operations will become innocent corpses. Instead of being stuck in a facility that’s a resort hotel compared to any prison in the Mideast, they’ll be dead — victims of someone else’s moral vanity.

+

I was born and educated into the class that produces “gentry liberals”, but I’ve come to loathe them. This is why. It’s always someone else who pays the cost of their posturing. Very often, it’s the people they claim to be helping: the black teenager who ends up in a drug posse because because minimum-wage laws would force the small businessmen in his ‘hood to take a loss if they hired him for a legal job; the coal miner who gets pneumoconiosis because nuclear-plant construction was strangled in environmental red tape; the woman found in an alley strangled with her own pantyhose, because the handgun she could have shot that rapist with was denied her by force of law.

+

They’re so very, very convinced of their moral superiority, they are. The pious anti-torture crusaders, the “economic-justice” cod-Marxists, the no-growth environmentalists, the gun banners, and all their kin in the tribe of wealthy white left-liberals. Armored by their certitudes and their sheepskins and their class privileges, they sail serenely above the deadly consequences of their meddling. Not for them any need to worry about second-order effects or process costs or who actually pays the cost for their delusions, oh, no. They are the anointed, and lofty intentions are their sovereign excuse however much damage they do.

+

Truly, I hate them all. Perhaps I hate them more intensely because I so narrowly escaped being one of them. But it’s really the invincible stupidity and myopia that gets me, and the way their “compassion” stinks of narcissism. Some days I think if I could have just one wish, it would be this: let their folly come back on their own heads.

diff --git a/20100218005257.blog b/20100218005257.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..340661a --- /dev/null +++ b/20100218005257.blog @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +Being an oracle is weird +

In some areas of computer science, “oracle” is used as a term for a magic box that delivers solutions to undecidable problems. Or, sometimes more generally for any machine that generates answers by a process you don’t understand. One of the roles I play with respect to the Battle For Wesnoth fantasy game is as an oracle that generates plausible fantasy names on demand.

+

Here’s a (very lightly edited) transaction of this kind that I took part in a short while ago. There’s something going on behind it that is odder than will be immediately apparent.

+

+

+[22:27] <espreon> Espreon: Would you please generate an authentic name for an elvish city?
+[22:28] <esr> Sure. Where is it? Are there names of nearby places? What kind of city is it?
+[22:29] <espreon> It is in an off-map area of the Northern Forest (probably a part of the Lintainir Forest). Nearby names: Firecloud Peak… Noct… Dramalida
+[22:29] <espreon> It was a capital city of that elvish civilization.
+[22:30] <esr> Welcome to the city of Aranion
+[22:30] <espreon> Thank you. :)
+[22:30] <esr> It’s a gift :-)
+[22:31] <esr> I actually don’t know how I do it.
+[22:31] <espreon> May I also have a name for a mountain within that forest; it has an ancient crypt in which a great elvish ruler (I named him Tyurnio) rests?
+[22:32] <esr> Do you want an Elvish name or a kenning in English?
+[22:32] <espreon> Elvish please.
+[22:32] <esr> Smallish mountain or large?
+[22:32] <espreon> An English alternative would probably be needed too.
+[22:33] <espreon> Small–medium…
+[22:33] <esr> Mount Deranar, called in the tongue of men “Hero’s Rest”.
+[22:34] <espreon> Meh, the ruler was a bit hasty and wrathful… but… meh…
+[22:34] <esr> OK, thinking…
+[22:35] <esr> Mount Thrakal, called in the tongue of men “Pridefang”
+[22:36] <espreon> Excellent. +

+

OK, now here’s what makes it odder than it looks. You’d think, reading this transcript, that I was running some kind of conscious algorithm and that my questions were directing me down a logic branch or setting parameters that I was aware of.

+

But no. Except for “Do you want an Elvish name or a kenning in English?” I actually had absolutely no idea why I asked the questions I asked. I listened to them coming out of my mouth as though I were a spectator. I also had no introspection at all about how the answers to my questions affected the generated names, nor did I actually know what I was going to generate until it sort of popped up in my attention from somewhere out of sight in my mind.

+

This is all the more bizarre because I’m pretty sure I know from first principles what my brain must be doing. There’s a stock technique for generating plausible sets of names that resemble a known corpus. You build a Markov-chain statistical model of how lexemes, or syllables, are coupled based on observed transition frequencies; then you just roll dice (word-based versions of this technique are often called travesty generators). Many years ago I was a developer on the classic dungeon-crawling game Nethack; it used this technique for generating names and probably still does.

+

It is almost certain that my brain is doing likewise, especially since I am observably capable of generating instantly and at will names that are recognizably Elvish, Dwarvish, or Orcish. This implies a strong likelihood that the reason I asked for nearby placenames was to get some handle on the local transition frequencies. But this is purely a deductive guess on my part; I can’t monitor the generator in my head at all!

+

Being an oracle in this way feels pretty weird when it’s happening. It’s almost disassociative.

+

A couple of other things are interesting to note. One is that Espreon instantly accepted my first name choice for the city. This is normal; I don’t think I’ve ever had a dev reject a name I generated because it sounded wrong for the language it was supposed to be in. So not only do I have a Markov chain in my head that generates names, it reliably generates names with phonotactics that others recognize as correct. This suggests that all post-Tolkien fantasy fans have learned very similar phonotactics that they’re able to apply for recognition, if not for generation.

+

Note how fast the generator works. I invented three names in 8 seconds, and a lot of the intervening latency was actually typing time. Usually it takes me at most a second or two to come up with something appropriate. Whatever I’m doing, it’s clearly not computationally expensive. I consider this weak supporting evidence that I’m running a Markov chain; it’s a fast, cheap algorithm.

+

I interpreted Espreon as rejecting “Hero’s Rest” because he felt that kenning didn’t have the atrnosphere he wanted. I’m guessing that “Pridefang” might be an echo of “Mount Fang”, Tolkien’s Westron name for Orthanc (the keep of Saruman), but that wasn’t in my consciousness at the time. I generated “Pridefang” first, then felt real pressure to come up with a different name to match the new kenning; it was like an actual sensation of tension or discomfort in my head, with considerable felt relief when I uttered “Thrakal”.

+

I think “Thrakal” might actually be a Dwarvish name; there’s a pattern in Wesnothian Human and Elvish languages of using Dwarvish borrowings or calques for names of mountains and mountain ranges, and this one matches Dwarvish phonotactics. (The elves, on the other hand, tend to toponymically own the rivers.)

+

I’m completely clueless about why the size of the mountain was relevant. I’d love to know, or even have a plausible guess, about how I used that information.

diff --git a/20100218213723.blog b/20100218213723.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..814eeb8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100218213723.blog @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +How you know you’ve made a difference +

I received this a few seconds ago in my mailbox. It’s not especially unusual for me to get wow-you-changed-my-life email, I see two or three in a typical month, but this one is…well, I’ll say a bit more intense than usual. Also, 34 is an unusual age; they tend to be teenagers. Sender’s name masked and one bit turned into a live link. Otherwise unedited, typos and all.

+

+I just finished reading your [Hacker HOWTO] for the second time in as many
+days. All of my life I have wanted to be a programmer. I have never
+done it. I dealt with the failure of that by downloading cracked
+software and telling myself that I was a “hacker.”

+

When I clicked on the link to your guide, my intention was to get
+started on the road towards what I envisioned a hacker to be.

+

By the end of your guide, I was wallowing in humiliation. I felt…
+well basically I felt like a jack ass. I never even knew what a
+hacker was. I wasn’t even a cracker, just some poser with no
+ambition.

+

Your guide showed me that any of my few contributions to the cracker
+community were meaningless, juvenile ploys for attention with no
+progressive merit. They won’t matter in 6 months because I haven’t
+‘built’ anything.

+

After reading your guide, I began to research and really appreciate
+the open source community. I saw that the degree of separation
+between us wasn’t to huge of a gap and I realized that I could,
+through dedication and hard(but fun) work, be part of something that
+is growing and giving. A place where individual contributions aren’t
+lost in the grand scheme of things, but help shape that scheme.

+

I am 34 years old and I have no problem admitting to you that your
+guide made me feel like a complete ass. It also directed me to an
+ideal I will be proud to contribute to.

+

For that, I thank you Sir.

+

XXXXX XXXXXX +

+

I replied by quoting “I saw that the degree of separation between us wasn’t to huge of a gap” and said “I’m glad you got that far. Good luck on your journey.”

+

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you know your life has made a difference.

diff --git a/20100219140321.blog b/20100219140321.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5d55df7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100219140321.blog @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +On being against torture +

I’m against the horror of therdiglob. All right-thinking people should be against therdiglob; civilized societies have long abandoned the practice. Therdiglob makes us look bad in the eyes of the world. If you’re not against therdiglob, someone may do it to you someday.

+

Eh…what?

+

The above statement is meaningless, because “therdiglob” is undefined. It has the form of moral indignation, but it is not morally serious. Actually, it’s vacuous except as a way of conveying the speaker’s desire to sound high-minded and morally superior. As read, it is actually faintly ridiculous — indignation without substance, tone without content, pure posturing.

+

Everything depends on the extensional meaning of “therdiglob”. If “therdiglob” were defined as “flaying the subject alive”, it would be difficult to object to the above. On the other hand, if “therdiglob” were defined as “giving the subject cotton candy”, it would become utterly rather than faintly ridiculous.

+

Now consider this:

+

I’m against the horror of torture. All right-thinking people should be against torture; civilized societies have long abandoned the practice. Torture makes us look bad in the eyes of the world. If you’re not against torture, someone may do it to you someday.

+

+

The above statement suffers from the exact same kind of meaninglessness in the absence of a definition of “torture”. In the presence of a definition of torture, it will be be meaningful but could be anywhere from a serious assertion of principle to ridiculous posturing. Where the weight of this statement falls depends on the definition we attach to “torture”.

+

I think it is very important to have a clear, morally serious, and shared definition of the word “torture” for the same reason it is important to have a clear, morally serious, and shared understanding of the word “genocide”. There are some acts which civilized societies should put utterly beyond the pale of acceptable behavior. It is important that we not trivialize the terms that apply to such acts, otherwise we will actually make it more difficult to condemn and prevent them.

+

As an example: if we were to encompass within the term “genocide” the killing of rodent populations, we would make it more difficult to unequivocally condemn the killing of human populations. Retrospectively, the correct application of the word “genocide” to events like the Holocaust or the Rwandan massacres would lose moral heft. I do not think it would be going too far to say that trivializing the term “genocide” would be a compounding crime against the victims of real genocides.

+

The reason this elaborate analysis is required is that in the year 2010 we can no longer take for granted that persons claiming to be opposed to “torture” will have a morally serious definition of that term. It has been associated, by the ACLU among others, with practices including (a) desecration of the Koran, (b) playing loud pop music, and (c) humiliating deployment of female underwear. I say “associated” because the ACLU and others have carefully worded their denunciations so that they can claim to be labeling these things “detainee abuse” rather than “torture”, but have failed to distinguish in any principled or consequential way between “detainee abuse” and “torture”, commingling these terms in their propaganda. This ACLU statement is representative.

+

Trivializing the term “torture” has the same sort of costs and consequences that trivializing the term “genocide” would. It deprives us of the language in which to condemn acts which are truly atrocious and should be put beyond the pale. But it has a subtler effect as well. It forces us to substitute repellently legalistic definitions of “torture” for a folk understanding of the concept that may be more humane and inclusive.

+

To see how this operates, let us consider the term “genocide” again. If a fictional “human-rights” organization named the ULCA were to use the term “genocide” for the killing of a hundred people out of a total population of ten thousand of the fictional Nohopistani ethnic group, we would almost certainly dismiss it as hyperbolic. If the ULCA were to commingle the terms “mass murder” and “genocide” in the description, a reasonable person would accept the term “mass murder” but reject the term “genocide”.

+

If the ULCA and its allies were to continue commingling the terms “mass murder” and “genocide” in describing the killings, and were to ask all of us to condemn the killings as though they were genocide and to be considered a mini-Holocaust, then we would be forced into trying to define some sort of numerical or proportional threshold for “genocide”. More than 5000 people? Over 99% of the Nohopistanis? Over 51%? Even thinking in such terms is repugnant; but, worse, any threshold we come up with would become a political football and might even come to serve as a shield for the perpetrators of atrocities rather than a way to condemn them.

+

Those who trivialize the term and the category of “torture” put us in exactly the same position. Weak bleating that (for example) Koran desecration was only described as “detainee abuse” is unresponsive for exactly the same reason that use of the term “mass murder” was unhelpfully confusing in our fictional example. The effect of such semantic shell games is to make principled opposition to actual atrocities more difficult by depriving us of unambiguous language in which to express it.

+

Now I am going to recommend that the reader take time out to at least skim over George Orwell’s immortal 1946 essay Politics and the English Language in order to understand that this is not a new problem. As he says, “the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts” and “to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration”.

+

Orwell, writing in opposition to the muscular totalitarianism of his day, failed to foresee what its spiritual heirs would do in ours. In 2010, to attempt to be clear and morally serious about the definition of “torture” is to immediately be accused of being pro-torture! This is an ingenious twist, one which puts the trivialization of the term outside the limits of discussion and masks the trivializers’ actual agenda behind a facade of high-mindedness.

+

(I note in passing that “torture” is not the only term that the politically-correct have boobytrapped in this way. Consider “racism”…)

+

But as reading Orwell reminds us, in order to reason effectively about the causes and prevention of atrocities we must first know what we are talking about. We must have clear definitions with consequences, and we must be ready to reject as empty and unhelpful posturing the speech of disputants who resist having clear definitions. We are not unburdened from this requirement by the fact that language is slippery and definitions commonly have difficult edge cases; in fact, that makes semantic discipline more necessary rather than less.

+

When I use the term “torture”, I intend it to apply to any application of force which intentionally causes irreversible physical or psychological harm to the subject in the course of coercing him (or her).

+

There are undeniable difficulties and ambiguities in this definition; there will be in any proposed definition. The proper questions to be asked are (a) whether the scope of this definition enables us to unequivocally condemn all the practices which are entailed in informal “folk” notions of torture; opposingly (b) whether it is overbroad and encompassing of practices which do not match those folk notions; and (c) whether the edge cases of the definition are so important as to render it useless in practice.

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If we fail to pass test (a), we will violate the moral intuitions about torture that are expressed in ordinary language. If we fail to pass test (b). we will trivialize the term and make it more difficult to condemn actual atrocities. If we fail to pass (c) we will have erected a definition which is perhaps formally or emotionally satisfying but inapplicable to so many real situations that it is useless.

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Before examining this definition in detail, let us note and explain a conspicuous absence: “pain” is nowhere mentioned. This may seem curious in view of the fact that the folk script for “torture” normally includes the victim screaming in agony. I explain this with the following scenario, which I will later employ in another important way:

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Detainee A is frog-marched into a room with a surgical table in it and several personnel in scrubs. A gleaming tray of sharp instruments is visible. Interrogator X says: “Tell us what we want to know, or we will strap you to this table, anesthetize you, and put out your eyes.” Though no pain is promised, our moral intuition is that the degree of pain inflicted is relatively insignificant compared to the blinding, and that this is in fact a threat of torture whether pain were entailed or not.

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Let us now examine each of the traits we have posited:

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Intention and coercion: I think we are on very firm ground here. The script or frame that goes with the word “torture” in folk use is that someone (a torturer) is intentionally and painfully coercing someone else to achieve some objective, which is typically either (i) punishment, (ii) interrogation, or (iii) sadistic gratification. We may speak of “unintentional torture” but we recognize this as an exception which has to be qualified precisely because it is an exception.

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Application of force: This seems almost trivially true, in that without the application of force the subject of torture may simply refuse to be tortured — flee, attack the torturer, or otherwise disrupt the process.

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Physical or psychological harm: If neither harm is present, no torture. Most people have intuitions about physical harm which pose no real difficulties here. The issue (one of two serious ones with this definition of torture) is what constitutes “psychological harm”. The problem is that “psychological harm” is difficult to verify, and either claiming it has occurred or denying that it can occur may constitute a dishonest form of gamemanship by which disputants in borderline cases pursue agendas they cannot otherwise justify. I will return to this point after considering irreversibility.

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Irreversibility: I think this is the most productive term in the definition, but it is also the source of the most serious difficulty. In considering the threat-of-blinding scenario above, our intuition is that the true threat is not pain but irreversible loss; in fact the offer of anesthesia seems almost mocking. The blinding threat would lose most of its force if eye clinics could install new eyes for you as easily as they could prescribe glasses. Similarly, the implicit threat that makes painful physical tortures really threatening is that you will never get over this; your joints will be cracked, your bones will be crushed, your flesh will be rent, you will be ugly and scarred and crippled and in residual pain for the rest of your shortened life.

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I don’t think irreversible damage gives us any false positives. The difficulty is that many people have trouble with excluding reversible damage from the scope of torture. Yes, it’s easy to mount silly counterexamples: if interrogator X punches detainee A in the face just once, and A goes “Ouch!” and gets a black eye that goes away in four days, we are not in the land of torture. But we have a moral intuition, expressed in widespread folk language, that certain kinds of pain and physical damage rise to the level of torture even if you appear to make a full physical recovery afterwards. How do we handle this?

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I think the key concept here is of lingering psychological trauma, which unifies this problem with the issue of what constitutes an unacceptable degree of psychological harm. If a torturer causes you to be repeatedly bitten by rats, and you recover from rat bites but have a phobia of rodents for the rest of your life, that’s lingering trauma; if you are waterboarded and can never again step into a shower without getting the shakes, that is too (while the latter case is hypothetical, the former is not). Here again, the key distinction is irreversability. Something has been done to you that never actually ends.

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Of course, as I observed before, there will be a certain amount of gamesmanship around claims of psychological trauma. But even so we can draw two conclusions, both valuable.

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One is this: If you have a test for irreversible psychological trauma that you believe, then you have resolved most of the definitional problems around torture. I don’t think we’re very far from this. The neurology of phobia and trauma is becoming tolerably well understood, with observations of measurable changes in the amygdala and hippocampus.

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The second is this: To avoid committing torture, you must refrain from using interrogation or punishment or self-gratification techniques which are likely to produce irreversible trauma, either physical or psychological, in the subject. This is both sufficient and necessary.

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Having proposed and justified a definition, I can now state unequivocally that I am against torture. And torture is no longer therdiglob. I know what I am opposing, and you know what I am opposing too. If my definition seems repellently legalistic to you, blame the people who have been flinging the term “torture” around so promiscuously that a folk definition is no longer good enough.

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I am against torture because it is a horrible crime against its victims, and because it corrupts the people and institutions that use it. We must all oppose torture, if only for Thomas Paine’s reason: “He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”

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It should now also be clear why I am opposed to frivolous and petty-partisan accusations of torture, especially in regard to practices which do not meet the definition I have justified. We do not make our liberty secure when we confuse the trivial with the serious, when we dilute and debauch the only language we have for condemning oppression and atrocities. We cannot oppose torture with the moral force required if we have rendered the concept and the term vacuous. And those who seek to make it vacuous while posing as the defenders of liberty are in sober fact the enemies of liberty.

diff --git a/20100224014848.blog b/20100224014848.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0b96cc5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100224014848.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Marginal Devolution +

The recession got personal for me today, when I learned the reason a man I’ve been gaming with at my regular Friday night group hasn’t been showing up lately is because he’s broke and in a homeless shelter. I’m going to ask the Friday night gang for help for the guy — not money, but the job lead he needs much more. And it got me to thinking, about the two people I know who’ve actually been dragged under by the crappy economy.

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You might wonder what took me so long. I knew it was getting bad out there, with the nominal unemployment rate at 10% and the actual hitting 17% and 6 applicants for every job. But my friends are mostly university-educated professionals in high-skilled tech jobs — last fired, first hired, and bright enough that if they had to change careers or found their own business they could probably hack it. Except…except for these two, who I’ll call A and B. What’s happening to them is bad. Very bad. And it illustrates a problem that’s going to get worse barring some drastic changes in the system.

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A is the less screwed, so far. He’s in his mid-50s, white, college-educated, a tall Irish Catholic guy who looks right in a tweed cap. He’s a good bit brighter than average, probably in the 125-130 IQ range, but he’s bipolar (manic depressive) and has sleep-disorder issues. And he’s, hm, I think the best way to put it is rigid. Very capable at well-defined tasks and strategy games, but tends to get flustered and inarticulate when off his script. (No, it’s probably not mild autism, I know what that looks like; he’s actually more like OCD.) Socially awkward; few girlfriends, has never married, and tends to come off as an odd duck. He’s been underemployed all his life — clerking at a government agency, selling tract real estate, selling cars. Recently he’s working at a state-run liquor store, but that’s after two years of unemployment and an eviction fight. He’s got no cushion, nowhere to land if he loses this job.

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B is in worse shape. About the same age. Average or a hair below-average intelligence — which, given the people he and I tend to hang with, has the consequence of almost always making him the slow guy in the room (I have to remind myself that this is a context effect when I deal with him). What I know of his job history is low-paid clerical work, the kind that requires a lot of specialized procedural knowledge that isn’t portable. A nice guy, very earnest, probably quite a hard worker. I believe he has a two-year degree from a local community college, but he shows no discernible high-value skills. Also unmarried, possibly asexual, slightly effeminate presentation. He’s black, which makes him a EEOC lawsuit risk — and if you don’t know how much that hurts his chances, you haven’t been anywhere near a small or medium-sized business in the last 30 years. Now he’s the guy in the homeless shelter.

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What these guys have in common is that they’re only marginally employable. What borderline mental illness has done to one, mediocre skills and the unintended consequences of anti-discrimination laws have done to the other. As long as I’ve known both (and that would actually be most of my years, for both of them), they’ve worked dead-end jobs and put their passion into science fiction and wargaming. They’re decent, honest, unambitious men who have never wanted anything but steady work, a normal life, and a hobby or two. They’re not stupid and they have respectable work habits; in fact they’re probably more conscientious and safe than average. Now they don’t quite fit; too old, too geeky, too male, too quiet. The job market has discarded one and the other is hanging by a thread.

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When I look at these guys, though, I can’t buy the explanation most people would jump for, which is that they simply fell behind in an increasingly skill-intensive job market. Thing is, they’re not uneducated; they’re not the stranded fruit-picker or construction worker that narrative would fit. Nor does offshoring explain what’s happened to these guys, because their jobs were the relatively hard-to-export kind.

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No. What I think is: These are the people who go to the wall when the cost of employing someone gets too high. We’ve spent the last seventy years increasing the hidden overhead and downside risks associated with hiring a worker — which meant the minimum revenue-per-employee threshold below which hiring doesn’t make sense has crept up and up and up, gradually. This effect was partly masked by credit and asset bubbles, but those have now popped. Increasingly it’s not just the classic hard-core unemployables (alcoholics, criminal deviants, crazies) that can’t pull enough weight to justify a paycheck; it’s the marginal ones, the mediocre, and the mildly dysfunctional.

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If that doesn’t scare the crap out of you, you’re not paying attention. It’s a recipe for long-term structural unemployment at European levels of 10%, 15%, and up. What’s even crazier is that the Obama administration wants to respond to this problem by…raising taxes and piling more regulatory burden on employers.

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Yeah. That’ll work, sure. It is, in fact, the diametrical opposite of what A and B need if they’re not going to rot in homeless shelters. They need the overhead of employment to fall, not rise. Otherwise their future looks pretty damn grim. They’ve got about a decade each before they can collect Social Security, and even on the optimistic assumption that Federal entitlements won’t crash or be eaten up by a hyperinflationary episode I wouldn’t bet a lot on either one living that long.

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I now think the increasingly jobless recoveries from the last couple of downturns were leading indicators. The end of the post-New-Deal fantasy that we could increase the friction costs of capitalism without limit, regulating and redistributing our way to prosperity, is hurtling towards us like a dark sun. A and B are two of the luckless bastards who are spiraling down its gravity well. Multiply them by ten million to see what it’s like when the contradictions of socialism on the installment plan come home to roost.

diff --git a/20100225184627.blog b/20100225184627.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d72f261 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100225184627.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +How smartphones will disrupt PCs +

I never bought the hype that laptops were going to obsolesce the conventional desktop PC, nor do I buy today’s version of the hype about netbooks. The reason I didn’t is simple: display and keyboard ergonomics. I use and like a Lenovo X61 Thinkpad happily when traveling, but for steady day-to-day work nothing beats having a big ol’ keyboard and a display with lots of pixels. I have a Samsung 1100DF, 2048×1536, and it may be a huge end-of-lifed boat anchor but I won’t give it up for a flatscreen with lower resolution and less screen real estate.

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But now I’m going to reverse myself and predict that smartphones — not today’s smartphones, but their descendants three to five years out, will displace the PC. Here’s what I think my computing experience is going to look like, oh, about 2014:

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All my software development projects and personal papers live on the same device I make my phone calls from. It looks a lot like the G1 now sitting on the desk inches from my left hand; a handful of buttons, a small flatscreen, and a cable/charger port. My desk has three other things on it: a keyboard about the size of the one I have now, a display larger than the one I have now, and an optical drive. Wires from all three run to a small cradle base in which my phone sits; this also doubles as a USB hub, and has an Ethernet cable running to my house network. And that’s my computer.

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(In a slight variation, the screen and keyboard devices don’t have wires to the phone; instead, they talk to it via wireless son-of-Bluetooth. But wires have a significant advantage, as we’ll see below.)

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When I leave the house, I pull the phone from its cradle and put it in my pocket. At that point, the onboard screen becomes its display. I’m limited to low resolution and a soft keyboard through the phone’s touchscreen…until I get to my local internet cafe, which is full of display-keyboard combinations much like the one I have at home, awaiting my use. If for some reason I need an optical drive, I borrow one and plug it into the device hub that’s servicing my phone.

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And that hub is definitely wired to its devices, if for no other reason that this avoids unnecessary wireless collisions over which cradle owns which devices. It also make my private traffic more difficult to snoop casually.

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The key to this scenario is a combination of the convenience of a very small, portable computing device with the ergonomics of a desktop system. Actually, because I’m a hacker, I probably own two or three of these: the “phone” is whichever one has my sim card in it, leaving the others available for experimental OS installs and trial upgrades. Whenever my devices are connected to the house net, they sync file state with each other, so there’s always a recent backup handy if I lose the one from my pocket.

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I am never without my phone. I am never without my computer. They’re the same device. I remember having a “desktop”, but it’s just as firmly in the past as my long-ago days using refrigerator-sized minicomputers; I’d no more go back than I would to a VAX-11/780. The distinctions we used to make between phones, computers, music/video players, personal GPSes, and PDAs already seem quaint; my “phone” is all of those.

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This is why smartphones are important. They’re pretty disruptive already; you only have to look at the havoc they’re wreaking on the market for standalone GPSes to see that. What most people haven’t figured out yet is that what they’re doing to GPSes today they’re bound to do to every other sort of personal electronic device tomorrow, including personal computers. Once you’re carrying a networkable Turing-complete device on you, the economic/ergonomic case for having it do all those GPS/media-player/PC things is unanswerable. Who wants the hassle of multiple devices when they can just have one? It’s all computing, anyway.

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The only step towards that it we haven’t taken yet is dissolving the marriage of our conventional screens and keyboards with those bulky tower cases beside our desks and teaching phones how to use them. Otherwise most people could meet their computing needs with their smartphones (and an outboard drive for their music/video/movie collections) today.

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In a future post, I’ll explain why the same economic forces driving the convergence pretty much guarantee that the software on them will be open source.

diff --git a/20100228182625.blog b/20100228182625.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..490be0c --- /dev/null +++ b/20100228182625.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Plug for a worthy project: Softbound +

When I do my ESR-the-famous-geek road show, I get two kinds of questions: the public ones from my auduence, and the private ones from people who buttonhole me afterwards because they politely don’t want to burden the audience with their particular concerns. Of these, the single most common one is probably “How do I attract developers to my project?”

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Last Wednesday I was giving a talk at University of Pennsylvania, which I do once in most years because it’s near me and one of the professors there, Dr. David Matuszek, is an old friend who likes to have me in once a year as a treat for his students.

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One of his colleagues approached me with the familiar question. There isn’t a good general answer to this one, because how you attract developers depends in subtle and complicated ways on which developers you actually want. But this particular pitch interested me because it could be part of a significant change in the open-source tools infrastructure that I see coming down the pike.

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The Free Software Foundation’s Gnu Compiler Collection, and the toolkit around it (ld, gdb, etc.) pioneered open-source compiler technology and has served our community well for a quarter century. But it isn’t news to anyone that the GCC codebase has been getting old, tired, and sclerotic. The efforts required to fit new compiler technology onto an old framework have required increasingly heroic effort for diminishing returns. FSF policy decisions aimed at hindering reuse of its code by exclusively proprietary add-ons haven’t helped matters.

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There’s been an upsurge of interest in alternatives to GCC as a workhorse compiler. An increasing amount of that interest has been focused on LLVM, and while the LLVM folks won’t talk about wanting to knock GCC off its perch, they are looking ever more like a competitive threat.

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Now comes Softbound, an LLVM add-on that aims to produce “hardened” binaries that are rendered immune to buffer overflows by a compile-time transformation of generated LLVM code. This could have very large implications for the quality and security of C code, and it’s a capability GCC cannot offer.

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The project lead, Dr. Milo Martin, tells me he has a proof-of-concept that is not ready for production use. He needs developers to move it from lab demo to production tool. He’d prefer to do the whole thing in open source, but is considering any path to getting it done, including booting up a company around a proprietary version.

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He’s even proposed a clever tactic that is sure to be controversial: use the new compiler to create “value-added” binaries by compiling open-source programs to create “hardened” versions that protect against buffer overflow attacks. The compiler would remain closed source and the company would charge for the copyrighted binaries. I told Dr. Martin that I think this end-run of the GPL might actually work legally and technically, but that there’d be an open-source community mob with pitchforks and peasants at his castle door if he tried it.

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So, here’s my attempt at heading off any such dire confrontation. If you’re interested in compiler technology, formal methods, or security, please look at Softbound and consider joining up to help so the technology won’t wither on the vine or have to be taken proprietary.

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That is all.

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UPDATE: Oops: I’ll investigate GCC’s capabilities for bounds-checking.

diff --git a/20100302142154.blog b/20100302142154.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c47934b --- /dev/null +++ b/20100302142154.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +The Nose of Peace +

My regular readers will know that I’m sometimes fascinated by the extent to which mammalian body language crosses species lines — and, indeed, is so well conserved that families as far apart as felids and primates can communicate in ways that are emotionally satisfying to both parties. We take this for granted, but it’s really quite remarkable when you think about it; there’s a repertoire of mammalian gestures that must have maintained consistent social meanings since the earliest mammals in the late Triassic, 200 million years ago, all the way through dizzying changes in size, encephalization and ecological niche.

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My wife Cathy reminded me of another one today: the Nose of Peace. “I thought you’d enjoy this photo of a kitten and a young deer exchanging the Nose of Peace” she wrote; our label for it comes from my attempt to describe to a friend over the phone the behavior of two cats who, after quarrelling for days, decided to get along. My friend understood what was intended by “the Nose of Peace” immediately, and that term for it has since spread to several other mutual friends.

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It made sense to my friend because cats often greet each other like this to signal non-hostility, and cats will sometimes greet favored humans the same way if humans make that possible. Back when we lived in a house with three stories, one of our cats would sometimes use the ground-floor stairway to position herself at head height for a human. We noticed this, but didn’t figure out why until one of us passed by close enough one day and she offered a gentle nose-touch. After that, we made a point of allowing this to happen when she assumed the position.

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That photo of a cat and young deer touching noses shows that it’s not just humans consciously imitating feline body language who produce the gesture; the deer recognizes it, too. Dogs as well as cats use it. And of course the greeting is used human-to-human, most famously among Inuit. That’s four separate mammalian lines including Cervidae; the likelihood that this is a very, very old mammalian gesture seems correspondingly high.

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As body language, it’s classic Lorenzian uncompleted aggression. Faces are vulnerable places on an animal, the eyes especially so. A nose touch says “I could bite you, but I don’t want to,” which is about as definite a way as a pre-linguistic animal has of signaling friendliness. Now look at the deer/cat picture again and go “Awwww!”. This response, too, is part of the picture; the gesture is also a signal to onlookers that the participants are happy, curious, and not disposed to fight.

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Humans are prone to over-sentimentalize animals a lot, probably as a side effect of their nurturant instincts towards human young. But underlying that tendency is a hard and interesting fact; there is a mammalian community of empathy, even of sociability, that is tremendously wide and two hundred megayears deep. Our lives are richer for it.

diff --git a/20100302180506.blog b/20100302180506.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fe3e9dd --- /dev/null +++ b/20100302180506.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Cocoa party! Yeah! +

First there was the Tea Party movement. Which I’ve been keeping my distance from because while some of the small-government talk appealed to my libertarian instincts, it seemed to have a whiff of grouchy-old-fart social conservatism about it. While I’ve nearly achieved the calendar age required for grouchy-old-fart status, I don’t want anything to do with that mindset thank you very much.

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Then there was the Coffee Party movement, which smelled of astroturf and humbug even before the founder was outed as a Democratic political operative and former New York Times staffer (but I repeat myself).

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Now, there’s…the Cocoa Party movement! Yeah. Sign me up!

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This satire is especially personally funny to me because in sober fact I am a cocoa-drinker by choice. I don’t like coffee, and while I enjoy tea well enough, I’d rather have a big mug of Godiva Dark Chocolate any day – extra strong, piping hot, no sugar or cream but a few shakes of cinnamon for sure.

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My taste is particular, actually. Most of the hot chocolate mixes sold in supermarkets are oversweetened muck with crappy chocolate in it and too little of that; if you’re carrying around the idea that it’s a drink for children, that’s why. I’ll drink Ghirardelli’s too, but it’s a bit too sweet and vanilla-flavored to be optimal. My wife actually set up a blind Godiva/Ghirardelli test for me once because she was curious whether I could really tell the difference, and it was quite easy; Godiva has a noticeably stronger and earthier flavor and even looks darker. I’ve had import brands that were in a class with Godiva, but they tend to be more expensive and only sporadically available.

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Starbucks uses Godiva syrup and actually does cocoa pretty well, which is more than my caffeinoholic friends will say for their coffee. One such friend told me once that the original Starbuck business plan depended on the fact that the roasting process unavoidably produces a certain percentage of overroasted beans; according to his story, what Starbucks did was buy those on the cheap and market the charred, bitter flavor as a feature. This turn-it-up-to-11 philosophy makes bad coffee but really good cocoa.

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I have no actual punch line or moral for this post. Except to mote that that I refuse to “work toward the addition of those little marshmallows”. Gaaah. I hate those things…

diff --git a/20100304133733.blog b/20100304133733.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8a6128c --- /dev/null +++ b/20100304133733.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Lies and consequences +

In the horrible-inevitability department: Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets.

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My first thought when I read this was: “Creationists opposing AGW hysteria? Wow. So those stupid fucks are good for something after all.”

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My second thought was: “It’d be a damn shame if AGW ends up discrediting good science with the public, but if it happens the scientific establishment has only itself to blame for not busting the AGW fraud first.”

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In fact, I don’t think that bad outcome is likely to happen, for reasons I explained in Will the AGW fraud discredit science?. But this news story is a warning to all scientists: if you don’t want creationists to get traction, you can’t just treat this as someone else’s problem. You have to clean house. You have tolerated liars and rascals like Phil Jones and Rajendra Pachauri in your midst too long; you need to throw them out.

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A diplomatic way for any random professional society to do this would be to demand that all climate science must be held to the strictest standards of methodological scrutiny. All data, including primary un-“corrected” datasets, must be available for auditing by third parties. All modeling code must be published. The assumptions made in data reduction and smoothing must be an explicitly documented part of the work product.

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These requirements would kill off AGW alarmism as surely as a bullet through the head. But its credibility is already collapsing; the rising issue, now, is to prevent collateral damage from the scientific community’s failure to insist on them sooner. Every day you delay will strengthen the creationists and the flat-earthers and all the other monsters begotten from the sleep of reason.

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UPDATE: and, in a nice bookend, ABC follows the money, suggesting strongly that the scientific establishment has failed to clean house because alarmism is just too damn lucrative.

diff --git a/20100304184237.blog b/20100304184237.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ee245a0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100304184237.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +Greed kills: Why smartphone lock-in will fail and open source win +

In a previous post, How smartphones will disrupt PCs, I explained how and why I think small, ultra-portable, general-purpose computers that we’ll think of and use as “smartphones” are going to displace the PC. I promised then to explain why the software of these devices will be open source.

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Go read Androids Will Challenge the iPad. It isn’t about smartphones, but the logic that will break the iPhone business model is clearly set out in it for anyone who’s paying attention. What we’re about to see in the smartphone and tablet markets is a repeat of the way the IBM PC shouldered aside the Apple II after 1980. Google’s deliberately slow-balled launch of Android via the G1 was just prelude; it’s with the Motorola Droid, the unlocked Nexus One and the generic Android tablets that the game begins in earnest.

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After 1981, IBM seized the lead in the personal computer market by exploiting two advantages over Apple. The first was marketing and sheer size: IBM’s brand had a lot of power, and IBM’s run rate allowed it to fund product development and reap economies of manufacturing scale on a scale Apple couldn’t match. Twenty-nine years later Google has at least as cool a brand as Apple, more financial mass, and more engineers. And that’s all I need or want to say about the biz-journalism end of things.

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IBM’s second advantage was openness. The PC was designed to be kit-bashed; it became the hardware platform that launched a thousand hardware startups and, effectively, the entire PC industry as we know it. The manuals included a BIOS listing, the bus specification was public; anyone could plug in, and did. IBM’s own attempt to close the platform a few years later, the PS/2, was a failure that sank almost without trace.

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Fast forward three decades. The commoditization of hardware that the PC pioneered has succeeded so completely that all smartphones are built by anonymous OEMs on the Pacific Rim and the real competition has shifted from hardware to software. Forget details like smartphone vs. tablet form factors and which handset manufacturer is the belle du jour: the real competition is the OS X ecology vs. the Linux/Android ecology.

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And isn’t it entertaining, boys and girls, how thoroughly Unix won? Both OS X and Android are Unix underneath. Windows Mobile is hemhorraging market share and even the most notoriously Microsoft-gullible elements in the technology press can see it’s a no-hoper.

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On its way down, Windows Mobile gives us an object lesson that allows us to predict how the OS X/Android war will end. It’s the same lesson that the Apple II vs. PC war taught, and it’s heightened by the way that Microsoft has (just barely) managed to hang onto a dominant position in desktops — by allowing lots of third-party developers to make money from that dominance. (Update: I wrote “just barely” because Microsoft has had to give away most of its profit margin to maintain share.)

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IBM won its battle for ubiquity over the Apple II because it was willing to give up control, to let third parties (including Microsoft and the peripheral-card industry) make most of the money and content itself with a tiny sliver of a rapidly expanding pie. Microsoft kept Windows viable on the PC desktop by yelling “developers, developers, developers!” and conceding third parties a huge share of that pie.

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And now? Google is willing to let handset makers, telecoms providers, and third-party developers capture most of the overt value of the Android market. Google can give all that prompt revenue away because everything it’s doing in this space is actually funded the same way its search-engine business is; by the volume of consumer attention Android devices will bring to its advertising. Apple, on the other hand, acts as a very controlling gatekeeper of its products — requiring (and insisting) that it’s going to capture most of the profit margin for itself.

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Apple’s problem now is the same as the Apple II’s problem in 1981: in markets reliant on a vigorous ecology of allies to add value to a product, greed kills. Gatekeepers lock out potential allies; walls limit the garden’s growth. Ask any strategic planner at a telecoms provider or handset maker why Windows Mobile failed and you’ll hear the same thing: they saw what happened to IBM and swore they’d never let Microsoft talk them into being its butt monkeys. Windows lost out to Linux in the medium and high-server market, because third-party developers are much less important there; customers tend to be writing their own bespoke software, so server Windows isn’t pinned in place by a huge collection of allies. There’s a harsh tradeoff between control and ubiquity; the original IBM PC and desktop Windows got on the right side of it, but Windows mobile got on the wrong one.

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The competitive dynamic between Linux/Android and OS X can be understood in the same way. OS X is playing a control game and Android a ubiquity one. We can expect the outcome to be the same: when the bazaar meets the walled garden, the walls will eventually come down, crushing the life out of the garden.

+

This is why Symbian is now open-source in spite of having no inheritance from Unix-land; its backers have figured out that a control strategy collects short-term gains over a ubiquity strategy but simply cannot compete in the longer term against open-source Android and open-source Maemo. Apple will learn this, to its cost, too. Because Steve Ballmer may be an evil maniac, but when he yelled “developers, developers, developers!”, he was right. In the war for market-share, allies are better for your long-term prospects than walls, and ubiquity will always eventually triumph over control.

+

UPDATE: I wish I had read Where Android beats the iPhone before I wrote this. It bolsters the argument pretty effectively.

+

UPDATE: And here’s Gylnn Moody dispelling some anti-Android FUD.

diff --git a/20100307010312.blog b/20100307010312.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..04d4186 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100307010312.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Sink, the Bismarckian state! +

Hmm: On 24th February I wrote, in a comment on this blog:

+

+We’re about to reach the end of the historical era that began when Bismarck first implemented state socialism in the 1880s. The changes will be huge and wrenching; I wouldn’t even put the dissolution of the USA outside the realm of possibility. +

+

Two days later, Mark Steyn writes this in Our own Greek tragedy:

+

+The 20th century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. +

+

Coincidence or conspiracy? You be the judge.

diff --git a/20100310091128.blog b/20100310091128.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ff3d637 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100310091128.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +On Learning Haskell +

I’ve had learning the computer language Haskell on my to-do list for some time. I’m actually stepping up to learn it now, thanks to a temporary lull in my other activities and a vicious cold that has left me disinclined to strenuous work. I may associate Haskell with the taste of zinc gluconate for the rest of my days; both have an astringent and medicinal quality and produce fervent claims of effectiveness about which I am moderately optimistic but which I have not yet personally verified.

+

Haskell is very obviously a language built by mathematical logicians for mathematical logicians. Category theory lurks behind it in the same way that the lambda calculus lurks behind LISP. The following is an effort to make Haskell’s way of carving up the world intelligible, written partly to clarify my own thoughts.

+

+

Haskell is built around a handful of powerful primitive concepts and a pons asinorum. The most pervasive of these, purely functional programming without side effects or variables, is generally described in introductions to Haskell as the most difficult barrier for most programmers arriving from conventional imperative or OO languages like C, C++, and Python. And yes, if your mental model of programming is all about for-loops and static variables — or, for that matter, objects! — learning to think in Haskell is going to be quite a wrench.

+

There are reasons to make the effort. Haskellers (Haskellites? Haskellians? Haskellators? Haskelletons?) maintain that imperative programming relies heavily on side effects that push proving the correctness of programs to somewhere between impractically difficult and impossible. They also like to point out that side effects make programs difficult to automatically parallelize across multiple processors, an increasingly important consideration as multicores become the rule rather than the exception.

+

Both are solid arguments. It’s less a wrench for me to give up imperative thinking than for most because I’m a Knight of the Lambda Calculus from way back — and, while LISP is not a purely functional language, anyone who programs seriously in it will develop a feel for the functional style. Accordingly, while hanging out on the #haskell IRC channel I recommended to someone newbier than me that he might consider learning some LISP first and then coming back to Haskell. None of the hard-core Haskellians on the channel demurred, and I think this is probably good advice in general.

+

Now I will admit that the preceding paragraphs contained two fibs. First: Haskell does have variables, sort-of kind-of. But such a “variable” can only assigned once and the value of the variable is a promise to re-evaluate the expression on the right side of the assignment whenever the variable is evaluated; it behaves more like a safe macro or an Algol-60 call-by-name than like what people used to modern imperative languages call variables. Second: it is possible to define operations that have side effects, and things that have the behavior of real variables, using a construct called a monad.

+

I’ll get back to monads, but before I do I should introduce two other fundamentals of Haskell: static typing and lazy evaluation. Static typing shouldn’t be a strange concept to anybody who’s ever written in a compiled language like C or Java, but Haskell pushes the concept to some sort of logical limit. Variables need not have explicit types (they’re implicitly typed by the expression they’re shorthand for), but there’s a syntax that allows you to attach type signatures to any function, and the compiler does type inference from those. This has two consequences: it makes efficient compilation of the language possible (which is unusual for a language at Haskell’s level of abstraction), and (more importantly in the Haskell view of things) the type annotations assert invariants that can be used to prove the correctness of the program.

+

User-defined types are (more or less) the values of type-valued expressions (it’s actually more complicated than that, but thinking about it this way is a useful point of entry). The single most delightfully weird detail of Haskell I’ve run into so far is this: you can have type-valued variables, and write type-valued expressions that are recursive! For some types, such as trees, this is the natural way to do things.

+

Lazy evaluation is easier to understand. All it means is that the value of an expression is not computed until it’s actually needed by the caller; evaluation runs outside-in rather than inside-out. If you’re familiar with the idea of a closure from Scheme (or another language, such as Ruby, that has borrowed Scheme closures) it helps to think of Haskell expressions as returning closures. When the program runs, the outermost (main) closure is forced (evaluated); this may trigger the forcing of other closures (expressions and function calls) directly inside it, and so on through their sub-expressions which are also closures. Local color so you can sound like you know what you’re talking about: in Haskell-land, a closure is called a “thunk”.

+

Various optimizations make lazy evaluation efficient; notably, because expressions are (usually) pure, the closure can often be replaced by a pointer to its value and never need to be evaluated more than once. A benefit of lazy evaluation is that you can write code like an Icon or Python generator that spins forever, returning a value on each cycle, and it will only be called for the exact number of returns that the enclosing program actually needs even if the caller is itself a generator. This is one of the capabilities that replaces for-loops in imperative languages.

+

Even if most of your Haskell code is pure (no state, no side effects) it’s going to need to interface with a stateful world. I/O, in particular, is not pure; getting a line from your input source gives a result which will vary depending on the state of the world outside the program. Normal Haskell practice is to write your programs with as much pure code as possible and a minimum number of calls to functions with side effects (such as getting a line of input from standard input or putting a line of input to standard output). Only, because evaluation is outside in, what I/O function calls actually do is create closures that will have I/O side effects when they’re forced.

+

So, the question: let’s say we have multiple calls to functions generating closures with with output side effects. How do we write the code so the closures get forced in the order we want? There are multiple ways this could be done; the most obvious would require some kind of special construction that is an exception to “everything is function calls”. What Haskell uses for such sequencing is a monad.

+

Ah, monads. These are Haskell’s pons asinorum. Haskellers are in love with the fact that they actually behave like a recondite concept called “strong monads” from category theory; at this point in many expositions of the language the author would start waving this fact around. I’ve been a mathematician myself, I retain some grasp of category theory, and I say invoking it here is confusing and unnecessary.

+

A simpler way to think about monads is as a hack to turn function composition into a way of forcing the sequencing of function calls, or the functional-programming equivalent of a shell pipeline. And having said that provocative thing, I’m not going to go into the gory technical details required to make that actually happen.

+

I normally consider the syntax of a language, no matter how odd, to be a mere detail compared to more important things like its type ontology and how it does evaluation. But one central thing about Haskell’s syntax deserves attention: the way it uses productions. A Haskell function can be written in a sort of AWK-ish style as a series of pattern-action pairs; they’re tried, in sequence, and the first pattern to match the input fires. Falling off the end of the list yields a runtime error, but a wildcarded “everything else” production is easy to write.

+

Summing up: I don’t know what I’m going to use Haskell for, or indeed if I’ll ever use it at all. But the time I’ve spent wrestling with it has not been wasted; it has challenged my preconceptions, shown me some possibilities I hadn’t seen before, forced me to develop a practical grasp of some concepts like lazy evaluation that were previously only theory to me, and in general shook up my thinking. That’s valuable in itself. In How To Become A Hacker, I wrote “LISP is worth learning for [..] the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot.” I think the same can be said of Haskell, and for very similar reasons.

diff --git a/20100313172207.blog b/20100313172207.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e7e3680 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100313172207.blog @@ -0,0 +1,66 @@ +Subversion to GIT Migration: A Tale of Two Gotchas +

I’ve been wanting to migrate the GPSD codebase off Subversion to a distributed version control system for many months now. GPSD has a particular reason for DVCS; our developers often have to test GPSD sensors outdoors and aren’t necessarily in range of WiFi when they do it.

+

GPSD also needs to change hosting sites, for reliability reasons I’ve written about before. Though I’m a fan of Mercurial, I determined that moving to git would give us a wider range of hosting options. Also, git and hg are similar enough to make intermigration really easy – from SVN to either is 90% of the way to the other.

+

This blog entry records two problems I ran into, and solutions for them. One is that the standard way of converting repos does unfortunate things with tags directories. The second is that the CIA hook scripts for git are stale and rather broken.

+

+

GPSD uses tags directories strictly for archival purposes. When we cut a public release XX, we make a tag with the name “release-${XX}” and never modify that tree copy afterwards. We don’t use tags as branches. So, when I migrated, I wanted the release tags to be mapped into git tag objects rather than branches.

+

Unfortunately, the git-svn extension can’t do this; it will turn your tags into git branches. I’m told svn2git has the same behavior. Here’s what I ended up doing:

+

git svn clone –stdlayout –no-metadata file://${PWD}/stage2-repo

+

The –stdlayout tells git-svn that the project has a stock SVN layout with trunk, tags and branches. It will tell the fetch operation to turn both tags and branches into git branches, then strip those three prefixes out of the repo paths. Then I did this:

+

git svn –ignore-paths=”tags” fetch

+

This prevented the tags directories from being turned into branches. But it meant I had to make the git
+symbols by hand. I wrote a script to extract the rev levels that looked like this:

+

+#!/bin/sh
+#
+# Get a table of tag releases and dates from a checkout directory
+
+dir=$1/tags
+
+for x in $dir/*
+do
+    base=`basename $x`
+    info=`svn info $x | grep Last`
+    rev=`echo $info | sed -n '/.*Last Changed Rev: \([0-9]*\).*/s//\1/p'`
+    date=`echo $info | sed -n '/.*Last Changed Date: \(...................\).*/s//\1/p'`
+    echo "$base\t$rev\t$date"
+done
+
+

Running it gave me a table that looked like this:

+

+release-2.21        1566	    2005-04-12 20:10:40
+release-2.22        1592	    2005-04-25 17:01:53
+release-2.23        1637	    2005-05-04 14:07:39
+release-2.24        1688	    2005-05-17 12:48:47
+release-2.25        1737	    2005-05-21 00:19:51
+
+

The columns are tag name, Subversion revision level, and date-time stamp. I then went through the SVN and git versions of the logs and added git IDs as a fourth field. that gave me a file that looked (in part) like this:

+

+release-2.21        1566	    2005-04-12 20:10:40   1dd11f752275842a220ce5b2b93da2e2fa31a53c
+release-2.22        1592	    2005-04-25 17:01:53   d11c967125b8432e7d906fba18d67b3b2e7feaad
+release-2.23        1637	    2005-05-04 14:07:39   70e3d9e0ed7e2676554735ccfce8a4dd46b8bd9c
+release-2.24        1688	    2005-05-17 12:48:47   4fcd4e7bebfbf587c2889657ba94b79f6ace2859e
+release-2.25        1737	    2005-05-21 00:19:51   e2816c19964d124381a90d9338530a17ce47d43
+
+

Note: I’d have written a tool to generate the entire thing, but I estimated that for only about 45 tags it would take less time to hand-hack the list. Then I applied the following script:

+

+#!/usr/bin/env python
+#
+# Apply a table of tag releases and debates from a checkout directory
+#
+import sys, os
+
+for line in file(sys.argv[1]):
+    (release, rev, date, time) = line.split()
+    os.foo('GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="%s %s" git tag -m "Tag for public release." %s' % (date, time, release))
+
+

The “foo” in there should actually be the word “system”, but if written that way WordPress thinks it’s an attempt at malicious code injection and barfs.

+

I think this was more work than I should have had to do. When stdlayout is enabled, the conversion tools should know that SVN tags have different semantics than SVN branches and automatically lift to tag symbols if the tag tree has not been modified.

+

The second problem I ran into is that the git hook scripts CIA.vc supplies for git are badly out of date. Modern git installations don’t put all the helper commands in the normal $PATH; I had to add these lines to the shell hook script to make it work.

+

export PATH
+PATH=”$PATH:`git –exec-path`”

+

The Perl script has a similar problem. Investigating further I found that the CIA local copies of these scripts are very stale; they need to refresh from the upstream maintainers.

+

These were just speedbumps; the git repo is working fine now, and I’ve shut down SVN. I hope this note will be good googlebait for anyone who trips over the same problems.

+

UPDATE: The author of the gitorious project svn2git alleges that his tool can do this. But you have to write a rules file, and he admits the tool is “not well documented”. Do not confuse this with the tool of the same name on github, which is but a thin wrapper around git-svn…

+

UPDATE2: I fixed the CIA git scripts. They live in the official git repo now.

+

UPDATE3: This comment is correct. Because I understood git internals poorly at the time, I missed a simpler way to do this job. Allow git-svn to do the conversion of tags into branches and then just move the tag files!

diff --git a/20100315013459.blog b/20100315013459.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5e13aee --- /dev/null +++ b/20100315013459.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +In search of: the sonic stunner +

I’ve been enjoying the TV Tropes website a lot recently. Today I created my first full-fledged trope entry: the sonic stunner.

+

+

Feel free to chime in with other instances in SF literature, film, animation, and whatever. I’m especially interested in turning up uses prior to 1958, the year of Alan E. Nourse’s Gold In The Sky. As I note on the page, I am pretty confident this was the trope codifier; Nourse explains the effects and limitations of the Markheim gun in some detail, and these seem to have been copied by later authors who felt less and less need for explanation as SF fans got used to the concept.

+

However, there may very well have been ur-examples other than the Kornbluth one I note from 1941. They would have been quite plausible back to the beginning of the Campbellian revolution in 1938, and not implausible in earlier pre-Campbellian space opera.

+

Hm…I found a copy of Fire-Power and the reference probably wasn’t intended to be to a sonic stunner but to something more like a wireless Taser. So Alan E. Nourse looks like the actual originator on this one, not just the codifier. Unless someone sends me an earlier instance…

+

UPDATE: I’ve concluded that Nourse’s “Markheim guns” were actually Static Stun Guns and derived from originals by Robert Heinlein. So far, my commenters have found sonic stunners going back to 1948 (H. Beam Piper), but the trope seems to have been defined by Randall Garret’s “Hunting Lodge” (1953).

diff --git a/20100315141356.blog b/20100315141356.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c4698f7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100315141356.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Social Security and the fiscal event horizon +

The Ides of March, 2010 may be remembered as the day the entitlements crash began. Social Security liabilities exceed inflow, and SSA has begun tapping its vault full of Treasury bonds. “Too bad” (as the AP story notes) “the federal government already spent that money…”

+

+

Technically, Social Security is now broke. Since it’s politically unthinkable to admit this, the Treasury will have to go cap in hand to the bond markets and buy more short-term debt in order to keep the benefits flowing. This will heavily increase a structural federal deficit that is already unsustainable.

+

The government will fail to do anything meaningful to address the problem — because there is nothing it can do. Cutting payouts isn’t on the table, not for an administration ideologically committed to redistributionism.

+

Nor will raising taxes work. According to the Tax Foundation’s figures we’d have to triple the tax rates on the top 50% of earners just to cover the Federal FY 2009 budget of $3.55 trillion, let alone cover any debt or accumulate revenue for future years. And the bottom 50% only pays 2.89% of revenues; there’s no money there.

+

The next stage of this slow-motion train wreck will arrive when the bond rating agencies admit that the U.S. is broke and not going to get un-broke, and downgrade the risk rating on Treasuries from AAA. There’s already talk of this and warnings from the agencies; I can’t see it being more than nine months out at this point. If Obamacare actually passes, expect the downgrade sooner rather than later; vaporous talk of “bending the cost curve” isn’t fooling anyone with actual money on the table.

+

When Treasuries get downgraded, the Treasury will have to offer higher interest rates to sell bonds, increasing future deficits and putting solvency further out of reach. At some point not too long after that, the bond markets (and by that I mean China and Japan) will stop playing. Game over.

+

We have passed the fiscal event horizon. A singularity looms. Debt default, hyperinflation, or something equally traumatic is coming soon.

+

UPDATE: At Zero Hedge, economist Tyler Durden says: “In a word: the US collects enough money organically (via taxes) to cover less than a third of its outlays.”

diff --git a/20100317044749.blog b/20100317044749.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ccfccca --- /dev/null +++ b/20100317044749.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +In search of: FTL taxonomy +

I’ve been troping again. This time I found and repaired the TV Tropes page on Faster Than Light Travel. It had previously made a distinction between three subtypes of FTL drive: “jump”, “warp”, and “shortcut”. The “shortcut” category was confused and confusing, and I’ve renamed it to “portal” and fixed the definitions of both “portal” and “warp” subtropes.

+

I’m now looking for earliest occurrences and trope codifiers on these subtypes. I think I have one nailed down, but I can’t push the other two back very far. Instances and cites are solicited.

+

+

The easiest one is the portal drive. This is the newest of the three subtropes; I think it was codified in Niven & Pournelle’s The Mote In God’s Eye, 1975. Note that we want to be careful about distinguishing it from FTL involving fixed artificial stargates and/or naturally occurring wormholes. I’m interested in ur-examples.

+

The jump (or fold-space) drive goes back at least as far as Robert Heinlein’s 1953 “Starman Jones” Isaac Asimov’s earliest Foundation story in 1942. There may well be earlier examples.

+

The warp drive goes back at least as far as Murray Leinster’s first “Med Service” story in 1957. Again, I’m certain there are earlier examples. Let the digging begin!

diff --git a/20100323211424.blog b/20100323211424.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..656168a --- /dev/null +++ b/20100323211424.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Victimology bites +

Dr. Richard Friedman’s Sabotaging Success, but to What End?, published 2010-03-22 in the New York Times, is about an instantly recognizable pattern — people who sabotage themselves so they can feel like martyred victims of an uncaring world.

+

The piece is insightful and even funny in a bleak sort of way, but as I read through it I felt an increasing sense that there was something missing from this story. I was nearly at the end before I realized what had been lurking unspoken in Dr. Friedman’s account. But the crucial clue had been there from the beginning, when he writes of one patient “In fact, her status as an injured party afforded her a psychological advantage: she felt morally superior to everyone she felt had mistreated her. This was a role she had no intention of giving up.” Where…now, where had I heard that song before?

+

+

And the answer is: politics! This is what’s missing from Friedman’s account. He, and his patients, and everyone else nowadays, live in a culture saturated with the lesson that playing the victim card is the fastest route to power over others. “Help, help, I’m being repressed!” goes up the cry, and legions of professional grievance-mongers materialize more swiftly than the djinn of the lamp. Indignation is publicly indignated. One dares not even laugh at such posturing lest one be pilloried for “insensitivity”. Laws are passed. And the victim gets to become the oppressor while still collecting all the bennies of martyrdom. Such a deal!

+

And where might Friedman’s patients have learned the tactics of this strategy? By his own account, he has “intelligent and articulate” patients. I’m guessing they all went to college, where the student hours that used to be filled with trivialities like the heritage of western civilization are now increasingly consumed by “sensitivity” training, and life outside the lecture halls is regulated by speech and behavior codes so punishing in the hands of designated-victim groups that they’d be worthy of George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.

+

Full circle; after decades of hearing from the left that the personal is political, Friedman’s patients are the political become personal with a vengeance. No surprise that an article in the New York Times would miss that elephant, though; this is the newspaper about which it can be said that the famous parody headline “World To End Tomorrow; Women, Minorities Most Affected” was a good spoof mainly because it was nigh-indistinguishable from a lot of what they actually print. The aptness of Friedman’s article appearing in the house organ of the limousine left is extreme; the jokes write themselves, and the unintended ironies just don’t stop.

+

Perhaps you think I’m snarking because I feel left out? No; I could have played the victim card myself, you betcha. Cerebral palsy, oooh, that’s “disabled”, and for starters it qualifies you for a premium parking space pretty much anywhere; we’re told to ignore the regulatory taking of the lot owner’s property and the deadweight drag on the economy because those spaces might as well be unusable most of the time. What does a little thing like costs inflicted on third parties matter when the political class is doing it for the poooor opppresssed viiictiiiims?

+

For myself, I refuse. I prefer self-respect to privileged treatment. Friedman’s article, despite its blind spot, is valuable because it exhibits the results of making the victim card into an ace. You get more victims, duh…and not just in the form of increasingly splintered and contrived identity groups jockeying for sweeteners from the political class, either. Individuals will internalize this strategy, too. You’ll get the kind of privileged, “intelligent and articulate” losers Friedman sees every day — useless to themselves and a misery to everyone around them.

+

The unintended ironies do not end with Friedman’s article, but continues with responses to it. The gravamen of which was mainly that Friedman was a bad person for writing about self-sabotagers so disdainfully, and who can blame them for not expecting a meanie like him not to be helpful?

+

These responses illustrate something else that politicized victimology has done to us; it has eroded the distinction between victims and trash. Before the welfare state, people used to talk of the “deserving poor”, distinguishing those who could succeed on their own character if given a little crucial help from the bone-idle, slothful, and irredeemably irresponsible. We used to be able to make a parallel distinction between people who’d failed through bad luck or adverse circumstances and people who have chosen failure and magnify their slights because that’s a role they have no intention of giving up.

+

The former are victims who deserve our help, if they are not too proud to take it (and it’s usually better for their children if they are too proud). The latter are trash — chronic, self-programmed losers. They deserve the contempt they work so hard to earn, and we should give it to them. Not just because it’s the appropriate response to them as individuals, but because it’s a bad thing for society when we reward chronic losers as though they really are morally superior to the rest of us. That way lies nothing but civilizational suicide on the installment plan.

+

That is why I congratulate Dr. Friedman on his disdain for these people;. it’s entirely healthy and appropriate. And that is also why I vow to be as nasty as I can to the next person waving the “I’m a victim!” banner in my face. Black, gay, transgendered, learning-disabled, or whatever the designated victim group of the week is — being that thing is not necessarily a flaw, but playing the victim card for a position of moral and political superiority definitely is.

+

For a better future, demand that individuals get respect the old-fashioned way — by earning it.

diff --git a/20100324231254.blog b/20100324231254.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1c3919d --- /dev/null +++ b/20100324231254.blog @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +Scenes from the Life of a System Architect +

I’ve been doing some heavy work on the core code of gpsd recently, and realized it would be a good idea to explain the whys and wherefores to my co-developers on the project. After I wrote my explanation and reread it, I realized I had managed to generate something that might be relatively accessible, and perhaps even interesting, to people who aren’t intimate with the GPSD codebase.

+

I guess I’m aiming this at junior programmers and particularly curious non-programmers. It’s a slice of what software systems design — the thing that project leads and architects do — is like in the real world, where the weight of history is often as pressing as today’s requirements list. I think this note shows an example of doing it right, or at least not getting it too badly wrong.

+

If you find the technicalese in here difficult, it may be useful to refer back to some of my previous posts about this project:

+

GPSD and Code Excellence

+

GPSD-NG: A Case Study in Application Protocol Evolution

+

Why GPSes suck, and what to do about it

+

+

Those of you following the commit list will have noticed a flurry of changes to the gpsd core code recently. It occurred to me this afternoon that I should explain what I’m doing, because it’s not a good thing that I still seem to be the only person who really understands the part of the architecture I’m modifying.

+

0. Prerequisites

+

To understand what follows, you have to remember that GPSes have reporting cycles. Start of cycle is when the firmware computes a fix. It then ships a burst of sentences reporting the fix. Wait a bit – usually 1 second – and repeat. This becomes an issue because when your device speaks NMEA 0183 you have to aggregate reports from all the sentences in a reporting cycle to get a complete fix.

+

You also need to know that the part of the code I’m modifying is the dispatcher layer. This is where the daemon’s main select loop lives, waiting on input from client sessions, active GPSes, and the special control port. The dispatcher allocates and deallocates sockets for the client sessions and the control port, and handles user commands. It calls the packet sniffer to accumulate traffic from the GPSes into packets that can be analyzes for fixes, applies some policy and error modeling, and ships reports to client sessions.

+

To do these things, the dispatcher calls out to a core library that assembles packets and a bunch of drivers to analyze them once assembled. The details of that level aren’t important for this discussion. What’s mainly significant here is the fact that they’re separated from the dispatcher logic by an API I was pretty careful about designing.

+

1. The motivation: bring back polling

+

The modifications I’m doing have been triggered by Chris Kuethe’s request that I bring back support for client-initiated polling in the new JSON-based protocol. At the moment, all clients are expected to set watcher mode, then poll their socket often enough to handle the bursts of time-position-velocity JSON that gpsd will send at them once per cycle.

+

The original gpsd protocol was polling based, but had significant design defects. One of them was that it was normal to poll for a bunch of partial reports (latitude/longitude, altitude, speed, etc.) but they weren’t timestamped, so it wasn’t easy to tell when the data was stale.

+

There were also some unpleasant edge cases arising from the fact that, in order to conserve power on battery-driven devices, the daemon didn’t try to activate any attached device until you polled for position data. Thus, you couldn’t actually do a single-shot poll reliably under old protocol – first time you tried it would wake up some device but return no data, and you would probably start getting good data on the second or third poll (depending on the timing of the next cycle edge).

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There were other problems as well, and I eventually gave up on client-initiated polling entirely; when I redesigned the client API for use with the new protocol, I left it out. Chris has a decent use case for it, though, and I’m aiming towards bringing it back. The way it will probably work is that the client starts by setting a ?WATCH that doesn’t do the once-per-cycle JSON bursts, but just clues the daemon to activate devices. Thereafter the client will be able to poll for the state of the cache from the last fix(es) – that’s more than one if there are multiple sensors attached.

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2. Clearing the way

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But there’s major work needed to prepare the ground. The good news is that it’s entirely in the dispatcher layer and the core library, and won’t destabilize the packet sniffer or the device drivers. Changes in that lower layer are *messy* and I approach them with trepidation.

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Basically, before I can re-implement client polling in a clean way I need to clear away a lot of scar tissue and complexity. I ripped out the command interpreter for old protocol weeks ago, but there’s stuff underneath the new one that’s pretty tangled. Most (but not all) of it is a result of the infamous – and now dead – J command.

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Those of you who have been around for a while will remember that old protocol used to have a per-user-session policy switch controlling the circumstances under which old data was held over and merged into new data; you could have display-jitter reduction at the risk of occasionally seeing stale data from the previous reporting cycle, or you could guarantee fresh data only but pay for it with display jitter.

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The reason J was needed was that the sentence mix shipped by NMEA devices is highly variable, and we didn’t have a reliable way to pin down the end of cycle – users had to know about their devices and choose the right policy. I was never happy with this, because zero configuration is one my goals, but that UI issue was nearly trivial compared to the complexifying effect on the dispatcher internals.

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Because the J policy switch was per user, you could have user sessions with opposite smoothing policies (minimize jitter vs. avoid staleness) getting data from the same underlying device. Several steps of implication later, this meant the dispatcher layer had to maintain a pair of this-fix and last-fix buffers per client session, copy data up into them from the device-driver layer, and apply some policy-specific logic before emitting an actual report.

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Eventually I figured how to do automatic end-of-cycle detection and the J command went away. But the tricky buffer-shuffling used to implement it didn’t! I knew I’d have to clean that up someday, but didn’t want to tackle that sooner than I had to. I knew it would require major surgery on the dispatcher.

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When Chris made his request, though, I decided that it would be begging for obscure bugs to reimplement polling on top of the user-session-level buffering, and concluded that I needed to rip the latter out first.

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One of the hard parts is already done. There still needs to be a buffer pair (this fix and last fix) for things like computing speed and course if the GPS doesn’t supply them. But it can be per-device and live in the core library rather than per-user-session and live in the dispatcher. I successfully dropped those buffers down a level a couple of days ago; as a happy side effect, this has already reduced gpsd’s memory footprint some.

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What I’m working on now is getting rid of the channel structure. Under old protocol client sessions listened to a specific list of devices; under new protocol they listen to everything unless they’ve selected a *single* device. The difference means that the channel structure array, which exists to manage (potentially multiple) subscriber-to-device links, isn’t really needed anymore

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Once I abolish channels I’ll have a clean, fairly simple dispatcher architecture that’s matched to the way new protocol actually works. That will be a good base on which to re-implement polling.

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3. Removing code is good

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One very nice thing about the work I’m doing is that it’s mostly ripping out chunks of code that aren’t needed anymore, with some refactoring to separate out those chunks first. While it’s possible to introduce bugs during code removal, they tend to be the unsubtle kind that lead to immediate crashes or gross regression-test failures. It’s thus relatively easy to have confidence in the results when I take a step forward in the process.

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The line count, memory usage, and overall complexity of the dispatcher is going to drop significantly even after I have re-implemented polling. Polling will be handled by a relatively small, contiguous span of code in the command interpreter that raids the device-level buffers to generate a report; the removed code, by contrast, will have been from all through the dispatcher, especially the grottier parts that kept data structures with different roles in proper synchrony.

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This is all good. Decreased line count means increased maintainability, and given the high reliability requirements of something that’s going to be used in navigational systems (and thus potentially life-critical) that’s especially important for gpsd.

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UPDATE: I did successfully remove the channel structure, and I added a polling command – in 23 continuous lines of code.

diff --git a/20100331073816.blog b/20100331073816.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0a8611f --- /dev/null +++ b/20100331073816.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Autotools must die +

Me, on the GPSD mailing list:

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Once upon a time, I did not hate autotools. Yea verily, it was the morning of the world and all things (even autotools) seemed fresh and new). I’d say this innocence lasted until about, oh, 1995.

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But autotools was a kluge. And it did accrete kluges and crocks around it, adding layers of complexity until it became sore difficult to tell which end was up. And lo, it became a festering pile of special cases and obscure semi-documented rules, leading to a combinatorial explosion of unplanned interactions and obscure lossage.

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Like, say, the fact that our make check insists on running gps-makeregress twice and in spite of being a genuine autotools expert with fifteen years of experience bear-wrestling the sorry fscker I cannot figure out why it is doing this.

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Oh, there’s a reason, all right. And if I were willing to quintuple the three hours I just spent poking at our build setup I’m sure I could find it. But that was three hours wasted as far as solving any real problem was concerned. Life is too short for such nonsense.

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Autotools has reached the Chandrasekhar mass limit of software and become a black hole of suck that consumes endless hours of bright peoples’ time without any good result. It is well past time for it to die.

diff --git a/20100401164029.blog b/20100401164029.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d26fe32 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100401164029.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Abusing CIA for Fun and Profit +

No, not the Central Intelligence Agency. I refer to CIA.vc, a nifty free service that monitors commits on open-source repositories in real time and echoes notifications to IRC. And not really abuse, either – rather, I just implemented a way to make it do something else useful. Others might consider doing likewise.

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My GPSD project does a lot of fiddly things with packed binary protocols, and is thus more than usually sensitive to platform idiosyncracies – little- vs. big-endianness, word length, that sort of thing. For the same reasons, it’s also prone to trip over toolchain bugs and unusual compiler decisions about char signedness, structure packing, and the like.

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We have a pretty good regression-test suite, but it has had the limitation that any dev hacking on the code would tend to run regression tests only on the hardware nearest to hand. Which meant, in practice, that the code got washed on i86_64 and am64 pretty frequently, but oddball platforms like sparc64 and older 32-bit machines didn’t get exercised much.

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Two days ago I decided to fix this.

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The devutils directory of gpsd now contains two small programs and a file containing a list of remote-test sites. One of the programs, flocktest, is the one a developer will call. It walks through the flock-sites file and uses ssh to remote-execute the second script, flockdriver, on each one. flockdriver updates a slave git repo, bullds, runs the regression tests, and captures an error log. Both are quite small; flocktest is 160 lines of Python, flockdriver is 150 lines of shell.

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For efficiency, flocktest backgrounds all the remote flockdriver processes as it spawns them, so they run in parallel. This means the total test time is the maximum of the individual ones, not their sum, a big advantage. But it makes getting the results back to the caller a bit of a problem. My original plan was to simply have flockdriver email them all back, but that thought made me increasingly unhappy. I imagined developers, weary of being spammed with long logs full of boring positive results, tuning out. The last thing the world needs is another spambot, even if it’s a well-intentioned one.

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The obvious way to reduce the lossage seemed to be to turn the successes into one line emails – test passed, you win, kthxbye. Better. Still not happy-making. Using email for these notifications seemed…heavyweight. Creaky. Old-school.

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And then it hit me. I can make CIA do this!

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See, over the weekend I’d just written a pair of Python and shell CIA hook scripts for GPSD’s git repo. Yes, there were pre-existing ones, but they were dusty and buggy in minor ways and didn’t autoconfigure themselves as cleverly as I though they should. So I decided to do new ones right. You can see the results here, and they’re going into git’s contrib/ directory next point release (I just missed one yesterday).

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The point was, the light XML hackery needed to feed CIA commit notifications was fresh in my mind…and I realized that CIA basically doesn’t care about the field contents. From its point of view, “Regression test succeeded” and “Regression test failed” are perfectly reasonable log messages. The commit ID for the revision tested can go in the same display space it would for a commit.

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A few hours of hacking and testing later, here’s how it works: both regression-test successes and failures get shipped to CIA.vc to be announced on the project IRC channel, but you only get a log mailed to you in case of failure, when you actually want it. Win!

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The scripts have very little in them that’s GPSD-specific. I might very well spin them out as a mini-project for other projects with similar requirements to use. Because I think, actually, this is in the spirit of what CIA is trying to enable. The point of the service is to have commit activity be part of the conversation on the project’s real-time channels. Test results as they happen are a very natural thing to add to the mix.

diff --git a/20100405201138.blog b/20100405201138.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2d552f9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100405201138.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +The iPad: Second Coming of the Newton? +

The just-released and much hyped iPad is Apple’s second foray into hawking a tablet computer. And all the reasons Steve Jobs would like us to forget that are, in fact, good reasons to remember the Newton and the fact that it never became more than an early-adopter status toy. It, too, was greeted with hosannahs by rapturous Apple fans and a bedazzled trade press back in 1992 – but who remembers it today?

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+

The Newton was a fascinating technology demonstration, but it sank almost without trace because nobody ever found a real use for it. It was too large to fit in a pocket and underpowered for replacing a real computer…like the iPad. And the thing that has me scratching my head, two days after the iPad announcement and knowing it has sold 300K copies in that time on the strength of Apple’s brand, is that I can’t find a real use for it either.

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It can’t replace even a netbook, much less a laptop or desktop computer: can’t multitask, no USB port, limited on-board storage. It can’t replace my cellphone or a conventional PDA, because it won’t fit in a pocket. It can’t replace a dedicated e-reader – battery life too short and the display type isn’t tuned for that use, not being reflective. If it’s designed as a browser appliance, the absence of Flash support is a pretty serious hole below that waterline.

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What I’m seeing is a device that competes in four or five different product categories without having a compelling story for any of them – a perpetual second-best. It makes me wonder what Steve Jobs was thinking, really. This isn’t like the iPhone, which did one thing – even if that was just being a cellphone with a nifty color display – better than anything else that came before it.

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Of course, the standard rejoinder to pointing out what a new technology can’t do is that people will invent their own unforeseen uses for it. But this is where the iPad software lockdown starts to become a serious drag, because it means any software application some third party comes up with has to pass through the eye of Apple’s needle. And there’s a serious problem with that…

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The approval process for iPhone apps is already notoriously slow, arbitrary, and frustrating; the process for iPad apps will probably be as problematic or worse. The iPhone can survive that, because even without 1001 apps it’s got the being-a-phone thing to fall back on. But the iPad? Not so much. The fallback position, in the case that a large ecology of apps fails to proliferate because Apple is overcontrolling, isn’t obvious.

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I’m not the only one to notice the odd lack of a value proposition here. A-list blogger Ann Althouse, just two days after buying one, asks what am I doing with an iPad?

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Back in the early 1990s, that’s a question a lot of early adopters found themselves asking about the Newton when the initial euphoria wore off. They never found a good answer, either.

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UPDATE: Good summary of the anti-iPad case at 13 Glaring iPad Shortcomings. It’s pretty damning.

diff --git a/20100406170409.blog b/20100406170409.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..81e964b --- /dev/null +++ b/20100406170409.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +IBM: Back to the Bad Old Days? +

Sadly, Florian Mueller’s scream of outrage (IBM breaks the taboo and betrays its promise to the FOSS community is not an April Fool’s joke. IBM has done what it swore not to in 2005 – picked up the patent weapon and aimed it to block an open-source project.

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I was thoroughly briefed on this about ten days ago by Jay Jurata, a lawyer working for CCIA (Computer and Communications Industry Association), which is even now bringing an antitrust action against IBM over the matter. Assisting him was Jay Maynard, an Armed & Dangerous regular who happens to be the lead of a project called Hercules.

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Hercules is an open-source emulator for IBM mainframes. Words cannot easily describe my degree of bogglement the first time Jay brought it up an a Linux laptop in my presence and I saw the unmistakable arcane runes of a 360 boot sequence – and in an old-school band-printer-style font, too. Now, after 11 years during which IBM nodded when its own employees used and contributed to Hercules, Big Blue has brought down the hammer.

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The issue begins with z/OS, IBMs’s mainframe operating system. For Hercules to be support the trillions of dollars’ worth of mainframe applications out there, z/OS has to run on top of it so the applications can run on top of that. But IBM has long refused to officially license z/OS to run over non-IBM hardware or emulators. Recently, TurboHercules SAS tried to change that.

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TurboHercules SAS is a small company founded by Roger Bowler, the same guy who launched Hercules itself in 1994. He passed Jay Maynard the project leadership in 1999 when it went open-source, and later founded a company aimed at selling z-series emulation for disaster backup and other uses. In the U.S. it’s aiming at government agencies with IBM mainframes that have been ignoring their backup mandates because, jeez, one mainframe is expensive enough, let alone a spare.

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Bowler asked IBM to license z/OS for use over Hercules and got back a letter that waved around vague charges of “intellectual property” violations. The letter outright refused to license z/OS for anything other than true-Big-Blue hardware. CCIA responded on behalf of TurboHercules by filing an antitrust action alleging illegal product tying.

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This is where matters stood when Jay & Jay first briefed me on it. At that time, I told Jay-the-Lawyer that if the matter remained a spat between two for-profit companies over proprietary software it would be difficult to get anyone in the open-source community very excited about it. But I also said that if (a) IBM were to take direct legal action against the open-source Hercules project, or (b) violate its patent-nonaggression pledge from 2005, that would be a different matter – time, then, to light the beacon fires and gather the clans.

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We still haven’t seen (a); no summons on Jay Maynard’s doorstep, yet. But a few days later we got case (b), big time. IBM sent TurboHercules a letter alleging that Hercules commits over 160 separate patent violations. Crucially, two of those were patents that IBM explicitly promised never to raise against open source.

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I told them I’d blog that, for sure, but didn’t want to do it on or too near April Fool’s Day. Which is why Florian Muller broke the story rather than me. Florian has his facts right, but his interpretation is…perhaps a bit overheated.

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It’s not justified to conclude from this attack, as Florian does, that IBM has never been sincere in its alliance with the open-source community. IBM has ploughed some big bills in marketing money and development time into the success of Linux. I am in a position to know for certain that IBM’s legal posture in the SCO case was tuned to help us out rather than defending solely their own interests on the narrowest possible grounds.

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On the other hand…I was invited to speak at an IBM internal technical conference back in 1998, when they were formulating their pro-open-source strategy. They’d been reading my open-source papers, and the key planners behind the new, pro-Linux strategy wanted their peers to hear the word straight from the source. And the first thing I said into that microphone was that it felt strange for me to be there, because I had been a hacker long enough to remember when IBM (not Microsoft) was the Great Enemy.

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That got a laugh, then…but those bad old days could be upon us again. Because for all IBM’s intentions to reposition itself as the world’s biggest consulting and systems-integration house, mainframes still generate 25% of its revenues and 50% of its profits. It could be IBM is reverting to type…or it could be that something like the rear brain of a Stegosaurus is defending its flanks by reflex before the official brain up font has had time to catch up with what’s going on.

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IBM has reached a critical juncture. For the last decade the company has has had it both ways – allied with the open-source community to grow its forward-looking services business, and creamed big profits off the long-since-paid-for z-Series technology. Now these two strategies are in conflict. Whichever way this ends, IBM will probably only get to keep one of them.

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I’m still not greatly concerned with the purely anti-trust aspects of this dispute. But our community must call IBM publicly to account on its violation of its own patent pledge for the same reasons we mobilized to help IBM defeat SCO in 2003, because we’ve got to keep their laws off our code. The kind of suppressive fire by blizzards of patents that IBM is deploying now is not just a single project’s concern, but a very serious threat to open-source development in general.

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We need to find a way to push back. Because if there’s a first time that patent aggression works to lock us out of a whole area of software development, it won’t be the last. IBM needs to learn, as SCO and others have before, that that betraying our trust and going to war against us has consequences severe enough to make it a very, very bad idea.

diff --git a/20100407122923.blog b/20100407122923.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b46a699 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100407122923.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +IBM: Digging itself in deeper +

Yesterday I blogged about the escalating dispute between IBM and TurboHercules SAS. I said, and will repeat now, that the central issue for the open-source community in this matter is not the antitrust allegations, but rather the fact that IBM has raised a patent threat alleging that Hercules violates its intellectual property. And especially, that IBM in doing so has cited two patents that were explicitly listed in its 2005 pledge to the open-source community.

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IBM has now made matters worse. Much worse.

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The Wall Street Journal quotes an IBM spokesperson as follows:

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+In 2005, when IBM announced open access to 500 patents that we own, we said the pledge is applicable to qualified open-source individuals or companies. We have serious questions about whether TurboHercules qualifies. TurboHercules is a member of organizations founded and funded by IBM competitors such as Microsoft to attack the mainframe. We have doubts about TurboHercules’ motivations. +

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That is, IBM now appears to be claiming the right to nullify the 2005 pledge at its sole discretion, rendering it a meaningless confidence trick.

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The correct filter for whether an individual or company is “qualified” is that described in the pledge itself – conformance of the project’s licensing to the Open Source Definition. Any retroactive attempt to deprive the pledge of actual effect would be profoundly unethical. And probably nullified by the legal doctrine of promissory estoppel.

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I’m watching this and I’m wondering when the adult supervision at IBM is going to step in.

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The original letter to Roger Bowler denying TurboHercules’ request for a z/OS licensing program was full of vague threats and ominous language – I said to Jay Maynard at the time that no IBM counsel could possibly have looked at it, because as written it was dripping red meat for antitrust regulators.

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Including two patents from the 2005 pledge list in their count of alleged Hercules violations was colossally stupid. With more than 160 other patents to allege, why court a fight with the open-source community over those two?

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And now it’s compounded by this graceless attempt to nullify the entire pledge, a move which couldn’t offend the open-source community more if it were calculated to do so. IBM may be aiming at TurboHercules, but so far it has shot three bullets squarely into its own foot.

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Would somebody with a clue please wake up over there?

diff --git a/20100408063458.blog b/20100408063458.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..72a690e --- /dev/null +++ b/20100408063458.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +You have ascended +

Redoubtable hacker Chip Salzenberg wrote me last night with the subject line “You have ascended”. I quote in full:

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+Long time no chat. Hope you are well. In fact, I don’t have to hope, because I just read this in a book:

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Raymond in his brilliant The Cathedral and the Bazaar [2001] …

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That’s all well and good, and I know enough authors not to be excessibly impressed by publication.

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Thing is, this book is by Fred Brooks. As in, Brooks’ Law.

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Oh My Lack Of God.

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Do you have a halo now, or maybe a relic to protect you from feature creep? +

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After boggling for a few minutes, I wrote back:

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+I can almost top this. Donald Knuth once sent me a bug fix. For INTERCAL. +

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Hmmm.. Now, where did I stash that Amulet of Yendor?

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If you found the preceding exchange cryptic, you need to get out more are probably a normal human being with, like, a life. How sad for you.

diff --git a/20100408141515.blog b/20100408141515.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9a12df9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100408141515.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +IBM: Now trying to dig out… +

IBM has issued another statement on the TurboHercules imbroglio. This one is reported by the Linux Foundation, but comes from Dan Frye. Dan Frye heads IBM’s Linux Technology Center and was actually at the top of my mental shortlist of likely voices of sanity over there. (Full disclosure: Dan kept me supplied with IBM Thinkpads for a couple of years as a thank-you gesture.)

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The good news is that Dan says IBM will stand by the letter of its 2005 pledge. Furthermore, the second sentence of Dan’s pledge leaves no room for doubt that Hercules is a covered project. This is in flat contradiction to whatever brainless droid the Wall Street quoted yesterday on IBM reserving some right to decide that Hercules is ineligible. It also contradicts the previous implication that IBM is prepared to go to court over those two patents.

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The bad news is that Dan leaves open the possibility that IBM may sue over the other close to 200 patents. I think it’s important not to overreact to this; his statement was clearly immediate damage control rather than a final ukase. The effect is that IBM now looks as though somebody with a clue has woken up to how much reputation damage their previous blunders have done them.

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My guess is that the matter is now being debated (or soon will be) at a level higher than Frye or either of the pair of clowns who had previously made IBM’s posture look so very wrong. This might, still, blow over.

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But IBM should hear this, loud and clear: the letter of your pledge is not enough. You cannot simultaneously hold yourself forth as an ally of open source and conduct patent warfare against an open-source project. Betrayal stings; we won’t abide it, and I wouldn’t argue that we should even if I thought I could win that argument. If you try to have this both ways, you will enrage the community more than if you had been a frank enemy all along.

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Understand that our intransigence on this score this is only partly on behalf of Hercules itself. We detest the patent weapon, even in the hands of a sometime ally, because we fear it so much. What IBM does in this matter will set a precedent for the behavior of others; if IBM chooses to set the wrong precedent, it will make enemies of us.

diff --git a/20100412203854.blog b/20100412203854.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b32dd57 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100412203854.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Adventures in feline ethology, part three +

A while back, in Sugar and the Bathroom Demon, I blogged about the knotty questions of evolutionary biology and ethology that engage me when I interact with my cat. I returned to this theme in The Nose of Peace.

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And today I have something new to report. My cat, at the age of 16, has noticed something novel in the world: the cat in the mirror. This is interesting because it feeds into a fascinating theory: we produce cognitive uplift in our pets.

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To understand this story, you need to know a bit about the interior layout of our house. My wife and I share a master bedroom which is dominated by a queen-sized waterbed. The adjacent room is my wife’s office and personal space, not visible from the master bedroom. My office, where I’m typing now, is partially visible across the hall through the bedroom door.

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Sugar has a well-established end-of-day ritual. When humans get in the big bed, she jumps onto it, then makes a couple of circuits around the perimeter as though checking for potential intruders. The impression of martial watchfulness is a bit countered by the fact that she’s normally purring like a truck engine throughout.

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Then she picks a human more or less at random and snuggles with said human for a while (if purring had not previously commenced, it is certain to at this point). She then switches to the other human. She seems to have a rule that the the humans must get approximately equal attention, and is quite conscientious about it (if “conscientious” can be meaningfully applied to a cat). More snuggling ensues. When she has thoroughly fuzz-bombed both of us, she picks a spot to sleep in next to either human, and does so.

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A few months ago something deranged this cozy routine. After the playtime with humans, at the point where she’d previously gone to sleep, she started jumping off the bed and wandering out the bedroom door. We would then hear what sounded like distressed yowling for a while – not at the level of “I’m injured”, but “Something is bothering me!”. She’d generally let us call her back in after a few minutes, and then go to sleep quite normally.

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We couldn’t seem to catch her when she was vocalizing, though, and it became something of a mystery why it was happening. We carefully investigated the state of the food dish, water bowl, and litterbox just after several of these incidents, but they seemed irrelevant. She definitely wasn’t in my office when this was happening; we’d see her in there. But the acoustics of the house made it impossible to localize her exactly.

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We became concerned enough to talk to our vet, and discussed medical hypotheses including hyperthyroidism and feline senile dementia. Neither quite fit, as she seemed in rude good health for a cat her age (enough so that our vet seldom fails to remark how lucky we are).

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Last night my wife finally caught what Sugar was doing when she was vocalizing: looking at herself in the full-length mirror in my wife’s room. (Now, reading this, my wife says it’s actually the second time – the first time, she missed the significance of where the cat was.)

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What makes this interesting is that Sugar had previously completely ignored mirrors. For the first fifteen years of her life, she not only failed to recognize herself in a mirror (which is normal for cats) she never even seemed to realize there was another cat, or anything interesting at all, in mirrors. I still don’t think she’s recognizing herself, but it seems impossible now that she’s not at least noticing there’s another cat there. At her age this is rather as though a human octagenarian had sprouted a previously unexpected talent.

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But on one level this is not entirely surprising. Parrots in the wild don’t talk, and the probability that a pet parrot will start doing so is well correlated with age. Other domesticated near-sophonts (chimps; corvids; my swordmaster’s Malamute dogs, who have recognizable call-by-name vocalizations for their humans) can develop communication behaviors far more elaborate than their wild kin.

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We produce uplift in our pets. We actually operant-condition them towards full sentience! (I am not the first to notice this. The primatologist Frans de Waal has written about this idea.)

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I can’t help but suspect that Sugar has retained into old age the kind of neurological plasticity required to spring a new capability on us like this precisely because of her long interaction with us. Our human behavior towards her is to reflexively ascribe humanlike mental states to her; that is, we can not do this when we’re thinking about it, but we will tend to anthropomorphize when we’re not.

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The flip side of this is that, in effect, Sugar has had fifteen years of incentive to model humanlike mental states. And, by damn, she’s trying hard. I wonder if she’ll pass the mirror test of self-awareness before she dies?

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If that happens, I’ll be surprised…but not nearly as surprised as I would have been six months ago.

diff --git a/20100415195359.blog b/20100415195359.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..41ec2de --- /dev/null +++ b/20100415195359.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Pandora’s Biases +

Back in February I experimented with Pandora Radio and loved it…enough that I bought a subscription within a few days. It’s my background music now; I might never own an analog radio again.

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For a while I ran around telling all my friends about how Pandora was the greatest thing! since sliced bread! you should try it! But I’ve stopped doing that, because I’ve learned that it doesn’t work as well for other people…starting with my wife. I think I know why, and it reveals an interesting failure mode of all such systems.

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Back in February I commented on my original post saying this:

+

+From the reactions here I think it’s the case that some seeds and gene clusters are more productive than others under their similarity metric, and I seem to have picked one that’s at the good end of the distribution. I wonder why that is? I have a tentative guess that it’s because the stuff I like is complex and has lots of structure, so there are lots of traits sticking out of it.

+

There may also be a selection bias. The classification system was almost certainly designed by musicians and is certainly applied by musicians, so the traits it’s going to represent most effectively will be those that are foreground for people with analytical musical ears. And that describes me; a lot of the stuff I like could be truthfully tagged “only musicians listen to this”. +

+

60 days later the feedback I’m getting seems to confirm this pretty strongly. How well Pandora will work for someone seems to correlate closely with the distance of the center of their tastes from “stuff musicians like”. And I think this highlights a likely failure mode of all recommender systems based in a taxonomy.

+

That is, if you try to do an equivalent of the Music Genome Project for creative content type X, your natural pool of evaluators is people who make content type X. That pool is much smaller than, and may have different tastes than, most of the the X Genome Project’s potential audience.

+

But there’s a subtler and perhaps more important effect – not different tastes, but different feature filters. It’s not just that musicians like somewhat different music than non-musicians do, it’s that they hear and retain things non-musicians miss. As a personal example, my memory of electric-guitar solos I’ve heard more than once or twice is so precise that it includes pick-scrape noises and unintentional quarter-tone off-notes. I can still recall my bemusement when I finally figured how unusual that is – that most people have trouble hearing such things even when they’re cued to the timing and told what to listen for.

+

Thus: I think an in-built limitation of Pandora is that it will work well if you have feature filters like a musician’s. Actually, it’s worse than that – because my wife is a musician, but doesn’t hear music in the hyper-analytical way I do, and Pandora doesn’t work well for her. So, maybe, the key group is “musicians listening with their left ears”. Yes, this actually matters – it’s been shown in the lab that left-ear listening activates the analytical left brain. It makes sense; if you’re hiring people to analyze music, you’re likely to find unusually analytical musicians.

+

The larger point here is that all recommender systems dependent on hiring evaluators are likely to have the same problem. Even if you work at getting a broad selection of taste in the evaluators (say, by making an extra effort to hire people who understand country & western, or psychotronic films, or 19th-century penny dreadfuls) you’re likely to end up with a pool that has feature filters different from the general population – probably more analytical, finer-grained, pickier. This will leave your classification system with subtle biases, possibly ill-matched to the general population.

diff --git a/20100419034249.blog b/20100419034249.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e43a49f --- /dev/null +++ b/20100419034249.blog @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +Incentives to be Open +

A correspondent pointed me at a paper by Carliss Baldwin and Eric von Hippel, Modeling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaborative Innovation, which builds on my papers in some interesting ways. Here’s one of the money quotes:

+

+Building on arguments of Ghosh (1998), Raymond (1999), and von Hippel and von
+Krogh (2003), Baldwin and Clark (2006 b) showed formally that, if communication costs are low
+relative to design costs, then any degree of modularity suffices to cause rational innovators that
+do not compete with respect to the design being developed to prefer collaborative innovation
+over independent innovation. This result hinges on the fact that the innovative design itself is a
+non-rival good: each participant in a collaborative effort gets the value of the whole design, but
+incurs only a fraction of the design cost. +

+

+

If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s descended directly (as the authors acknowledge) from my argument in The Magic Cauldron that open-source projects are an inverse commons which encourage collaboration because that minimizes downstream costs to participating selfish actors. But Baldwin and von Hippel cast a much wider net than just software by developing a picture of user-driven and collaborative innovation in other industries — sporting goods, of all things, make several walk-ons in the paper.

+

Their demonstration is interesting in part because it bolsters my economic case against the GPL. The authors are saying, in effect, that we do live in what I called a “Type B” universe, where efficiency incentives favor the open-source design of software. In fact, they think they have a formal proof of this result, but I haven’t seen their 2006b paper so I can’t evaluate it. And they argue that the result applies to other forms of engineering design as well. I am cautious about this: they may be right, but my own intuition is that the effectiveness of open-source methods is limited when the limiting factor of production is something other than human attention.

+

There is one assumption they make that I think is stronger than necessary:

+

+By focusing on anticipated benefits and costs we assume that potential innovators are rational actors who can forecast the likely effects of their design effort and choose whether or not to expend the effort +

+

But, in fact, forecasting of this kind is extremely difficult and I don’t think any model should assume open-source contributors actually do it routinely. That would be equivalent to solving the patch-valuation problem I pointed out in The Magic Cauldron; I think there are good Hayekian reasons to doubt this is even possible.

+

I think Baldwin and Hippel are closer to the truth of the matter when they talk about institutions being self-reinforcing collaborative games, and I want to suggest a way in which that can explain rational-actor behavior without assuming a degree of knowledge and forecasting ability that the individual agents don’t actually possess.

+

+ In institutional game theory, an institution is defined as the equilibrium of a game with
+self-confirming beliefs (Aoki, 2001). Within the institutional framework, participants join or
+contribute resources in the expectation that other parties will enact their respective roles. If all
+behave as the others expect, everyone’s initial beliefs are confirmed: the pattern of action then
+becomes a self-perpetuating institution. When the participants in the institution are rational
+actors, one of their self-confirming beliefs must be, “I am better off participating in this
+institutional arrangement than withdrawing from it.” On this view, a stable nexus of contracts,
+a solvent firm, and an active open collaborative innovation project are all special cases of
+institutional equilibria. +

+

After this, Baldwin and von Hippel do some astute analysis of how changes in communication costs can make open-source collaboration viable. This is fine and worthy stuff; OK, so I got there first, but my arguments were qualitative and relatively informal. These two have have the analytical toolkit to be neoclassical where I was Austrian, and the degree of rigor they bring in is valuable.

+

But it seems to me that they are missing two other important effects: (1) rational evaluation of the collaborative game itself can substitute for forecasting the cost and value of particular design efforts, and (2) there is a sort of group-selection effect by which the relative success of different games changes individuals’ perceptions of the value of the one they are in. Where I am pointing here is towards nothing less than an economic analysis of the meaning and value of cultural loyalty.

+

Let us suppose that I, as an individual programmer, am exposed to the results of open source cooperation and find them beautiful and good. Because I want to be part of the culture that produces such things, I look for an open-source project to contribute to. I send a patch and experience the personal reward of seeing that it is incorporated in the project. Seeking that again, I contribute to this project, and perhaps to others.

+

I told a psychological story in the preceding paragraph, but I think there is an economic one underneath it. When the individual evaluates the products of the open-source culture are beautiful and good, he is learning confidence that his participation in the institution of open source is likely to bring him results he values. This confidence relieves him of the need to do a de novo payoff analysis for each bit of design effort he might invest. In effect, the manifest rationality of the entire game (judged by its products) reduces his decision costs with respect to any transaction in it. The effect is strictly parallel to the classical Coasian analysis of how firms lower decision and transaction costs for insiders.

+

With regard to my second point, institutions do not exist in isolation. Like firms, they have competitors. Competition occurs not just between individuals but between rival games, because institutions are selected for the ability to attract individuals to play their roles. Individuals judge institutions not only by their productive output in isolation but by their differences in productive output. Again, evaluation of these differences may, by reinforcing the beliefs associated with a winning institution, lower the individual’s decision costs about contributing design effort within it.

+

History matters, too. When an individual observes that an institution — such as an individual open-source project, or the entire open-source culture — has a long history of producing outputs of the sort the individual desires, that implies that it has competed successfully against rivals. This provides rational support for joining it, which again reduces the decision costs associated with any individual go/no-go choice about design effort.

+

There is yet another level: the individual knows that all the incentives operating on him also operate symmetrically on the other members of the institution. This edges us back towards the reciprocity incentives in the situation. I didn’t bring it up to rehash those but to point out that all these effects combine to reduce the overhead of making confident rational decisions about the payoff of individual design efforts from being somewhere in the knowledge-problem stratosphere to a level actual human beings can actually cope with.

+

Or, in other words: Yes, communication costs matter a lot. But so do loyalty, history, and trust.

diff --git a/20100420232821.blog b/20100420232821.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..274919a --- /dev/null +++ b/20100420232821.blog @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +Hear, O Nobly Born: The Way of the Hacker +

I get several requests in an average week from people who want me to teach them the way of hacking. Yesterday I got an unusually witty one in the form of a mystical poem, imploring me to accept the author as a disciple. I replied that I don’t know how to do what he seems to want, which is to pour the essence of hacking in through his ears or something. He replied that he was pretty sure I’d say that, but had been hoping for a reply in the manner of The Loginataka.

+

I told him “Sorry, I was distracted.” Then I wrote this:

+

+

Hear, O nobly born: Techniques can be taught, but the Way of the
+Hacker cannot be taught. Skills can be acquired, but the Way of the
+Hacker is not a checklist of skills. Programming can be accomplished,
+but the Way of the Hacker is not a place at which you can stop and say
+“I have arrived!”

+

Hear, O nobly born: The Way of the Hacker is a posture of mind; he who
+seeks a teacher of the Way knows it not, but he is only looking for a
+mirror. All those competent to teach the Way know that it cannot
+be taught, only pursued with joyous labor and by emulation of the
+great hackers of the past.

+

Hear, O nobly born: Great were the hackers of the past! Subtle and
+deep in their thinking, shaggy-bearded and with thunder on their
+brows! You may seek to become as them, but it will not suffice you to
+grow a beard.

+

Hear, O Nobly Born: The center of the mystery is the act of coding. You
+have a keyboard before you; pursue the Way through work.

diff --git a/20100421231727.blog b/20100421231727.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0387f71 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100421231727.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Penguicon! +

For any of you who happen to be in Southeast Michigan or its environs, Cathy and I will be attending Penguicon from April 30th to May 2nd.

+

A&D regular Ken Burnside will be there as well, sharing a room with us and hawking his excellent 3D space games – Attack Vector: Tactical, Squadron Strike and others. He’ll be teaching those games too, possibly with me at the table.

+

A&D regular Jay Maynard will be attending as well. Probably in full Tron Guy drag, at least part of the time.

+

Join us for a weekend of “You got your Linux geekery in my science fiction convention! Yeah, well, you got your science fiction stuff in my Linux convention!” Two great tastes that taste great together.

diff --git a/20100422133022.blog b/20100422133022.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f0f0f74 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100422133022.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Apple, postmodern consumerism and the iPad +

It’s not very often that I feel impelled to quote someone else’s blog post in its entirety, But Ann Althouse says of the iPad…

+

+I have it, and I feel like I could be using it. But I don’t really use it. Maybe I think I’m going to be using it. But I also think it’s possible that I’m never going to use it. I seem to have a need for it, but I have other things that fit that need that I go back to instead over and over again. And yet there it is, over there. I think I’m going to be going there, maybe later. Maybe tomorrow. +

+

Amazing. The iPad is the ultimate Steve Jobs device – so hypnotic that not only do people buy one without knowing what it’s good for, they keep feeling like they ought to use it even when they have better alternatives for everything it does. It’s a triumph of style over substance, cool over utility, form over actual function. The viral YouTube videos of cats and two-years-olds playing with it speak truth in their unsurpassable combination of draw-you-in cuteness with utter pointlessness. It’s the perfect lust object of postmodern consumerism, irresistibly attractive but empty – you know you’ve been played by the marketing and design but you don’t care because your complicity in the game is part of the point.

+

+

This has to be Steve Jobs’s last hurrah. I predict this not because he is aging and deathly ill, but because he can’t possibly top this. It is the ne plus ultra of where he has been going ever since the Mac in 1984, with his ever-more obsessive focus on the signifiers of product-design attractiveness. And it’s going to make Apple a huge crapload of money, no question.

+

But what comes after this? After reading Althouse, I’m getting the feeling that the ultimate may also be terminal. The way I thought the iPad was going to go was to get disrupted from below by less expensive, less locked-down Android tablets. Now I’m not sure there’s enough reality there to sustain the product category at all. The entire segment might well turn into as huge a bust as PDAs were in the 1990s. And that means that over the medium term, two to three years out, Apple is in even more trouble than I thought.

+

I’ve alluded before to the fact that the two most fanatical and longest-term Mac loyalists among my face-to-face friends are carrying Nexus Ones now, having migrated from Sidekicks but passing up the iPhone. The fact that Jobs couldn’t get these two people to change cellphone providers to worship at his shrine tells me more about the fading of Apple’s magic than the hot air and bullshit in a dozen market surveys. Apple has bet its company on the Jobs philosophy, but at the same time I see it losing the adhesive loyalty of the fanbase that’s been with it since the Mac Classic.

+

Fast-forward this a couple years and I can see Apple in hell, committed to sexy overpriced products that nobody actually needs, undercut by Android from all directions, and subsisting on a decaying aura of pop-cultural cool. Because that’s what tends to happen when you put yourself in the fashion business and you’re past your peak; those who live by hipness get to die by it too.

diff --git a/20100427163651.blog b/20100427163651.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..40831fd --- /dev/null +++ b/20100427163651.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +My open-source project is cooler than yours +

Yes, GPSD is way cooler than your project. You know how I can tell?

+

Because my latest feature request is from a scientist who wants to use GPSD as part of the control software for an autonomous robot submarine. That’s how I can tell.

+

No word yet on whether the robot submarine will have a frickin’ laser mounted on its frickin’ head. But I’m hoping.

diff --git a/20100428005352.blog b/20100428005352.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c662e25 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100428005352.blog @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +The Nexus One has landed: telecomms companies, beware! +

Google sent me one of the unlocked developer Nexus One phones. It arrived today. And, in the wake of recent news about Verizon not after all carrying the Nexus, stimulated some interesting thoughts in my mind about where the cellphone market is going. The balance of power is changing fast in ways that are going to be very good for consumers.

+

+

Let’s start with the microlevel. Here is what switching over to the Nexus One from my G-1 was like:

+

(1) I plugged in the Nexus to charge its battery.

+

(2) While it was charging, I enabled WiFi and entered the WEP key for my house wireless network and my Google account credentials.

+

(3) Over WiFi, without a sim card in it, it automatically synced my contacts from Google.

+

(4) I grabbed a couple of apps that I actually use from Android Market.

+

(5) I popped the backs off both phones, moved the sim card from one to the other…and everything just worked!

+

(It also took an over-the-air firmware update during this sequence. I had that as step 2, but a commenter pointed out that I must have misremembered the timing, because it would need the sim card in. I think what happened was that I remembered the update happening right after a boot, but forgot that it was the second boot – I had to pop out the battery to put the sim card in.)

+

This how it should be. Easy transition, mostly automatic, with the only hand-work required being things I hand-customized on the G-1. Notice what I didn’t have to do, which was throw myself on the tender mercies of my cellphone provider begging for (a) permission to change handsets, or (b) the magic keys to cross-load my contacts list and other data from the old phone to the new one.

+

The only thing I had to do that was even a bit mysterious was mount the Nexus’s SD as USB mass storage (which Android supports nicely) and drop my custom ringtones in Android/media/audio/ringtones, creating those directories beneath the pre-existing Android directory on the SD card. The only capability I lost was the app to manage my T-Mobile faves list (the five numbers I get free calls to) from the phone, and it turns out I can do that from my account on T-Mobile’s website…through the Nexus browser, if need be. No big deal since I’m not even allowed to change that list more than once a calendar month.

+

Yeah, sure, so that customized T-Mobile firmware was adding a lot of value to the G-1…not.

+

Which brings me to the larger topic of this post: how the balance of power between consumers and Google and the telecomms providers is changing, and what that means. Part of it is already expressed: I didn’t have to ask permission, I didn’t have to pay fees, I didn’t have to kiss a T-Mobile salesbeing’s ring…I just did it. Tremble, telecomms providers, because Android is a honey trap; it saves you truckloads on your engineering budget and dramatically improves your time to market, but it is already inexorably eroding your ability to lock in and gouge your customers.

+

At $529 the Nexus One is too expensive to affect the mass market directly – I couldn’t have justified buying one myself if Chris DiBona over at Google hadn’t generously opted to include me in a recent run of promotional giveaways. But it has broken the ice. Unlocked Android phones will get less expensive on a Moore’s-Law curve, and even while they’re still early-adopter toys they’re going to reshape consumer expectations about who gets to control what.

+

As that trend accelerates, it’s going to be interesting times out there. Consider, as a harbinger, Google’s dealings with Verizon.

+

We’d been hearing for months that Google and Verizon were going to do a deal on a Verizon-branded Nexus One. Then, last week, one of my spies confirmed that it was so, reporting that a friend of hers was involved in the field tests of the Verizon Nexus One. She told me “It’s crippled. The Verizon firmware is seriously inferior to the stock Google Android build.” My spy has a Google Nexus One like mine, and had seen the Verizon prototype in operation, so she was speaking from direct knowledge.

+

We both marveled at this. While it was certainly consistent with Verizon’s past behavior (lock in customers, then use the limitations of their handsets to hawk them stuff – like, custom ringtones because you can’t just download any old soundfile you want) it seemed to both of us like a stupid, self-destructive stunt to be pulling when the customers would have ‘pure’ Googlephones to compare the Verizon marque to.

+

Then, on 26 April, came word that the deal had been canceled and that Google was telling disappointed prospective customers to go buy Motorala Droids. When I heard about this, I assumed Verizon had had an attack of even more suicidal idiocy and backed out. But now it appears that, in fact, Google walked away. Verizon is now trying to pretend that it was never interested and all the hype was Google just fantasizing. But, thanks to my informant, I know better. Verizon had a prototype and Google killed it.

+

Here’s what I think actually happened….

+

Step One: Verizon latched on to the Nexus One’s new hotness for the same reason Android looks irresistible to almost every other telecoms provider in the world – huge savings in development costs, huge improvement in time to market, prospect of an app ecology adding value to it, and the open sourceness means Verizon couldn’t be locked in by a predatory upstream vendor. (As I’ve noted before, fear of the latter is the reason the telecomms outfits told Microsoft to stuff Windows Mobile up its own ass.) Note that these advantages were powerful enough to win the argument with iPhone – in fact, Verizon might very well have wanted an Android line specifically as a way of denying Apple power over them.

+

Step Two: Because Verizon is who it is, they proceeded to piss and shit all over Android until they liked the flavor better. And, as my informant reports, crippled it to a ludicrous degree.

+

Step Three: Google looked at the resulting mess and said “Not under our co-branding you don’t.” Sure, the code is open source, and Verizon could ship the prototype – but without Google’s imprimatur to divert attention from the scar tissue and holes where Verizon locked stuff down and ripped stuff out, there was no way for the product to be anything but an epic fail. There were probably other levers as well; losing Google’s engineering support would have hurt, and access to the app store might have been in play. Doesn’t matter; the point is, Google had enough leverage to abort the product launch, and they did.

+

The trade press is calling this a setback for Google. That is absurdly wrong, as demonstrated by the fact that Google can tell Verizon customers to go buy, instead of the cancelled Nexus One…another Android phone! Verizon is the loser here, not Google. Verizon tried to subvert Android, to flim-flam Google into propping up the walls on Verizon’s garden, and it failed.

+

The significance of this should not be missed. Eighteen months ago, when the G-1 was a prototype with a doubtful future, Verizon would have held the whip hand over Google; now, control of the smartphone market has shifted. You can stick a fork in the telecomms providers’ walled-garden strategy, because it’s done — and with it, all the lock-in and price gouging that they love so much. Google has served notice: it’s not going to tolerate the crippling of Android to protect anyone else’s margins, and it doesn’t have to. Because there are no realistic alternatives left, even for the exclusive iPhone provider (AT&T offers an Android phone, too).

+

Google has played a long game, and played it extremely well. (They can afford to; as I’ve noted before, the grand strategy around Android doesn’t rely on them making one thin dime in licensing fees.) They threw Android to the telecomms companies with barely any strings attached. They slow-balled Android’s introduction with the G-1. They knew that the economics of open-source development gave Android a bone-crushing advantage over proprietary systems, and they gave half a dozen telecomms providers time to figure that out and talk themselves into Android-centric strategic bets. They then tolerated a certain degree of initial fragmentation in order to allow their business partners the illusion that said business partners would control the pace of the roll-out, and get to selectively opt out of Android’s openness.

+

That illusion of control was persisting on borrowed time the day Google started selling the unlocked Nexus. Now it’s dead and in the same grave with the Verizon deal. Watch for Google to quietly but mercilessly increase the pressure on its business partners, and for updates and feature additions to effectively pass out of its’ partners’ control. Nine months from now, if you’re using any Android device later than a G-1 (which has hardware limitations that matter), you’ll be running the latest version of Android; talk of “fragmentation” will have faded like mists at sunrise. On about the same timescale, expect the cost of unlocked Android phones to drop below $200, at which point the market viability of locked phones will collapse. Telecomms providers will then lose control of the firmware entirely.

+

Of course, this is all good news for consumers. I started this post with a blow-by-blow description of how the G-1 and Nexus have empowered me (Yay! A phone upgrade that doesn’t feel like undergoing root canal!). This is what Google wants – frictionless phones, frictionless Web, and to commoditize all the co-factors in its advertising business. That means, as I’ve pointed out before, bludgeoning the telecomms providers into being nothing more than low-margin bit-haulers with the customer firmly in control.

+

It’s not just “Don’t be evil!”; as a matter of grand strategy, it’s in Google’s interest not to allow anyone else in the telecomms sector to be evil, either. And that’s good news for all of us.

diff --git a/20100429045659.blog b/20100429045659.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ad0a757 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100429045659.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Sheep from Goats: the rise in long-term unemployment +

The graph in this article is most interesting. The feature that fascinates me is not the huge crossover from short-term (0-14 week) to long-term (27 weeks or more) of employment, it’s the purple time series describing 15-26-week employment. It has spiked but is now dropping again.

+

I think I know what this means. It’s the statistical face of the phenomenon I described in Marginal Devolution.

+

+

You may recall that in that essay I described two friends of mine, one who’s been squeezed out of the labor market by the rising cost of employment and another who’s hanging on by his fingernails. I said “Increasingly it’s not just the classic hard-core unemployables (alcoholics, criminal deviants, crazies) that can’t pull enough weight to justify a paycheck; it’s the marginal ones, the mediocre, and the mildly dysfunctional.” And I pointed at a cause: “We’ve spent the last seventy years increasing the hidden overhead and downside risks associated with hiring a worker — which meant the minimum revenue-per-employee threshold below which hiring doesn’t make sense has crept up and up and up, gradually. This effect was partly masked by credit and asset bubbles, but those have now popped.”

+

I think this graph shows on the macro-level what happened to employment after the bubble popped.

+

The size of the cohort experiencing a near-median out-of-work period between jobs peaked in mid-2009 and has now returned to historically normal levels. I have a strong hunch that this cohort is demographically stable as well – that is, it’s mostly the same people in 2010 that it was in 2000.

+

The dramatic crossover from short to long-term unemployment in the rest of the working population is, I suspect, the result of my two friends multiplied by umpty-bump million. This is the job market exiling people who can’t generate enough value at work enough to cover the tax, regulatory, and deadweight costs of their employment. And I mean that “deadweight” as a very broad category including the effects of minimum-wage laws, the Davis-Bacon act, union work rules, diversity mandates, and all of the other ways we pile social costs onto employers. Obamacare, of course, will be yet another and can be expected to depress employment still further.

+

Of course, this can’t go on. It’s of a piece with the skyrocketing deficits even in G8 countries. Latest word is that Great Britain is facing a Greek-style bond downgrade and a debt crisis in the near future; Spain is already there. The state of California, which would be the sixth largest economy in the world if it were a nation, has done nothing to climb out of its budgetary hole because, really, what can it do? Within the political assumptions and alignments we have now, no solution is possible. A minimum of thirty-seven other states and the U.S. Federal Government are staring near-term bankruptcy down the muzzle for the exact same reasons.

+

The unemployment numbers and the deficit numbers aren’t simultaneously going crazy by accident. They’re two facets of the same systemic illness, two major symptoms of what I have previously dubbed an Olsonian collapse. It took us twenty years longer, but we’re now reaching the same crisis point the planned economies of the Communist Bloc hit around 1990. The regulatory megastate is in the process of being destroyed by its own contradictions.

+

UPDATE: Those of you who think the last paragraph extreme should note that no less eminent an economist than Robert Samuelson is now writing on The Welfare State’s Death Spiral. But I was there first… :-)

diff --git a/20100502144321.blog b/20100502144321.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dff71c4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100502144321.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +G-1 to Nexus One: an informal comparison +

It’s been an eventful week here at Eric Conspiracy Secret Labs, what with robot submarines busting out all over and a “Disruptive Innovation Award” from the Tribeca Film Festival (!) landing on my somewhat bemused head (possible topic of a later post). And I’m writing from Penguicon, where in about an hour I’m going to be starring in an event billed as “Jam Session with ESR – Ask Him Anything!” Whoever scheduled this for 9AM on the morning after Saturday night at a convention needs to be found and seriously hurt, but I figure anyone with enough willpower to show up at that unGoddessly hour of the morning deserves the best of me.

+

Which is all, in this case, a lead-in to observing that I’ve now been using a Google Nexus One under field and travel stress for about a week. The differences from the G-1 I had been carrying are, I think, suggestive about how Android-based smartphones are evolving and their competitive posture against the iPhone, Symbian, and Windows Mobile.

+

+

Perhaps the most widely-touted change in Android 2.0 is multitouch gestures; the G-1 didn’t support them, the Nexus One does. I’ve folded these into my routine now. They’re convenient in a minor way for zooming/unzooming web pages and scaling photographs as I’m turning them into contact icons, but I have to say that the hype around this feature now seems quite overblown to me.

+

Much more impressive in practice is the fact that voice-to-text now works on any text input box, rather than being a browser-only feature. It’s not perfect – you’ll get the occasional funny homonym – but it’s good enough to reduce the amount of typing I have to do really significantly, and the background-noise cancellation works remarkably well. I’ve grown used to having it work even in the hubbub of a crowded convention room.

+

As one might have expected, the Nexus interface is visually a lot slicker than the G-1’s plain-but-serviceable one. The way app access is now handled is nice – instead of living in a sort of slide-out drawer, they now explode onto the screen when you touch a sort of app constellation icon at the bottom center of the main screen.

+

But not all the improved visuals are good things; I think, in particular, that the animated wallpapers are a mistake. I don’t want my phone doing things that attract my eyes unless it has a real event notification for me. Fortunately, though the default is animated, still wallpapers remain available.

+

All the visual stuff is helped out by the fact that the Nexus One display is gorgeous – easily the best I’ve ever seen on any device of even approximately cellphone size, and clearly superior to even the iPhone’s. This is the feature that attracted me to the device when first I got to handle one; I use my phone browser heavily, and I very much wanted the upgrade in pixel count and luminance range. A week later: yes, it does matter in practice.

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My wife thinks it’s significant that the Nexis One is thinner and lighter than the G-1. I don’t, really, but then I have larger hands and larger pockets than she does. She’s probably right that this difference will matter more to the average mass-market consumer than it does to me.

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The biggest surprise to me about the Nexus One is that I’m missing the physical keyboard on the G-1 far less than I thought I would. I found the soft keyboard on the G-1 annoying and difficult to use, but something about the Nexus One version makes it significantly easier. This could be a consequence of the larger display size, or possibly the touch-recognition software has improved, or perhaps it’s both. The effectiveness of the Nexus One’s voice-to-text feature helps here.

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Some things they have sensibly left unchanged even though temptation to visually elaborate them must have been present. The notification bar and associated windowshade widget, in particular, is beautifully functional and works pretty much as it did on the G-1.

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So far, the most serious flaw I’ve found in the Nexus One’s hardware is that something about the surface treatment of the display seems to make it significantly more vulnerable to finger smudges than the G-1’s was. Alas, the software stack is a little more glitchy. Either the ability to do image saves from the browser is absent or I can’t figure out how to invoke it. And something seems off about the tuning of the touch interface in some components; notably, the app-list window seems to have trouble picking up the finger-flick to make the viewport spin.

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Overall, however, the Nexus is indeed a clear improvement on the G-1. It points the way Android is going pretty unambiguously – towards head-to-head competition with the iPhone, rather than simply vacuuming up the market share of dumb phones and lesser competitors such as Symbian and Windows Mobile.

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In at least one respect – the voice-to-text capabilty – Android is already ahead of anything iPhone offers or is ever likely to be able to support. There’s a huge infrastructure of statistical pattern-matching engines in the Google-cloud behind it that Apple won’t be able to replicate easily, if at all.

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Watching the next year of ths competition will be interesting.

diff --git a/20100504070123.blog b/20100504070123.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..65eea60 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100504070123.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +How many ways can you get Android wrong in one article? +

One of my regulars pointed me at Is Android Evil?, an article by one Andreas Constantinou which purports to be a brave and hardhitting contrarian take on Android.

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I read this, and I’m asking myself “Wow. How many different ways can one guy be wrong in the same article?” Particularly entertaining, and the main reason I’m bothering to rebut this nonsense, is the part where Mr. Brave Contrarian Guy claims that the success of Android has nothing to do with open source and then lists three “key factors” of its success in every one of which open source is critically involved.

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“With the unprecedented success of the iPhone and the take-it-or-leave-it terms dictated by Apple to network operators, the carriers have been eagerly looking for cheaper alternatives…” Damn straight they have been. And two of the key advantages of an open-source cellphone stack are: (1) avoiding per-unit licensing costs, and (2) you get to leverage the fact that somebody else spends most of the NRE. One wonders how Brave Contrarian guy thinks these could ever be duplicated by a closed-source OS.

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“Android provides the allure of a unified software platform supporting operator differentiation at a low cost (3 months instead of 12+…)” Yes, it does. It’s not like there’s any secret about open source cutting time-to-market; embedded-systems vendors for things that aren’t cellphones have been relying on this as a key part of their business strategies for years now. One wonders to what else Mr. Brave Contrarian Guy wants us to attribute this time-to-market advantage in the cellphone case. Are we supposed to think it was left under the telecomms operators’ pillows by the Tooth Fairy?

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His third point is mostly repetition. “In other words, in an Android handset, most of the OEM budget goes into differentiation; compare that to Symbian where most of the OEM budget goes into baseporting.” Well, duh. This is somebody-else-paid-most-of-the-NRE again. Mr. Utterly Oblivious Contrarian somehow fails to notice the central reason that investment could be spread across multiple stakeholders in the first place. You don’t get competitors covering each others’ engineering costs unless everybody rationally expects to get more out of the pool than they put in, and that’s exactly the promise open-source development both makes and delivers on.

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Mr. Brave Contrarian Guy then proceeds to list eight control points that he claims make Android “closed” even though the SDK is open. All of these miss the central constraint on Google, which is that if participation in Android doesn’t return more value to its development partners than they’re investing they can fork the codebase. His failure to grapple with the implications of this is even funnier since he notices that China Mobile is actually doing it.

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You have to think game theory about the second-order, third-order, and nth-order effects of irrevocable strategic commitment to really get what’s going on here, something Mr. Brave Contrarian Guy seems unwilling or unable to do. Everybody knows that one of the constraints of the open-source game is that overcontrol leads to forking; because it’s so, Google’s business partners can form justified expectations about its behavior that enable them to make billion-dollar bets with much more confidence in the stability of Google’s behavior than they could have otherwise. These expectations, in turn, create future value for Google in ways I’ve previously described…and so on, out through several more layers of strategic minimaxing by both Google and its partners. The bottom line is that these selfish agents can form a stable cooperative equilibrium that wouldn’t be stable without the open-source commitment.

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Against this background: Wow. So Google has process, partnership-agreement, and trademark constraints that push against any attempt to fragment the platform. How shocking! How unexpected! How courageous Andreas Constantinou is to write about them! I’d say the real question here is how anybody this dim manages to operate a keyboard, except I don’t actually think Constantinou is as stupid as he appears. What he’s done here is adopt the rhetorical posture of Mr. Brave Contrarian as a way of sexing up a business-case analysis that would otherwise rather boring and obvious. Well, except for the part he doesn’t get: those control points create value for the Android OEMs, too by stabilizing the cooperative game that all parties are playing.

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His failure to get that would be OK, because the factual material about specific Google control points isn’t completely useless even without the insight that they’re game stabilizers, if Constantinou hadn’t felt he needed to set up his rhetorical ploy with a quite idiotic series of claims about open source being irrelevant. But Google knows better and so do its partners — and if they somehow managed to forget that, the China Mobile fork would be there to remind them.

diff --git a/20100510050320.blog b/20100510050320.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f935876 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100510050320.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Summer sword training is coming up +

This year I will once again be going to Michigan for summer sword training. I wrote about this back in 2008 in a series of posts beginning with “And So, It Begins…”. Should you make the opportunity for it, this is an amazing summer adventure vacation that will teach you much and probably leave you with lifelong friendships. I’m posting a heads-up because I think many of my regulars would find it interesting.

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Since 2008 the school I used to train with has fissioned. There are now two schools descended from it; Sal Sanfratello runs one and his former chief instructor Heather Fish the other. Sal kept the Aegis name, Heather the training facility and most of the senior instructors. There are people who train and hang out with both groups; my wife and I are among them.

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Heather’s group, Polaris Fellowship of Weapons Study, will be running their Summer Weapons Retreat June 23rd to June 27nd. Sal’s, Aegis proper, is running their Sword Camp in July; I’ve forgotten the exact date and it’s not on their Sword Camp page, but I’ll post it in an update as soon as I dig it up.

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My wife Cathy and I will be at the Polaris event, as I was last year. I wanted to do Sal’s this year, but I discovered I had a schedule conflict that week when Sal first announced his date.

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I’m not going to recommend one over the other, if only because I have good relations with both schools and want to keep it that way. But even if I were willing to risk alienating one of two good friends, I’d be hard put to say which is “better”. Sal and Heather are both superb instructors, they’re teaching the same basic curriculum, and the schools haven’t had time to evolve very far apart yet. (I know this because while I missed Sal’s last camp I hang out at Aegis demos – I wore the Aegis staff shirt and helped Sal run a panel on duelling at Penguicon last weekend).

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The differences are at this point still largely stylistic. Sal, and his training, have a bit more of a masculine military edge, while Heather is moving her group towards being a bit more like a conventional martial-arts school attractive to health-and-wellness types (including designing a belt-rank system, though that hasn’t been fielded yet). It is unlikely that Heather’s group will teach classes on improvised munitions or advanced firearms…on the other hand, she has more depth on the instructors’ bench and kept the physical site that did a lot to make previous Sword Camps memorable.

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Either way, you will train intensively for a solid week in combat skills with sword and shield. The training weapon is a boffer that simulates a cut-and-thrust transitional sword from around 1500; the base style is southern Italian. Shields are 24″-to-26″-diameter and round, with an active parrying technique. Swordplay and weapons quite like these were central to European combat for a thousand years, from the late Iron Age to the end of the Renaissance. You will have some opportunity to learn other related styles as well: notably single sword without shield and close fighting with short blades. This is a battlefield style, not a stylized dueling form; you will fight in the round, and both schools do a lot with formation tactics and fighting in groups.

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I’m recommending either one. They both have slots for Basic training still open, though that may not be true for long; more than about four Basic-level students each is not really feasible with the headcount of instructors either school has available. The (overlapping) student populations are not a bad reason to show up in themselves, as they are (a) selected for intelligence, (b) serious, self-motivated martial artists, and (c) usually science-fiction fans, and/or SCA types, and/or neopagans, and/or gamer-geeks. Seldom have I known a more interesting group of folks to hang with.

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As both schools are selective, you must apply and provide character references. Contact addresses are on the websites previously referenced. Previous martial-arts background is helpful but not necessary. You must be able to handle an instructional style that is both information-dense and relatively nondirective and self-paced – the physical exercises may resemble boot camp but the intellectual level is more like a college seminar.

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Physically and mentally challenging? Oh yes…you’ll work hard, you’ll play hard, you’ll have a helluva good time, and you’ll leave walking just a bit taller than you came in.

diff --git a/20100511051237.blog b/20100511051237.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..16da99d --- /dev/null +++ b/20100511051237.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Android Rising +

The news comes to us today that in 1Q 2010 Android phones outsold Apple’s iPhone by a significant 7%. As it said on the gunslinger’s gravestone, “I was expecting this, but not so soon.”

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Business Week and the Wall Street Journal are on the story, but the most interesting version is from the story they’re apparently deriving from at All Things Digital, because it includes a graph showing recent market share trends that conveys a lot more information than the present-time numbers.

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I’ve written before that I think Google has been running a long game aimed against the telecomms carriers’ preferred strategy of customer lock-in, and executing on that game very well. Against the iPhone, its strategy has been a classic example of what the economist Clayton Christensen called “disruption from below” in his classic The Innovator’s Dilemma. With the G-1, Google initially competed on price, winning customers who didn’t want to pay Apple/AT&T’s premium and were willing to trade away Apple’s perceived superiority in “user experience” for a better price. Just as importantly, Android offered a near-irresistible deal to the carriers: months, even years slashed off time-to-market for a state-of-the-art cellphone; a huge advantage in licensing costs; and the illusion (now disintegrating) that said carriers would be able to retain enough control of Android-powered devices to practice their habitual screw-the-customer tactics.

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In Christensen’s model, a market being disrupted from below features two products, sustaining and disrupter, both improving over time but with the disruptor at a lower price point and lesser capabilities. Typically, the sustaining company will be focused on control of its customers and business partners to extract maximum margins; on the other hand, the disruptor will be playing a ubiquity game, sacrificing margin to gain share. The sustaining company will gold-plate its product in order to chase high-end price-insensitive customers; the disruptor will seek out price-sensitive low-end customers.

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The trap for the sustaining company/product is that as it chases high-end customers, it will ship marques that are more and more gold-plated – overdesigned, overengineered, and overpriced relative to what most customers actually want. The break in the market occurs when the disruptor reaches the level of capability that customers actually want to pay for, at which point they switch over en masse and the bottom falls out of the sustainers’ market share. If it’s very lucky, it holds onto an eroding fortress at the high end of the market for a while. A short while. Lots of historical examples of this pattern can be found at the Wikipedia article.

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In the smartphone market I have been expecting a disruptive break that would body-slam Apple’s market share, but I expected it to be several quarters in the future and with a really fast drop-off when it happened. Instead, it looks like Apple took a bruising in 4Q 2009 and has failed to regain share in 1Q 2010 while Android sales continued to rocket. Android hammered market-leader Blackberry just as badly, a fact which has gotten far less play than it probably should because the trade-press loves the drama of the Apple-vs.-Google catfight so much.

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What actually seems to be going on here is that Android is successfully disrupting both Apple and Blackberry from below; together they’ve lost about 25% of market share, not enough to put Android on top but close enough that another quarter like the last will certainly do that. What does this tell us?

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First, that Google’s slow-ball launch of Android and its attempt to advance on a broad front by co-opting a lot of vendors has worked spectacularly well, recent fallings-out with Sprint and Verizon over the Nexus One notwithstanding. The Motorola Droid and lower-end Android phones have to be selling like crazy for NPD’s numbers to look like they do, and I believe that because I’ve been tripping over new Droid users a lot lately. I predicted that the ubiquity game would beat the control game, so I get to do a bit of a fist-pump about this.

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Second…several articles of conventional wisdom need to be re-examined. One is the attractive power of the app store. Apple’s supposed advantage here isn’t doing them any obvious good at all. How can we tell? Like this: Apple and Blackberry have experienced very similar drops in unit share, about 7% each in the last two quarters. One has an app store, the other doesn’t. [I was wrong about this; Blackberry has one, but Apple's is universally conceded to be far better.] If that’s made any, difference, it’s not one that’s showing in the numbers. The least hypothesis is that the app store doesn’t matter.

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My best guess is that mass-market smartphone users are already overserved by even Android’s app store, let alone Apple’s allegedly richer one. Who could build any kind of mental model of what’s there without it being a full-time job? Hard-core geek that I am, I’d be one of those most rationally expected to dive in and turn my phone into an app-enabled superwidget…but the truth is, I’ve only ever grabbed a dozen or so, and most of those were games, and the only two I use regularly are games I could do without. I might as well be on a Blackberry.

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Onboard apps just don’t look like they’re that important. We developers and maybe-someday developers need to face the disturbing possibility that, basically, users don’t care about them. That they’re buying (um) phones, not the Superwidget of the Future, and all the hype about apps was mostly just sustainer gold-plating.

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Third: it doesn’t look offhand like anything about the iPhone is saving it from bleeding unit share right in parallel with Blackberry. This includes Apple’s vaunted superiority at UI and physical product design. All the arguments about how far Android is or is not behind the iPhone on this level begin to look to me like irrelevant, elaborate ways of missing the point – because nobody thinks Blackberry competes well in UI polish with Apple, and that lack doesn’t seem to make a damn bit of difference to the velocity at which they’re both losing share to Android.

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Time out for a moment while I laugh and point at the Apple fanboys. In your fantasies, mass-market smartphone customers were just pullulating with eagerness to plight their troth to Apple’s unsurpassed UI like so many architecture students swooning over Barcelona chairs. You overlooked the fact that the same advantages never pulled Apple’s computer market share over 10% and they’ve been hard-pressed there as well; in January they dropped to fifth place in the U.S. Steve Jobs’s pitch to everybody’s inner art fag is beginning to look a little threadbare.

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I suppose about the only good news for anti-Androiders is that WinMobile, the only contender many of them love to hate more, got the living snot beaten out of it sooner than the iPhone and Blackberry did. It’s dropped about 10% unit share since 1Q 2009, only 3% or so of which was in the last two quarters. In fact, as I look at that graph, Android is the only smartphone contender to post a net rise in unit share since mid-2009!

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Apple, Blackberry, WinMobile, Palm…that graph says Android is eating everybody’s lunch. And not slowly, either, but even more rapidly than I predicted it would. This is going to have knock-on effects. I will leave as an example exercise for the reader the question of what it does to the future of the iPad.

diff --git a/20100519223421.blog b/20100519223421.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f7ba94e --- /dev/null +++ b/20100519223421.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Software licenses as conversation +

An article published yesterday, I could license you to use this software, but then I’d have to kill you calls out some odd outliers in the open-source licensing space – odder, actually, than any I ever reviewed when I was the founding president of the Open Source Initiative. I wonder, though, if the author actually gets all the levels of the joke.

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The author notes that the top 10 licenses cover 93% of all projects and the top 20 almost 97%; the oddities lie in the remaining 3%. If one were to graph the frequencies, I’m guessing the distribution would roughly obey the generalized Zipf’s Law. He’s particularly amused by Poul-Henning Kamp’s Beerware License, the “Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License “, and the “Death and Repudiation License”; read his article for the terms of these.

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The author writes as though he finds the motivation for these licenses difficult to understand. I don’t, though; they make perfect sense if you understand open source licenses not as legal documents but as signaling devices, or as rhetorical rendezvous points for particular social contracts, or even as tribal totems.

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This is probably the sanest way to view them, anyway. Years of reviewing open-source licenses and learning about the applicable law has left me with the evaluation that (legally speaking) they’re mostly air and voodoo, reflecting a touching but unjustified faith that judges and courts will execute them as though they were programs in legalese. In retrospect, I think the enormous efforts put in the half-decade around 2000 into producing licenses “better drafted” than the classics (GPL/MIT/BSD) was pretty much entirely a waste of time – and I say that as a key player in those efforts. The brutal truth is that if a court understands and agrees with a simple license’s intention, the court will find doctrinal reasons to enforce it – and if it doesn’t, not all the complex language and careful drafting in the world will prevent the court from doing what it damn well pleases.

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Open source licenses make more sense as tribal totems, or as statements of the licensor’s position in an ongoing conversation about how the open-source community defines itself. One of the features of conversation is that people comment on, make jokes about, and emit satires of other peoples’ speech.

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Thus, for example: I haven’t checked with Henning-Kemp, but when I read his Beerware License I see a man saying “Whoa! Step back, we are all taking ourselves waaay too seriously here.” OK, interesting behavior tends to be overdetermined and I have no reason to doubt that the guy likes beer and enjoys the collection of autographed exotic beer bottles a commenter reports he has accumulated. Still, the effect is to poke gentle fun at the cult-like earnestness around a lot of licensing debates. I don’t think that’s an accident. And I approve.

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It’s even clearer that the Do What the Fuck You Want To Public License is a satire. The author is one of those who thinks the Free Software Foundation has traduced the word “free” by hedging the GNU General Public License about with restrictions and boobytraps in the name of “freedom” – and he’s got an issue or two with BSD as well. He is poking fun at both camps, not gently at all. His page about the WTFPL is funny-because-it’s-true hilarious, and I admit that I feel a sneaking temptation to start using it myself.

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The Death and Repudiation License isn’t a satire, exactly. It appears on some software dual-licensed with BSD, so nobody ever actually has to apply it. It appears to be a screw-you gesture aimed at people who wanted the software dual-licensed, probably with GPL. The software author’s reply was “Yeah, I got yer dual license right here.”

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The feature all these licenses share is that, though they’re drafted as legal documents and may have the force of same, they’re not actually about the legalities at all. It might be interesting to audit the other licenses with frequencies down in the statistical noise and see what percentage are like this; I’d bet there are lots of others.

diff --git a/20100521073041.blog b/20100521073041.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cd9baa1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100521073041.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +New music update +

I’ve written before about what a revelation Pandora Radio has been for me. Following, in no particular order, some capsule reviews of new bands I’ve discovered and old bands I’ve rediscovered through this resource.

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Porcupine Tree spans a gamut between elaborate old-school prog rock, crunchy new-school prog-metal, and Pink-Floydish spaciness. Steven Wilson is a genuine genius who, unlike all too many of his stripe, manages not to slip into mere self-indulgence very often. If you like Radiohead or Transatlantic, this is the band that ups their game.

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My reaction to Swedish death-metal band Opeth is more mixed. They write achingly beautiful music from a palette of influences that includes rock, classical, middle-eastern, technical metal, and pyschedelia – then they disfigure it with growling-zombie vocals. This is rendered odder by the fact that their vocalist can actually sing quite well and very movingly and will sometimes switch in and out of growling within in a track. One is left wondering why.

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I find that Billy Cobham’s pioneering jazz-fusion albums from the early 1970s hold up extremely well, sounding much less dated than a lot of stuff from that era. I’m thinking especially of Spectrum and Crosswinds. It may be difficult to hear, nowadays, how innovative they were, because the fusion guys won the argument and reshaped much of mainstream jazz in their image.

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The players in Riverside have done what Opeth should have; they’ve found a prog-metal sound that’s lush and stirringly beautiful (with a similar palette of influences) and transcended their death-metal roots. The result is like unto the epic progressive-rock concept albums of my teens, but with better musicianship and a pleasing absence of pointless bloat.

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Planet X is, I think, my single favorite Pandora discovery – instrumental prog-metal played with filigree elegance and dark, savage intensity. The sound is dominated by layers upon intricate layers, often creatively dissonent, of knotty keyboards and shred guitar. Tempo and signature changes are frequent and the rhythm section is fully part of the conversation in a way that recalls the best jazz fusion. The effect is both spacy and crunchy, atmospheric and epic at the same time.

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The Hellecasters are three session musicians from Nashville who record instrumental guitar albums in a style that could be described as follows: pour one part Grand Old Opry and one part Jeff Beck into a cocktail shaker, bolt a warp drive to the shaker, light it up and stand back. The results are both pyrotechnically good playing and hilariously funny. The funny is intentional; it is reliably reported that they recorded their first album, The Return of the Hellecasters as a joke, and their retro/campy cover of the Peter Gunn theme tends to confirm that. There have been two sequels. May there be many more.

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Gordian Knot is another superb instrumental prog-metal band, differing from Planet X in being more overtly jazz-influenced and taking a cooler, more cerebral approach to their material. Indeed, some people might find their one album a touch on the sterile and mathematical side,. but I don’t think there was a track on it that didn’t challenge me to think about what the musicians were doing and present me with textures and contrasts not quite like any I’d ever heard before. A very promising debut that I’d like to see followed up.

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Ozric Tentacles is just as much weird and loopy fun is you might expect from their name. It’s sort of late-70s instrumental space rock reloaded, but played like tight jazz with a keyboard- and bass-centered sound. The arrangements are rich and full of quirky, unexpected turns; the sound is unique and, once you’ve heard three or four tracks, instantly recognizable. This is party music for brights.

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I wasn’t a big fan of Dream Theater during their first fifteen minutes of fame in the early 1990s. I got a couple of their albums as Christmas gifts from my sister Lisa, who understands my tastes pretty well and likes to push my envelope a little, but I found them too full of glossy soulless vocals and rock-opera pretentiousness. But Dream Theater shares musical DNA and personnel with a lot of bands I do like; Liquid Tension Experiment is a brilliant case in point, as are Planet X and Gordian Knot. Thus, they’ve been showing up on my Pandora station a lot and I’ve developed new respect for them. They’re good listening when they shut the annoying vocalist up and just play. John Petrucci’s brilliant guitar work can earn forgiveness for a lot of excess.

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Tool utterly blew me away with Lateralus, but I found the following album 10,000 Days a severe disappointment. Grungy prog-metal in 5/4 time is a trick you can repeat only so many times before it gets stale and you need to do something else, and they didn’t; 10,000 Days taken as a whole sounded like a weak imitation of Lateralus by a band that had run out of ideas and energy. But tracks from it kept coming up in my Pandora station, and I noticed something interesting; taken individually, and surrounded by other music, they sounded much better. So I’ve rediscovered that album, too.

diff --git a/20100523134309.blog b/20100523134309.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8e4d909 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100523134309.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Now’s a bad time to be an Apple fanboy… +

It’s an unhappy day for Apple fanboys. Dan Lyons Newsweek’s tech correspondent just ditched the iPhone for Android, slamming the phone and Steve Jobs’s control-freak strategy in very harsh terms.

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It might be tempting to dismiss this on the grounds that Dan Lyons is, not to put too fine a point on it, a fool whose confidence in his own judgment is in inverse proportion to its quality; his gullibility about SCO’s allegations in their lawsuit against IBM became legendary, and some of the stuff he’s written about blogging is hilariously stupid. Given his track record, betting directly against his technology and market projections would be smarter than betting on them.

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Yes, but…Newsweek is an awfully big megaphone. And the larger news isn’t the bad stuff that pushed him away from Apple, it’s the good stuff the pulled him towards Android. The Android 2.2 feature list is a body blow from which the iPhone, already trailing Android devices in unit sales, may not be able to recover.

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I’m not going to be coy about this. You can talk about all the other cool 2.2 features all day long, but the real killer is that Android 2.2 phones will be on-demand WiFi hotspots. This by itself will have all the laptop-toting road warriors I know falling over themselves to switch to Android phones. Imagine, no more airport and hotel connection fees; it’s easy if you try. Buh-bye Apple.

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Announcing Flash 10 support twists the knife. OK, Flash is fragile crap and we’d all be better off if it disappeared, but as a way to ram home the contrast between Google’s “do what you want” and Steve Jobs’s “do what I want”, Flash support is a marketing gesture that’s pretty tough to top.

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I’m not going to count off the rest of the feature list here, because I want to focus on the larger picture. Apple has been outflanked by Google’s multi-vendor strategy, outsold in new unit sales, and is now outgunned in technology and user-visible features. Again, I was expecting this…but not so soon.

diff --git a/20100525100841.blog b/20100525100841.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..607a63c --- /dev/null +++ b/20100525100841.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Flattening the Smartphone Market +

Common cellphone operating systems like Android, WebOS, and Maemo are depriving cellphone carriers of one of their most treasured means of keeping customers in the dark and feeding them bullshit. They’re making smartphones comparable to each other, and by doing so brutally intensifying the competitive pressure on the carriers.

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Before these common platforms, one of the ways carriers had to quell customer demand for features like tethering was simply that the feature sets of different phones were difficult for customers to compare in meaningful ways, and there was no real benchmark for what a cellphone could or should do (I mean, other than make phone calls).

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That’s all changed now. To see how, consider the impact of the Froyo announcement – Android 2.2. This was a feature list of what upcoming cellphones would be able to do that wasn’t censored by a carrier. Every actual Android phone offering from now on will be compared against the Froyo feature list and against all other Android cellphones. And if any come out with an Android feature disabled or available only at extra cost, the pressure won’t be on Google – it will be on the carrier.

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Consider as an example the feature of 2.2 that looks most deadly to the iPhone right now – its ability to act as a WiFi hotspot for up to 8 devices. If you’re Sprint, and you’re betting your company on fielding a 4G data network that means always-on high-bandwidth Internet for your road-warrior customers, this is great news; you’re ready, and the marketing for the EVO 4G is already promising it. If you’re not Sprint, your data network is probably underprovisioned and this feature scares the living crap out of you.

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But what are you going to do about that? If you disable the feature, you drive your customers to Sprint. If you charge extra for the feature, you still drive your customers to Sprint (people love flat-rate plans; they have a psychological resistance to being nickled and dimed, even when it’s an economically rational choice for them). In effect, Sprint is defecting from the feature-suppression cartel that has kept tethering out of the hands of almost all U.S. cellphone users. And this is difficult for the other carriers to obfuscate because now, everybody knows that Android 2.2 is supposed to do that.

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I’ve written before that the carriers are losing control of their cellphones’ feature sets to Google. First to go has been the ringtone market; not much life left in it when you can grab any random MP3 or OGG off the net and use it as a ringtone. Android 2.2 is where this becomes overt. There’s been a lot of talk about how Apple will have to play catchup with the 2.2 feature list at its iPhone 4G announcement, but the story behind that is that the carriers will now have to play catchup. The same competitive logic that applies to tethering in 2.2 will apply to any other feature Google chooses to ship in future releases – and consider the havoc this could wreak if it were (say) VOIP support or SIP conferencing.

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Back to Apple. Anybody want to bet that Steve Jobs hasn’t already been on the horn to AT&T demanding that they allow the iPhone 4G to ship with tethering enabled? From his point of view this is now a must-have if the 4G isn’t going to look like a weak second-best. But AT&T is going to push back, oh yes they will, because they’re already notorious for iPhone service problems stemming from network underprovisioning and congestion. Hilarity, and possibly some bloodletting, will ensue. There are only three possible outcomes here: (a) iPhone 4G fails to ship with tethering, in which case Apple and AT&T both take a hit, (b) iPhone 4G ships with tethering and it sucks, in which case AT&T takes a hit and Apple may dodge a bullet or not, or (c) AT&T ponies up a gigabuck or three to upgrade to 4G at record speed.

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The punchline is that Google is now setting the agenda for Apple, AT&T and the carriers in general. Products are now comparable; everyone has to react to Android feature announcements. Google can probably raise the bar faster than they can react. What if it were to, say, announce native support for SIP teleconferencing in 2.3? Suddenly proprietary videophone support wouldn’t be a differentiator anymore.

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It’s by steps like this that Google will hammer the carriers to their knees, consigning them to the role of low-margin bit-haulers while Google ratchets up the smartphone feature set. I’d say it has already begun, but that would be understating the case; with Android 2.2 the process is already quite advanced.

diff --git a/20100526084200.blog b/20100526084200.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..079c503 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100526084200.blog @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +The Iron Laws of Network Cost Scaling +

The shape of the cost curves that show up as we build and run communications networks have properties that seem counterintuitive to many people, but that have been surprisingly consistent across lots of different technologies since at least the days of the telegraph, and probably further back than that.

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Herewith, the Iron Laws of Network Cost Scaling:

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1. Upgrade cost per increment of capacity decreases as capacity rises.

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2. Network costs scale primarily with the number of troubleshooters required to run them, not with capacity.

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3. Under market pressure, network pricing evolves from metered to flat-rate.

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When you learn to apply all three of these together, you can make useful qualitative predictions across a surprisingly broad set of real-world cases.

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The easiest way to see why upgrade cost per increment of capacity decreases as capacity rises is to think about the high capital cost associated with laying the first cable from A to B. You’re going to have to pay to dig a trench and lay conduit, or put the functional equivalent of telephone poles in a right-of-way. If we’re talking wireless, you need two antenna towers – OK, maybe one if the start end is on your net already. Trenches are expensive; rights-of-way and poles are expensive; towers are expensive.

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But once you’ve got that physical conduit or poles or towers in place, pulling replacement wire or upgrading your radio repeaters is much less expensive. As your tech level rises, you (mostly) stop having to do that, even; you find cleverer ways to squeeze bandwidth out of fiber, copper, or air by using denser encodings, better noise cancellation – better algorithms. The action moves from hardware to software and upgrade costs drop.

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As a very recent example of how the shift from hardware to software affects developing communications networks, the differences between the two major fourth-generation wireless data technologies, WiMAX and LTE, are so slight that the same hardware, running different software, can support either. This means that on any timescale longer than that required to push firmware upgrades to your repeaters, the differences between the two aren’t of consequence for planning.

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The amortized cost of network capacity gets cheaper fast, partly due to the first Iron Law and partly due to the Moore’s Law cost curve of hardware. Skilled people on the spot don’t get cheaper. Therefore the dominant cost driver is salaries for people required to run the network. Furthermore, hardware/software maintainence costs tend to be low for the links (which are simple) and high for the switching nodes (which are complex).

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The consequence is that cost scales not with network capacity but roughly with the number of routers and switches in the network, and is primarily salaries for people to watch and troubleshoot the routers and switches. This fact is well known to anyone who has ever had to actually run a data center or a network; it’s a reality that recurs very forcefully every time you have to pay the monthly bills.

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There’s actually more we can say about this. In a roughly scale-free network (which communication networks with smart routing tend to become; it’s an effective way of maximizing robustness against random failures), the node count is coupled to the link count by about n log n. This means that as network reach or coverage (proportional to the number of leaf nodes, aka customers) rises linearly, the number of interior nodes (which counts routers and switches) actually rises sublinearly.

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This is all in stark contrast with most peoples’ intuitions about network costs, which heavily overweight capital expenditures, heavily overweight bandwidth cost, and predict linear or superlinear rises in administrative costs as coverage increases (the “high-friction” model of network costs). But with a more correct model in hand, we can approach the third Iron Law: under market pressure, network pricing evolves from metered to flat-rate.

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This is certainly the way network pricing has moved historically. Can we say anything generative about why this is so?

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Yes, as a matter of fact, we can. We saw before that as customer count rises linearly, the major cost drivers in the network (router and switch count, and salaries for people to watch them) rise sublinearly. But to do per-transaction metering you have to store, manage, and process an amount of state that rises directly with customer usage – that is, linearly. This means that, especially on a maturing network, the cost to meter usage rises faster than the cost to serve new customers!

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The qualifier “under market pressure” is important. Customers really don’t like being charged for both usage and maximum capacity. But they dislike being charged for usage more, because it makes their costs harder to predict (and usually higher). Comms providers are ruthless about exploiting the myth of high network friction to justify high prices and metering, and they generally get away with this for a while in the early stages of a new communications technology. But at least two things cooperate to change this over time, both actually effects of the widening gap between that mythical “high-friction” cost curve and the actual one.

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One is that metering overhead rises as a proportional drag on on per-customer revenue (and thus profits) as the network’s coverage increases. Again, this is strictly predictable from the fact that the cost of service rises more slowly than the cost to meter. The other is that profit margins, as in any other sort of market, tend to get competed down towards actual cost levels. Telecomms vendors, like all other producers of non-positional goods, feel constant pressure to price in a way that actually matches their cost structure more closely.

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Usually this means pricing by maximum capacity with no metering. Eventually, as link capacity reaches a level the average customer isn’t capable of saturating, flat-rate unlimited starts to make more sense.

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Thus, communications-network prices have a very specific trajectory that’s repeated over and over with new technologies: from metered by transaction to billed by maximum capacity to flat-rate unlimited. The providers resist each change as ferociously as possible, because each one is accompanied by a shift to decreasing profit margins on increasing volume, but the underlying logic is inexorable.

diff --git a/20100528162631.blog b/20100528162631.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a5713c6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100528162631.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +I am twitter-enabled, mainly for gaming purposes +

Those of you who wish to follow me on Twitter can now do so.

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You’ll find much of my Twitter content a bit strange, as I am using it mainly to play an on-line game called EchoBazaar. All the tweets labeled #ebz are game stuff.

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EchoBazaar has an interesting business model: you play for free, but can buy Fate Points useful in game. I understand this has been done before, but it’s the first time I’ve encountered it.

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(Someone else has twitter ID “esr”, alas.)

diff --git a/20100601103534.blog b/20100601103534.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..43e2d77 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100601103534.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +AIS “security” considered harmful +

One Kelly Sweeney is publicly advocating that public access to AIS ship information should be prohibited in order to foil pirates and terrorists.

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I must respectfully disagree with the premise of this article. I’m the lead of GPSD, a widely-used open-source GPS/AIS monitor daemon, and I am thus both a domain expert on AIS and a systems architect who is required to think about data security issues all the time. Attempting to “secure” AIS data would harm the public and have no security benefits. In fact, the second-order effects would be seriously bad.

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The public harm is obvious; people such as your friend on Puget Sound with an interest in knowing what traffic passes near them would be hindered. But it would also fail to have security benefits, because getting actual use out of AIS is in direct contradiction with the threat model.

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AIS information has to be widely available to anyone on the water in order for the system to achieve its design purposes (notably, automated collision avoidance). This means that credentials to get access to it have to be widely distributed as well. Pirates and terrorists would have very strong incentives to steal and spoof those credentials.

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Any security light enough to leave the system usable would be no more than a minor, easily surmountable nuisance to the bad guys; any security heavy enough to stop them would make the friction cost of enabling AIS high enough to effectively lock out many legitimate users who have actual need for it.

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Suppose for example that AIS receivers were password-protected so that a skipper had to enter an MMSI/password pair periodically to maintain access. The consequences you’d be begging for would include (a) most boaters never changing a factory-preset password that the bad guys would swiftly learn, (b) forgetful boaters putting their passwords on post-its near the AIS receiver, (c) boats being raided and stolen for receivers with known passwords, (d) non-forgetful boaters being threatened and tortured for their passwords.

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Ineffective security is often worse than none at all. This would be one of those cases.

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Also see my Comment to USCG on NAIS policy

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(I have attempted to leave this as a comment on Captain Sweeney’s blog,. but the UI and captcha challenge there is so badly designed that I don’t know whether or not I have succeeded.)

diff --git a/20100602112518.blog b/20100602112518.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7af39a2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100602112518.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Steve Jobs’ Snow Job +

One of my predictions in Flattening The Cellphone Market came true today. It suggests that the iPhone’s Android-induced troubles are about to get much worse.

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I had written:

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+Back to Apple. Anybody want to bet that Steve Jobs hasn’t already been on the horn to AT&T demanding that they allow the iPhone 4G to ship with tethering enabled? From his point of view this is now a must-have if the 4G isn’t going to look like a weak second-best. But AT&T is going to push back, oh yes they will, because they’re already notorious for iPhone service problems stemming from network underprovisioning and congestion. Hilarity, and possibly some bloodletting, will ensue. There are only three possible outcomes here: (a) iPhone 4G fails to ship with tethering, in which case Apple and AT&T both take a hit, (b) iPhone 4G ships with tethering and it sucks, in which case AT&T takes a hit and Apple may dodge a bullet or not, or (c) AT&T ponies up a gigabuck or three to upgrade to 4G at record speed. +

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It looks like we got outcome (b). Apple AT&T announced today that the 4G will allow tethering for an extra $20 per month, but there’s a sting in the tail: only with a new data plan that has a 2G-per-month cap, and the iPhone unlimited-data plan is being scrapped. I think we can deduce from what wasn’t announced that there will be no mobile-Wifi-hotspot support, especially since multiple WiFi clients would hit that cap in no time at all.

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And yes, iPhone tethering is going to suck. We learn from Business Week that iPhone users average 7 times the data load of non-iPhone users on AT&T’s network. This means the usage cap will hit them 7 times as hard.

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It’s pretty clear that Jobs’s reality-distortion-field failed and AT&T won this round with Apple. The net effect will be to decrease the data load on AT&T’s creaking, underprovisioned network while increasing the toll charged for it. Unfortunately for Apple, this probably also means that the iPhone 4G is not going to achieve feature parity with Android 2.2. Of course it’s possible that Jobs is going to pull the mobile-Wifi-hotspot feature out of the air at WWDC in 5 days, but now that looks unlikely. The timing of today’s announcement tells me that Apple doesn’t want to be seen to be playing catch-up at WWDC.

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Catch-up is, nevertheless, what Apple has to play now. It’s significantly behind in features (mobile-Wifi-hotspot, voice recognition, and Flash support are the big ones) and behind in new-unit sales. It’s fast alienating app developers with onerous restrictions on development tools and an app-approval policy that looks increasingly murky and arbitrary. All of which makes me think Steve Jobs’s cunning has deserted him, that he’s either losing his grip or overtightening it.

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It will be interesting to see how aggressive the Android-using carriers get about kicking Apple when it’s down. Sprint, in particular, has a golden opportunity two days from now at the EVO 4G launch. It’s already announced that the mobile-WiFi -hotspot feature is on; if Sprint decides to exploit its 4G buildout by making that feature uncapped, Apple will get well and truly hammered among the elite, opinion-molding users it most covets.

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This also illustrates the point that Apple’s bind isn’t entirely due to Android. The fact that iPhone has a U.S. exclusive with a badly underprovisioned carrier is seriously limiting Steve Jobs’s ability to respond. One wonders what he will do about that, or can do.

diff --git a/20100604153227.blog b/20100604153227.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e33189e --- /dev/null +++ b/20100604153227.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +More dispatches from the smartphone wars +

Well, it was fun carrying the most advanced smartphone on the planet. For a whole 32 days. But the Sprint EVO 4G launched today and its specs – especially the larger OLED display and WiMAX capability – put the Nexus One in the shade.

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The bigger story today, though, is the ripple effects of AT&T consigning its unlimited-data plans to the dustbin of history. Gizmodo’s take, AT&T Just Killed Unlimited Wireless Data (and Screwed Everybody in the Process), is pretty representative.

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Because I understand how network costs scale I’m more sanguine about the longer-term prospects than Gizmodo is. Unlimited flat rate will return when someone – probably Sprint, given the nature of their network buildout – decides it’s a useful competitive weapon. That will force others to follow suit; the market-equilibrium condition will be all flat rate, same as it is in voice calling today and for exactly the same reasons.

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In the short term, though, AT&T’s move kicks Apple square in the nuts. The simplicity of unlimited-flat-rate data was a significant part of the appeal of the iPhone and iPad; this change takes a significant part of the shine off both devices, especially the iPad. Understanding this, Apple has suspended Web-store sales of the iPad 3G. Indirectly, this is good news for Android and should help it maintain the upward momentum from Q1, in which it surpassed the iPhone in unit sales.

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This also means the stakes for Steve Jobs’s talk at WWDC in three days have gone way, way up. The iPhone is reduced to #3 in unit sales; it’s lagging Android in features like Flash, voice-to-text, and WiFi-hotspot capability; developers are near revolt against murky app-store policies; and now it’s got higher total cost of ownership! The product looks stale and tired. Jobs needs to pull a rabbit out of his hat, and fast.

diff --git a/20100607145009.blog b/20100607145009.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4729a9c --- /dev/null +++ b/20100607145009.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +The iPhone 4: Too little, too late +

As I write, the announcement of the iPhone 4 at WWDC is just a few hours old. See the Engadget coverage for details. The bottom line? This is too little, too late to stop the Android deluge.

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There are some very cool individual features on this phone, no doubt. The two that stand out the most to me are the onboard gyroscope and the “retina display” – yes, 960 x 640 at 326ppi will be damn nice, and if I were writing apps I would seriously lust for that six-axis motion sensing. But the improvements are mainly in the hardware; Apple has conspicuously failed to address the areas where it has fallen behind Android 2.2 in software. There’s no progress on voice recognition, Flash, or WiFi hotspot capability. And even the hardware falls short of where it needs to be; while 802.11n is nice, the “G” after that “4” is conspicuously missing.

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If I were an Apple marketing guy, I’d be asking “How the hell can I compete against the EVO 4G with this?”

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Maybe the biggest news is that, as I predicted, the iPhone 4 has not gone multicarrier in the U.S.. And it desperately needed to, especially after AT&T effectively shitcanned its unlimited-data plan. The hopeful rumors of a CDMA iPhone remain only hopeful rumors.

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The “one more thing” rabbit Jobs pulled out of his hat was full-motion video in calls between iPhones. But it was a lame rabbit, only working over WiFi. Jobs says Apple is in talks with carriers about this, and I’ll bet a lot of the “talks” consist of AT&T cursing sulphurously about a feature that couldn’t have been better designed to bring an underprovisioned cell network to its knees if it had been done on purpose. I’m guessing this “feature” will quietly disappear into the same limbo as Apple TV.

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Another point: it’s going to be tough for Apple to make any hay out of the talk of Android fragmentation since it has conceded that 3GS and older apps will need “a little work” to take full advantage of the new display.

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I wasn’t anticipating a really strong riposte from Apple this time out, but the iPhone 4 manages to low-ball even my minimal expectations. Better displays were coming anyway; about the only prompt effect I can see is that this announcement will make six-axis motion sensing a checklist feature for next-generation Android phones. On the software side, Android 2.2 has certainly won this round, leaving Apple with still more lag to make up on its next refresh.

diff --git a/20100610195055.blog b/20100610195055.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e5b21b9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100610195055.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Missing the point: The real stakes in the smartphone wars +

The responses to my last several posts on the smartphone wars (The iPhone 4: Too little, too late; More dispatches from the smartphone wars; Steve Jobs’ Snow Job; Flattening the Smartphone Market; Now’s a bad time to be an Apple fanboy…; Android Rising) demonstrate that many of my readers continue to miss the real stakes in the smartphone wars and the real point of my analyses of them.

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It’s not about whether or not Apple will be crushed. It’s not about who makes the “best” products, where “best” is measured by some interaction between the product and the speaker’s evaluation of the relative importance of various features and costs. It’s about what the next generation of personal computing platforms will be. Down one fork they’ll be open, hackable, and user-controlled. Down the other they’ll be closed, locked down, and vendor-controlled. Though there are others on each side of this struggle, in 2010 it comes down to whether Apple or Android wins the race to over 50% smartphone market share; after that point, network effects will become self-reinforcing until the next technology disruption.

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When I took my first hard look at the smartphone wars (Why Android matters), I observed that “…Google itself doesn’t have to win or end up with control of anything for the future to play out as described. It’s not even necessary that Android itself be the eventual dominant cellphone platform. All they have to do is force the competitive conditions so that whatever does end up dominating is as open as Android is.” This remains the single most important fact behind Google’s strategy. It means they’re playing to achieve an Internet that is as friction-free and commoditized as possible, with no one else able to extract tolls or rents that would cut into their future ad revenue. It also means they don’t have to make a single dime from Android licensing to win – in fact, it makes business sense for them to spend engineering dollars for the short-term benefit of telephone carriers in order to keep smartphones out of anyone else’s control.

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The good news – from both Google’s and the consumer’s point of view – is not so much that Android is winning. It’s that the closed-source proprietary alternatives to Android are all losing. WinMobile is a joke. The least implausible candidates to come out of left field would be WebOS and MeeGo, the former mostly open source and the latter entirely.

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At this point Apple’s iPhone OS is the only viable champion of a bad outcome. But Apple does not have to go into receivership for the long-term good to prevail. If Apple is content to be what it has been in the PC space – a boutique vendor building its notion of the “best” products, with high margins and a single-digit market share – that’s not a problem. In that future, we could leave the fashion victims and art fags to their insistence that Apple does the slickest “user experience” and that’s all that matters, without worrying that their cult-like devotion will cause problems for the rest of us.

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What must not be allowed to happen is a recurrence of single-vendor closed-source monopoly, only with better industrial design and PR than Microsoft’s. That would be bad…but it also looks almost vanishingly unlikely now. The iPhone 4 was at best a very weak riposte against Android 2.2; it will keep its fanbase, but (especially in view of Apple’s failure to go multicarrier and AT&T’s recent pricing moves) almost certainly won’t regain Apple’s lost market share, let alone slow down Android as the latter hoovers up most of the user conversions from dumb phones.

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Really, the fact that the Sprint EVO 4 and Nexus One even look plausible against the iPhone probably means it’s game over for any thought Apple might have entertained of owning the smartphone space. Apple fanboys who are now itching to repeat “But that’s never been what they were after…” at me for the forty-seventh-gazillionth time should just stuff it. If you’re right, that just means that Android has already won in the only sense I have ever cared about, care about now, or ever will care about before the heat-death of the universe.

diff --git a/20100611174151.blog b/20100611174151.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1cb1f41 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100611174151.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Hanging nicely: a practical tip for pistol-wearers +

I made a minor but useful discovery about pistol holsters this morning. It may be something a million shooters have figured out sooner, but since it took me over a year of constant carry to notice there are probably at least as many who haven’t. Therefore the following tip.

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I use several carry methods depending on conditions. One of them is a DeSantis MiniSlide, a smallish leather belt holster designed for concealed carry; my belt threads through slots in the holster’s side flaps. While this rig is generally satisfactory, it has shown some tendency to slide around, and adjusting the rig when it slips into an uncomfortable position is something I prefer not to do in public.

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This morning it occurred to me that I could cut down on the shifting by threading my belt through the rear slot in the holster, under one of the keeper loops on my Levis, and then through the front slot of the holster. This does two good things: (1) it snugs down the belt between the holster slots, slightly increasing the inward pressure on the flaps so slippage is decreased, and (2) it prevents the weapon from sliding any further forward or back than the point at which one side will hang up on the keeper in the middle.

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That is all.

diff --git a/20100619101120.blog b/20100619101120.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9ea2a4a --- /dev/null +++ b/20100619101120.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +A Specter is Haunting Genetics +

Had my life gone a little differently, I might have been a molecular geneticist and hip-deep in what is now called bioinformatics. When I was twelve or thirteen or so I came to intellectual grips with the fact that I have congenital cerebral palsy; shortly thereafter I dove into the science of congenital defects, developmental biology, and from there into genetics. Eventually I taught myself a fair chunk of organic chemistry before becoming fascinated by linguistics and theoretical mathematics, and a few twists and turns from there got me into software engineering; but my interest in genetics and human developmental biology didn’t cease so much as become pushed into the background. I give this background to explain why I’ve been paying closer attention to genetics than most people do ever since.

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In the wake of the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome, I’ve seen three or four forward-looking articles about the implications of cheap genomic analysis (most recently a quite good one in The Economist) all of which are are haunted by a common fear. It’s almost like they’re written to a template; glowing projections of accelerated drug discovery, personalized medicine, and deep insight into the nature of humanity, ended on a worried note about what we’ll find when we discover just how much of human variation is genetically rather than environmentally controlled. Sometimes the prognosticator can only bring himself to drop hints, but the braver ones come out and ask the question: what if it turns out that genetic differences among races are real and actually matter?

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A specter is haunting genetics; the shadow of racialist slavery, eugenics, and Naziism. Western civilization since 1945, traumatized by the horror of the Holocaust, has elevated anti-racism into an unquestionable secular piety. Much good has been accomplished thereby, but like all pieties the worthy results have been accompanied by a great deal of willed repression, denial, and cant. Evidence that racial genetic differences do matter is not actually hard to find; Murray & Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve (1994) included a brave and excellent summation of the science on this point. Consequently, the bien-pensant reaction to that book was hysterical vilification, anathematization of heresy in full cry. Even at the time the lurking fear beneath the hysteria was easy to spot – that the authors might, after all, be right, and must be damned even more intensely because they might be.

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Now, in 2010, cleared-eyed observers are imagining a near-term future scenario that looks like this: (1) we will shortly have genomic-sequence information on hundreds of thousands of human beings from all over the planet, enough to build a detailed map of human genetic variation and a science of behavioral genetics. (2) We will confirm that variant alleles correlate strongly with significant measures of human ability and character, beginning with IQ and quite possibly continuing to distribution of time preference, sociability, docility, and other important traits. (3) We will discover that these same alleles correlate significantly with traditional indicia of race.

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In fact, given the state of our present knowledge, I judge all three of these outcomes are near certain. I have previously written about some of the evidence in Racism and Group Differences. The truth is out there; well known to psychometricians, population geneticists and anyone who cares to look, but surrounded by layers of denial. The cant has become thick enough to, for example, create an entire secondary mythology about IQ (e.g., that it’s a meaningless number or the tests for it are racially/culturally biased). It also damages our politics; many people, for example, avert their eyes from the danger posed by Islamism because they fear being tagged as racists. All this repression has been firmly held in place by the justified fear of truly hideous evils – from the color bar through compulsory sterilization of the ‘inferior’ clear up to the smoking chimneys at Treblinka and Dachau. But…if the repressed is about to inevitably return on us, how do we cope?

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It’s not going to be easy. I saw this coming in the mid-1990s, and I’m expecting the readjustment to be among the most traumatic issues in 21st-century politics. The problem with repression, on both individual and cultural levels, is that when it breaks down it tends to produce explosions of poorly-controlled emotional energy; the release products are frequently ugly. It takes little imagination to visualize a future 15 or 20 years hence in which the results of behavioral genetics are seized on as effective propaganda by neo-Nazis and other racist demagogues, with the authority of science being bent towards truly appalling consequences.

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I’m writing about this because I think a first step to coping is to stop discussing the evidence in code and and the stakes in hushed whispers. Continuing the repression will only make the blow-off uglier. Contrariwise, the sooner we end the denial, the sooner we’ll actually solve the problem.

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And we can solve the problem; there’s never really been any mystery about how to do it. The simple, powerful truth that banishes racist prejudice is this: the individual is not the mass. Statistical distributions do not predict the traits of individuals. It’s OK to acknowledge that (for example) Ashkenazic Jews average significantly brighter than gentile whites, because the difference in the means of those bell curves tells us nothing about where any single Jew or gentile falls on them.

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We can – we must, in fact – learn to judge individuals as individuals, not as members of racial or other ascriptive groups. This has always been the right thing to do; as knowledge about genetic group differences becomes more detailed and widespread, we will need to learn how to focus rigorously on individuals with the same discipline (and the same justified fear of failure) that we now apply to averting our eyes from genetic group differences.

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Part of the reason this evolution won’t be easy is that so much of our politics has been distorted by racial grievance-mongering. It’s not only the obvious bad guys like neo-Nazis, Black separatists like Louis Farrakhan, and Bharatiya Janata who are invested in racialist categorization as a lever to power. The political Left has fallen into a lazy habit of screaming “racist!” at anyone who disagrees with them, won’t readily relinquish that rhetorical club, and have a lot invested in the present system of taboo, resentment, “disparate impact” legislation, and racial identity politics; expect them, too, to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

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Still, the right strategy is clear. Actual knowledge makes both prejudice and repression unsustainable. “Know thyself!” said the oracle, and behavioral genetics will allow – actually. force us – to know ourselves in ways we never have before. That way lies the pain of revelation, but also the path of redemption.

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Also clear is at least one important tactic: objective testing. We already use this in athletics; if you can’t score the goal, run the mile, or leap the hurdle, you don’t make the team and your skin color is irrelevant. But today, employers and schools generally won’t use IQ tests or many other forms of psychometry out of fear of a discrimination lawsuit brought under a disparate-impact theory. This is exactly backwards; in fact, good psychometry, by allowing us to measure important traits in individuals, is exactly the way to make superficials like their skin color irrelevant.

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Fifty to seventy-five years from now, I think our present “corrective” obsession with race will be seen for what it is – as a pernicious flip side of overt racism, an entrenchment of attitudes not made much less evil or silly merely because it’s a bit more subtle than what it replaced. Our great-grandchildren will consider racial special pleading every bit as ugly as racial prejudice, and wonder why we didn’t. Their historians will tell them we were traumatized for generations by the Holocaust and be right, but that fact will have lost much of its emotional impact through the passage of time. This wound, too, will heal.

diff --git a/20100622212209.blog b/20100622212209.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..26dd4db --- /dev/null +++ b/20100622212209.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Reports of PC’s Impending Death Greatly Exaggerated +

One Farhad Manjoo has attracted some attention by projecting in an article written for Slate that desktop PCs are headed for extinction, outcompeted by laptops and netbooks.

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I have seen the future and I say “Balderdash!” It is undoubtedly true that computers will continue to get smaller and lighter and more portable. Indeed, I’m expecting that for most people, descendants of smartphones will become their primary computing devices. I am, however also certain that this does not imply the demise of “desktop” systems.

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Manjoo, and other enthusiasts for the imminent death of the desktop PC, are missing a basic ergonomic point. Computers themselves could shrink to the size of a matchbox without inconveniencing anyone – but some of the things attached to them are scaled to humans and don’t shrink so easily. Of these, the two most significant are display screens and keyboards.

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The kind of tiny display that will fit on a smartphone is just barely usable for browsing the Web, provided you’re willing to accept some inconveniences like not having an actual mouse. Tiny keyboards are OK for tiny amounts of text. We accept these inconveniences in a smartphone because it has to fit in a pocket.

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But, for steady use, there are no good substitutes for having at least 1K by 1K pixels on a display large enough to mostly fill your visual field, and a full-size/full-travel keyboard. Furthermore, being able to adjust the position of your keyboard and monitor separately can be pretty important if you want to avoid a stiff neck and other posture-related aches and pains.

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These ergonomic constraints can’t be satisfied by anything in a smartphone, netbook, or laptop package. Instead, I expect that human-sized peripherals will begin to decouple from ever-tinier computers. As I’ve previously projected, there will be a growing market for human-scale peripherals meant to be slaved to a computing core that you walk up to them, using a USB docking cradle or some analogous technology.

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There’s a conceptual error in projections like Manjoo’s, that of thinking of a “computer” as an indissoluble lump that has to bundle together all of the hardware capabilities we associate with a PC. But human needs are more various than that. In the future, the hardware to meet them will be too.

diff --git a/20100701110248.blog b/20100701110248.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b59f09c --- /dev/null +++ b/20100701110248.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +After the McDonald decision: what next? +

Monday’s decision in McDonald vs. City of Chicago is a major victory for civil rights. Yes, it was 5-4 and the ruling was weaker than it could have been, but the basic holding that the Second Amendment is incorporated against states and all lower levels of government can be a powerful tool for positive change if we wield it correctly. The legal climate for full restoration of firearms rights in the U.S. is now better than it’s been since the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968.

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Much remains to be done, however. The Heller ruling in 2008, while affirming that firearms ownership is a fundamental individual right, allowed “reasonable regulation” and failed to specify a standard of scrutiny for what is “reasonable”; the McDonald decision does not specify this either. The constitutionally correct position, of course, is that laws infringing on Second Amendment liberties should have to meet the same strictest-scrutiny standard applied where the First Amendment is concerned — but the City of Chicago has already made plain its intent to nullify the Heller and MacDonald rulings by equating “reasonable” with “prohibitive”.

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The next major round of litigation will almost certainly be over the scrutiny standard. The tactical question for gun-rights advocates, though, is which kind of state and local regulations to attack, and in what order. Of course outright gun bans like Chicago’s need to be first on the target list; but after that, what?

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It seems to me that the next logical target is concealed-carry bans and permit requirements for handguns. This is an issue that affects more Americans than restrictions on long arms or registration requirements, so popular pressure should be easiest to muster here. Two states (Wisconsin and Illinois) forbid concealed carry altogether; three others (Alaska, Vermont, and Arizona) do not have any permit requirement. Comparing crime and violence rates per capita it’s pretty clear which arrangement wins.

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If I were a pro-Second-Amendment lawyer, I would argue thusly: (1) the applicable standard is “strict scrutiny”, e.g. the law must serve a compelling purpose which cannot be served by less stringent regulation, and (2) the example of Alaska and Vermont shows that these regulations do not serve a compelling purpose at all.

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It will be interesting to see if any civil-rights group is brave enough to try this.

diff --git a/20100702103841.blog b/20100702103841.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..122e311 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100702103841.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Apple gets egg on its face — single platform = single doom +

One of the predictable responses to my recent writings on the smartphone market and the rise of Android has been a deluge of scornful invective by Apple fans confidently predicting that Android’s 1Q2010 surge in unit share represented a bubble that would pop under pressure from Apple’s “superior user experience”.

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Then came the flap over the iPhone4’s antenna problems, and the silence of the fans. Yeah, that’s a superior user experience, all right – huge percentages of dropped calls (including reports that it drops 100% of calls when the bottom left corner is touched), and Steve Jobs telling iPhone 4 users it’s all their fault because they’re holding their phones wrong. The satirical backlash at Jobs on the Internet has been merciless, and completely deserved. Nokia even had the cheek to post a blog entry on the many ways you can hold your Nokia phone.

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Now comes Apple’s attempt to spin the problem out of existence. The tone of desperation is palpable. “Oops…” Apple says “…we fucked up the display algorithm for the signal strength meter.” Oh, yeah, that’s a superior user experience all right. It’s Apple, and It Just Works!(tm).

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But there’s a story behind this story. Actually, two stories. One is that Apple is lying outright about the scope and nature of the problems. And the second, more important one, is that the fragility of the single-carrier, single-platform strategy for iOS has come around to bite Apple hard. There’s a lesson here for the future.

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First, Apple is lying. While I have no trouble believing the iOS signal-strength meter is screwed up, there’s a hardware-design problem too. We know this because the company has posted job openings for antenna engineers. In fact, it gets better. Apple knew there was a problem before launch because it was looking for top antenna engineers before Jobs announced the product. Remember, though, Apple’s user experience is superior! In other breaking news from the Ministry of Truth, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and the Obama stimulus worked.

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Second…in outlining Apple’s struggle against disruption from below by Android, I’ve repeatedly used the term “outflanked”. Apple’s single-carrier, single-platform strategy leaves it exposed to single-point failures that Android can recover from more easily because it’s got other carriers and hardware to fall back on. If, say, my Nexus One were to have a problem when you grip it a certain way (and there are reports it does) consumers would correctly identify this as an HTC problem rather than a Google problem. Apple, having elected to own everything, gets to own every failure. And to be hostage to AT&T’s crappy network and its pricing moves.

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It never looked very likely that the iPhone line would recover the unit share advantage against Android that it lost earlier this year. Now Apple has taken a serious hit to their brand image and they’ll be lucky not to watch their share drop like a rock. And there’s no one else Apple can blame; they launched the iPhone 4 with serious user-visible software errors and (on the evidence of those job postings) knowing the antenna design was defective. Apple owns every failure.

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In the future, the Apple fanboys trumpeting the “superior user experience” among my commenters will be pointed to this post and mocked without mercy. Your god has failed you, even in the terms it set itself as the criteria of excellence. The iPhone 4 now stands for lies and incompetence.

diff --git a/20100703163431.blog b/20100703163431.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..01c0d62 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100703163431.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +FroYo, yum yum! +

The over-the-air update for Android 2.2, aka FroYo, landed on my Nexus One this morning.

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The WiFi hotspot feature works perfectly when tested with my ThinkPad X61 running Linux.

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I am liberated. No more per-diem WiFi charges in hotels. No more cursing as I discover that the airport hotspots are all pay-for-play. Internet on my laptop in the shotgun seat of the car!

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This feature will be a must for road warriors everywhere. And the iPhone 4 doesn’t have it. The screams of denial from the Apple fanboys as that absence costs Apple another hunk of market share that it will never get back should be most entertaining.

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UPDATE: Have verified that USB tethering just works, too. Plug it in and go!

diff --git a/20100706195102.blog b/20100706195102.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..35fc355 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100706195102.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality +

Oh Thoth Trismegistus, oh Ma’at, oh Ganesha, oh sweet lady Eris…I have not laughed so hard in years!

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Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of the brightest people I’ve ever met in a lifetime of seeking out gifted- to genius-grade thinkers because people who aren’t usually bore me pretty quickly. Eliezer has spent years studying the deep structure of rationality and probably understands the systematic sources of bias and irrationality in the shared architecture of the human mind as comprehensively as anyone alive. I have previously commented on some of his writings.

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Usually Eliezer thinks about questions like how to build human-compatible ethical reasoning into AIs. Serious, deep stuff. When he turns the vast and imponderable force of his intellect to writing, of all things, Harry Potter fanfic, a quite unexpected degree of hilarity ensues.

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Read it and laugh. Read it and learn. Eliezer re-invents Harry Potter as a skeptic genius who sets himself the task of figuring out just how all this “magic” stuff works. The science is real – it really would be a lot harder to explain transformation from a human into a cat than mere levitation, for example. When Harry, confronted with a magical time-travel device, is immediately terrified that he might be holding an antimatter bomb, this is actually a more justified fear than many readers may understand.

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But the characters are not slighted. Eliezer is very good at giving them responses to the rather altered and powered-up Harry that are consistent with canon. The development of Minerva McGonagall is particularly fine.

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Strongly recommended. And if you manage to learn about sources of cognitive bias like the Planning Fallacy and the Bystander Effect (among others) while your sides are hurting with laughter, so much the better.

diff --git a/20100707035236.blog b/20100707035236.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4d1638b --- /dev/null +++ b/20100707035236.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +What is truth? +

[This may become part of a book.]

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What is truth? There are complicated ways of explaining “truth” that get all tangled up in questions about reality and perception, but we’re going to use a very simple one: truth is what makes the future less surprising.

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No matter what you think you are and no matter what “reality” may be, the experience that you have to deal with (like every other human being) is of being thrown into a surrounding that does things independently of your thoughts. Shit happens, and you have to deal with it. The first step to dealing with it is to be able to predict it.

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So, for example, if somebody says to you “It’s raining outside,” the meaning of that claim is a bundle of implied predictions, including “If you go outside without a hat, hood, or umbrella your head will get wet.” You test the truth of that claim by checking if those predictions are true. You don’t have to know what water “really is”, or for that matter what “reality” is. (We’ll get to what “reality” is later; it’s not actually very complicated when you start from here.)

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All truth claims can be unpacked as predictions. Sometimes they’re predictions about obvious, directly observable events in our immediate environment (“Rain will make your head wet.”). Sometimes they’re predictions about events we can’t observe directly but which have consequences we can observe (“Electricity is a flow of electrons,” or “Genetic information is carried by DNA.”) Sometimes they’re predictions about the distribution of outcomes in repeated tests (“A flipped coin will fall heads-up half the time and tails-up half the time.)

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Sometimes truth claims are predictions about states of mind in other people – but even these are tested by observable consequences. If I say “Cathy likes chocolate,” for example, you could check that claim by offering Cathy some and seeing if she smiles.

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If anyone makes a “truth” claim at you that you can’t unpack into testable predictions, be careful. It may be that you don’t understand the claim but it’s still true – if you don’t know what the properties of an electron are, for example, you’re not going to get much meaning out of the truth claim “Electricity is a flow of electrons”.

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But it may also be that the claim is meaningless. A classic example is the sentence “Green ideas sleep furiously.” How would you tell if this is true? What consequences could you check? You can only assign a meaning to this sentence if you can answer these questions.

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A more concise way of putting it is that every truth claim corresponds to a set of experiments, not necessarily in the formal sense with test tubes and lab coats but in the informal way that we might stick a hand out a window to see if water falls on it.

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And now we can say what “reality” is; it’s wherever the experiments happen. It’s whatever observables are accessible to us.

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We can also say what “theory” is. A theory is just a machine for generating predictions. We judge the theory’s “truth” by whether those predictions are correct. And, remember, we make predictions because we need to cope with the shit that happens. A theory is a survival adaptation: we are theory-builders because we are prediction-needers because we are goal-seekers because we are survival machines.

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All other distinctions, even those as basic as the one between “me” and “everything else”, are consequences of our need to theory-build so we can generate predictions so we can cope with the shit that happens.

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Often, this theory-building has happened out of sight of our conscious minds. Some theories (like the one that there’s a “me”, and an “everything else”) are formed so early in life that by the time we learn to speak we’ve forgotten the process. Others, like the theory that reality consists of “objects” separated by “space”, are wired deep into the evolved structure of our nervous systems.

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[Having got this far, we can start talking about mental models and perception and the map-territory distinction and ontology. The point is *not to try to do those first*; that way lies only confusion. And, BTW, good for you you if you recognized this as Peirce crossed with Heidegger with a dash of Husserl.]

diff --git a/20100707213145.blog b/20100707213145.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5a0b7ba --- /dev/null +++ b/20100707213145.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +The Model M: A timeless classic +

I just found an informative article about the origin, life, and astonishing persistence of my favorite keyboard. Nearly every article on this blog was hammered out on the same Unicomp Model M I’m typing on now. The design is 25 years old and still going strong, a nearly unique longevity in computing devices.

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I endorse every bit of snarkiness and ergonomic wisdom in that article. I find the lack of tactile feeback and noise from modern “soft-touch” keyboards disconcerting and uncomfortable. It does my heart good to know the model M is still being produced, now with USB interfaces even. I expect I’ll be using these until I die or we get brain/computer interfaces, whichever comes first.

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I feel about the Model M the way I feel about the 1911-pattern .45 pistol and the core design of Unix. All three of these are too frequently dismissed as dinosaurs, but stand out to the discerning as timeless classics of square-shouldered ruggedness and fitness-for-purpose whose virtues, it seems, need to be rediscovered anew in every generation. They get the job done, outlasting transitory fads and fashions; they endure, with quiet excellence that is burnished rather than eroded by the passage of years. They have what architect Christopher Alexander called the Quality Without A Name and embody as well as any engineering design can the human quality the ancient Greeks called arete.

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I have been many things in my life, but I am first and last and always an engineer, a maker. To me, designs that achieve the level of excellence of these examples are art to rival the Parthenon, fit to be counted among the great achievements of any civilization. It’s no bar that they are humble and utilitarian; in fact, I think they speak on that account more truthfully about the virtues of their designers and their civilization than art objects made for display and to impress.

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As such, the Model M (and all engineering designs at that level of excellence) are worth celebrating. If you have one, take a moment to think about your keyboard and appreciate it. If you don’t, find out what you’re missing and buy one so Unicomp will keep making the lovely things for another 25 years, and many more after that.

diff --git a/20100711153637.blog b/20100711153637.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..63eef41 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100711153637.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Killing the Founder +

During the controversy I described in Condemning Censorship, Even of Werewolves one of the parties characterized me as “nuts and in decline.”. This failed to bother me, and not because I’m insulated against such insults by my natural arrogance. OK, I am largely insulated against such insults by my natural arrogance, but that’s not the main reason I easily shed this one.

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In general I’m much less bothered about people who think I’m crazy than they usually think I should be because I know a lot about the life cycle of reform movements. I studied this topic rather carefully in early 1998, just after Netscape announced its intention to release the Mozilla sources, when I noticed that a burgeoning reform movement seemed to need me to lead it. I was particularly influenced in my thinking by the history of John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Community.

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Here is part of what I learned: There comes a point in the development of every reform movement at which it has to kill the founder. Or anathematize him, or declare him out of his mind. Or neutralize him in a more subtle way by putting him on a pedestal so high that he can’t actually influence events on the ground.

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Movements that don’t do this tend strongly to remain dependent on the founder’s special nous, and don’t survive his death or incapacity. Children have to separate themselves from their parents in order to become adults. Reform movements have to kill their founders in order to survive them.

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Some founders, failing to realize this, hold their movement in an iron grip of personal charisma. By doing so, they fail to allow the movement to mature and institutionalize itself properly. They generally end up being declared crazy anyway, and they take whatever they’ve accomplished down to dust with them when they die.

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There are sporadic exceptions to this rule, but they’re the sort that tend to prove it. Generally the apparent exceptions happen because a second charismatic leader pulls together something from the wreckage left by the first. My favorite example of this is the reformulation of Babism into the Baha’i Faith by Baha’u’llah after the death of the Bab.

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But generally, if the founder is not at least metaphorically killed, the movement does not live.

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This is not the outcome I wanted for the open-source movement. I had the capability to hold it in a grip of charisma, had I so chosen; instead, I consciously engineered a different outcome over a period of years, through both things I did and things I did not do. Many of those decisions are now taken for granted by people who cannot really imagine how it could have been otherwise.

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Yes, this means that more than a decade ago I knew that the day would likely come when significant portions of the movement would dismiss me as a loon, or worse. I accepted that consequence with my eyes open. I view it as normal, healthy, and even necessary that this be so.

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I don’t know if we’ve actually reached that point yet, but if and when we do it won’t bother me. I did not do what I did for anyone’s approval; I did it because it was right. And then I let go.

diff --git a/20100714163300.blog b/20100714163300.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e1e6dea --- /dev/null +++ b/20100714163300.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +The doom of the telecomms carriers +

Forward-thinking technologists, including me, have been predicting for some time that adaptive mesh networking would be the doom of the telecomms-carrier and broadband oligopoly. Now comes a scientist from Australia with an idea so diabolically clever that I’m annoyed with myself for not thinking of it sooner: put the mesh networking in smartphones!

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For those who came in late, “adaptive mesh network” is shorthand for a way to do Internet everywhere by building cheap wireless Internet routers that communicate over unlicensed radio spectrum and self-organize by handshaking with their neighbors. Such a network can relatively easily be engineered to autoconfigure and heal itself against point failures.

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In Dr. Gardner’s scheme, smartphones equipped with adaptive-mesh hardware and software take the place of the dedicated mesh nodes everyone else has been imagining. Here’s what makes this diabolically clever:

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  • By pitching it as a backup in case a power outage or disaster takes out cellphone towers, Dr. Gardner makes it an easy political sell and hard for the carriers to oppose. Regulators might even mandate it as a way to solve the 911 problem!
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  • Smartphones already have to have most of this capability anyway; adding one more frequency band and adaptive-routing software is no big deal.
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  • The scheme amortizes the cost of the mesh support across the smartphone vendors’ huge production runs, lowering cost per unit way past anything achievable for dedicated mesh nodes.
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  • Very clever attack on the power-distribution problem; people will solve it every day because they want to keep their individual phones running!
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  • This mesh would be self-deploying; instead of fixed node locations, it goes where the users are.
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There would still be a place for fixed-location mesh nodes as a backhaul network to increase aggregate bandwidth and service reliability. And they’d get much cheaper, because cellphone production volumes would pull the cost of the repeater hardware down to zip. People would buy sixpacks of booster nodes at supermarkets; banks would give them away like they do calculators now.

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This idea is beautiful. It is made of goodness and winnitude. It’s technically feasible, should be politically viable, and gets on the right side of economics of production scale. Hey, Google! Want to really undermine the bandwidth monopolists? Throw some funding at this guy now – better yet, hire him and put the mesh support into Android!

diff --git a/20100715142437.blog b/20100715142437.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5397a75 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100715142437.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Women in computing: first, get the problem right +

Every few months I trip over another earnest attempt to rectify the gender imbalance in software and computing fields. Very few women opt to become programmers, system administrators, or hardware/software engineers. Indeed, the number of women who try seems to be falling rather than rising. This observation is invariably accompanied by a lot of hand-wringing and proposals for elaborate and (too often) coercive schemes to achieve “gender parity” – all doomed, because the actual problem is misdiagnosed.

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I’m writing about this because I think the misdiagnosis arises largely from a refusal to speak uncomfortable truths. Discussion of the problem is nearly suffocated under a cloud of political correctness, cant, and willful blindness to the actual conditions of working in this field. Honesty won’t automatically fix the problems, but it’s a prerequisite to fixing the problems.

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Let’s get one shibboleth out of the way first: Larry Summers was right to be skeptical about the prospects for “equality” in STEM (science, technology, math, engineering) fields in general. Just the difference in dispersion of the IQ curves for males and females guarantees that, let alone the significant differences in mean at spatial visualization and mathematical ability. Removing all the institutional, social and psychological barriers will not achieve a 1:1 sex ratio in these fields; the best we can hope for is a large, happy female minority – that is, as opposed to a small and unhappy one.

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It needs pointing out that 1:1 parity is not achievable without coercing men out of these fields, because there are actually political moves afoot in the U.S. to try to achieve this through an extension of federal Title IX legislation to STEM fields. This would be a disaster, compounding already-serious incentive problems in academia that threaten the U.S.’s ability to sustain STEM research at all. (Summary: Cash-strapped corporations won’t fund basic research, and the academic system to support it is collapsing because grad students are underpaid, overworked, and no longer have a realistic shot at tenure.)

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Having recognized this, though, formulating a goal with recognizable win conditions does get more difficult. It has to go something like this: any woman who wants to be in a STEM field should be able to get as far as talent, hard work, and desire to succeed will take her, without facing artificial barriers erected by prejudice or other factors. If there are women who dream of being in STEM but have felt themselves driven off that path, the system is failing them. And the system is failing itself, too; talent is not so common that we can afford to waste it.

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Now I’m going to refocus on computing, because that’s what I know best and I think it exhibits the problems that keep women out of STEM fields in an extreme form. There’s a lot of political talk that the tiny and decreasing number of women in computing is a result of sexism and prejudice that has to be remedied with measures ranging from sensitivity training up through admission and hiring quotas. This talk is lazy, stupid, wrong, and prevents correct diagnosis of much more serious problems.

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I don’t mean to deny that there is still prejudice against women lurking in dark corners of the field. But I’ve known dozens of women in computing who wouldn’t have been shy about telling me if they were running into it, and not one has ever reported it to me as a primary problem. The problems they did report were much worse. They centered on one thing: women, in general, are not willing to eat the kind of shit that men will swallow to work in this field.

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Now let’s talk about death marches, mandatory uncompensated overtime, the beeper on the belt, and having no life. Men accept these conditions because they’re easily hooked into a monomaniacal, warrior-ethic way of thinking in which achievement of the mission is everything. Women, not so much. Much sooner than a man would, a woman will ask: “Why, exactly, am I putting up with this?”

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Correspondingly, young women in computing-related majors show a tendency to tend to bail out that rises directly with their comprehension of what their working life is actually going to be like. Biology is directly implicated here. Women have short fertile periods, and even if they don’t consciously intend to have children their instincts tell them they don’t have the option young men do to piss away years hunting mammoths that aren’t there.

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There are other issues, too, like female unwillingness to put up with working environments full of the shadow-autist types that gravitate to programming. But I think those are minor by comparison, too. If we really want to fix the problem of too few women in computing, we need to ask some much harder questions about how the field treats everyone in it.

diff --git a/20100716042335.blog b/20100716042335.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d31d65b --- /dev/null +++ b/20100716042335.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Smartphone, the Eater-of-Gadgets +

I’ve been thinking for some time now that the smartphone has achieved a kind of singularity, becoming a black hole that sucks all portable electronics into itself. PDAs – absorbed. Music players – consumed. Handset GPSes – eaten. Travel-alarm clocks, not to mention ordinary watches – subsumed. Calculators – history. E-readers under serious pressure, and surviving only because e-paper displays have lower battery drain and are a bit larger. Compasses – munched. Pocket flashlights – crunched. Fobs for keyless locks – being scarfed down as we speak, though not gone yet.

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This raises an interesting question: what else is natural prey for the smartphones of the future? Given my software interests, one low-hanging fruit that seems obvious to me is marine AIS receivers. If the frequency of any of the RF receiver stages in a phone were tunable, writing an app that would pull AIS data out of the air wouldn’t be very difficult. I’ve written a lot of the required code myself, and I know where to find most of the rest.

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But in an entertaining inversion, one device of the future actually works on smartphones now. Because I thought it would be funny, I searched for “tricorder” in the Android market. For those of you who have been living in a hole since 1965, a tricorder is a fictional gadget from the Star Trek universe, an all-purpose sensor package carried by planetary survey parties. I expected a geek joke, a fancy mock-up with mildly impressive visuals and no actual function. I was utterly gobsmacked to discover instead that I had an arguably real tricorder in my hand.

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Consider. My Nexus One includes a GPS, an accelerometer, a microphone, and a magnetometer. That is, sensors for location, magnetic field, gravitational fields, and acoustic energy. Hook a bit of visualization and spectral analysis to these sensors, and bugger me with a chainsaw if you don’t have a tricorder. A quad- or quintcorder, actually.

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And these sensors are already completely stock on smartphones because sensor electronics is like any other kind; amortized over a large enough production run, their incremental cost approaches epsilon because most of their content is actually design information (cue the shade of Bucky Fuller talking about ephemeralization). Which in turn points at the fundamental reason the smartphone is Eater-of-Gadgets; because, as the tricorder app deftly illustrates, the sum of a computer and a bunch of sensors costing epsilon is so synergistically powerful that it can emulate not just real single-purpose gadgets but gadgets that previously existed only as science fiction!

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So I think the tunable-RF capability I want for my AIS receiver app won’t be long in coming to a smartphone near me. At which point, of course the smartphone will eat not just AIS receivers but personal radios – and another two segments of the consumer-electronic industry will disappear down the singularity’s maw. But this is a good thing; it’s even, dare I say it, environmentally sound. My cellphone is smaller and lighter than the shelf-full of gadgets it replaces; fewer atoms serving more of my needs means lower impact from manufacturing and less stuff going into landfills.

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I specified “personal” radios because radios have something in common with personal computers; their main design constraints are actually constraints on a peripheral stage. For a computer you’ll be using for hours at a time you really want a full-sized hard keyboard and a display bigger than a smartphone’s; for a really good radio, the kind you supply sound for a party with, you need speakers with resonant cavities that won’t fit in a smartphone enclosure.

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Digital cameras are another diagnostic case. The low-end camera with small lenses is already looking like a goner; the survivors will be DSLRs and more generally those with precision optics too large and too expensive to fit in a phone case.

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These two examples suggest Raymond’s Rule of Smartphone Subsumption: if neither the physics nor the ergonomics of a gadget’s function require peripherals larger than will fit in a smartphone case, the smartphone will eat it!

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UPDATE: Added calculators and cameras to the hit list.

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UPDATE2: More: Flashlights! Fobs for keyless locks.

diff --git a/20100717204618.blog b/20100717204618.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f10abc2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100717204618.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Jobs Crashing to Earth +

The stench of desperation must be getting pretty thick on the Infinite Loop. Can it be that the generator for Steve Jobs’s notorious Reality Distortion Field has finally broken down?

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Two days ago, we learned that Jobs knew of the iPhone 4’s antenna problem before launch. They had warnings both from an in-house antenna engineer and “carrier partner”, presumably AT&T. Yes, this means all the Apple fanboys who had hissy fits at me when I said fifteen days ago that Apple was lying about the problem now get to go sit in the stupid corner.

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Also two days ago, New York Senator Charles Schumer issued an open letter to Steve Jobs regarding the iPhone 4 antenna issues. Chuckie Schumer is the worst sort of political bottom-feeder, a power-worshiping greaseball with a spine of pure jelly; when such as he thinks it’s good politics to pile on Apple, you may be sure that Jobs’s teflon coating has definitively worn off.

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A day ago, we got to watch Jobs tap-dance his way around the problem. This was a first; I cannot recall any previous instance in which the Turtlenecked One, rather than effectively controlling the agenda, has had to operate in full damage-control mode. He could have manned up and said “OK, we messed up on the antenna design, we’re recalling,” but no. Instead it’s bumper cases for all and a truly smarmy attempt to claim that everyone else in the industry is just as bad.

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Way to recover your damaged reputation, Stevie boy! Time was when the wunderkind’s reality-distortion field would have somehow soothed everyone into glaze-eyed insensibility, but that’s not the way it’s going down today. Instead, there’s public pushback from both RIM and Nokia, and neither company is being shy about specifying just how far his Jobness has rammed his head up his own ass.

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And there is absolutely no one else to blame for this; it’s obviously Job’s fetishism about cool industrial design, the aesthetic of the minimalistically slick-looking surface above all else, that compromised the antenna design and led him to ignore the warnings. The exact quality that Apple fanboys have been telling us would ultimately win the game for Jobs turns out to be the tragic flaw instead. And now he’s reduced to telling everyone to wrap a big ugly rubber on, it, sparky! Hubris and nemesis; this epic fail could be right out of Aeschylus.

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Not a word from Google yet, and I’m guessing there won’t be – not the company’s style, and besides the right people to bitch-slap Jobs would actually be its partner handset makers. But you can bet that somewhere, deep inside the Googleplex, some planning and product teams are laughing. At Jobs, not with him.

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Remember when I said Apple gets to own every failure? This one’s still escalating. It’s nowhere near a company-killer yet, but it’s beginning to look like a product-killer. And, the shambolic end of the Jobs mystique.

diff --git a/20100718155513.blog b/20100718155513.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..af812ab --- /dev/null +++ b/20100718155513.blog @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +Kafkatrapping +

Good causes sometimes have bad consequences. Blacks, women, and other historical out-groups were right to demand equality before the law and the full respect and liberties due to any member of our civilization; but the tactics they used to “raise consciousness” have sometimes veered into the creepy and pathological, borrowing the least sane features of religious evangelism.

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One very notable pathology is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.” I’ve been presented with enough instances of this recently that I’ve decided that it needs a name. I call this general style of argument “kafkatrapping”, and the above the Model A kafkatrap. In this essay, I will show that the kafkatrap is a form of argument that is so fallacious and manipulative that those subjected to it are entitled to reject it based entirely on the form of the argument, without reference to whatever particular sin or thoughtcrime is being alleged. I will also attempt to show that kafkatrapping is so self-destructive to the causes that employ it that change activists should root it out of their own speech and thoughts.

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My reference, of course, is to Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”, in which the protagonist Josef K. is accused of crimes the nature of which are never actually specified, and enmeshed in a process designed to degrade, humiliate, and destroy him whether or not he has in fact committed any crime at all. The only way out of the trap is for him to acquiesce in his own destruction; indeed, forcing him to that point of acquiescence and the collapse of his will to live as a free human being seems to be the only point of the process, if it has one at all.

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This is almost exactly the way the kafkatrap operates in religious and political argument. Real crimes – actual transgressions against flesh-and-blood individuals – are generally not specified. The aim of the kafkatrap is to produce a kind of free-floating guilt in the subject, a conviction of sinfulness that can be manipulated by the operator to make the subject say and do things that are convenient to the operator’s personal, political, or religious goals. Ideally, the subject will then internalize these demands, and then become complicit in the kafkatrapping of others.

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Sometimes the kafkatrap is presented in less direct forms. A common variant, which I’ll call the Model C, is to assert something like this: “Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}, you are guilty because you have benefited from the {sinful,racist,sexist,homophobic,oppressive,…} behavior of others in the system.” The aim of the Model C is to induce the subject to self-condemnation not on the basis of anything the individual subject has actually done, but on the basis of choices by others which the subject typically had no power to affect. The subject must at all costs be prevented from noticing that it is not ultimately possible to be responsible for the behavior of other free human beings.

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A close variant of the model C is the model P: “Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}, you are guilty because you have a privileged position in the {sinful,racist,sexist,homophobic,oppressive,…} system.” For the model P to work, the subject must be prevented from noticing that the demand to self-condemn is not based on the subject’s own actions or choices or feelings, but rather on an in-group identification ascribed by the operator of the kafkatrap.

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It is essential to the operation of all three of the variants of the kafkatrap so far described that the subject’s attention be deflected away from the fact that no wrongdoing by the subject, about which the subject need feel personally guilty, has actually been specified. The kafkatrapper’s objective is to hook into chronic self-doubt in the subject and inflate it, in much the same way an emotional abuser convinces a victim that the abuse is deserved – in fact, the mechanism is identical. Thus kafkatrapping tends to work best on weak and emotionally vulnerable personalities, and poorly on personalities with a strong internalized ethos.

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In addition, the success of a model P kafkatrap depends on the subject not realizing that the group ascription pinned on by the operator can be rejected. The subject must be prevented from asserting his or her individuality and individual agency; better, the subject must be convinced that asserting individuality is yet another demonstration of denial and guilt. Need it be pointed out how ironic this is, given that kafkatrappers (other than old-fashioned religious authoritarians) generally claim to be against group stereotyping?

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There are, of course, other variants. Consider the model S: “Skepticism about any particular anecdotal account of {sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression,…}, or any attempt to deny that the particular anecdote implies a systemic problem in which you are one of the guilty parties, is itself sufficient to establish your guilt.” Again, the common theme here is that questioning the discourse that condemns you, condemns you. This variant differs from the model A and model P in that a specific crime against an actual person usually is in fact alleged. The operator of the kafkatrap relies on the subject’s emotional revulsion against the crime to sweep away all questions of representativeness and the basic fact that the subject didn’t do it.

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I’ll finish my catalog of variants with the verson of the kafkatrap that I think is most likely to be deployed against this essay, the Model L: “Your insistence on applying rational skepticism in evaluating assertions of pervasive {sin,racism,sexism,homophobia, oppression…} itself demonstrates that you are {sinful,racist,sexist,homophobic,oppressive,…}.” This sounds much like the Model S, except that we are back in the territory of unspecified crime here. This version is not intended to induce guilt so much as it is to serve as a flank guard for other forms of kafkatrapping. By insisting that skepticism is evidence of an intention to cover up or excuse thoughtcrime, kafkatrappers protect themselves from having their methods or motives questioned and can get on with the serious business of eradicating thoughtcrime.

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Having shown how manipulative and psychologically abusive the kafkatrap is, it may seem almost superfluous to observe that it is logically fallacious as well. The particular species of fallacy is sometimes called “panchreston”, an argument from which anything can be deduced because it is not falsifiable. Notably, if the model A kafkatrap is true, the world is divided into two kinds of people: (a) those who admit they are guilty of thoughtcrime, and (b) those who are guilty of thoughtcrime because they will not admit to being guilty of thoughtcrime. No one can ever be innocent. The subject must be prevented from noticing that this logic convicts and impeaches the operator of the kafkatrap!

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I hope it is clear by now that the particular flavor of thoughtcrime alleged is irrelevant to understanding the operation of kafkatraps and how to avoid being abused and manipulated by kafkatrappers. In times past the kafkatrapper was usually a religious zealot; today, he or she is just as likely to be advancing an ideology of racial, gender, sexual-minority, or economic grievance. Whatever your opinion of any of these causes in their ‘pure’ forms may be, there are reasons that the employment of kafkatrapping is a sure sign of corruption.

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The practice of kafkatrapping corrupts causes in many ways, some obvious and some more subtle. The most obvious way is that abusive and manipulative ways of controlling people tend to hollow out the causes for which they are employed, smothering whatever worthy goals they may have begun with and reducing them to vehicles for the attainment of power and privilege over others.

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A subtler form of corruption is that those who use kafkatraps in order to manipulate others are prone to fall into them themselves. Becoming unable to see out of the traps, their ability to communicate with and engage anyone who has not fallen in becomes progressively more damaged. At the extreme, such causes frequently become epistemically closed, with a jargon and discourse so tightly wrapped around the logical fallacies in the kafkatraps that their doctrine is largely unintelligible to outsiders.

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These are both good reasons for change activists to consider kafkatraps a dangerous pathology that they should root out of their own causes. But the best reason remains that kafkatrapping is wrong. Especially, damningly wrong for anyone who claims to be operating in the cause of freedom.

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UPDATE: A commenter pointed out the Model D: “The act of demanding a definition of {sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression} that can be consequentially checked and falsified proves you are {sinful,racist,sexist, homophobic, oppressive}.”

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UPDATE2: The Model M: “The act of arguing against the theory of anti-{sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression} demonstrates that you are either {sinful,racist,sexist, homophobic, oppressive} or do not understand the theory of anti-{sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression}, and your argument can therefore be dismissed as either corrupt or incompetent.”

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Model T: Designated victims of {sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression} who question any part of the theory of {sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression} demonstrate by doing so that they are not authentic members of the victim class, so their experience can be discounted and their thoughts dismissed as internalized {sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression}.

diff --git a/20100720170200.blog b/20100720170200.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..76a18dc --- /dev/null +++ b/20100720170200.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Donald Knuth reads my blog? +

Received in email from Donald Knuth’s secretary:

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+I know from your blog that you’re doing lots of real important stuff these days. So I’m sure you want a break; you clearly must be ready to hack INTERCAL just once more. +

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Huh…Donald Knuth reads my blog?

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Um…Donald Knuth reads my blog?

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Wha…Donald Knuth reads my blog?

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Eric clutches the nearest piece of furniture as the universe spins dizzily around him.

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Eric successfully resists a vague feeling that he ought to fall to his knees and cry out “I’m not worthy!”

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Er. Well then. I guess I’ll have to ship another release of INTERCAL, won’t I?

diff --git a/20100721145625.blog b/20100721145625.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a0f5847 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100721145625.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +Double Vision +

Yesterday I discovered that Donald Knuth at least occasionally reads my blog. I only half-jokingly reported a vague feeling that I ought to be falling to my knees and crying “I’m not worthy!” In response, a “v. m. smith” popped up in my comments to say this:

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+Dude, you have written at least two books (that I have read) and possibly more. I have never read any of Knuth’s books, so I am forced to consider this hypothesis:

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You might be worthy.

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Of course, it’s only a hypothesis. +

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At this I laughed so hard that my eyes watered. That last line! I’m going to be giggling about it for weeks. But, you know, once I calmed down, I realized that “v. m. smith” had an actual point. Which led me to some interesting thoughts about fame, double vision and personal identity – how we choose to become what we are.

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So, imagine you’re me for a moment. As an adolescent and a young man you were an eager hacker who dreamed of doing great things. You idolized, to the extent of your relatively limited capacity for idolizing, the great uber-hackers of yore: people like Ken Thompson and Bill Gosper (yes, I know you young’uns have mostly forgotten Bill Gosper) and, indeed, Donald Knuth. People who changed the world around them by the sheer beauty and force of their code and their ideas.

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Years – decades, actually – pass. You code and you think and you struggle and you have inspirations and you write and you code some more. Lots of hard work and some talent and a bit of luck come together; you find your moments and you seize them. Fame follows, but that’s the least interesting consequence; what matters is that you really do change the world. Your code is everywhere, running on hundreds of millions of servers and PCs and cellphones and gaming consoles and router boxes. There’s a piece of the Internet architecture that you can point at and say “That was me.” You’ve engineered far-reaching changes both obvious and subtle in the hacker culture, with ripple effects on everything it touches. You’ve written a bestseller – about software engineering, of all the non-bestselling topics. Your ideas have spawned reform movements in at least three scientific fields that you know of and rewritten the business strategies of companies in the Fortune 50; there are so many consequences that it gets hard to keep track after a while.

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You’re not that kid any more. You made it. You really did. And when Donald Knuth sends you email, you might be worthy. Heck, you might actually be more influential than Knuth at this point; you’ve probably sold more books, anyway, and Knuth’s code (brilliant though it is) doesn’t run on the router boxes in everyone’s basement.

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But you recoil from such thoughts. They feel…blasphemous, somehow. It seems the natural order of the universe that when Knuth speaks it is the voice of thunder. When his secretary forwards email from him, you still feel like that kid inside. Do we never grow up, really?

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I think we do, actually. But, on reflection, I’m not sorry that I still feel a childlike awe of Donald Knuth – because without being the kind of person who feels that awe, I would never have become who I am or have done what I have. After my initial shock, I see him now with a kind of double vision – both as a near-peer and as one of the archetypal geeks after whom I patterned myself in decades past. Both perspectives are valid. Both are part of my identity. Both are me.

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I think I laughed as hard as I did at “v. m. smith” because he more or less forced me to pay attention to both of those perspectives at the same time. This was, in a small way, an enlightenment experience; I know myself better for it. Thank you, oh rascal guru.

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And it causes me to ask the next question. I’ve been a famous geek for, oh, about 15 years now. Is that a long enough time for someone to be on the other end of this kind of double vision, with me in Knuth’s spot? I’m thinking probably not yet; there are plenty of people who relate to me as both “the famous ESR” and a development peer, but there hasn’t been enough time for them to become stratospheric ubergeeks yet, so the shift between childlike awe and the mature perspective is not yet as large or as funny as it was for me yesterday. Maybe in a decade or so, someone will find themselves in that spot.

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So this post is partly a message to that future, about what I learned by thinking on my history with Donald Knuth. It’s OK to still have heroes when you’re all growed up, really it is. Your feelings of awe aren’t really about me at all, any more than mine were ever really about Knuth himself – which is good, because really being worshiped is a heavy burden that I don’t want and Knuth probably never did either. They’re really about what virtues you honor and seek, and how you’ve chosen to construct yourself.

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And if you, oh future-equivalent-of-me, ever find that you are a model for some still later generation…well, I hope you’ll understand that it isn’t really about you, either, and I predict that you’ll find it humbling. And I’m pretty certain Donald Knuth would agree.

diff --git a/20100727192455.blog b/20100727192455.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..70d47eb --- /dev/null +++ b/20100727192455.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +How not to sign NDAs +

If you’re any kind of consultant or contract programmer, and you’re an open-source person, one of the persistent minor (and sometimes not-so-minor) irritations of doing business is NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements). Your client will often want you to sign one. About 1% of the time they’re protecting actual business-critical information; the other 99% they’re suffering from an unfounded delusion that they’re protecting business-critical information – but the rigamarole is 100% annoying 100% of the time. Besides, even if (like me) you consider it a point of personal honor not to blab things you’ve been told in confidence, you probably have a philosophical objection to being gagged.

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I haven’t signed an NDA in least the last 12 years of active consulting, and over my entire 27 years of such I’ve maybe signed a grand total of two NDAs, and I’ll never sign one again. Herewith, a short course in how to evade them.

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The general rule is this: set up circumstances where the pain to them from having the NDA exceeds the extent to which they’re willing to trust you. Basically, this means that you have to make the NDA have potentially unpleasant legal consequences for them.

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The best way I know to do this is to be a director or other officer of a corporation, with fiduciary responsibility to the corporation. You tell them: “I never sign NDAs because I refuse to end up in a no-win legal situation – the NDA terms might require me to violate my fiduciary responsibility, or vice-versa.” Back when I was a director of VA Linux, this was a nuclear bomb that immediately vaporized all talk of NDAs whenever I brought it up.

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Even without a directorship, a variant of this works pretty well. Tell them you never sign NDAs because you’ve had other clients in the past and will have more in the future, and you don’t care to get caught in the no-win situation that an NDA puts you in the gunsights of a nonperformance or honest-services prosecution (or vice-versa).

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If they press the point, tell them you’ll sign that NDA if, and only if, they will sign an agreement indemnifying you against all costs arising from any lawsuit arising from a conflict between the NDA and any future agreements or fiduciary responsibilities you may assume. That’ll usually shut them right up; they’ll set the limited downside risk that you’ll blab something against a potentially unlimited risk from a big messy civil lawsuit and fold up like cheap cardboard.

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This does mean they have to need you enough so that the soft option isn’t to say “No NDA, no business,” and walk you out the door. But if they didn’t need you to cover something nobody in-house can do as effectively, they wouldn’t be asking for the NDA in the first place. So hang tough about this. Most NDAs are pro-forma, ass-covering gestures to begin with; chances are the person trying to get you to sign one knows this is true about his piece of paper and won’t fight very hard to defend it.

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It’s always good to point out that you have a reputation to protect, and you’re not going to injure your client by flapping your lips because if word got around that you did that sort of thing you wouldn’t have any clients anymore. Stand on your dignity, point out that you’re a professional, and sound a bit offended at the suggestion that anyone would be crass enough to doubt your discretion (but don’t overdo that last part lest it seem like posturing).

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This battle is worth winning for reasons other than avoiding legal risk. It sends a clear message that you are a professional with a backbone and a clear sense of your own worth – not to be jerked around and chickenshitted at. And that is always a good thing to establish before the job starts.

diff --git a/20100728174816.blog b/20100728174816.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..481d5ec --- /dev/null +++ b/20100728174816.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Sometimes, ancestry matters +

I’ve written before, on several occasions, about solving the problem of racism by strict individualism – a studied refusal to allow what we know about genetic population differences and differing means in measures like IQ to distort our judgment of individuals. The bell curve is not the point; the mass is not the individual. Ancestry is not destiny. Sanity demands that we recognize the difference.

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But ancestry may matter after all. I’m going to tell you a personal story now about one of the most powerful moments in my life. I’m not sure what it meant, or if it meant anything at all. But it was certainly interesting to live through.

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To understand this story, you have to know at least two things about me. One is about my twenty-year attachment to Asian hand-to-hand martial arts. The other is where my ancestors were from.

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I’ve been training in various Asian hand-to-hand styles since 1982, and seriously since 1990. Shotokan, tae kwon do, aikido, wing chun, and the variant jiu jitsu that’s part of MMA. Some bits and pieces of other stuff, too – Japanese sword and staff and naginata, Philippine stick-fighting, the odd move from penjak silat. I’ve been both a student and instructor (and a pretty capable instructor, at that – one of my frustrations is that my teaching ability often exceeds my physical skills). I love this stuff, and I’ve reached the point where I eat new styles like candy. Once I’ve got a decent handle on MMA, krav maga will probably be next.

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It wouldn’t be stretching things at all to say that being a martial artist, in the sense loosely defined by the whole mutually-influencing Asian group of hand-to-hand traditions, is an important part of my identity — my own sense of who I am. I have many of the indicia you’d expect with that; I love wu xia movies, I’m attracted to and strongly influenced by Zen Buddhism, and I was all excited the first time I went to Japan because it’s the motherland of so many of these hand-to-hand styles.

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But I’m not genetically Asian at all. Oh boy am I not. My ancestry is a mix of French, Irish, Scots, and I think mostly – on both sides – Rhinelander Germans. My father’s family hailed from Alsace-Lorraine, probably petty gentry; my mother’s ancestors were Swiss-German burghers from the region of Zurich. My genes are written in my face and build; I’ve been to Zurich, and the locals there thought I looked Swiss-German, and I did notice that I disappeared on those streets. I have blue eyes and pale freckly skin and was blond as a child; other than the odd bit of Amerind that family tradition ascribes, I’m about as white as a white boy can get.

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This has never mattered to me much. Most of my impressionable years were spent outside the U.S., so I never acquired any of the American neuroses about race, neither the prejudices nor the guilt. I was a crib bilingual and changed continents (not to say countries) every few years as a child; cosmopolitanism is in my bones. I had to learn adaptability back then, so my level of do-not-care about tribal/ethnic markers like skin color or what language people speak is very high.

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My ancestry or “race”, accordingly, is not a central part of my self-definition. Certainly not the way being a martial artist or a hacker is; the former is an accident of birth, the latter two are things I chose and reaffirmed through hard work over many years.

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I guess there’s actually a third piece of necessary background: I’m not romantic about swords. I know this because I have lots of friends who are. I can use one competently, thank you, but I learned how in order to extend my general competence as a martial artist rather than from having an attachment to that weapon. Being a swordsman wasn’t a major childhood fantasy for me; in fact, when I saw the classic Errol Flynn movie version of Robin Hood, the part that made me go “I wanna do that!” wasn’t the famous duel with Guy of Gisbourne, it was the quarterstaff fight with Little John.

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OK, that’s all the scene-setting. Now for the story…

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In 2005 I went to my first sword camp. I got six days of tough, physically and mentally demanding training. How to move. How to strike with a sword. How to parry. How to block with a shield. And at night I had to watch tournaments and battles…passed swordsmen having huge fun that I couldn’t join because I hadn’t passed my Basic qualification yet. It was quite frustrating.

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In the training as it was then done, your graduation day ended with a passage ordeal called the Hundred and began with your first fight. That is, your first duel with another student, as opposed to just drilling in moves and fighting techniques. On the word of my instructor, I took up sword and shield, faced my opponent across the duelling ground, and we saluted each other.

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Remember the moment in the first Lord of the Rings movie where Aragorn salutes the Witch-King with his sword before fighting him? Like that; a considered gesture of respect to the foe, a mark of chivalry, an affirmation of the warrior’s own honor. And, as I saluted, I had a moment outside time.

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Suddenly everything clicked. This was right in a way that, oddly, I’d never quite felt in twenty years of Asian hand-to-hand. I had bowed to an opponent before, of course…but as I brought the sword up to my face in salute I felt as though three thousand years of the shades of my ancestors had suddenly materialized behind me, nodding and smiling and with a great silent shout of “THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE!”. And I remembered that, after all, my ancestors hadn’t been peasants in the Yangtze Valley or the Kanto plain; they were tribesmen in the great forests of Iron Age Europe. And the sword and the shield and I were one.

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Five years later, I still don’t know quite what that moment meant or where it come from. Because I’m still not romantic about swords. And what I was left with all those possibly-fictive ghosts had registered their approval wasn’t Aryan pride, it was bemusement. Huh…so my ancestry matters after all. Who knew?

diff --git a/20100729104059.blog b/20100729104059.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..77a344e --- /dev/null +++ b/20100729104059.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Lies my grandfather told: the perils of ethnic identification +

This began as a reply to a comment on my previous post. It’s an explanation of why no “ethnic identity” is very central to who I think I am.

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My father’s family, my name ancestors, were from Alsace-Lorraine, a border region on the banks of the Rhine between France and Germany. His father (my grandfather) told his children the family was ethnic French; it is recorded that one of his and my direct-line ancestors was an officer under Napoleon who died leading his men in a charge against the walls of Moscow in 1813. But I learned in my teens, after my father had been doing some genealogical digging, that the family had formerly identified itself as ethnic Germans. This is not as odd as it now sounds. Before world War II there were pockets of ethnic Germans under other sovereignty all over Europe; the “wrong” bank of the Rhine wouldn’t have been at all a strange place to look for them.

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I still recall my father’s expression of surprise as he reported that his father had been fibbing about that. We didn’t know why at the time, but I now suspect that it was an effect of strong anti-German sentiment during World War I. A lot of the ethnic Germans in the U.S. at that time suppressed their German ties and even changed their names, though this wasn’t necessary in our case. (I do, however, suspect that I have relatives from the other bank of the Rhine named Riemann or Reeman).

+

The point here is that half my alleged ethnicity, the “French” part, turned out to be a fiction spun by my paternal grandfather. You may be sure that learning this discouraged me from taking any claim about my ancestry very seriously. He died in the 1940s when my dad was in his teens, so I never got to ask the old man what was up with that myself. He was a formidable character by all accounts, a train driver on the Pennsylvania Railroad back when that was a prestigious high-tech job.

+

And it’s actually a little messier than I’ve described yet, because my father’s cousins later did their own digging and they think the family was an eastern sprig of a very old Norman-French noble house of Raymonds. Which of course would make us Danish or Norwegian Vikings far enough back, even if we got assimilated among ethnic Germans on the French side of the Rhine later on. Could be just romanticism, but….Napoleon did recruit a lot of officers from the noble and gentry families who survived the Terror. I actually queried the French national archives about this years ago, and was sent back a coat of arms attributed to a “Raymond” family in Alsace-Lorraine. I rather suspect that my Moscow-charging ancestor had the use of it.

+

One reason for that suspicion is that the (normally aristocratic) tradition of producing cavalry officers stuck with us in the New World. Another direct-line ancestor, the Napoleonic officer’s grandson, was a Union cavalry officer who died at Gettysburg. That’s only a few hours from here; I keep meaning to go look for his name on the monument.

+

I suppose, just to make the infodump about family tradition complete, that we’re pretty sure my father’s direct ancestor lit out of France in 1815 because it wasn’t comfortable for Napoleonist grognards in France just then. And that the next couple of generations of Raymonds became the New World equivalent of petty gentry in central Pennsylvania, producing judges and engineers and military officers until the whole region was economically smashed flat by the Great Depression.

+

My mother’s family has its own legends. The family name was Lehman and the provenance from the German-Swiss area near Zurich; oddly, one of the things we do know is that some of her name ancestors were styled “Bishops” under some German Protestant sect that used the title. But there was Irish in her ancestry as well, and Amerind, and some tenuous connection to the royal house of Scotland. They crossed the U.S. in Conestoga wagons in the mid-1800s and settled in Nebraska. My maternal grandfather ditched the rural life to become a sign painter in Hollywood; my mother grew up on Laurel Canyon Road in the 1940s with Robert Heinlein as a near neighbor.

+

Anyway. I’ve actually had three theories presented to me about my father’s family’s actual ethnicity. One exploded, two others differing but possibly both true. Hard to get very attached to any of them, under the circumstances. And under any theory I’ve ever heard I’m probably a mix of French, German, Scots, Irish, Amerind, Scandinavian, and Goddess knows what else – if the people I tend to hang with and some of the women I’ve been attracted to are a clue I’d have to suspect some Ashkenazic Jewish got into the mix somewhere along the ancestral lines. That’d be nice, actually, if I could confirm it.

+

You can’t really form an “ethnic identity” out of a mess like that. It’s silly to even try. What, am I supposed to beat myself up because my hypothetical ancestors on one bank of the Rhine hated the equally hypothetical ones on the other? About the most sentiment I ever invest in the matter is to wear green on St. Patrick’s day, which in the U.S. is customary if you’re part Irish or even if you’re not.

+

When the subject of my ancestry comes up and I’m inclined to try to be funny and anti-PC about it (which is usually), I borrow a locution I read on USENET decades ago. What’s my ethnicity? “European dominator party mix.” Yeah. That’ll do.

+

UPDATE: For you foreign readers, my commenters are quite correct. While the details of my family history are individual this kind of ethnic mix is very normal in my country — I’m a typical American this way.

diff --git a/20100731211955.blog b/20100731211955.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..71e40e4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100731211955.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Spam inundation may result in lost posts +

The amount of bot-spam being posted to this blog has gone up by an order of magnitude in the last week.

+

I wouldn’t bother my readers about this, except that if one of your posts happens to trigger the spam filter, the odds that I will notice and rescue it have dropped significantly. It’s easier to notice the ham in a dozen putative items of spam, which was the typical length of queue last week, than when the queue is 217 items long as it was just now.

+

This probably means akismet, the WordPress shared spamtrap that I use, needs some tuning. But I don’t know when or even if that problem will be fixed. Apologies for any inconvenience.

diff --git a/20100803015101.blog b/20100803015101.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1e5dda4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100803015101.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Inception +

I just saw Inception. It was brilliant, and I’m astonished that it got made in Hollywood. It’s not a movie you can watch with your brain turned off – and that’s its glory.

+

+

Inception is brilliant on many levels. It works as a science-fiction movie, it works as a thriller, it works as psychological horror. What makes it a true science-fiction movie is that the writers play fair: everything you need to know to understand the mind-bendingly bizarre things that fly by on the screen is told to you in advance, but blink and you’ll miss the exposition. Effects follow causes; effects may come out of nowhere and slap you in the kisser but always, always, there is a terrible inevitability about them when the causes are revealed. And I speak of the psychological level of the action as well as the physical.

+

It works as a thriller, too. There’s enough gunplay and explosions and spectacular collapses and paranoid tension for the summer-movie crowd. In fact, through much of the movie the characters are in thrillerland on three different levels of unreality simultaneously. But unreality bites, oh yes. The obvious threat is that death in the movie’s deeper dreamworlds can kill you or leave you catatonic in baseline reality. But down at the bottom of the rabbithole…

+

…the deadliest enemy of all is far subtler, a simple and infectious idea that has already killed one victim and laid waste to the protagonist’s life. There are moments in this film that are epistemic horror. And oh, yes, you will see it coming. And it will move you to awe and pity and terror anyway when it arrives.

+

Props to the writers for not taking the easy way out. Cobb, our tormented hero, is led out of his coils by a pretty young woman named Ariadne, but not because they fall in love; they don’t. No, her intellect is what saves them both. And the question raised by the climactic moment of epistemic horror is never…quite…resolved. The screen goes dark before the top quite tumbles over.

+

If the movie has any weakness, it’s the leading man. Leonardo DiCaprio is no longer a fluffy prettyboy, but he is a few points shy of being able to do the kind of tormented intensity the role of Cobb really needed. His performance is credible, however, and he is backed by a strong supporting cast. Ken Watanabe is as always superb playing the Japanese industrialist Saito; Tom Hardy and Ellen Page (two actors I’d never seen before) are similarly excellent as Eames and Ariadne.

+

If this doesn’t cop next year’s film Hugo, there is no justice.

diff --git a/20100808154915.blog b/20100808154915.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..beee7e1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100808154915.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Android the Inexorable +

CNET reported a few days ago (while I was busy at the World Boardgaming Championships, or I’d have blogged on this sooner) that Android hits top spot in U.S. smartphone market.

+

There’s a boatload of bad news in the numbers for Apple fans, but no surprises for anyone who has been following my strategic analyses for the last seven months. In the first quarter Android new sales passed Apple’s but ran second behind Blackberry sales; in the second quarter, Android has passed Blackberry and opened up an 11% gap in front of iPhone sales.

+

+

Other reports indicate that, at about 160K per day, Android activations now exceed the totals for iPhone 3, iPhone 4, and iPad combined.

+

Apple’s bid to define and control the smartphone market is going down to defeat. I was going to describe the process as “slow but inexorable”, but that would be incorrect; it’s fast and inexorable. My prediction that Android’s installed base will pass the iPhone’s in the fourth quarter of this year no longer looks wild-eyed to anybody following these market-share wars; in fact, given the trends in new-unit sales a crossover point late in the third quarter is no longer out of the question.

+

There’s an important point that, so far, all the coverage seems to have missed. You can only see it by juxtaposing the market-share trendlines for both 1Q and 2Q 2010 and noticing what isn’t there – any recovery due to the iPhone 4. This product has not merely failed to recover Apple’s fortunes against Android, it has not even noticeably slowed Apple’s loss of market share to Android.

+

Forget for now the blunder the trade press has been calling “Antennagate”; I had fun with it at the time, but bruising as it was, it’s only a detail in the larger story. With the iPhone 4, Apple tried to counter the march of the multiple Androids using a single-product strategy, which was doomed to fail no matter how whizbang the single product was. As I predicted would happen months ago, the ubiquity game is clobbering the control game; Apple has wound up outflanked, outgunned, and out-thought.

diff --git a/20100809111648.blog b/20100809111648.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e55ac13 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100809111648.blog @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +Breaking free of the curse of the gifted +

In what threatens to become a semi-regular series, I give you a plea for help that landed in my mailbox this morning, anonymized, and my response. Querent’s situation is not unique; what’s unusual is his ability to self-diagnose and his willingness to ask for help.

+

+I have diagnosed myself with what you described (here) as ‘the curse of the gifted’. I am currently seeking advice as to how to correct this and would greatly appreciate it if you could help me.

+

When I was a boy, pretty much everybody would call me ‘genius’. I got top grades in school and yadda-yadda. I am now but a shadow of what people would think of me: I have really hit the point where my brains alone can’t take me any further. I have to work hard, but I don’t know how.

+

Problem is, I’m so far down this rabbit hole that I’m actually afraid of failure. I know I should be taking risks and doing my best, but I simply can’t. I didn’t leave my country to look for a better future in a bigger one because I was afraid to leave the safety of my parent’s house. I stick to my day job because here there are so many ways to hide from real work and real challenges. I don’t contribute to open source or even start my own pet projects because I know that at the first obstacle I’m gonna drop them.

+

I often find myself wishing that I still were the “genius” that I was before (which I think to be a clear symptom of the condition), thinking that If something doesn’t come smoothly to me than I shouldn’t even bother.

+

How to cure this? How to learn discipline? How to learn how to work hard? +

+

+

Here is how I replied:

+

I remember being where you are now; I had a doldrums like this in my late teens and early twenties. So the first help I have for you is the reassurance that climbing out of the hole *is* possible. I did it.

+

I can recommend three strategies for climbing out. Don’t pick just one; pursue all three, because they support and complement each other.

+

First strategy: Do some hard work to acquire competence at things for which having a genius IQ doesn’t help a lot. Perhaps a physical skill like some form of athletics or dance; martial arts has at times served this function for me. Perhaps an artistic or mystical skill in which the difficulty lies in a shift of perception or attention rather than handling symbolic complexity; for me, being a musician is sometimes like this.

+

By seeking competence in an area where you have no huge cognitive advantage over other people and your self-image as a genius is not threatened if you fail, you will accomplish two things. First, you will evade your own tendency to quit if success does not come easily. Secondly (and much more importantly) you will have a place to *learn* how to work hard, a place to develop the self-discipline that you never had to before. The mental habits you develop will transfer back to IQ-loaded fields.

+

Second strategy: Reinvent yourself as a polymath. I never had to do this explicitly myself because (thanks to Robert Heinlein’s influence) I had this as a goal before I hit my doldrums. But if you are the more typical sort of young genius whose abilities have so far concentrated heavily in one field, broadening your base is valuable on many levels.

+

One level is competitive synergy. There are so many bright people working single fields that some of them are effectively certain to be brighter than you are and able to stay ahead of you now matter how hard you apply yourself. The number of thinkers who are capable of genuinely cross-disciplinary analysis is much lower; by positioning yourself to do that, you greatly increase your chances that you can stay ahead of not just the narrow specialists but the few other polymaths as well.

+

But if you are fighting the curse of the gifted, the psychology of this move is more important than the competitive positioning. If you are are gifted (say) at mathematics, but have stopped pushing yourself there because failing would damage your self-image as a genius of mathematical talent, it will help you a lot if you are able to reinvent yourself as a polymath genius who happens to do math. This sideways shift lowers the emotional cost of a failure or setback in math, or any other single field.

+

Of course, to make this work, you actually have to *believe* you are a polymath, and the only way to justify that belief against collapse is to actually be one. Fortunately, this is less difficult than is usually assumed.

+

Any linguist will tell you that the third language you acquire is generally easier than your second, the fourth is easier than your third, and so on. Learning each language develops common cognitive substructures that make the next one easier. Entire intellectual fields are like languages in this way; mastery in N fields makes mastery of field N+1 easier, pretty much regardless of what fields you’re talking about.

+

For your next area of mastery, pick something that interests you but is not too close to any of your already-developed areas of mastery; that will give you the best leverage for the next field after that. A math or programming genius, for example, might want to consider developing master-level skills at prose or poetic composition; for a genius based in natural language, on the other hand, swallowing some field in math or hard science would be best.

+

Third strategy: Develop your will and your courage and your self-image as a person who is *unconquerable*, unstoppable. Logic and brains will not get you out of the trap you find yourself in; if that were possible, you would probably be out already. What you need is intestinal fortitude, sheer guts and bloody-minded persistence.

+

Of all three this is the most difficult strategy to describe or give concrete advice about, but essential nevertheless. You need to learn to think of failure as a temporary condition, something from which you learn better tactics but which never touches the core of what you are.

+

The first stages of execution on these strategies will be very difficult. They will require you to work harder than you ever have – which is the point and nearly the definition of the problem, yes? But you will find that success feeds on itself and that small victories create the preconditions for greater ones.

+

When the path out of the trap seems discouraging, the thing to remember is this: you have the curse of the gifted *because you are gifted*. You are special. You have rare talents in you. Your challenge is to grow the rest of yourself so it matches those talents in scale and depth.

diff --git a/20100810222911.blog b/20100810222911.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bf077bb --- /dev/null +++ b/20100810222911.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Shameless name-dropping +

I hold in my hand an extract of a draft manuscript paper-mailed to me by Donald Knuth.

+

It is titled “TPK in INTERCAL” and it has a handwritten note from Don offering a bug bounty of 0x$1.00.

+

In it, I am quoted three times.

+

If my grin were any wider, it would hurt.

+

I believe the proper item of contemporary slang for me to utter would be “Squee!”

diff --git a/20100811173419.blog b/20100811173419.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..315f969 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100811173419.blog @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +A world without “ESR” +

One of my commenters speculated as follows:

+

+Perhaps I overestimate him, but I suspect that without Eric our choice would be Richard Stallman or Bill Gates without much in between. That isn’t a pretty picture. Maybe Linus Torvalds would have help fill the vacuum, or perhaps someone else would have stepped up. +

+

Because I think at least part of the time like a historian/anthropologist, I’ve actually spent a fair amount of effort contemplating what the world might look like if I hadn’t affected it. The more general and interesting question this touches (and what makes this particular instance actually worth thinking about) is a familiar one in historiography: to what extent the times make the man versus the man making the times.

+

+

At one extreme you get Thomas Carlyle’s view of history, in which heroic figures shape events and the whole drama is basically their psychologies and struggles writ large. In this version, the details of “ESR” (my public persona) were spectacularly important and a different culture hero would have led to a radically different outcome. At the other you get the Marxist style in which vast tides of history sweep us all along and “heroes” do what they had to do because they had to do it. In this version, I was nothing more than a conduit or focal point for changes that were going to happen anyway.

+

Of course, I don’t have a certain answer to this question…but in some ways I’ve been a uniquely privileged observer of the historical processes in which I was personally involved, and it has left me with some thoughts and judgments.

+

As appealing as it would be to be one of Carlyle’s heroes, I have to say that I come down more on the “times make the man” side. Specifically, I’m pretty sure that the hacker community was going to get a generative theory of open source similar to the one I enunciated in The Cathedral and the Bazaar sometime within five to seven years of the mainstreaming of the Internet around 1994. As it was, a couple of people (Richard Gabriel, Larry McVoy) came damn close to it before I did without quite making it to the key insights. Somebody was going to get the rest of the way if I hadn’t; it was time.

+

The argument that open source constituted a strictly more efficient mode of production than proprietary development that I made in The Magic Cauldron would certainly have followed on that, and a propaganda campaign aimed at selling that truth to people with lots of money would have followed at one remove. In a general sense I think all these developments were pretty much locked in as soon as the Internet began to show people what sorts of productive organization are possible when communications costs approach zero asymptotically.

+

So, was “ESR” unnecessary? What difference did I make? Or, to put it more precisely…if we imagine a sheaf of histories in which different hackers made that inevitable conceptual breakthrough, what’s marked about the ones in which it was me? In what ways did we (the hacker culture, civilization at large) get lucky….or unlucky?

+

Most days I think we did in fact get lucky. I think it was inevitable that we were going to get the theorist, and the economist, and the public propagandist. What was contingent and remarkable is that we got one person who could, during a critical transitional period, do all three of those – imagine, and then execute, a change strategy that fused software engineering theory, economic analysis, and effective public advocacy. The result, I think, is that open-source ideas have taken hold rather sooner and rather more strongly than would otherwise have been the case.

+

I now view the critical transitional period as having spanned roughly 1997-2003. Six years, at the end of which we’d basically booted up a set of sustaining institutions and more or less won the technical and economic argument for open source. My best guess is that without “ESR” we’d have had to grind for a decade, maybe fifteen years, for a fuzzier and more qualified victory.

+

“But wait…” you might ask. “Isn’t that the hero theory sneaking in the back door, with yourself conveniently cast as hero?” Might sound that way, but here’s where it gets truly interesting. I said most days I think we got lucky. Some days I think something much weirder and more interesting: that there was no real luck involved, that the hacker culture created an ESR when it needed one and because it needed one. This would take us back towards inexorable tides of history and all that.

+

I am an individual; nobody who’s ever met me is in any doubt about that. But I am also a carrier of culture, my mind shaped by memes. Decades ago, my mind was colonized by a set of memes that you can read about in the Jargon File. Those memes pointed at a kind of perfection – more specifically, at a kind of perfected ubergeeky self that I have been trying to achieve ever since. You could say that I am, at least in part, an invention of those memes. They made me “ESR”…

+

…and “ESR” happened to become exactly the theorist/economist/propagandist those memes needed to infect others most efficiently in 1997-2003. Wow, what a fortunate coincidence! Or, maybe not. “ESR” may in fact be an especially clever and self-aware memebot, shaped by the hacker culture to propagate the hacker culture. Resistance is useless! You will be assimilated!

+

Now we have, at least implicitly, two possible theories that bear on the original question. In one, I’m a culture hero; in the other, a sort of memebot/paladin. The practical difference is this: if I was in relevant ways invented by the hacker culture, the hacker culture can invent another paladin like me…and probably would have within a few years if I hadn’t emerged into the role around 1996.

+

Another way to put this is that if the “times make the man” theory is really strongly true, and the hacker culture invented me, we would not in fact have been stuck with “Richard Stallman or Bill Gates without much in between”. The in-between would have happened, just with a different set of initials.

+

(It wouldn’t have been Linus Torvalds, or any plausible alternate version of him. He has the brains for the role but the wrong psychology – too much the classic introverted geek, not enough performer/communicator.)

+

Now I’m going to admit that I fibbed a little earlier. I do not in fact believe one of those theories some days and the other the rest of the time; that was in the nature of a rhetorical flourish. I actually believe them both at the same time. The weighting coefficients in that 2-vector do fluctuate, however. Most of the time, the arrow lands on the historical-determinism side of the x=y line. But not always.

+

I am both inventor and invented. I mostly think a hacker culture without ESR would have grown something rather like one. But the details and the style would be different. Less Heinlein influence, probably, and fewer guns – though I do think the other-timeline versions would be mostly libertarians, because without starting from a Hayekian stance some key elements of the theory would be rather more difficult to notice. It certainly wasn’t entailed that our paladin had to be a neopagan or have cerebral palsy. On the other hand, I’d bet on at least a large minority of my other-history analogues being shadow-Tourette’s cases with an interest in martial arts; those traits contributed to my toolkit in subtle but important ways.

+

Sometimes I wonder, though, when the coefficients fluctuate that way. Maybe I really was a unique, heroic axis of history a la Carlyle. It’s an interesting thing to be unsure about.

diff --git a/20100813074624.blog b/20100813074624.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..39563ce --- /dev/null +++ b/20100813074624.blog @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +Oracle sues Google over Java implementation methods. +

Oracle has just sued Google over implementation methods used in the Dalvik virtual machine at the heart of the Android operating system. The complaint alleges knowing and willful infringement of seven patents originally issued to Sun Microsystems.

+

Oracle has retained Boies, Schiller & Flexner. One wonders if they’ll be any more competent than they were on the SCO lawsuit…

+

Results of a quick skim of the patents follow.

+

+

Here’s the list:

+

6125447: Protection domains to provide security in a computer system

+

6192476: Controlling access to a resource

+

5966702: Method and apparatus for pre-processing and packaging class files

+

7426720: System and method for dynamic preloading of classes through memory space cloning of a master runtime system process

+

RE38,104: Method and apparatus for resolving data references in generated code

+

6910205: Interpreting functions utilizing a hybrid of virtual and native machine

+

6061520:Method and system for performing static initialization

+

The six patents we can see are all mobile-Java implementation methods. Most seem to relate to optimization techniques, compilation, and JNI, though the claim language is general and vague enough in some cases that it is difficult to be certain.

+

I’m not seeing any algorithmic depth here – Google’s defense will almost certainly in part be that all this stuff fails the obviousness bar. There is also an interesting question as to whether Oracle has met its obligation under law to notify Google and allow it reasonable time to cure the infringement (removing these techniques from the Dalvik machine) before suing.

+

The commenter who tossed the complaint link at me notes that Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison are best buddies. So this could in part be Apple, rapidly losing the market-share battle to Android, striking back by proxy. I’m guessing Ellison told his lawyers to throw anything at Google that they thought might stick, and do it yesterday.

+

On a slightly different level, I think this is Apple implicitly conceding that it can’t beat Android with product design and needs to stop the competition before iOS gets kerb-stomped.

+

This post may be updated as I learn more.

+

UPDATE: On rereading, I see that there are copyright as well as patent claims; they’ll have to pierce Google’s clean-room defense to make those stick. Also, while they do seek an injunction, I see no request for a temporary restraining order; this suggests that Oracle’s lawyers know they don’t have an open-and-shut case and are wary of overplaying their hand. But if that’s so, why the actual-damages claim? Puzzling.

+

UPDATE2: A commenter found a link to the ‘720 patent. These weakens the argument that the complaint was a sloppy rush job.

+

UPDATE3: There’s prior art for the ‘720 patent in Emacs. Happens I know that part of the Emacs codebase of old and can confirm the author is correct. One down, six to go.

+

UPDATE4: I was incorrect in thinking the direct monetary damages claim is unsustainable; Oracle inherited J2ME, which it licenses to some handset makers.

+

UPDATE5: J2ME gives Oracle more skin in the mobile-Java game than I knew. This decreases the likelihood that Larry Ellison is doing a favor for his best buddy Steve.’

+

UPDATE6: Predating the ‘476 patent, RFC 86.0 is probably grounds for an obviousness challenge.

+

UPDATE7: It has been alleged that the technique described in the ‘205 patent was described in Efficient implementation of the smalltalk-80 system (1984)

diff --git a/20100813192400.blog b/20100813192400.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a23ea98 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100813192400.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +I cast a wish into the air +

Being admired by lots of open-source geeks can be useful in unexpected ways. Probably the most extreme example I can recall is the Linux user group that once asked me to speak at a conference in Kansas City and rewarded me by paying for the ammunition at a local gun range where I got to fire fully-automatic weapons for the first and so far only time in my life. Though, come to think of it, the Korean LUG that gave me a tour of the DMZ complete with a trip down a captured North Korean infiltration tunnel was up there, too.

+

I was thinking about some of the more unusual experiences I’ve had of the road earlier today and it occurred to me that there’s one that almost happened, at Linucon 1, but didn’t because some insurance or municipal-health bureaucrat forced the conference to cancel the event. I’ve regretted it ever since.

+

So here it is. I don’t do a lot of road trips any more, but if your LUG or university is thinking about how to get me to give a talk, I have an unfulfilled wish…

+

Someday, I want to help judge a chili cook-off.

+

Hey, I like chili. I have some foodie tendencies and a good nose; I’d probably do the judging thing as competently as anybody who isn’t a professional cook. There it is; maybe some geek in a chiliaceous part of the U.S. will see this and go “Yeah. We could do that…” And a good time would be had by all.

+

A barbecue cook-off would also be quite acceptable :-)

diff --git a/20100822123322.blog b/20100822123322.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2c6aef2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100822123322.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Expended +

I saw The Expendables, Sylvester Stallone’s I-want-to-be-a-blockbuster action flick, just after it opened. I found it a curiously listless affair, considering all the star power and special-effects money lavished on it, but it’s taken me a week to realize why. Stallone, who wrote and directed and stars in the film, misses his target by a mile. Or, more likely, he couldn’t decide where to aim.

+

+

The trailer led me to expect an affectionate parody of 1980s action movies, the sort of thing that Arnold Schwarzenegger did with deadpan hilarity in True Lies. My expectation was enhanced by the news that both Ahnold himself and Bruce Willis have cameos early in the movie. So I was all set up for mindless wide-screen fun that knows not to take itself seriously – the sort of thing that the Pirates of the Caribbean movies delivered in truckloads, only with more gunfire and explosions.

+

And for about the first half hour or so it seemed like we might get that movie. Arnold’s cameo (“Give the job to my friend, he likes playing in the jungle.”) was genuinely funny. So was Dolph Lundgren as the drugged-out nutcase who had to be fired after the establishing sequence. The merc team as motorcycle gang, complete with cheesy “Expendables” decals lovingly zoomed in on, set the right tone of testosterone-drenched ludicrousness.

+

When Stallone’s and Jason Statham’s characters infiltrate the tropical island where they’re supposed to do an op for reconnaissance by posing as ornithologists, I laughed. I chuckled some more at the deliberately overblown way the female lead was dropped into the picture. The chase scene as they get the hell off the island, culminating with Statham’s character machine-gunning a dock liberally drenched with explodium, is the best-executed set piece in the whole flick.

+

After that, things fall apart. Stallone tries to turn what could have been a spectacular romp into an earnest and serious thing, some sort of essay on responsibility and the psychological costs of violence, and is defeated by his own thick-necked, mumbling inarticulacy. The ultraviolence turns hollow and detached, except for one scene of the female lead being tortured that is deeply creepy. Jet Li’s screen time is completely wasted, and nothing made me know or care who the Obligatory Large Black Guy with the grenade-launcher was. After a while it seems like Stallone is just sleepwalking through the rest of the plot and you just stop caring.

+

In retrospect, most of the life in this sad turkey was provided by Jason Statham, who demonstrates once again that he is the reigning king of badass action stars in this decade. Props also to Dolph Lundgren for his gleefully deranged performance as Gunner, and to Mickey Rourke for a soulful soliquy that telegraphs the movie’s descent into seriousness (it’s in no way Rourke’s fault that bending the story arc in that direction was a very bad idea). Everyone else is forgettable. So, alas, is this movie.

diff --git a/20100823130508.blog b/20100823130508.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8a5d8b1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100823130508.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Organic guilt +

I have a confession to make. I buy “organic” food, and I feel rather guilty about it.

+

My wife and I were in the local Wegman’s the other day (Wegman’s is worth a rant by itself; I’ll get back to Wegman’s) poking around in the “Nature’s Market” section where they keep the organic food. “Aha!” says my wife, “here’s something you’d like,” and held up a small bag labeled “Gone Nuts: Cilantro Lime Mojo” with, underneath it in smaller type, “Pistachios and Pepitas”.

+

I seized the bag and looked on the back. “Pure food ingredients” it trumpeted.
+“No weird stuff added. INGREDIENTS: Raw Pistachios, Sprouted Organic Pumpkin Seeds, Organic Lime Juice, Organic Fresh Cilantro, Organic Spices, Organic Jalapeno, Organic Cold Pressed Olive Oil, Himalayan Crystal Salt and Lime Oil.” My mouth watered. “Oh Goddess,” I muttered in her direction, “it’s packaged crack for me…”

+

Ah, but then came the deadly disclaimers. “VEGAN GLUTEN-FREE NO GMOs NO TRANS FAT.” and “We support local and fair-trade sources growing certified organic, transitional, and pesticide-free products.” Aaaarrrgggh! Suddenly my lovely potential snack was covered with an evil-smelling miasma of diet-faddery, sanctimony, political correctness, and just plain nonsense. This, I find, is a chronic problem with buying “organic”.

+

+

I definitely have “organic” tastes. I don’t eat or drink things with high-fructose corn syrup in them because the stuff tastes to me like burnt plastic. Give me free-range chicken and grass-fed beef, yes, because factory-farmed animals fed on corn mush, rapeseed, and bone meal produce bland, characterless meat. I like artisan breads made without preservatives and eaten the day they were baked because compared to that experience conventional packaged bread is like chewing a bad grade of foam rubber.

+

The problem is, every time I buy “organic”, I feel like I’m sending a reinforcement to several different forms of vicious stupidity, beginning with the term “organic” itself. Duh! Actually, all food is “organic”; the term just means “chemistry based on carbon chains”.

+

Take “no GMOs” for starters. That’s nonsense; it’s barely even possible. Humans have been genetically modifying since the invention of stockbreeding and agriculture; it’s what we do, and hatred of the accelerated version done in a genomics lab is pure Luddism. It’s vicious nonsense, too; poor third-worlders have already starved because their governments refused food aid that might contain GMOs. And without GMOs it’s more than possible that the new wave of wheat rust, once it really gets going, might condemn billions to death.

+

Vegan? I’ve long since had it up to here with the tissue of ignorance and sanctimony that is evangelical veganism. Comparing our dentition and digestive tracts with those of cows, chimps, gorillas, and bears tells the story: humans are designed to be unspecialized omnivores, and the whole notion that vegetarianism is “natural” is so much piffle. It’s not even possible except at the near end of 4000 years of GMOing staple crops for higher calorie density, and even now you can’t be a vegan in a really cold climate (like, say, Tibet) because it’ll kill you. In warmer ones, you better be taking carnitine and half a dozen vitamins or you’re going to have micronutrient issues sneak up on you over a period of years.

+

OK, I give on gluten-free. Some people do have celiac disease; that’s a real need. But “no trans fat”? Pure faddery, or the next thing to it. The evidence indicting trans fats is extremely slim and surrounded by a cloud of food-nannyist hype. I hate helping to keep that sort of balloon inflated with my dollars.

+

Who could be against “fair trade”? Well, me…because the “fair trade” crowd pressures individual growers to join collectives with “managed” pricing. If you’re betting that this means lazy but politically adept growers with poor resource management and productivity prosper at the expense of more efficient and harder-working ones, you’ve broken the code.

+

Finally, “pesticide-free”. Do I like toxic chemicals on my food? No…but I also don’t fool myself about what happens when you don’t use them. This ties straight back to the general cluster of issues around factory farming. Without the productivity advantages of pesticides, synthetic fertilizer, and other non-“organic” methods, farm productivity would plummet. Relatively wealthy people like me would cope with reduced availability by paying higher prices, but huge numbers of the world’s poor would starve.

+

I buy “organic” food because it tastes better and I can, but I feel guilty about reinforcing all the kinds of delusion and superstition and viciousness that are tied up in that label. We simply cannot feed a world population of 6.6 billion without pesticides and factory farming and GMOs and preservatives in most bread; now, and probably forever, “organic” food will remain a luxury good.

+

Try telling its political partisans that, though. Hyped on their belief in their own virtue, and blissfully ignorant about scale problems, they have already engineered policies that have cost thousands of lives during spot famines. The potential death toll from (especially) anti-GMO policies is three orders of magnitude higher.

+

And my problem reduces to this: how can I buy the kind of food I want without supporting dangerous delusions?

diff --git a/20100824132006.blog b/20100824132006.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9ae9f27 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100824132006.blog @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +Three kinds of teleology +

Some comments on my last post sidetracked into a discussion of evolution, teleology and design and under what circumstances the language of “purpose” or “intention” can reasonably applied to a natural system. I’ve had a new insight while thinking about that discussion, so I’m going to write about it a bit more. And yes, I am aware that this discussion may appear to overlap with Daniel Dennett’s notion of the intentional stance, but I’m actually addressing a different set of issues.

+

+

For historical background, see Wikipedia on telos or final cause.

+

To understand why teleology matters, it helps to remember that human beings are prone to project intentions on everything. We are animists by instinct. Our religions and our folklore are full not merely of gods, angels, devils, and elves but talking trees and rocks as well. We need to think clearly about intention, purpose and design not so much to see it where it is but in order to avoid imputing it where it is not.

+

Applying the language of purpose and intention to human beings, animals, and hypothetical other beings that we suppose to have desires has never been controversial. Human action has teleology; humans want to satisfy desires, and the anticipated future state of satisfaction is a cause of behavior in the past of that state.

+

Nor is it controversial to apply teleological language to human artifacts. We may say, for example, that a firearm has the purpose of firing bullets or an airfoil has the purpose of generating lift without supposing that inanimate objects have intentions. What is relevant is that these functions express the designer’s intention for the artifact. I will call this “teleology of the first kind”.

+

We perceive somewhat more difficulty applying the language of purpose and intention to natural systems that lack an obvious designer. What do we mean when we say that the purpose of the nectar in a flower is to attract bees? Is it at all meaningful to say that a flower intends to attract bees?

+

If you are a creationist, then the nectar in a flower can have purpose in the same way that an airfoil or a firearm can have purpose; that is, as an expression of purpose in the mind of a designing God. But if you are doing philosophy, creationism is a self-destroying position; when anything can be explained by the action of a (causeless, inscrutable) God, philosophy dies because there is no point in causal accounts or explanatory theory at all. The moment anyone says “miracle”, it’s game over.

+

So we’re left with a much more pointed question: is it ever meaningful to say that natural systems have purposes or intentions – teleology – in the absence of a designer? Intuitively, we feel that it is reasonable to say that the nectar in a flower has the purpose of attracting bees because the flower and the bees behave as though the flowers had been designed to attract bees, even if we can’t identify a designer. We have less tendency to attribute intentions to a flower because, outside of mythology, we don’t think of flowers as having mental lives.

+

Historically, a school of so-called “natural theology” inferred a designer from the purpose of attracting bees. But, even if you could ignore the many internal problems with this position (starting with the one I pointed out in my next-to-previous paragraph) Charles Darwin pretty much killed natural theology stone-dead more than a century ago by inventing what I’ll call “teleology of the second kind”.

+

Darwin said: Competing replicators are selected under pressure, and adaptation produces design without a designer. The nectar in a flower has the purpose of attracting bees because flowers that spread their pollen more effectively have more descendants, and attracting bees are an effective tactic which genetic lines of flowers have been competing to learn for millions of years.

+

This one huge final cause in biology – that which replicates, survives – substitutes for a designer and separates teleology from design. It becomes a driver of behavior that can be usefully described as purposive all through biological systems. This account kills “natural theology” because it has more explanatory power than natural theology and proceeds from a premise that is both simpler than the existence of God and actually testable. We can observe evolution in action at many scales.

+

All this is old news to anyone who has thought seriously about the philosophical implications of evolutionary theory. But now I enter new ground, because as an ex-mathematician I consider “two” to be a suspicious and unstable number. This suggests a simple question which as far as I’m aware no one has broached before: might there be a third kind of teleology?

+

That is: are there natural systems in which the most natural description of behavior includes “purpose” or “intention”, but the driver is neither design nor Darwinian selection? Somewhat to my own surprise, I realized a positive answer within minutes of formulating the question. Not only that, I can identify the answer with a specific term in an equation of physics.

+

First, an example. Trap about a centimeter thickness of water between two horizontal parallel glass plates. Apply uniform heat to the lower plate. If you watch, you’ll see the same increasing roiling and turbulence you’d get in a conventional tea kettle – except that past a certain critical temperature the turbulence abruptly disappears, and the water forms a regular, honeycomb-like array of hexagonal convection cells.

+

Order – order that looks designed – has spontaneously appeared from turbulent chaos. What’s going on here?

+

In the language of intention and purpose, the water “wants” to shed heat as rapidly as it can. At a certain temperature, it needs to form convection cells to do so. This is like the macroscopic order found in an artifact or an evolved adaptation, but the final cause is neither design nor Darwinian selection; rather, it’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

+

The physical causation seems to work like this: randomly occurring convection micro-cells shed heat faster than neighboring chaotic regions and expand. The size of the resulting macro-cells is determined by the radius and depth that maximizes flow rate. Because the water is isotropically uniform, equal forces acting on all cells, you get a regular hexagonal close-pack – the most efficient (minimum-energy) tesselation. (In a real experimental setup of finite size, there will be distortions and broken cells at the edges).

+

This kind of spontaneous order was explained in a more general way by a physical chemist named Ilya Progogine in the 1970s. What he discovered is that in thermodynamic systems far out of equilibrium, the tendency to remain disorderly may be overwhelmed by the tendency to dissipate heat as fast as possible. Such systems may spontaneously develop a dissipative macroscopic organization that looks purposive. Another well-known example is the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction.

+

This is teleology of a third kind, neither designed nor Darwinian. Prigogine showed that it corresponded to an additional term in the equations of thermodynamics that is zero or unobservably small near equilibrium. For this he got a Nobel Prize in 1977, and well deserved it.

+

Are there more kinds of teleology? I haven’t thought of any. But it’s an interesting question, isn’t it?

diff --git a/20100827122508.blog b/20100827122508.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..18f51a6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100827122508.blog @@ -0,0 +1,60 @@ +Risk, Verification, and the INTERCAL Reconstruction Massacree +

This is the story of the INTERCAL Reconstruction Massacree, an essay in risk versus skepticism and verification in software development with a nod in the general direction of Arlo Guthrie.

+

About three hours ago as I began to write, I delivered on a promise to probably my most distinguished customer ever – Dr. Donald Knuth. Don (he asked me to call him that, honest!) had requested a bug fix in INTERCAL, which he plans to use as the subject of a chapter in his forthcoming book Selected Papers on Fun And Games. As of those three hours ago Donald Knuth’s program is part of the INTERCAL compiler’s regression-test suite.

+

But I’m not actually here today to talk about Donald Knuth, I’m here to talk about risk versus skepticism and verification in software engineering – in five part harmony and full orchestration, using as a case study my recent experiences in (once again) calling INTERCAL forth from the realm of the restless dead.

+

+

(Feel free to imagine an acoustic guitar repeating a simple ragtime/blues tune in the background. For atmosphere.)

+

Those of you coming in late may not be aware that (1) INTERCAL is the longest-running and most convoluted joke in the history of programming language design, and (2) all modern implementations of this twisted, sanity-sucking horror are descended from one that I tossed off as a weekend hack in 1990 here in the town of Malvern Pennsylvania (the manual describing the language goes back to 1972 but before my C-INTERCAL there hadn’t been a running implementation available in about a decade).

+

Since then, the attention I’ve given C-INTERCAL has been rather sporadic. Years have gone by without releases, which is less of a dereliction of duty than it might sound like considering that the entire known corpus of INTERCAL code ships with the compiler. INTERCAL attracts surreality the way most code attracts bitrot; after one longish maintainence hiatus (around the turn of the millennium, whilst I was off doing the Mr. Famous Guy thing on behalf of open source) I discovered that INTERCAL had nucleated an entire weird little subculture of esoteric-language designers around itself, among whom I had come to be regarded as sort of a patriarch in absentia….

+

Despite my neglect, every once in a while something like that would happen to remind me that I was responsible for this thing. Donald Knuth provided the most recent such occasion; so I gathered together my editors and debuggers and implements of of destruction and dusted off the code, only to discover that it had been a full seven years since I’d last done so. (I can see the tagline now: “INTERCAL has ESR declared legally dead, film at 11.”)

+

A week of work later, I was even more nonplussed to discover that others had been doing serious work on the compiler while I wasn’t looking. Notably, there was one Alex Smith (aka ais523, hail Eris, all hail Discordia!) a doughty Englishman who’d been shipping a descendant of my 2003 code since 2006. With lots of new features, including a much more general optimizer based on a technique that could be described as a compiler compiler compiler. (That’s “compiler to the third meta”, for those of you in the cheap seats.)

+

I straightaway wrote Alex explaining the challenge from Knuth and suggesting we defork our projects. He agreed with gratifying enthusiasm, especially when I explained that what I actually wanted to do was reconstruct as much of the history of C-INTERCAL as possible at this late date, and bash it all unto a repo in a modern distributed version control system which he and I could then use to cooperate. Now, early in this essay I introduced by stealth one of the topics of my discourse on skepticism and verification, the regression-test suite (remember the regression-test suite?). This is another one, the DVCS. We’ll get back to the DVCS.

+

Reconstructing the history of C-INTERCAL turned out to be something of an epic in itself. 1990 was back in the Dark Ages as far as version control and release-management practices go; our tools were paleolithic and our procedures likewise. The earliest versions of C-INTERCAL were so old that even CVS wasn’t generally available yet (CVS 1.0 didn’t even ship until six months after C-INTERCAL 0.3, my first public release). SCCS had existed since the early 1980s but was proprietary; the only game in town was RCS. Primitive, file-oriented RCS.

+

I was a very early adopter of version control; when I wrote Emacs’s VC mode in 1992 the idea of integrating version control into normal workflow that closely was way out in front of current practice. Today’s routine use of such tools wasn’t even a gleam in anyone’s eye then, if only because disks were orders of magnitude smaller and there was a lot of implied pressure to actually throw away old versions of stuff. So I only RCSed some of the files in the project at the time, and didn’t think much about that.

+

As a result, reconstructing C-INTERCAL’s history turned into about two weeks of work. A good deal of it was painstaking digital archeology, digging into obscure corners of the net for ancient release tarballs Alex and I didn’t have on hand any more. I ended up stitching together material from 18 different release tarballs, 11 unreleased snapshot tarballs, one release tarball I could reconstruct, one release tarball mined out of an obsolete Red Hat source RPM, two shar archives, a pax archive, five published patches, two zip files, a darcs archive, and my partial RCS history, and that’s before we got to the aerial photography. To perform the surgery needed to integrate this, I wrote a custom Python program assisted by two shellscripts, topping out at a hair over 1200 lines of code.

+

You can get a look at the results by cloning from git://gitorious.org/intercal/intercal.git which is the resulting git repo. Now, friends, you may be wondering why I bothered to do all this rather than simply starting a repo with ais523’s latest snapshot and munging my week’s worth of changes into it, and all I’m going to say about that is that if the answer isn’t intuitively obvious to you you have missed the point of INTERCAL and are probably not a hacker. A much more relevant question is why I’m writing about all this and what it has to do with risk versus skepticism and verification in software engineering. That’s a good question, and the answer is partly that I want you all to be thinking about how software-engineering practice has changed in the last twenty years, and in what direction it’s changed.

+

Software engineering is a huge exercise in attempting to control the risk inherent in writing programs for unforgiving, literal-minded computers with squishy fallible human brains. The strategies we’re evolved to deal with this have three major themes: (1) defensive chunking, (2) systematic skepticism, and (3) automated verification.

+

I’m not going to go on about defensive chunking much in the rest of this talking blues, because most of the tactics that fit under that strategy aren’t controversial any more. It’s been nearly forty years since David Parnas schooled us all in software modularity as a way of limiting the amount of complexity that a programmer’s brain has to handle at one time; we’ve had generations, in the tempo of this field, to absorb that lesson.

+

But I am going to point out that is highly unlikely we will ever have another archeological epic quite like C-INTERCAL’s. Because another form of defensive chunking we’ve all gotten used to in the last fifteen years is the kind provided by version-control systems. What they let us do is make modifications with the confidence that we can revert chunks of them to get back to a known-good state. And, as a result, hackers these days create version-control repositories for new projects almost as reflexively as they breathe. Project history tends not to get lost any more.

+

Distributed version control systems like git and hg and bzr help; they’re astonishingly fast and lightweight to use, lowering the overhead of using them to near nothing. And one effect of DVCSes that I’ve confronted in the last couple of days, as ais523 and I got the new C-INTERCAL repo and project off the ground, is to heighten the tension between development strategies that lean more on systematic skepticism and development strategies that lean more on automated verification.

+

I’m going to sneak up on the nature of that tension by talking a bit about about DVCS workflows. Shortly after I created the C-INTERCAL repo on gitorious, ais523 and I had a misunderstanding. I emailed him about a feature I had just added, and he pointed out that it had a bug and he’d pushed a correction. I looked, and I didn’t see it in the repo, and I asked him, and here’s what he said:

+

+I pushed it to a separate repository, <http://gitorious.org/~ais523/intercal/ais523-intercal> I thought the normal way to collaborate via git was for everyone to have a separate repository, and the changes to be merged into the main one after that. Should I try to push directly to the mainline? +

+

Here’s what I said in reply:

+

+Yes. git workflow is highly variable, and the style you describe is normal for larger projects. Not for small ones, though. I’ve worked in both styles (my large-project experience is on git itself) so I have a practical grasp on the tradeoffs.

+

For projects the size of C-INTERCAL (or my gpsd project, which has at most about half a dozen regular committers) the most convenient mode is still to have a single public repo that everybody pulls from and pushes to. Among other things, this workflow avoids putting a lot of junk nodes in the metadata history that are doing nothing but marking trivial merges.

+

This is not quite like regressing to svn :-), because you can still work offline, you’re not totally hosed if the site hosting the public repo crashes, and git is much, *much* better at history-sensitive merging. +

+

Now, this may sound like a boring procedural point, but….remember the regression-test suite? Have a little patience and wait till the regression-test suite comes around on the guitar again and I promise I”ll have a nice big juicy disruptive idea for you right after it. Maybe one that even undermines some of my own previous theory.

+

Here’s what ais523 came back with, and my next two replies telescoped together:

+

+> Ah; my previous DVCS experience has mostly been in small projects where
+> we kept different repos because we didn’t really trust each other. It
+> was rather common to cherry-pick and to ignore various commits until
+> they could be reviewed, or even redone from scratch…

+

Interesting. The git group functions this way, but I’ve never seen it on
+any of the small projects I contribute to. Makes me wonder about
+cultural differences between your immediate peer group and mine.

+

I should note that on the gpsd project, one of the reasons the
+single-public-repo works for us is that we have a better alternative
+to mutual trust – an *extremely* effective regression-test suite. The
+implicit assumption is that committers are running the regression
+tests on every nontrivial commit. Why trust when you can verify? :-)

+

I guess I’m importing that philosophy to this project.

+

Hm. I think I should blog about this. +

+

Why trust when you can verify, indeed? But I now think the more interesting question turns out to be: Why distrust when you can verify?

+

Keeping different repos because you don’t really trust each other, cherrypicking and having an elaborate patch-review process, being careful who gets actual commit privileges in what – this is what the Linux kernel gang does. It’s the accepted model for large open-source projects, and the hither end of a long line of development in software engineering strategy that says you cope with the fallibility of squishy human brains by applying systematic skepticism. In fact, if you’re smart you design your development workflow so it institutionalizes decentralized peer review and systematic skepticism.

+

Thirteen years ago I wrote The Cathedral and The Bazaar and published the generative theory of open-source development that had been implicit in hackers’ practice for decades. If anyone living has a claim to be the high priest of the cult of systematic skepticism in software development, that would be me. And yet, in this conversation about C-INTERCAL, as in several previous I’ve had about my gpsd project since about 2006, I found myself rejecting much of the procedural apparatus of systematic skepticism as the open-source community has since elaborated it…in favor of a much simpler workflow centered on a regression-test suite.

+

Systematic skepticism has disadvantages, too. Time you spend playing the skeptic role is time you can’t spend designing or coding. Good practice of it imposes overhead at every level from maintaining multiple repositories to the social risk that an open-source project’s review-and-approval process may become as factional, vicious and petty-politicized as a high-school cafeteria. Can there be a better way?

+

The third major strategy in managing software-engineering risk is automated verification. This line of development got a bad reputation after early techniques for proving code correctness turned out not to scale past anything larger than toy programs. Fully automated verification of software has never been practical and there are good theoretical reasons (like, the proven undecidability of the Halting Problem) to suppose that it never will be.

+

Still. Computing power continues to decrease in cost as human programming time increases in cost; it’s inevitable that there has been a steady interest in test-centered development and setting programs to catch other program’s bugs. Conditional guarantees of the form “I can trust this software if I can trust its test suite” can have a lot of value if the test suite is dramatically simpler than the software.

+

Thirteen years ago I wrote that in the presence of a culture of decentralized peer review enabled by cheap communications, heavyweight traditional planning and management methods for software development start to look like pointless overhead. That has become conventional wisdom; but I think, perhaps, I see the next phase change emerging now. In the presence of sufficiently good automated verification, the heavyweight vetting, filtering, and review apparatus of open-source projects as we have known them also starts to look like pointless overhead.

+

There are important caveats, of course. A relatively promiscuous, throw-the-code-through-the-test-suite-and-see-if-it-jams style can work for gpsd and C-INTERCAL because both programs have relatively simple coupling to their environments. Building test jigs is easy and (even more to the point) building a test suite with good coverage of the program’s behavior space isn’t too difficult.

+

What of programs that don’t have those advantages? Even with respect to gpsd there are a few devices that have to be live-tested because their interactions with gpsd are too complex to be captured by a test jig. Operating-system kernels and anything else with real-time requirements are notoriously hard to wrap test harnesses around; even imagining all the timing problems you might want to test for is brutally hard to do. Programs with GUIs are also notoriously difficult to test in an automated way.

+

I think this objection actually turns into a prescription. We cannot and should not junk the habits of systematic skepticism. Open source is not going to become obsolete, any more than previous big wins (like, say, high-level languages) became obsolete when we figured out how to do open source methodically. But what we could be doing is figuring out how to design for testability and do test-centered development on a wider range of programs, with the goal (and the confident expectation) that doing so will reduce the overhead and friction costs of our open-source processes.

+

The aim should be to offload as much as possible of the work now done by human skepticism onto test logic so that our procedures can simplify even as our development tempo speeds up and our quality improves. The signature tools of the open-source world over the last fifteen years have been new kinds of collaboration engines – version control systems, web servers, forge sites. Perhaps the signature tools of the next fifteen years will be test engines – coverage analyzers, scriptable emulation boxes, unit-test frameworks, code-auditing tools, and descendants of these with capabilities we can barely imagine today.

+

But the way of the hacker is a posture of mind; mental habits are more important than tools. We can get into the habit of asking questions like “What’s the coverage percentage of your test suite?” as routinely as we now ask “Where’s your source-code repository?”

+

And friends, they may think it’s a movement. The INTERCAL Reconstruction Anti-Massacree movement. No, wait…this song’s not really about INTERCAL. It’s about how we can up our game – because the risk and challenges of software engineering never stand still. There’s an escalator of increasing scale that made the best practices of 1990 (the year C-INTERCAL was born) seem ridiculously patchy in 2010, and will no doubt make today’s best practices seem primitive in 2030. Our tools, our practices, and our mental habits can’t stand still either.

diff --git a/20100903033957.blog b/20100903033957.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..671edf6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100903033957.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +CyanogenMOD rocks my old G-1 +

I spent some time today rooting and reflashing my old G-1 so it’s jumped from stock Android 1.6 to Android 2.2. CyanogenMod is a truly impressive piece of work, with both snazzy surface polish and a lot of nice little hackerly touches like including a root console in the standard apps panel and easy access to the recovery loader. I really feel like I have control of the device now.

+

Which is nice, but doesn’t have a lot of practical relevance yet. My main use for the G-1 is as a fallback in case my Nexus One gets lost or stolen. Still, there was some enjoyment in learning that, yes, I can do stuff like reflashing a phone without bricking it, and swapping around SIM cards without perpetrating some egregious blunder that wipes them. Alas, I’m still not very comfortable doing risky things with hardware – I retain some emotional reflexes from thirty years ago, when zorching anything computerlike meant you’d just incurred a five-figure bill and were in deep, deep shit.

+

+

As usual in such exercises, the hard part was interpreting the instructions. The hackers who wrote them were trying very hard to be clear, but the result was a thicket of poorly-organized details. I could follow the procedure, but I had to do it almost blind; there was nothing that gave me a high-level view of the process so that I could grasp clearly why each step was necessary and why they had to happen in the order they did. As a result, for troubleshooting I absolutely had to have live help on an IRC channel.

+

I wish someone would write a bird’s-eye view of the smart-phone modding process. It can’t be that complicated, and I know what’s involved in writing boot loaders for general-purpose computers. Shout to my readers: has anyone done this already, or do I need to put it on my over-full to-do list?

diff --git a/20100907180801.blog b/20100907180801.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..05aebb4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100907180801.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +More dispatches from the smartphone front +

Four days ago I blogged about upgrading my old G-1 to CyanogenMOD and complained that the mod’s home site contained no high-level overview of the modding process to help pepople understand all the details in the modding instructions for individual devices.

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It took some days of research, but I have now fixed that problem. I had that narrative description reviewed by experts on the IRC #cyanogenmod IRC channel while I was writing it, so it’s an outsider view with insider correctness.

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In other news, see Android’s Share Of Mobile Web Use Soaring, iPhone Falling. If that share is tracking installed base accurately, Android installed base will pass iOS’s sometime between the beginning of December 2010 and mid-February 2011. This is just mildly more pessimistic than my forecast months ago of a crossover in 4Q2010, but it also needs bearing in mind that iOS webshare includes iPads as well as iPhones, and iPads don’t yet have effective competition. Thus the usage figures probably underestimate the rate of share decline for iPhones alone.

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All indications continue to be that the iPhone is collapsing towards the same status of high-margin niche product with single-digit market share that has been the historic norm for Apple. The Apple fanboys who think that smooth UI and industrial design trump freedom from vendor lock-in and everything else (and champion the walled-garden content model!) have a lot more crow still to eat. I expect to enjoy every second of serving it to them.

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The dirty little secret about Google Android suggests that Android’s triumph may not be a good thing after all. In its reading of events, the withdrawal of the Nexus One signals that Google is allowing cellphone carriers to seize back the power over feature lists that it seemed to be claiming with the announcement of the Android 2.2 feature list. And it’s true that some Android devices now have unhelpful carrier customizations that lock out features like USB tethering and lock in crapware apps that users might qet to delete.

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Months ago, I thought that Google walking away from a deal with Verizon meant that Google was going to get tough with the carriers about not crippling Android 2.2. I may have been wrong about that, or right at the time but something has changed in their calculations since. They’re not resisting feature deletion and crapware with the intensity I expected then.

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While this is cause for concern, it’s not yet time for alarm. I pointed out in Flattening the Smartphone Market, five months ago, that what’s really dangerous to the carriers is comparability of product. When customers start asking questions like “Sprint Android has tethering, why don’t I?” and “Why have you blocked me from deleting apps that you privileged?” vendor attempts to control features are living on borrowed time, whatever Google does or doesn’t do.

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The existence of aftermarket upgrades like CyanogenMod for phones produced in huge volumes sharpens the edge of that blade by making unlocked, user-controlled phones a reality. Projects like OpenMoko’s FreeRunner are worthy and wonderful but can’t capture the economies of scale that come from expected production runs in the hundreds of millions; thus they’re doomed to remain expensive niche toys for hackers. CyanogenMOD is more effective because it co-opts the commercial success of Android and the financial mass of the handset manufacturers.

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Which brings me back to CyanogenMOD documentation. Anything that lowers the barrier to installing that mod on mass-market phones increases the pressure on the carriers. The amount of grief they can inflict on their customers via Android customization is now bounded above by the hassle cost of installing CyanogenMOD. By making that installation easier, I have directly attacked their lock-in.

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Are Google’s strategic planners counting on efforts like CyanogenMOD to help fight their corner? You betcha. They learned how to think about the open-source long term from me (I still have Larry and Sergei’s fanmail from 1998 to prove that), and they’re not stupid. If I can see where product comparability is leading, I’m bound to assume that so can they – and it recommends a very Taoist strategy. That is, rather than fight the carrier oligopoly for openness directly, give them enough rope to hang themselves with – and let their customers do the actual hanging.

diff --git a/20100908062937.blog b/20100908062937.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d693d5d --- /dev/null +++ b/20100908062937.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +The smartphone wars: a global perspective +

While doing some research to check an assertion made by a commenter on More dispatches from the smartphone front I ran across excerpts from a very interesting report from investment analysts at Piper Jaffray on global smartphone market share and how they expect it to change in the next few years.

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I can’t get at the full report, as Piper Jaffray has it paywalled and sells it to customers. But I have to say that for bankers the excerpts I can see make them look pretty smart to me. They’ve suggested a scenario for a radical change in market conditions that I actually think is quite plausible.

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Before I get into that, let’s consider what they have to say about current conditions. For months I’ve been hearing a story from commenters overseas that my prediction of near-term and irreversible Android dominance was founded on a U.S.-centric view that ignores structural differences in foreign markets. According to this apologetic, Apple’s U.S. market-share crash since 4Q2009 is really a result of it being bundled with AT&T’s crappy network. Overseas, I was told, where unlocked phones are normal and carriers hawk SIM cards instead of tied hardware, Apple’s iOS is doing much better and still leads Android.

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Of course, the prediction that goes with this that as soon as AT&T’s U.S. exclusive ends in 2012 and iOS goes multicarrier, we will all learn that every Android customer in the known universe really wanted an iPhone and Android’s market share will collapse like a pricked balloon. (Bear in mind this prediction has been enthusiastically seconded by the same fanboys that said Apple’s falloff in Q1 was due to customers holding off purchases until the iPhone4 came out and surely, surely Android’s market share would then collapse like a pricked balloon. Well, we know how that rosy fantasy died. iPhone4 didn’t even slow the rate of decline noticeably.)

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Here’s another dose of cold hard reality: the belief that Apple is beating Android overseas is (according to Piper Jaffray) mythical. They’re expecting final market share figures for 2010 to show iOS up by just 1% at 15.9% to 14.9%. Backing this up is a report from Canalys that puts iOS’s 2Q2010 global share at 13% and, though it doesn’t give a figure, says the momentum is all with Android. According to IDC, Apple itself only claims 16%. And Gartner Research says that as of August Android actually leads at 17% to Apple’s 14.2%!

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The picture is clear: (1) iOS and Android are now at or near a statistical dead heat in global market share, and (2) every analyst expects Android to gain dramatically in the near future. What I notice in the data that they’re not saying is this: the world seems only to be lagging smartphone-OS trends in the U.S. by four to six months, suggesting that carrier bundling in the U.S. is having relatively little effect on those trends.

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This puzzled me when I first tried to understand it, but I think I get it now. The data only make sense if the rate at which U.S. consumers replace their phones (and move to Android) is substantially faster than their contract-expiration cycle. The typical contract term in the U.S. is two years; if the rates match we’d expect to see a trend lag of a half cycle, about twelve months. This is clearly not what’s happening. The U.S. market looks more like the (unbundled) worldwide smartphone market than one might expect.

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I can only guess why U.S. customers are replacing their phones that fast, but the simplest hypothesis seems also the most likely: a truly massive move is on from dumb “feature” phones to smartphones (and Piper Jaffray’s report agrees with my guess). I think Android isn’t mainly stealing present customers from Apple; instead it’s doing hugely better among customers up-migrating from hardware like my old Samsung VT660. And I don’t think we need to look much further than price for a reason; Android phones are cheaper and Apple just isn’t justifying its price premium for most. I also think the most plausible model is one in which once users land on a smartphone their choice is fairly stable, though with erosion towards Android continuing at a low rate.

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That’s what’s happening now. What comes next?

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The consensus scenario among most of these analysts seems to be that Android clobbers the living snot out of iOS in 2011, with its growth being especially strong in Asia. Canalys is emphatic on this last point, and it makes sense; those customers are more price-sensitive than Americans. But Piper Jaffray thinks something even more dramatic is going to happen.

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Piper Jaffray thinks that Nokia and RIM are hardware companies in their DNA, and are soon going to be forced to face up to the fact that they’re just not very good at software – not good enough to compete with Google, anyway. It’s expecting one or both of them to fold and jump to Android in 2011. The ZDNet report on the Piper Jaffray study says there’s already been one bloody internal battle at RIM about this.

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On due consideration, I think this is plausible and that I really should have spotted this possibility before Piper Jaffray did. It’s following out the same pro-Android logic I did many months ago about software development being a cost sink for handset manufacturers that they’d best get rid of. Probably the only thing stopping Nokia is the amount of money and prestige they’ve sunk into Symbian, but it has to be dawning on them now that Android has Symbian seriously outgunned. (I actually thought the Nokia acquisition of Symbian smelled faintly of doom back in 2008 before Android was a real factor. I wasn’t sure why, there was just that odor about it to me.)

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So the international question reduces to this: is Android going to swamp iOS quickly on more less smooth continuation of present trends, or are Nokia and RIM going to fold and shuffle their userbases into the Android column even faster? Not a lot of good news on the Rialto for Apple fans, and I suspect it’s going to get worse before it gets worse.

diff --git a/20100909083620.blog b/20100909083620.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fc6fbf0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100909083620.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +The social utility of hacker humor +

I’ve been doing a lot of work recently on an ancient project of mine, C-INTERCAL, that’s an implementation of the longest-running joke in the history of computer languages. It’s an implementation, begun in 1990, of a language conceived in 1972 as a parody of programming languages of the 1960s. Now it’s nearly 40 years later, and yet some skilled hackers are still investing their time into fixing bugs, shipping releases, and even (gasp!) documenting the thing.

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That’s a lot of effort to plow into a joke, and some people don’t get why. But there are parallels elsewhere: consider, for example, the venerable custom of issuing spoof Internet standards, published through the same channels as the real RFCs, on every April 1st. Behaviors like INTERCAL or the spoof RFCs don’t usually persist as long as these have without some powerful reason behind them.

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I got a clue about this in the early 1990s when I was working on the Jargon File, another artifact with aspects of a joke that many hackers take very seriously indeed. I had been invited to a sort of cultural-studies conference run by the Getty Foundation at which a bunch of anthropologists and folklorists were trying to get their heads around hacker culture as a culture, using me more or less as a star informant.

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I was talking with one, and asked what her sorts of questions cultural anthropologists normally ask about cultures they’re doing fieldwork on. She thought for a moment and said: “What’s the ritual calendar? What are the high holy days of mandatory observance?” It took me a bit of thought to understand why this is an important question, but it certainly is one. The high holy days of a culture encode the myths and values it most celebrates.

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I figuratively scratched my head and said “Uh, I dunno…I don’t think of any *HOLY SHIT*….yes, actually, I can. April Fool’s Day!” And then I explained about the Joke RFCs and April Fool USENET parodies. And we gazed upon each other with a feeling of discovery, for it was clear to both of us that we had grasped something important.

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There are lots of things that can help define a culture. Shared artifacts. Shared myths – and by “myth” I don’t necessarily mean a falsehood, it can be real history interpreted in a value-laden or normative way. Shared taboos. Shared attitudes. And shared jokes. One of the things that can help define a culture is “we are a people who laugh at the same things”.

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INTERCAL, and the joke RFCs, and the in-jokes in the Jargon File, all have an important gatekeeping function for the hacker culture. Hackers get why these things are funny, the same way they get why a feature request from Donald Knuth is like unto a commandment from $DEITY ($DEITY is yet another venerable hacker joke – it expands as “insert choice of god here”). These artifacts are like the famous quip about jazz that if you need to have it explained to you you’ll never get it – a defining mystery that selects not merely for technical competence for but a certain posture of mind. And induces it, too…

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The people who write and maintain these jokes are expressing and reifying hacker values. This is especially important for us, because our avenues of cultural transmission are in some ways quite restricted. We don’t have a material culture; we use and borrow the tangible artifacts of the culture(s) around us, but we don’t really have any of our own other than ephemera like T-shirts and mugs and a few toys from ThinkGeek. Nor do we have generational transmission in the normal sense; almost nobody gets to learn hacker folklore at a parent’s knee (although I know one exceptional family that comes close to this).

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Here is, as it were, the punch line: April Fool’s Day is the hackers’ only annual day of fixed observance in part because shared jokes are more central to our identity than they are in most cultures. Which takes us back to INTERCAL; the programmer (or would-be programmer) who stumbles across it, reads, and begins to laugh, is becoming one of us. Is, in fact, making himself one of us. He is acquiring, by transmission through its jokes, the hacker posture of mind. Much the same could be said, for example, of the infamous RFC 1149 (A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers).

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The joke gets funnier, and the cultural transmission mechanism more effective, as the material around it more exactly reflects the serious values of the culture. Thus, INTERCAL has to be an actual working compiler for a Turing-complete language, and its maintainers have evolved it from a scratchy one-off into a near-spotless example of good practice – clean, well-documented code using up-to-date tools and version control and with a regression-test suite. In fact you can look back through the INTERCAL code, as I recently did, and see in it a potted history of how key practices in software tools, version control, documentation, testing and software distribution have evolved in the the last twenty years. From shar archives to tarballs; from no version control to centralized version control to distributed; from flat-text documentation to groff to texinfo to asciidoc; the assimilation of the Web; and, recently, an increasing focus on development by test.

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There are messages on several levels here: one of the most important is that hackers are expected to be such dedicated craftsmen that they work to contemporary high standards even when the project is an intrinsically ridiculous museum piece. In a similar spirit, the best joke RFCs are such immaculately deadpan parodies of standards language that if you’re not careful you can read several paragraphs in before you realize you are up to your eyeballs in satire.

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This is odder than it may appear at first. It is not just that hackers use technical humor to maintain an ironic distance from the machinery of software production they are so intimate with. It’s that this ironic distance, this affectionate parody, is one of the core observances of hacker culture – actually definitional of it. We have a term for this borrowed from SF fandom; “ha ha only serious”, and I can’t think of any real parallel to it elsewhere; even circus clowns don’t celebrate their art by making satires of it.

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A non-hacker might well ask “Why do I care?” Which is a good question; it’s all very well that hackers have invented a cute little subculture around themselves, and may be academically interesting that acculturation by ha-ha-only-serious is important there. But does the existence of this culture and these mechanisms mean anything to anyone else but anthropologists? Is there any broader social utility here?

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Yes, there is. The jokes and the culture they figure forth matters because every once in a while something erupts out of them that is a game changer on a civilization-wide level. Two of the big ones were the Internet and open-source software. These two movements were intimately intertwined with hacker culture, both produced by it and productive of it. The origins of our tribe go back a bit further than either technology, but we have since re-invented ourselves as the people who make that stuff work.

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And I don’t mean “make it work” in a narrow technical sense, either. As long as there are people who laugh at INTERCAL and RFC1149 and the Unix koans of Master Foo, and recognize themselves in the Jargon File, those same people will care passionately that computing technology is an instrument of liberation rather than control. They won’t be able to help themselves, because they will have absorbed inextricably with the jokes some values that are no joke at all. High standards of craftsmanship; a subversive sense of humor; a belief in the power of creative choice and voluntary cooperation; a spirit of individualism and playfulness; and not least, a skepticism about the pretensions of credentialism, bureaucracy and authority that is both healthy and bone-deep.

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These are not trivial qualities in people who who have their hands on the controls of what may be the most critical layer of shared infrastructure in today’s computer-dependent civilization. Someday, the spirit of hacker humor might head off any number of grim futures. In fact, I think it not unlikely that it already has.

diff --git a/20100910154716.blog b/20100910154716.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9b12048 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100910154716.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +The smartphone wars: a cautious cheer for T-Mobile +

T-Mobile announced the G-2 yesterday. They were, of course, the first carrier to ship an Android phone when they released the G-1 back in 2008. I think this announcement signals yet another phase change in the smartphone wars, in which carriers begin to back off the proprietary skins that have disfigured recent Android releases.

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Press coverage has it that the G-2 is an HTC device and will run a vanilla, un-skinned 2.2. The hardware news is unsurprising; the G-1 was an HTC Dream, and an excellent fit for purpose. Rumor all along has been that the G-2 would be a branded variant of the HTC Magic.

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Vanilla 2.2 bucks a recent and unhappy trend of carrier devices running down-version Android with heavy skinning and (often) lockout of much-desired features like tethering. I predicted this trend wouldn’t last as customers caught wise and began to vote with their feet, and the G-2 is significant because it gives them a major-carrier device to run to. Inevitably, the G-2 will increase market pressure against skinning.

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On that account, here’s a cautious cheer for T-Mobile. My wife and I became T-mobile users to get the G-1, and it must be said that they’ve they’ve been notably non-unpleasant by carrier standards. Coincidentally, we reached the point of needing to decide whether to re-up with them in the week just before the announcement, and swiftly agreed it was a no-brainer. Their coverage meets our needs and their rates aren’t silly. They get additional points for two things: (1) It wasn’t difficult to get them to unlock my G-1, policy is that any customer in good standing can have that after 90 days and (2) when I got my Nexus One the service rep I talked with not only didn’t give me crap about changing phones on a plan designated “G-1″, he sounded frankly envious that I’d gotten an N1 to play with.

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Yes, you’re catching my implication correctly; I actually like my cell carrier. T-Mobile still pulls crap like charging mucho bucks for SMS when the incremental cost of the service to them is zero, but compared to the sleazy control-freak moves their competition routinely gets up to they’re actually pretty nice.

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The personal report has a larger point lurking in it. When you’re the number 4 carrier, perpetually derided as playing catch-up and scrambling for market share, one of the ways you can compete is by – gasp – not treating your customers like shit. And not actively crippling the devices you ship. This seems to be the route T-Mobile is going.

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There are features of the evolving smartphone market that are pushing in this direction, anyway. One is the increasing release tempo, driven by the number of handset manufacturers who want to get in on the action. Symbolically, Nokia just sacked its CEO; as one of my commenters correctly noted, “No doubt this is a direct result from the failure to compete in the US smartphone market”. They’re going to be trying harder. This means that time to market is going to become an ever more pressing issue for new hardware rollouts, increasing the opportunity cost of vendor skinning.

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Sure, the vendors can try to put the brakes on the hardware-release tempo. But unless they actively collude it’s not going to happen – there’s too much marketing advantage to being first to hit the street with sexy new hardware, as we’ve seen for example with the EVO 4G, and the handset vendors will be upping the tempo in response to competition in their market. As product cycles shorten, increasing deadline pressure on the Android porting process means vendor customization costs are going to rocket, negating a significant part of Android’s cost advantage.

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We can be very specific about the issues with vendor skins. Their only advantage to customers is in the opportunity to improve stock Android’s user interface, which is a weak justification because it doesn’t actually suck to begin with. The problem is that they function mainly as cover for various forms of carrier control. In increasing order of annoyance, we can list (1) obtrusive branding, (2) uninstallable advertising/crapware paid for by business partners, (3) hijacking of the app store, and (4) data-usage caps, especially disabling of tethering and WiFi hotspot features.

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Customers are bound to notice what a shitty deal this is, creating a marketing opportunity for a carrier that’s willing not to play these games. The true significance of the G-2 announcement is that by trumpeting stock Android 2.2, T-Mobile is kicking its competitors right where it will hurt and shortening the lifetime of the skin-your-phones-skin-your-customers strategy. As I’ve previously noted, I think Google is counting on this dynamic.

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If carrier skins actually functioned as effective differentiators they’d be better able to justify their increasing opportunity costs. But the carriers’ own marketing suggests they’re not – notice how hardware-focused their new-product pitches are? One suspects that various attempts to hype their custom interfaces didn’t survive focus-group testing, and no wonder when they mainly subtract value rather than adding it.

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In sum, I predict that the smartphone wars are about to enter phase three. Phase one began with the Android launch and was dominated by a face-off with Apple iOS that Android won, rocketing past it in U.S. market share and reaching global market-share parity (soon to be dominance). The theme of phase two, which began a few months before the Nexus One was canned off Google’s web store, was increasing attempts by carriers to stuff the Android genie back in the bottle by skinning.

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Phase three begins with the G-2 launch and will feature an accelerating collapse of carrier attempts to control and corral Android. They’ll be ended by customer pushback and time-to-market pressures on product development. This will throw the carriers into the exact kind of competition they most want to avoid – directly on price and quality of network provisioning. Bad news for them, but great news for everyone else.

diff --git a/20100911091840.blog b/20100911091840.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c6cda25 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100911091840.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Eminent Domains: The First Time I Changed History +

In a day or two I plan to do a blog post on the way engineering decisions can be critically important at cusp points in the history of society. In order for part of the argument in that post to make sense, my readers need to hear a story I’ve been hinting at in comments for some time: the first time that I personally made a difference in the world at what I believe was history-changing scale, and how that happened.

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I think it was at the 1983 Usenix/UniForum conference (there is an outside possibility that I’m off by a year and it was ’84, which I will ignore in the remainder of this report). I was just a random young programmer then, sent to the conference as a reward by the company for which I was the house Unix guru at the time (my last regular job). More or less by chance, I walked into the meeting where the leaders of IETF were meeting to finalize the design of Internet DNS.

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When I walked in, the crowd in that room was all set to approve a policy architecture that would have abolished the functional domains (.com, .net, .org, .mil, .gov) in favor of a purely geographic system. There’d be a .us domain, state-level ones under that, city and county and municipal ones under that, and hostnames some levels down. All very tidy and predictable, but I saw a problem.

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I raised a hand tentatively. “Um,” I said, “what happens when people move?”

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There was a long, stunned pause. Then a very polite but intense argument broke out. Most of the room on one side, me and one other guy on the other.

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OK, I can see you boggling out there, you in your world of laptops and smartphones and WiFi. You take for granted that computers are mobile. You may have one in your pocket right now. Dude, it was 1983. 1983. The personal computers of the day barely existed; they were primitive toys that serious programmers mostly looked down on, and not without reason. Connecting them to the nascent Internet would have been ludicrous, impossible; they lacked the processing power to handle it even if the hardware had existed, which it didn’t yet. Mainframes and minicomputers ruled the earth, stolidly immobile in glass-fronted rooms with raised floors.

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So no, it wasn’t crazy that the entire top echelon of IETF could be blindsided with that question by a twentysomething smartaleck kid who happened to have bought one of the first three IBM PCs to reach the East Coast. The gist of my argument was that (a) people were gonna move, and (b) because we didn’t really know what the future would be like, we should be prescribing as much mechanism and as little policy as we could. That is, we shouldn’t try to kill off the functional domains, we should allow both functional and geographical ones to coexist and let the market sort out what it wanted. To their eternal credit, they didn’t kick me out of the room for being an asshole when I actually declaimed the phrase “Let a thousand flowers bloom!”.

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(I wish I could remember who the one guy who immediately jumped in on my side was. I think it was Henry Spencer, but I’m not sure.)

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The majority counter, at first, was basically “But that would be chaos!” They were right, of course. But I was right too. The logic of my position was unassailable, really, and people started coming around fairly quickly. It was all done in less than 90 minutes. And that’s why I like to joke that the domain-name gold rush and the ensuing bumptious anarchy in the Internet’s host-naming system is all my fault.

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It’s not true, really. It isn’t enough that my argument was correct on the merits; for the outcome we got, the IETF had to be willing to let a n00b who’d never been part of their process upset their conceptual applecart at a meeting that I think was supposed to be mainly a formality ratifying decisions that had already been made in working papers. I give them much more credit for that than I’ll ever claim for being the n00b in question, and I’ve emphasized that every time I’ve told this story.

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Now look at what we avoided. With the chaos came a drastically decreased vulnerability to single-point failures – and I mainly mean the institutional kind, not the technical kind. If DNS addresses had been immobile and tied to individual legal jurisdictions, there would have been a far stronger case for keeping address issuance under government auspices (it’s not like phone numbers, which started out being privately issued on privately-owned infrastructure). The bad consequences would only have started with expense and bureaucratization; more than likely control of the Internet address space would have become, in many jurisdictions, a political instrument used to reward approved parties and control information flow.

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Not only would this have been a bad thing in itself, it would have set a negative precedent for centralizing other aspects of Internet governance that might well have hardened into stone by the time the technology was ready for the general public a decade later. Those of you who think ICANN and fly-by-night registrars are a pain in the ass aren’t wrong, but you should be on your knees in thanks that we got a system with that much play and polycentrism in it. We very nearly didn’t.

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If I were a dimwitted egotist I’d claim to have saved the world, maybe. But what really mattered is that I threw my disruption into a roomful of hackers with an innate distrust of hierarchy and a strong allergy to system designs with single-point vulnerability. It was that shared culture that made the difference, more than me – it produced my objection, and it produced people ready to hear it.

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Still. It was my hand that went up. Anybody who grokked that computers could be mobile could have changed history just then, but it happened to be me, and it was my first time.

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UPDATE: It’s been pointed out that while the RFC-issuing group that became the IETF existed in 1983-1984, it did not formally constitute itself as the “Internet Engineering Task Force” until 1986. So my use of the term here is anachronistic.

diff --git a/20100912063137.blog b/20100912063137.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..08296f1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100912063137.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Engineering history +

On a mailing list I frequent, a regular expressed doubt about the possibility that very small subgroups of a society (less than 5% of its population) can cause large changes in the overall direction of its evolution without long historical timespans to work in. But I know from experience that this can happen, because I’ve lived it. My explanation (lightly edited and expanded) follows.

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Of particular note is my explanation of how engineering design can shape history.

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Sometimes, when society reaches a cusp point, the decisions of individuals and small groups can have very large downstream consequences that are even visibly large in the near term.

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I have personally been present, and an actor, for at least two such hinge points of history: the finalization of the Internet design in 1983, and the mainstream emergence of open-source methods in the late 1990s. Even in the relatively short time since it has become clear that these are game-changers on the civilizational level, with ripple effects that will shape the rest of human history.

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There may be other ways for it to to happen, but the way I’ve seen it happen is that a few engineers make choices that have very large implications for centralization vs. decentralization and the prevalence of information asymmetry, then bake these into infrastructure before the political class notices that the outcome could have been different.

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Thought experiment: imagine an Internet in which email and web addresses were centrally issued by government agencies, with heavy procedural requirements and no mobility – even, at a plausible extreme, political patronage footballs. What kind of society do you suppose eventually issues from that?

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I was there in 1983 when a tiny group called the IETF prevented this from happening. I had a personal hand in preventing it and yes, I knew what the stakes were. Even then. So did everyone else in the room.

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Thought experiment: imagine a future in which everybody takes for granted that all software outside a few toy projects in academia will be closed source controlled by managerial elites, computers are unhackable sealed boxes, communications protocols are opaque and locked down, and any use of computer-assisted technology requires layers of permissions that (in effect) mean digital information flow is utterly controlled by those with political and legal master keys. What kind of society do you suppose eventually issues from that?

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Remember Trusted Computing and Palladium and crypto-export restrictions? RMS and Linus Torvalds and John Gilmore and I and a few score other hackers aborted that future before it was born, by using our leverage as engineers and mentors of engineers to change the ground of debate. The entire hacker culture at the time was certainly less than 5% of the population, by orders of magnitude.

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And we may have mainstreamed open source just in time. In an attempt to defend their failing business model, the MPAA/RIAA axis of evil spent years pushing for digital “rights” management so pervasively baked into personal-computer hardware by regulatory fiat that those would have become unhackable. Large closed-source software producers had no problem with this, as it would have scratched their backs too. In retrospect, I think it was only the creation of a pro-open-source constituency with lots of money and political clout that prevented this.

+

Did we bend the trajectory of society? Yes. Yes, I think we did. It wasn’t a given that we’d get a future in which any random person could have a website and a blog, you know. It wasn’t even given that we’d have an Internet that anyone could hook up to without permission. And I’m pretty sure that if the political class had understood the implications of what we were actually doing, they’d have insisted on more centralized control. ~For the public good and the children, don’t you know.~

+

So, yes, sometimes very tiny groups can change society in visibly large ways on a short timescale. I’ve been there when it was done; once or twice I’ve been the instrument of change myself.

diff --git a/20100913005125.blog b/20100913005125.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f0b6e7b --- /dev/null +++ b/20100913005125.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +The smartphone wars: Google goes Taoist, Microsoft uses the farce +

A few days ago, I observed that Google is not pushing back against cell carriers’ lockdown of Android phones as vigorously as I had expected in the wake of the Android 2.2 announcement. If this Twitter rumor is true, Google locked horns with the carriers and lost that confrontation, leading to the semi-discontinuance of the Nexus One. Does this mean the carriers have won the war?

+

+

I think not. The good news is that the announcement of the T-Mobile G-2, which will run un-skinned Android, suggests that Google’s longer-term strategy is still working. I have noted that the opportunity cost to the carriers of these unhelpful customizations is rising, propelled upward by increasing time-to-market pressures that force them to either drastically compress development schedules or run down-version releases of Android that sacrifice performance and customer appeal.

+

I still think the carriers will hang themselves, given enough rope – and that the third phase of the smartphone wars, in which carrier efforts to tame Android collapse of their own weight, is about to begin. I’ve argued this much in a previous post; my point now is that Google’s smart move now is Taoist. They don’t need to fight the carriers in any other way than by keeping the Android release tempo up and the time-to-market pressure on the carriers correspondingly high.

+

One of my commenters asked how Android customization by handset vendors (as opposed to the carriers) changes this picture. Not much at all, actually; if anything, the time-to-market pressure is worse on them than it is on the carriers, because they have more competition. Most places, the carriers’ markets look like oligopolies, but the handset market has more scrappy small players – and this makes complete sense, since the financial mass required to build and maintain a cell network is so much larger than you need to hire some engineers and rent fab capacity.

+

The difference in time-to-market pressure has consequences; expect the handset vendors to try to shed the cost of customizing Android faster than the carriers do. Notably, I don’t think HTC Sense will survive very long, especially not if the G-2 (which is expected to be an unskinned HTC Magic) does well. Crap like Sprint’s NASCAR branding will outlast it, because NASCAR will actually pay the carrier for that placement and offset Sprint’s development costs.

+

Of course, as the handset vendors stop customizing Android, the carriers’ cost of differentiating Android will go up faster. There’s only one way that game can end, really; carriers lose, and Google wins. The carriers can’t get off the tiger any more, not with Android’s new-unit sales growth utterly demolishing every other smartphone OS worldwide.

+

Which brings us to Windows Phone 7. Microsoft actually had the audacity to throw a shipping party that included a mock funeral for the iPhone. All that really needs to be said abut this is that the event was recorded by an Android phone.

+

I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but…I find I’m actually pitying Microsoft a little. They’ve got nothing, no hand at all in this game. Their desktop-computing monopoly not only won’t help them gain share, it’s an actual hindrance; carrier and handset-vendor execs understand precisely what Microsoft did to the PC market and are determined not to be Ballmer’s bitches. Microsoft’s previous mobile products have been a string of money-losing duds followed by an outright disaster – the wicked knock on Windows Phone 7 you’re going to keep hearing is “next of Kin“.

+

Brand power? It is to laugh; if you ask a random consumer in 2010 whether “Android” or “Microsoft” has more positive associations, Android will win hands-down (high marks to Google for effectively flooding that zone). Really Microsoft’s only asset is financial mass; if it’s possible for anyone to outright buy their way into the smartphone-OS market, they’re the outfit that can do it. Of course, this would involve forgoing actual profits, which is a problem now that their legendary cash hoard has largely been spent on fruitless acquisitions and stock buybacks.

+

No, Google has nothing to fear from Microsoft…and isn’t that an indication of how much the world has changed?

diff --git a/20100913203414.blog b/20100913203414.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5cc677a --- /dev/null +++ b/20100913203414.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +The smartphone wars: What Gassée has to say +

This is interesting. Jean-Louis Gassée, former head of Be Inc. and now a venture capitalist, has spotted what may be another prong of Google’s strategy; break the carriers’ term-contract system by driving the price of smartphones so far down that customers don’t need or want a carrier subsidy.

+

+

Here’s what he says:

+

+The great news is Google wants to disintermediate the carriers. How do they do that? By working with the Android army of manufacturers and targeting the $89 price point. Once there, carrier subsidies are no longer needed, consumers are free to move from one carrier to another as they get a better deal, or as they buy a new gadget without having to beg for an ETF (Early Termination Fee) exemption. +

+

I’m not sure why Gassée thinks $89 is a magic price point, and this paragraph appears in a post labeled Science Fiction: Nokia goes Android, but no matter. Qualitatively, Gassée is certainly on to something.

+

There has to be some price point below which subsidies become unnecessary and the term-contract system collapses. It may not be $89, but it’s probably bracketed by $50 and $100. Maybe Google thinks the handset manufacturers really can push handset prices that low if the hardware people don’t have to pay for smartphone OS development. It may be right; the underlying question is probably whether smartphones have any components that aren’t following a Moore’s Law cost curve.

+

(Until recently, I would have said “Aha! The display!”. But it turns out the price of LCDs was being held artificially high by collusion among major manufacturers; the ring got busted in early 2009, and lawsuits are continuing.)

+

Well before we reach the point at which the term-contract system collapses, the declining bill-of-materials cost on a smartphone will put a hard squeeze on the amount carriers can afford to spend on software development – yet another strike against carrier skins. This reinforces my conclusion that the time when crippling Android with customizations remains a viable strategy is limited. It may be over already.

+

Gassée emphasizes an important fact that I first wrote about nearly two years ago, around the time the G-1 first shipped. The drama with Apple is in many ways a distraction; Google’s medium-term strategic goal is to break the cell-carrier oligopoly – smash their profit margins and commoditize their function. Gassée doesn’t note that longer-term than that they’ll have to take on the fiber/cable oligopoly as well, but he is certainly not stupid enough to have missed this.

+

Gassée has spent a lot of time thinking about which way Nokia’s going to jump once it becomes apparent that its software strategy is a fragmented mess. Like Piper Jaffray (and now me) he sees a move to Android as a strong possibility, but he raises another possibility. What if Stephen Elop, the Microsoft alumnus they’ve tapped as CEO opts for Windows Phone 7?

+

I don’t think it will happen. It would combine all the present business disadvantages of Android with the disadvantages of a closed-source codebase controlled by someone else. Nokia’s engineers would scream bloody murder, and Nokia’s stockholders would probably tar and feather Elop and ride him out of Finland on a rail.

+

Still, the possibility can’t be completely ruled out. Large companies have certainly done more blatantly self-destructive things before. The smartphone wars have been aspiring to the condition of low comedy ever since Steve Jobs said “You’re holding it wrong!”; a mad fling between Nokia and Microsoft would take them straight to opéra bouffe.

diff --git a/20100915065531.blog b/20100915065531.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..38a7386 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100915065531.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Pessimistic anarchism +

I received email recently asking me to respond to an article in the Huffington Post, No Safe Harbor on Gulf Coast; Human Blood Tests Show Dangerous Levels of Toxic Exposure. Questioner’s English wasn’t very good, but the question he was trying to pose was how market anarchists like myself can oppose government action to mitigate disasters like the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and what we have to say about the charge that corporate money is suppressing news of the full toll of the disaster.

+

What I had to say to him about that follows, slightly edited and expanded. It’s as good an individual case as any to explain why my free-market anarchism is a result not of optimism about the perfectibility of markets but of profound pessimism about the limits of any sort of collective action by human beings.

+

+

It does not matter for purposes of answering your question whether or not I think this article is factually accurate, since the situation it describes (environmental disaster followed by insidious long-term health effects that those responsible may be using corrupt means to cover up) represents a possible sort of collective-action problem with which anti-statists have to deal.

+

Our key insight is a pessimistic one: this is the sort of situation which, though individuals and markets don’t handle it well, isn’t actually handled well by governments either. The fundamental mistake of statist thinking is to juxtapose the tragically, inevitably flawed response of individuals and markets to large collective-action problems like this one against the hypothetical perfection of idealized government action, without coping with the reality that government action is also tragically and inevitably flawed.

+

The implicit burden of the article, after all, is indignation that the government has been done too little and the wrong things. What the author fails to grasp (because his thinking is warped by the religion of state-worship) is that this sort of dysfunction is not a sporadic accidental failure that could be corrected by sufficiently virtuous thoughts and deeds; it is an essential failure, entirely predictable from the incentives operating on all the actors (including the actors within government).

+

His sort of fantasy thinking implicitly throws a burden of proof on anarchists to construct a perfect response to something like the Deepwater Horizon disaster in a stateless system, or else have their critique of statism dismissed as heartless and inadequate. But the correct analysis is to notice that we can only do what we can only do, and compare the rationally expectable effectiveness of flawed government action against the rationally expectable effectiveness of flawed individual and market action.

+

The second level of error, once you get this far, is to require that the market action achieve a better outcome without including all the continuing, institutional costs of state action in the accounting. So, for example, other parts of the continuing costs of accepting state action to solve this individual toxic-exposure problem in the Deep Horizon aftermath is that Americans will be robbed every April 15th of five in twelve parts of their income (on average), and be randomly killed in no-knock drug raids. And it’s no use protesting that these abuses are separable from the “good” parts of government as long as you’re also insisting that the prospect of market failures is not separable from the good behavior of markets!

+

Irrational anarchists believe that utopia is somehow achievable in a stateless system; they make the exact reciprocal error from statists, believing that all evil proceeds from government. Rational anarchists like myself know that stateless systems will have tragic failures too, but believe after analysis that they would have fewer and smaller ones.

+

If this seems doubtful to you, do not forget to include all the great genocides of the 20th century in the cost of statism. It was contemplating those that turned me into an anarchist – because that sort of eruption of fire and blood, too, is not accidental but essential given the logic of state collectivism.

diff --git a/20100917053808.blog b/20100917053808.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dee608f --- /dev/null +++ b/20100917053808.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Needling Haystack +

In mid-2009, just after Neda Soltan was shot down on a Tehran street, I was working with a group of hackers attempting to provide covert communications support to the Iranian dissident movement. I blogged about it at the time, received my second death threat as a result, and had a couple of interesting conversations with the FBI. Eventually I stopped working with the group; they made what I considered some serious mistakes of direction, and I was anyway beginning to doubt the principal’s claims of having an extensive contact network on the ground in Iran.

+

The group I was working with was deploying stealthed HTTP proxies and Tor nodes; my main technical contribution was a Squid configuration tuned to the purpose in ways I won’t discuss because the techniques might be useful against another tyranny someday. We knew of other groups using different technology; one seemed to be organized around a program called Haystack and its designer, a guy named Austin Heap.

+

I had brief contact with Heap during that period. Now I learn that he may have been a fraud. The Great Internet Freedom Fraud all but accuses him of this.

+

+

I’m blogging about this because, on the one hand, I had a few suspicions about Heap at the time. On the other, neither my interactions with him nor (in my judgment) the public evidence quite supports the theory that he set out to scam people. For whatever it’s worth, I think he started with good intentions, talked a bigger game than he was really capable of executing, and got in over his head.

+

There was a lot of that going around – including, very possibly, in the group I was working with. To this day I don’t know what, if any, impact we actually had. Could have been a lot. Could have been nothing. All I know is that someone apparently affiliated with the Iranian regime threatened to have me killed over it, and the FBI believed the threat was credible enough to talk to me about the whole deal. But that threat, too, could have been a phantom or fraud, and well I know it.

+

Why am I blogging about this now? Partly because I think the Slate article overreached a bit in its implied accusations against Heap. I was in the trenches with him and others who were trying to help the dissidents, and I think he’s owed just a bit more benefit of the doubt than he’s getting there.

+

But mainly I want to point out what this episode teaches about the epistemic problems of operating in a stealth mode, among a group that is trying to do operational security. These problems are shared by spies, terrorists, and groups like the ones I was working with who are gaming against spies and terrorists.

+

The problem is this: to protect your network, and yourself, you have to accept that you are going to have relatively little information about what your network partners are doing and what their capabilities are. In this instance, I didn’t want to know details about the scope or nature of our on-the-ground network in Iran; I was, for some crucial weeks after the Neda Soltan shooting, our public contact person, and thus the most exposed to pressure by our adversaries.

+

The obvious problem was, my rationally-chosen ignorance left me unable to form judgments about whether people in my network were lying to me. More subtly (and here we get back to what I think happened with Austin Heap) it left me unable to form judgments about whether they were lying to themselves.

+

Normally, I think I’m pretty good at detecting self-deception – face to face. There are tells in affect, tone, and body language that you learn to spot after a few decades of peoplewatching that tell you a speaker is actively suppressing doubt about his own utterences (and these are slightly different than the tells for outright lying). I’ve actually had to practice this; it’s one of the most important person-to-person leadership skills. But it’s much more difficult to spot self-bullshitting over text links and chat, and I have little confidence that I can do that reliably.

+

Thus, my ties to this network depended on a high level of faith in my contacts. It couldn’t be otherwise, because trying to gather information that might have allowed me to reason out the odds better might have jeopardized them, jeopardized the dissidents I was trying to help, jeopardized me, and blown the network. As a direct consequence, my participation was fragile; when my contacts said and did things that eroded my faith in their judgment, I dropped out.

+

Here’s the next turn of the screw: I think living in that kind of informationally poor shadow-world makes it more likely that a well-intentioned but only marginally competent person will overcommit to others and himself in order to increase his influence, and eventually con himself into a role he can’t sustain. Because who has the information to call bullshit soon enough to stop the escalation before it gets past little white lies?

+

I suspect very strongly that this is the trap Austin Heap fell into. And I’m not sure my contacts weren’t down the same hole and my effort wasted. I don’t think I can assign less than a 30% probability to that outcome.

+

Still – even with that uncertainty I’d do it again, death threat and all. Because I’m a man and an American and a libertarian, and all three of these entail duties. In the course of those duties, there are some sorts of risks that must be run; honor and ethics require it. The risks I took, and am still taking as a result, were among them.

+

I don’t think my experience was unique; people who fight for good causes in shadow have, no doubt, been experiencing these problems since history began. But I’m not sure I can extract any larger lesson here. I don’t mean to excuse whatever lies Austin Heap may have told, but I do mean to suggest he may well have been his own first victim.

diff --git a/20100920130044.blog b/20100920130044.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..282c005 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100920130044.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Terry Pratchett ascends to the pantheon, alive! +

Some years ago, in The Delusion of Expertise, I wrote about the memorable occasion in 2003 on which some friends and I were able to bestow on author Terry Pratchett the accolade of hacker, recognizing him as what he had always been: one of us.

+

Now comes the news that as part of his preparations to be formally knighted by the Queen of England, Terry made his own sword – smelted the iron, and helped hand-forge it. Including, as he says, “several pieces of meteorites — thunderbolt iron, you see — highly magical, you’ve got to chuck that stuff in whether you believe in it or not”.

+

+

To heck with a trivium like knighthood – with this beautiful hack, Terry ascends to a different pantheon. Here’s what I emailed him:

+

+That is take-my-breath-away *awesome*. Even though no actual code is
+involved, it arguably exceeds the awesomeness even of the guys in
+Norway who actually implemented TCP/IP over carrier pigeons in 2002.

+

Some instances of ha-ha-only-serious achieve a sublime quality that
+will be praised as long as there are geeks and hackers to remember
+them. I think this is one. +

+

Happens I taught Terry how to shoot pistols that weekend in 2003. I hope his sword is properly balanced for combat use, because this I swear on my honor as a swordsman and a geek: if I ever make it to within travel range of Terry and his sword, I will teach him at least the basics of what he needs to know to use it properly.

+

Well, unless he already knows. It never came up when we talked, but he could be a swordsman too. I think I’m long past being surprised by any brilliant talent Terry exhibits.

diff --git a/20100921082440.blog b/20100921082440.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1d445b8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100921082440.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +Fourteen months of carrying +

It is now about fourteen months since, after receiving my second death threat, I started carrying a firearm almost constantly. This experience has taught me a few truths, some merely amusing but others with larger implications.

+

The major lesson: people are amazingly oblivious to what they don’t expect to see. When I carry using a belt holster (not my only method), I watch peoples’ eye movements and facial expressions for this pattern: eyes going to my right hip, momentary startlement or an increase in tension. This would mean the shirt I’m wearing flapped over the pistol butt has ridden up and it’s exposed. But, in fact, with only one exception that I’ll get to, I have never seen this. On the other hand, there have been occasions when I’ve noticed by touch that the weapon was exposed, or my wife has told me it’s showing, and nobody around me gives any sign of having noticed.

+

+

The one exception: a teenage girl in my regular gaming group with a minimal-brain-damage syndrome that isn’t autism but gives her an autist-like tendency to notice details other people miss. She did startle. I explained, and she ceased being bothered.

+

The gaming group taught me another lesson: never, ever, ask permission to carry or give others an option to deny it – just do it and refuse to discuss the matter. I won’t reveal the details, because doing so would poke a small hole in my security plan. But I learned this one the hard way.

+

And about that security plan: carrying a firearm is nearly useless without very specific kinds of mental preparation. It’s not just that you have to think through large ethical issues about when to draw and when to fire (equivalently, when to threaten lethal force and when to use it). You also need good defensive habits of mind. Carrying a firearm is no good if an adversary wins the engagement before you have time to draw.

+

The most basic good habit of mind is maintaining awareness of your tactical environment. From what directions could you be attacked? Is there a way for an assailant to come up behind you for a hand-to-hand assault, or to line up a shooting position from beyond hand-to-hand range where you couldn’t see it? Are you exposed through nearby windows?

+

One advantage I had going in was reading Robert Heinlein as a child. This meant I soaked up some basic tactical doctrine through my pores. Like: when you go to a restaurant, sit with your back to a wall, preferably in a corner, in a place with good sightlines but not near a window. When you sit down, think about possible threat axes and which direction to bail out in if you have to.

+

Advice I’ve gotten from people with counterterrorism training includes this lesson: watch your environment and trust your instincts. Terrorists, criminals, and crazies don’t tend to blend in well even when they’re trying. If someone nearby looks or feels out of place in your surroundings, or behaves in a way not appropriate to the setting, pay attention to that; check your escape routes and make sure you can reach your weapons quickly.

+

How careful you have to be depends on the threat model you’re planning against. I’m not going to talk about mine in detail, because that might compromise my security by telling bad guys what expectations to game against. But I will say that it assigns a vanishingly small probability to professionals with scoped rifles; the background culture of both Iranian terrorists and their Arab proxies makes it extremely difficult for them to train or recruit snipers, and I am reliably informed that the Iranians couldn’t run professional hit teams in the U.S. anyway – too difficult to exfiltrate them, among other problems.

+

This, along with some other aspects of the threat model I won’t discuss, narrows the range of plausible threats to something an armed and trained individual with good backup from law enforcement has a reasonable hope to be able to counter. And the good backup from law enforcement is not a trivial detail; real life is not a Soldier of Fortune story or a running-man thriller, and a sane security plan uses all the resources available from your connections to the society around you.

+

So here’s another lesson: if you’re going to do anything that might piss off violent fanatics, make friendly with your local cops. Fortunately the ones in my town already like me. In truth, I think they’re kind of jazzed by the thought that they get to be second-hand involved in an international intrigue. Hackers and tyrants and terrorists, oh my!

+

Let ‘em have their fun. I, being in the crosshairs, have to be more cold-blooded than that; hero fantasies could get my ass killed if they distract me from situational awareness and all the little low-level safety practices that go with it. In fact, it’s fair to say that the firearm I carry functions largely as a tangible, ever-present reminder of my need to maintain the alertness and mental stance that increases my chances of surviving a clutch situation. As a combat instructor I know puts it, “The mind is the first weapon”; it has to point before the gun can be aimed.

+

Since I am, alas, no longer actively involved in trying to subvert the mullahs’ regime, the odds I’ll have to cope with terrorist action are gradually dropping over time (not that they were ever very high; I never flattered myself with the assumption that I was a priority target). I feel less need to carry than I did fourteen months ago. But I also feel less need to stop. I’ve learned how to deal with the minor inconveniences, and developed habits that integrate constantly carrying a weapon with the rest of my life.

+

And it’s not only my own life that these habits may save. “When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.” Intervention by armed civilians on the spot aborts hundreds of crimes a year in the United States, and thousands more could be prevented if there were more of us. Carrying is not just a survival tactic for me; it’s a service, a net benefit to my neighbors and my nation and my civilization, and I feel good about that.

diff --git a/20100922170011.blog b/20100922170011.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f528750 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100922170011.blog @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +No apology needed +

A few moments ago I received email from the Iranian who first asked me to try to help the dissidents fourteen month ago. I reproduce his email and my response in its entirety, except that I omit information that might identify him.

+

+

+> Dear Eric ,
+>
+> On behalf of most Iranian people , I’m “so sorry” that you feel like this :(
+>
+> Your actions are and will be so valuable to us and we appreciate your
+> attempts from the bottom of our hearts .
+>
+> If I knew that you will face with such a barbarian threat, I’d never
+> emailed to you about what happened in Iran last year :(
+>
+> I’m very very sorry for what’s happened to you …
+> God bless you Eric , and take care …
+>
+> Sincerely Yours , +

+

No apology needed. Nothing I have experienced is even comparable to
+the risks and suffering Iranians endure daily in their struggle to be
+free of the mullahocracy.

+

I am grateful to have even have had the chance to try to help. The small risk
+to my life was more than justified by the potential to strike a blow at an
+odious tyranny.

+

In thinking about the risks, and deciding I could accept then, and doing
+so, I acted on my most fundamental values. I walk a little taller and feel
+a little happier today – more fulfilled, more myself – because I passed
+that test.

+

That test was a gift. Thank you.

+

UPDATE: For the blog, I have a bit more to add:

+

I do not want to be thought of as heroic for risking my life in the defense of liberty. Instead, I want this to be understood as the ordinary duty of every American.

+

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy said this: “Today we need a nation of minutemen; citizens who are not only prepared to take up arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as a basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom.”

+

JFK was not proposing anything novel. Rather, he was reminding Americans of their roots as libertarian revolutionaries, as the people who said a resounding “NO!” to tyranny and backed that up with their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

+

This is what being an American means. And it’s why, though I grew up on three different continents and forgot two languages before I was thirteen, I am and always have been American down to the bone.

diff --git a/20100924112640.blog b/20100924112640.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7c9c260 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100924112640.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +A Digital Video Primer for Geeks – Three Thumbs Up! +

About an hour ago I watched A Digital Video Primer for Geeks. This is, hands down and no exceptions, the best instructional video I’ve ever seen. It takes a complex, dry, detail-filled topic and presents it with lucid clarity and a sense of fun.

+

+

They’re not kidding about the “for geeks” part; the exposition is fast and dense and assumes the reader is able to handle having concepts as complex as Nyquist’s theorem thrown at them in one go. But the exposition is also very clear and direct, and delivered with a keen sense of which details need most emphasis. The effect is only secondarily to impart facts; what they’re attempting, successfully, is to give the viewer a feel for the subject matter, an overall grasp of how the pieces fit together which can be filled in by later deep-diving into the pieces.

+

Full marks to Monty for his delivery, which is excellent on all levels. I’m no slouch myself at presenting technical ideas in accessible language, but I will cheerfully admit that this is as good as me at the top of my form, or possibly better. I know how much skill and effort is concealed in making a performance like this look casual; if you don’t, just trust me that what Monty has pulled off here is quite impressive just as an act of presentation-fu.

+

And yes, this is a video – not just an e-book narrated by a well-spoken talking head. The uses of props, whiteboard, and special effects are tasteful and understatedly clever. I particularly enjoyed the playful use of special effects to illustrate things like sample-rate compression, signal-clipping artifacts and how YUV chroma representation actually works. That was a very effective way to tie those abstractions to experiential reality so the viewer won’t forget them.

+

The material was ideal for my level of knowledge at start. That is, if you have (a) programmer chops, (b) a bit of basic knowledge of the physics of sound, and (c) you’ve heard of Nyquist’s theorem before and broadly grasp the relationship between sampling rate and cutoff frequency, you’re going to eat the rest of the video up like candy. Probably (c) isn’t necessary; what it meant for me is that I started getting new material at the point where Monty explained about sample rates above 44.1 being a way to get away with cheaper bandpass filters.

+

In general, the production is unobtrusively immaculate. This is all the more impressive because it’s clear the piece was shot on a tiny budget. And it proudly announces at the end that only open-source tools were used. Creative Commons license, natch.

+

One final thing: On top of all its other virtues, this video is a lovely aesthetic expression of the hacker posture of mind. If you are a hacker, you will know what I mean by this when you watch it; if you aren’t, there is little to no point in my trying to explain. If you think you may be becoming a hacker, watch it twice. Then get a night’s sleep and watch it again. This will help you in broad and subtle ways.

diff --git a/20100925084608.blog b/20100925084608.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7c8315c --- /dev/null +++ b/20100925084608.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Mystical Poetry and Mental Postures +

Over the years I’ve written at least three expositions of the hacker mindset that use the form of mystical poetry or teaching riddles. Probably the best known of these nowadays is The Unix Koans of Master Foo (2003), but there has also been The Loginataka (1992, 2010) and the short Zen poem I included in How To Become A Hacker.

+

One of the regulars at my Friday gaming group is a Greek Orthodox priest, but an educated and broadminded one with whom I get along surprisingly well considering my general opinion of Christianity. A chance remark he made one night caused me to recite at him the line from the 2010 portion of the Loginataka that goes “The way of the hacker is a posture of mind”, and then when he looked interested the whole four stanzas.

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He laughed, and he got it, and then he articulated the reason that I write about being a hacker in this form so well that he made me think about things I hadn’t considered before and probably should have. Like, what if other people don’t get it? All they’d see when they looked at the Loginataka or the Unix Koans is pretentiousness or satire.

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But no. The mystical language of these works is functional in a very direct way, which the priest grokked instantly and I will now explain. It has applications beyond the way I’ve used it.

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First: The way of the hacker really is a posture of mind. Being a hacker isn’t a skillset (like being a programmer or an electrical engineer), nor is it a social presentation (like, say being a goth or a hipster). It’s a mental stance: partly an attitude, partly a set of cognitive habits, and partly other qualities even more difficult to label and define.

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Second: It’s a very useful mental stance. That is, it enables people to do things that are nifty and useful and occasionally staggeringly important. Like, say, inventing the World Wide Web important. So creating ways for people to enter and inhabit this stance actually has a lot of utility.

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Third: The tough thing about mental stances is that they cannot be conveyed by explanation. Even if I could come up with paragraphs of precise analytical language about how hackers think, it would be like trying to explain “red” to a color-blind person by listing a frequency range and pointing at stoplights. At best such an explanation could only be useful for reasoning about the hacker posture of mind from outside it, not entering it.

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The problem of how to induce valuable mental stances in human beings when explanation is insufficient is not a new one. All religions and mystical schools face it, and all have solved it in broadly similar ways. One way is direct mimesis: you imitate the behavior of an initiate rigorously, hope for the behavior to induce a mental state usefully like the initiate’s, and a surprising percentage of the time this actually works.

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Another way is to develop artifacts like mystical poetry or koans which have the instrumental quality that they tend to induce the desired state(s) of mind in anyone who meditates on them. Because it operates on human brains that are all wired pretty similarly, mystical poetry from many different traditions has common qualities: vivid, dreamlike imagery, strong use of rhetorical antinomy, and hypnotic rhythms are three of the most obvious. They induce a sort of indirect mimesis, putting you in something like the mental state of the composer.

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If you are anywhere near being a hacker, you already see where this is going – I’m interpreting koans and mystical poetry as a form of functional brain-hacking, not unlike surrealist art (which famously aimed at “the transformation of mind and all that resembles it”). Once you’ve realized this, the only question is whether these techniques can be tuned to induce the hacker posture of mind – as opposed, say to producing satori or union with the Holy Spirit, or existential crisis, or whatever other traditional religio-mystical-philosophical state one might have in view.

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Since I did in fact write the Loginataka and the Unix Koans, I guess I’m not going to surprise anyone at this point by asserting that yes, I think this is possible. Furthermore, there is evidence in the behavior of others (the way people respond to these works) that they succeed as more than satire – that they are a ha-ha-only-serious that is useful for inducing the hacker posture of mind in those ready to achieve it.

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Now, I am not here to argue that mystical poetry is enough by itself; after all, in religious/mystical traditions, it’s always coupled with other kinds of discipline and instruction. In the hacking context, those “other kinds of discipline and instruction” are implied by learning a difficult technical skill, usually programming. The point is that in hacking as in mysticism, skill training plus direct mimesis (imitating the senior hackers around you) plus indirect mimesis (via koans and inductive poetry) can take you farther and faster than skill training and fumbling for the desired posture of mind in a random and unguided way.

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The priest understood this immediately, even though he’s never written a line of code in his life. His branch of Greek Orthodoxy has a strong mystical tradition, and when I said “the way of the hacker is a posture of mind” his eyes widened.

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I’m not a big fan of religion, in general. My own religion, to the unusual and limited extent I have one, is largely designed as a way to satisfy the emotional needs addressed by religions without requiring the practitioner to believe several truckloads of irrational bullshit before breakfast. But while I generally welcome the weakening of the grip of religion on peoples’ minds, one of the things I recognize we tend to lose along with that is the techniques religions have cultivated over many centuries for indicating and inducing altered states — postures of mind, states of consciousness.

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That technology, assuming we can pry it loose from the truckloads of irrational bullshit, is worth saving. If only because, yes, we can use it to grow hackers…and probably other sorts of useful people, too. Programming and related tech skills are far from the only kind in which competence is partly a function of posture of mind; perhaps every profession would benefit from having its own mystical poetry.

diff --git a/20100926230744.blog b/20100926230744.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f480100 --- /dev/null +++ b/20100926230744.blog @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +The Golden Age of Wargaming is Now +

I’m what people in the strategy-gaming hobby call a grognard. The word is literally French for “grumbler”, historically used for Napoleonist diehards who never reconciled themselves to the fall of L’Empereur even after 1815, and nowadays refers to guys who cut their teeth on the classic, old-school hex-grid wargames of the 1970s.

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As a grognard, I’m expected to grumble dyspeptically about the superiority of the huge, heavy, elaborately simulationist two-player wargames we used to play back in the day, and bemoan how fluffy and social the modern wave of multiplayer Eurogames are. Sure, they’ve got four-color printing and unit counters you don’t have to use tweezers to pick up, but where are my pages and pages of combat resolution tables? Where are my hairsplitting distinctions between different types of self-propelled assault gun? O tempora! O mores!

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But you know what? Times change, and game designers have actually learned a few things in the last forty years. In this essay I’m going to revisit two games I’ve reviewed previously (Commands and Colors: Ancients and Memoir ’44) and take a closer look at two others: War Galley, and Conflict of Heroes. These games exemplify how very much things have changed, and how little point there really is in pining for the old-school games any more. Yes, I may forfeit my old-fart credentials by saying it, but…I think the golden age of wargaming is now.

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So we know what we’re talking about, I’m going to start by laying out some metrics by which you can judge the quality of a game design, then evaluate these for the games we”ll be looking at.

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First: Realism. A historical game is “realistic” to the extent that if you do correct period tactics you will get the results that historical commanders got. A highly realistic game should also not reward doing things that are ahistorical. That is, for example, if you find a corner case in the game rules that makes some unit type vastly more effective than it was in period and that distorts the outcomes of battles, this is a realism bug.

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Second: Playability. How difficult are the rules to learn and remember? How much setup time is required? How long does the game take to play? Simple rules engines, minimal setup, and rapid play are good, but these virtues may have a cost in simulation realism.

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Third: Depth. A game is “deep” when it offers lots of behavioral space to explore, multiple paths to victory, and surprising turns which proceed naturally from its logic. Deep games reward repeated play and careful study.

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Fourth: Thematic appeal: A game has thematic appeal when it covers a subject that is intrinsically interesting. Of all the metrics I’ll describe, this is the one gamers are likely to disagree about most, simply because tastes in “intrinsically interesting” vary so much. A game can have thematic appeal by revisiting a well-known arena (Pirates on the Spanish Main! Arrr!) or by shining an interesting light on an obscure corner of history (The second Roman siege of Jerusalem? Cool!)

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Fifth: Presentation. Is the physical furniture of the game appealing? Are the maps, tables, and counters easy to read, pleasant to handle? Do they package the game’s mechanics in a way that minimizes the effort of play?

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There’s one thing everyone, grognard and newbie alike, can agree on: the average quality of presentation in games has improved spectacularly since the 1970s. Part of the reason for this is technological: cold-press technology has made four-color and specialty printing far less expensive, and economical at much smaller print runs, than it was back in the day. Wider use of game counters with tactile interest (wooden blocks and figures as opposed to thin paper squares) has contributed as well.

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Another part of the reason is that game designers have techniques they didn’t in the old days, and fully exploit good ones that were formerly rare. An excellent example of this is the broad shift away from combat based on die rolls followed by a table lookup. This has frequently been replaced by faster-playing, less tedious mechanics using cards or chit draws or unit block losses.

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I don’t think there’s much case that the average level of thematic appeal has changed since the olden days, if only because judgments about that are so idiosyncratic.

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But now to the grognard’s complaint: where old-school games emphasized realism and depth (sometimes to the actual exclusion of playability), modern designs trade away all that for playability and presentation. And for *grumble* social gaming.

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There’s some truth to the charge. The archetypal mega-failure in old-school wargames was Campaign For North Africa (CNA). As the Wikipedia entry correctly notes, “Even gamers who were initially fascinated with the idea of an extremely detailed war game might have been chagrined when they opened the box to discover 1,800 counters, maps large enough to cover several tables, and a three-volume rulebook of considerable weight and density. The rules cover logistics in extreme detail…”.

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By contrast, rather a lot of modern games are pretty but shallow and easily solvable. I’ll give one extreme example, a multiplayer card game called Straw about loading stuff (including magic carpets with negative weight) on a camel’s back. It was easy to learn, cute, we laughed a lot while the game was going on, and I never want to play it again because it would bore me to tears the second time.

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But these extremes are not symmetrical. These light, fluffy games are popular, much more so than CNA ever was. They have lower development budgets, too. And a game publisher doesn’t care much if you only play a game once, as long as you bought it before that first time. From the publisher’s point of view, replay value and depth are mainly marketing tools to improve the brand; if they can pump out lots of silly, appealing, shallow “family” games for more profit they’re generally going to do just that.

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Even forgetting the grognards with extreme views on the subject, this looks like a setup for tragedy from any serious gamer’s point of view. Is everything truly interesting about the hobby doomed to be swept away in a tide of fluff?

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Thankfully, no. For one thing, the fluff is incubating a market for more challenging games. Among serious gamers, we recognize a category of games we ironically call “gateway drugs” – brightly-packaged, appealing games of light to moderate complexity that are both worth playing in themselves and tend to arouse a taste for higher-complexity experiences. Puerto Rico, a now-classic Eurogame of trade and development in the 16th-century Caribbean, is a well-known gateway drug. So is Carcassonne, a tile-laying game in which players compete to build medieval cities. An excellent recent example is Castle Panic, a fun little game in which you must fend off waves of monsters besieging your fantasy fortress; I’ve met the author of that one and he smilingly admits to having designed it to be a gateway drug.

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For another thing, as I’ve previously noted, there’s a new wave of designers trying to revive the traditional simulationist hex wargame, but in a more modern and playable style. These publishers are finding a market not just among grognards like me but among newer gamers who have passed the gateway-drug stage and are hankering for more challenging fare.

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The question all these designers and publishers are facing, now that everyone takes good presentation pretty much for granted, is: Must realism and playability be forever at odds? Can we achieve both in a game that both appeals to newbies and gets the grognard seal of approval? To address this question, I’ll evaluate four recent designs that have tackled it in different ways and with differing degrees of success.

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I’ve blogged about Commands and Colors: Ancients before. It’s an excellent example of new-school design applied to a very old-school subject, tactical ancient-period warfare with hoplites and barbarians and legionaries and war elephants and all. It keeps the classic wargame hex grid, but fits over that a light, fast-playing rules engine that mostly replaces lookup tables with results read directly off specialized dice. Another new-school trick is the use of an action-card system to simulate fog of war and the difficulty of unit coordination.

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I liked this game when it first shipped in 2006 and have only grown more fond of it since. The designer, Richard Borg, did a superb job of creating highly authentic tactical feel with a very simple rules engine. The game is easy to teach to newbies and has excellent depth for its weight. Each of the four expansions to the base game has broadened and deepened it, to the point where it does a decent job of covering nearly a thousand years of military history – from the early classical Greeks through the wars of Alexander, the post-Alexandrian succession wars, the Punic wars, the Roman civil wars, the career of Julius Caesar, the Roman wars with the Parthian Empire, and the beginnings of the barbarian invasions that brought down Rome. When I compare it to older, heavy-simulationist ancient-period games like the PRESTAGS system, they look absurdly overcomplicated for the degree of realism they deliver.

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The realism, playability, depth, and presentation of this game are all good to excellent. Importantly, it proves that realism and playability don’t have to be antagonistic qualities fighting each other in a zero-sum way. But C&C:A doesn’t quite address the grognard’s complaint by itself, and there are several reasons for this. The most superficial is that it lives off in a specialty corner of thematic space, not competing with the modern-period classics of the wargaming form.

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But there are deeper problems. C&C:A does yield realism in the sense that one can recognize things that happen on the board as accurately mirroring surviving accounts of ancient formations and tactics. But those accounts are fragmentary, and it is often difficult to separate what we actually know from the results of modern imaginative reconstructions. The orders of battle in the game scenarios use historical facts (such and such a general was present, there were cavalry in this battle and elephants at that one, etc.) but are largely invented because we lack the facts to be definite about them, and they invented are so as to balance sides and create an interesting game.

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C&C:A is also evasive about the details of its own simulation. Just how many men does a unit represent? – it never says. The apparent scale of a map hex seems to vary a great deal among scenarios. It treats weapons types and doctrines as interchangeable over very long periods. For example, it is not actually very likely that all skirmishing missile troops from classical Greek slingers c.500BCE up to late Roman bowmen c.260CE could actually be treated as tactically interchangeable – too much variation in weapons, doctrine, morale. Yet for C&C:A purposes they’re all just light troops with four attrition steps, a two-hex missile range, and identical movement and combat power.

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In sum, C&C:A, though an excellent game, is open to the charge that its “realism” is only skin-deep, a product of artful vagueness. It is possible to at least imagine a better game, one which would not merely feel realistic in play but justify that feeling by not handwaving away so many details.

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Memoir ’44 makes an interesting contrast, because it’s from the same designer as C&C:A, deals with a period that is very well documented, and does compete directly with those modern-period classics. It applies a minor variation of the C&C:A rules engine to a different topic, yielding very divergent results. In doing so, it lends additional point to the grognard’s complaint.

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M44 is an operational-level World War II game. Like its ancient-period sibling C&C:A, is both highly playable and has excellent presentation; accordingly, it is highly popular (lots of people like WWII games) and the hobby equivalent of a runaway bestseller.

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The trouble with this is that Borg’s rules engine doesn’t apply nearly as well at operational rather than tactical scale, nor to a period in which (a) mobility is higher, (b) units have radios, and (c) ranged weapons are much more important. The system of action cards and field zones that worked so well in C&C:A feels ahistorical here, leading to unnatural tactics. The game makes a good first impression (I was more positive about it back when I first reviewed it), but these flaws – invisible to newbie gamers unfamiliar with the period – become more obtrusive over repeated plays.

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I’ve also found that M44 scales up poorly. C&C:A works well whether you have only a handful of units or large armies on the board, but in M44 realism degrades badly as unit counts go up. At this year’s World Boardgaming Championships I spent about five hours as one of eight players refighting Operation Market Garden as an M44 scenario. It was not really a happy experience; command errors combined with the flaws of the M44 system in unfortunate ways.

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I’m not going to say M44 is a outright bad game, but overall it’s…disappointing. Mediocre. Doesn’t deliver on its initial promise and surface gloss. It makes a decent gateway drug to get people interested in more realistic WWII games (one of which I’ll review later in this essay). Other than that, though, it exemplifies the grognard’s fear of mediocre but popular lightweight games driving out better designs. Realism poor, playability and presentation excellent, depth medium, thematic appeal good.

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Well, if that’s a problem, why not try doing the old-school thing bigger and better with 21st-century production values? That’s the tack taken by War Galley, a game of ancient naval fleet warfare clearly aimed straight at hard-core historical-wargaming grognards. Hundreds of counters, rules for everything – oared movement, sail movement, ramming, board fireships, a gallimaufry of critical-hit types. You want combat resolution tables, it’s got ‘em by the dozen. It’s the kind of game where you need a reference chart just to keep track of the turn sequence.

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I wanted this game precisely because it promised a crunchy simulationist experience in the classic style about a topic that has strong thematic appeal for me. Alas, what I got was a chore and a bore. My wife and I started the first scenario, stalled out, and it’s been sitting on the big dining-room table for two months, mocking us.

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Maybe it would get easier with repeated plays, but I think the lesson for me is that you can’t go home again. Thirty years ago I would have screwed my courage to the sticking point and played this thing through, because the payoff – immersion in an exotic puzzle with interesting connections to military history – wasn’t attainable with any less effort. But the competitive landscape has changed now; it includes both computer games that do heavy simulationism with much less user effort, and elegant lightweight games with good historical feel like C&C:A. In today’s environment War Galley is a dinosaur. Huge, slow, magnificent from a distance, and doomed.

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But it doesn’t have to be that way. When I last touched on the subject, four years ago, there was a tentative renaissance in hex wargaming starting to happen; the launch of C&C:A and its impressive early success could be seen as part of that. Since then, designers have been groping forward, trying to match both the realism standards of the heavy, old-school simulationist game and the playability of contemporary Eurogames. I’ve seen any number of worthy attempts that didn’t quite make it…and now, there’s at least one that does.

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Conflict of Heroes is that game. Properly, it’s a game system like C&C:A; the first two installments cover Russians versus German on the Eastern Front from 1941-1943, and more are plausibly promised. It’s a tactical-level game; you’re maneuvering squads of soldiers and individual tanks. This setting is probably the single most popular one for wargames ever, and CoH enters it begging for comparison with Panzerblitz/Panzer Leader, Combat Commander and other tactical-scale classics of the old school.

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In some ways it’s like them. The hairsplitting distinctions of old are back; differences between 5cm and 8cm mortars, or Panzerkampwagon model II and IV tanks, are actually significant. Line-of-sight rules for direct-fire weapons; check. Special mechanic for close assault; check. Options for hidden deployment; check…et cetera. This game scores so high on realism that if you get good at it, you’ll actually have internalized a better grasp of modern small-unit tactics than many professionally-trained military officers have – I know this because my main playing partner used to be one of those and so reports.

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But it’s also different from those old-school classics in significant ways. There isn’t a combat resolution table in sight; instead, hits are rolled for with a saving-throw-like mechanic using various simple modifiers, rather obviously lifted from the fantasy-roleplaying tradition. There’s a chit-draw system for allocating damage after a hit. There are no movement points as such; rather, all unit actions (movement, firing) are paid for from per-unit action-point pools, optionally topped up with scarce Command Action Points representing officers’ exertions on the spot.

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Where older games sometimes had reaction fire and overwatch bolted on as a sort of afterthought, it’s fundamental to the CoH rules engine. Each time a unit moves into a new hex, the enemy has an opportunity to react if they have the action points remaining to do so. This makes play more fluid and means each player actually has things to do during the opponent’s turn. Additional flavor and some unpredictability is provided by special action cards which can allow you to bend the rules a bit and pull the occasional nasty surprise.

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The result is a system which matches the tactical realism of games like Panzer Leader but with a much simpler, faster-playing rules engine. It’s like what C&C:A does to old-school ancients games like PRESTAGS – but in CoH there’s no vagueness and no handwaving of the details; you can see down to the bottom of the simulation. Fights that might have taken three hours of mechanics-heavy slogging in older systems collapse to 45-minute joyrides. It’s almost too easy.

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Academy Games, the publisher, is marketing this thing well beyond the comparatively small group of grognards like me who would normally be drawn by a detailed tactical game, as a “wargame Eurogamers will want to play”. Their marketing, reacting to the headache-inducing reputation old-school wargames have among younger gamers, emphasizes the lightness and accessibility of the system. But I think this is almost unfair, because I’ve played those classics and I say this game can hold its own just fine in all other ways, too, including realism.

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The naked truth is that a lot of the heavy simulationism in early old-school games was a barely functional or even anti-functional way to impress players with the seriousness of what the designers were doing – a sort of blitz of corroborative detail meant to obscure the fact that, hey we’re playing with paper counters and dice here, not real infantrymen and tanks. Once this sort of self-validation by weight of rulebook became the accepted form, it turned into an evolutionary arms race that eventually produced monstrosities like CNA.

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The archetypal grognard’s complaint about new-school games is in part an unwillingness to give up those signifiers of seriousness. But I’ve got thirty-seven years of grognarding right here that says to hell with that; the lessons that Eurogames have taught the designers of C&C:A and CoH – and other wargames that will come after them – are valuable. The hex wargame is back, and it’s better than ever. The golden age of wargaming is now.

diff --git a/20100928100025.blog b/20100928100025.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..aa9ee7b --- /dev/null +++ b/20100928100025.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +The smartphone wars: Android thunders on +

My prediction months ago that Android would pass Apple iOS in total share in the fourth quarter of 2010 is looking more prescient all the time. this ComputerWorld reports IDC’s conservative prediction that global (not U.S. share) will reach 16% for Android, 15% for iOS at the end of 2010.

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More interesting is the report from ChangeWave that corporate IT buyers now favor Android over iOS in new purchases. The installed base of corporate iOS devices is about double that of their Android counterparts, but Android’s recent growth in that space is a factor of twenty larger than iOS’s. In fact Android is perceptibly eroding the position of market leader RIM’s blackberry line even among corporate IT buyers, RIM’s core market.

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ComputerWorld also reports that a survey of 2300 app developers find them bullish on iOS as a short-term revenue opportunity but believing that Android’s long-term prospects to dominate the smartphone market are better, by 59% to 35%.

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Part of this evaluation seems to be a revolt against Apple’s restrictions on app development and friction problems in its approval process. Perhaps just as importantly, worries about Android platform fragmentation are diminishing, with Google now reporting that over 70% of deployed Android devices are now running 2.1 or 2.2.

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That 70% figure has another message. Smartphone customers appear to be exerting significant market pressure against phones that lag behind Google’s software leading edge. This decreases the carriers’ maneuvering room, making it more difficult for them to lock out features and generally more expensive to maintain customized skins.

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In good news for MeeGo fans, the Gartner Group projects that the other open-source smartphone OS will, propelled by Intel and Nokia, keep ahead of Windows Phone 7 as both launch and struggle for recognition at the bottom end of the market.

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On the hardware side, the Samsung Galaxy S phone’s simultaneous rollout through all four major carriers is complete. It’s being sold as AT&T’s Captivate, T-Mobile’s Vibrant, Sprint’s Epic, and Verizon’s Fascinate, initially running Android 2.1 but with 2.2 promised as an over-the-air update. This development is interesting on several levels, beginning with the fact that it marks Samsung’s emergence as a supplier not just of critical components such as AMOLED displays but of whole smartphones. Planners at Apple and HTC who have depended on Samsung as a critical part of their supply chain now have to sweat the fact that the company is likely to allocate its resources to where its profit margins are higher, likely putting a price and availability squeeze on its OEM customers.

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The Galaxy S firmware uses a UI skin called TouchWiz which also runs on Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Samsung’s own proprietary dumb-phone OS. It hasn’t been getting good reviews, and on Android Samsung has taken interesting step of allowing users to disable it. In another move towards openness, Samsung has released its Android source code, and it is reported that most Galaxy S variants have unlocked bootloaders that make installing custom firmware relatively easy. The phone has been successfully rooted and CyanogenMOD support is promised for 6.1.

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The picture isn’t perfectly rosy; AT&T’s Captivate disables app sideloading, and the Fascinate locks the search provider to Microsoft Bing. But I see the ability to disable TouchWiz and the unlocked bootloaders on the Galaxy S as part of the same development as the unskinned Android 2.2 on the T-Mobile G-2; the carriers are feeling pushback from reviewers and users that hate locked-down phones, and they’re gradually giving up on that strategy.

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Another implication of the Galaxy S releases is that all the carriers are trying to develop depth in their Android product lines, offering both inexpensive and high-end flagship models. Compare the Epic to Sprint’s flagship EVO 4G, or the Vibrant to T-Mobile’s much-touted G-2. Samsung seems to be repeating its historic product strategy for dumb phones, which centered around being a technology follower rather than leader and trying to own the broad middle range of the market.

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Actually, I think we may be seeing the beginnings of a shakeout on the hardware side. Android presented a disruptive opportunity for new players in the handset space (especially given Nokia’s failure to compete effectively in smartphones), but with the dust settling HTC seems to have been the only one to capitalize on it effectively. Samsung’s entry in force is going to make it significantly more difficult for new players to find room to compete. I think the big bets by small companies are increasingly likely to happen in the still-nascent Android tablet space rather than smartphones.

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UPDATE: The developer mindshare predictions lead me to another projection. In 2011 the iPad is going to get seriously hammered by the wave of Android tablets now just beginning to ship. Developers are already planning for this, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy because the positioning of tablets means apps will be more important for them than apps have been for cellphones.

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UPDATE2: It seems RIM won’t be going Android after all. They plan to go with QNX. I say stick a fork in ‘em, because a painful transition to yet another proprietary single-platform operating system is not anything a developer will willingly undergo when there’s a multiplatform open-source system grabbing market share at a furious clip.

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UPDATE3: Seems they open-sourced QNX while I wasn’t looking. This improves RIM’s odds some.

diff --git a/20100929125538.blog b/20100929125538.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e56fefe --- /dev/null +++ b/20100929125538.blog @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +Was Stuxnet a work of hackers? +

My friend Jay Maynard has successfully incited me to blog by asking me the following question: “Would you call the perpetrators of the Stuxnet worm `hackers’, rather than crackers”? He’s actually raised an interesting question of definition, culture, and ethics, and I’m going to tackle it.

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The factual background: The Stuxnet worm takes over a particular make of Siemens programmable industrial controller and does things to it the exact nature of which are undetermined, but which are highly unlikely to be good for whatever the controller is running. Once in place, it can be remote-programmed from a control machine. It appears to have targeted the industrial infrastructure of Iran. Code analysts believe the development and test time required to field Stuxnet would be 2.5 to 5 man years of full-time work by a well-funded group with access to test hardware. The worm continues to spread in Iran; the Iranians deny that it has damaged any government systems, but are offering big bucks to any security experts willing to help them clean it out.

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Well-grounded speculation: It is widely believed that Stuxnet was aimed at the Iranian uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz and the nuclear power plant at Bushehr; experts have described it as clearly a “directed sabotage weapon” aimed not at normal criminal purposes such as spamming, phishing or intrusion blackmail but rather at causing physical infrastructure damage. The development effort was probably beyond the sustained funding capability of entities smaller than a large multinational or nation-state; the most obvious candidates are Israel and the United States.

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For the purposes of this post, I am going to assume all these speculations are correct. I will further assume that actions which delay or halt the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran are a good thing, if only because they lessen the likelihood that the regime will actually be able to make good on its threats to execute a genocide on Israel.

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Jay’s question is whether I think the programmers who wrote this code fall within the semantic field of the term “hacker”, and if not, what would I call them? Crackers? Jay clearly does not intend this merely as a question about my personal preferences, but as a question about how the hacker community defines itself in relation to large ethical issues: is it ever correct for us to use our abilities in such an attack, or should hackers adhere strictly to a rule of doing no harm?

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I am by no means the hacker community’s only tribal elder. But I am one of them, and it is thus fair of Jay to ask the question and within my duty to attempt an answer.

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Generally, I and others confer the label “hacker” only on people who build things that are useful or aesthetically interesting, and deny it to those who break things (or break into them). We dismiss people who merely exploit security vulnerabilities as “crackers”. A typical cracker trick relies, for example, on system administrators failing to change default passwords programmed into a router.

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Hackers recognize the existence of a subculture of crackers distinct from our own; an important marker of the difference is that, in contrast to our open-source ethos, crackers keep their methods secret and use pseudonyms intended to hide their identities. We consider the members of that culture to be generally inferior to us in both technical skill and ethics – they couldn’t create something like (say) the Linux operating system, and would have little desire to try. The activities we primarily associate with crackers are vandalism and crime – spamming, phishing, data theft, and instrusion blackmail.

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We know that many hackers could be extremely effective at cracking, but choose not to do it because they have better uses for their time. My own experience includes instructive examples. In the late 1980s I cracked into some systems on a Sun network where I was a guest – and promptly sent the system administrator mail as root explaining the hole and how to plug it. A few years later I broke some very trivial security on a real-estate database so that my mother (a licensed real-estate agent) could access it from a home PC rather that having to drive to the dedicated terminals at her firm’s offices. Most senior hackers could, I think, tell similar stories. But hackers don’t think of cracking as a primary skill, nor do we go looking for targets in the absence of a specific impediment to getting actual work done, and we have a strong ethos of not doing harm with the cracks we find.

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These categories are further complicated by the fact that some sorts of cracking do both require real creative skill and contribute to the general good. The recent reconstruction of the HDCP master key, for example, must have required serious programming skill and mathematical analysis. By once again demonstrating the futility of DRM, it impedes the ongoing effort by the music and film industries to abolish fair-use rights and cripple general-purpose computers in order to prop up their failing business models. It supports the right of consumers to control and tinker with all the hardware they own.

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Many hackers (I’d dare to say “almost all”, actually) consider the elements of the media industry pushing DRM to be gangsters, thieves, and enemies of liberty. We would be willing to consider whoever cracked the HDCP master key a peer in technical skill, and allow that he/she/they probably had motives reflecting the hacker ethos – after all, the crack was publicly released rather than privately exploited for criminal gain. The anonymity of the release is not quite good form by hacker standards, but excusable in light of the fact that the gangsters would certainly use the courts and law enforcement to attack the responsible person(s) if self-identified.

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Tentatively, then, hackers might be willing to describe whoever broke HDCP as a hacker – the skill and the ethical commitments required seem to be present. The only hesitations we’d have would be about mindset and shared culture. Before conferring the honorific, we’d really prefer to know that the person laughs at hacker humor and shares the traditions we do. Not that this is a huge barrier, it’s not like there’s a lodge-pin or secret handshake, but it’s there. A good test for that cultural continuity is this: anybody who wouldn’t feel honored by being called a hacker almost certainly isn’t one.

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In two important ways, the Stuxnet worm is like the HDCP crack, with bigger stakes on the table. Stuxnet is an extremely sophisticated and capable piece of software, not the sort of thing we think of crackers as being able to produce. And there are not many imaginable good outcomes larger than preventing a nuclear genocide. On the other hand, Stuxnet is unlike HDCP decryption code (which you could use to back up encrypted video) in that it has no constructive use. One does not commonly break into industrial plants in order to improve their process efficiency!

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Stuxnet becomes a still more challenging case if we accept the speculation that it was created by a national military or intelligence establishment. I don’t doubt this, myself, and in particular I’d say the style of the operation has Israeli fingerprints all over it. Bold covert operations striking from unexpected angles have been a trademark of Israeli statecraft and warmaking since 1948. My bet would be that the most obvious speculative scenario is the correct one: Stuxnet was an Israeli project with U.S. approval and technical assistance.

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The problem with this is that hackers do not in general handle the demands of operating in a military or spook shop very well. Even when there is no political clash, there’s a psychological beard-vs.-crewcut one; we tend to have strongly internalized personal ethics and not do subordination very well, and we don’t like secrecy. Thus, hackers in general don’t find it easy to imagine that they might have peers in the basement of the Pentagon or its Israeli equivalent.

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What Jay is pointing out with this question is that we really don’t have good language or categories for edge cases like these. Furthermore, this absence is not a mere gap in language; it reflects troublesome issues of ethics and identity. Which is in turn why it’s not silly for me to be writing about it.

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If we call the Stuxnet crew “hackers” we do two questionable things. First, we make an assumption about their cultural attachments that may not be true. Maybe they’ve never laughed at RFC1149! Second, we extend the honorific “hacker” to those who create software for destructive purposes. Yes, there’s the argument that preventing nuclear genocide is a constructive purpose, but there’s an obvious slippery slope here that I think many hackers would be reluctant to go near.

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On the other hand, “cracker” doesn’t seem quite adequate either. Stuxnet is too clever for that. I think our community would also be reluctant to put people motivated by a desire to prevent their country from being A-bombed into radioactive slag in the same bin with people who break into websites to steal credit-card data.

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I don’t think I can justify labeling the Stuxnet team as hackers based on the present state of my knowledge – but I can also imagine having a fifteen-minute conversation with one of them that would change my mind about that.

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In professional security circles, where the term “hacker” is often sadly abused and misused, they often speak of “white hats”, “black hats”, and “gray hats”. This is a reference to old Western movies in which stereotypically villains wore black hats and good guys wore white ones. When Jay telephoned me about this question, the least bad approximation I thought I could come up with for the Stuxnet team was “white-hat crackers”.

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That will do for now, I think. The important thing is not to quibble over labels but to understand the ethics and value issues behind the labels.

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UPDATE: I should clarify that if I had been personally asked to work on Stuxnet on the premise that it was the least violent way to stop an Iranian A-bomb from happening, I would have accepted instantly and felt it was in conformance with hacker ethics to do so. However, I recognize that other hackers might consider creating destructive software to be unethical regardless of purpose, and therefore do not project my judgment on all hackers.

diff --git a/20100930094150.blog b/20100930094150.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5d2443d --- /dev/null +++ b/20100930094150.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +Democratic decline, interrupted +

Veerrry interresting. Michael Barone, editor of The Almanac of American Politics for many years, writes an in-depth article on the psephology of the 2010 midterms titled Dems retreat to coasts as GOP rules vast interior. I read this and had a feeling of deja vu.

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Rummaging through my archives…aha! Six years ago, running a post-mortem on George Bush’s election win, I asked Are the Democrats becoming a regional party?. My analysis then was essentially the same as Michael Barone’s now. I even made a strong prediction about the 2004 county-by-county returns that turned out to be correct, based on my (and now his) theory about the regionalization of the Democratic base.

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I called the 2008 elections wrong; I thought Obama was going to crumble at the last minute. But now it is beginning to look like Obama was a fluke in a long-term story of increasing Democratic failure outside the coastal metroplexes and a few university towns (the likes of Austin and Ann Arbor).

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Barone’s analysis is even causing me to put more credence in the theory (muttered by some Republicans) that Obama, the Chicago machine politician, used ACORN and SEIU to steal the election by stuffing urban ballot boxes in a handful of key swing states. Still not proven, for sure, and I wouldn’t even say I put the odds of it having been true at over 50% yet – but I do remember that the stench out of Ohio was pretty thick in 2008. and ACORN/SEIU have certainly been caught in wholesale vote fraud since then. It would be nice if we had a Justice Department interested in enforcing clean voting to dig into this and put the question to rest one way or another, but that ain’t happening.

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I have not forgotten the leaked Democratic strategists’s complaint in the late 1990s that the only base the party had left is “the blacks and the public employee unions”. I don’t think Michael Barone has either. The third leg of the Democratic tripod, the people Joel Kotkin calls “gentry liberals”, would be too small a bloc to swing elections without the public-employee unions and the blacks, a fact somewhat obscured by gentry-liberal control of most of the national media and their crucial importance in funding the party machine.

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Probably the largest opportunity the Democrats missed in the last fifteen years was corralling Hispanics into their base. This might have been managed, especially given Republicans’ ham-fisted failure to attract a group with upward mobility and broadly social-conservative instincts. But what tension with the Democratic black establishment didn’t do, rapid assimilation did. U.S.-born Hispanics are fast ceasing to be ethnically marked, rather as Italians lost that coloration after World War II. We can expect their voting behavior to increasingly resemble that of recently-assimilated white ethnics like Italians and Poles, not preferentially tilting towards either party. We can also expect Democratic efforts to hold back the tide by pouring money into fringy Hispanic identity-politics groups, a tactic unlikely to be any more successful in the future than it has been up to now.

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Having failed to expand their base, the Democrats need to attract voters outside that base to exert nationwide clout. Obama managed it it by trading on white guilt about past racism, but that’s a card that can probably only be played once and his plunging poll ratings (worse than George W. Bush’s at the corresponding point in his presidency) suggest he couldn’t do it today.

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Barone’s point is that, absent Obama, the underlying psephological trends look very bad for the Democrats’ ability to pull independents and Republicans. I continue to think that the core of the problem is the Democrats’ loss of its conservative-populist Southern wing beginning in the 1950s, a development which led to the capture of the party apparatus by the unions and the New Left in the 1960s and eventually destroyed the party’s ability to maintain the broad national coalition created by FDR.

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If Barone and I are right, the Democrats are probably going to see their worst-case scenarios become real in the upcoming midterms. The surface drama will be all about Obama vs. the Tea Party movement, but the actual problem will be the continuation of the long Democratic decline in the heartland that became visible when Reagan peeled blue-collar whites out of the New Deal coalition in 1980.

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My prescription for the Democrats remains what it was in 2004. To remain viable at a national level the party needs to reverse Reagan’s move and peel groups out of the Republican coalition. The tactic I recommended then, reversing the party’s anti-Second-Amendment stance, has probably lost a lot of its potential effectiveness following the Supreme Court’s Heller ruling in 2008. Democrats leading a pro-gun-rights charge charge before Heller would have looked laudably willing to think outside the post-1968 party’s box, but if they try following it today they’ll probably just look weak.

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The Democrats today need some corresponding course reversal that would only alienate a small part of the party coalition while having broad appeal outside it. But whose ox are they going to gore? If they alienate gentry liberals, their funding base and effective control of national-media-except-Fox will be damaged, perhaps crippled. The public-employee unions are their most reliable footsoldiers and voters. And the blacks are right at the core of the party’s mythologization of itself as the banner-bearers of the 1960s civil-rights movement and the Great Society.

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I think in 2010 the faction the Democrats least need to keep solid is probably the blacks. Blacks are in demographic decline as a percentage of the U.S. population, and racial-grievance politics was looking pretty stale even before the country elected a black President. Hispanics, the closest approximation to a rising minority group even if they are in late-stage assimilation, don’t like the black political establishment and aren’t very wedded to the apparatus of racial preferences and set-asides the Democrats built to keep the blacks on side. Scrapping racial preferences and set-asides would be hugely popular, would deprive Republicans of a key rhetorical weapon, and Obama’s election has probably given the Democrats enough cover to advocate it.

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Absent a reversal at least this dramatic in Democratic party politics, its base and geographic breadth will almost certainly continue to decline. As I pointed out in 2004 and Barone is doing now, national demographics are not favoring its prospects. Nor is the party’s own internal conversation – it almost seems to want to fort up in the big cities and university towns and abandon the rest of the U.S. to the Republicans. But that psephological math won’t work for the Democrats; it cedes the Electoral College to the other party.

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Obama’s urban cool, his Ivy-League manners, and his air of detachment neatly symbolize this trend in Democratic instincts. But it’s not a healthy one for the party; in fact, it’s accelerating the Democrats down a road to impotence in national elections. It remains to be seen what, if anything, they will actually do about that.

diff --git a/20101003211222.blog b/20101003211222.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..77fef4b --- /dev/null +++ b/20101003211222.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Indistinguishable from malice +

I believe it was the historian Robert Conquest who said that every organization eventually behaves as though it is run by a secret cabal of its enemies. I have seldom seen any more convincing evidence of this than the “No Pressure” video released by the anti-global-warming activist campaign 10:10.

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Watch it. Go ahead, I’ll wait. You might have to Google for “no pressure video”, as there seems to have been a concerted attempt by 10:10 and its allies to scrub this thing off the public Internet when they realized what a colossal blunder it was. It’s not pleasant viewing – children being blown up and rivulets of gore spattering in all directions – but you have to actually see it to grasp how callous, awful, and anti-humane it actually is.

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The reaction from AGW skeptics was no surprise; many fulminated that the mask had slipped, and this video is the agenda of environmental fascism writ large. Thoughtcrime brings death! Conform! Obey! Or die…and the survivors get pieces of their friends spattered all over them as a warning. I think we open a more interesting inquiry by taking the 10:10 campaign at their word. They thought they were being funny.

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The question this video really poses is: what kind of person thinks it’s funny to show schoolchildren being blown into bloody gobbets for any reason at all, let alone for merely disagreeing with a teacher’s chirpy sermonizing? And another, which I haven’t seen anyone else articulate: what kind of idiot could fail to foresee what a gift this bit of grand guignol would be to 10:10’s opponents?

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There’s a mind-boggling disconnect from the feelings of ordinary human beings implied here, a kind of moral and emotional incompetence. It’s as though the 10:10 campaigners were so anesthetized by the secretions of their own zealotry that they became incapable of understanding how anyone not living deep inside their reality-tunnel would react.

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In its own way, I think this is actually a more frightening possibility than the obvious hypothesis that these people are conscious eco-Stalinists who let the mask slip. C.S. Lewis has an apposite thing to say about idealistic tyrants: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

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To update Lewis, your garden-variety power-mad monster might commit the atrocities in this video, but only because they are not funny – because they spread fear or demonstrate power and ruthlessness. The kind of idealism that aims to be “tormenting us for our own good” may be what is required before you think blowing up schoolchildren with the push of a button is funny.

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Ultimately I don’t think it matters. There’s an adage known in some circles as Clark’s Law that reads “Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” There is no interpretation hinging on either malice or incompetence under which the 10:10 campaign is, after this, qualified to tell anyone how to live. It has self-destructed any moral authority it ever pretended to.

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From now on, this video should be Exhibit A whenever the global-warming alarmists pretend to moral or intellectual superiority over the rest of us. All we have to say to them is this: Your kind thought this was funny.

diff --git a/20101005155743.blog b/20101005155743.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8cc9939 --- /dev/null +++ b/20101005155743.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Kill the Buddha +

There’s a Zen maxim that commands this: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him”

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There are several closely related interpretations of this maxim in Buddhist tradition. The most obvious one is that worship of the Buddha interferes with comprehending what he actually said – that religious fetishization is the enemy of enlightenment.

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While I completely agree with this interpretation, I’m writing to argue for a more subtle and epistemological one. I interpret Zen Buddhism as a set of practices for not tripping over your own mind – avoiding our tendency to bin experiences into categories so swiftly and completely that we stop actually paying attention to them, not becoming imprisoned by fixed beliefs, not mistaking maps for territories, always remaining attentive to what actually is. Perhaps the most elegant expression of this interpretation is this koan setting forth the problem: “The mind is like a dog. His master points at the moon, but he barks at the hand.”

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In this sense, Zen is discipline that assists instrumental rationalism by teaching important forms of self-monitoring and mental hygiene – in effect very similar to General Semantics.

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In this interpretation of Zen, “killing the Buddha” can be taken to stand for a very specific practice or mental habit. Here’s how it works:

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Find the premise, or belief, or piece of received knowledge that is most important to you right at this moment, and kill it.

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That is, imagine the world as it would be if the most cherished belief in your thoughts at this moment were false. Then reason about the consequences. The more this exercise terrifies you or angers you or undermines your sense of self, the more brutally necessary it is that you kill your belief.

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Sanity is measured by the ability to recognize evidence that your beliefs are wrong, and to detach yourself from them in order to form improved beliefs that conform to reality and better predict your future experiences. Killing the Buddha is an exercise to strengthen your sanity, to decrease your resistence to inconvenient facts and disruptive arguments. It teaches you not to become attached to beliefs, as you gradually learn that your rational coping capacity transcends any specific belief about how the universe is.

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Being sane, being rational, does not consist of attachments and knowledge and beliefs. You do not become one whit more rational by knowing Newton’s Laws or the Periodic Table or the Pythagorean Theorem, or by believing evolutionary theory; what matters is how you acquired such beliefs and how you maintain them.

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Sanity is the process by which you continually adjust your beliefs so they are predictively sound. By regularly killing the Buddha, you prepare yourself for those moments in which you must abandon a belief not because you choose to do it as a mental exercise but because experience of reality tells you it has failed the predictive test and is thus false.

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When you have reached the point that killing the Buddha every day no longer frightens you, but is instead a central part of your self-discipline that you greet each and every day as an opportunity to learn, you are on the road to full sanity.

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But only on the road. Your next challenge, which never ends, is to learn how to see — and kill — the Buddhas that are invisible because they lurk behind your own eyes.

diff --git a/20101007004828.blog b/20101007004828.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8809ce0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20101007004828.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Don’t let them give you to the women +

I taught my wife Cathy how to play Conflict of Heroes this evening, and learned something of which all men (or at least all men who are wargamers) should beware.

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Cathy was climbing a fairly steep learning curve on this. She’s a very capable gamer with some experience of tactical wargames, but mostly ancient-period and fantasy stuff. CoH is her first modern-period wargame, which I wanted to teach her partly to find out how much of her knowledge would transfer. Ancients and fantasy tactics differ from WWII and later tactics quite a bit because, where ancient-period weapons favor concentration of forces, modern semiautomatic and automatic weapons demand dispersion and mobility if you’re not going to get shot up to no purpose.

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We played scenario 2, “The Gap”, from Awakening The Bear (the first CoH fame, covering 1941-1942 on the Russian Front). The scenario is basically a platoon-level German probe at a Russian fixed defense of a village in the Ukraine; the Germans want to push through it, the Russians to stop them, and the victory point scoring conditions favor whoever ends up in control of a large stone house that’s a natural strong point. The Russians start with control of the strong point, but seriously outnumbered; they’re holding for reinforcements. The Germans are under time pressure.

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I took the Germans because we both thought Cathy would be more in her element playing defense. Since she was learning modern tactics as well as the mechanics, I helped her out early on by telling her where I would site my units if I were defending the position, explaining concepts like fire lanes and mutual support. One of her setup conditions was the ability to place two hidden units, offering her the opportunity for some tactical surprise.

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My initial challenge was to take out the heavy Maxim machine gun Cathy had sited in the strong point. Not too difficult as my German platoon had a light machine gun for each for four squads; I dispersed them and laid down suppressive fire until I could get my infantry near enough to close-assault the strong point. My close assault succeeded right at the end of turn 2, leaving me in control of the strong point with no casualties and a couple of unit kills on the Russians.

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The whole time this was going on, Cathy was bitching and moaning about not knowing what to do, feeling confused about the mechanics, etc, etc. The truth was, though, she’d used that Maxim to pretty good effect before I took it out, forcing my units to stay in cover and further out from the village than I was happy with in a game with a tight turn limit. The close assault only worked because my infantry ran in after Cathy’s units in line of sight had expended all their action points firing at my troops earlier in the turn, and it was a near-run thing.

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Then it got ugly.

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It was the end of turn 3 in 5, and I’d collected the 5 victory point bonus for being in control of the strong point at turn end. But the unit holding it, and that unit’s backup in an adjacent hex, were where the Russians might be able to cut both off and kill them, with my rear units barely in support range. And Cathy had reinforcements coming in, including another Maxim which she promptly sited in some heavy woods with a fire lane clear to my forward units.

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The only thing for it was to blitz my rear units into the village, hope they didn’t get popped by the hidden Russian units on the way in, and go house to house ripping the Russian infantry out of their holes.

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My wife continued to bitch and moan about not being sure what to do, not knowing the rules, getting lousy die rolls…and fought like a cornered tigress. She gacked four of my eight units in the house-to-house fighting and actually took back the strong point building…OK, so I blew her attack force away on the next turn with concentrated fire from my remaining three light machine guns, but taking it back at all was pretty impressive considering she was outnumbered.

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The whole time Cathy was complaining about feeling clueless I did not see her make one single tactical error. She sited her hidden units right where they’d be maximum pains in the asses when I found them, chose her fire priorities well, deployed properly to delay and block me, used her heavy weapons as one should, and inflicted 50% casualties on my troops. OK, she did one thing that might have been disastrous, running infantry in for close assault across a fire lane for two of my LMGs…but that gamble worked – she got a Rally roll at the right time and was able to punch out the target.

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I won this one, but only because I was more experienced and didn’t make any errors Cathy could jump on and used the fire/maneuver advantages of my LMGs to the hilt. I’ve known professional military officers who wouldn’t have run Cathy’s end of the action that competently, and this was her first game. I love my wife….

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So, what’s the lesson here? Don’t let them give you to the women…because a woman may bitch and moan and whine about how lost she feels doing something like this, but that won’t keep necessarily keep her from kicking some pretty serious ass.

diff --git a/20101017215731.blog b/20101017215731.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..76fb418 --- /dev/null +++ b/20101017215731.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Retired, Extremely Dangerous +

It’s not giving much away to tell you that the title of the new action comedy “RED”, stands for “Retired – Extremely Dangerous”. My wife uttered the most succinct possible praise of this movie when she said, as we were leaving the theater, “This was the movie The Expendables should have been.”

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Indeed it was. This fun flick about theoretically-superannuated Spec-Ops assassins forced back into the game is light where The Expendables was leaden, moving where The Expendables was preachy, and funny where The Expendables was plain stupid. Who knew Bruce Willis could do comedy from inside his action-star persona? OK, to be fair, a certain amount of wry deadpan humor has always been part of the man’s shtick, but in this movie he gracefully crosses over into spoofing all his previous tough-guy characters, with genuinely hilarious results.

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It starts good, with Willis packing more funny into a retiree wordlessly going through his morning rituals than a lot of comedians can manage in the same number of seconds of high-decibel mugging. Frank Moses moves as he fears the mundane life he’s constructed around himself might shatter if he pokes at it too hard, and his quiet desperation is well figured by his telephone conversations with Sarah, the woman who’s his customer rep at the government agency that cuts his pension checks. She’s just as trapped as he is, reading trashy romances and dreaming of travel and flirting with Frank because he’s a long-distance fantasy that can never become real enough to let her down.

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It gets better, as Frank’s home is literally shot to pieces by a CIA hit squad that he defeats in classic action-hero style – the bit with the bullets in the skillet is especially good and I shall remember it in the unlikely event that I ever have to simulate a firefight in my house. Frank, taking it on the run, realizes that Sarah is likely on the hit list too because she’s his closest contact, and ends up kidnapping her shocked and disbelieving self so he can pull her out of the line of fire. The scenes immediately following, in which Sarah oscillates between shrieking physical indignation and her increasing attraction to the man who is actually saving her life, are the funniest in the movie, and stake Mary-Louise Parker’s claim to A-list status in the comic actress division. Though Willis is, in his own quiet way, even funnier when he muses wistfully about how he wishes they had actually met. Neither of them misses a note, they have excellent chemistry, and the writers get a gold star for creative use of duct tape (which, yes, becomes a running gag later in the movie).

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More plot would be a spoiler. Frank, and an increasingly cooperative Sarah, must get to the bottom of who is trying to kill them and why. And to do that Frank will need old friends – his ops team – and at least one old enemy. The movie shifts gears into an ensemble comedy with explosions as old loves are rediscovered, old loyalties tested, villains turn into heroes, and the shape of the double betrayal driving the plot becomes clearer.

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This thing isn’t any more plausible than your typical action movie, but the writers generate so much fun pastiching the conventions of the form that you won’t mind. It’s worth the price of admission just to hear Helen Mirren’s character Victoria airily suggest “a little girl time” with Sarah while fondling a sniper rifle, and then coolly inform the girl “If you break his heart, I will kill you and bury your body in the woods”. Even funnier is Sarah’s gulped “OK…”, which manages to compress into a disyllable more emotional nuance about her developing relationship with Frank than a lesser actress would have needed several lines of dialogue to convey.

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It doesn’t hurt that every one of the players seems to be enjoying their roles immensely, and catches the audience up in that. Even the supporting parts – notably John Malkovich as the comically paranoid team nutcase and Brian Cox as the old Soviet adversary turned ally – are carried off with unusual elan and an appropriate air of broad farce. It’s actually high praise to note that Morgan Freeman, being his usually patrician and charismatic self, is the weakest link in this chain.

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Perhaps the only wrong note this movie hits is one that was perhaps inevitable, Hollywood being Hollywood. The actress playing the female lead is in her mid-40s, a decent age match for Frank Moses who looks a bit younger than Bruce Willis’s actual 60 years. But they dressed her and made her up to look rather younger than that. The effect isn’t outright creepy in the way that pairing Harrison Ford in his 60s with twentysomething starlets was in those middle Indiana Jones movies, because Mary-Louise Parker’s natural mode is more intelligent waif than sexpot – but I couldn’t help noticing it. In retrospect I wish they had let the woman look a little closer to her natural age, but that ain’t going to happen with a female lead in Tinseltown.

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Still. RED was undoubtedly the best action movie I’ve seen in 2010. It’s up there with Grosse Point Blank and True Lies as one of the rare films that does a consistently deft and intelligent job of weaving between action/suspense and satire of its own genre. Everyone in this film will be proud to look back on it, I think, but the one it may be a career-defining performance for is Mary-Louise Parker. It’s not news that Bruce Willis can carry a movie, but she was a surprise – funny tough, vulnerable, intelligent, echoing the Jamie Lee Curtis of True Lies a little, and developing a character that could have been nothing more than a shrill cartoon into something appealing and quirky and believable. I’ll watch for her in future movies.

diff --git a/20101022055732.blog b/20101022055732.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..72db581 --- /dev/null +++ b/20101022055732.blog @@ -0,0 +1,65 @@ +Krythar: a world that almost was +

One of the experiences that made me swear off proprietary software was doing some designing of a fantasy-world map with a proprietary program I have long forgotten; this would have been in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Of course the program became obsolescent and nothing else could read the map….I recently stumbled across a copy of the text I wrote to accompany the map, mod-dated 1994 but probably a few years older. There’s a continent of Krythar in the Neverwinter Nights universe, but this long predates it.

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Explore with me now the world of Krythar. Because the “accompanying map” no longer exists, it will never be.

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Adventuring in Krythar

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Krythar is a continent designed to be used in fantasy role-playing campaigns. The Krythar materials are not specific to any role-playing system. They offer a wide variety of potential campaign backgrounds — from chivalric warfare in the Sunrise Kingdoms through wilderness adventures in the Cauldron and the Heart Forest, to battling pirates in the Stormwrack Isles or deadly intrigue in the perfumed cities of the Istrans.

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Physical Geography, Geology, and Climate

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Krythar is a small north-temperate zone continent, comparable in size to Australia but at about the equivalent latitude of the southern U.S. It is a bit less than 1000 miles east-west and 800 miles north-south (see accompanying map).

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Overall the climate is mild and moist, shading to subtropical and tropical in the extreme south. However, a substantial fraction of Krythar’s terrain (especially in the north) is hilly and mountainous, creating a complex pattern of microclimates including a few genuinely cold and arid regions.

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The major regions of Krythar include:

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The Kestran Plain

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The coastal plain of Kestra, shading into the delta of the Shining River, comprises the eastern extreme of Krythar. It is mild, flat, and well-watered, rising gradually from sandy coasts to the foothills of the Windward Reach and the mouth of the Shining River valley. Soils are alluvial and quite fertile, often permitting two harvests a year. The Kestran plain is one of the two most civilized and urbanized area of Krythar; it is rivalled only by the cities of the lower Istra in the extreme south. Exports include cloth, wine, dyes, and a wide variety of manufactured goods.

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The Windward Reach

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These are the coastal mountains of northeastern Krythar. They block the prevailing northwesterly winds, creating a rain shadow that makes the valley of the western Shining River the driest region of the continent. The tallest peaks of the Reach are around 15Kft high, with are in the 7K to 9Kft range. The soil of the Windward Coast itself is poor and rocky; further inland, the mountains support cold, dense coniferous forests on the north slopes and drier, warmer, mixed forests on the southern side.

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The Reach is not hospitable country and the people of the Reach are a tough, clannish lot. There is little land more than marginally arable; they live primarily on fish, game, and tubers. The coastal towns are small; only Gull, at the southern end of the Reach, is really prosperous and that is primarily due to its trade with the nearby cities of the Kestran plain. The Reach’s exports include lumber, furs, game, salt fish, copper, and famously grim men-at-arms.

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The valley of the Shining River

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This is the northernmost of Krythar’s three major catchment areas (the others being the valleys of the Istra and the Greenwater). Rainfall varies from sparse at the eastern (inland) end to moderate near the coastal plain of Kestra. Soils vary from sandy to heavy and are moderately productive, with fertility increasing towards the coast. The river itself is relatively narrow and swift, with numerous rapids and few navigable stretches at any distance from the sea.

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The drier inland end of the valley is good country for cattle ranching. Towards the coast farming is more successful and the population more dense, merging into the rich coastal plain. Exports include livestock, grain, and cheese.

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The Far North

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The northwest end of the Windward Reach is bounded by the steep-sided valley of the River Lann. The Lann valley is rugged and heavily forested, home to a wide variety of large game.

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Across the valley begins the area known to civilized Krytharians as the Cauldron. This area includes the high peaks of the Hero’s Knot and the Bitter Hills to the south. It is geologically active and difficult terrain, little explored and poorly mapped.

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North of the Hero’s Knot the mountains trail off into the rainy and isolated Stormwrack Isles.

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All these areas are sparsely populated and not well known to civilized Krytharians.

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The Mistfell Downs (Old Krythar)

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This northwestern quarter of Krythar is bounded by the Cauldron to its east and the Greenwater River to the south. The Mistfells themselves are a low range of inland hills (only a few top 1000 feet). The surrounding country is primarily chalk moors and scrubby deciduous forests cut by innumerable small, winding rivers and dotted by thousands of tiny lakes. The coast is sandy and fenny. Soil is generally poor, especially shoreward of the Mistfells.

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The Downs are were at one time rich country, but are now only sparsely populated. The terrain shows signs of past overcultivation, deforestation, and soil loss everywhere. Subsistence agriculture and sheepherding
+dominate the local economy.

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The Heart Forest and Greenwater Valley

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The Heart Forest includes several thousands of square miles of dense and nearly unexplored terrain nearly at the center of continental Krythar, north of the Istra valley and west of the Marches and Shining River valley.

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The Greenwater River runs nearly east-west, rising in the Heart Forest and running nearly to the westernmost extremity of Krythar. It is navigable for more than half its length, and defines a shallow valley bounded on the south by the foothills of the Irongrims and on the north by the Mistfell Downs.

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The Greenwater Valley is lightly settled, and the inhabitants have little contact with the more civilized regions of eastern and southern Krythar.

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The Irongrims

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The great southern massif of Krythar is considerably higher than the Windward Reach or Hero’s Knot, with many several topping 25Kft. The western Irongrims are actively volcanic, but the highest peak, Fang-of-God, is situated in the smaller eastern arm. Between these is the high valley of the Coldswift River.

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The only significant concentration of population in the Irongrims is in the mountain towns of the Coldswift Valley. These trade iron ore, raw gems, gold, silver, lumber and charcoal to the Tamargh coast.

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Tamargh

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The coastal region of Tamargh, south of the Irongrims, is temperate and well-watered by mild southerly winds; these give it a climate remniniscent of the Earth’s Mediterranean or southern California.

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Thin, dry soils support extensive cultivation of grapes, olives and fruit. Small ranches and farms in the Irongrim foothills supply lamb and millet. The cities export fine metalwork and cut jewels. Proverbially, Tamargh also supplies Krythar with its keenest swords and loveliest dancing girls.

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The Istra Valley

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The Istra runs south from the wilds of north-central Krythar to the sea, skirting the eastern flanks of the Irongrims and petering out in a vast convoluted delta with many estuaries. The river is broad and navigable over much of its length. The valley of the Istra is wide and flat, tending towards swampiness. The climate is warm, and rainfall frequent.

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The valley has long been populated and has conditions ideal for intensive agriculture, but is not a particularly healthy place for humans; disease is rampant and devastating plagues not infrequent. Nevertheless the river cities of the southern Istra are vast and sophisticated. The region exports rice, fruit, drugs, slaves, and spices.

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Culture, Ethnicity, and History

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There are three major culture groups of humans on Krythar. Your players will probably want to start as people from the Sunrise Kingdoms, the youngest of the three. The Sunrisers are the inhabitants of the Kestran plain and the Shining River Valley. They are recent arrivals on Krythar, having arrived by ship six hundred years ago from the east. Ethnically they resemble Earth’s Germans or Scandinavians; their dominant culture is high-feudal, similar to that of the 12th-century Anglo-French Angevins on Earth.

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The oldest of the continent’s culture groups is the people who call themselves `Krythari’ or `Old Krythari’ and are so called by others — the people of the Mistfell Downs and Greenwater Valley. Their culture resembles that of early medieval Wales — low feudalism, cattle-raiding and an incredibly rich oral and poetic tradition. They are a tall, pale-skinned, dark-haired and gloomy folk, given to mad fits of courage but undisciplined; the newer peoples of Krythar say of them that they “fight like devils and sing like gods”.

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The people of the Windward Reach are distantly related to the Old Krythari, but have interbred heavily with Sunrisers and are now hard to tell from the latter. The people of the Coldswift Valley towns are also of Old Krythari stock.

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The third major Krytharian people is the Istrans of the south. The Istrans have mythological traditions of having migrated to Krythar from over-sea, but have been established on the continent for a very long time. Their civilizations have undergone many cycles of rise and collapse. Most have been despotic empires resembling Byzantium or Pharaonic Egypt; Istran priesthoods maintain dynastic calendars going back millennia. Ethnically, Istrans resemble various of Earth’s Mediterranean peoples; they are typically olive-skinned, wiry and curly-haired. They have the repute of being clever and slippery.

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The people of the Tamargh coast are ethnically related to the Istrans and (being generally taller, darker-skinned, and more muscular than the Istran norm) resemble the Istran upper class. They are a volatile and fierce people, given to great boasts and sudden passions. They are noted for their regularity of feature and well-formedness of body and are proverbially Krythar’s handsomest folk.

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Though most of Krythar’s people are human, there are substantial populations of the major humanoid peoples in various known parts of the continent, and rumors of many others in the wilds.

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The most important nonhuman group is a nation of Elves that live in the forests south and west of the Kestran plain. They trade heavily with the Sunrise Kingdoms and are not an uncommon sight in the coastal cities.

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There are known to be Dwarven warrens in the Hero’s Knot, the Bitter Hills and the Irongrims. Individual Dwarves not uncommonly set up as smiths and craftsmen in human cities, though only very few are known to have lived entire lives among humans.

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There are said to be Halfling villages in the Greenwater valley and remote parts of Old Krythar.

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Language

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Sunrisers speak more or less elaborate and “courtly” dialects of Common.

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Krythari have their own musical tongue (the Poets’ Tongue) which very few outsiders speak, but they are good with languages and most have some understanding of spoken Common. Krythari nobles, merchants, and
+travellers invariably speak fluent Common.

+

Istrans speak an elaborate, heavily-inflected language of their own. The “Low” or peasant dialect has in recent historical times become quite infilterated by Common loan-words and is not too difficult for Common-speakers to understand with a little practice (speaking it is more difficult). It is almost impossible for outsiders to learn spoken High or “court” Istran, as it involves an elaborate set of social-status inflections that are dangerous to get wrong.

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A Common-Istran pidgin has evolved in the trading cities of the Marches; it is about equally intelligible (and sounds about equally uncouth) to native Istran and Common speakers. Most Istran travellers can speak the pidgin.

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The people of the Tamargh coast speak both Common and a simplified form of Low Istran quite different from trade pidgin.

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The people of the Windward Reaches used to speak a language related to Old Krythari, but the old tongue is now almost forgotten. Most now use a rough dialect of Common embellished with words from the old tongue.

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The people of the Coldswift Valley towns speak a dialect of Old Krythari among themselves but Common to strangers. A few have learned the Tamargh Coast form of Low Istran.

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Nonhumans have languages of their own, but when encountered in human areas will invariably speak Common. Elvish travellers, even more adept at languages than Old Krythari, often speak Poets’ Tongue and Low Istran as well.

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Religion

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The most powerful religion of Krythar is unquestionably the state church of the Istran Empire. In theory, Istrans practice an elaborate henotheism (polytheism in which one god is regarded as dominant) centered around the god called `Sun Serpent’ who is the patron and guardian of the Istran Imperial House. In practice, Istran religion is as decadent and fragmented as the Empire itself, with the priesthood of the Sun Serpent exerting only nominal control over a bewildering array of temples, orders, and semi-secret societies.

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Of these, the most important is the cult of the Dark Mother, nominally the Sun Serpent’s consort. The priestesses of the Dark Mother contend for power with the priests of Sun Serpent, and have in past times dominated the Empire.

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The religions of Istra are served by vast temple complexes and legions of shaven-headed acolytes. Some of the most powerful orders field substantial military formations which are among the best-disciplined and most formidable troops in the Empire. The more usual weapons of religious dispute, however, are those usual in Imperial politics — the barbed rumor, the poison-cup, and the assassin’s knife.

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No one religion or unified theology dominates the Sunrise Kingdoms. After centuries of conflict with the henotheistic Istrans, polytheism has become a central part of Sunriser identity.

diff --git a/20101023085403.blog b/20101023085403.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a49ccb0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20101023085403.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Tetris, Torture, and the Gorilla-Arm Problem +

Every time computing technology changes, we learn something new about the affordances of being human. I got my most recent lesson when I discovered DroidTris, a clone of the popular falling-blocks game for Android. As it turns out, a touchscreen version of Tetris works really, really well – and in doing so, it sheds new light on one of the classic ergonomic blunders of computing history.

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The earliest ancestor of today’s handheld touch screens was the light pen, originally invented on the Whirlwind project in 1952. A light pen is nothing but a photodiode on a stick that you can use to designate a spot on a monitor; as Wikipedia notes, “a light pen works by sensing the sudden small change in brightness of a point on the screen when the electron gun refreshes that spot. By noting exactly where the scanning has reached at that moment, the X,Y position of the pen can be resolved.” Several early attempts at hypertext editing systems in the 1960s used light pens, but the device was overshadowed by Doug Engelbart’s invention of the mouse.

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Touch-screens proper were invented in 1971, and enjoyed a brief round of hype in the early 1980s. For a time it appeared that this was an input style that might displace the mouse and make computing interfaces really natural – after all, what could be simpler than just pointing at what you want? But it didn’t happen. The technology claimed a couple of niches in places like restaurant point-of-sale systems, where it’s still widely used today, but it never achieved mass consumer adoption.

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The light pen and touch screens both fell victim to the same problem, which was really about the way the host displays were mounted. Humans aren’t designed to hold their arms at or above shoulder height for any longer than it takes to complete a burst-exertion maneuver. In fact, forcing people to do this with the threat of beatings or electrocution was a form of torture favored by the North Vietnamese that left former presidential candidate John McCain (among others) with crippling injuries. In less extreme settings, the discomfort caused by using a light pen or touch surface mounted at or above shoulder height is called the “gorilla-arm problem”, and neatly explains why mice and trackballs won.

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The hint that restaurant point-of-sale systems give us about touch screens is that display mounting matters. Take your vertically-mounted torture device, drop it two feet and rotate it to face upwards, and the gorilla-arm problem vanishes; suddenly touch manipulation is actually useful. Especially for short command sequences that don’t involve repetitive motion.

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Now fast-forward to my Android phone. I try out DroidTris and I discover that being able to literally swipe and drag the falling piece any direction but up is terrific – in act, I can play competently at significantly higher speeds than I ever manged with arrow keys. Er, but wait – this isn’t short bursty command sequences like a restaurant point-of-sale system, it’s rapid precise motions for long periods. Where’d my ergonomic problem go?

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Answer: I can position the touch surface where I want it with my other hand. We’ve just rediscovered the ergonomics of scribbling on a hand-held notepad with a pencil or pen. In practice, doing this involves occasional changes of the relative position of the writing surface to avoid repetitively stressing the same small bunches of muscle fibers in the arm. People who scribble on notepads are unaware they’re doing this, but in combination with keeping the pad below shoulder height this is what banishes gorilla arm.

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So, indeed, the ancient failures of light pens and touch screens were all about the tacit assumption that the touch surface needed to be mounted in a fixed vertical position at eye height, well above shoulder level. That’s a valuable lesson.

diff --git a/20101029133510.blog b/20101029133510.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..55e96fb --- /dev/null +++ b/20101029133510.blog @@ -0,0 +1,53 @@ +Children of a Lesser Good +

Regular readers of this blog are probably pretty clued in about my better-known software projects – gpsd, fetchmail, giflib, libpng, INTERCAL, ncurses, Battle for Wesnoth, Emacs VC and GUD modes, and the like. If those are the best, what about the rest? Here’s a tour of some of the lesser-known stuff I’ve written or had my fingers in. Warning: obscurity, trivia, and obsolescence lie ahead!

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Retrolanguages

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It’s no news to my regular readers that I derive a perverse thrill from reviving horrible ancient languages from the paleolithic strata of computing. INTERCAL is my best-known such project, but there are others.

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cupl actually gives you an interpreter for two revenants from the dawn age – Cornell University Computing Language (CUPL) and Cornell Compiler (CORC).

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mad is the Michigan Algorithm Decoder, a wonderfully strange old language from the realy 1960s. What can you say about a lanuage where you have explicit operations to twiddle a stack of values of a variable as a substitute for the function local scope you don’t have? Yes, I know; it sounds like INTERCAL. No, not quite.

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mixal is an implementation of the hypothetical MIXAL assemply language from Donald Knuth’s “The Art Of Computer Programming”. I didn’t write this, but I ported it to Unix and got the permissions required to redistribute the MIX examples and description from the book.

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Development Tools

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One of my very first C programs back in the early 1980s was hexdump. Yes, Unix had the od command, but I always prefered the CP/M style of hex dump – 16 hex bytes per line with ASCII over on the right and a gutter in the middle that helps you figure offsets by breaking them into groups of 8. Because I was working on an SNA terminal emulator when I wrote it, this hex dumper also has the unusual ability to dump EBCDIC. A quarter-century later EBCDIC is long gone from my life but I still think the CP/M display style of hex display is superior.

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semex is almost as old. No, nothing to do with plastic explosive; it’s an interactive excerciser for the System V semaphore facilities found in Linux and other modern Unixes. You can use it to learn how they work with less friction than writing your own C code, or as a callable tool for use from scripting languages that don’t have a native binding to the semaphore calls.

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ascii is a handy little utility that recognizes many different ways of naming an ASCII character (hex, octal, binary, decimal, C escape, ISO character table pair, slang names, and others) and prints out all the equivalents.

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minised, aka small-sed, is the fast, small sed originally distributed in the GNU toolkit and still distributed with Minix. The GNU Project dropped it when they built their own sed around an enhanced regexp package, but minised still better for some uses (in particular, it’s faster and less memory-intensive).

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Occasionally I hare off in a direction nobody seems interested in. Back when GNU gettext was just getting known, I thought it was too heavyweight. I wrote my own tool for internationalization, cstrings and used it on a couple of small C projects. Alas, I don’t think anyone else ever did.

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When I was an active libpng developer, I wrote the support for six of the more obscure chunk types that had been described in the PNG standard but not implemented in the reference library. It frustrated me that there were no decent tools for doing surgery on the more obscure chunk types, so I wrote sng. This was a program that could unpack a PNG into an editable text form and reverse the transformastion. Need to wrote a program to tweak, say, the meters-to-pixel field in a pHYs chunk? No problem – explode the PNG with sng, hack it in your favorite text editor, and unexplode it with sng. Writing the regression-test suite was easy :-).

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I’d love to know if anyone but me ever got any use out of my C-to-Python translator, ctopy. It turns out that regexp-bashing can do about 80% of the job on well-formed C. I translated a couple of fairly large programs with it, including Super Star Trek (which see below).

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It’s not likely there are many SCCS files left out there, but if you know what one is and you want to lift it to RCS, sccs2rcs is your tool. This isn’t the C-shell version that floated around unmaintained for many years, it’s my Python rewrite with much better error checking.

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Because I cleverly got it accepted into the Subversion suite, svncutter is not its own project any more. This is a tool for slicing and dicing Subversion repositories. The single trickiest thing it can do is merge runs of adjacent commits with the same commit comment – a not-uncommon form of scar tissue when a repo has been up-converted from SCCS/RCS/CVS. It can also selectively delete commits and excise files from a repo history entirely.

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Now we reach deep into obscurity for yacchack, a project so ancient and neglected that I never even gave it a web page. It was a set of hacks to enable building multiple YACC parsers into the same runtime, turning the parser globals into members in a state structure that you could have more than one of. I remember that this worked once but have forgotten what I wrote it for.

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Communications

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ssh-installkeys installs your SSH keys on remote sites for you. Unlike its direct competitor ssh-keyinstall, you need enter your password only once; it uses a send/expect library to run an ssh session that does all the work.

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The web is a wonderful thing, but I hate, hate, hate having to do mechanical clicky-dances on websites; service designers who don’t provide an API for scripting transactions with them deserve to be hung up by their thumbs (yes, SourceForge, I’m talking to you!). My freshmeat-submit tool exercises the API at freshmeat.net; with it, you can post release announcements and edit project metadata. This tool is actually intended to be called by other programs as part of your release process.

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In fact, the main user of freshmeat-submit is my shipper program. shipper automates the tedious process of shipping a software release to standard places, including your own hosted website, FTP archive sites, and the like. Optionally it can generate and upload a templated web page for the project and announce to Freshmeat. This program is in alpha state and rapidly acquiring more capablity.

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Document and Web Tools

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There are few things more entertaining than to succeed at programming an algorithmic solution to a problem the domain experts thought was impossible to automate. It was supposed to be impossible to lift the ugly-presentation-level tag soup in troff markup (man, ms, mm, me etc.) to nicely structured XML-DocBook. But, it turns out, with a sufficiently clever application of cliche analysis it can be done. ctdoclifter has about a 95% successful conversion rate. This may be the most algorithmically dense code I’ve ever written.

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I found the conditionalization facilities in XML-DocBook too painful to use, so I wrote xmlif to fix this. It’s a simple preprocessor that interprets XML processing instructions in your text body in a way that allows you to conditionally include or export different portions of the text.

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vh stands for Volks-Hypertext. Back when I was first working on the Jargon File, I distributed it for a while in a flat-text form in which all the references to entries were surrounded by curly brtaces, a la “{foo}”. A guy named Ray Gardner thought “Hey, why don’t I…” and write what we’d now call a browser for the File – it was screen-oriented, could page up and down, and could chase links. The right and left arrow keys hopped from link to link on the page; press enter on a link and go to the entry. The idea for the browser was Ray’s, but some of the interface polish was mine.

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What makes this interesting is that we weren’t imitating the text-mode lynx browser and the World Wide Web – we were anticipating it. Shortly after vh’s first release in 1991 I got email from a then-obscure programmer named Tim Berners-Lee hinting that he was doing some hypertext-related stuff and asking if I might be interested in collaborating on some standards. I replied “yes”, but never heard back from him.

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Of course Tim Berners-Lee didn’t stay obscure for very long after 1991. I’ve wondered ever since if Ray Gardner and I actually influenced the design of HTML. If I ever meet Sir Tim, I’ll ask him.

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The urgency to get rid of GIFs is gone now that the blocking patent has expired, but PNG is still a better image format and gif2png is still your handiest tool for mass-converting the things. I didn’t write it, but I’ve been the maintainer for a decade – and I did write web2png, which can convert an entire hierarchy of web pages in place, patching links as needed.

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sitemap is a tool for automatically building a site map from your web pages, meant to be run as a cron job. It mines indexing information about the pages from meta tags. I’ve had it running on my website for thirteen years.

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imgsizer optimizes a web page, or an entire tree of them, by analyzing IMG tags and adding width and height attributes to them derived from analyzing the image. This hint to the layout engine of a browser can significantly speed up page rendering.

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Because I’ve been such a Unix guy for the past million years, some people might find it difficult to believe that I ever worried about moving data back and forth from DOS/Windows systems. But I did, back in the 1980s, and wrote mstrans so I could batch-convert entire directories of manuscript files. It’s not hard to imagine where this could still be useful.

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Games

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Battle For Wesnoth isn’t my first game project, no, not by any means. I was a Nethack developer for many years; heck. it’s my doing that Nethack has color on the screen. I used to write and port a lot of games back in the days when we used terminals instead of GUIs. Some of these retain considerable play value today; one or two even qualify as timeless classics.

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Save the Federation from the invading Klingons! Visit exotic planets and strip-mine them for dilithium! Encounter mysterious space thingies! Long, long ago, there was a family of tremendously influential games called “Star Trek”; the earliest of this seems to have been a tiny BASIC game from 1971. One of the most influential versions was written in FORTRAN in 1973-1974 at the University of Texas; it was eventually translated into C to become BSD Trek. Super Star Trek is the UT game, translated into Python and with most of the features from BSD Trek and several later versions folded in.

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Super Star Trek is, no question, a timeless classic. You can play it in either its original TTY-like mode, or you can enable the screen-oriented interface.

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Almost as venerable is wumpus. Hunt The Wumpus was first written in BASIC in 1974, and seems to have the first game with a map that was topologically interesting, e.g not a grid. You hunt the wumpus in an icosahedral cave, hoping pot him by shooting one of your limited supply of arrows through nearby rooms. But beware lest you stumble over the Wumpus himself (which will eat you) or fall into a pit or get carried off by bats! This implementation lovingly preserves the crude interface of the original. Also includes superhack, which is a structurally similar game with a different premise.

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Or there’s my bs game from 1993 – yeah, it’s Battleships for the terminal screen. The point-and-shoot with arrow keys is primitive compared to clicking a mouse in a GUI…but, oh, wait, you can point and shoot with a mouse in this thing, too. That’s not something you see often in a program running in a terminal emulator, and the magic I used is unlikely to work anywhere but under Linux. (Not originally mine, but I rewrote it to make the UI not suck.)

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Then there’s bluemoon a nice card solitaire game that’s not injured by lacking a GUI. (Also not originally mine, but I rewrote it to make the UI not suck.)

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Once upon a time in 1994, I saw a neat little game for the old pre-Unix Macintosh called “Galaxis”. I thought it was fun, so I wrote a workalike.

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greed is a game that might not work as well if it did have a GUI. You use arrow keys to walk around a field of digits, trying to eat as many as possible. The catch is that the length of your next move is set by the digit you eat, and you can’t cross your own back trail. Somebody named Matt Day wrote this back around 1989 and then disappeared. I’ve kept it maintained since 1994.

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Imagine you are skiing down an infinite slope, facing such hazards as trees, ice, bare ground, and the man-eating Yeti! Unfortunately, you have put your jet-powered skis on backwards, so you can’t see ahead where you are going; only behind where you have been. However, you can turn to either side, jump or hop through the air, teleport through hyperspace, launch nuclear ICBMs, and cast spells to call the Fire Demon. And since the hazards occur in patches, you can skillfully outmaneuver them. This game, ski would definitely not work as well with a GUI. Not my design, but very funny and worth my effort to maintain it.

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It’s not real likely anyone will ever want to play Tetris on a terminal screen again, but in case they do they can dust off tetrix. Originally written for the Amiga; I ported it to Unix. Probably best mercifully forgotten now.

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Finally, there’s VMS-Empire. This game was ancestral to the whole genre of 4X (expand/explore/exploit/exterminate) games, including Civilization and Master of Orion. Its history before 1990 is a bit murky, but I’ve been maintaining it since. This game should not be forgotten; it, too, is a timeless classic.

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Miscellanea

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I used to play Magic The Gathering. To help me evaluate the probability of, say, pulling any of 3 Hurloon Minotaurs in my first 7 cards of a 60-card deck, I wrote deal. It computes hypergeometric distributions for non-replacement probabilities. It’s based partly on an earlier program called “cardprobs” that seems to have sunk without trace.

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Bayesian filtering has become a very popular spamfighting method. Shortly after Paul Graham invented the technique in 2002, I observed sadly that, much as I love Lisp, his use of it as an implementation language made it far less likely that this worthy idea would get the traction it deserved. I wrote bogofilter, the first Bayesian spam-filter in C. I handed it off to others about a year later. It has achieved extremely wide use.

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In 2003, as a reaction to the SCO lawsuit, I wrote a comparator that uses a shred-and-hash technique find similar portions of program text in very large source trees (fuzzy matching after whitespace normalization, brace, and comment removal is supported). Ron Rivest (yeah, the “R” in RSA) was kind enough to design a custom hash function for me. A main virtue of this program is that it’s eye-poppingly fast – I have actually seen it compare up to two million lines of code per minute on a 1.8GHz Intel box.

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letterize takes a phone number and tries to turn it into the most plausible string of English characters that you could type on a phone keypad to get that number. Most plausible, that is, given the relative frequency of trigraphs in English.

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Morse Classic is a Morse code training program for aspiring radio hams. I was handed the maintainer’s baton years ago but haven’t had to do much more than merge sporadic contributions from others; the code is old but very stable.

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nolan was a program that gave the Nolan Quiz, something we’d now hardly think of doing with anything but a Web form. The implementation technique was kind of interesting, though; I wrote a little markup language that was compiled to C by a script written in sed and awk.

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X Video Explorer was a tool I wrote in conjuction with the XFree86 Video Timings HOWTO I used to maintain. Because mdern display hardware autoconfigures using EDID, the tool and the HOWTO are both obsolete.

diff --git a/20101101154302.blog b/20101101154302.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0b7ff04 --- /dev/null +++ b/20101101154302.blog @@ -0,0 +1,74 @@ +Announcing reposurgeon – a tool for the good new days +

I’ve been mostly blog-silent for the last week because I’ve been working my tail off on a new project. It’s reposurgeon, a tool for performing surgery on repository histories, and there are several interesting things to note about it.

+

+

One of my regular guests on the blog, apparently a younger programmer, recently left a comment regretting the old days he wasn’t there for. He reports feeling stifled by the experience of Googling every time he has a nifty programming idea and discovering that someone else has already done it.

+

But with new days come new challenges, and new opportunities. Reposurgeon exploits a possibility that didn’t exist until quite recently; there has never been anything quite like it before, though there was were very partial precedents in svndumpfilter and my own svnsquash/svncutter tool.

+

reposurgeon is a repository-history editor. With it, you can edit old comments and metadata, remove junk commits (of the sort frequently generated by repository conversion tools such as cvs2svn), and perform various other operations that version-control systems (VCSes) don’t want to let you do.

+

I wrote it because I’ve been doing a bunch of repository conversions recently and I wanted a way to deal with the crufty artifacts those tend to create. But there are other obvious uses; one would be expunging repo contents that’s got some intellectual-property issue from the history, so you’re not re-infringing every time somebody clones the repository…

+

And when I say “editor”, I mean a tool general enough to have uses I’m not anticipating. It has a rather powerful little minilanguage in it for specifying selection sets. It lets you dump the metadata from the VCS history (committer, commit date, and comment text) in a textual form that you can edit and feed back into to it to modify the history.

+

Something like this, though limited to one specific VCS, could have been written before now. But the astute reader will note that I haven’t mentioned a specific VCS. In fact, reposurgeon can operate on histories created by RCS, CVS, Subversion, git, Mercurial, bzr, and probably several other VCSes about which I haven’t the faintest clue.

+

Yes, you may boggle now. If you are wondering where in the fleeping frack I get off claiming to support version-control systems I admit I don’t know anything about, this shows you are paying attention. It has been rumored that I am a clever fellow, but what, what, *what*? Right. You deserve an explanation and shall have one.

+

The trick that enables reposurgeon to do its magic is that it only fakes editing repositories. What it actually edits is git-fast-import command streams.

+

Aha! Some of you are already nodding knowingly. For the rest of the audience, a “git-fast-import command stream” is a format Linus Torvalds and friends invented to flatten a git repository history into one big file that can be used to reconstitute the repository by another instance of git.

+

This is meant to enable writing import tools; the moment you have an exporter that can generate this format from (say) Mercurial or bzr, you can transcode repositories from the other system to git as easily as you pour water from one cup to another. (Well. Some older systems that use only local usernames as committer IDs rather than full email addresses have an issue, but it’s easily worked around in a variety of ways.) And exporters are easy to write; if your special VCS has a command-line interface at all, odds are building an exporter is about a day’s work in the scripting language of your choice.

+

This stream format has useful properties. It’s easy to parse and self-describing. But the really important property is that it expresses an ontology or data model that is both very simple and general enough to capture the state of repositories made not just with git but with other VCSes. It has to, or it wouldn’t be good enough to support importers – too much state would get lost in transition.

+

So, lots of git fans have written exporters for a huge range of VCSes. Not to be outdone, fans of other VCSes have written importers for their systems. They don’t want all the migration to be one-way, you see. Lossless import capability makes a VCS a potential destination, giving it a competitive advantage over systems that can only export projects away from themselves.

+

Look what’s happening here! Without necessarily intending it, the git crew have created a de-facto-standard interchange format for passing around version-control histories. This is huge. Because what it actually does is decouple the whole I’ve-got-a-project-history thing from any individual version-control system.

+

Watch for second-order consequences of this in the future. In particular, I predict that VCSes will increasingly converge on supporting exactly the set of abstractions in a fast-import stream. They’re a good enough set, and being interoperable will prove a powerful lure.

+

While the rumor that I’m a clever fellow isn’t entirely false, the most important knack I have is for seeing the stupid-obvious possibilities that have been sitting under peoples’ noses all along – in this case, the possibility for a VCS-independent history-editing tool. What reposurgeon actually does is take a fast-import stream in one end, allow you to hack it in various interesting ways, then ship the modified repo out its other end as a modified fast-import stream.

+

It can look like you’re editing a repository, sure. But that’s because reposurgeon has a method table in it that’s indexed by VCS type and contains a small handful of command-line templates for each of them, including an importer command and an exporter command. And that, basically, is it; that handful of commands is all reposurgeon knows about any specific VCS, and probably all it will ever need to know. Adding reposurgeon support for new VCSes is easy and doesn’t require changing any executable code at all.

+

If you want to work with a VCS that isn’t in the list, use the exporter of your choice to dump to a stream file, then tell reposurgeon to load from that. When you’re done, tell reposurgeon to write the stream to another file, then use whatever importer you like to rebuild a repo from it.

+

There is one significant drawback to operating this way. In a system like git or Mercurial that uses hashes of a commit’s content to identify it, the IDs of anything that’s downstream of a commit you alter or delete will change. This will tend to hose people trying to sync from the modified repo. You do not, repeat not, want to use reposurgeon on a publicly-visible repo – not unless you can get everyone to re-clone it in a clean directory afterwards.

+

But this isn’t reposurgeon’s fault; any surgery tool would have the same issue. In a way, that’s liberating; metadata that no surgery tool could possibly preserve even in principle is metadata that reposurgeon doesn’t have to worry about preserving.

+

There are a couple other fun things about reposurgeon. I wrote and documented the whole thing in eight days from a standing start, and if after seeing the manual page you think that’s a lot of work for eight days you’re not wrong. I was able to be that productive because (a) I didn’t pause to reinvent any wheels, and (b) stuck to a brutally simple, minimalist design.

+

An example of not reinventing wheels is how I support metadata editing. Look at the following session transcript; I’ve added some whitespace and comments (beginning with ;;) for clarity:

+
+esr@snark:~/WWW/reposurgeon$ reposurgeon
+reposurgeon% read
+reposurgeon: from git repo at '.'......(0.20 sec) done.
+
+;; That's the repo being grabbed
+
+reposurgeon% list 426
+   426 2010-11-01T00:47:57 Documentation improvement.                        
+
+;; That's a summary listing of event 426, a commit
+
+reposurgeon% write 426
+commit refs/heads/master
+mark :425
+author Eric S. Raymond  1288572477 -0400
+committer Eric S. Raymond  1288572477 -0400
+data 27
+Documentation improvement.
+from :423
+M 100755 :424 reposurgeon
+
+;; That's how it looks as a fragment of a git-import stream
+
+reposurgeon% mailbox_out 426
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+Event-Number: 426
+Author: Eric S. Raymond 
+Author-Date: Mon 01 Nov 2010 00:47:57 -0400
+Committer: Eric S. Raymond 
+Committer-Date: Mon 01 Nov 2010 00:47:57 -0400
+
+Documentation improvement.
+
+;; And that's how it looks when it's been mailboxized.
+
+

That ‘mailboxized’ version is is the form you get to edit. It contains all the metadata you can safely modify and nothing that you can’t, with the (unavoidable) exception of the event number. In fact, reposurgeon has an “edit” command you can use that grabs as much of the repository’s metadata as you want, launches an editor session, then de-mailboxizes what you leave when you exit your editor and applies the changed bits.

+

The point here is that I didn’t invent anything I didn’t have to. Reposurgeon isn’t some glossy idiotic GUI thing where you have to edit commit metadata via a form full of clicky-boxes; you get to use your own editor and deal with a data format as simple as an email message.

+

Reposurgeon is a command-line tool in the classic Unix style. (Yeah, I wrote a book about that once.) Part of the reason I wrote it that way is that it meant I got to use the Python cmd.Cmd class as my interpreter framework – once again, not inventing anything I didn’t have to. But I would have done it anyway, because command-line tools can be scripted. And that was a goal.

+

(This project is, by the way, reason #2317 why I heart Python. The ready-to-use convenience of the cmd.Cmd class, the email parser, and shlex were absolutely essential to getting this done without bogging me down in low-level implementation details.)

+

Back to scripting. Here’s a command I could have used to generate that transcript:

+
+reposurgeon 'verbose 1' read 'list 42' 'write 426' 'mailbox_out 426'
+
+

See that? Reposurgeon actually improves on the classic style by having no command-line options. None. Instead…the command-line arguments are interpreted exactly the same way user input typed to the prompt would be. There’s only one specially-interpreted command-line cookie; ‘-‘, which means “run the interactive interpreter’.

+

So, for example, I can say “reposurgeon read list -” to my shell prompt; reposurgeon will cheerfully read the repo in the current directory, list its commits and tags, then hand me a prompt. This is what I mean by brutally (and effectively) simple.

+

It’s not perfect, of course. I’ve only tested it on small repos with linear histories, which is why I’m calling the initial release 0.1; it needs to be torture-tested using large repos with tricky topologies, and it needs to be tested on things that aren’t git. There are some operations I have planned but haven’t implemented yet, like doing a topological cut of a repo into two repos that keeps the rest of the branch structure intact.

+

But it’s a good start. It’s already quite useful for my original goal, cleaning up cruft from repo conversions. The core classes are solid. The expression language works. The code is properly factored. It should make a good platform for implementing more complex surgical operations like history merges.

+

Best of all, every time I add a capability to the tool, it will support every single VCS, now and in the future, that speaks the import-stream format. And the fact that this is even conceivable is a pretty good reason not to pine for the old days.

+

UPDATE: Thanks to Russ Nelson’s suggestion, the project now travels under the sign of the blue sturgeon. Heh.

diff --git a/20101109220503.blog b/20101109220503.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..07da1c9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20101109220503.blog @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +Lessons learned from reposurgeon +

OK, I’m officially coming out of my cave now, after what amounted to a two-week coding orgy. I’ve shipped reposurgeon 0.5; the code looks and feels pretty solid, the documentation is written, the test suite is in place, and I’ve got working repo-rebuild support for two systems, one of which is not git.

+

The rest is cleanup and polishing. Likely the next release or the one after will be 1.0. It’s time for an after-action report. As usual, I learned a few things from this project. Some are worth sharing.

+

+

The basic concept was to edit repositories by (1) serializing them to git-import streams with export tools, (2) deserializing that representation into a bunch of Python objects in the front end of reposurgeon, (3) hacking the objects, (4) serializing them to a modified git-import stream with the back end of reposurgeon, and (5) feeding that to importers to recreate a repository.

+

Did it work? Oh, yes, indeed it did. By decoupling reposurgeon from the internals of any particular VCS I was able to write a program that, for its power and range, is ridiculously short and simple. 2665 lines of Python can perform complex editing operations on git and bzr, and will add more VCSes to its range as fast as they grow importers. (Next one will almost certainly be hg; its exporter works, but its importer is still somewhat flaky.)

+

In fact I exceeded my planned feature-list – found myself implementing a couple of extra operations (topological cut and commit split), simply because the representation-as-Python-objects was so easy to work with that it suggested possibilities.

+

Another thumping success was the interface pattern – a line-oriented interpreter with the property that command-line arguments are simply treated as lines to be passed to it, with one magic cookie “-” meaning “go into interactive mode and take commands until EOF”. This proved extremely flexible and easy to script, especially after I write the “script” command (execute command lines from a named file).

+

With this interface in place, adding stuff to the regression-test suite was almost absurdly easy. Which meant that I wrote a lot of tests. Which is good!

+

What’s the biggest drawback? Speed, or rather lack of it. On large repos, waiting for that repo read to finish is going to take a while. Can’t be helped, really; first, the exporter has to serialize the repo, then reposurgeon has to read and digest that whole input stream. I profiled, and as is normal with code like this it spends most of its time either on disk I/O or in the string library. There just aren’t any well-defined optimization targets sticking up to be flattened.

+

The performance issue raises an obvious question: was Python a mistake here? I love the language, but there is no denying that it is a high-overhead, poor-performing language even relative to others in it class, let alone relative to a compiled language like C.

+

On the other hand…no way this would have been a 16-day project in C. I’d have been lucky to get it done in sixteen weeks in C, probably with 14 of them spent chasing resource-management bugs and a grievously high maintenance burden down the road. Python I can fire and, more or less, forget – no core-dump heisenbugs for me, baby.

+

You pays your money and you takes your choice. I think Python was right here – heck, if I’d had to do in C I might not have been brave enough to try it at all, and my other scripting languages are now rusty enough that I would have lost a lot of project time to relearning them. But a slowish language is a relatively easy tradeoff here because this is not a program I expect to be in daily production use by anyone; it’s a coping mechanism for unusual situations.

+

Jay Maynard happened to be staying at my place during the first frenzied week of hacking. He actually argued semi-seriously that it’s a good thing reposurgeon is slow, as repo surgery is such a fraught and potentially shady proposition that it should be difficult and give you plenty of time to reflect. Less chance of fingers getting ahead of brain that way, maybe.

+

Most fun part of the project? That’s a toss-up, I think. One candidate was the graph-coloring algorithm I wrote to check whether breaking a given parent/child link would actually accomplish a topological cut of the commit graph. Another candidate is the bit of reduction algebra that I wrote to simplify sequences of file operations after a commit deletion. Both held challenges pleasing to my ex-mathematicianly self.

+

The least fun part was being dependent on flaky import-export tools. And I found out that, even though it’s the first non-git system I have support for in reposurgeon, I don’t like bzr. I don’t like it at all.

+

In your bog-standard generic DVCS – of which git and hg are the two leading examples – the unit of work (the thing that’s passed around when you clone and push and pull) is an entire repository that can contain multiple branches and merges and looks like a general DAG (directed acyclic graph). Sync operations between repositories are merge operations aimed at coming up with a reconciled history DAG that both sides of the merge can agree on.

+

(Yes, I love thinking about this stuff. Shows, doesn’t it?)

+

bzr has a conceptual problem. It can’t decide whether it wants its unit of work to be a repo or a branch. The way it wants you to work is to create a branch which is copied from and tied back to a branch in a remote repo. Your branch isn’t the entire project history, just one strictly linear segment of it that you occasionally push and merge to other peoples’ branches (or collections of branches).

+

Maybe this model has virtues I’m oblivious to, but it seems both restrictive and overcomplicated to me. Here’s where it bites reposurgeon: the bzr exporter can only export branches, but the importer creates an (implicitly multi-branch) repo with your branch living in a subdirectory named ‘trunk’.

+

It seems deeply wrong to me that the import and export operations aren’t lossless inversions of each other as they are in git (well, except for cryptosigned tags) and will be in hg when it gets its importing act together. I’m now trying to persuade the relevant bzr dev that they’ve missed the point of import streams and should be exporting entire repo graphs rather than just branches. We’ll see how that goes.

+

Late nights, monomaniacal concentration, and code code code. Ahhh. Not the life for everyone, but it suits me fine.

diff --git a/20101116144753.blog b/20101116144753.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..607693e --- /dev/null +++ b/20101116144753.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +After the spamraping, there has been some loss +

This blog was badly raped by a spambot on Saturday. Recovery from the problem required restoring from a backup made early that morning. Lost in the restore were two posts and about a dozen comments.

+

It is possible I may be able to rescue some content by looking directly at an SQL dump, but I can’t guarantee anything. Apologies to anyone who was inconvenienced.

diff --git a/20101116193454.blog b/20101116193454.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e87d5cc --- /dev/null +++ b/20101116193454.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +The Rape of the Blog +

(Part of this is a repost. The problem it described have been solved, at least until someone finds the next hole in WordPress. I have restored it to keep the record complete.)

+

Sometime late Sunday night or Monday, I wrote:

+

+My blog is being raped by a spambot. I first noticed about a half an hour ago that some older posts had become inaccessible through search. Then I actually accessed an old post (“Women With Guns”) twice, a few mnutes apart, and saw that the 8 comments there originally had been replaced by one spam comment.

+

What’s probably happeniing is some sort of SQL attack on the database behind the blog engine.

+

I don’t recommend commenting until after we can close the hole and restore from a backup. +

+

My rm -fr blunder on Friday proved to be but the entr’acte of a four-day descent into system-administration hell, from which I shall not even yet say I am delivered lest the dread god Finagle and his mad prophet Murphy laugh at my presumption and turn their awful gaze upon me. The aftermath of the spambot rape was actually mere a divertimento, playing as several different unrelated hardware and software snafus delivered a finely orchestrated attack upon my sanity.

+

Did I say merely my sanity? The consequences actually drew blood, which has done a pretty good job of soaking through the bandage over the laceration on my thumb. I have learned several different lessons which are unlikely to grow dim or doubtful.

+

1. Do not trust KVM splitters. They are flaky and can interfere with your diagnostic process, especially if you are having boot-time problems.

+

2. Ubuntu 10.10 is fucked up. I mean really fucked up, as in I have seen it hang during install on four different machines in the last 24 hours (and that was trying two different media). I had to drop back to 10.04 to get anywhere.

+

3. Ancient optical drives are an insidious horror. They can cause installations to fail in un-obvious ways. I replaced three today. It helped, but didn’t help enough by itself.

+

And most generally…if you are you one of those people, like me, who tends to never throws away superannuated hardware until it fails catastrophically, recycling old drives and cases and cables through multiple motherboard upgrades…stop now. You’ll feel virtuous and thrifty right up until the day you have a system emergency that snowballs into a major nightmare because some of your fallback hardware is marginal-to-the-point-of-near collapse and more of it is obsolete.

+

(Memo to self: Both PS/2 trackballs get replaced with USB devices as soon as I can get to MicroCenter. Who knew a brand-new motherboard would refuse to see them on the port?)

+

I’ve learned my lesson. I bought my way out of this disaster by paying $400 for a shiny new mailserver/webhost/DMZ machine. The machine it’s replacing is going to the recyclers. No parts are going to get saved to be built into Frankenboxes this time.

+

Now I gotta go wrestle with more consequences. My mail isn’t back up yet. The new machine needs configured.

diff --git a/20101116195329.blog b/20101116195329.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9a25405 --- /dev/null +++ b/20101116195329.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +INTERCAL justifies its existence +

(This is a repost. The original went of on 2010-11-14, a few hours before the spambot rape.)

+

Last night I made a classic n00b mistake. I was in a rush to get a test finished because my wife had just gotten home and it was time for us to haul off for the weekly Friday night with the regulars at our friendly local game store. I typed the rm -fr * to clear a scratch directory in the wrong window.

+

“Huh…” I thought, “that’s taking longer than it should have…” then realized with horror that it was clobbering my home directory and hastily interrupted it. Fortunately, I had a full backup on my laptop. Unfortunately, the full backup was ten days old; I stood to lose a lot of recent email and work.

+

Instead of gaming, I spent the next couple of hours recovering from this. I pulled the backup onto a scratch directory on my main machine, made file lists of the damaged $HOME and the backup with find(1), diffed them, and braced myself to discover how much I had irretrievably lost.

+

Nothing, as it turns out. I interrupted the rm -fr as it was still chewing through the alphabetically low directories under $HOME. The big one was dead.projects, my archival graveyard of superannuated stuff. When I killed it, it was busily munching on the huge directory full of tarballs and archives that I pulled together during the great INTERCAL Reconstruction Massacree.

+

Yes, that’s right. INTERCAL saved my butt, preoccupying the grim reaper rm just long enough…

+

In the end, no harm done except Cathy and I didn’t get our weekly gaming debauch – I urged her to go without me but she went all wifely and supportive and stuff.

+

Lessons: Make backups early and often. And instead of throwing old code away, archive it where rm -fr will hit it first – because you never know, someday it might interpose its body between you and the deadliest typo.

diff --git a/20101116205022.blog b/20101116205022.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5fa849a --- /dev/null +++ b/20101116205022.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Three cheers for Daniel Radcliffe, geek +

When the photographer from People magazine showed up to do a spread on me in 1996 (yes, 1996 – pre-open-source, it’s from my first 15 minutes of fame as a lexicographer), he taught me a useful term – “face people”. Face people are people who are famous for being famous, the vacant icons of celebrity narcissism who throng the pages of magazines like, well, People. The photographer observed that he found dealing with someone who is not a face person refreshing.

+

In a similar way, I always find it heartening when I discover someone who by position ought to be a mere face person but is in fact one of us. And by ‘us’, I mean a geek. Er. Reads science fiction, likes computers, enjoys challenging games, is generally into bright-person stuff. This is especially nice on the rare occasions when the putative face person has made a show-biz reputation acting like a bright geeky sort.

+

And today I learned that Daniel Radcliffe, the kid who played Harry Potter, went on British TV, described Tom Lehrer as the cleverest and funniest man of the 20th century and his hero, and then sang The Elements. Badly, but with feeling..

+

Now I’m not going to say that I know Radcliffe has the whole constellation of geek traits. But after seeing that YouTube clip, I know which way to bet.

diff --git a/20101117115742.blog b/20101117115742.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f8abd6f --- /dev/null +++ b/20101117115742.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Why spamrape happens +

One of my regulars writes, re the recent spam-raping of the blog

+

>I’m still trying to figure out what the attack was. All the comments were replaced by spam?

+

No. What happened was that on Sunday night I caught a bot in the act of replacing real comments with spam, oldest first. It was working its way forward in time, apparently limited by the spped at which the PHP in WordPress could respond. It was very lucky that I caught it as soon as I did; I happened to need to look at a post from 2002 twice within minutes and saw the comments had changed.

+

I think the purpose of replacing oldest comments first was to delay or prevent me from noticing what had happened until the whole blog was corrupted. And corrupting the blog wasn’t the actual aim, anyway; what they were actually trying to do was boost the Google ratings of various shady marketing and scam sites by stuffing a fairly high-ranked blog with links to them.

diff --git a/20101117141552.blog b/20101117141552.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a5adaeb --- /dev/null +++ b/20101117141552.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Bleg for info – Linux backup tools and services +

One of the comments that got lost in the recent database restore was a pointer to a backup program I can’t offhand remember the name of. I remember that it’s a command-line tool written in Perl (alas) and meant to be done by a cron job; what it does underneath is rsync with hardlinks to the remote target, so you get a Time-Machine-like effect for not much beyond the space requirement of the initial dump. Can someone remind me what this is. please?

+

Also, I’m in the market for a dropbox-like service that I can rsync to and from, for off-site backup. Any suggestions?

+

UPDATE: rsnapshot is what I was trying to remember. A very elegant little tool, thoughtfully written and handy. I may go with rsync.net for offsite backup.

diff --git a/20101118153708.blog b/20101118153708.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e857647 --- /dev/null +++ b/20101118153708.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +I join the not-flying list +

Count me with those who will not be flying until the TSA procedures requiring either a full-body X-ray scan or a grope are rescinded. This is meaningless security theater taken to a Kafkaesque extreme, and I won’t consent to it even passively. When the airlines feel enough pain from refuseniks, they’ll push back faster than we can.

+

+

The whole gallimaufry of escalating “security” restrictions since 9/11 has been a bad joke out of Monty Python parody, achieving nothing; tiger-team tests reveal that the ridiculous ease with which weapons and bombs can be slipped through has changed not one bit.

+

The Israelis, targeted by terrorists more ferociously than any country on earth, have never had a single hijacking or bombing and rightly laugh at our “security”. It’s all Kabuki theater, a ritual intended to pantomime seriousness in the absence of any actual seriousness. If we actually cared about security we’d arm the air crew, and if we really cared we’d arm the passengers.

+

It was always bound to come to this. Once “security” was based on the premise that only planes full of disarmed sheep are safe, the full-body scanners and genital-groping were as inevitable as night following day – and, in the future, so will be body-cavity searches. But perhaps scanning and groping will prove to have been the reductio ad absurdum of that strategy; there are signs that the revolt against it might become serious enough to inflict damage on revenue that the airlines can’t tolerate.

+

Causing enough pain to the airlines that the TSA buckles is only the first step, though. It’s not just the regulations that are broken, it’s the pervasive sick-think behind them. I will know that illness has been cured only when I am not only permitted but encouraged to wear my personal weapons onto an airplane.

diff --git a/20101123000154.blog b/20101123000154.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f815b88 --- /dev/null +++ b/20101123000154.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +First impressions of the G-2 +

As a very happy user of the G-1 back when it was the only Android phone available, I was keenly looking forward to what HTC and T-Mobile would do for an encore in the G-2. Especially when T-Mobile promised it would run stock Android with no skin and no unremovable crapware. I was seriously planning a first-day upgrade when the G-2 came out, just to get the higher data speeds.

+

Great was my disappointment when they shipped a crippled phone. T-Mobile kept the promise not to add crapware, but they disabled tethering and hotspot – two absolute must-haves for me. By the time these features were un-disabled in a firmware update, I’d discarded my plans to upgrade. The Nexus One is still a very nice phone and a pleasure to use.

+

But, quite by accident, I now have a G-2 for evaluation. No, T-Mobile didn’t send me one; I ran into a friend at the Philadelphia Science Fiction convention who’s replaced his G-2 with an Android tablet and wants to sell the former. So he lent it it to me to try for a while; the theory is, if I like it after a couple of weeks, I’ll give him fair market minus 15% for depreciation and we’ll both be happy.

+

The surprise is that, rather to my own bemusement, I’m leaning towards giving it back.

+

+

Oh, it’s chock-full of Android goodness. And the higher-speed browsing on the HSDPA network is nice. But I find that one feature I was really looking forward in the G-2 isn’t such a win after all, and that a misfeature I didn’t think would be a big deal is bothering me more than I expected.

+

When I was using my G-1, the thing that griped me most about it was the crappy physical keyboard. Still, my biggest issue in moving to the Nexus One was the screen-keyboard-only design. One of the things I was most looking forward to about the G-2 was having a physical keyboard again, and with good fortune a better one.

+

Now I’ve got it…and I’m barely using it at all. I got used to tapping the screen on the Nexus, and seldom find that I enter enough text to make the delay while I rig out the G-2 keyboard worth incurring.

+

What that keyboard does do is exacerbate the G-2’s size and weight problem. It’s about an ounce heavier and half-again as thick as the Nexus, and quite to my surprise I find this makes a significant ergonomic difference. The Nexus feels slim, elegant, and is a good fit for my hand; the G-2 feels a bit clunky and oversized and brick-like.

+

It’s actually an index of progress that I notice these differences. Both phones run stock Android 2.2, so they’re not differentiated much at the software level and the software ergonomics is good enough for anyone not a fully-inducted fanatic of the Apple cult. This means that small differences in the hardware platform matter more.

+

Jury’s still out on whether I’ll keep the G-2 – I’m leaning against, but more familiarity could change my mind. I’ll post reports here.

diff --git a/20101124182405.blog b/20101124182405.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9a4ed0b --- /dev/null +++ b/20101124182405.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +It’s good to be ubiquitous +

So, while trying to discover the minor version of the Android 2.2 running on my G-2, I touched the tab labeled “Open source licenses”. Scrolled down, and “Eric S. Raymond” popped out at me.

+

+

Seems the phone uses libpng 1.2.6., of which I am a contributing author.

+

So of course I looked on my Nexus One. If libpng is there the license is buried pretty deep – but it uses libgif, and my name’s on that for even better reasons.

+

Ah, there’s libpng, about 25% of the way through a huge pile of licenses. Suggests libgif is on the G-2 as well, deeper than I’ve looked in that pile, though it’s a bit of a puzzle why the licenses are in different orders.

+

This is my happy for the day. Android phones are about the only smartphones I thought didn’t carry those – I assumed they’d been replaced by some blob of Java.

+

It’s good to be ubiquitous. And your little dog Toto basement router, too!

diff --git a/20101125021029.blog b/20101125021029.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..21e6111 --- /dev/null +++ b/20101125021029.blog @@ -0,0 +1,90 @@ +If RCS can stand it, why can’t your system? +

I’ve written software for a lot of different reasons besides pure utility in the past. Sometimes I’ve been making an aesthetic statement, sometimes I’ve hacked to perpetuate a tribal in-joke, and at least once I have written a substantial piece of code exactly because the domain experts solemnly swore that job was impossible to automate (wrong, bwahahaha).

+

Here’s a new one. Today I released a program that is ugly and only marginally useful, but specifically designed to shame other hackers into doing the right thing.

+

+

Those of you who have been following the saga of reposurgeon on this blog will be aware that it relies on the rise of git fast-import streams as a universal history-interchange format for VCSes (version-control systems).

+

Alas, support for this is still spotty. On git, where the format was invented, it’s effectively perfect. Elsewhere, bzr comes closest to getting it right with official import and export plugins but a weird asymmetry between export and import. Mercurial has a fairly solid third-party exporter, but its third-party importer is crap. Elsewhere the situation is worse; Subversion is typical in that it has a proof-of-concept third-party exporter that loses some metadata, and no importer.

+

And this is ridiculous, actually. It’s already generally understood that writing exporters to the stream format is dead easy – the problem there seems political, in that VCS devteams are perhaps a bit reluctant to support tools that make migration off their systems easier. But having written one myself for reposurgeon, I know that a high-quality importer (which encourages migration towards your VCS) is not all that difficult either. Thus, there’s no excuse, either technical or political, for any self-respecting VCS not to have an importer.

+

I decided to prove this point with code. So I dusted off the oldest, cruftiest version-control system still in anything resembling general use – Walter Tichy’s Revision Control System (RCS). And I wrote a lossless importer for it. Took me less than a week, mostly repurposing code I’d written for reposurgeon. The hardest part was mapping import-stream branches to RCS’s screwy branch-numbering system.

+

To appreciate how silly this was on any practical level, you need to know that RCS doesn’t have changesets (the ability to associate the same comment and metadata with a change to multiple files). I cheat by embedding changeset-oriented data as RFC822 headers in RCS comment fields. An exporter could be written to invert this and completely recover the contents of the import stream, and I’ve been communicating with the author of rcs-fast-export.rb; it may actually do this soon.

+

There is one circumstance under which rcs-fast-import might be useful; if you wanted to break a project repo into multiple pieces, blowing it apart into constituent RCS files and re-exporting separately from the cliques might be a way to do it. But mainly I wrote this as a proof of principle. If crufty old RCS can bear the semantic weight of an import stream, there is simply no excuse left for VCSes that claim to be modern production-quality tools to be behindhand on this. None.

+

At this point there is an inevitable question burning in the minds of those of you who are moderately clued in about ancient VCSes. And that is: “What about SCCS?”

+

Ah, yes. The only VCS even cruftier and more ancient than RCS. Those of you really clued in about ancient version-control systems will have guessed the answer; they’re so similar that making rcs-fast-import speak SCCS if anyone ever wants that would be pretty trivial (in particular they have the same semantics of branching, which is the hard part). Actually the code is already factored to support this; out of 841 lines only 36 are the plugin class that exercises the RCS command set, and an SCCS plugin wouldn’t be more than a few lines longer.

+

But I targeted RCS partly because it’s still in actual use; some wiki engines employ it as a page-versioning backend because it’s fast, lightweight, and they neither want nor need changesets. In truth, if you have a directory full of documents each one of which you want to treat as an atomic unit, RCS still has utility (I use it that way). SCCS, on the other hand, survives if at all in a handful of creakingly ancient legacy installations.

+

(What made the difference? RCS was open-source from the get-go. SCCS wasn’t. We all know how that dance goes.)

+

Yes, 841 lines. 574 of them, 65%, stripped out of reposurgeon. Less than a week of work, crammed in around corners while I was busy with other things. It’s not complicated or tricky code. The trick is in having the insight that it’s possible. And a living rebuke to every modern VCS that hasn’t gotten its fast-import act this together yet.

+

One entertaining side-effect of this project is that I figured out, in detail, how CVS could have been written to not suck.

+

Those of you into VCS archeology will know that CVS was a layer over a RCS file store, a layer that tried to provide changesets. It was notoriously failure-prone in some important corner cases. This is what eventually motivated the development of Subversion by a group of former CVS maintainers.

+

Well…here I am, writing rcs-fast-import to make RCS hold the data for losslessly reconstructing import-stream changesets…and at some point I found myself doing a double-take because I had realized I had solved CVS’s problems. Here’s how I explained it to Giuseppe Bilotta, the author of rcs-fast-export:

+

+Incidentally, a side effect of writing the importer was that I figured
+out how CVS should have been written so it wouldn’t have sucked :-) It
+had a tendency to break horribly near deletes, renames and copies;
+this is because the naive way to implement these (which they used)
+involved deleting, copying, and renaming RCS master files.

+

In fact, I figured out last night. while building my importer so it
+would round-trip, that you can have reliable behavior from changesets
+layered over RCS only if you *never delete a master*, not even to
+rename it. I know what the right other rules are, but it’s nearly
+twenty years too late for that to matter.

+

Sigh. If I had looked at this problem in 1985 I could have saved
+the world a lot of grief. +

+

Giuseppe said:

+

+> I’m very curious to hear about your solution about tracking these
+> operations. I mean, git doesn’t track them because it only cares about
+> contents and trees, but how would you do that in a file-based vcs? +

+

Here’s how I explained it:

+

+On delete, don’t delete the master. Enter a commit that’s an empty file
+and set the state to “Deleted”. (The second part isn’t strictly necessary,
+but will be handy if you need to do forensics because other parts of
+your repo metadata have been corrupted.)

+

On rename, don’t delete the master. Copy it to the new name, so the
+renamed file has the history from before the rename, but also *leave
+that history in the original*. Give the original a new empty commit
+as you did for delete, with a state of ‘Renamed’. If your RCS has
+a properties extension, give that commit a rename-target property
+naming what it was renamed to. Give the same commit on the master copy a renamed-from property referencing the source.

+

On copy, check out the file to be copied and start a new master with
+no history. If your RCS has a properties extension, give that commit
+a copied-target property naming what it was renamed to, and give the
+initial commit of the copy a copied-from property referencing the
+source.

+

On every commit, write a record to a journal file that looks like a
+git-fast-import commit record, except that the <ref> parts are RCS
+revision numbers.

+

You’re done. It may take you a bit to think through all the
+retrieval cases, but they’re all covered by one indirection through
+the journal file.

+

Don’t like the journal file? No problem, you just write a
+sequence-numbered tag to all files for each commit. This would be
+slower, though.

+

There are optimizations possible. Strictly speaking, if you have
+an intact chain of rename properties you can get away with not
+copying history to the target of a rename.

+

The key point is that once a revision has been appended to a specific
+master, you *never delete it*. Ever. That simple rule and some pointer
+chasing gives you a revision store that is robust in the presence of D,
+R, and C operations. Nothing else does.

+

Not by coincidence, modern DVCSes use the same strategy. +

+

He did raise one interesting point:

+

+> Considering the debates still going on the “proper” way to handle
+> renames and copies, I’m not sure it would have been accepted ;-) +

+

But it turns out that has an answer, too:

+

+The above scheme gives you git-like semantics. For bzr-like semantics,
+add one more wrinkle; a unique identity cookie assigned at master-creation
+time that follows it through renames. Your storage management doesn’t
+care about this cookie; only the merge algorithm cares.

+

All this is so simple [and actually implemented in rcs-fast-import] that
+I’m now quite surprised the CVS people got it wrong. I could ship a
+daemon that implemented these rules in a week, and could have done
+so in 1985 if I’d known it was important. +

+

Sigh…sometimes the hardest part is knowing what to spend your thinking time on. I console myself with the thought that, after all, I have gotten this right some times that it mattered.

diff --git a/20101129015511.blog b/20101129015511.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6596314 --- /dev/null +++ b/20101129015511.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +The smartphone wars: Symbian Foundation folds its hand +

Some drastic change of direction is about to take place in Nokia’s smartphone strategy. We can predict this because Nokia has shut down the Symbian Foundation. What we can’t tell yet is what direction they’ll jump, and there are at least four somewhat plausible scenarios. I’m going to list them in what I think are roughly decreasing order of probability and then explain my reasoning.

+

+

Case Android: Nokia takes up Android.

+

Case MeeGo: Nokia implements MeeGo across its whole product line.

+

Case Windows: The Microsoft alumnus now running the company brings in Windows Phone 7.

+

Case Unsymbian: Nokia tries to build a next-generation smartphone OS in-house based on the closed codebase it acquired along with Symbian, Inc..

+

Given that HP is holding WebOS pretty close to its chest and Blackberry actively doesn’t want any other hardware vendor running its software stack, I think that pretty much exhausts the possibilities. Now let’s try to figure odds.

+

Case Unsymbian seems the least likely to me on time-to-market grounds. We’d be looking at a multi-year development effort, and Nokia hasn’t got time for that with Android breathing down its neck. People who think this case is even possible are forgetting the reason Nokia booted up the Symbian foundation in the first place – they did a cost analysis and concluded they couldn’t afford the engineering hours needed to port Symbian to all the hardware they needed to support. (I had this straight from a Symbian executive, face-to-face, around 2002.)

+

Nokia’s management has been veering from blunder to blunder recently, so it’s just possible they’ve forgotten what they once understood about the economics. But the development-cost problem hemming in their strategic choices has only become crueller in the last eight years as product cycles have shortened. If they bet the company on Case Unsymbian, what you’ll see is mighty thrashing for a year or two followed by collapse.

+

Case Windows is a currently popular conspiracy theory. According to this one, ex-Microsoftie Stephen Elop will push the company he now runs into adopting Windows Phone 7, offering Nokia a plausible way out of its software problem and handing his true dark masters at Microsoft a huge chunk of market share into the bargain.

+

The trouble with this theory is that it wouldn’t actually solve any business problem at all – not for Nokia, anyway. WP7 would incur the same porting costs as Unsymbian, with the added negative that at the end of the day Microsoft and not Symbian would control the codebase. I can’t imagine Nokia’s big shareholders tolerating this for a Helsinki minute — not when early indications are that Microsoft WP7 will make only about about 2% market share this season. Once again, time is the problem; Android is eating Nokia’s lunch so fast that they can’t afford to wait long enough for WP7 to become an actual consumer draw, assuming it ever does.

+

But every report I’ve seen says WP7 stinks like a dead mackerel; there’s simply nothing there that can compete with Android. If Elop somehow succeeds in ramming it into Nokia on a wish and a promise, I expect that both he and WP7 will be outta there within a year. (But that would probably be long enough to leave Nokia circling the drain anyway.)

+

Case MeeGo actually seems the most plausible to me right now, under the assumption that Nokia management hasn’t gone utterly brain-dead. They need a state-of the art smartphone OS, they need to be able to co-opt more developers and porting engineers than they can afford to hire, and they want something that’s not Android in order to maintain some product differentiation. Process of elimination…and after all, MeeGo is partly descended from the Nokia Maemo codebase.

+

Notwithstanding the above argument, I think Case Android is still pretty likely. As I’ve pointed out a couple of times in a couple of ways, time-to-market pressure has to be the most serious one Nokia is feeling. At present rates of Android uptake worldwide, Nokia certainly doesn’t have a year to assemble a viable alternative; they probably don’t have six months, and may not have even three.

+

Then there’s this: Case MeeGo involves more NRE than Case Android would; the MeeGo codebase is simply not as mature. Even if Nokia decides it can afford the longer time to market, that would be handing HTC and the other Taiwanese handset makers a cost advantage that would prove decisive. Nokia’s past as a manufacturer emphasizing volume and low cost is a problem here; the Taiwanese armed with Android can probably beat it at that game, and Nokia doesn’t really know how to play any other.

+

I’ll wrap up by observing that Nokia’s long-term prognosis seems poor to me under any of these scenarios, including Case Android. The business model that mode them #1 worldwide in the dumb-phone era has broken, and I do not see a plausible path for them back to the top of the heap. The handset future belongs to HTC and its shadowy kin and competitors on the Chinese mainland; in that future, Nokia is at best an also-ran with shrinking profit margins.

diff --git a/20101129211418.blog b/20101129211418.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d58487c --- /dev/null +++ b/20101129211418.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Other peoples’ money +

“The trouble with socialism,” Margaret Thatcher once famously said, “is that sooner or later you run out of other peoples’ money. This observation is the key to understanding the wave of government bankruptcies that has already begun to break over us.

+

+

The state of California was a leading indicator in the U.S., so broke that it has started issuing IOUs to its suppliers in lieu of cash. The state governments of Illinois, New York and New Jersey are in straits almost as dire. Before I checked, I thought 39 of 50 states were running deficits, but according to this visualization of 2010 estimates, 46 states are now in deficit. A massive selloff of U.S. municipal and state bonds is getting underway as investors run for the exits.

+

From overseas, we hear endlessly of the threat of sovereign default in Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain – the so-called PIIGS countries. The financially stronger EU countries (by which I mean, basically, Germany) have organized bailouts designed to give bond investors confidence that the PIIGS merely have a temporary cash-flow problem, but the markets aren’t buying it; the rush to unload Irish paper wasn’t even slowed down by the loan to Ireland. Analysts are now wondering if Belgium might be next.

+

What’s actually happening here is that bond investors are catching wise about the largest political truth of the post-Cold-War era: government is bankrupt. It’s not just individual governments that are headed for financial collapse, but the entire model of ever-expanding statism that began with Otto von Bismarck’s Prussian state-pension system in the late 1800s.

+

This bankruptcy was inevitable from the moment governments got on the treadmill of buying their legitimacy with entitlement spending. As I observed in Some Iron Laws of Political Economics, in any democracy political demand for income transfers, entitlements and subsidies always rises faster than the economy can generate increased wealth to supply them from; this is backed up by a recent study showing that each additional dollar of tax revenue collected in the United States has produced $1.17 in additional government spending.

+

Thus, raising taxes never helps. All it does is increase the system’s run rate towards collapse, and increase government appetites for borrowing to cover the ever-widening gap between revenues and political commitments. This is why EU governments are trying to bail out their weaker members – what they fear most is that they’ll lose the ability to paper over that gap using the bond markets, at which point the entire edifice of Eurosocialism will irretrievably crash.

+

American conservatives who want to blame pet villains like the public-employee unions for the insolvency wave in the U.S. are missing the forest for the trees. Those unions are doing nothing but rational minimaxing within a system where the incentives are broken at a much deeper level. And it’s no coincidence that the same problems are becoming acute simultaneously nearly worldwide, because the underlying problem transcends all details of any individual democracy’s history or particular political arrangements.

+

Between 1880 and 1943, beginning with Bismarck and ending with Roosevelt’s New Deal, the modern West abandoned the classical-liberal model of a minimal, night-watchman state. But the redistributionist monster that replaced it was unsustainable, and it’s now running out of other peoples’ money. We are living in the beginning of its end.

+

UPDATE: From the day after I wrote this Europe Debt Fears Hit More Secure Countries. Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin!

diff --git a/20101201214355.blog b/20101201214355.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..44d5b0d --- /dev/null +++ b/20101201214355.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Off with their header files! +

I released a new software tool today. The surprise about this one is that it turns out to be consistently more useful than I expected. And thereby hangs a tale.

+

+

The tool is deheader. What it does is find, and optionally remove, #include files that their C source file does not actually require to compile. It does this by the brutally simple method of repeatedly attempting to recompile each source with more #includes removed than on previous passes. There are some bits of cleverness about the order #includes are test-deleted in, and it avoids some cases likely to lead to false positives – notably, includes within the scope of #if/#endif. But, basically, it just brute-forces its way through.

+

The benefit of removing these unused includes is threefold. First, it reduces build time – sometimes by a lot, especially on C++ projects. Secondly, it may cut the runtime size of your binary modules. Third, by removing noise from #include lists it makes clearer what each module’s dependencies actually are.

+

The first surprise is that even on quite large projects this check doesn’t take forever. On modern hardware, single-module C compiles are very fast. I’ve learned from watching deheader runs on a couple of largish C projects that, out of total build time, the compiler consumes a smaller fraction – and the linker a quite a bit larger fraction – than I would have thought beforehand.

+

C++ is another story; due to templates, the average of compile times is greater and the variance in compile times is much larger – but the gains from removing unused headers are proportionately larger, too. Notwithstanding templates in the mix, complete deheader runs have (surprisingly) tolerable time to completion even on projects the size of Battle For Wesnoth.

+

The second surprise is that there a lot more unused includes out there than I expected. When I ran deheader on the gpsd sources this afternoon, I expected maybe a couple dozen hits. I got over 200. Running the first prototype on Battle For Wesnoth back in late 2008 turned up a preposterous pile of them, I think over a thousand.

+

Evidently programmers not only drop a lot of #includes in place by reflex, but are very poor at noticing when code refactoring has made them unnecessary. It’s a quiet error, relatively harmless, and we have other things to pay attention to.

+

I use a guillotine as the deheader project’s logo (due props to hacker/artist sirea, who released it under CC-by). Off with their header files!

+

If you maintain a C or C++ project, I recommend running this tool on it. I predict the amount of #include cruft you clear out will surprise you.

diff --git a/20101203171107.blog b/20101203171107.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..77f3ffc --- /dev/null +++ b/20101203171107.blog @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +Culture and certification +

I had an IRC chat with one of my semi-regular commenters a few nights ago in which she reported giving a talk on hacker culture that went extremely well.

+

+[00:12] <HedgeMage> It was one of those situations, though, where I felt *very* odd being treated like a subject-matter expert. I certainly don’t consider myself one in this case, though I guess it’s all relative, and as far as I could tell I knew more [abut hacker culture] than the audience.

+

[00:13] <HedgeMage> Sure, I knew more than those I was teaching, but it bothered me a bit that they seemed to think I was an expert when I clearly wasn’t.

+

[00:15] <esr> Been there, done that. The *really* weird stuff starts when you give descriptive reports of hacker culture that others begin to consider normative.

+

[00:15] <esr> If you’re not careful, you can unintentionally become a geek cred certification authority.

+

[00:15] <HedgeMage> I have an easy way to avoid that.

+

[00:15] <HedgeMage> I refer them to you :P

+

[00:16] <HedgeMage> So, no dying or I might end up there! +

+

This actually isn’t the first time I’ve been in a conversation like this one. And that brings on some thoughts about social authority among hackers and geeks and in other subcultures that seem worth developing.

+

+

There’s a school of sociologists that has studied information transfer within communities of scientists and developed language to describe how it works. An important primary term for these sociologists is “invisible college” – that is, a voluntary social network of cooperating peers who share information. This term is a deliberate nod to Robert Boyle’s contemporary description of an invisible college in the 1640s among early scientists who would later form the core of the Royal Society.

+

Another important term in this language is “gatekeeper”. That is a member of an invisible college who has the social authority to include people into the network and declare them peers. The key thing about gatekeepers is that nobody appoints them and they have no source of authority outside the network itself; they emerge from the way members of the college internally rate one anothers’ competence and dedication.

+

I have observed several invisible colleges and noted that membership in them is not a binary predicate but graded. There are peripheral members and central members; centrality of membership correlates (though not perfectly) with relative status within the college. There is another role, not identical but overlapping with gatekeeper, which manages status and centrality within the college. Even when the criteria for in-group status are objective (you get cited a lot by other scientists), good work doesn’t reliably translate into in-group status or centrality until one of these internal gatekeepers certifies it to the college.

+

So, in addition to gatekeepers, invisible colleges have certification authorities. There’s a third role as well; “elder”. An elder has the authority to say whether the behavior of members of the college is within the college’s accepted norms of behavior. To summarize: a gatekeeper answers the question “Who is a member?”, a certification authority answers the question “How do we evaluate in-group status?” and an elder answers the question “Was this behavior correct within the college’s norms?”

+

Of course these roles mingle at the edges. And I’ve gone beyond the sociological literature here, which to the best of my knowledge does not systematically distinguish among them. But the sociologists get something right: unless somebody has the social authority to confer status, you don’t have a college. What you have instead is a bunch of people who may earnestly be trying to form one, but who don’t know what the in-group rules should be or how to cooperate.

+

Now let’s step back a little and ask why this matters. Why do people form invisible colleges, and assign each other these roles, anyway? There are at least two possible accounts, both true and complementary of each other.

+

In one account, people form invisible colleges because they agree on a mission. An invisible college is a cooperative social machine for producing results desired by the participants. Without the normative roles of gatekeeper/certifier/elder, the machine doesn’t function – it dissolves or veers off track.

+

In another account, people form invisible colleges because they have a genetically wired-in drive to play social-status and identity games, a drive so powerful that they’ll create same even around essentially meaningless activities like (say) stamp collecting. People really want to be able to say, to themselves if to no one else, “I’m one of the best at X”, or “I represent an X that is bigger than myself.” For games that produce these results to run, somebody trusted has to keep score.

+

As I observed in a more specific context in Homesteading the Noosphere, the virtue of invisible colleges is that they merge these accounts. They harness the human drive to play status and identity games to achieve other-directed goals.

+

It is also instructive to note where invisible colleges do not form. Where mission and status criteria are rigorously objective, the apparatus of peer evaluation is not needed and does not form. A good example is athletics; if your criteria of mission success is as crisply measurable as “who can run the fastest mile”, the need for gatekeepers, (internal) certification authorities and elders basically vanishes. (In this case the certification authority would be any guy with a stopwatch, not necessarily or even usually part of the athlete’s peer network.)

+

Now we have all the apparatus required to understand the nuances of my conversation with HedgeMage. What she was reporting was something I first experienced in the early 1990s while working on the Jargon File. That is: hackers desperately want certification authorities (and elders, too; on the other hand, we’re pretty effective about distributing the “gatekeeper” role so it’s not a bottleneck). Hackers want certification authorities so badly that if you show the least aptitude for the job, they’ll suck you into it before you can say foo.

+

Noticing this made HedgeMage very nervous. Welcome to my world, HedgeMage! Scared the crap out of me, too, way back when. It would take a dullard or a blind egomaniac not to find the implied responsibility frightening. If you accept it, you’ve got people’s self-worth in your hands, to the extent they’ve invested their identity into being hackers. And, you’re suddenly responsible for the mission. It’s become your job to define it.

+

HedgeMage doesn’t want this. HedgeMage wants me to live forever so she doesn’t have to answer that call. HedgeMage has some understanding of the costs – which begin with, for example, being perpetually besieged by fanboys and haters. HedgeMage is wise.

+

But I think HedgeMage also suspects that if the time comes that she looks around and sees a leadership vacuum, she will step up. Some people cannot turn away from that call and still be themselves. I couldn’t. If I’m any judge of character, HedgeMage won’t be able to if it comes her turn. She’ll bitch and moan, but she’ll do it.

+

There’s nothing special about hackers in this respect. I’m sure this story plays out all the time in other invisible colleges, too. The issues have the particular spin they do for us because we’re somewhere in the middle of the objectivity-of-success scale along with scientists; more in need of peer evaluation than athletes, less so than fine artists. I think we’re also more instinctively distrustful of authority than most other subcultures with invisible-college organization, which creates a conflict between our need for certification authorities and our unwillingness to acknowledge that need and that role.

+

I’ll finish with warning and encouragement.

+

I think I have a large enough reader-base to make something statistically certain. One or more of you, reading this, will become a hacker cred certification authority in the future. At least one of you, reading this, will have to face the fear HedgeMage and I have faced – that we’re not worthy, that we’d fuck up, that we’d be consumed by our own egos, or even that we’d make some monstrous well-meaning error of judgment and our college would follow us into a crash.

+

The encouragement I have is: this is normal. File under expected challenges of being human. You get used to it. You adapt. It stops being so frightening after a while – though, if you ever stop feeling the weight of responsibility, get the hell out because you’ll have become dangerously unmoored.

+

The thing that carries me through is a sort of bloody-minded determination. Having been shoved into the job of certification authority by all that need and then accepted it, I’ll be damned if I give it less than my best. It can be done right. Mistakes (and I’ve made my share) aren’t instantly fatal to your college. You can learn on the job, and you will get better at it with practice. (It will help if you can keep firm hold of a sense of humor.)

+

Truly, the rewards are worth playing for. Not so much the obvious primate-social-status thing; that may be on instinct level what drives the social engine, but as I’ve written before it stops being important once you reach a certain level. The true gain is elsewhere. The fool who claimed that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world should have referred to technologists instead; being a certification authority in the right kind of invisible college is power to shape the future in subtle but large ways.

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Somebody has to do that. Maybe, just maybe, it will be you.

diff --git a/20101204231950.blog b/20101204231950.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..56727af --- /dev/null +++ b/20101204231950.blog @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +The uses of tribal cohesion +

One of my regulars has expressed mildly disgruntlement about the degree to which a feeling of mutual tribal solidarity has taken hold among hackers, and become an increasingly defining characteristic of them. He finds it creepy – he didn’t use the phrase “disquieting groupthink”, but I’m pretty sure he was thinking something like it.

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“You are, I regret to say, partly a victim of my social engineering…” I said to him, and promised to explain that. Yes, what he’s reacting against is in significant part my doing, and I did it for specific reasons, and it had the results I intended. This does not mean all the consequences were unmitigatedly good – sociocultural engineering, like other kinds, is a matter of tradeoffs under constraint. Explanation in more detail follows.

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When I began working on the Jargon File in 1990, the hacker culture was probably no more than 1% of its current size – the population explosions that would follow from Linux and the mainstreaming of open source had yet to occur.

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But as importantly, the culture was far more diffuse and less coherent. Partly this was because the Internet was still an expensive laboratory artifact with relatively few nodes, and access to those quite difficult unless you happened to have some connection to a handful of university laboratories.

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But there was another factor, a subtler and more psychological one. Hackers of that day identified less with the hacker culture in general and more with specific projects or institutions – languages like Perl, operating-system communities like those around Unix or ITS, various university labs, the Free Software Foundation, and so forth. It’s not that something more like today’s tribal solidarity was completely nonexistent, but it tended to matter only among a small hard core of the most senior people in the culture. The term ‘hacker’ itself was not then in nearly as wide use among the sort of people who would (correctly) apply it to each other today.

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By 1990-1991 I had decided this was a bug that needed to be fixed. My reasons were quite specific: crypto-export regulations, the proposals which culminated in the Clipper chip of 1993-1996, and various now-forgotten legislative rumblings which were eventually to culminate in the Communications Decency Act of 1996. From 1987 onward I had been aware of gradually increasing political pressures in the direction of locking down software and networks. Serious threats to liberty were, if not yet directly present, at least looming on the horizon.

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The problem I saw was that the one group of people with the most to lose and the best basis of knowledge from which to push back didn’t have enough group cohesiveness to cooperate on that project. The EFF and the Free Software Foundation already existed (the EFF just barely, having been formed in 1990), but were sort of floating in midair without much of a grass-roots culture to back them up.

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And…I suspected I had a potential handle on these problems! When I was giving interviews around the publication of the first edition of the New Hacker’s Dictionary, I was quite explicit about my political motives. I said that I thought the legislative climate was growing dangerous and that the public image around the term ‘hacker’ needed to be fixed, and that the book was in part an attempt to attract and amuse lots of non-hackers so we’d have allies outside our tiny group of technologists. (And that worked, by the way, especially among journalists and other wordsmiths.)

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What I didn’t talk about so much – though it was hardly hidden from anyone paying attention to what I was doing and saying – was that I was also consciously attempting to re-engineer the hacker culture itself in the specific direction of (a) greater group cohesiveness, and (b) greater ability to infect others with its primary memes. Because that was what I thought it needed to become a political interest group with the ability to head off some of the crap I saw coming.

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The Jargon File was a powerful instrument towards this end. By propagating a shared language and a quasi-mythologized history of the culture it created a sort of attractive memetic template to which people could choose to assimilate themselves. Each individual act of self-identification – each moment of “Cool! I want to be a hacker!” – or, just as commonly, “Huh. Guess I’m a hacker. Who knew?” – was an increment of social power for the culture I was trying to strengthen.

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Entertainingly, I had no inkling at all that I would come to be perceived as a leader of that culture. That possibility never even occurred to me until I was asked to referree at the Free Software Conference in 1996. No. I was doing what I thought needed to be done because the entire context within which I wanted to work and play seemed threatened. For exactly the same reason, I stepped up and qualified to become an individual amicus curia in the Supreme Court fight against the CDA in 1996.

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Nor did I did at that time have any clue that I would be committing far more visible acts of memetic engineering after 1997. But the “open source” thing was perfectly continuous with my earlier efforts. Here, finally, was the missing piece – the locus of identification powerful enough to pull together the entire culture and overshadow older loyalties to individual subtribes almost completely (well, bar a handful in the FSF’s frothing-fundamentalist wing, but that was an acceptable tradeoff).

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Today, we live in a world where the Clipper chip is dead, the crypto-export restrictions likewise, and the CDA not only gone but that whole line of thinking a discredited laughingstock. Did the changes I engineered contribute significantly to that? In principle it’s difficult to know. But I think so.

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I am rather more sure that they were essential tooling-up for a development I could not foresee at the time – the mainstreaming of open source after 1997. To meet that challenge, our culture needed the ability to grow its numbers and assert its norms and values at unprecedented scale. It’s a commonplace to note that my specific propaganda about open source helped it do that. What’s easy to miss, unless you’ve been paying close attention with the right sort of analytical perspective, is that my earlier work on making the hacker culture more cohesive and infective was also important. If we’d tried to meet post-1997 conditions with the more fragile constellation of in-group loyalties and the more limited ability to recruit bright proto-hackers we had had before I started to work the problem…well, maybe we’d have coped OK. Maybe. But it’s just as well that contingency was never tested. Gives me some willies thinking about it.

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Now I want to flip the perspective on this account. Instead of seeing this story as something “ESR” did, I want to invite you to see it as something the evolving set of memes that is hacker culture did using just this guy Eric as an instrument, and creating “ESR” in the process. Because that is, in fact, how I see it. None of this was me sitting in a mad-scientist castle going “Bwahaha! The fools! I shall cunningly manipulate them all!” No. My awareness of what I was doing co-evolved with the hack in progress. I was responding organically, as a member of a nascent culture that was doing its damnedest to self-assemble out of preexisting materials and wake up. Because it was time.

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What made it time was not merely the sense of political threat that was directly motivating me in the early 1990s, but a lot of stuff that was going on in the larger technological and social context. The exhaustion of various attempts to grapple with the software complexity problem. The plunging price of computers and the emergence of the Internet – the very possibility of dispersed online communities of interest…do I have really have to rehearse all those factors now, in 2010?

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Cultures – collections of linked memetic programs running in the minds of humans – evolve under selective pressure just as species do. Sometimes they adaptively radiate; sometimes they adapt by developing more complex, denser organization. And as I was reshaping the hacker culture, the hacker culture was reshaping me – indeed, that process had begun years sooner in the late 1970s. The Jargon File wasn’t something I invented, it was something true that I lifted into a larger context; it made me as much as much as I made it. It’s like the Escher print of the hand drawing the hand drawing the hand; there’s no place the causal loop actually stops, no place to say “here it began”.

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Twenty years later I’m pretty pleased with the results of the hack. I don’t kid myself that they were all positive, though. Well before 1996 I anticipated two negative ones. My complaining regular has neatly fingered the more serious of them.

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Posers. I knew we’d get more posers. Any time a subculture increases in infectivity and prestige, you get an influx of people who want to talk the talk, but are unwilling or unable to walk the walk. And lo, it did come to pass. But, as I anticipated, that was an easily manageable problem. Really no more than a very minor irritation.

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The more serious problem is that creepy groupthink follows naturally in the wake of tribal solidarity. Even if you don’t actually get all the way to creepy groupthink, a shift towards greater tribal solidarity implies that there’s some cohort of extreme individualists for which the culture will become an uncomfortable place.

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After I wrote the above, my wife read it and said “Um, would that include you?” I thought about it for a moment and replied “Dunno. If I weren’t a pack alpha, maybe.” But on reflection, no. Hacker culture would have to become more groupthinky than I think is within the plausible envelope of outcomes before I’d be creeped out. I’ve done what I can to keep the possibility distant by never even trying to modulate my own thorny individualism and contrarianism, by utterly refusing to fear offending anyone with my guns or my libertarianism or my Heinlein quotes.

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That’s all me, it’s all true, but it’s also part of the hack. It’s me demonstrating that a true hacker never bends his core values and his commitment to the best in himself under mere social pressure – that we may have become a tribe, but that doesn’t mean we ever have to let creepy groupthink win.

diff --git a/20101208162031.blog b/20101208162031.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..23abd9f --- /dev/null +++ b/20101208162031.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +The smartphone wars: Google changes aim +

I just got a look at the promotional video for the Nexus S. What it reveals about Google’s Android strategy is fascinating, and suggests that the pressure on Apple and the telcos is about to ratchet up another notch.

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The Nexus S, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention, is the successor to the Nexus One, the original Googlephone. Similar looks, identical price point ($529 from Google, $199 with T-mobile contract). HDSPA radio capability, which means it can use T-Mobile’s 3.5G network. Android 2.3 “Gingerbread”. Spec sheet here. This would have been the Nexus Two if Google CEO Eric Schmidt hadn’t for some now-forgotten reason promised there’d be no Nexus Two.

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HTC is on the sidelines – this is a Samsung handset. And it has the NFC (near-field capablility) that Schmidt recently highlighted as a key feature for next-generation phones. He’s basically said up front that Google aims to replace conventional credit cards and the credit-card companies are OK with this. Hey, if it talks to their payment systems they don’t care. Not having to ship and manage as many physical cards will lower their costs.

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The video tells us some very interesting things about how Google is positioning the Nexus S. And, because Google isn’t stupid and doubtless test-marketed and focus-grouped the product pretty carefully, that in turn tells us a lot about what Google thinks the state of the smartphone market is and where the battlegrounds of the next phase of the smartphone wars will be.

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First message: Google thinks that this time it’s got an iPhone killer that can capture the youth/hipster/trendoid market. The video is aimed squarely at teenagers and fashion victims just as surely as the Nexus One was positioned as cutting-edge techno-cool for geeks and salarymen.

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Second message: This thing is being marketed squarely as an organize-your-world information appliance. I’m not certain I ever saw an actual phone call occur in the video, and if there was one it went by so fast that I missed at. No, the focus was actually on augmented-reality apps – using the phone display as an information overlay on your physical environment.

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Third message, and the stinger in the tail: Near the end, the video says “Pure Google”. Yes, this does seems to mean that Google has read consumer disgust with carrier skinning and lockdown and decided to actively market the uncompromised Android experience against the carriers.

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On the assumption that Google’s market-intelligence people haven’t been taking stupid pills, this sets up a prediction: Apple and the cell carriers are about to take a hard punch in the face.

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If this seems overly optimistic, reflect on the way that Android phones have so far been winning every market Google has chosen to throw them at. All other smartphone OSes have been losing relative market share. Carrier efforts to capture, cripple, and own-brand Android have already, as I’ve noted in my reports on the G-2, stumbled badly.

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The most interesting second-order implication of “Pure Google” is that Google now thinks it can say a loud public fuck-you to the telco carriers and get away with it. Big change from July when the Nexus One got pulled from the Google store, a move many observers (but not me) took to mean Google had lost the power struggle with the carriers. I don’t think there’s much doubt who has the whip hand now.

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And as for Apple…their strategic problem just got dicier. The N1 wasn’t designed to go head-to-head with the iPhone on “user experience” and wasn’t marketed that way either. The Nexus S, from this video, squarely is. Apple fanboys may be too worshipful to think this is a real danger, but I think Apple’s planners know better. Watch for an increasing marketing emphasis on their tablets and media/entertainment delivery as a leading indicator that they’re conceding defeat in phone handsets.

diff --git a/20101209011353.blog b/20101209011353.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d079bc0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20101209011353.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Blog outage for upgrade +

Hey ho, another day, another mandatory WordPress security update.

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There will be a brief outage. Possibly there might be a prolonged one.

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The management regrets any inconvenience.

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UPDATE: That’s done. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled flamage.

diff --git a/20101210185106.blog b/20101210185106.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5a0b738 --- /dev/null +++ b/20101210185106.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Examples and consequences +

SF author and civil-rights activist Joel Rosenberg has been unjustly arrested. Good coverage at PopeHat; essentially this is harassment following a Nov 5th assault on Joel by a cop while he was pursuing a FOIA request related to his first arrest, on bogus charges that prosecutors subsequently dropped.

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I have very mixed feelings about this one, because I suspect I may, in a manner of speaking, have helped get Joel in trouble.

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I don’t know Joel Rosenberg very well. I’ve met him face to face maybe twice, long ago at SF conventions. We had a few on-line dealings back in Genie/CompuServe days, pre-Internet. Neither of us had found our power yet; I was just another technogeek and Joel was a decent mid-list SF and fantasy author. Wasn’t till years after our limited contact that he discovered what he came to consider his calling as a firearms instructor and Second Amendment activist.

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Joel, determined to assert his rights under the law and the U.S. Constitution, did exactly what I would do; he went to City Hall and talked with them about it. In fact, I don’t have to use the subjunctive; I did exactly that barely a day after the Heller ruling in 2008.

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Because my police chief is a small-town conservative who’s actually read the Constitution and cares what’s in it, I got back a handshake and a smile rather than a criminal assault and a ration of shit. But it could have gone the other way, too, and very well might have in my nearest big city. The cops in Philadelphia have some funny (read: ignorant and wrong) ideas about firearms rights. Even in Malvern I went in aware of the outside possibility that I might be assaulted, arrested and harassed. But I went in anyway because I understood it to be my duty as an American, a patriot, and a man.

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Joel understands this duty. He is an American, a patriot, and a mensch (he’s Jewish, so I get to use that fine Yiddish word that connotes decency, uprightness, moral fortitude, and a sense of responsibility). He caught the blowback that I didn’t. Not long after he was assaulted I sent him a brief supportive email.

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The reply I got back was quite a surprise. He said my support meant “more to me than you know”. The rest wasn’t very clear (he had to have been under a fair bit of stress about then) but suggested that I might have at some point after I knew him become one of his heroes or role models or something not completely unlike that considering he’s three years older than me.

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So, maybe I helped Joel get in this trouble. It makes me happy to think that I might have assisted him in finding the determination to challenge injustice; it’s the kind of good example I’ve worked very hard at trying to set. But by the same token I now feel like I might be partly responsible for the injuries to liberty and dignity that he is now undergoing, and that ain’t so good.

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On another level, I know that’s silly. Joel Rosenberg is a man. He makes and owns his choices, and I have no doubt he took his risks with eyes open, same as I did. We should honor him for that; I know I will.

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Matters have not deteriorated yet to the point where anyone is talking legal defense fund, so far as I know. If they do, I plan to give generously. So should you.

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UPDATE: I have donated $100 to Joel’s defense fund. Please consider doing likewise.

diff --git a/20101214003407.blog b/20101214003407.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..856f60b --- /dev/null +++ b/20101214003407.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +The smartphone wars: Yes, I can call them! +

The newest comScore report contains some fascinating statistics on the state of the U.S. smartphone market. And this is where I get to intone “All is proceeding as I have foreseen”, because the prediction I made and was duly calumniated for early in the year has come true right on schedule.

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comScore is not just tracking new-unit sales, where Android has been winning for about a year. They’re tracking total subscribers, and Android is now at effective parity with the iPhone and (unlike the iPhone) actually growing share at above statistical noise level. This tracks my predictions from 1Q 2010 when Android was just beginning to slam the hell out of everyone else in new-unit share; I said to expect crossover in 4Q 2010 and it’s happening.

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And this is before the marketing around the Nexus S hits, which as I pointed out in my last report represents the first direct push into the iPhone’s turf. It will be very interesting to compare Christmas-season sales figures, if we can get them. The iPhone needs to not just beat the Nexus S during the Christmas rush but make it look like an ignominious failure; otherwise, app developers and others making strategic bets are going to have grounds to suspect that Apple can’t even hold its core demographic in the longer term.

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Or, to put it another way: if the Nexus S outsells the iPhone over the next thirty days, it’s game over for Apple – their chances of holding a profitable niche at the high end of the market basically evaporate. If the Nexus S and iPhone sell at rough parity Apple has to do something – another product rollout, a multicarrier announcement – to prove they’ve still got game against the relentless flood of ever-improving Android devices. Only if iPhones outsell the Nexus S by a minimum 5%-6% can Apple afford to continue executing on the same product strategy.

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Once again, the fundamental problem Apple has is not the Nexus S itself; rather, it’s that they’re stuck in a comparatively fragile single-vendor/single-product strategy, facing an multi-vendor army that in aggregate has more financial mass, more capacity to innovate, and more freedom to innovate. The Black-Scholes theorem applies; a portfolio of options is more valuable than an option on a portfolio. If the Nexus S fails to take core-demographic share from the iPhone over Christmas this is only a reprieve, because the Android army is going to be driven by competitive dynamics to keep making bets until they get that right; on the other hand, if iPhone doesn’t win decisively, Apple’s only bet fails and Apple’s strategy with it.

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What’s even worse for Apple is that with the release of NFC capability in the Nexus S the iPhone is now playing technological catch-up. If they fail, Google will probably lock up the market for phones as portable electronic-payment devices over the next year; if they succeed, they’ll be seen to be chasing Google’s taillights, which would pretty much be death for their brand image. And NFC is not going to be the last bullet in Google’s magazine, so the question becomes: how many bullets can Apple dodge?

diff --git a/20101218123147.blog b/20101218123147.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..71a861e --- /dev/null +++ b/20101218123147.blog @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +NMEA 2000 and the Obverse of Open Source +

In discussion of the GPSD project, a commenter suggested that its role might be going away in part because the NMEA 0183 protocol historically used in GPS sensors is being replaced by NMEA2000. So far, this is not true, and the reasons it’s not true are worth a look because they illustrate a sort of flip side of the economic and technological tends driving the adoption of open source and open protocols in the wider technology market.

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NMEA0183, the quasi-standard protocol historically used by GPSes reporting over serial and USB links, is horribly badly designed. The awfulness of NMEA0183 and the various proprietary vendor protocols competing with it is a major reason that GPSD fills a need.

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One might expect, then, that a major redesign of the protocol would be an occasion to rectify these design failures, and that rectification would trigger a concerted rush to adopt NMEA2000 as players in the GPS market sighed with collective relief. And NMEA, the National Marine Electronics Association, would certainly like you to think this is happening.

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In fact, uptake of NMEA2000 has been so poor that there are only a tiny handful of GPS sensors supporting it, all of them tightly coupled to the proprietary physical network specification of the protocol and (so far) used only in specialized marine systems. Uptake in the more general GPS market has been zero; we at the GPSD project have received no requests for NMEA2000 support, and as far as we can tell, the Pacific-Rim companies that produce the bulk of consumer-grade receivers have completely ignored it.

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As it turns out, there are actually pretty good reasons for them to ignore NMEA2000. One of the major ones is revealed by a class of products specifically marketed to users of existing navigation software that offer to gateway from NMEA2000 physical networks to USB, translating NMEA2000 packets on the fly to NMEA0183 sentences that existing software can read. The fact that this is possible reveals that NMEA2000 adds little information and little value to the contents of an NMEA0183 stream of navigation data.

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Another reason for the specialized gateways: the coupling of NMEA2000 to a proprietary physical network is so tight that there is no standard for shipping it over USB, RS232, Ethernet, or any of the other physical networks commonly used in the general computing market. GPS vendors serving that market would have to be plain nuts to abandon the userbase around those physical networks for a protocol that doesn’t serve them.

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Yet a third problem with NMEA2000 (for anyone outside the NMEA vendor cartel, anyway) is that the NMEA2000 specification itself is proprietary and expensive. In theory NMEA0183 was, too, but there’s a difference: enough information about it leaked out, in the days before aggressive IP lawsuits over protocols were common, that conforming to it became easy and a widespread practice. That leakage was assisted by one of the few good things about NMEA0183, the fact that it’s textual and easy to read with a Mark One Eyeball. NMEA2000 “fixes” that; its packet format is unreadable binary goo.

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Taken all together, these features of NMEA2000 are a classic case study in how to design an application protocol for as little uptake as possible. Add little or no value to existing protocols, tie it tightly to a specific physical networking scheme, make the specification expensive and proprietary, and make it opaque binary goo.

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I’ve often made the point in the past that open source and open protocols grow markets and create opportunities. NMEA2000 sharply illustrates the obverse of this point. All of these major choices were made in the opposite direction from the way we’d do it in the open-source tradition, and the effect is to shrink and lock down the market it addresses.

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It’s not clear whether this constitutes a failure on NMEA’s part. The not-very-well-hidden purpose of NMEA is to sustain a technology cartel protecting the major marine-electronics vendors. NMEA2000 probably tightens the NMEA’s control of that particular market; therefore, they may very well not care that they’re getting no adoption elsewhere, not even in parallel vertical markets such as aviation systems.

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Back when NMEA2000 was just a heavily-promoted gleam in NMEA’s eye, we at the GPSD project thought for sure we’d have to support it when it actually issued. This didn’t particularly bother us – ho hum, another stupid fscking vendor binary protocol, another reverse-engineering job, another logic path in the autoconfiguring packet sniffer, yeah, so what else is new?

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Now it looks like NMEA has done such an effective job of walling off their garden that we’re never going to have to deal with it. It’s not that they’ve locked us out of marine navigation, even, just that the applications that might use GPSD will all be sitting on the near side of those NMEA2000-to-USB gateways.

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And in the general-purpose GPS-receiver market that GPSD serves, NMEA2000 is not going to be a factor. Not until and unless it’s decoupled from its physical network, and probably not even then – not enough value-add there for the vendors to move.

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The final question NMEA2000 raises, one which has its own open-source implications, is how much NMEA’s retreat into a fortified position is going to cost its vendors in the long run. Is the market for general-purpose GPS sensors declining or growing? We do know that handset GPSes are being rapidly killed off by smartphones, though that in itself affects GPSD very little since the handset users never needed us in the first place; the question is whether GPSes in smartphone-like devices are going to kill off the sort of receiver that has a USB or serial cable hanging off it.

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This reflects a larger question about how much tightly-integrated bespoke systems like smartphones and proprietary marine networks linking special-purpose devices are going to replace the sort of general-purpose computers that have serial and USB ports. Open-source software in general (and GPSD in particular) thrives in loosely-coupled systems of general-purpose computers and doesn’t do as well in the sort of world that NMEA and proprietary smartphone vendors want to create.

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So the last lesson of NMEA2000, and an encouraging one, is how atypical and archaic it looks in 2010. Binary packets instead of HTTP? Wacky proprietary physical layers? This is not the direction the rest of the Web-enabled, Internet-centric world is moving. And as for GPS sensors with cables, smartphones don’t seem to be inhibiting the pace of new-product launches one iota. If anything, the increasing visibility of location-aware apps on smartphones seems to be driving more demand for standalone sensors. This may seem counterintuitive; why should that be?

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I think it reflects a fundamental economic law; when a technology like GPS gets cheap, every use case for it attracts more money and more vendors as people find uses for both loosely-coupled and tightly-integrated versions of it that create new goods and substitute for more expensive old ones. Smartphone GPSes and the sort with cables aren’t in zero-sum competition after all; they’re complementary goods that indirectly stimulate demand for each other. Really we should have known this years ago from observing the demand for handset GPses.

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That means that, ultimately, NMEA has made the wrong bet. They’ve chosen to be the big frog in a small pond. It means that GPSD is going to continue to have devices to reverse-engineer and a role to play for the foreseeable future. And, more generally, it assures us that the sort of loosely-coupled computer systems in which open-source software has a starring role will continue to attract increasing investment.

diff --git a/20101222064057.blog b/20101222064057.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5678d22 --- /dev/null +++ b/20101222064057.blog @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +Taxonomy of the haterboy +

Human beings being what they are, famous people attract fans. Human beings being what they are, famous people also attract haters, the dark obverse of fans. If you are famous, normally your fans are going to be more visible to you than your haters because your fans will have more tendency to seek you out; but the Internet changes that by lowering the cost of hater behavior.

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Here at Armed & Dangerous we’ve seen our share of fanboys (and, though with regrettably lower frequency, fangirls). We’ve also seen our share of haterboys (hatergirls are far more rare). I’ve now seen a large enough sample over the years that some interesting patterns have emerged. There follows, accordingly, a taxonomy of basic haterboy types.

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If your first reaction to that lead-in is “Why not a taxonomy of fanboys first?”, congratulate yourself on having asked a good question. Because the first interesting thing about haterboys is that they hew much closer to a small set of identifiable stereotypes than fanboys do. Another way to put this is that I see more variation in the behavior of fanboys, more individuality. Fanboys may be annoying in their effusiveness sometimes and try to praise me in ways I don’t necessarily think I always deserve, but I seldom get from them the sense of monomoniacal and faintly robot-like narrowness that haterboys often exude.

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While we’re on the subject of differences between fanboys and haterboys, one obvious one is that haterboys are far more likely to use handles that mask their actual identity. The reason may seem obvious; haterboy behavior is not generally considered a good thing, so the people who do it have social-status reasons for wanting it to be deniable. But I think that anonymization – that refusal to be known – reveals something else; a haterboy’s relationship to the subject of his fixation is less personal than a fanboy’s, less about who the subject of hate actually is and more a projection of the haterboy’s own interior dramas.

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Another difference that goes with this: fanboys have a much easier breaking out of their normal behavioral pattern to criticize the subject of their veneration than haters do executing the reverse maneuver. Indeed, one of the diagnostic signs of haterboyness is an unvarying emotional tone and intensity. The haterboy’s hate is always on, like 60-cycle hum in a bad set of speakers.

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Use of handles and this relentless flatness of affect are two aspects of haterboy behavior that make them easy to spot right off. Often, on this blog, they make themselves obvious on first comment.

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Now let’s examine some of the common haterboy types…

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First, the Peevish Adolescent. This is the most common and least interesting form of haterboy. There’s almost nothing there except a juvenile desire to fling feces. This is the type that is most likely to have indifferent-to-poor writing skills – crappy spelling, difficulty forming coherent sentences, run-on paragraphs – and most likely to use an anonymizing handle.

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The Peevish Adolescent’s dominating emotions are all about primate posturing for status. One often gets the sense that any authority or high-status figure would do as a target for his feces-flinging and one has been chosen for the role almost at random. The Internet enables him to demonstrate belligerantly at a silverback male without fear of actual consequences; this thrills him and helps him feel marginally less inadequate.

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The polar opposite of the Peevish Adolescent is the Embittered Old Fart. This type is much less common and much more interesting. Tends to be middling on the language-competency scale, and may have interesting things to say if you can mask out that 60-cycle hum.

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The dominant emotions of the Embittered Old Fart are envy and resentment. The EOF fails to hide the fact that he thinks he could have been as famous and successful as you, or should have been; in order to live with his own comparative failure, he has to try to tear you down and trash your reputation. The amount of effort and intelligence an EOF may expend on this project is a very sad thing to see; one can’t help thinking he’d have much less resentment in him if he’d directed his energy more constructively in the past. Accordingly, where the Peevish Adolescent is mostly just ridiculous, the Embittered Old Fart is genuinely tragic.

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Next we come to the Zealot. The Zealot thinks you are an articulate advocate of evil and must therefore be discredited at all costs. He doesn’t hate your success other than consequentially, and isn’t mainly concerned with posturing for status. No; his problem is that you have associated yourself with the wrong operating system, or the wrong political ideas, or the wrong religion, and that you commit the intolerable crime of persuading others to do likewise.

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High-grade zealots are the most articulate variant of haterboy; indeed, they often run over with immaculately grammatical verbiage. Of all the haterboy types, they are most likely to try to pack a PhD thesis into a blog comment, complete with numerous hyperlinks. The thing about them, though, is that no matter what their particular idée fixe is, they all sound alike after awhile. The 60-cycle hum drowns out the idea content.

+

Zealots are also the least likely type to use an identity-concealing handle. Sadly, the appearance of honesty often deceives; their citations are apt to be thin and hyperpartisan, and their arguments to have gaps or even tactical falsehoods at crucial points. You are more likely to learn something useful from an Embittered Old Fart than from a Zealot.

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Finally, the Iconoclast. The Iconoclast is, in his own mind, a fearless and principled speaker of truth to power. You are the idol with feet of clay, the pretender, the false god he must destroy. But note how he differs from the Peevish Adolescent; he is relatively unconcerned with his own status, and more like the Zealot in that he is mainly interested in protecting others from your baneful influence. The core of his complaint, though, is about social power and personal influence rather than ideas.

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On this blog, the characteristic accusations of the Iconoclast are that (a) I’m a monster of ego, and (b) I claim a position of leadership in the hacker community that I don’t actually hold. I point these out because they’re issues that matter much less to the other haterboy types. The Peevish Adolescent and the Embittered Old Fart attack me exactly because they see me as a silverback alpha, and the Zealot is only upset by my social power insofar as it assists the infectiousness of my ideas.

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As with the other types, what makes the Iconoclast a haterboy rather than a critic is the degree to which his emotional fixation drowns out and damages his critique. Where a refuted Zealot will generally shift to a different line of attack, Iconoclasts have a strong tendency to repeat old ones with metronomic regularity, seeming unable to retain the fact that nobody bought them the first time.

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Of course, combinations of these types occur. What they all have in common is what I’ve been calling the “60-cycle-hum”, the tendency for anything substantive they have to say to be overwhelmed by their emotional fixation against the subject of their haterism. The result of this fixation is a kind of self-sabotage; haterboys fling random poo, or make transparently bogus and even dishonest arguments, then seem genuinely puzzled and indignant when their subject fails to be gravely wounded and others call them on these behaviors.

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They don’t see, apparently cannot see, what sad clowns they are. As a commenter on this blog recently observed, most of the excrement they fling at their subject of vituperation lands on themselves. Consequently they stink, and they’re covered in shit, and they completely fail to notice that the sane people are laughing at them.

+

This points up the typical haterboy’s single most besetting flaw – a quasi-autistic inability to reflect on his own behavior and how it is read by others. One consequence of this is that he typically has a sense of humor that is stunted and tending towards the vicious (with an inability to laugh at himself). But, more basically, the haterboy radiates a sense of damage, of behavior that is negative and robotic and limited because he lacks the psychological resources to generate better options.

+

Again, the difference from fanboys is instructive. Only the most abject specimens of fanboy radiate that sense of damage. Most fanboys (well, at least, most of my fanboys, anyway) seem to be relatively healthy sorts for whom fanboyism is a sort of aspirational maneuver, an attempt to generate the psychological resources with which they can become more like the aspects of their subject of veneration that they admire. Learning by mimesis in that way is a reasonable goal, and I try to support it.

+

Haterboys, on the other hand, are dead-ended. Some, especially among the Peevish Adolescents, will grow out of this (I often think, on encountering one of this subtype, that his problems would be largely cured by more sex in his life). Others, sadly, will not. Anger, resentment, and envy are not helpful starting places from which to try to generate psychological resources and options; haterboys can change the focus of their ire but have much more difficulty breaking the pattern of fixation and self-sabotage.

+

Fanboys know they’re confirming their subject’s importance in the scheme of things when they act like fanboys, and they’re OK with that. Haterboys also confirm their subject’s importance every time they rant, but they don’t know this. Again, their inability to see how their behavior reads to others is their most serious blind spot. The result, if one is the subject, is that they’re funny — in a broken, desperate way that one feels a bit low and unclean about laughing at.

+

I don’t know how to fix these people. My usual policy towards them is this:

+

Peevish Adolescents I mostly ignore, unless they provide me with a springboard for something I wanted to say anyway. They drift in and out of my view frequently, and are fairly likely to just go away when ignored.

+

Embittered Old Farts sometimes know things I don’t. To them I lay down the law: be interesting or be banned. I am more likely to invest time in trying to housebreak one of these than any of the other types; sometimes they’re trainable, sometimes they’re not.

+

Zealots seldom surprise me – the density of meaningful information in their thickets of verbiage is low (as in, far lower than they themselves realize). I generally leave the task of keeping them in check to the more levelheaded of the regular commenters on this blog, and that works sufficiently well that I seldom have to censure one directly.

+

I treat Iconoclasts basically the way I treat Embittered Old Farts, except that I place a lower expected value on their output and am therefore less willing to spend effort trying to housebreak them.

+

Finally: Yes, I have multiple examples in mind for all these types, but no I am not going to name them nor respond to speculations about who I might have in mind. If you find that any of these descriptions makes you angry, that probably means you’re it. If you feel like an intended target of mockery, you probably are. Cope with it by changing your behavior.

diff --git a/20101224142553.blog b/20101224142553.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d1d60bf --- /dev/null +++ b/20101224142553.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +Dr. William Short’s “Icelanders in the Viking Age”: A Review +

A little over a year ago I reviewed Dr. Wlliam Short’s Viking Weapons and Combat on this blog, finding it excellent on all levels. Now Dr. Short has given us a quasi-sequel, a sort of reader’s companion to Icelandic saga literature. While not quite as exciting as the earlier book, it is in many ways even more informative.

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+

The stated aim of the book is to provide modern readers with the informational context required to read with the fullest possible understanding and appreciation the body of literature known as the Icelandic family sagas. These, written down in the later medieval period after 1200, preserve and elaborate on oral poetic material from the period of the Icelandic Commonwealth – roughly 870 to 1251. Major examples include the Saga of Burnt Njal, the Laxdaela Saga, the Saga of Egil Skallagrimmson, Grettir’s Saga, and the two Vinland sagas describing the ultimately failed Icelandic attempts to establish settlement in the New World. These remain by far the most important literary sources for our understanding of the Viking Age.

+

As an indicator of my competence to review this book, I note that I have read all those sagas mentioned and many more. I have extensive martial-arts experience with weapons designed to emulate those of the period. Also, I am able to check many of Dr. Short’s claims about clothing, food and domestic life through my wife Cathy’s independent knowledge of the scholarly literature on these topics; she experiments with reconstructed recipes, makes and wears museum-quality replicas of Viking women’s costume and is actually no slouch with period weapons herself. See her blogs Food Through Time and Loose Threads for more. Cathy and I have both visited Iceland and are more than casually familiar with the archeological evidence bearing on the period there and in Scandinavia. I have personally seen and touched more than one of the preserved artifacts to which Dr. Short refers (notably in the Viking Ship Museums at Oslo and Roskilde).

+

From this background, I can certify that Dr. Short has done an excellent job of assembling and interpreting the evidence as previously known to me. But it is where he goes beyond this, of course, that I found the book most interesting. I have a few minor arguments with his reconstruction which I will return to later in this review, but I unhesitatingly recommend this book to anyone with even a shred of interest in the Viking era.

+

Let’s begin with the basics. Short’s account of what we know about the settlement of Iceland is faultless, weaving together archeological and literary evidence in a way that tells a coherent story while commendably not glossing over the inconsistencies in the record. His account of Viking-era shipbuilding and transport technology is clear and correct, if a bit pedestrian; readers even moderately familiar with the literature on this topic and the surviving archeological evidence will find no surprises here. The material on geography, climate, agriculture, and open-ocean navigation is all solid and well presented.

+

For a reader with anything like my interest in historical examples of stateless societies, Short’s explanation of the details of judicial procedure in the Commonwealth is worth the price of the book all by itself. The unique contract feudalism of the goðorð (chieftainship) system has previously been well-explored by David Friedman and other libertarians, but at a bit higher level of abstraction; in no account previous to Dr. Short’s have I seen such a nuts-and-bolts account of legal conflict resolution.

+

Where this book gives its greatest value is in integrating the literary evidence from the sagas with archeology and on-the-ground observation in Iceland – academic literature, with its narrow focus, often tends to miss out on the cross-disciplinary insights available in this way. For example, one of the sections I learned a good deal from is Short’s discussion of the architecture of Icelandic longhouses; he does an interesting and persuasive job of interpreting various physical features in light of saga descriptions of domestic scenes.

+

The few places where I might argue with Dr. Short are matters of emphasis and (perhaps inadvertent) omission. Most of these cluster round the status and social power of women in the saga age.

+

Dr. Short accurately and comprehensively describes what we know about the legal status of women in saga Iceland – but both I and my wife believe from our own reading that such a legalistic account somewhat (and perhaps greatly) understates the actual social power of women in that society. All the saga evidence is consistent that Viking women were not to be lightly crossed even by men to whom they were formally subordinate in law; Short reports some consequences of this (noting, for example, instances of women successfully prodding their men to restore family honor by violence, and describing the difficulties attendant on divorcing a wife) but never really explores the larger implications.

+

Another curious and related gap: Dr. Short reports that women were forbidden from bearing weapons under Icelandic law. Doubtless true, the law-books of the Commonwealth were not ambiguous in such matters – but what then are we to make of the fearsome Freydis of the Vinland sagas, who slaps her bare breast with a sword and is quite willing to battle the invading Skraelings herself if Viking men don’t step up to the job? More to the point, Dr. Short cannot be ignorant of that account; he falls short of the high standard of the rest of this book by failing to juxtapose it with his report of the law and at least suggest some possible reconciliations.

+

Elsewhere, Short’s account of domestic life illuminates by collecting the sorts of facts that tend not to be foregrounded in more academic studies. I was much interested to learn, for example, of the high status that board and table games of skill held in period. There is primary evidence that the Vikings considered this sort of skill as important and praiseworthy an attribute as physical strength!

+

In this and other ways, the Commonwealth Icelanders of Dr. Short’s account can seem curiously modern. Consider the dry, laconic style of the sagas; the pragmatism revealed in their architecture, shipbuilding, and tactics of warfare; religious attachments so loose that they could be and were largely severed by a single decree of the Law-Speaker in the year 1000; the egalitarianism of their society; and contemporary Adam of Bremen’s report that “they have no kings, only law”. Other than their combativeness and easily-offended sense of honor, the virtues Dr. Short points out the saga Icelanders most esteemed are a less alien list than most societies would compile for another half a millennium – self-control, moderation, truthfulness, intelligence, generosity, and fair reciprocal dealing. Pretty bourgeois for people often dismissed as barbarians!

+

I would have enjoyed a bit more generative theory, a bit more inquiry into why they were like that and some comparison with other cultures at similar technological levels. My own conjecture is that the key similarity with the modern West is that the saga-age Icelanders – even more than the continental Norse – were a society of small freeholders, and thus found it adaptive to cultivate egalitarian freeholder virtues along with their crops and cattle.

+

On this level, however, Dr. Short’s book is silent. As with the sagas themselves, it does not introspect; we learn much about how the saga Icelanders lived, fought, married, built, farmed, sailed, and sued, but are left to ourself to find the interior meaning in that narrative. Perhaps that is as well.

+

I think the most interesting single new thing I learned from this book may be how late Icelandic contact with the New World actually persisted. While early colonization attempts failed, Dr. Short reports that Icelanders made occasional voyages to Vinland and Markland to gather timber and other resources not readily available in Iceland. The last such voyage was recorded in 1347, only 145 years before Columbus planted his flag. And there might have been later ones unrecorded; post-Saga-age Icelanders never lost the open-ocean sailing technology that supported the original voyages.

+

Possibly the connection is causal; Dr. Short quotes a letter of 1477 in which Columbus actually claims to have visited Iceland himself! Did he hear of the Vinland sagas while there? Nobody knows – but since we know they survived to our own time, Icelanders must have been re-telling them in his.

+

To sum up, this is a book stuffed full of interesting material for anyone interested in the sagas, the Viking age, the Icelandic Commonwealth, and early contact with the New World. Highly recommended.

diff --git a/20101227101424.blog b/20101227101424.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0966f16 --- /dev/null +++ b/20101227101424.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +The smartphone wars: Fortune catches up with me +

Fortune magazine says 2011 will be the year Android explodes and makes a number of predictions that track what I’ve been writing on Armed & Dangerous for the last year so closely that I have to wonder if their correspondents have been reading this blog.

+

Nice work, guys, even if you are a bit late to the scene. Me, I kinda thought 2010 was the year Android exploded, what with posting several quarters of market share growth in the 600% range and overtaking Apple in the U.S. userbase figures. But the article isn’t just old news presented as though it were breaking; there’s some fascinating info about a new chip from Broadcom that’s going to blow a Jupiter-sized hole in the price floor of the smartphone market.

+

+

Broadcom thinks its new BCM2157 smartphone-on-a-chip will push the retail price of a smartphone – not the handset bill of materials but the retail price – below $100, and might push it below $75. And they’re targeting it directly at Android OEMs. Phones based on the chip are expected to ship in volume before mid-year 2011, with the first possibly hitting the trade show circuit in a month.

+

The article doesn’t note that something like this was pretty much inevitable about now; there was just too damn much money waiting to be made from single-chip smartphones as the dumb-phone base turns over, especially in overseas markets at lower pricepoints. The only surprise, and it’s a minor one, is that Broadcom got there before Qualcomm. Expect Qualcomm to follow suit, and expect at least one more competitive phone-on-a-chip from one of the Pacific Rim manufacturers – my first bet would be on Samsung, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we get one from mainland China.

+

The prompt effect will be to open a lot of additional daylight between Apple and Android pricing. Of course Android phones have been less expensive all along, and that’s been fueling the explosive Android market share growth we’ve seen since late 2009, but the price gap is about to widen into a vast and yawning chasm. Like, with a width in three figures.

+

I think Apple’s hopes of retaining market share above 10% will disappear into that chasm, especially since app developers are quite capable of seeing where the price and volume winds are blowing. Given Apple’s history and Steve Job’s psychology, I do not expect Apple to try to compete seriously for volume in a market where midrange has fallen below $100; it is far, far more likely that the company will take a defiantly top-of-market position and hope they get enough lock-in from iTunes to defend that turf. Expect Apple’s brand positioning to shift further towards that of a luxury and positional good.

+

But that’s not going to be the biggest effect. Oh, no. The real impact of the BCM2157 and its kind will be on the cell carriers. I’ve been writing for two years that Google’s long-term Android plan is to break the carrier oligopoly over its knee, pry their customers loose from the contract system, and reduce the carriers to low-margin bit-haulers in cutthroat price competition with each other. And Jean-Louis Gassée has pointed out that around $89 retail is where shit gets real; at that point, the carriers stop being able to offer enough of a price break so customers will enter contract bondage to get it. This, in turn, is going to kill off carrier locking on phones.

+

That’s no longer a distant future prospect. It’s likely we’ll reach $89 before the end of 2011, and carrier locking probably won’t outlive that break point by more than a year. Fortune, to its credit, gets some of the implications (maybe this means the rest of the business press will be belatedly catching up with where I was in 2008 over the next quarter?). They note that increased customer mobility is going to exert downward pressure on data plan pricing. Yeah, will it ever.

+

Increased customer mobility between carriers is also going to pump up competition in the already frenetic handset market as customers get used to moving their phones and their Android customizations more or less frictionlessly between carriers. That means $75 won’t be where it ends; I expect a race to the bottom in the next three years, with cheap smartphones becoming nearly as disposable by 2014 as calculators are now. And the positive network externalities pulling people towards Android (most importantly, the size of the app ecosphere) are only going to increase as its market share does.

+

Big losers in this scenario start with Apple and the carrier oligopoly, for reasons I’ve already covered in detail. RIM? Stick a fork in them, they’re done – headed for a textbook disruptive collapse within that three-year timeframe. The minority Linux-based smartphone OSes (WebOS, MeeGo) are noble but doomed, no-hopers. Microsoft WP7 isn’t going to survive the smartphone price crash, either – their problem is that they need to make money from licensing fees, and that’s hard to do when your hardware platform is priced in the supermarket-giveaway range.

+

The largest remaining open question is whether Microsoft will drag Nokia down with it. The most optimistic scenario for Nokia is that they evade the lure and bail to Android; in that case they end up as yet another handset maker but at least they have a line of business playing the pump-out-handsets-cheap game they’re historically good at. The most pessimistic one is that Microsoft sells them on WP7 and they watch their market share drop like a rock as Android steamrollers right over it. It would be a billion-dollar fiasco, a classic don’t-do-that for the business-school casebooks.

+

If all this sounds crazy optimistic, don’t forget that people who should have known better said I was crazy optimistic two years ago when I analyzed Google’s grand strategy, and again almost a year ago when I predicted Android’s U.S. market share would break 50% right about when it happened. The trade press is catching up with where I was, but where I was ain’t where I is; I’m looking to the future, and I see that chipsets like the BCM2157 and their followons are going to be bigger game-changers than Fortune magazine yet understands.

diff --git a/20101229121302.blog b/20101229121302.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..036f554 --- /dev/null +++ b/20101229121302.blog @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +The smartphone wars: There’s dross in them thar hills! +

Ken Burnside emailed me an interesting tip about a boring financial fact that I think is absolutely fundamental to understanding the smartphone wars. Turns out there’s no gold in them thar hills; the return on investment of wireless networks is negative.

+

+

Exhibit A for this proposition is a ZDnet article titled Broadband networks: Returns on invested capital stink. They cite a research note indicating that the ROIC (return on invested capital) in wireless broadband is 0.3% over the last decade. That’s not a year-over-year average, it’s the ROIC for the entire ten years.

+

Sounds pretty bad, yes? Wait. It gets worse. Ken also points out, quite correctly, something the article’s authors missed. The annualized inflation rate from 2000 to 2010 – including the mini-deflationary cycle from 2008 to 2010 that we’re just now exiting – has been about 0.5% per year. So the inflation-adjusted returns to the carriers have been negative.

+

This is a more robust result than it looks like. Inflation of 0.5% compounded over 10 years is about 1.6%; this means for constant-dollar carrier returns to the carriers to be positive, the ROIC figures would have to be low by a minimum factor of over 5. Another way to look at this is that the carriers have been losing money to the tune of about 1% of ROIC, but with the losses largely masked by inflation.

+

Yes, I realize the ZDNet article doesn’t say whether the 0.3% was adjusted for inflation; it might have been. But an optimistic assumption about that turns out not to get the carriers out of their hole; the ZDNet authors argue real returns have been negative, though they don’t say by how much, because of huge and botched acquisitions. So the losses may not mount as high as 1%, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to slice the numbers that doesn’t indicate at least slightly negative ROIC.

+

This has a number of fascinating implications.

+

First: Markets are working. Despite the carriers’ oligopolistic behavior and obnoxious customer-control tactics, wireless users have captured almost all the gains from the infrastructure buildout.

+

Second: The carriers have a pretty convincing case for resisting further regulatory takings (including “net neutrality” rules) even given that their FCC licenses make them creatures of government fiat. There simply aren’t any “excess profits” to be taxed or socialized away.

+

Third: Google’s strategic direction looks smarter every day. They’ve put themselves in a position where they profit from the buildout without having to eat negative returns. Same goes for Apple, but Google’s advertising profits will probably scale better with network usage volume than Apple’s hardware sales.

+

Fourth: The carriers have to be playing a long game, hoping they can amortize their buildout costs and move into net profitability before something disruptive happens.

+

Fifth: The carriers are desperate to cut costs and drive up margins. But not symmetrically; they’ll tend to favor cost-cutting, because the causal link to better ROIC is both more direct and easier to demonstrate to investors.

+

To understand that last point, you have to understand how net-present-value accounting works. When firms do their capital-allocation planning they apply a discount to future profits because money has time value – that is, having money now is better than having money later. Below a threshold positive ROIC it’s better to keep your capital in your pocket. If your ROIC is negative it’s much better.

+

Taken together, all these do a good job of explaining some otherwise puzzling features of the smartphone wars.

+

The big one is why the carriers have fallen into Android’s honey trap. They’ve traded cost-cutting in present time (by the amount of NRE they no longer have to use on in-house software development) for future loss of control over their customer base. If their ROIC were positive enough, this would be crazy. But now we have good reason to think it’s slightly negative – and if you’re underwater and using net present-value accounting, it’s difficult to construct a scenario in which foregone future profits matter more than cutting costs to get into profitability now.

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For exactly the same reason, Windows Phone 7 is a no-hoper. Windows licensing fees are not just like NRE, they’re actually worse because they’re a recurring expense that will come right out of per-unit margin on sales and bring with it all the strategic problems of losing control of your software layer. It would take seriously bad drugs to get a carrier CEO to buy that combination.

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I’ve predicted before that carrier skinning of Android wouldn’t last long as a business tactic, and indeed it seems to have been in decline since T-Mobile shipped the unskinned G-2 in October. Giving it up is a similar trade; reduced software-development costs now for loss of customer control later. What I didn’t get was how brutal the cost-reduction pressure on the carriers is. Even in a positive-ROIC situation, it’s likely that carrier skinning would fail the net-present-value test as consumers caught wise to how much it sucks. Since carrier ROIC is actually negative, the relative value of unexpended capital goes way up and there’s basically no hope that the NRE spent on carrier skinning pays off. The only thing sustaining it has been mental habit and irrational territoriality.

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(OK, you in the back there waving your hand frantically. Yes, I know about deals like the NASCAR/Sprint tieup. NASCAR pays Sprint to skin phones as a marketing move. Yeah, you’re right, this is a different business case from carrier skinning. The problem is that NASCAR has to pay Sprint’s entire NRE for the NASCAR skin or the deal is worth less than nothing to Sprint. In fact, it’s worse than that because NASCAR also has to pay Sprint for taking a time-to-market hit and afterwards being stuck with a down-version build of Android that Google is teaching consumers not to want. Those costs pile up fast, so tie-ups like this don’t have a bright future. We might already have seen the last one.)

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It’s also easy to see why carrier marketing is pushing the smartphone transition so hard – they’re chasing sales of higher-pricepoint, higher-margin handsets. They’d do this anyway, but the negative ROIC on their buildout makes it panic-urgent. Android exploits this urgency; if the carriers had enough positive return, capital spent on in-house development of their own smartphone OSes or Windows Phone 7 licensing fees might still pass the net-present-value test.

+

The most interesting question though, is what’s going to happen and how much blood is going to be spilled when investors figure out out just how utterly hosed the cell carriers are. Negative ROIC right now plus Google successfully commoditizing their future equals get the hell out while you still haven’t lost your shirt. Where are the carriers’ profit margins going to come from a decade hence?

+

I think it’s actually time to ask a more radical question: will the carrier oligopoly still exist in ten years? And I’m inclined to think the answer is no.

+

To see why, let’s start from the ZDnet analysis. They think carrier ROIC is negative because the carriers have been wasting crap-tons of money on stupid acquisition deals. Empirically it’s hard to argue that the acquisitions haven’t been stupid, but there are deeper questions here. Like: why are these acquisition deals stupid? And: Is that stupidity essential, entailed, or is it plausible to imagine a history in which the carriers played smarter and kept their ROIC positive?

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To answer these questions we need to go back to the basic Coasian theory of the firm, in which corporate scale is driven by the difference in communications and transaction costs between the interior of the firm and the exterior; the higher that difference, the more internal diseconomy of scale you can tolerate and still win. Now consider a business environment in which that difference is steadily dropping (because faster, cheaper communication is lowering overall transaction costs). The optimal competitive size of firms drops with it.

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So, why are the carriers huge? Because large capital concentrations both demand and reward heavyweight management structures. During something like a huge infrastructure buildout, you need capital concentration and the smart move is to merge your lump of capital with as many other lumps as you can as fast as you can, because the biggest lump is likeliest to win the infrastructure race. Thus the big stupid M&A deals – strategy sound, execution poor.

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But what happens when the buildout is done? You’re stuck with the diseconomies of scale from bigness, but your massive lump of capital isn’t so much help any more. This is exactly the situation the cell carriers are in.

+

I hear you boggling. “Huh?” you say, “There’s lots of the U.S. and the world where the cell coverage sucks.” That’s right; it’s because there isn’t enough expected volume and return from extending coverage to justify the capital cost. For years now the carriers have only been extending their networks to avoid losing market share against each other, not to increase overall coverage. From the financial-minimax point of view, the cell buildout is done. We won’t see dramatic coverage improvements before a technological break that dramatically lowers cost per square mile covered.

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But while this is going on, communication/transaction costs are still dropping, so the diseconomies and penalties of being large enough for the buildout phase are still rising.

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My conclusion: eventually, investors will bail and the carrier oligopoly is going to disintegrate. And I mean dis-integrate – lose the vertical and horizontal cohesion it now has. Maybe Google will buy the towers up cheap at the going-out-of-business sale.

diff --git a/20110102175246.blog b/20110102175246.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d4c4e67 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110102175246.blog @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +Cultural literacy for hackers +

I’ve written before on the hacker culture as a invisible college defined partly by a network of trust, gatekeepers, and certification authorities. Jay Maynard ask the next question: What are the non-technical things every hacker should know?

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Jay wrote in email:

+
+> It just struck me that this might be an interesting subject for
+> exploration. It's pretty obvious that any hacker out there worthy of
+> the name would know Monty Python and the Holy Grail backwards and
+> forwards. The same goes for Airplane!, Blazing Saddles and Young
+> Frankenstein, TRON and now TRON: Legacy, and such written works as
+> TNHD and Bored of the Rings and CATB (whether on paper or on the Web
+> isn't important), not to mention pretty much the entire Weird Al
+> Yankovic corpus (but especially It's All About the Pentiums and White
+> and Nerdy).
+> 
+> But it goes beyond that. How many hackers wouldn't immediately place a
+> soft voice saying "I want to boot some head too" and get a chuckle out
+> of the thought? Or hear a comment about world domination and think of
+> a white mouse with a big head and a dumb sidekick?
+> 
+> Just what would you say is basic cultural literacy for a hacker? Not
+> in the sense so much that a hacker would need to be familiar with the
+> works in order to be a hacker, but rather that someone with the hacker
+> mindset would be drawn to them innately?
+
+
+

Good question, and I can add a few things. If you are a hacker or proto-hacker:

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* You should know at least a few of Tom Lehrer’s ditties as well as Weird Al’s. Huge style points if you can sing The Elements a la Daniel Radcliffe.

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* If you are mystified by the phrase “Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!”, you need to fix that bug immediately.

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* You should have romped through the logic puzzles in one or more of Raymond Smullyan’s books.

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* You need to know who the dread god Finagle and his mad prophet Murphy are, and be able to recite dozens of corollaries of Murphy’s Law off the top of your head. And what “on the gripping hand” means and who actually has one.

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* Terry Pratchett. If you need that name or his relevance to the hacker posture of mind explained to you, I pity you deeply.

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Thread open for more suggestions.

diff --git a/20110107010650.blog b/20110107010650.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f723652 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110107010650.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Plug and Pray in GPS-land +

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another darkly humorous tale of the seamy side of GPS interfacing. GPSD working with USB GPS mice has, when properly installed, lovely plug-and-play self-configuring behavior. That is, you plug a USB GPS into a USB port, the hotplug system notifies the gpsd daemon that the GPS is available, the daemon records this fact…and subsequently when you start up any GPSD client application It Just Works. Well, usually. There’s a dangerous weakness in the machinery, and yesterday it came around and bit us in the ass.

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The root of the problem is a hole in the the USB standard. For most other kinds of USB devices (printers, mice, mass storage, smart cards, hubs, what have you) there’s a defined device class code which gets presented to your USB subsystem; so, for example, your print spooler can enumerate all the USB printers attached to your system and ignore everything that isn’t a printer. But the standard does not define a device class code for GPSes.

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If there were a GPS device class, and GPS manufacturers followed the standard, then GPSD’s hotplug rules could simply say “hand everything with that type to GPSD” and all would be happiness. But there’s no such class, so we have to whitelist a bunch of vendor/product IDs and assume that if the device presents one on this list, it’s a GPS.

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In truth, we’d probably have to do this even if there were a GPS device class. You see, all the GPS mice we’ve ever seen are are lash-ups consisting of a receiver module that’s wedded by a sort of bastardized TTL version of RS-232 with an RS-232-to-USB adapter chip. The USB device class is presented down the wire to your PC by the adapter chip, which would have to be custom-modified to show something other than its own device class and vendor/product ID. These devices are produced on such thin margins that the vendors might not spend the extra pennies for the customization.

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In point of fact, USB to serial adapters don’t have their own USB class either (they return 0xFF for “Vendor Specific”). So we have to whitelist the vendor/product ID pairs of the USB adapter chips most commonly used in GPS mice; by far the most common of these, incidentally, is a doohickey called the Pacific Logic 2303.

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So here we are with our udev rules file that’s watching for a plugin event from anything on the whitelist. The udev rule calls a Python script written by yours truly which launches a gpsd instance if one is not already running, then stuffs a notification up the daemon’s special control socket that said device might be a GPS. Later, when a GPSD client app wants location data, the daemon will actually open every device on its stash list and attempt to recognize GPS information flooding from them (not a trivial process; the GPS information could arrive in any of 13 mutually incompatible formats, which are untangled from each other by a big honkin’ state machine also written by yours truly).

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Astute readers will already see the problem. We don’t actually have any guarantee that the thing behind any given whitelisted adapter is, in fact, a GPS. But for six years this failure case remained theoretical. Until yesterday.

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Yesterday, we got a plaintive bug report from a guy who was trying to mate a cute little Linux SBC called a Gumstix with a GSM modem. A perfectly reasonable thing to do if you were, say, trying to remote-control some kind of instrumentation package over a GSM cell network. Our guy complained that every time he plugged in one of his modems, gpsd would spam a bunch of data at it. This sometimes gave the modem indigestion.

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Well, guess what? Both of the USB-to-serial adapters he tried using with his GSM modem were in our whitelist, and gpsd duly sent them the crapload of vendor-specific probe strings it uses to try to prod a GPS into returning an identifying response. So our friend tried removing the GPSD package from the Gumstix, only to find that the KDE environment depends on it. FAIL.

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The workaround is to uninstall GPSD’s udev rules. But now he’s going to have to peg GPSD’s version, or his modems will fall down go boom again right after his next upgrade pulls a new GPSD package installation and installs a new copy of our udev rules.

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This basically sucks all around. And there’s no good fix. And if there were one, the skeezy Pacific-Rim fly-by-nights who pump out the world’s production of GPS mice probably wouldn’t apply it. Sigh…another wonderful day in the life of GPSD.

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UPDATE: The person who reported the bug says I misunderstood his use case, though apparently not in an essential way. You can read his description.

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UPDATE2: Ah, seems I conflated two bug reports from different people, one of which really did involve a Gumstix.

diff --git a/20110109200825.blog b/20110109200825.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ca37ae6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110109200825.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Geeks, hackers, nerds, and crackers: on language boundaries +

Geeks, hackers, nerds, and crackers. It’s an interesting indication of how popular culture has evolved in the last quarter-century that the scope and boundaries of these terms are now of increasing interest to people who don’t think they belong in any of those categories — from language columnists for major newspapers to ordinary folks who have relatives they suspect might fall somewhere in the Venn diagram those terms define.

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I’ve been watching these terms shift and move in and out of prominence since the early 1970s. Over time, distinctions among them that were once blurred have tended to sharpen. This is not happening at random; it accompanies the changes in “mainstream” culture that I noted in The Revenge of the Nerds is Living Well. As groups who were one marginalized erupt into mainstream visibility, everybody’s functional need for language that puts a handle on their social identities becomes more pressing.

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Here’s a report on the state of play in early 2011, with some history intended to illuminate it.

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One of the interesting things about being a participant-observer anthropologist, as I am, is that you often develop implicit knowledge that doesn’t become explicit until someone challenges you on it. The seed of this post was on a recent comment thread where I was challenged to specify the difference between a geek and a hacker. And I found that I knew the answer. Geeks are consumers of culture; hackers are producers.

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Thus, one doesn’t expect a “gaming geek” or a “computer geek” or a “physics geek” to actually produce games or software or original physics – but a “computer hacker” is expected to produce software, or (less commonly) hardware customizations or homebrewing. I cannot attest to the use of the terms “gaming hacker” or “physics hacker”, but I am as certain as of what I had for breakfast that computer hackers would expect a person so labeled to originate games or physics rather than merely being a connoisseur of such things.

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One thing that makes this distinction interesting is that it’s a recently-evolved one. When I first edited the Jargon File in 1990, “geek” was just beginning a long march towards respectability. It’s from a Germanic root meaning “fool” or “idiot” and for a long time was associated with the sort of carnival freak-show performer who bit the heads off chickens. Over the next ten years it became steadily more widely and positively self-applied by people with “non-mainstream” interests, especially those centered around computers or gaming or science fiction. From the self-application of ‘geek’ by those people it spread to elsewhere in science and engineering, and now even more widely; my wife the attorney and costume historian now uses the terms “law geek” and “costume geek” and is understood by her peers, but it would have been quite unlikely and a faux pas for her to have done that before the last few years.

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Because I remembered the pre-1990 history, I resisted calling myself a ‘geek’ for a long time, but I stopped around 2005-2006 – after most other techies, but before it became a term my wife’s non-techie peers used politely. The sting has been drawn from the word. And it’s useful when I want to emphasize what I have in common with have in common with other geeks, rather than pointing at the more restricted category of “hacker”. All hackers are, almost by definition, geeks – but the reverse is not true.

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The word “hacker”, of course, has long been something of a cultural football. Part of the rise of “geek” in the 1990s was probably due to hackers deciding they couldn’t fight journalistic corruption of the term to refer to computer criminals – crackers. But the tremendous growth and increase in prestige of the hacker culture since 1997, consequent on the success of the open-source movement, has given the hackers a stronger position from which to assert and reclaim that label from abuse than they had before. I track this from the reactions I get when I explain it to journalists – rather more positive, and much more willing to accept a hacker-lexicographer’s authority to pronounce on the matter, than in the early to mid-1990s when I was first doing that gig.

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That shift is so marked that I think the most interesting issue about the hacker/cracker terminological boundary is no longer journalistic abuse. It’s about what label, and what social identity, belongs to people who use hackerly skills to ends that others may define as criminal or vandalistic, but which are considered virtuous by most people who are unambiguously hackers.

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I approached this question in Was Stuxnet a work of hackers?. The most interesting boundary case, which I also discussed there, is people cracking open intrusive DRM methods such as DVD or HDCP encryption, or jailbreaking cellphones. Hackers or crackers? The ambiguity arises because hackers are hostile to technologies that deny users complete control of their own computers and purchased media; thus hackers consider breaking DRM methods a social good even if such is activity is itself illegal or associated with illegal behaviors.

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The line is not always easy to draw, but in 1996 I summarized it as “Hackers build things. Crackers break things.” I think that distinction is still the generally-accepted one; so, for example, a hacker asked to categorize someone who breaks security on a system will begin by asking whether the security-breaker built his own tools or is merely mechanically applying tricks originated by others.

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In 2010, the term “nerd” has the least definite semantic field of any of the four I have examined here. In times past it was roughly synonymous with “geek” (and more commonly used!), but the latter term has shifted and sharpened while the former has not. Perhaps it is a label-in-waiting, ready to attach itself to some subcultural efflorescence of the future.

diff --git a/20110111124243.blog b/20110111124243.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ef5b6f1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110111124243.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +The smartphone wars: Verizon gets iPhone +

Finally, after 18 months of busted rumors and false starts, Verizon got the iPhone today. Apple fanboys, still stinging from comShare’s November report that Android had passed the iPhone in U.S. market share, are delirious with joy. People who actually get paid to think about smartphone market trends are less sanguine.

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“We believe that current estimates of [iPhone's] potential sales are overblown,” said Daniel Hays, who covers telecommunications for consulting firm PRTM. This is sensible, in view of the iPhone 4’s failure to reverse Apple’s market-share losses earlier this year.

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Other analysts have pointed out that, now that AT&T has lost its exclusive, they’ll certainly be promoting Android phones more. “Now that AT&T has an incentive to promote Android more than it’s done until now, Android there will grow,” says Tero Kuittinen of MKM Partners LP. “It’s going to compensate for much of the decline at Verizon.” According to the Wall Street Journal, AT&T has already committed to shipping a dozen new Android models this year. This will offset the increase in iPhone sales through Verizon; given AT&T’s market position, it is even possible that Kuttinen is underestimating and the net effect on iPhone volume will be zero or negative.

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My prediction is that the Verizon iPhone will prove no more effective than the iPhone 4 was at stemming the progressive weakening of Apple’s market position. It’s too late; the window when Apple could irrefutably claim superior “user experience” began to close with the release of Android 2.2 and slammed shut during the iPhone 4 antenna fiasco.

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The coming wave of cheap system-on-a-chip Android phones will crank up the pressure, as the price difference between iPhone and equally capable Android models opens up to three digits in U.S. dollars. Bloomberg reported Apple’s stock slightly down and Google’s slightly up in advance of the announcement, suggesting that investors have already priced in this expectation.

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I’ve already spam-binned one attempted threadjacking about this news. I will continue to do that. Comments should be attached to this post and not elsewhere. Content-free flamage will be deleted.

diff --git a/20110115033434.blog b/20110115033434.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..219b112 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110115033434.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +The Rollover of Doom: a Trap for Good Programmers +

GPS, the Global positioning System, was designed in the 1970s under hardware-cost constraints that would seem ridiculous today. This makes interpreting the data it sends into a black art, and produces some really painful edge cases.

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There’s one edge case in particular that I’ve come to think of as the Rollover of Doom. This morning I came up with an evil, clever hack for getting around it. I call it clever because you have to think your way out of a conceptual box to see it. As to why it’s evil…well, you’ll see. If you can figure it out.

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The root cause of the Rollover of Doom is the peculiar time reference that GPS uses. Times are expressed as two numbers: a count of weeks since the start of 1980, and a count of seconds in the week. So far so good – except that, for hysterical raisins, the week counter is only 10 bits long. The first week rollover was in 1999; the second will be in 2019.

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So, what happens on your GPS when you reach week counter zero? Why, the time it reports warps back to the date of the last rollover, currently 1999. Obviously, if you’re logging or computing anything time-dependent through a rollover and relying on GPS time, you’re screwed.

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Now, we do get one additional piece of time information: the current leap-second offset. The object of this exercise is to figure out what you can do with it.

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For those of you unfamiliar with calendrical arcana, a leap-second is a shim inserted in calendars to cope with variability in the Earth’s rotation, which is slowing very gradually due to tidal braking.

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If you start an atomic clock running – say, in a GPS satellite – and you want to compute Earth time such as UTC with it, and you want days and weeks and months in UTC to stay in sync with astronomical time (when the sun rises and sets), then you occasionally have to stuff a second in somewhere so the Earth’s gradually-slowing rotation has time to spin it to where you would have expected it to be if the spin were truly constant.

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So, in order to allow UTC to be computed from the GPS-week/GPS-second pair, the satellite also broadcasts a cumulative leap-second offset. The offset was 0 when the system first went live; in January 2010 it is 15 seconds. It’s updated every 6 months based on spin measurements by the IERS.

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For purposes of this exercise, you get to assume that you have a table of leap seconds handy, in Unix time (seconds since midnight before 1 Jan 1970, UTC corrected). You do *not* get to assume that your table of leap seconds is current to date, only up to when you shipped your software.

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For extra evilness, you also do not get to assume that the week rollover period is constant. The not-yet-deployed Block III satellites will have 13-bit week rollover counters, pushing the next rollover back to 2173CE.

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For extra-special evilness, there are two different ways your GPS date could be clobbered. after a rollover. If your receiver firmware was designed by an idiot, all GPS week/second pairs will be translated into an offset from the last rollover, and date reporting will go wonky precisely on the next rollover. If your designer is slightly more clever, GPS dates between the last rollover and the ship date of the receiver firmware will be mapped into offsets from the next rollover, and date reporting will stay sane for an entire 19 years from that ship date.

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You are presented with a GPS time (a week-counter/seconds-in-week pair), and a leap-second offset. You also have your (incomplete) table of leap seconds. The GPS week counter may invalid due to the Rollover of Doom. Specify an algorithm that detects rollover cases as often as possible, and explain which cases you cannot detect.

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Hint: This problem is a Chinese finger-trap for careful and conscientious programmers. The better you are, the worse this problem is likely to hurt your brain. Embrace the suck.

diff --git a/20110116235553.blog b/20110116235553.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5d31ea4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110116235553.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +True Grit times two +

I just got back from seeing the Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit starring Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon. I had prepared by watching the classic 1969 John Wayne film. The similarities and contrasts have some interesting messages about how audience tastes and filmmaking styles have changed in the last 40 years.

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First, some obvious wins for the new movie. It’s far more period-accurate than the ’69 original; the details of language, costume, and manners are immaculately authentic for the end of the 1870s, with none of the Tinseltown-backlot feel that you get from a lot of “classic” Westerns. The violence is less theatrical, uglier, more immediate. And it’s nice that the negro family retainer is actually black, rather than looking like a white guy dipped in walnut stain. Audiences’ standards for verismilitude have risen, and filmmakers’ aspirations towards it as well.

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But the one place where the Coen brothers most clearly score better than the ’69 original is in the portrayal of LaBoeuf. In the ’69 film Glen Campbell was a pretty-boy lightweight who could not really be taken very seriously in the role of a Texas Ranger by the audience and certainly wasn’t by John Wayne. Matt Damon’s version is far more credible, less a foil for the leads and more a character in his own right.

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Wayne vs. Bridges is very a nearly a draw; I think Wayne wins on points, but wouldn’t argue very strenuously with someone making the opposite judgement. The latter-day Cogburn is older, more grim, more dissipated, and never develops the easy chemistry with Mattie Ross that was at the core of the original fim (more remarkably so in that Wayne, who had hoped to cast his own daughter in the part, disliked Kim Darby and barely spoke to her off the set). Also, Wayne handled his action scenes with a flair Bridges cannot quite match. The main thing that can be said for the Bridges version is that he achieves an admirable kind of flinty psychological realism that Wayne’s didn’t – but he gains this at the cost of much of the character’s likeability.

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As for Mattie Ross, I regret to say that newcomer Hailee Steinfeld is not an improvement on 1969’s Kim Darby. She lacks the fire and much of the attractiveness that Darby brought to the character; her performance is creditable, but no more. I’m inclined to think this is mostly not her fault; she had the disadvantage of actually being 14 (rather than a much more poised 21-year-old playing a 14-year-old), and the nature of her performance makes me think she was neither well-coached nor well-directed.

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The minor characters are pretty much a wash between the two films. Tom Cheney, the villain of the piece, neatly encapsulates their differences in style. The 1969 Cheney was a loser, a clown, an almost comic figure who wallowed in self-pity between crimes. The 2010 version is a mean, hot-eyed near-psychopath who fits the character’s back-story as a hardened outlaw much better.

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In general the 2010 film is both visually and emotionally darker than the 1969 original; the Coen Brothers’ West is a sepia-toned and seedy place. As with the Bridges version of Cogburn, it convinces more thoroughly at the cost of losing much of the exuberance and sheer fun of the original.

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There’s been a lot of buzz that the remake is a better film than the original and that the Jeff Bridges take on Rooster Cogburn is enough to make you forget John Wayne. Is it a better film? Not clearly, not to me; the gains and losses seem about equal. And no, the Dude’s Cogburn won’t make you forget the Duke’s and doesn’t even seem to be intended by Bridges to achieve that effect; the deprecation of Wayne is, I think, more a reflection of current fashion by people who never liked Wayne’s old-Hollywood style to begin with.

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I will say this: if you see one film, you should see them both. Their flaws and virtues are almost exactly complementary and the 2010 version comments on the 1969 version in interesting ways. But, if inadvertently, the 1969 version also holds a light up to the 2010 remake that is not entirely flattering to our time. The Duke’s genial charisma may, in the end, endure better than the Dude’s intense method acting.

diff --git a/20110122215712.blog b/20110122215712.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6d14e34 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110122215712.blog @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +Embracing the suck +

This is a followup to The Rollover of Doom: a Trap for Good Programmers. That post ended “This problem is a Chinese finger-trap for careful and conscientious programmers. The better you are, the worse this problem is likely to hurt your brain. Embrace the suck.”

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That last phrase is a take on a military objurgation which translates as “The situation is bad. Deal with it.” Well, my friends, I am about to tell you how bad the GPS rollover situation really is.

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First, my solution to the Chinese finger-trap. Good programmers – especially good programmers who are bright but prone to linear thinking – hurt their brains on this problem in two ways. First, they try to solve a more difficult problem: disambiguating the GPS date by deducing which rollover period we are in, as opposed to simply detecting that a rollover has occurred. Once they’ve realized they can’t solve the harder problem with the information given, they look for a way to code a rollover detector that always return true (rollover has occurred) or false (rollover has not occurred).

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The second assumption is the killer. You can’t do it; there isn’t enough information supplied. You jump out of the “conceptual box” I referred to by recognizing that the rollover detector must return three values: true, false, and undetermined. (Remember that I specified “detects rollover cases as often as possible, and explain which cases you cannot detect.”) There are returned dates for which you will not be able to tell if rollover has occurred. You cannot get to working code until you embrace this suck.

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A&D regular Jay Maynard phoned me and said “You…you did a Kobayashi Maru on the problem!” He’s right. Often the right answer to an unsolvable conundrum, if you’re doing engineering rather than theory, is to grok that you got the conditions of the problem wrong…or to change them. Tellingly, of the three or four people I bounced this problem off, the one who grokked the most rapidly is not a programmer but a control systems engineer, the kind of guy who designs factory wiring for a living.

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Here’s the ugly but correct algorithm. Look at the date. Look at the table of all recorded leap seconds. Is the date within the table range? If yes, then check to see if its entry matches the leap second you see – that’s your true or false answer. If no, then return ‘undetermined’.

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If you are a programmer, you may well be spluttering in outrage at this point. You may be asking “What the hell good is that? You can’t check dates past the end of the table! You can only validate the past!

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Wrong, semicolon-breath! Remember, by hypothesis you’ve been handed the date after it may have been clobbered by rollover. Each input value corresponds to a countable infinity of future dates. Think of the set of future time values as being sort of striped like an old-fashioned barber pole; the algorithm will return “true” or “false” over the red parts, with white gaps where it returns “undetermined”. Each red/white pair of stripes will have exactly the width of a rollover period. (Pinning down positions and relative widths would involve painful details about hidden magic numbers and logic in the receiver firmware. The above is a good enough first approximation.)

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“Er, wait.” you say. “Won’t all future dates return either rolled-over or or undetermined?” Why, yes, that’s true. But what’s the future? I did not say you could have the system clock as an input to your algorithm. I left that out deliberately; ideally, we’d like to be able to use the GPS to set that clock. I’ll return to this issue shortly (cue ominous background music).

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Look, I did warn you it was ugly. This problem is really a test of lateral-thinking ability: can you Kobayashi-Maru it?

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But we are not yet at the end of the suck (ominous background music wells in volume).

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Another A&D regular, Patrick Maupin, Koybayashi-Maru’d the problem in a different way than I did. He pointed out that, if you can get a year estimate within 512 weeks from the leap-second input, there’s a way to interpret a week/tow pair that gives you a firm date. Someone else pointed out (at about the same time I was getting there myself) that a curve-fit to the historical leap-second data might give us good enough confidence in predicting years of future leap seconds. Then somebody else muttered that Trimble, a GPS vendor, has a patent on a similar technique.

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I shrugged and started writing code anyway. First step: hack up a script to parse the U.S. Naval Observatory’s leap-second history. Run a least-squares fit on the data and see what the residuals look like (you don’t want a higher-order curve fit on random data with a strong central tendency, as it would tend to over-weight outliers).

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As I was doing this, I ran across the Trimble patent. To say this is “junk” would be to wallow in understatement. There’s prior art, it failed the obviousness test, over-broad, badly drafted – if there’s any way this patent is not utterly bogus, I couldn’t find it. Fuck ‘em; if they send me a C&D I can tell them to stick it where the sun don’t shine.

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Um, but. Turned out there were two problems between me and a patent fight. The first was that the maximum residual on my least-squares fit was 215 weeks – close enough to 512 to make me nervous and that’s only on the past data. I didn’t like that abrupt change in the trend line in ’98, either; it suggested that there could well be enough randomness at decadal scales to break the estimation.

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And then….I looked through our device drivers, just to check, and discovered that for older firmware revs of the most widely-used GPS receiver chip on the market…we can’t get leap second out of it. So much for that idea. In fact, it turns out there is only one time reference we have reliably available; the host-system clock. (Ominous background music reaches a thundering crescendo.)

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Well, on the one hand, this means we can forget about using the GPS to set the system clock. On the other hand, life is now much simpler. Since we must rely on the system clock anyway, all the estimation stuff goes out the window, and the logic for determining the current rollover period is near trivial.

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In this case, embracing the suck isn’t so bad.

diff --git a/20110124175649.blog b/20110124175649.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c41e733 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110124175649.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +The smartphone wars: Samsung folds under pressure +

Some months ago I wrote (in Flattening the Smartphone Market) about the real significance of the Android 2.2 announcement. That was the moment that Google made clear that it intended to take control of the smartphone feature list from the cell carriers. Subsequently, carrier-loaded crapware and suppression of features like hotspot and tethering have been in decline under market pressure. The release of the T-Mobile G-2 and the Samsung Galaxy S (marketed as “the pure Google experience”) have been indicators of this trend.

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I should have added that 2.2 takes control of the smartphone feature list away from handset vendors as well. A leak by someone claiming to be a T-mobile employee in the know alleged that Samsung has been dragging its feet on 2.2 upgrades for the Samsung Vibrant, hoping customers will upgrade to the Vibrant 4G in order to get the 2.2 that ships with it. Now comes word that Samsung has folded under pressure from the maneuver and announced an OTA update schedule for 2.2 on the Vibrant.

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Other handset makers will take the same lesson the carriers are a few quarters further along in learning – footdragging on Android upgrades is one of those sleazy customer-control tactics that only works as long as the Argus-eyes of the Internet haven’t spotted it, at which point it becomes marketing suicide. Samsung just barely dodged the bullet this time by reversing itself and announcing an upgrade schedule quickly, but exactly nobody will believe the spin that the delay was due to technical problems. Samsung’s planners can bet Android fans will be watching the company’s upgrade timeliness like hawks in the future and they will not be kind about undue delays. In an intensely competitive handset market, Samsung cannot afford to take that hit to its brand image.

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What we’ve just seen is another ratchet-step in the commoditization of the smartphone market.

diff --git a/20110126203727.blog b/20110126203727.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f70d7a9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110126203727.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: The Fall and Fall of Windows Phone 7 +

And now, for a bit of comic relief, let us examine the state of Windows Phone 7. It launched just over three months ago in a cloud of hubris – Microsoft’s first-ship party featured pallbearers lugging a huge mockup of an iPhone (and the rest of what you need to know about that moment was that the video was caught by an Android phone). Just how is Redmond’s bid to escape irrelevance doing?

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Not well enough for Microsoft to want to disclose sales figures, apparently. While Google reports 200K Android phones a day are shipping, Microsoft is reduced to gamely insisting that it is confident Windows 7 will eventually succeed. At least one of its channel partners is, shall we say, less sanguine.

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James Choi, a strategist at handset maker LG, says “From an industry perspective we had a high expectation, but from a consumer point of view the visibility is less than we expected”. Choi holds out some hope that WP7 will make better sales as it is ported to less expensive handsets, but that hope itself suggests the software is hobbled by bloat and poor performance.

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Developers aren’t showing up in droves either. Microsoft claims 6K apps in its store, a poor showing when Android and Apple are both well above 100K.

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In truth, WP7’s prospects were never very good. It has neither Apple’s reputation for UI and polish to build on nor Android’s low-cost and open-source appeal to hardware partners, and was launched years after both competitors were well established. The disastrous failure of the Kin phones gave Microsoft a black eye in the youth market, and Blackberry had already captured high-end corporate customers with deluxe Microsoft Outlook support before Microsoft itself got there to contest the territory. There was early speculation that Nokia (now helmed by a Microsoft alumnus) might jump to WP7 rather than Android or its faltering MeeGo project, but that prospect has faded in the face of continuing silence from both companies.

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Microsoft claims 93% of its customers are satisfied with WP7, but one can’t help asking asking “93% of how many?” This is a product still looking for a market, motivated by Microsoft’s belief that it needs a play in the smartphone space rather than either customer pull or any kind of innovative value-add.

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I predicted that WP7 would be a bust, swamped by Android and iOS. This was not a projection that required a lot of nerve even before launch; today, three months in and with nothing in the way of visible market penetration to show for all of Microsoft’s hype, it’s a complete no-brainer. No rabbit got pulled out of any hat, and network effects are pushing against WP7 rather than for it.

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It would take an event at least as dramatic as Nokia betting the company on WP7 to revive this product. But I think nothing like that will happen, and that WP7’s affect on the smartphone market will amount to nothing more than statistical noise.

diff --git a/20110127153839.blog b/20110127153839.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..81eae19 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110127153839.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: AT&T CEO reveals all +

Well, well, well. A hot-off-the-press AP article, “AT&T CEO: We’ll push Android phones”, finally sheds light on the vexing question of why AT&T let Apple out of its exclusive a year early. It’s just stuffed full of revelations, but the implication the reporter fails to draw is bigger than any of the fascinating facts on exhibit.

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AT&T letting the iPhone go looked mysterious because most of us – including Android fans like myself – accepted the premise that the iPhone is a significant marketing advantage for any carrier that has it, generating lots of premium business (high-margin sales to relatively price-insensitive customers). But now it looks like that’s not true – and furthermore, Apple may have been pushed out of its exclusive as much as it jumped.

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From the article: “AT&T [...] signed up a net of just 400,000 new customers on contract-based wireless plans in the last three months of last year. It was the lowest quarterly number in at least five years.” This is pretty shocking in general, and has very specific implications about the state of the iPhone brand. The first Christmas season after the iPhone 4 release should have been a banner quarter for the product, with heavy Apple and AT&T marketing leading to a healthy bump in new AT&T sales. But this didn’t happen.

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We already knew that AT&T has plans to introduce a dozen Android phones over the next year. Now its CEO says it will be marketing them aggressively. The implication is clear: AT&T believes joining the Android army will boost its flagging new-contract numbers. (One may safely guess that this is also a bid to increase profit margins by lowering the per-phone cost-of-goods.)

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The article says “the iconic [iPhone] has lost much of its power to attract customers from other carriers”. Evidently; viewed in that light, that 400K new-contracts number, on volume of 4.1 million iPhones activated, is a disaster. Best case for Apple, if those were all iPhones, would be that the market that AT&T can reach is about 90% saturated, with sales of the device coming almost entirely from repeat customers. Since we know AT&T’s product mix isn’t all iPhone, the actual saturation percentage is higher and number of new iPhone customers is lower.

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My mind is just boggling. Far from scoring a coup, Verizon may have just bought the biggest bag of substanceless hype and wind Steve Jobs has ever peddled while AT&T snickers behind its hand. The iPhone brand is in worse shape than I thought was even possible. And the implications of that are huge.

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First: We can expect Verizon’s iPhone sales to be anemic. A bit of arithmetic applied to this chart tells us Verizon has been churning about 93M * 1.42% * 3 = 396K customers a quarter – about the same as that deadly 400K. The smart way to bet is that most of Verizon’s potential Apple customers decamped to AT&T long ago and are part of that 90% saturation.

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Second: Anybody betting their dollars or reputation that Apple’s “superior user experience” would guarantee it perpetually increasing market share just took it on the chin, hard. AT&T’s CEO has just told us as plainly as a CEO ever does that that theory is busted. AT&T’s bet is on Android now.

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Third: The iPhone is in deep trouble. 4.1 million activations looks like a lot, but any product manager will tell you that in a market moving as fast as smartphones, a product with less that 10% new customers in a quarter is usually only a few quarters from market share decline. Comparing this to the 600% quarter-over-quarter growth rates Android has been posting just doesn’t look good.

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Over a year ago, when Android was shiny-new and I was just beginning to analyze the smartphone market, I predicted that the ubiquity game would beat the control game. This has since been happening at a rate even my boldest predictions couldn’t keep up with, and the accelerator pedal just got another stomp.

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UPDATE: The article allows us to total up AT&T iOS activations (counting iPads) at about 4.5M for the quarter. Google says it’s activating Android devices at a rate of 200K * 90 = 18M per quarter. Conclusion: Android is outrunning iOS at a 4:1 ratio.

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UPDATE2: UPDATE was incorrect. First, turns out it’s 300K or 24M Android devices per quarter, but that’s a worldwide number rather than a U.S. one. So to compute the actual ratio we need to know the percentage of Android sales going overseas. If it’s 33% or less – which seems likely based on press reports of “more limited” overseas sales – 4:1 or more is still right.

diff --git a/20110131170457.blog b/20110131170457.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5714b6d --- /dev/null +++ b/20110131170457.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Android hits #1 +

The technology press is abuzz with news of a report from Canalys that Android is now the #1 smartphone platform in the world, with its 33% share of sales edging out Symbian’s 31% and far surpassing Apple’s 16%. In the U.S, Android smartphones are now 53% of all sold.

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Once again, I was expecting this, but not so soon. As volume production of cheap Android handsets in Asia drove down prices the doom of the aging and stagnant Symbian platform was sealed, but I wasn’t expecting actual market share crossover until the end of 2Q2011. Once again, Android has exceeded expectations with eye-popping growth.

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The pressure on Symbian just ratcheted up another notch. It’s reported that Nokia has scheduled a “strategy announcement” for Feb 11. Investors will be demanding a bold move to counter the catastrophic erosion in Nokia’s market share – this time last year they were #1 at 44%.

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The odds that Nokia will junk its floundering Maemo/MeeGo plans and bail out to Android look quite a bit stronger to me than they did yesterday. If that happens, it’s game over for every other smartphone platform; even Apple’s iOS would have trouble retaining app developers against an Android with entree to 64% of the world’s handsets, and that’s before Android’s inevitable growth in the next quarter!

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It’s difficult to see what alternative to Android Nokia has now. Some analysts have touted Windows Phone 7, but that’s been doing so badly since its October launch that Microsoft refuses to utter even a ballpark sales figure. Independent estimates have it at most 2%, and the last thing Nokia needs is to tie a millstone owned by another company around its neck.

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Nor is there much comfort for Apple fans in the tablet market; Barron’s reports that the iPad’s share has dropped from 96% to %75 in the last quarter under pressure from the Samsung Galaxy Tab and other Android devices. And these are relatively expensive – when Android tablets hit true volume production based on system-on-chip engines, there will be probably be a three-figure priced delta drawing customers to Android.

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Google’s strategy of using open source to create a huge multivendor Android mob that swarms every competitor with sheer weight of numbers seems to be working.

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UPDATE: And the most entertaining news about WP7 may be the fact that it’s being outsold by Windows Mobile. Yes, brand-new WP7 is a weak enough customer draw that it’s being outsold by an ancient pile of festering crap.

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UPDATE2: 22% for Android tablets is probably false. Looks like Samsung was doing some WP7-like channel stuffing. No figures on actual sell-through yet.

diff --git a/20110203151520.blog b/20110203151520.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cae0c9f --- /dev/null +++ b/20110203151520.blog @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +Heavy weather and bad juju +

Many primitive societies believe that maleficient spirits cause all sorts of human misfortune that in the modern West we have learned to attribute to natural causes – cattle dying, crops failing, disease, drought, that sort of thing. A few societies have developed a more peculiar form of supernaturalism, in which evil spirits recede into the background and all misfortune is caused by the action of maleficient human sorcerers who must be found and rooted out to end the harm.

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A society like that may be a grim, paranoid place with everyone constantly on the hunt for sorcerers – but a sorcerer can be punished or killed more easily than a spirit or a blind force of nature. Therein lies the perverse appeal of this sort of belief system, what I’ll call “sorcerism” – you may not be able to stop your cattle from dying, but at least you can find the bastard who did it and hurt him until you feel better. Maybe you can even prevent the next cattle-death. You are not powerless.

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English needs, I think, a word for “beliefs which are motivated by the terror of being powerless against large threats”. I think I tripped over this in an odd place today, and it makes me wonder if our society may be talking itself into a belief system not essentially different from sorcerism.

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I have a friend who I’ll label “R” for purposes of this essay. I had a twitter exchange with him in which I said something about anthropogenic global warming being the “dogma of the day”. But this essay is not about AGW, except possibly indirectly. It actually starts with what he gave as his reasons for believing that human beings have screwed up the planet’s climate. At twitter length, this was the recent spate of really bad weather – deep winter all over the Northern Hemisphere, the record storms and floods in Australia, and a couple of other particulars I’ll omit because they’re identifying of him. It was evident that he found these developments quite threatening.

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Unlike R, I read a lot of history and thus know a fair bit about how weather impact has been perceived by humans over time. It is a fact that the 20th century was an abnormally lucky hundred years, meteorologically speaking. The facts I managed to jam into tweets included (a) the superstorm that flooded 300 square miles of the Central Valley in California in the 1860s, (b) rainfall levels we’d consider drought conditions were normal in the U.S. Midwest before about 1905, and (c) storms of a violence we’d find hard to believe were commonly reported in the 1800s. I had specifically in mind something I learned from the book Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, which relays eyewitness accounts of thunderstorms so intense that travelers had to steeple their hands over their noses in order to breathe air instead of water; but a sense that storms of really theatrical violence were once common comes through in many other histories.

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We had a quiet century geophysically as well – no earthquakes even nearly as bad as the New Madrid event of 1812, which broke windows as far north as Montreal. And no solar storms to compare with the Carrington Event of 1859, which seriously damaged the then-nascent telegraph infrastructure and if it recurred today would knock out power and telecomms so badly that we’d be years recovering and casualties would number in the hundreds of thousands, possibly the millions.

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(I’m concentrating on 19th-century reports because those tended to be well-documented, but earlier records tell us it was the 20th century calm that was unusual, not the 19th-century violence.)

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The awkward truth is that there are very large forces in play in the biosphere, and when they wander out of the ranges we’re adapted to, we suffer and die a lot and there really isn’t a great deal we can do about it; we don’t operate at the required energy scales. For that matter, I can think of several astronomical catastrophes that could be lurking just outside our light-cone only to wipe out all multicellular life on Earth next week. Reality is like that.

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But none of this would fit in a tweet, so what I said in summary was that this may be the new normal – or, rather, the old normal returning. Humans didn’t do it.

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What I got back was a torrent of political abuse that nearly singed my eyebrows. But it wasn’t the vehemence that perplexed me, it was the non-sequitur quality of it.

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R is a bright, funny guy, and I love him dearly. But like many geeks, he has some of the traits of a high-functioning autist (and, in his case, I’ve met a couple of relatives who are straight-up autistic). He has an IQ well into the genius range, but doesn’t handle novelty well. This makes it difficult for him to, for example, learn new software tools – if he gets frustrated initially, he will often form a negative judgment that blocks him from learning more, and get so emotionally stuck on that judgment that it takes dynamite or clever ju-jitsu to pry him loose of it.

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So this reaction wasn’t entirely surprising to me. One of my recurring roles in R’s life is to introduce novelty into it. This happens naturally because I’m strongly novelty-seeking, and when I trip over something that delights me he tends to hear about it. It also means that I’m used to occasionally transgressing the limits of his rather conservative temperament and having him blow up at me about it. All in a day’s friendship, really, and it generally passes.

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This time, though, the reaction seemed extreme even for him – finishing with an almost literal fingers in the ears and “La-la-la-la! I can’t hear you!”. It gave me pause. And I started to think about it.

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The most puzzling thing about the whole exchange was his insistence on interpreting my talk about the weather as a political move. I report the Central Valley superstorm of 1861-62 and R’s response is “When did you turn into Rush Limbaugh?” Uh, WTF, over?

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It took me a while to model the frame of mind that produced this, but when I managed to I had an insight. Which is why I’m writing this essay. I think, now, what I actually threatened was R’s belief that he, or somebody, could do something emotionally satisfying about the bad weather. Fix it, or prevent it from recurring, or at least punish the bastards who did it.

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Supernaturalizing the causes of large-scale misfortunes has become a difficult strategy to sustain for anyone with more exposure to modern scientific knowledge than a cinderblock. Politicizing them into someone’s bad juju, however…that’s easy. And, perhaps, more attractive than ever before – because the alternative is to feel powerless, and that is painful.

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Science and the increase in our control over our immediate environment at the small scale may, in fact, be driving us back towards a sort of sorcerism by making the feeling of powerlessness more painful. We are children of humanism and the Enlightenment; terror of the storm and dark is something we associate with the bad old days of angry gods. We should be beyond that now…shouldn’t we?

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Thus, the politicization of every bad thing that happens. And people like R, for whom “When did you turn into Rush Limbaugh?” becomes a sort of aversive charm to ward off fear of the Central Valley superstorm and its like.

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Yes, we need a word for this, too. Not “sorcerism”; “politicism”, perhaps. The insistence on locating for every large-scale problem a human cause that can be addressed through politics and a set of serviceable villains to punish. Also, the insistence that anyone who rejects the politically fashionable explanation must be in league with the evil sorcerers.

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Unfortunately, reality isn’t like that. If a supernova goes off within eight parsecs of us and strips off the Earth’s ozone layer it won’t have been Halliburton or the International Communist Conspiracy that did it. And if the Central Valley superstorm does repeat on us – well, statistically that looked pretty likely at a mean interval of about 150 years; welcome to your new normal, and hunting for the evil carbon-or-whatever emitters that did it is highly unlikely to do any more than supplying you with a scapegoat to ease your hurt feelings.

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Finally…feeling powerless may suck, but on the whole it’s preferable to sorcerer hunts. People get killed in sorcerer hunts, almost always people who are innocent. One reason I’m not a politicist is that I don’t want to be any part of a howling mob. It’s a form of self-restraint I recommend to others.

diff --git a/20110205080409.blog b/20110205080409.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..01967b2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110205080409.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +A major secret of effective writing +

I’m in the process of editing a document for a technical project that is intended to be an introduction for newbies to certain fairly complex issues. While requesting feedback on the project mailing list, I realized that I had accidentally revealed a major secret of really top-grade writing, exactly the sort of thing that put The Cathedral and the Bazaar on the New York Times best-seller list.

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I see no reason not to share it with my readers. So here is the relevant part of my request for feedback:

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Please fix typos and outright grammatical errors. If you think you have spotted a higher-level usage problem or awkwardness, check with me before changing it. What you think is technically erroneous may be expressive voice.

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Explanation: Style is the contrast between expectation and surprise. Poets writing metric poetry learn to introduce small breaks in scansion in order to induce tension-and-release cycles at a higher level that will hold the reader’s interest. The corresponding prose trick is to bend usage rules or change the register of the writing slightly away from what the reader unconsciously expects. If you try to “fix” these you will probably be stepping on an intended effect. So check first.

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(I will also observe that unless you are already an unusually skilled writer, you should not try to replicate this technique; the risk of sounding affected or just teeth-jarringly bad is high. As Penn & Teller puts it, “These stunts are being performed by trained, professional idiots.”)

diff --git a/20110209075322.blog b/20110209075322.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7382b5c --- /dev/null +++ b/20110209075322.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Elop’s Burning Platform +

Wall Street Journal’s TechEurope is running the full text of an astonishingly candid memo by the CEO of Nokia. Read the whole thing, in which Elop says Nokia’s performance and strategy over the last few years has been a disaster and it’s time to jump off the burning platform before the company is consumed by flames.

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I think we can deduce three things from this memo. First, Elop’s appreciation of how bad a fix Nokia is in is complete. Second, he’s going to jump Nokia to WP7 or Android when the promised strategy announcement happens in two days from now. And third, there are some subtle pro-Android clues in there.

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If this memo does nothing else, it proves that Elop is not afraid to look facts in the eye and propose drastic remedies for a near-terminal situation. I cannot recall ever hearing in my lifetime a CEO’s assessment of his own corporation that is so shockingly blunt about the trouble it is in. The degree of candor here is really quite admirable, and does more than any other evidence I’ve seen to suggest Elop has the leadership ability to navigate Nokia out of its slump.

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It’s clear from the memo that Elop is preparing his company to change their flagship smartphone OS. You can’t get more obvious than ‘We too, are standing on a “burning platform,” and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour.’

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The available alternatives are Android or WP7. Apple’s iOS is right out because Nokia needs to be able to sell cheap on a huge range of handsets. RIM and WebOS are tied to one company each. MeeGo’s been tried and failed. There are no other realistic contenders.

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I think we’re being given some subtle clues that it will be Android.

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Microsoft can dream all it wants of creating a third force in the smartphone OS market, but the brute economic fact it can’t make go away is that it can only price-compete with Android by selling every copy of WP7 at a loss, forever. Google can write off its Android NRE because Android is a feeder to a robust ad business – they did exactly what I taught them to in ’99 and found a secondary market to monetize. Microsoft doesn’t have the same option.

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This fact has stark implications for a Microsoft/Nokia tie-up. Because, basically, Nokia can’t afford to pay license fees to Microsoft. Consider what HTC and Samsung would do, playing Nokia’s volume-production game against Nokia with an OS that is already clobbering the living shit out of WP7 in market perception and has a lower bill-of-materials feed-through to consumer pricing.

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If Microsoft wants to use Nokia to grab market share, they’re going to have to subsidize Nokia to the tune of billions of dollars in foregone license revenue to get it. And where would the returns to Microsoft come from? I don’t see any strategic gain here, nor revenue enhancement for their core businesses.

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Elop has shown by writing this memo that he’s not stupid. He has to have figured out that WP7 would put Nokia at a serious competitive disadvantage absent huge subsidies, and that if huge subsidies were in the deal they wouldn’t be sustainable for Microsoft.

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That’s the business logic. Now let’s look back at the text of the memo.

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Android and Apple’s are the only competing smartphone platforms mentioned by name. RIM gets no mention, Microsoft gets no mention. There’s no groundwork being laid here to justify moving to either of the latter. If Elop were contemplating WP7 seriously, I’d have expected the memo to include at least some attempt to spin WP7’s truly godawful performance in its first quarter.

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(Reminder: WP7 is selling so badly that Microsoft won’t utter a sales figure and lost 1.5% market share this last quarter, according to comScore. One of my commenters turned up a report that they’re seeing 50-80% returns on WP7 devices, and other sources report WP7’s being outsold by Windows Mobile. A firm foundation for future success this is not.)

diff --git a/20110210192805.blog b/20110210192805.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..938747e --- /dev/null +++ b/20110210192805.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: iPhone 4V Falls To Earth +

So the Verizon iPhone arrives, iOS is finally multicarrier, and consumer first-day reaction is “meh…not interested”. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting this.

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Yes, I predicted, based on looking at AT&T’s 4Q2010 numbers, that Verizon iPhone sales would be “anemic”. There are statistical clues that AT&T has already largely saturated the market of people who really want an iPhone. But the way I was expecting things to play out was for a strong initial burst of sales to true believers to be followed with an unusually rapid fall-off. This is not the result we got.

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All day, reports were of short or no lines at Apple stores; several news stories reported that Apple employees, reporters, and cops laid on for crowd control consistently outnumbered the actual customers.

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It is just as interesting that Apple and Verizon seem to have been caught completely flatfooted by the slackness of demand. They overstaffed, overprepared, and in all ways behaved as though they were braced for a buyer feeding frenzy. This, of course, had the effect of emphasizing that slackness.

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I have no doubt that Apple and Verizon’s publicists will be engaging in some frenetic spin control over the next week. You’ll hear a lot of talk about record pre-order levels for the iPhone V, but watch for what you probably won’t hear – actual sales numbers, either for pre-orders or first-week in-store volume. What we’re likely to get is evasiveness on a par with Microsoft’s refusal to speak figures about WP7 sales. And what that will mean is that all three companies are running scared of what market analysts will say when they learn that a much-touted product has bombed.

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I’m confident in these predictions because we know what success looks like; we’ve seen it often enough with the first-day frenzies surrounding previous iPhones. But that dog has failed to bark this time. Stage ignition not achieved, Houston we have a problem.

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What happened here? How did a product that had been the focus of almost worshipful intensity fizzle like this? And what conspired to fool Apple and Verizon about the demand level?

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Several hypotheses suggest themselves. One, which I’ve discussed here before, is simply that iPhone V is a weak product. It’s a serious problem for Apple that its phones only handle 3G when the transition to HSDPA and 4G/LTE is well underway; there were signs that this was impacting demand as early as the iPhone 4 launch last summer.

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Ever since, it’s been clear that Apple must be bleeding potential customers to faster Android phones like the Sprint EVO and T-Mobile G-2. Nobody knew in what volume, but a craving for faster data rates was differentially more likely in the elite professionals, creatives, and youth market that Apple targets especially heavily. Now I think we’re getting a clue that this was not minor lossage – that, in fact, Android has siphoned off essentially all the growth there.

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Another hypothesis is that the mass of iPhone customers were never as brand-loyal as the company believed. It may be they only looked that way because for the first couple of years after the 2007 launch there was nothing to match the product in features and perceived quality. Support for this one comes from the fact that iPhone market share has been much larger than Apple computer market share. The question we should perhaps thought to ask was this: if the iPhone was creating Apple loyalists in volume, why did their PC market share remain stable at a much lower level?

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Now it’s 2011, the iPhone V is surrounded by cheap Android handsets with faster networking, and it begins to look as they have sucked away almost all the demand that we might otherwise have seen as block-long lines at Apple stores today.

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As for how Apple and Verizon got fooled…well, one of the dangers of being really good at marketing is that you can start believing your own hype. Apple, if not Verizon, is a company composed almost entirely of people from the same demographic niches it has focused on in the past. I think they may be beginning to have trouble seeing outside that bubble.

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The reality check is: how many of the phones did they actually sell, in preorders and today? How many will they sell over the next few weeks and the quarter? This is a question that we should not stop asking, and the importance of asking it rises directly with Apple’s reluctance to answer.

diff --git a/20110211071113.blog b/20110211071113.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..830bf86 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110211071113.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Nokia’s Suicide Note +

Stephen Elop has jumped his company off the burning platform, all right. And, I judge, straight into the fire.

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No, the choice that seals Nokia’s doom isn’t the tie-up with Microsoft (though that’s problematic enough, and I’ll get back to it). It’s the way Elop has failed to resolve Nokia’s drift and lack of a strategic focus. Instead of addressing this problem, Elop plans to institutionalize it by splitting the company into two business units that will pursue different – and, in fact, mutually opposing – strategies.

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After the brutal clarity of the “burning platform” memorandum, this is deeply disappointing. And not viable. One of my commenters voiced my very thought: the death spiral begins now.

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The plan Elop has pulled out from under wraps effectively splits Nokia in two. The “Smart Devices” piece own MeeGo and Symbian Smartphones, and is expected to work with Microsoft on developing a portfolio of WP7 phones. The “Mobile Phones” part is expected to “leverage its innovation and strength in growth markets to connect the next billion people and bring them affordable access to the Internet and applications.” The vagueness of this remit is telling. Clearly “Mobile Phones” is expected to milk the Third-World market for Symbian dumb-phones as long as it can, but “affordable access to the Internet and applications” implies low-cost smartphones as well.

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So not only does the new plan bless Nokia’s internal confusion by breaking the company in half, one of the daughter units (“Mobile Phones”) has two incompatible missions, one of which (the smartphone end) is at cross-purposes with the other daughter unit (“Smart Devices”). Another indicator of the those cross-purposes that both units have missions involving Symbian. So, which unit is going to own the Symbian codebase? Are they going to fork it?

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Actually, the “Smart Devices” unit has confusions of its own. It’s expected to manage no fewer than three platforms – MeeGo, high-end Symbian, and WP7. Nothing has been resolved here! We’re looking at a plan that will scatter Nokia’s management bandwidth and engineering talent in four different directions, formalizing the existence of product-line and line-of-business silos when what the company needed to do was exactly the opposite – shoot the weak horses through the head, end the internal infighting, and focus.

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Unspoken, but left on the table, is a strong likelihood that “Mobile Devices” is going to have to add a fifth platform to the mix (that is, after MeeGo, WP7, and two flavors of Symbian). They’re supposed to “bring affordable access to the Internet and applications”, and one of the pressures behind this reorg is that Symbian simply can’t carry that load. With MeeGo assigned to the other business unit, what alternative are they going to have other than to become an Android OEM?

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In fact, the only level on which this dog’s breakfast of trying to do everything at once makes any sense is if Elop wants to preserve that possibility. Could we be looking at a clever scheme to collect transfer payments from Microsoft with one hand (“Smart Devices”) while the other hand makes the real running with low-cost Android smartphones? I don’t know – but one thing to keep an eye on will be relative staffing levels. If most of the talent and the bodies go to Mobile Phones, might be the actual goal is for Microsoft to be taken for a subsidy-sucking ride by Smart Devices, buying time and capital for the other business unit.

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All the old reasons a WP7 commitment was a bad idea remain problems under the new order. WP7 has bombed in its first quarter; there’s actual evidence that it’s not competitive. This means that the alliance does nothing to address Nokia’s historic weakness in the North American market. Then, too, it’s going to take time to get WP7 to market on Nokia hardware; one of their press releases describes 2011 and 2012 as “transition years”, a pretty strong hint that Nokia thinks both business units will have to struggle through a valley of death and shrinking Symbian sales before the new plan starts to bear fruit.

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(Would an Android port take less time? Yes. Judging by current product cycle times for Android handsets, port time for the handset makers has to be bounded above by 90 days. My bet is that Android port time is actually down to two weeks and change. History matters; the Android codebase is designed to be ported in ways Microsoft is probably culturally incapable of even imagining.)

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And none of the problems with having someone else own the core software of your product have gone away. Elop is an ex-Microsoftie and can therefore be presumed to know all of Microsoft’s tricks for skimming the profit off that kind of relationship while laying the risks off on the hapless partner. If Nokia actually profited from the alliance it would be unprecedented.

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Is Elop devious enough to think that “Smart Devices” can head-fake Microsoft into supplying the capital for “Mobile Phones” to make an Android play? That’s the only reading of this crazy plan that makes any sense to me; the alternative is that Elop simply capitulated to Nokia’s internal confusion rather than even trying to fix it.

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But if that’s what Elop thinks he’s doing, he’s taking a hell of a risk. The reorg may dissipate Nokia’s people and energies into so many officially-sanctioned missions that it can’t execute on any of them – in fact I think that’s the outcome to bet on. It’s the company that’s burning now, not the platform; I would no longer bet on Nokia surviving another 24 months.

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UPDATE: Nokia takes a hammering on the Helsinki stock exchange as investors react to lack of focus and failure to cut bloated R&D expenses.

diff --git a/20110213051803.blog b/20110213051803.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f7bdcc4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110213051803.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +How to buy an Android phone +

Recently there was a request for advice on a mailing list I frequent, on how to choose an Android phone from the plethora of offerings out there. Here’s what I had to say on the matter:

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1) Because Android is Android, the underlying hardware – and thus the vendor – is a significant differentiator. Pick one with a good track record. My favorite is still HTC, but Samsung and Motorola are turning out good kit as well. Stay out of Motorola’s price basement, though, some of their low-end handsets are best avoided.

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2) Staying out of the price basement is in general a good idea. It’s not so much that the low-end phones lack features as that they’re more likely to be afflicted by poor build quality and carrier crapware.

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3) Do not buy a phone running an Android variant that has been skinned. If you see “runs MotoBlur” or “runs SenseUI”, avoid. These skins don’t add any value and tend to be flying cover for crapware and promotional tie-ins. Thankfully this is a receding problem and will probably be history by year end.

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4) Do give extra consideration to any handset supported by CyanogenMOD. This will guarantee you an upgrade path even if the vendor drags its feet about them.

diff --git a/20110214225104.blog b/20110214225104.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..233a66c --- /dev/null +++ b/20110214225104.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Nokia shareholders revolt! +

Well, that didn’t take long. Just a few hours ago I was speculating in a comment thread that Stephen Elop’s cozy deal with Microsoft Microsoft might lead to a fairly near-term shareholder revolt, and lo, it has occurred. Welcome to Plan B.

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This is pretty dynamite stuff. A group of Nokia shareholders is planning an attempted coup at the May 3rd general meeting. They want to start by firing Elop and his henchmen, then reframe the Microsoft tie-up as a tactical play for the U.S. market, then put the company fully behind MeeGo as their bid for the smartphone future.

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The question is, can it possibly work?

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Maybe. I have to say that on first reading Plan B sounds a helluva lot more sober and credible than Elop’s jump into the arms of Redmond. Well, except for the part where they don’t tell Microsoft to pound sand, that is. The points about concentrating rather than dispersing R&D will strike most open-source programmers as an odd thing to focus on (our culture is used to cross-time-zone collaboration and does it pretty well) but as a tactic for fully concentrating on a six-month sprint to get a MeeGo handset out the door it probably makes sense.

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Why do I say six months? Because I found a MeeGo dev who was willing to let me quiz him. He thinks tablet MeeGO and the infrastructure for handset MeeGO is in good shape; the work that’s left to be done is specific handset applications. When I asked him how long that would take, he considered a bit and said “6 months if it were being done entirely in house”. He fingered the open-governance process as a drag on time to market, which I’m guessing reflects the same growing plains that led the Plan B group to put centralizing R&D on their bullet list. Sounds like the project needed that fine old open-source tradition of a benevolent dictator but didn’t have one.

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That six-month figure is interesting because it means my source could be low in his estimate by a factor of two without making MeeGo’s time-to-market worse than WP7’s.

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Absent from Plan B is any kind of Android story. The Plan B backers seem to share Elop’s belief that Nokia would have its profit margins planed away to zero by Asian competition if it went that route. And I think they’re unwise not to simply tell Microsoft to shove WP7 up its own ass.

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Still, even with these reservations, I think Plan B is more likely to maintain Nokia as a viable company than Elop’s. It has the advantage that Microsoft’s ability and willingness to hold up its end aren’t critical to the plan. There’s a string of dead companies, including in the cellphone space both Sendo and Danger, that could tell you how very huge an advantage that is.

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UPDATE: Alas, the Plan B effort has folded. Institutional investors didn’t go for it.

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UPDATE2: And don’t miss this artful mockery. Of the Elop deal, nor plan B. I think…

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UPDATE3: Now we learn that Plan B was a hoax. You know what’s really sad? That the hoax still sounds more credible than Nokia’s actual business plan even when I know it’s a hoax.

diff --git a/20110216172954.blog b/20110216172954.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ae9e047 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110216172954.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Collabortage +

Yes, that’s a new word in the blog title: collabortage. It’s a tech-industry phenomenon that needed a name and never had one before. Collabortage is what happens when a promising product or technology is compromised, slowed down, and ultimately ruined by a strategic alliance between corporations that was formed (at least ostensibly) to develop it and bring it to market.

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Collabortage always looks accidental, like a result of exhaustion or management failure. Contributing factors tend to include: poor communication between project teams on opposite sides of an intercorporate barrier, never-resolved conflicts between partners about project objectives, understaffing by both partners because each expects the other to do the heavy lifting, and (very often) loss of internal resource-contention battles to efforts fully owned by one player.

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Occasionally the suspicion develops that collabortage was deliberate, the underhanded tactic of one partner (usually the larger one) intended to derail a partner whose innovations might otherwise have disrupted a business plan.

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I coined the term during an IRC conversation after a friend expressed dark suspicions that the MeeGo alliance between Intel and Nokia might have been a ploy by Intel to screw up Nokia’s ARM-centered product strategy in order to favor Intel’s Atom processors. I do not endorse this theory, but it started me thinking of various historical examples, such as Microsoft’s browser-technology collaboration with Spyglass, for which there is in fact strong reason to suspect deliberate collabortage.

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Joint software projects seem especially prone to collabortage – joint software projects involving a port to new hardware even more so. Since I’ve been writing about it and people will ask, I don’t think Nokia’s just-concluded alliance with Microsoft is intentional collabortage; both companies need it to work too badly for that. On the other hand, read “In memoriam: Microsoft’s previous strategic mobile partners” to read about a great deal of (probably inadvertent) collabortage in Microsoft’s past.

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Feel free to point out other examples in the comment thread. The most interesting examples would be those in which there is reason to suspect intentional collabortage, but the unintentional kind is interesting too as an illustration of diseconomies of scale and the way partnerships often suffer from misaligned incentives.

diff --git a/20110218101057.blog b/20110218101057.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..06ff25c --- /dev/null +++ b/20110218101057.blog @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Tightening the OODA Loop +

An excellent article on the future of smartphones puts hard numbers to a trend I’ve been watching for two years. In so doing, it points out one of the fundamental competitive drivers in the smartphone market. More than that, it displays a powerful if sometimes less than obvious advantage of open-source software, and implicitly relates that to a seminal concept in military theory called the OODA (observe/orient/decide/act) loop.

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The single most interesting feature of the article is a graph of how the average lifetime of Android handset products has been falling over time; 3 years as recently as 2007, it’s now down to 6-9 months. Unstated in the article is that to sustain that pace, development cycles actually have to be shorter than that. If you look at the pace of announcements from (for example) HTC, it’s clear the development time of the more nimble Android players is actually down to approaching 90 days.

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The article also talks about the “Quadroid” standard, how intense competition in handset design has been fueled by a combination of inexpensive phone chipsets from Qualcomm and the Android OS. The effect of this combination is to drastically reduce both engineering expenses and time to market. It is, fundamentally, why development cycles can drop to around 90 days and product lifetimes to 6-9 months.

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There was a fighter pilot named John Boyd who became the most important strategic theorist writing in English during the 20th century. He began with E/M (energy-maneuverability theory), which became the basis on which modern fighter aircraft are designed and modern fighter tactics taught. He ended his career as one of the architects of the winning “left-hook” strategy in the 1991 Gulf War. Connecting these was a general theory of military effectiveness (and more generally, organizational effectiveness) centered around what he called the OODA loop.

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OODA theory is worth reading about in more depth for anyone interested in…well, any kind of competitive dynamics, actually – military, commercial, individual, anything. The Wikipedia article is a good start. Stripped to its essentials, the theory is that competing entities have to go through repeated iterations of observing conditions, relating observation to a generative theory, deciding what option to pursue, and acting. Victory tends to go to the competitor who can run this cycle the fastest.

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OODA theory was originally generalized from the observation that in fighter design, maneuverability (especially a shorter turning radius) beats straight-line speed. When you get inside your opponent’s OODA loop, either physically or conceptually, you can attack him from unexpected angles. You can be where he isn’t. You have the initiative; he is reduced to reacting, often with too little and too late.

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Now let’s look at the smartphone market, and consider Android vs. single vendors like Apple, RIM, or (now) NoWin (Microsoft/Nokia). Your single vendor has a product development cycle on the close order of a year – exemplified by the fact that the NoWin alliance announced just a week ago won’t commit to shipping a phone before 2012. Apple iPhone releases have been issuing on a predictable once-a-year schedule.

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The Android army, and some of its individual members, now has a development cycle approaching 90 days. It gets three or four cycles around the OODA loop to each one executed by Apple, RIM, or NoWin. This is, in particular, why the Android army has been winning the race to exploit new networking standards such as HSDPA and LTE. More generally, it means the Android army can exploit technology changes and the availability of new components such as SoCs (System-On-Chip ASICs) at a pace single vendors can’t match. Most generally, it means the Android army has a faster reaction to consumer demand.

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No OODA theorist would be surprised at the result; Android is clobbering the crap out of its less nimble competition – not just on price but on features as well. If you know OODA theory, you would predict this result as soon as it became clear that Android’s OODA loop was going to be shorter.

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Of course the Android army has had other things going for it as well. Lower engineering costs is an obvious one. Greater collective financial mass than any single vendor, implying the ability to spend more on development and marketing. All these tie together with tighter OODA in a way that has open-source software at its base. Open-source software is the key.

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Because Android is open source, developing and shipping handsets becomes less expensive. Because Android is open source, handset makers and carriers can join the Android army confident that they’re not setting themselves up for extortion by Google or any other single software source. Because Android is open source, Qualcomm and Nvidia can front the enormous investment to make SoCs specialized for Android in confidence that they’ll have a market of more than one customer.

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All these drivers increase competition and shorten time to market; Android’s OODA loop tightens, while Apple and RIM and NoWin stumble around trying to respond and fighting last year’s war against products designed last quarter. And come up short, as in Apple’s anticlimactic iPhone 4V launch last week.

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There is no possibility that the single vendors can win such a battle; Android’s OODA will inexorably tighten into a noose around their necks. I said this confidently in late 2008 when Android first shipped, and it wasn’t wishful thinking; the consequences of open source were as obvious then as they are now to anyone who was paying attention.

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I’m repeating the point now only partly as a study in the competitive dynamics of the smartphone market. Really, there’s nothing special about smartphones in this respect; the general effect of open source tightening the OODA loop operates elsewhere as well, with predictable consequences. We actually should have learned this a quarter century ago from the way that TCP/IP surpassed and almost completely destroyed proprietary networking protocols.

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The story doesn’t end in 2011. Android SoCs aren’t generally deployed yet. When they start shipping later this year in third-generation Android phones, the parts count on a minimal smartphone is going to drop to a single chip, a capacitive display, a speaker/mic, a couple of microswitches, and the PCB to mount them on. Qualcomm is already predicting retail unit costs of $75 or less, and it’s going to be less once the chip development costs are amortized out.

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The key to this possibility is that most of what used to be hardware costs in a smartphone have been ephemeralized – converted into information complexity inside the SoC. The combination of ephemeralization and open source is the fundamental of the fundamentals here. (Not entirely by coincidence, every single one of the billions of these Androids will have substantial pieces of my software inside it.)

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It’s anybody’s guess what the lower limit of the OODA loop is. Not so long ago, 90-day product development cycles would have been considered an insane dream – but the rise of 3D printing and commodity SoCs might very well cut time to prototype much further. I can now easily imagine a handset designer with good CAD tools and a 3D printer producing a testable phone in a week.

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What is certain is that single vendors going it alone will not be able to match this pace. They won’t have the SoCs and they won’t be able to match the number of engineer-hours going into the software. Their development and production costs will be higher. Consequently, they’ll be more risk-averse and unable to make decisions on a fast turnaround even if their technology permitted it; their OODA loop will never be able to tighten as much as Android’s.

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All these problems – all of them – are predictable consequences of having a business plan stuck to a huge heavy blob of closed-source software. That is the weight that will ultimately drag down and kill Android’s competitors.

diff --git a/20110223151340.blog b/20110223151340.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..417e960 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110223151340.blog @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Bricks and Battiness +

After the high drama of the last couple of weeks in the smartphone arena, it’s refreshing to encounter some good old-fashioned low comedy. We’ll get to more serious fare, but let’s take a look first at how astonishingly Microsoft just screwed the pooch.

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Microsoft’s very first update to WP7, adding no features but intended “to improve the update process”, fails on some phones (requiring a manual reboot) and irrecoverably bricks others. Oh, yeah. Let’s just take as read the cheap jokes about very few users being affected because who bought a WP7 phone in the first place? I’m thinking those 50%-to-80% return rates we heard rumors of are about to go up, big-time. I’m also thinking that if I were a Microsoft stockholder I’d be eyeing the exits, and that if I were a Nokia shareholder I’d be running for them at full panic speed. This is what’s supposed to save Nokia’s bacon sometime in the future indefinite?

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Anyone want to bet against the upcoming Android 2.3 update going smoothly? ….No? I didn’t think so. There’s a lot more trust in Google’s cluefulness going around than in Microsoft’s here in the 21st century. My hot-spare phone, the Nexus One, sits on my desk awaiting its OTA with languid confidence. I think my G-2 is feeling jealous…

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There’s little comfort for either Microsoft or Nokia in comScore’s Mobile Year In Review, which gives us a fact- and statistic-stuffed take on the state of the smartphone market at the end of 2010. That’s nearly two months ago, which is quite a while at the frantic pace this market has been evolving. Still, if you pay attention to the measurements (and less to the forecasts) there’s much to be gleaned here.

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Start with raw population sizes. Bearing in mind that comScore’s survey population covers only the U.S., Europe and Japan, they report 63.2M smartphone subscribers in the U.S. and 72.6M in Europe. That’s a 15% gap, shrunk from 25% last year. On the other hand, unlimited data plans are much more common in the U.S.: “Nearly one-third of mobile users in the U.S. have unlimited data plans compared with just 8 percent of mobile users in Europe.” There’s also much more 3G and 4G penetration in the U.S.

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Yes, that’s right, according to this report U.S. users have faster and more widely-available data access than Europeans! This contradicts a widespread urban myth that state-owned telecomms companies and GSM standardization have added up to cellular Nirvana in Europe. Seems our messy competitive free markets have been doing a better job of deployment after all. Imagine that…

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In other news, WAP is dead. Remember WAP? It, and special “mobile” presentations of websites, have been rendered effectively obsolete by smartphones running capable browsers. The report tells us the trend is, unsurprisingly, towards full HTML everywhere. This, of course, is tied with the almost dizzying speed with which smartphones have found their way into consumers’ pockets. The report’s lists of top-selling phones in 4Q suggests that, though Europe got a bit of a head start on this, U.S. consumers abandoned dumb phones more rapidly during 2010.

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Smartphone penetration remains higher than the U.S. in certain European markets (Germany, Spain, Italy) but in general the U.S. and European markets seem to be converging. I’ve noted before that Europe and the rest of the world seem to lag smartphone tends in the U.S. market by about six months, and the numbers in this report (especially the smartphone OS share numbers) support that.

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The single most serious defect in this report is that comScore’s OS market share numbers look somewhat stale relative to those being published by Canalys – this makes Android look a bit weaker than it probably is and its competitors look a bit stronger. (For a correction from reality see this report from Great Britain.) Nevertheless, comparing the U.S. and European market share graphs reveals interesting differences.

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One major difference is the position of Nokia. It was the top-selling OEM in Europe through 2010 but barely on the radar in the U.S. market. Some unwelcome news for Nokia shareholders is that both markets are converging on the American pattern. The news from Britain and elsewhere makes it clear that Nokia is bleeding European market share to Android phones, as Stephen Elop acknowledged in the infamous “burning platform” memo. Ironically, Nokia’s miniscule market share in the U.S. isn’t crashing – perhaps because in this country the market has segmented in such a way that Nokia handsets are only competing with dumbphones.

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Android looks to be gaining market share at about the same (rapid) rate in the U.S. and Europe, but in Europe the effective launch date was later so share there is lagging the U.S. figures somewhat. Other smartphone lines are maintaining pretty much the same relative positions in the U.S. and Europe, all except Apple losing share to Android at comparable rates. In both the U.S. and Europe, Apple managed a just barely perceptible gain in share, but spent the year eating Android’s dust.

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This pattern is interesting because, along with the overall convergence in scale and smartphone penetration, it suggests that the underlying drivers acting on consumer demand and preferences are quite similar in the U.S. and Europe. comScore ventures to this conclusion from a slightly different reasoning. It also notes that the Japanese market is quite different from either.

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Here’s a surprise about a trend in both markets: “Even though applications received much more attention by the media throughout 2010, our analysis in the U.S. and the EU5 region showed that by a small margin, application usage is still second to browser usage when it comes to the mobile web.” I’ve voiced suspicions here that apps are less important to phone users, and less valuable as discriminators, than the smartphone OS pushers think they are; this seems to confirm that.

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Since I’m mainly interested in reporting on and analyzing the smartphone market’s competitive dynamics, I’m not going to dive into comScore’s material on mobile device usage patterns and how they vary by market. There are in any case few real surprises there – social networking is exploding in popularity, the advertising market is vigorous, etc. One pattern they half-illuminate is that smartphones are not yet replacing browsing on PCs; smartphone consumers show a strong pattern, sorted by time of day, of preferentially using PCs (and their large displays) when those are available.

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Circling back to NoWin – is the comScore report revealing a market in which there is any hope for them? I’d have to have said “no” even before the update fiasco. Android is kicking the living crap out of competition that’s here now; unless current trends in both the U.S. and Europe reverse dramatically it will have cemented a solid majority market share well before the earliest date Nokia thinks it might ship a WP7 phone. The best recent bet for a reversal of trend would have been for the Verizon iPhone to take off like a rocket rather than fizzling on the launchpad, but it’s probable that would have helped NoWin not at all.

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And it would have to be some really dramatic reversal. The comScore numbers show that there’s nothing noisy or jittery about the trends in Android market penetration, neither in the U.S. nor Europe. What we’re seeing in both markets is an inexorable rise that hasn’t even been measurably affected by competitive countermoves. The iPhone 4 and iPhone V failed to even speed-bump it, let alone stop it, and the handful of WP7 phones are now an even sadder joke than they looked when I predicted on launch day that they would flop.

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Apple has strategic problems; it’s being badly disrupted from below in the smartphone market, and I think will begin to experience the same in tablets towards the end of 2011 But I don’t see these challenges becoming acute for a couple of years yet; Apple can maintain a profitable high-margin business for a while even with drastically lower market share than it has now. In fact that’s what it wants to do culturally speaking.

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The major unknowns of the near future concern companies without Apple’s maneuvering room or brand strength. In particular: Will Nokia bail out of the disastrous NoWin alliance? And, what’s RIM going to do? But those, dear readers, are topics for another time.

diff --git a/20110225182231.blog b/20110225182231.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..44a1a24 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110225182231.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Nod and WinCE +

I learned this morning that Windows Phone 7 – the smartphone OS that bricks your phone! – is a skin over a bunch of core components from Windows CE. Which if you came in late, is widely regarded as the second most wretched hive of bugs and villainy Microsoft ever shipped.

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(Yes, I said “second most”. Even WinCE could not come near matching the epic failitude of Microsoft Bob, which can only be explained by the justified supposition that its product manager was doing the mattress mambo with Bill Gates. She later married him, and Microsoft Bob disappeared down the event horizon of a black hole created by its own suckiness.)

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My initial reaction to this news was “Doomed! What on Earth were they thinking?“. On reflection, however, there is an angle from which this way of slapping WP7 together makes a horrifying kind of sense. Not that I now think it’s any less doomed, mind you…but there are perhaps some useful lessons to be learned if we examine this fiasco from the Microsoft point of view.

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It’s 2008. Microsoft’s previous attempt at a new mobile-phone OS, codename “Photon”, has just crashed and burned. Suppose you are the loyal Microsoftie told that Microsoft needs to produce a new smartphone operating system on a deadline of less than three years. You can’t use anything with open-source ick all over it because der Ballmer would have an apeshit freakout and fire your ass the second he found out; there go all your best options. The weenies over in R&D have things they call operating systems, but after listening to a couple of presentations about stuff like fine-grained parallelism and persistent objects you realize they really are research vehicles and adapting one would be as much work as building from scratch.

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But you don’t have enough time to build a new OS from scratch. You’re on a tight deadline. And that deadline, for once, isn’t PHB bullshit; Apple shipped in early 2007, and by 3Q2009 there’s also a real risk from Android. In either case a late first ship could find a competitor so entrenched in a supermajority position that all your NRE would have been effectively wasted. If your higher-ups hadn’t held you to a tight deadline, that would have been good evidence that they were on bad hallucinogens.

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Note that this is not exactly, or not only, a “Microsoft is incompetent” analysis. Android took four years, 2003-2007, and that was with the tremendous boost it got by re-using the Linux kernel. Building a production-quality OS is not a weekend project, you can’t re-use Linux, and the tempo of today’s smartphone market is brutally fast. As recently as 2004 or so you might have had the luxury of three or four years to first ship, but not in 2008. You have to re-use massive amounts of code to have a prayer of shipping soon enough.

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There’s all the WinMobile and WinCE code lying around, and programmers who know it. Trying to salvage something from that wreckage makes sense even if you know it’s mostly shit. Otherwise how are you going to meet deadline?

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Reusing as much of WinCE as you can swallow without gagging is the rational-minimax thing to do under the constraints you’ve been handed. That doesn’t mean it’s a good thing, necessarily, as the owners of now-bricked WP7 phones have just found out. What really went wrong here?

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Closed source went wrong. I think it’s that simple; we don’t actually need the hypothesis that anyone at Microsoft was incompetent. They were boxed in at every turn by Microsoft’s insistence that we must own it and no open source can be allowed on strategically critical paths. They couldn’t reuse the Linux kernel, and their WinCE equivalent had three orders of magnitude less engineering time in it (judging by calendar years of deployment and the maximum possible size of the dev team). Possibly four orders…

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There’s no recovery from this, I think, because having to base WP7 on WinCE wasn’t a contingent, accidental failure. It was an essential one. And, a few years from now when smartphones are almost everyone’s primary computing devices, it may be the particular one that goes on Microsoft’s tombstone.

diff --git a/20110303222925.blog b/20110303222925.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b4aee4b --- /dev/null +++ b/20110303222925.blog @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +A natural contemplates game +

Slang dictionaries never fail to interest me. A few days ago I ran across one serving the PUA (pick-up artist) subculture, a network of men (and a few women) who have attempted to systematize and explain tactics for picking up women. Chasing links from it, I found a network of blogs and sites describing what they call “game”, which has evolved beyond mere tactics into a generative theory of why the tactics work; indeed in some hands (such as the ferociously intelligent PUA blogger Roissy) it seems to be aspiring to the condition of philosophy.

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I’ve found reading about this stuff fascinating, if not quite for the usual reasons. I’m what PUAs call a “natural”, a man who figured out much of game on his own and consequently cuts a wide sexual swathe when he cares to. Not quite the same game they’re playing, however. For one thing, I’ve never tried to pick up a woman in a bar in my entire life. College parties when I was a student, yes; SF conventions, neopagan festivals, SCA events, yes; bars, no.

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Also, and partly as consequence of where I hang out, it has been quite unusual for me to hit on women with IQs below about 120 – and it may well be the case that I’ve never tried to interest a woman with below-average intelligence. (Er, which is not to say they don’t notice me; even in middle age I get lots of IOIs from waitresses and other female service personnel. Any PUA would tell you this is a predictable and unremarkable consequence of being an alpha male.)

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Because the women the PUAs are after aren’t the kind that interest me, much of “game” as described in the PUA culture fills me with a mix of recognition and revulsion. And a third, more complex reaction that is the real reason I’m writing this essay.

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One one hand, I recognize techniques like kino escalation. Oh, do I ever! Adroit use of that one has gotten me into the sack more times than I can count. On the other hand, I’m basically incapable of what PUAs call the neg; I can’t insult a woman even by implication unless I think she’s done something to specifically deserve it, and the thought of flinging negs to score sex disgusts me in a very fundamental way.

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On the gripping hand…I recognize a harsh truthfulness in a lot of what the PUAs are saying. Crudely put, the “game” advice for most men (the population PUAs call AFCs or “Average Frustrated Chumps”) reduces to behaving like an asshole so women will mistake you for an alpha. I really am an alpha, so I don’t have to asshole-fake it – but it is nevertheless quite clear to me that the PUAs are on to something. This is frequently a successful strategy; I’ve been outcompeted by it myself on several humiliating occasions. Furthermore, the PUAs are probably correct in asserting that for many AFCs it is the best strategy available, and never mind that the thought of running it myself turns my stomach.

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In the PUA’s disturbingly persuasive analysis, I’ve had the luxury of not treating women like shit only because I have often had USPs for the brighter-than-average women I was interested in, notably in the combination of alpha-male qualities with high intelligence and expressive skills. Without those USPs, argues the PUA, my choices would have reduced to “frustrated loser” or “sexually successful douchebag” – and, looking at my own experience and that of my less successful peers, I find myself unable to refute this.

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That is kind of horrifying if you think about it. Possession of USPs is rare by definition, and if you have one you’re more than averagely likely to be an alpha anyway. The PUA is telling us that human beings are designed in such a way that the most reliable way for the large majority of beta males to get sex is to behave like narcissistic, dominating, emotionally-unavailable jerks. This would be appalling enough as pure theory, but the PUA makes it worse by applying it to actually have lots of sex. “Success” one blog unsparingly observes “is defined by penis in vagina.” Never take your eye off that ball, says the PUA. Much as one might like to dismiss this as crass reductionism, evolutionary theory makes any countercase rather difficult to argue.

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How did our poor species get into this hole? The PUA community gravitates to evolutionary-psychology explanations for human behavior as much as I do, it’s one of the interesting things about reading their stuff. It’s remarkable how often they manage to apply facts about human reproductive biology in a tactical way. The use they make of evo-bio concepts like hypergamy, peacocking, and sexy-son theory is, I find, sound and justified. The kind of pitiless clinical eye they turn on human mating interactions could scarcely be bettered by most scientists.

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But the PUAs don’t, at least so far as I’ve yet seen, have a generative explanation for why women friend-zone nice guys and fuck bad boys. They accept this as the foundation of game without asking what circumstances in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness stuck women with apparently counterproductive wiring.

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I’ve thought about this, and the only plausible explanation I can come up with is that in the EEA, when early humans lived in small hunting bands, the behaviors modern assholes now use to fake alpha must have been reliable indicators of superior status. Perhaps they were much more risky to fake in a small society where beta males were almost constantly under they eye of senior alphas with hard fists.

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Meanwhile, back in modernity, we’re stuck with the consequences – men who have been trained to be imitation-alpha jerks and abusers by women who are sexually fickle, manipulative and cruel towards beta males. It’s not a pretty picture, not if you’re looking in from halfway outside it like me and certainly not if you’re stuck in the middle of it as an invisible AFC or a woman wondering why she’s surrounded by douchebags.

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I don’t think the PUA crowd has any solution to the problem of how men and women can stop treating each other like shit. Nor do they claim to; the PUA attitude is that you just have to play your cards as best you can under a set of constraints that is intrinsically tragic. But I think the spotlight glare they’re putting on actual mating behavior – as opposed to the lies we tell ourselves about how we behave, or how we think we ought to behave – is a valuable first step.

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The truth hurts, but it also helps. Understanding that you’re being yanked around in unhelpful ways by your instincts is the necessary first step to gaining more control of your choices. This is why I think the people who should be paying most attention to PUA theory are women – and not for the most obvious defensive reasons, either.

+

If you are female, you may be thinking “OK, I should learn game so jerks won’t be able to play me.” Well, that’s nice, but almost completely irrelevant. Because what both evolutionary psych and PUA tell us is that in cold fact you want to be played by an alpha – and failing that, at least someone a bit taller, a bit older, a bit smarter, and a bit higher-status than you. The fact that you want to be better at detecting imitation alphas changes nothing essential; women have been polishing that counter-game as long as men have been practicing theirs.

+

No. The reason women need be paying attention to PUA goes much deeper than just notching up another escalation in the jerk-vs.-bitch arms race. It’s because until women stop lying to themselves about their actual behavior, they won’t have any prayer of becoming self-aware enough to change the sexual reward pattern they present to men. In pervasive female self-honesty begins the only hope of not training up more generations of jerks. And it’s there that the pitiless, revealing glare of the PUA spotlight might help.

+

Yes, I know what kind of reflexive screaming that last paragraph is going to trigger. Feminists will lash at me for suggesting that this is womens’ problem to solve; shouldn’t at least half the burden of self-awareness and change fall on men?

+

In fact, it can’t be that way, and it can’t be for a brutally simple reason. If you are reading this, you are almost certainly a member of a culture in which women have far more power to control mens’ sexual experience than the reverse. The only exceptions to this rule have been barbaric hellholes in which women were treated as chattel.

+

Ladies, with having more power over sexual outcomes there comes more responsibility. And there’s this, too; just suppose the great mass of men stopped thinking with their dicks and 99% of them suddenly became sensitive New Age guys eager to commit. Until most women stopped being cruel to betas and rewarding men who behave like dominating jerks with sex, nothing….nothing would change. PUA game would still work. The tragedy to which it is a minimax response would still be in motion.

+

I don’t have any final answers either. But, gentle reader…if you’re a beta male and not a natural, learning some PUA game might sound icky but it would sure beat masturbating to porn for the rest of your life. And if you’re female, think hard about the last guy you slept with and the last guy you friend-zoned. Maybe you owe yourself a rethink and friend-zone guy an apology, of the kind best delivered naked.

diff --git a/20110305110506.blog b/20110305110506.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0001c0a --- /dev/null +++ b/20110305110506.blog @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +Facing your inner alpha +

There’s been some discussion in response to my post on A natural contemplates game on the meaning of the term “alpha male” as it applies to humans. In comments, I had this to say as a definition:

+

+As I use “alpha”, it simply means someone who is equipped for leadership roles by psychology and temperament. You can tell you are one if your experience of life frequently includes being sucked into leadership vacuums. It’s not about having some sort of dark desire to dominate people, though of course there’s a subset of alphas that has that.

+

In the PUA context, “alpha” has the additional overlapping meaning of someone who has high hypergamic value to women. These two traits tend to be correlated and to reinforce each other. +

+

I also noted this:

+

+I don’t really know what makes alphas; I wasn’t always one myself, formerly having been what another commenter describes as a sigma [strong loner type, resistant to being in hierarchies]. In fact, for personal values reasons I denied to myself that I was an alpha until long after a third-party observer would have said so, facing the reality only when my pattern of constantly being sucked into leadership vacuums became undeniable.

+

I will further note that alphaness is not altogether a happy trait to have. The getting more sex part is nice, but the constant “somebody has to do it” presented by the leadership vacuums around you can be a serious pain in the ass. Especially if, like me, you have values conflicts about being an authority figure. +

+

and:

+

+..there was never a lot of “reaching out” involved on my part. The damn leadership roles reached out and grabbed me. Once I realized I was stuck with them, I just tried to handle the job as competently as I could.

+

I’m not sure what else to tell you, except that I still think people who crave leadership roles are not to be trusted. The reason I denied I was an alpha for a long time is that I had some confusion in my head between the sort of person who wants to run things and the kind of person who can’t help doing it. +

+

Now I will tell a story about one of the incidents that forced me to face my inner alpha.

+

+

It was 2005, and I had just arrived at my first Sword Camp. This was to be a week-long intensive training in Western sword and various associated fighting and survival skills.

+

The teaching doctrine of the school included a tradition that each class trained to fight as a tactical unit. The unit was expected to choose a name, design a banner, and (eventually) choose its command team. As you may imagine, this is a process often fraught with personal complications and conflicts.

+

Normal class intakes were clocked by the six-month span of basic sword training; thus, they had some time to shake down. The first Sword Camp was a (rather successful, as it later turned out) attempt to cram all that six months of training into a week of dawn-to-dusk intensity. The extreme acceleration meant our class didn’t have a lot of time to sort itself out.

+

There were three others in the first-ever Sword Camp class – two women (one of them an exceptionally beefy Valkyrie type who would be combat-equivalent to a fit man) and a younger man. We eyed each other and began exchanging stories.

+

Before this, I’d been reading about wargaming military history, tactics, and related fields for a very long time. One of those related fields was the command psychology of small units (note, if you want a painless but effective introduction to this you can do a lot worse than reading Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers). I knew a lot of theory about how good small-unit officers are supposed to behave towards their men, and the mind-set that generates that behavior.

+

And then it got real. Because within five minutes it became clear that, from my previous experience with hand-to-hand, Asian sword, and SCA heavy weapons, I had more relevant experience than all three of the others put together. My reaction to this wasn’t “I’m the expert, I should be in charge”, it was: “Damn, I need to take care of these people.” Or, equivalently, “They need me.”

+

That’s how a good small-unit officer thinks. In the field, your men eat before you do; you don’t sleep until they’re properly bedded down. You take care of them. It’s your job to ensure they’re the most effective fighters they can be. You may have to expend them for the mission, but you have to value each and every one, or the unit won’t work. I knew these things, but they were never emotionally real to me until that moment.

+

So I took charge. I report as a matter of checkable fact that we had a class name, a banner design, and a command structure chosen within fifteen minutes of time zero (Valkyrie-girl had “natural line sergeant” written on her forehead in letters of fire). This is still a record not to my knowledge even approached by any class since. And there was never an iota of doubt about who the class captain was, not in the class nor among the instructors and observers either.

+

We actually cohered as a tactical unit, which is not a minor achievement for a bunch of raw newbs without prior military training (the instructors were impressed and said so). Not because I played overt dominance games with anyone – I never even had to raise my voice – but because class Eleutheria was motivated and willing to be led by someone with a clue and the willingness to take responsibility and the right psychology to lead.

+

The point of this post is that I had the right psychology. I was, rather to my own astonishment, good at this job. It could have gone a lot worse; it was not any kind of given that class Eleutheria had to accept my authority, not as if I was wearing rank tabs in a real military. The way to bet, if I hadn’t had significant command ability, would have been that the unit never jelled.

+

When I told this story, later, the reaction I got was often something like this: “WTF? You’re a famously charismatic speaker, you energized an entire social movement, legions of geeks look up to you, and you’re surprised you have leadership capability? That is freaking hilarious.”

+

Um, yes, in retrospect I have to admit it is kind of funny. Even to me. But see above about my values conflicts. I’m an ornery individualist with a bone-deep distrust of hierarchies and people who want to be at the top of them. I wanted to see myself as a sigma, the kind of person who stands outside all that. But, obviously, it’s not that simple.

+

The experience I’ve just described wasn’t the first that pushed me to face my inner alpha. It was more like the point at which I could no longer kid myself that I wasn’t a natural leader in whatever biological/psychological sense those exist. And my reaction to that was not so much “Oh, cool!” as, “Oh, shit!”

+

Because with that power comes the responsibility to use it wisely. And, dammit, I don’t want that responsibility! I told myself I was a sigma long after I should have stopped kidding myself exactly so I could evade it.

+

But you have to take care of your people. You have to take care of your people. And if that means you have to face up to and use alpha qualities about which you remain seriously conflicted, that’s what you have to do.

diff --git a/20110306162723.blog b/20110306162723.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3834591 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110306162723.blog @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +Rape statistics: a case study in public flim-flam +

A commenter on a recent thread claimed “the lifetime risk of rape for a woman [in the U.S.] is one in six…Almost everyone who deals with the issue considers that wildly too low to be realistic. But one in six is indisputable.”

+

No incidence of rape above zero is acceptable to me. I teach women pistol self-defense at no charge. You may correctly infer my motives from the fact that the first time a female student of mine shoots a good tight center-of-mass group, my normal mode of expressing approval is to say “That’s one dead rapist!”

+

Accordingly, I found this claim so disturbing that I decided to research it. What I found appears to be a classic case of unreliable statistics being oversimplified through rumor, hysteria, the telephone effect, and self-serving inflation.

+

+

Where not cited, numbers are from the Wikipedia page on rape statistics.

+

I found the first layer of flimflam almost immediately. The public source of the 1 in 6 number is probably the Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault, which actually said 1 of 6 U.S. women has experienced an attempted or completed rape.

+

The inclusion of “attempted” rape is a clue that games were played to inflate the significance of this statistic by people using or passing it along. There are actually two levels of distortion here: one in which the categories of attempted and completed rapes are merged, and a second which trades on the listener’s tendency to equate “rape” with “forcible rape”.

+

In 2005, there were according to the USDOJ 191,670 reports of “rape or sexual assault” in the U.S. This is a larger category than rape or even rape plus attempts, but I’ll go with it for a first approximation most generous to CCASA.

+

In evaluating numbers derived from this the USDOJ figure, note that The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network defines sexual assault as “unwanted sexual contact that stops short of rape or attempted rape. This includes sexual touching and fondling”. I note that it can also include statutory rape, a notoriously elastic category which can include consensual sex between minors of similar ages.

+

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (1999) estimated that 91% of rape victims are female and 9% are male. Thus, I estimate from the USDOJ statistic that there were 174,419 reports of incidents against women in 2005.

+

The U.S. Department of the Census gives the U.S. population in 2005 as 296,410,404. According to the CIA World Factbook the M/F ratio in the U.S is 0.97 male/female, so women comprised 157097514 people in that population.

+

In 2005, then, we can approximate a woman’s risk of being the victim of a reported rape or sexual assault as 0.0012. Now, how does this convert to a lifetime risk?

+

I have included women at all ages in the population used to calculate the raw incidence, so I’ll simply multiply by the average female lifespan of 78 years. The thing to note is that if we picked an age range to restrict to the result we want would not change, as it would shrink the multiplier and the baseline population in the same way. So we get a lifetime incidence rate of 0.0936, or 9.3%. This is a rate of 1 in 11.

+

I found a web page on forcible rape rates from the 2000 U.S. census that implies an incidence of forcible rape in 1982 (the latest year they list) of 66.2 per 100K females, implying a forcible rape figure per annum risk 0.0006. This implies a lifetime incidence of 0.0468, implying a lifetime rate of about 1 in 23.

+

According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, the most recently available rape victimization rate is 0.4 per 1000 people. Applying the 0.91 percentage of female rape victims corrects this to 0.364 per 1000, implying a lifetime incidence of 3.64 and a rate of 1 in 27 (note – I previously bobbled this and got a 1 in 29 rate.).

+

But what about underreporting…and, for that matter, overreporting? The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) said only 39% of rapes and sexual assaults were reported to officials. But one 1994 study in the U.S. found overeporting of 41%. A vociferous critic of that study estimated overreporting at 5.9%, and a study in Great Britain found a false-allegation rate of 8%.

+

The methodology of studies on underreporting and overreporting of rape is notoriously dispute-prone. For a first approximation I will combine assumptions 39% underreporting and 5.9% overreporting to reach an estimate of the the ratio between reported and actual crimes. There are reasons to suspect this is quite generous to rape alarmists, but I’ll do it anyway in order to generate the largest reasonable incidence numbers.

+

(r + r*0.61) – r*0.59 = r*1.00 + r*0.61 – r*0.059 = r * 1.551

+

How does this change our figures? From the DOJ statistics we reach a lifetime incidence of 14.41% and rate of 1 in 7. From the census data on forcible rapes, a lifetime incidence of 0.0725 and a lifetime rate of 1 in 14. From the NCVS, a lifetime incidence of 0.564 and a lifetime rate of 1 in 18.

+

None of these figures are compatible with “1 in 6 women will be raped”, and those least corrupted by definitional flimflam are the least compatible.

+

UPDATE: I am revising the end of this post, because I am persuaded that one of my formulas was in error. I will preserve the original ending in a comment.

diff --git a/20110307051757.blog b/20110307051757.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..18c7a58 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110307051757.blog @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +Lady Godiva (with apologies to the Beatles) +

OK, to prepare for this read up on the legend of Lady Godiva, and then read the lyrics of the Beatles’ Lady Madonna. You might want to take the three minutes or so to watch it being performed.

+

Now sing this to yourself:

+

+
+Lady Godiva, peasants at your feet
+Suddenly you wonder how they make ends meet
+Husband takes the money when they pay the rent
+Did you think that money was heaven sent?
+
+Begging him to give the poor their stores back
+Sunday has you creeping like a nun
+He'll do it if you streak the town on horseback
+See how they run!
+
+Thomas the peeper, gazing at your breast
+Wonders if he'll manage to see the rest.
+Peeping through a knothole, blinded by delight
+Monday's when he traded that to lose his sight.
+
+Tuesday afternoon is neverending
+Wednesday morning's income didn't come
+Thursday night your stocking needed mending
+See how they run!
+
+Lady Godiva, servants at your feet
+Suddenly you wonder how you'll make ends meet.
+
diff --git a/20110308115229.blog b/20110308115229.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..350fdbe --- /dev/null +++ b/20110308115229.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Armed & Dangerous has offspring, sort of +

See Unarmed but still Dangerous.

+

Well, he says he’s unarmed but dangerous, yet I’ve seen no mention of empty-hand skills at all!

+

(That was a joke. You can chuckle now.)

diff --git a/20110310195152.blog b/20110310195152.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..53d8262 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110310195152.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +Religious toxicity +

Earlier today I stumbled over some accusations that atheists are lining up with Islam because their actual enemy is not religion but Christianity.

+

The actual revelation here is that the fever-swamps of the left are capable of generating unlimited amounts of nonsense and putting it on protest signs. And, that conservatives are still prone to respond with a kind of reflexive bigotry that undermines them even when they have valid points to make.

+

I’m one of those “militant atheists” Tatler and Publius Forum are ranting about. My position is slightly complicated by the fact that I’m also a neopagan mystic – but the sort of “religion” I practice is nontheistic and fully compatible with philosophical atheism. This is not as unusual as one might think: many neopagans and Buddhists could say the same.

+

In hopes that some conservatives might actually pay attention, I will now explain how “militant atheists” evaluate different religions and why Islam is actually the least likely of them to attract or seduce atheists. The model I’m about to convey is explicitly shared by one of the major “New Atheist” writers – Sam Harris – and I am in little doubt that the others in that group (notably Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett) would broadly approve of it.

+

+

To understand how militant atheists think about religion, you first have to understand that modern atheism is not simply against religion. It is for something; it opposes religion from a set of principles and values. Those principles first found expression in the French Enlightenment of the 1750s and the writings of men like Voltaire and Diderot. In later centuries they were further developed by (among others) Robert Ingersoll and Bertrand Russell.

+

Modern ‘militant atheists’ (including me) see themselves as the heirs of Voltaire, the children of the Enlightenment. Our rejection of theism is motivated by specific features of theistic religions. Two, in particular, stand out: (a) religious anti-rationality, and (b) religious violence. Not all religions are afflicted by these in equal measure.

+

To an atheist, religion A is worse than religion B when religion A requires belief in more anti-rational things than religion B does. More miracles, more superstition, more craziness. Religion A can also be worse than religion B by having a stronger tendency to erupt in violence – pogroms, witch-burnings, religious wars, conversion by the sword.

+

These compound into a sort of religious threat potential, the estimated likelihood that in any given year the believers are going to boil over into an irrationally murderous mob intent on putting unbelievers to the sword.

+

Atheists tend to broadly agree about the relative threat potential of major religions. Among those that come in very low on the toxicity scale we can include, for example, the more austere Theravada varieties of Buddhism. These are essentially systems of prescriptive psychology with almost no component of belief in a supernatural, and have no history of warfare or conversion by the sword. Threat potential: near zero.

+

We class other religions as low in toxicity but suspicious because of their historical roots. A good example of this class is the Baha’i Faith, which is a rather nice inoffensive little religion if you ignore that streak of Shi’a Islam in its past. Some of the quieter and more mystical Christian denominations, like Quakers, fall in this category as well – indeed, many Quakers are barely theistic themselves. I know of several atheists who deliberately adopted Quaker ritual for their weddings and didn’t surprise their atheist friends even a bit by doing so. Threat potential: low.

+

One Christian subgroup also gives us an example of a religion that maxes out the doctrinal-craziness scale while seeming relatively harmless on the violence front. That would be the Mormons. I mean, really – Amerinds as the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel? God lives on the planet Kolob and you get your own world to rule when you die? How do these people even take themselves seriously? Oh well, at least they seem to plan on inheriting the Earth by out-reproducing unbelievers rather than killing them. That’s something, even though it could easily change in the future. Threat potential: low to middling.

+

There’s also pretty general agreement on which religions are the toxic worst. These would be the religions that combine particularly crazy superstitions with a blood-soaked historical record. We atheists think of these as deadly memetic plagues, occasionally found in relatively well-behaved quiescent phases but prone to bloom into full-fledged insane murderousness whenever the next charismatic nutcase wanders along to remind them what they’re really about.

+

And which two religions are at the very top of the threat-potential list? No prizes for guessing that they are Christianity and Islam, not necessarily in that order. Both have relatively tolerable minorities (Christianity’s Quakers and Unitarians, Islam’s Sufis) but have extremely dangerous and powerful fundamentalist groups that effectively dominate the discourse inside their communities.

+

An accident of our time, post-9/11, is that Islam currently appears the more dangerous of the two. This is a case both Christoper Hitchens and myself on this blog have argued, despite our shared detestation of Christianity. And it’s why the notion that Western militant atheists would run en masse to Islam in preference to Christianity is especially absurd. That would be trading from bad to worse.

diff --git a/20110313204356.blog b/20110313204356.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9be6800 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110313204356.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Politics as usual is over +

A number of my regulars have asked me why I don’t blog about politics as much as I used to.

+

Fundamentally, it’s because I think the value of political persuasion is decreasing fast. Political persuasion matters most when when policy options are relatively open and unconstrained by objective conditions that politics cannot alter. It matters less when policy options are more constrained, and not at all when there are no choices left.

+

The political system I have been criticizing all my adult life is fast approaching the point of “no choices left”. And not just in the U.S., either; the same problems of political overcommitment and structural insolvency are playing out in advanced nations all over the planet.

+

+

Politics as we know it has had a structural problem for a long time; the self-destructive interest-group scramble that Mancur Olson identified in The Logic of Collective Action continually makes parasitic demands beyond the capacity of the underlying economy to supply, and the difference has to be papered over by massive government borrowing.

+

This is all very well until, as Margaret Thatcher put it about socialism, “you run out of other peoples’ money.” The system is reaching that point now. Bond investors are figuring out that the debt load has become impossible and are increasingly refusing to either purchase new debt or roll over existing paper. The muni and state-bond market in the U.S. is near-moribund, and the threat of sovereign debt default is tearing the Euro zone apart. U.S Treasuries increasingly look like Wile E. Coyote running in midair; they’ll keep selling only as long as nobody actually looks down.

+

I described the underlying structural problem in Some Iron Laws of political Economics. I laid out more of the logic in Timing the Entitlements Crash. I described the near-term fiscal consequences in Other Peoples’ Money and Social Security and the Fiscal Event Horizon – and it’s at this point a minor miracle that my prediction of a T-bond debt-rating downgrade hasn’t already come true. Goddess knows what kind of pressure the Feds are putting on the ratings agencies.

+

Insolvency is no longer a sporadic problem, it’s become pervasive at all levels of government everywhere. This is why the recent brouhaha in Wisconsin was so surreal. The public-employee unions weren’t just rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking Titanic, they were fighting to preserve their right to bore more holes in the hull.

+

When these are the objective conditions, what point is there in arguing that the whole system is corrupt and that middle-class entitlements have to go on the scrap-heap along with every other big-government program? It’s going to happen anyway soon enough. A year ago the U.S. government was only taking in a third of what it needed to cover annual outlays; today it’s so much worse that individual monthly deficits are larger than the entire Bush administration’s. The money’s all gone. Our options are closing down to default or hyperinflation.

+

It’s going to get ugly out there. A lot of old people are either not going to get their pensions and Social Security at all or get them in hyperinflated dollars that won’t be worth anything. Anyone else dependent on government transfer payments will be similarly screwed. Urban poor, farmers, veterans, the list goes on. Imagine the backlash when that really hits – when it sinks in that the promises were lies, the bubble has popped, the Ponzi scheme is over.

+

And if you’re prone to schadenfreude, you’ll at least have this consolation: at least here in the U.S. we have favorable demographics with a productive age cohort that will keep rising until 2050. Elsewhere, notably in Europe and Japan, the crash will be far, far worse.

+

There’s a not a lot of point in arguing about the aftermath, either. Whatever survives the worldwide crash in government finances is going to look like austere, minimalist night-watchman states simply because they will no longer be able to borrow the money to spend at anywhere near today’s levels.

+

Reality is about to smash the dreams of the world’s collectivists like the hammer of an angry god. They won’t even have the right categories to think about a world in which government is not defined and legitimized by its ability to hand out goodies and entitlements like so much addictive candy.

+

So…Argue about politics? Not me, not much. What would the point be, anymore?

diff --git a/20110317021948.blog b/20110317021948.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bf281a2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110317021948.blog @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +The bug that didn’t bite in the night-time: an anti-disaster story +

A very curious thing happened with GPSD this week. In fact it’s so odd I’m still having trouble believing it. In software engineering we often have trouble getting seemingly simple things to work reliably. How does one react when an incredibly complex, fragile piece of bit-twiddling code works – perfectly – after six years without real-world testing, during which the surrounding architecture underwent such massive changes that any rational person would have expected the feature to bit-rot into garbage?

+

No, really, this one is weird. Let me unfold to you the strange tale of The RTCM2 Analyzer That Shouldn’t Have Worked. Really. At All.

+

+

A principal source of errors in GPS position fixes is variable time delays in satellite signals induced by variations in ionospheric conditions. A way to compensate for this involves what’s called differential correction – receiving signals from a ground station at a fixed location and comparing their satellite pseudoranges with yours. Because the station’s location is known with high precision, your receiver can use its information to compute the local ionospheric delay (as long as you’re within a couple hundred kilometers of the station) and refine its fixes.

+

There are a couple of different ways you can get such corrections. The old-school method is to get a specialized radio that listens for broadcasts from differential-correction stations and reports them to you is a digital bitstream over a serial (RS232 or USB) link. The new-school way is to get that bitstream from servers that make it available over the Internet.

+

If all you want is to correct your GPS, all you actually need to do is shove that bitstream at the GPS’s serial or USB port as it comes in (though some GPSes want you to push the data into a special-purpose auxiliary serial port). Many GPSes simply interpret it on the fly. If yours claims to have DGPS support, it will have this capability. You don’t actually have to know what’s in the stream of corrections.

+

Actually understanding the corrections as they come in – making something from them that a human can see sense in – is much more difficult. But there are reasons you might want this. If you’re doing atmospheric physics, the network of differential correction stations is, in effect, a huge distributed ionosphere observatory. If you’re concerned about really high-precision geolocation, you may need to monitor the health of the differential-correction network in order to know when your confidence intervals are nice and tight.

+

Or you could be like me, annoyed beyond reasonableness at the idea of data flowing through your software that is opaque to you. In mid-2005 I decided to try to actually analyze the correction data flowing through GPSD.

+

This was no small undertaking. The protocols used for differential corrections are nasty. The most widely used of them is called RTCM2. It actually has two layers, each deeply hideous in its own special way.

+

The lower layer is the downlink protocol used by GPS satellites. It’s a bitstream, not a bytestream, and that raw bitstream (segmented into 8-bit characters along boundaries that don’t mean anything) is what you get from an RTCM2 source over a serial or socket link. This lower layer doesn’t formally have a name, but because it’s specified in a famously headache-inducing document called ISGPS200, those unlucky few of us who have had to deal with it tend to think of it as the ISGPS layer.

+

You start with your ISGPS bitstream. Your first challenge is to turn it into data frames. This involves sliding it bit-by-bit into a 36-bit buffer and looking for two fixed header bytes checked by six bits of parity information. When you sync successfully, you get a thirty-bit data word.

+

I’m making this sound simpler than it is. I started with an RTCM2 decoder in C written by two guys named Wolfgang Rupprecht and John Sager around 1999 (they’ve both since disappeared off the net), and my first job was to pry the RTCM2 layer loose from the ISGPS bit-sync code. I did it – you can look in the results in isgps.c in the GPSD codebase – but all by mechanical refactoring steps. Full of magic numbers, shifts, and inversions; I didn’t understand it then and don’t now. Oh, and it broke GCC’s optimizer. Twice.

+

And that upper layer? This is the RTCM2-specific part. Once you have your sequence of 30-bit data frames, you get to slice packed bitfields out of them according to one of a bunch of different message formats, identified by a type field in the first or header word. Then you apply scaling divisors because many of the data fields are float quantities.

+

This upper layer is simple in principle, but getting any bitfield length wrong reduces all following to garbage. Debugging this sort of thing is tedious and painful; is it the lower layer, the upper layer, or yet another damned optimizer bug?

+

The simplest(!) way to tackle it turned out to be to define a big ugly C union full of bitfields, cast the 30-bit-buffer pointer to a pointer to that union, and read the fields. Would fail on architectures that force padding between bitfields, but since modern CPUs all have barrel shifters I was reasonably sure I could say #pragma pack(1) and have the right thing happen.

+

(I lied. There are actually two big ugly unions with bitfields – one for big-endian machines, one for little-endian. Look in driver_rtcm2.c in the GPSD codebase. If you’re not frightened of that code, you are perhaps blessed in your ignorance.)

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The only reason I had any confidence in the results was because Sager’s code included a short segment of RTCM2 and an ASCII dump of same. At every refactoring step I checked that my code still gave the same output from the input. But I wasn’t really confident…because the Sager sample only included one type (type 9) and I therefore had no way to test the decodes of types 1, 3, 4, 5, and 16 (and later, when they upgraded the protocol, 13, 14 and 31).

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Later, I got a different check for the ISGPS layer. We were able to use it to decode a special GPS message called a ‘subframe’ and see the current leap-second value we expected at the place we expected it. This did nothing to verify the RTCM2 layer, though.

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One of my continuing headaches over the next six years was that I couldn’t get my hands on a decent test pair for this thing. What I needed was a pair of files like the Sager sample and its dump, but with a larger set of message types in it. High and low did I search the Internet, but in vain.

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And then, last week, a guy who’s been working with us on our support for Ntrip (a differential-correction service popular in Europe) finally handed me a test pair consisting of a raw RTCM2 bitstream segment and an ASCII dump of it made by some ugly proprietary Windows program. The dump included reports for message types 1, 3, 14, and 31, but no type 9s as in the Sager sample. (This was OK, as the type 1 and type 9 message formats are effectively identical).

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I had what I’d been looking for for six years…but to say that I feared actually collating that dump with GPSD’s output would be to wallow in understatement. So thick was the murk in the depths of my decoder that I had no freaking idea if I’d even be able to reconcile any differences.

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And indeed it didn’t look good, initially. The first reports appeared to match, except that a field called the zcount (a sort of timestamp) was ever so slightly off. Groan. Eventually I figured out that the time boundaries of the binary and the ASCII dump didn’t quite coincide. If I looked a few reports after the first in the dump I saw something that looked like a match.

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But it still didn’t look right. There were sentences of type 14 and 31 in the binary data that my decoder didn’t interpret because they weren’t defined six years ago. Groveling through some obscure documentation, I added more complexity to my huge pile of bitfield declarations and parsing code. Better, but…

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I still thought I had lossage…until I noticed that all those wrong satellite ID fields in the type 31s were wrong by a constant offset of 40, and realized that this was because the author of the other program had mapped GLONASS satellite numbers upwards so as not to collide with the GPS satellite IDs in the type 1 messages.

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I looked at my JSON dump. I looked at the ASCII dump from Windows-land. Four message types I’d never tested before. All. Matched. Perfectly. Even down to the low digits on the float quantities.

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My jaw dropped open. “That just isn’t possible!” I thought to myself. “Something here has to be wrong. What are the odds?”

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I looked again. And it was still right. Every bit of it.

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Anybody who isn’t a pretty hard-core programmer probably died of boredom about a thousand words ago. But in case you made it this far, and don’t know much about what writing low-level bit-twiddling code is like…this is freaky. Once-in-a-blue-moon freaky. You’re-full-of-shit-I-don’t-believe-you freaky. Not so much like dodging a bullet as like dancing stark-naked through aimed fire from a platoon of machine-gunners.

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So blindingly unlikely is this, in fact, that my skill level doesn’t enter into the odds. OK, I think I’m pretty good, and there’s objective evidence to back that up…but if I were Ken Thompson, Alan Turing, and Thoth Trismegistus rolled up into one ball of pulsating awesome I still wouldn’t have expected right-first-time on code like this.

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So, what actually happened here?

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I can isolate two things. First, the ISGPS layer, fearsome black art though it is, must have gotten better test coverage from the Sager sample and the odd subframe decode than I realized during those six years. That code terrifies me, and it will terrify you if you ever read it (“You are not expected to understand any of this.”) but in retrospective fact the only things that ever broke it were GCC optimizer bugs.

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Second, hanging on to the invariant that the Sager sample decoded correctly through all the changes in the rest of the codebase was a very good idea, even if it was only one sentence type. It did nothing to verify the rest of the decoder, but at least it ensured that the framework around the rest didn’t get subtly bent out of shape while I wasn’t looking.

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And I got really, really, really, really lucky.

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So lucky that I’m still feeling a bit dazed by it. And I don’t think I can draw any lessons from this. It’s too random and weird. But we have so many legends of software disaster that I thought a story of anti-disaster would be worth sharing anyway.

diff --git a/20110321010324.blog b/20110321010324.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..aab89b1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110321010324.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Naked Women With Guns +

(No, that is not the ultimate Armed & Dangerous post title. The ultimate Armed & Dangerous post title would be Naked Women With Guns Smash The State!.)

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A few nights ago I was on IRC with a friend I shall refer to as ‘H’ who may, if she wishes, identify herself in a comment, discussing rape statistics; she had been a post-rape counselor and I thought she would have a useful on-the-ground perspective. H shared my evaluation that the rape statistics I reported are seriously inflated by definitional flimflam, but that’s not our topic this evening. This post is, instead, stimulated (as it were) by her thoughts on the subject of pornography.

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Regular readers of this blog will be aware that I find the semiotics of pornography more interesting than porn itself. In Why does porn got to hurt so bad? I attempted to develop a theory of why there is so much demand for bad porn on which, as I put it “full of the fetish signifiers of sexual allure, to the point where they crowd out the reality of sexual allure”. I explained these fetish signifiers as a method of increasing the emotional distance between the viewer and the viewed.

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I asked H what she thought about the implications I drew from this. H agreed with the obvious hypothesis that men who associate sex with sin and dirt may develop a need for women to look trashy to be aroused by them; also with my more particular theses that symbolically jamming women in a box marked “sluts, to be used and discarded” might function as a sort of power-equalizing move to men who feel hemmed in and controlled by female power of sexual and other kinds. (This second theory is interesting because it predicts that porn will grow more ugly and degrading as female power increases.)

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H pointed out a third possibility I had missed; that bad, emotionally-distant porn appeals to men who can handle women being in overtly sexual roles or as desexualized equals, but not women who are both sexy and equals. I thought this sounded reasonable, but immediately noted that it failed to explain a relatively popular porn niche – naked women with guns.

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Many men find pictures of dangerous women – women with weapons, especially – to be erotically charged. (One of those men is me.) I pointed this out and wondered how it could be reconciled with H’s theory. She observed that for many men the weapons were simply another form of emotional or narrative distancing…

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…and I felt that shock like being slapped one sometimes gets at a moment of enlightenment. Because, you see, that isn’t my reaction to such images at all – and, when I realized I has been projecting my own reaction on other men, I realized something important about this kind of porn. That is, there are at least two different ways that men react erotically to images of naked women with guns, and these ways predict very different preferences about the composition of the porn.

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For one group of men, H is correct. The weapons (guns or otherwise) act as a yet another distancing element. These men will favor images in which the women are merely posing with weapons, and much of the focus is on implausible costume – fetishized version of military gear, chainmail bikinis, etc.

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For another group, the draw will be women exhibiting martial competence – shooting weapons, fighting hand-to-hand, moving gracefully and aggressively. For this group, fetish elements in the composition will be perceived as neutral or even anti-erotic. The fantasy this group is having is “This woman could kill me, but I can make her want to have sex with me”, and the women have the sort of I-would-bear-you-strong-offspring appeal I reported on in Dangerous Sons. In view of the next category I will discuss, I note that it is not required that the women look hostile, angry, or dominating – just really capable.

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Later I reported this conversation to my wife Cathy (who, you should not be surprised to learn, looks really sexy swordfighting or shooting). She pointed out a third group – men who want to be sexually dominated. For this group, the key is probably that the woman has to actually look like a dom – threatening, powerful, ready and able to punish with her power. Competence may help, also the right sort of fetishy gear.

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My thoroughly unscientific impression, from the trait distribution of naked-women-with-weapons porn I’ve stumbled across, is that group one (the distancers) is relatively large, while groups two and three (competence-seekers and dom-seekers) are relatively small.

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The personal lesson for me is a pretty obvious one: beware of unconsciously projecting your own reactions on others. Their preferences may be odder than you imagine. There will be no prize for guessing which group I fall in – the thing is, I didn’t even imagine the existence of the other two groups until clever women pointed them out to me.

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I’m not sure there’s a wider lesson, other than “Most porn is really sad.” But I knew that already. I’m also left wondering if there are groups 4 through N, size-distributed on some sort of Poisson or exponential curve, that I’ve missed.

diff --git a/20110325105127.blog b/20110325105127.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4685652 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110325105127.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Bookend consistency + + +

The writer’s side of the technique is this: Initialize both bookends to zero. On each write, increment the bookends. Then copy the wrapper structure to the shared-memory segment byte-by-byte, starting with the last byte and backing down to the first.

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The reader’s side is simpler: Copy the structure out of the shared-memory segment in normal (first-byte to last) order. Look at the bookends. If both have the same value, you have a coherent update. If they differ, you must back off and retry the read.

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The reason this technique works is that if the shared-memory segment is in a mixed state (update in progress) the reversed-order write guarantees that bookend2 will be greater than bookend1 until the read is complete. For the reader, on the other hand, forward copy guarantees that it can’t be fooled about the value of either bookend.

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(Thomas Zerucha <tz@mich.com> corrected my original proposal by exhibiting a case where you get inconsistency if the write copy is not in reverse order.)

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The technique is robust in the face of interrupts to the copy operations, but depends on nothing in the software or hardware stack beneath C reordering the reads and writes in the copies. A good place to begin ensuring this property is by declaring the pointer to the shared-memory segment ‘volatile'; this will tell your compiler that locations accessed through it may change asynchronously and it should not cache them or mess with operation order.

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There are issues with what the underlying hardware might be doing, however. There are two levels to worry about: instruction reordering in the processor and strange memory-controller optimizations. The latter we can probably forestall by putting memory barriers before and after the copy loops.

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One thing not to worry about is multiprocessor cache coherence. MP systems pretty much have to guarantee interprocessor cache coherency, otherwise common instruction sequences like writes to memory-mapped devices would have undefined behavior. (For the same reason, MP systems have to limit instruction reordering.)

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If you use memcpy(3) for forward copy, any modern compiler is likely to optimize it to a single-instruction copy or a phrase like X86 REP MOVS that won’t be reordered. The point of maximum vulnerability will be in the reverse copy. The iffiest case would be a single-processor system doing really aggressive instruction reordering that an MP can’t risk. I doubt this is a practical problem, however, as byte-copy loops are so dead-simple that they’re unlikely targets for reordering.

diff --git a/20110328045526.blog b/20110328045526.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..09b59e5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110328045526.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Don’t panic over Honeycomb’s release delay +

Google’s announced plans to delay the public release of the source code for Honeycomb, the tablet version of Android, are causing some indignation to be vented among the partisans of open source. But should it? This is a good time to reflect on what the freedoms guaranteed by the Open Source Definition actually mean and what they’re for.

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Google says it wants to hold Honeycomb close to its chest for a while because it doesn’t want random hardware vendors trying to jam it onto cellphones before it’s ready. Release is being restricted to a handful of tablet vendors Google is partnered with.

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Considering the disappointing crappiness and ridiculously high prices of the Android tablets that have shipped so far, it’s hard to blame Google for wanting to exert some quality control. There are difficult tradeoffs here. On the one hand, it serves nobody if handset vendors jump into shipping phones that are as flaky and nasty as the tablets we’ve seen so far; on the other hand, restricting source access also forfeits the code auditing and early field testing Google would otherwise get from early release. Also, Google pisses off the unfavored vendors and at least a substantial minority of the open-source community.

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But the controversy isn’t about whether the move is a good idea, it’s about whether Google is violating the norms of the open-source community and (in the most hyperventilating accusations) has turned evil and deceptive.

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I don’t think it has. This sort of release delay is an unusual thing to do, but it has happened before without a lot of screaming and finger-pointing. The Ghostscript and mySQL projects used to make a regular policy of time-delayed open-source releases lagging a leading-edge source tree they shipped only to paying customers; mySQL may still do this, I haven’t been keeping close enough track of them to know.

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We didn’t see pitchforks and torches at the castle gates of the companies developing mySQL and Ghostscript, because the Open Source Definition doesn’t forbid behavior like this. Nor does the web of customs surrounding the GNU general Public License. Neither these nor any other community norms actually require any development group to release code it thinks is half-baked. They don’t even forbid selective close-to-the-kimono releases – in fact, even the hardest-core zealots at the Free Software Foundation have never fussed about that and they’re conspicuously not doing so now.

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What the OSD and other community norms are designed to guarantee is that when there is a public release, you have a right to redistribute it, modify it, and reuse portions in your own code. Google has not attempted to infringe on this right and there is no sign that it intends to try.

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One reason I’m relaxed about Google’s plans is that I think I understand Google’s grand strategy. Actually attempting to renege on the rights guaranteed by Android’s OSD-conformant licenses would be suicidally disruptive of that strategy – the change in other players’ cost and business-risk calculations would blow the Android coalition apart.

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Thus, it makes sense for the Honeycomb delay to be exactly the interim measure that Google says it is. I have frankly been a bit puzzled about why they’re catching as much flak as they are, which is why I’m a bit late responding to the controversy. Everybody calm down, please! This is no big deal. There’s precedent, and Google’s self-interest will require it to release Honeycomb source publicly when it’s fully baked.

diff --git a/20110401000104.blog b/20110401000104.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b1057c4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110401000104.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Microsoft may win after all +

By a curiously-timed coincidence, three lines of evidence have combined over the last week to convince me that I have been seriously underestimating Microsoft’s competitive potential in the smartphone market. One is that I actually got my hands on a Windows 7 phone; another is a report from a major market-research outfit that has been reliable in the past; and the third is a revealing report from an informant on the hardware side who I’ll call Deep Chip.

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The sporadic reports that Microsoft has achieved something remarkable with its WP7 interface turn out, much to my astonishment, not to be lies. A major, underappreciated strength of the design is that the large, simple, rectangular touch areas turn out to require less dexterity and mental effort to use than the rows of tiny icons on an Android or iOS phone. Mate this to a well-thought out navigation structure and you get a sort of art that conceals art – not flashy, but more effective than a design that focuses more on eye candy. I’m thinking they may actually have stolen a march on Apple here.

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Next, we have Android, Windows Phone to rule mobile. IDC’s projection of a 67% compounded annual growth rate over 2011-2015 may seem implausible, but the company points out that Nokia is in a strong position to upsell its Symbian userbase (still a plurality worldwide) into WP7 phones. And IDC has an enviably accurate record in such market projections.

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Finally, I’ve received a fascinating report from a source inside a major component vendor. Deep Chip informs me that several major Pacific-Rim electronics manufacturers want Microsoft to break out of its present 2% basement because they fear being stuck in an Android monopsony, a concern which has become more acute as a result of persistent rumors that Google plans to go into the hardware business and produce own-brand phones.

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Apple manufactures its own chips, and its relationship with one contractor (Foxconn) is so intimate that the other electronics houses fear having to accept ever-decreasing margins through having no competing buyers. Thus, they’re actually pulling for WP7 demand to rise fast enough to create a vigorous non-Apple, non-Android market for their hardware.

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Meanwhile, Microsoft is quietly flexing its muscles. While Google has been unable to prevent premature tablet ports of Android, Microsoft has successfully prevented the carriers from issuing its March WP7 upgrade before it was fully baked. Microsoft’s contention all along has been that Android is chaos and that the carriers would benefit from a more measured and disciplined approach; that argument might be getting some traction.

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Between Microsoft, its allied carriers, and the electronics houses, the outlines of a coalition actually capable of surging past iOS and seriously threatening Android seem to be gradually emerging. A little-noticed feature of the Nokia-Windows alliance – the lack of an exclusivity clause on either side – assumes greater significance now. I’m thinking it may turn out that the NoWin deal was a billion-dollar head-fake.

diff --git a/20110402064401.blog b/20110402064401.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..db1ff1d --- /dev/null +++ b/20110402064401.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +The Four Levels of AFJ Mastery +

Once, in a bygone century, in the half-forgotten place called USENET, there were masters of satire and parody who could be an example to us all in these latter days. Among the greatest of their arts was the AFJ – the April Fool’s Joke, yes, but in the hands of these masters the AFJ could become minor epics of elaboration, subtlety, and Zen-like enlightenment.

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Today, Grasshopper, we shall speak of the four levels of AFJ mastery, and how the aspiring student may attain them.

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A parody consists of the exaggeration and mocking of a source known to both writer and reader; the reader understands it to be false in fact. A satire employs the methods of parody to make a serious point; the reader understands it to be false in fact, but it succeeds in making some point about the real world by exaggeration and mocking of the real world. A hoax is distinct from both in that it attempts to convince the reader that its falsehoods are true.

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The AFJ, as a distinct art form, uses the methods of parody and satire to achieve the condition of hoax. It is a subtle art, because the objective of the AFJ author is to achieve suspension of disbelief in the reader, then strain it as near as possible to the breaking point without actually snapping it. This is how the AFJ is distinct from a normal instrumental hoax, for which it is good play not to strain the suspension of disbelief at all.

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The AFJ author aims at the strongest possible moment of cognitive rupture – when the reader realizes it was a joke and his perception of the content undergoes a catastrophic lurch. In the hands of a true master the rupture induced by AFJ can become something akin to a Zen moment of enlightenment, changing the reader’s relationship to the subject of the hoax in a lasting way.

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There are four levels of possible reader reaction to an AFJ:

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Level the Zeroth: AFJ attempted, humor not achieved.

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Level the First: Obvious humor, immediate cognitive rupture. The reader instantly catches on that an AFJ is in progress, and laughs. Perhaps he entertains fleetingly the thought that others less perceptive than he might take it seriously.

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Level the Second: The reader is briefly taken in, but reaches some assertion or train of phrase that strains his credulity past the breaking point. He re-evaluates what he has read, enjoys the rest as a joke, and entertains rather more seriously the thought that the less perspicacious might be fooled.

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Level the Third: The reader swallows it all, hook line and sinker; cognitive rupture does not occur until afterwards, he realizes (or has someone point out to him) that it is April 1st and he has been had.

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Level the Fourth: The reader swallows it all, has it pointed out that the work is an AFJ, experiences cognitive rupture, and then repairs the rupture by insisting that the hoax is actually true!

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You have achieved the fourth level of mastery of the AFJ when you utter examples in which the distribution of responses includes a large number of Level Threes and a handful of Level Fours. Achieving too many Level Four reactions goes over the line from an AFJ into founding a religion; that is not the AFJ author’s objective, though some examples of hoaxes such as Discordianism and the Rosicrucian Manifestos resemble long-form AFJs and straddle the dividing line with religion in interesting ways.

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I said previously that the intent is to produce maximum cognitive rupture, but there’s also in element of differential scoring like Martin Gardner’s Eleusis game – you also win by inducing the widest possible range of reactions and exposing the failure of critical-thinking skills in those who in fact failed to apply them.

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Application of this framework to my previous post and the reader reactions to it is left as an exercise for my commenters.

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For readers not native to the hacker culture, I will point out a few things obvious to hackers. I did not invent the AFJ form; it has been a central, almost defining feature of hacker culture since the beginning (which is why I said of my previous post that it is in what I like to think of as the classic style). Less elaborate relatives of it exist elsewhere. And I didn’t pull the rules of the form out of my butt, though I think I am the first to write them down.

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You have 364 days until next April 1st. Go, Grasshopper, and hone your skills. When you can snatch the cognitive rupture from my hand, it will be time for you to leave.

diff --git a/20110404164826.blog b/20110404164826.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1c8dedc --- /dev/null +++ b/20110404164826.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Stolen jewels +

Our cat, Sugar, is getting old. The final, swift decline one tends to see in aging cats is not yet upon her; she’s still the lovely creature we’ve known for nearly two decades – eyes bright, coat soft and glossy, purr ready and resonant. Our friends marvel at her apparent health at over 18 years…but we know her kidney function is slowly degrading, on bad days days the arthritis makes her walk stiffly and slowly, and some of the wartlike growths beneath that plush fur are becoming disturbingly large.

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My wife Cathy and I have been bracing ourselves. We know Sugar can’t have much time left. She’s already beaten the 15-year average for well-cared-for indoor cats by more than three years; if she makes it to 20, that would be statistically quite exceptional. But she could slide into final senescence tomorrow and be dead within a month; on the odds, actually, that should have happened already.

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Neither my wife nor I can avert our eyes from these facts. We don’t talk about them much, though. We don’t have to. When Sugar is interacting with both of us, we can see the shadow of anticipated sorrow on each other all too clearly.

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I don’t think losing a pet can get much more difficult than this is going to be. Sugar was literally a deathbed charge from Cathy’s mother, Mary. Cathy’s stepfather Jerry had given the kitten to Mary to comfort her during a long dying from pleural cancer; when he quietly fell dead, Mary was in the terminal ward. Mary’s last words to us, before she slid into final coma, were “Eric, please take care of Cathy…and Cathy, please take care of my cat.”

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We took Sugar home that night through the blackest thunderstorm I have seen before or since; I found out later that as we were driving down PA422 past Limerick we passed within a mile and a half of where four small tornadoes were touching down right about then. Sugar was just 18 months old. We think she found Jerry’s body, her other human had vanished days before, and strangers had put her in a box to take her somewhere unknown. It takes no effort of memory for me to hear her screaming piteously from inside the cat carrier on my lap.

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On arriving home, we put Sugar in a cat bed and stumbled upstairs to ours, exhausted. And hadn’t quite fallen asleep when we heard a desolate yowl from the other side of the bedroom door. It was unmistakably the sound of a cat who needed comforting. I no longer remember which of us got up to let her in (Cathy thinks she did), but I do remember Sugar gazing at us from the open doorway for a long few moments before visibly reaching a decision, jumping onto the bed, and curling up between us. That simple act of trust won us over irrevocably.

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Ever since that black night in 1994, Sugar has been…just amazing. Some fortunate conjunction of genetics and good nurturing shoved her all the way over to the right end of the bell curve for positive qualities in a cat. She is sunny in her disposition, unfailingly affectionate, and good with houseguests, strangers and children. She greets her humans at the front door and nurses them when they’re sick. She charms pretty much everyone she meets; we have standing offers from two families to look after her when we travel, and would have a third if not for allergies.

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Even more exceptionally, Sugar is polite. She’s good at figuring out what humans want and doing it. Doesn’t pester humans who don’t want to play, actually quiets down when a sleepy Cathy says “Another ten minutes, please?” before morning feeding, only claws the one couch in the basement we’ve already written off, and whole months go by when we never have to raise our voices at her. We can live with an occasional spin of the toilet-paper roll, and she seems to know that, too.

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And she’s always there. Purring contentedly somewhere on the bedclothes as we fall asleep. Wrapping herself around a human’s feet as we sit and work. Oscillating between Cathy and me almost as if on a schedule when we’re both in the house, so neither of us feels neglected. Poking about inquisitively as we tinker with computers or cook or play games. Spreading her uncomplicated affection over both of us like a warm cloak. It has become difficult to remember what life was like without her.

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Of course, the cost of having a pet who’s such a paragon is that it will be more wrenching to lose her. A Buddhist would say that you can avoid grief only by not being attached, but how do can do that when the meaning of a relationship is all about the attachment? None of the complexities and distances of a bond with another human save us here; Sugar’s willingness to love and be loved is so simple, so unstinting, that it would feel evil to try to put protective emotional distance between ourselves and her, even though we know her death is otherwise likely to leave a painful hole in our lives.

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But I am not writing to wallow in a grief that’s still in the future. I’m here to say that there is a way to cope which we have gradually been finding. That is to accept that Sugar should already be dead, and treat every month of her remaining life as a gift to all three of us.

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If Sugar were to die tomorrow, she would have had a longer and happier life than most cats ever do. There is not a day since we brought her home that we haven’t felt fortunate in her; honoring Mary’s deathbed charge has never been something either of us regretted even for a microsecond. These are the things to remember; that we have done right by Sugar, and Sugar by us, and every additional moment we get with her is a jewel stolen from the forces of entropy.

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The day that Sugar goes will be hard on us – especially since, given the progressive kidney failure, we’ll probably have to euthanize her to save her from a death as painful as Mary’s. But at least, instead of being trapped in grief for what has been taken, we will able to remember that Sugar lived long past when her time should have come, and treasure every one of those stolen jewels.

diff --git a/20110405205915.blog b/20110405205915.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d0d40ec --- /dev/null +++ b/20110405205915.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +SCons is full of win today +

It’s not much of a secret that I loathe autotools and have been seeking to banish that festering pile of rancid crocks from my life. I took another step in that direction over the last four days, and have some interesting statistics to report.

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I have been muttering dark threats against the autotools-based build system in GPSD for years. All the usual reasons applied – it’s brittle, clunky, slow, and a huge maintainance headache. There was one piece of it in particular, the place where the generated makefile calls setup.py to make some Python extension modules, that was just hideously bug-prone.

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But one of my lieutenants doesn’t like Python. That, and too much other stuff to do, kept shooting autotools through the head just far enough down the priority list that it didn’t get done. Until we had an embedded user show up (Thomas Zerucha from my post on bookend consistency) and complain that our autotools build takes nine eternities to run on the little ARM device he’s targeting.

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That did it. Out came the notional .45. Die, you monster! *BANG*

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It’s now about a week later; I have a success story and some interesting statistics to report. But first, let us set the scene. GPSD is a mid-sized project at about 41KLOC of C and Python in 120 or so sourcefiles. Our build products are eight binaries, five Python scripts, a moderately complex Python extension module, and sixteen man pages. The build system is also the framework for our regression-test suite, a large and important component that goes far towards explaining GPSD’s exceptionally low defect rate.

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The autotools build system is a bit over 2100 lines of stuff. That’s just counting Makefile.am, configure.ac, and autogen.sh; if I counted all the auxiliary scripts and crap autotools leaves lying around (aclocal.m4, anyone?) it would balloon up to 14K.

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It took me about 6 man-days of concentrated effort to convert this to an SCons recipe. Most of that effort and time was spent comprehending what the autotools build is actually doing; replicating it in SCons once I understood it was relatively easy and actually kind of fun. I guess I should explain that…

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An SCons recipe is a Python script which evaluates to a set of production rules making targets from sources. The rules can be, and usually are, chained together; you tell the system to make a target and it fires the minimum set of rules to achieve that. This is familiar territory to anyone who’s ever written a makefile.

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One thing that makes SCons tremendously more powerful than a makefile is that you get to use a full programming language to generate the production rules. And not just a lame macro language like autotools, either. One of my devs spotted an opportunity: where I had a utility production that sequentially invoked fifteen variant splint(1) commands, he turned into a data table that the recipe walks through using a Python loop, generating a production rule on each tick. The table is far easier to understand and modify than the code it replaced.

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2129 or so lines of autotools code turned into 1057 lines of SCons recipe. That’s a full factor of two shrinkage, but it actually understates the gain in readability. Where the autotools builder is written in an incongruent mixture of three quite dissimilar languages (shell, m4 macros, and make notation), the SCons recipe is just Python calling rule-generator functions. It’s a refreshing change being able to look at a build recipe that size without feeling like you’re inexorably losing sanity points thereby.

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But the real surprise was the build time. Pretty consistently the SCons build completes almost three times as fast as the autotools build. On my 2GHz Intel Core Duo, wall time drops from 50-odd seconds for configure/make to about 20 for scons.

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Not all is perfection yet. There’s one minor component (the Qt client library) that scons can’t build yet, because it requires idiosyncratic build tools of its own that are stapled into the autotools build in ways I don’t understand yet. The real problem is, as as usual, that any random autotools build can be expected to be a nigh-incomprehensible mess.

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A more serious issue is that I haven’t figured how to do out-of-directory builds in SCons. That’s a fragile and difficult feature in autotools; we haven’t got it quite right, last I heard (I don’t need or use VPATH myself). But at least it’s theoretically possible, and our Mac-port guy is probably going to become difficult if I have to tell him he can’t have it.

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This is my second scons conversion. The first, for Battle For Wesnoth, went pretty well too. Thomas just checked in and loves the speed increase. I’m feeling happy about having tremendously reduced GPSD’s long-term maintainance burden.

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Say it with me…no, yell it good and loud: “AUTOTOOLS MUST DIE!”. SCons is not the only competitor to replace it, but it’s the one I recommend.

diff --git a/20110406134912.blog b/20110406134912.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..89dc5bb --- /dev/null +++ b/20110406134912.blog @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +Imprimatur me! +

In the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department, I learned a few minutes ago that I have been quoted, approvingly, in an article published with the imprimatur of the Vatican. This is from a news report that made Slashdot; I have not seen the article itself, which is apparently print-only and is likely in Italian.

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OK, yes, I did say, “Hackers build things, crackers break them.” And it’s nice that the author got the distinction right. But as for the rest of the argument…well, since they quoted me to support it, I guess I’m almost obligated to point out that it’s so wrong it’s hilarious.

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The thrust of the article is an attempt to argue that the hacker culture and Christian virtue have essential parallels. The irony only begins with the fact that they by quoting me they attempted to derive support for this position from a third-degree Wiccan and atheist whose utter detestation of Christianity (and all other faith-centered religions) is no secret.

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But it is in other ways evident even from a secondhand account that the author (one Antonio Spadaro) doesn’t actually understand the hacker culture very well, and is to a damaging extent projecting what he wishes to see on it rather than paying close attention to what’s actually there. Hacker culture, we are told, “opposes models of control, competition and private property”.

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There’s just enough truth to that to make it far more misleading than claiming the exact opposite would be. It makes hackers out to be a bunch of fuzzy-sweater communitarians shading over into cultural Marxists. And indeed, hearing this sort of thing from the Vatican is a first – the usual attempts to co-opt us in this way issue from secular left-wingers.

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Er, for those of you who also haven’t been paying attention, I am in my own person pretty good evidence that the hacker culture gets along with private property and competition just fine, thank you. If that weren’t the case my anarcho-capitalist politics would look like much more of an outlier than they do. But they don’t, because I am only a bit more outspoken and theoretically consistent than the average in the large contingent of libertarian hackers.

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Any of you tempted to dismiss the above as argument by anecdote should remind yourselves of the fact that Spadaro cited me as an authority on the hacker nature. But of the handful of other people he might have cited similarly, I’m pretty sure not one – not even RMS, who’s the closest among our philosopher-princes to an ideological anti-capitalist – would cop to being opposed to private property other than in software.

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And as for competition…hackers are a cooperative bunch, but I look around and see a lot of competition going on every day. That the goals are mainly reputational doesn’t make it any less real. Spadaro is, probably, one of these simple-minded thinkers for whom cooperation is good and competition is bad; such people can’t get that to really maximize efficiency you need to play both games well. Hackers play both games well.

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To say that hackers oppose “control” is closer to being true, but it’s a pretty rum thing to hear approvingly from a Catholic priest. Hello? Hello? I was a Catholic once. Your religion is all about control; I’d call it the original totalitarianism if the Zoroastrians hadn’t gotten there first. Sin, guilt, dogma, thoughtcrime, and the demand to obey or burn in Hell are what you are made of.

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So far, though, we’re in the territory of what I think of as “normal” projection; secular left-wingers utter pretty much the same wrong-headed things about hackers, and about the only change in the counter is that it’s their statist politics rather than their religion that makes their words hollow by being all about control and coercion.

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In both cases (the priest Spadaro and any random left-winger) part of what’s going on is a massive disjunct between what they claim to believe about “control” and what they actually manifest in their behavior. Out of one side of the mouth they praise hackers for supposedly being opposed to “control”, and out of the other side they repeat the rhetoric of causes like Christianity and Marxism that are soaked in the blood of people who just wanted to be left the hell alone and uncontrolled.

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Again, this is all bog-standard stuff. I’ve watched such people project misty-eyed collectivist idealism on the hacker culture so often that it doesn’t even bother me any more; I just laugh at the idiocy and move on. Where Spadaro takes off into a special, almost unique looniness is where he tries to connect the hacker culture to Christian theological ideas.

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Fair is fair; I’ll start by admitting that if you happen to be deep inside a Christian worldview the idea that hacking is “a form of participation in the ‘work’ of God in creation” is at least reasonable. But, er, why just hackers? Why not other kinds of engineers, too? There’s nothing generative here, no account of what makes hackers special little angels or why. Consequently the claim is either meaningless or crazy.

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“It’s a vision that is … of a clear theological origin,” Spadaro is reported to say. Right, because theology has to be at the bottom of every virtue. There is only one source of Good, and if you’re not plugged in you are either inconsequential or the enemy. See “totalitarianism”, above. Listen close, because Spadaro’s innocent-sounding claim here is absolutism, evil, and death speaking.

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To his credit, Spadaro seems not completely unaware of the contradictions in his own view. The secondary source reports this:

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+Spadaro acknowledged there were problems of compatibility between the Catholic Church’s hierarchical organization and its focus on a “revealed truth” and the hackers’ rejection of authority and of any hierarchy of knowledge. +

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Um, yes. When I titled The Cathedral and the Bazaar as I did, the proximate cause was that Fred Brooks had used cathedral-building as a central metaphor in The Mythical Man-Month, and I wanted to challenge the model that book presented on both an objective and symbolic level.

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But it was also in my mind that cathedrals – vertical, centralizing religious edifices imbued with a tradition of authoritarianism and “revealed truth” – are the polar opposite of the healthy, skeptical, anti-authoritarian nous at the heart of the hacker culture.

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Spadaro wants to pretend that the circle can be squared, that the “problem of compatibility” can be ignored. And he has the audacity to quote me in support. But I know better – and so, I think, do most hackers.

diff --git a/20110407111323.blog b/20110407111323.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c768244 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110407111323.blog @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Almost boring now… +

Ah, yes, I see it’s time for another comScore report and another round of breathless journalism on the state of the U.S. smartphone market. But, you know, these are getting almost boring now. Once again, Android rampages over its competition like Godzilla laying the radioactive smackdown on Tokyo. And once again…everyone acts surprised?

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Get with it, people. Some of us (by which, of course, I mean me) predicted this trajectory in the first months after the G-1 launch in November 2008, and have been patiently explaining Google’s grand strategy and the underlying economics ever since. By now this kind of market news should be no surprise to anyone.

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Still. This round of alarums and excursions has a few piquant tidbits in it. Let us consider them together.

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The top-line figure is that Android gained a full 7% of smartphone market share (to 33%) in comScore’s last reporting period, November 2010 to February 2011. RIM got brutally hammered, losing 4.6% and landing at 28.9%; this put Google at #1 for the first time on just about the schedule I had predicted at the beginning of 2010. Still, RIM managed to stay ahead of Apple, who gained 0.2% over the quarter and hung in there at 25.2%. Microsoft lost 1.3%, landing at 7.7%.

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Those are the numbers. What do they mean?

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To begin with, WP7’s market performance can only be described as epic fail. Microsoft had a shiny new product, plowed a shit-ton of money into marketing it, launched at the optimum time for the holiday sales peak – and lost share. Other sources indicate that their smartphone share has declined not just in relative but absolute terms; they have fewer users than they did a year ago.

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Heads should roll over this, but probably won’t. Because the problem clearly starts right at the top with Steve Ballmer, who – no two ways about it – has been a disaster for the company, so enamored of the Windows franchise that he has let its weight suffocate WP7 and all their other growth prospects. The man is an incompetent buffoon. Which, considering what Microsoft was like when somebody competent was running it, is actually very good news for everyone who isn’t a Microsoft shareholder.

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I think these numbers tell us that Microsoft has no hope of being a significant force in the market unless and until Nokia makes good on its end of the NoWin alliance. This is not going to materialize until 1Q2012 at the earliest, if it ever does,

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Now let’s take a closer look at RIM. In a market as volatile and subject to network effects as smartphones, a 4.6% share drop looks an awful lot like the knell of doom. Is there any plausible recovery path for them, or are we watching the initial stage of a death spiral?

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I think there are two possible endgames for RIM. In one, they manage to fort up around a small userbase of mainly corporate accounts, with share holding in the 5% to 9% range. In the other they just completely tank. It will take three to four quarters before we know which way things will fall, with their market share dropping at 5-7% per quarter. (It was only -4.6% in ComScore’s reporting quarter, but market collapses like this tend to accelerate in progress.)

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I don’t see RIM reversing this because they don’t have any near-term prospect of shipping a product that competes well in current conditions. Choosing to replace their aging software stack with an own-brand smartphone OS built around QNX (rather than becoming an Android shop) was a bad, bad mistake; it means they got nothin’ until they can field that new OS, and once they do they’ll have to bid for the attention of app developers from a desperately weak position.

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Has RIM got enough users who are held captive by inertia and transition costs to sustain the company anyway? It’s possible – that’s the optimistic scenario – but I wouldn’t bet on it. In any case both scenarios lead to the same predictions over the next three to four quarters.

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Not much to say about WebOS and Palm, except that nobody should be making any long bets on them. They’re fading from minisule to microscopic; see the comScore stats for the depressing details.

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Now for the big news: Apple’s failure to gain significant share (I’m not sure 0.2% isn’t within the statistical noise range). I think this needs to be interpreted in light of AT&T’s numbers last quarter. According to a theory originally suggested by A&D regular Patrick Maupin, AT&T nearly saturated the iPhone market in 2010. I think he’s right; this would explain the lackluster sales of the iPhone 4V and, now, these ComScore figures.

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This leads to a prediction: Apple’s not going to see any serious iPhone share gain in 2011Q2 either. Nor in Q3 unless the delayed iPhone 5 comes out looking really spectacular. The userbase for iPhone is loyal but it’s not expanding. Or, possibly, people who would have joined it under past conditions are now buying iPads. Apple may get a point gain here or there, but the days when it could count on vacuuming up a lot of dumb-phone conversions as a matter of course are over. If the comScore figures prove nothing else, they do show that Android is now the popular choice for that.

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What’s certainly not going to happen is any Apple share gains against Android’s existing userbase. If Apple couldn’t fend off the upstart back when it had a clear market and technical advantage, it’s not going to pull off a come-from-behind now that the network effects are operating in Android’s favor.

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On the other hand, the brand loyalty of the remaining Apple customers means I don’t foresee Android poaching a lot of Apple’s userbase in the near term either. For the next nine months or so it’s going to be Apple and Android going head-to-head for dumbphone conversions and users bailing out of RIM, with Android winning almost all of those.

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I have another reason for confidence in this scenario besides the premise that the iPhone market is near saturated. It’s the pace of device introductions. New Android hotness ships every month, creating a pull that Apple’s long release cycles don’t allow it to duplicate.

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And what about the iPhone 5? Apple’s announced delay raises the stakes on that release. It has to be a killer product, otherwise Apple’s growth prospects in the smartphone market are toast. Nothing merely comparable to the best Android phones will do.

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At the moment there are at least enough other players in decline that Apple and Android have room to grow without trying to hit on each others’ core customers. I think that will change towards the end of 2011 when Android starts to run out of soft targets. At that point, the minor smartphone players (Palm, WebOS, WP7) will be statistical noise or dead. RIM will be forted up or dead. And the pace of dumbphone conversions in the U.S. will be slowing, if only because most of them will have happened already.

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Accordingly, events grow more difficult for me to forecast after about mid-3Q2011. Too many variables: will iPhone 5 be killer, will Nokia deliver smartphones that don’t suck, will RIM crater messily? But until then, expect a regular procession of Android-stomps-everything-in-sight stories. And try not to be surprised.

diff --git a/20110410161846.blog b/20110410161846.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e38ccbb --- /dev/null +++ b/20110410161846.blog @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +Analysis of scaling problems in build systems +

My post SCons is full of win today triggered some interesting feedback on scaling problems in SCons. In response to anecdotal assertions that SCons is unusably slow on large projects, I argued that build systems in general must scale poorly if they are to enforce correctness. Subsequently, I received a pointer to a very well executed empirical study of SCons performance to which I replied in the same fashion.

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In this post, I intend to conduct a more detailed analysis of algorithmic requirements and complexity in an idealized build system, and demonstrate the implied scaling laws more rigorously. I will also investigate tradeoffs between correctness and performance using the same explanatory framework.

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An idealized build system begins work with four inputs: a set of objects, a rule forest, a set of rule generators, and a build state. I will describe each in turn.

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An object is any input to or product of the build – typically a source or object file in a compiled language, but also quite possibly a document master in some markup format, or a rendered version of such a document, or even the content of a timestamped entry in some database. Each object has two interesting properties: its unique name and a version stamp. The version stamp may be a timestamp or an implied content hash.

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A rule forest is a set of rules that connect objects to each other. Each rule enumerates a set of source objects, a set of target objects, and a procedure for generating the latter from the former. A build system begins with a set of explicit rules (which may be empty).

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A rule generator is a procedure for inspecting objects to add rules to the forest. For example, we typically want to inspect C source files and add for each one a rule making the corresponding compiled object dependent on the C source and any header files it includes that are in the set of source objects.

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A build state is a boolean relation on the set of objects. The value of the relation is true if the right-hand object is out-of-date with respect to the left-hand object. In some systems, the build state is implied by comparing object timestamps. In others, the build system records a mapping of of source-object names to version stamps for each derived object, and considers a derived object to be out of date with respect to any source name for which the current hash currently fails to match the recorded one.

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We say that a build system guarantees correctness if it guarantees that the build state will contain no ‘true’ entries on termination of the build. It guarantees efficiency if it never does excess work (corresponding to a DAG edge for which the corresponding value of the build state is false but the rule on the downstream site fires anyway).

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The stages of an idealized build look like this:

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1. Scan the object set to generate implied rules.

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2. Stitch the rule forest into a DAG expressing the entire dependency structure of the system. Each DAG node is identified by and with an object name.

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3. For each selected build target, recursively build it. The recursion looks like this: scan the set of immediate ancestor nodes A(x) of each target x; if the set is empty, you’re done. For each node y in A(x), check the build state to see if x is out-of-date with respect to y. If so, rebuild y. The dependency graph must be acyclic for this recursion to have a well-defined termination state.

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Now that we understand the sequence of events, let’s consider the algorithmic complexity of the steps in the process.

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Scanning to detect and record implied rules will be O(n) in the total size of the objects. Each object will need a name lookup for each reference to another object (such as an #include) that it contains. Thus O(n log n) in the number of objects, though a naive implementation could be O(n**2).

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Stitching the rule forest into a DAG will also be minimally O(n log n) in the number of rules, because every object name occurring as a source will need to be checked against every object name occurring as a target to see if that target should be added to the source’s ancestor list. In typical builds where most source files are C sources and thus have one dependent which is a .o file, this implies O(n log n) in the number of source files. (Note: I originally estimated this as O(n**2), thinking of the naive algorithm.)

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The recursive build may have a slightly tricky order but as a graph traversal should be expected to be O(n) in the number of DAG nodes.

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We notice two things immediately. First, the dominating cost term is that of assembling the dependency DAG from the rule forest. Second – and perhaps a bit counterintuitively – the build system overhead will be relatively insensitive to whether we’re doing a clean build or many up-to-date derived objects already exist. (Total build time will be shorter in the latter case, of course.)

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Now we have a cost model for an SCons-like build system that guarantees build correctness. As I orginally posted this, I thought that a complexity of O(n**2) in the number of objects was empirically confirmed by Eric Melski’s performance plot – but, as it turns out, this curve could fit O(n log n) as well.

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But Melski also shows that other build systems – in particular those using bare makefiles and two-phase systems like autotools that use makefile generators – achieve O(n) performance. What does this mean?

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Our complexity analysis shows us two things: If you want to pull build overhead below O(n log n), you need to not incur the cost of stitching up the dependency DAG on each build, and you need to also not pay for implicit-dependency scanning on each build.

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Handcrafted makefiles don’t do implicit-dependency scanning, avoiding O(n log n) overhead. They do have to stitch up the entire DAG, but on projects large enough to be an issue much of the overhead for that is dodged by partitioning into recursive makefiles. The build process stitches up DAGs for the rules each makefile, but this is a sum of quadratic-order costs for much smaller ns.

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The problems with bare makefiles and recursive makefiles are well understood. You get performance, but you trade that for much higher odds that your rule forest is failing to describe the actual dependencies correctly. This is especially true when dependencies cross boundaries between makefiles. The symptoms include excess work during actual builds and (much more dangerously) failure to correctly rebuild stale dependents.

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Two-phase build systems such as autotools and CMake attempt to recover correctness by bringing back implicit-dependency scanning, but also keep performance by segregating the O(n log n) cost of implicit-dependency scanning into a configuration pre-phase that generates makefiles. This sharply reduces the likelihood of error by reducing the number of dependencies that have to be hand-maintained. But it is still possible for a build to be incorrect if (for example) a source change introduces a new implicit dependency or deletes an old one.

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Another well-known problem with two-phase systems is that build recipes are difficult to debug. When make throws an error, you get a message with context in the generated makefile, not whatever master description it was made from.

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My major conclusion is that it is not possible to design a build system with better than O(n log n) performance in the number of objects without sacrificing correctness. If the build system does not assemble a complete dependency DAG, some dependencies may exist that are never checked during traversal. Belt-and-suspenders techniques to avoid this (for example in recursive makefiles) tend to force redundant builds of interior objects such as libraries, sacrificing efficiency.

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A minor conclusion, but interesting considering the case that drove me to think about this, is this: SCons is just as bad, but not necessarily worse, than it has to be.

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UPDATE: I originally misestimated the cost of DAG building as O(n**2). This weakens the minor conclusion slightly; it is possible that SCons is worse than it has to be, if there is a naive quadratic-time algorithm being used for lookup somewhere. Since it’s implemented in Python, however, it is almost certainly the case that the lookup is done through a Python hash with sub-quadratic cost.

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Objections to the above analysis focused on exploiting parallelism are intelligent but don’t address quite the same case I was after. SCons and other build systems on its historical backtrail (such as waf and autotools) will all try to parallelize if you ask them to; unless there are very large differences in how well they do task partitioning, Amdahl’s-Law like constraints pretty much guarantee that this can’t change relative performance much. And in cases where the dependency notation tends to underconstrain the build (I’m looking at you, makefiles!) attempting to parallelize is quite dangerous to build correctness.

diff --git a/20110414172634.blog b/20110414172634.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f42b21e --- /dev/null +++ b/20110414172634.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: NoWin deal “more takeover than deal”? +

In this week’s installment of “As the Smartphone World Turns”, we hear dire rumors from Nokia and see (more) evidence that RIM is circling the drain. We finish with a fascinating dispatch from the Android front.

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First up, Nokia will lay off up to 6,000 next week? (Hat tip to Richard Herrell.) OK, this is a thinly-sourced story in the category of “rumor”, but dismissals that size are hard to hide in a country as small as Finland. If the layoffs happen on schedule, that will be at least partial evidence for the rest.

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A “senior figure” at Nokia has reported as saying “This isn’t a deal between Nokia and Microsoft, this is a Microsoft take over.” Which would certainly be consistent with Microsoft’s past history. It is also rumored that Symbian is being handed to Microsoft for development.

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Symbian, handed to the managers and developers who have made WP7 so wildly successful that Microsoft now has less smartphone share than it did a year so. Oh, there’s a prospect to gladden a Nokia shareholder’s heart. Not.

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I’ll take “Formerly respected companies circling the drain” again for $400, Alex. Answer: RIM. Bing! “What company just had the product it was betting on to reverse its catastrophic market share decline roundly panned?”

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Yes, the RIM Playbook is out and nobody is impressed. Turns out the most interesting functions require it to be – wait for it! – tethered to another Blackberry. (Best-snark award to David Pogue at the New York Times: “RIM has just shipped a BlackBerry product that cannot do e-mail. It must be skating season in hell.”)

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Business-saving advice to RIM: hunt down the genius who planned this and shoot him through the head. That is, if you can still afford the bullets by the time you find him.

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Really, with competition like this, what’s going to stop Android from blowing past 55% in Q3 – a giant-meteor strike? Aside from Apple, its smartphone competitors seem to be contending mainly for the epic-incompetence award – and Apple hasn’t been doing so hot itself since the iPhone 4 antenna fiasco.

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Meanwhile, 7-inch Android tablets now ship for less than $90 quantity 1.

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Mind you, this is before the Android SoCs are shipping in volume. This tells us three things: first, my previous price projections were way, way too conservative – $85 tablets now implies $50 tablets by year end.

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Second, the price of low-end smartphones is about to crash hard. Yield problems with the displays (and thus their cost) scale as the square of the size; when 7-inch displays are cheap enough to fit in an $85 retail price, it’s likely HTC could already build a $50 smartphone around the 4-inch displays that are midrange now.

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Third: By year end, the price pressure on anything non-Android in the smartphone and tablet markets is going to be brutal. Unsurvivable for RIM; stick a fork in them, because their growth prospects are toast. Even for Apple, maintaining share will be tough uphill fight.

diff --git a/20110415131935.blog b/20110415131935.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2cbdf00 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110415131935.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +rsnapshot: you’re doing it right! +

Some years back I wrote a book titled The Art of Unix Programming. My goal in that book was to convey the Zen of Unix to today’s generations of eager young Linux and *BSD programmers. In the spirit of that book, I feel impelled to point out out a program I’ve recently learned as a striking, near-perfect example of Unix style in the modern day. rsnapshot, you’re doing it right!

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rsnapshot is a filesystem snapshot utility for making backups of local and remote systems; you save your stuff with it. I can describe it pretty well by just listing the ways that it fulfills classic Unix design patterns.

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1. Everything the program does is driven by a single configuration file in a plain-ASCII text format – easily readable by the Mark One Eyeball, easily editable without special tools.

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2. The configuration file is a specification in a declarative minilanguage. That is a bit different and stronger statement than point 1; it implies that, rather than being a series of tweaks of opaque parameters that cannot be understood without intimate knowledge of the rsnapshot code, the configuration is largely self-describing given a certain fairly minimal understanding of the application’s domain (making backups).

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3. rsnapshot delegates everything it can and doesn’t reinvent wheels. The actual backup engine is rsync, possibly assisted by ssh (two bog-standard Unix tools every sysadmin will have installed). Backup scheduling is handled by putting rsnapshot jobs in a cron file. Notifications to the sysadmin are done through normal email.

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4. While high performance of the backup engine is important (and rsync is tuned for it) performance of rsnaphot itself is not. So it’s written in a scripting language for best flexibility and maintainability. Perl wouldn’t have been my first choice, but for this application it is a big win over C or any compiled language.

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5. rsnapshot doesn’t have a GUI because it doesn’t need one; the real “interface” to it is a text editor running on its config file. If somebody wanted to give it a GUI, the GUI code could be a separate small program that simply does structured modifications of the config file while remaining completely isolated from the logic of rsnaphot itself. Such separation lowers global complexity, reduces bugs, and increases the options to improve both programs.

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6. Mechanism is clearly separated from policy. In this particular case, the portions of the configuration language that describe the tools to use for doing backups are clearly separated from scheduling and the specification of archive locations.

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7. rsnapshot run on a config file with a syntactic or other detectable error emits a useful error message including the line number of the error to standard error. The real point is that errors lead to more understanding rather than some bland “A problem occurred” pointing nowhere in particular.

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8. rsnapshot includes a -t (test) option that allows you to see the rsync and other copy commands a given configuration would emit without committing them. It also includes a -V option to show more detail about how these actions were generated. These options, especially in combination with the previous point, make the program discoverable; they lower the cost of becoming familiar with it.

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9. rsnapshot makes as few wired-in assumptions as it can get away with. This future-proofs it against, for example, changes in the preferred backup tools. If rsync were to be obsolesced by a faster and better file-tree-synchronization tool tomorrow, rsnapshot installations would be using it without fuss the next day.

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10. rsnapshot isn’t just good, it’s unobtrusively good. The design doesn’t repeatedly hit you over the head with how clever it is or try to impress you with flashiness signifying nothing. It is spare, clean, elegant, and gets out of your way. This is correct Unix style!

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I’m not saying rsnapshot is absolutely perfect – I could quarrel with the reliance on tabs as field separators in the config file, even though the parser is helpful about telling you when you’ve used the wrong kind of whitespace. But it’s near perfect, and a worthy model for programmers trying to improve their Unix style.

diff --git a/20110418020746.blog b/20110418020746.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5f0ecdd --- /dev/null +++ b/20110418020746.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: The Stages of Apple-Cultist Denial +

It has been quite humorous watching the acolytes of the iPhone sink into deeper and deeper denial as Android blows through obstacles at ever-accelerating speed. It would require an epic poet, or perhaps a psychiatrist specializing in religious mania, to do full justice to this topic. But I will attempt a brief tour through the more prominent delusions here.

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Back in the beginning – I remember first hearing this just weeks after the G-1 shipped (I got mine on day 3) – There was “Android will never gain any significant market share because the user experience is inferior.”

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The latest fashionable form of denial is “It doesn’t matter that Android is now the #1-selling smartphone in the U.S. and worldwide, Apple is making money hand over fist.” Heh. What this actually says to any long-time tech-industry watcher is: disruption from below succeeded, Apple marketshare and revenue collapse coming in 3, 2, 1…

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Ah, but let us consider some of the intermediate delusions. “Developers won’t write for Android because the Apple app store already has too big a network-effect advantage.” That was an early one, more recently replaced by “Nobody’s making any money writing for Android.” Somewhere, the Angry Birds crew is laughing at that one all the way to the bank.

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Remember “The iPhone 4 is coming! It will rule OK and whip all you whimpering Android weenies back to your fetid holes!” I recall that one being quite the favored invocatory chant around this time last year. It was, of course, followed by the Antennagate fiasco and the utter failure of the iPhone 4 to slow Android’s rise even enough to show up as a speed bump on comScore’s 2010 quarterlies.

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Blaming Android’s rise on the AT&T carrier exclusive had always been a popular evasion. After the iPhone 4 failed to deliver salvation, the faithful switched to “The iPhone 4V is coming! It will rule OK, etc.” Alas, sales out of the gate were unimpressive. Two months later it appears that the iPhone 4V is now being outsold on the Verizon network not just by Android in aggregate but by a single Android phone – the HTC Thunderbolt.

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It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Apple boosters assured us repeatedly that what consumers wanted was slick industrial design, iTunes, and the close, comforting embrace of the walled garden – not all that icky, chaotic openness and freedom and choice. They’ll pay extra to have Steve Jobs tell them what they really like!” chorused the cultists. The consumers…disagreed.

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Ah, yes. And do you remember when version fragmentation was the sure doom of Android? This one was particularly popular in early 2010, when the 2.x versions hadn’t completely replaced 1.6 on smartphones. Having learned almost nothing from that go-round, the Jobsians are now singing the same tune in a minor key about Android tablets.

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In fact, now that Android has blown the doors off Apple zooming past it in the smartphone market, the belief that Apple can somehow make the tablet market come out differently from smartphones is probably now the most cherished of the Apple fan’s delusions.

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One popular version of this myth is Apple cleverly bought up all the parts, preventing anyone else from ramping up production of inexpensive tablets for years!” Uh huh. Anyone except every single electronics company on the Pacific Rim, seemingly all of whom are piling into the Android tablet market like sharks smelling blood in the water. Archos, Heropad, Samsung, eLocity, Viewsonic, scores of others – it’s nearly a full-time job just tracking the product announcements.

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It’s all quite like the mid-2009 explosion in inexpensive Android phones. Yeah, sure, no threat to Apple’s marketshare at all there. Low-end disruption? Never heard of it. iPad 2, superior user experience, quality leader, la-la-la-la-la-la-la. One only hopes that Apple’s product planners are less prone to self-delusion than the company’s fans.

diff --git a/20110419000238.blog b/20110419000238.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..30c86ab --- /dev/null +++ b/20110419000238.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Android measured at over 50% U.S. market share +

Two consecutive smartphone-wars posts is unusual here, I know, but the latest marketshare news is high-explosive stuff. The Guardian in Great Britain has published data from a European market-research outfit, Kantar WorldPanel Comtech; the article is titled Nokia and RIM bleeding smartphone share while Android cleans up, and includes a very informative table of smartphone share numbers by country. They become even more interesting when set against the ComScore numbers covering Nov 2010 to February 2011, which I previously analyzed in The Smartphone Wars: Almost boring now….

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The article does not say outright whether Kantar is reporting new-unit sales or total installed base, but the Kantar November 2010 figures for Microsoft, RIM, and Apple are so close to comScore’s from July 2010 that I think it must be the total installed base. Their differences max out at about 4%, which is not far above statistical noise level, and fit their known market-share trend lines for that period. Android is 19% in Kantar’s June 2010 results vs. 26% in comScore’s November 2010 ones, which can be accounted for by the (known) phenomenal growth between June and November.

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So it appears the comScore and Kantar numbers are comparable. But if I’ve been fooled by a numerical coincidence, that’s not going to make a long-term difference. In a market turning over technology and units as fast as smartphones are, installed base doesn’t lag new-unit sales by a whole lot. If the Kantar figures aren’t describing total installed base now, they’re predicting it in 3 to 6 months.

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At the risk of reducing the rest of this post to anticlimax, I will first report that Kantar measures Android market share in the U.S. at 54.7% in March 2011. This is a 21% jump from comScore’s February figures in a single month. It suggests that, a good six months sooner than I expected, Android is entering the final runaway to uncontested market dominance at 85% or up.

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It’s certainly not looking like any competitor has what it takes to stop Android. Kantar has Symbian at 1.2%, Microsoft at 4.9%, RIM at 10.6% and Apple at %27.2. While regaining second place is good news for Apple, this is mostly because RIM is going down in flames; a gain of less than 2% since February isn’t going to do diddly to Android when Android’s growth rate is literally an order of magnitude higher.

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Results from other countries show local variations on a similar pattern. Android is hammering the snot out of its competitors everywhere. The main difference from the U.S. is that while iOS is still posting tiny share gains here, it’s getting badly hurt elsewhere. In France it has actually lost 23% of share in the last year! It’s hardly doing better in Great Britain; -16%.

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There are fewer surprises in the analysis above the table. “The key underlying trend is that Android is growing in every country,” said Dominic Sunnebo, described as “consumer insight director” for Kantar. He zeroes in on the Android army’s faster OODA loop and ability to place lots of different product bets at different price and capability points – quite a familiar theme to readers of this blog. He also identifies low Android cost as a major sales driver outside the developed world.

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In a recent post I projected that serious zero-sum competition between Android and Apple wouldn’t begin until at least 3Q2011 after Android has chewed up the market share of all the soft targets – RIM and Microsoft, most notably. Kantar’s non-US figures give us a foretaste if what that’s going to be like, and they suggest that I may actually have overestimated Apple’s ability to retain share under Android pressure. It looks as though the disruptive collapse of iPhone has arrived in Europe.

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The figures also point an increasingly bleak picture for the NoWin alliance, which has failed to stop both Nokia and Microsoft from incurring severe losses in market share. It is beginning to look as though the earliest possible time Nokia could ship WP7-based smartphones is going to be well after Android has achieved a strong supermajority. Since the minority competitor seems certain to be Apple, it’s difficult to locate a plausible point of entry for NoWin phones.

diff --git a/20110420142521.blog b/20110420142521.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c0290dd --- /dev/null +++ b/20110420142521.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Broadening my Deepwater Horizons +

I’ve gotten used to being cited in computer science and software engineering papers over the last decade, but here’s a new one. Today I read a draft in which I and the GPSD project get cited a bunch of times and it’s – er – not about open source. It’s about Marine AIS in disaster management. Broadening my deepwater horizons, as it were.

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You can read a PDF of Vessel Tracking Using the Automatic Identification System (AIS) During Emergency Response: Lessons from the Deepwater Horizon Incident, but be warned that it’s pretty heavy going unless you’re deep into AIS or have a thing for disaster-management porn.

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It’s nevertheless interesting on several levels. Kurt Schwehr, the author, writes well for an academic and manages to make the bureaucratically-clogged portions of the narrative less deadly boring than they might have been. Both the low-comedy aspects of government reaction to the disaster and the heroic attempts to cope with the clusterfuck-in-motion come through pretty clearly.

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I’m only a supporting player in this story, but the paper does illustrate one point I’ve been hammering on for years. Making standards for life-critical systems proprietary is not just stupid, it’s evil. Kurt reports that some work I and the GPSD project guys did helped prevent that from being a problem in his part of the Deepwater Horizon response, and I’m pleased about that. Next time, though, we might not get so lucky.

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Unanswered question: was GPSD running in any of the robot submarines they sent in to try to plug the gusher? Inquiring minds want to know…

diff --git a/20110421164818.blog b/20110421164818.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ae43fa6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110421164818.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: multicarrier breakout fail +

The news is out that Verizon sold 2.2M iPhones in the roughly 60 days from product launch to their quarterly report. I’ll fess up; this is well over what I was expecting, based on the reports of unimpressive first-week sales.

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But I also underestimated Android new-unit sales by a larger factor. Even on the very optimistic assumption that Verizon sustains its pace through Q2, Android phones are selling so much faster in aggregate (ratio of about 10:1) that iPhone 4V is barely going to budge the needle on the market share numbers (if that). Focusing too much on the the quarterly numbers is ignoring the forest for the trees.

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Forest vs. trees notwithstanding, I’m going to be scrupulous about pointing out the possible ramifications of my mis-forecast now so there won’t be any accusations later that I’ve tried to sweep it under the rug. 2.2M units in 60 days means the plausible range for Q1 and Q2 together tops out at about 6M units; a more realistic estimate would be 4M (which is in line with Piper Jaffray’s launch-day prediction that I was skeptical about; props to them). They’re likely to beat 2.6M that I set as a threshold for “anemic” pretty easily, like in another three weeks. And if Android volume now had been where I thought it would be when the iPhone 4V launched, this would be pretty serious news. But it isn’t; it’s much higher.

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The iPhone didn’t need just moderate success on Verizon, it needed the massive multicarrier breakout various Apple fanboys were confidently and gloatingly predicting for over a year on this blog. It needed to rack up sales numbers high enough to exceed Android’s growth over the same period to dent Android’s momentum. That didn’t happen, and quibbling over the odd million or two error in unit sale projections is not going to change the fact that it didn’t happen.

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In fact, it didn’t even come within an order of magnitude of happening. 6 million units, the top end of the now-plausible Q1+Q2 range, is – depending on how you predict rate of growth in Android activations – between 14 and 17 days of Android sales.

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I got this far in thinking out the implications before, in a comment. Now I’ll extend the analysis.

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The only plausible comeback scenario for the iPhone after Android blew past it in November 2010 was that there was huge demand for the iPhone being pent up by customers’ inability to use it off AT&T’s network. In this narrative, customers were merely settling for a cheap substitute that they would drop like a rock when the real thing became available.

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This fantasy is now dead. Over the last two months, both the total volume of Android sales and the rate of Android growth have exceeded corresponding figures for the iPhone by brutally large margins. The long-awaited multicarrier breakout was a strategic fizzle. And the news from outside the U.S., where Apple’s market share has been nosediving over the last year, is worse.

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Accordingly, I no longer think there is any plausible scenario under which Android fails to achieve over 50% smartphone market share in the U.S. and worldwide this year. If Apple couldn’t spike the wheels on this juggernaut, there is no hope that RIM or any of the minor players is going to do it. And to give you an idea how robust that prediction is, Android could still beat 50% in the U.S. if its growth rate dropped by a full third.

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Now add to this the fact that Apple’s smartphone market share has been essentially flat for two quarters. That’s a very bad sign in a market where returns tend to increase with scale and both gains and losses in share are self-amplifying. Apple is balancing on a knife edge.

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I think we’re looking at the end stage of a successful technology disruption on the classic pattern. The question is no longer whether Android can be stopped, but when Apple’s market share will fall off a cliff. I think that could easily happen as soon as the next 90 days; one of the patterns in technology disruptions is that collapse often follows the victim’s best quarter ever.

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But I could be way wrong about that short-term prospect without changing the overall picture. It wouldn’t be sufficient for Apple to gain a few points of share from the Verizon iPhone; it would have to substantially beat Android’s overall growth rate, which means pegging at least a 7% share increase. And that is not going to happen.

diff --git a/20110501024241.blog b/20110501024241.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3fc02a0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110501024241.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Scenes from Penguicon +

It’s Saturday night at Penguicon. A few hours ago I blatantly pulled social rank on someone, and I am not ashamed. This is how it happened.

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So, it all started when I was playing Dominion with my wife Cathy and a couple of friends in in the game room. Heather the swordmistress of Polaris (a woman as beautiful as she is deadly and one of my best friends) texted me saying “We have glow-in-the-dark beat sticks! Join us!”…and, after finishing the game, I joined Heather and a gaggle of my sword-geek friends in roaming around the party halls mock-dueling with the glow-in-the-dark foam beat sticks and making silly noises.

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Came a point in our wanderings where we heard rumor that the Vikings were planning to raid the Romans, who are usually the pirates. To make sense of this, you need to know that Cathy’s and my friend Joe Saul (with which we have been known to do Internet Law panels at previous Penguicons) has a tradition of roaming the convention halls with a gang of friends in elaborate pirate costumes, pulling a ship-shaped cart full of strong grog which they dispense to all and sundry (and beauteous them pirate wenches be, arr!) . Spontaneous dancing has oft been induced by the boom box cleverly concealed in yonder vessel.

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Well, except this year they changed it up a little, as the ship morphed into a columnated classical temple and everybody wore togas and legionary costume and the odd gladiatorial rig. And the wenches be just as beautiful in dancing silks, ave!

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For some reason I never quite sorted out there had been another gang of people show up wearing seriously cheesy Viking costumes – plastic horned helmets with LEDs on. I was electrified by a rumor that the Vikings were planning to raid the Romans.

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“My Viking blood calls to me!” I declaimed to my sword-geek friends, flourishing my glowing green foamy beat-stick above my head; “I must raid the Romans!” I duly scampered off after the Vikings, who were taking the elevators to the 14th floor to muster in preparation for their foray.

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So I catch up with the Vikings, who are stripping for battle by stowing away their drinks cart (and the striped square-sail on a small boom that made it properly Viking).

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“Can I join your raid, please?”, I said, waving my magic sword for effect. “Can I have a helmet?” Guy looks at me and says “Well, they’re reserved for members. You’d have to join I3.”

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“What’s I3?” I asked. “It’s a hackerspace in Ferndale” he said.

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My eyes lit up with an unholy glee and I said “My name is Eric Raymond. Could I be considered a member?” He grinned and said “Ex officio” and handed me a cheesy helmet. With a blinking LED of my very own!

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And thus it was that I joined the Viking raid as we stormed up the stairs to the 16th floor and charged the Roman party position. The Emperor Saul suggested we settle our differences with a dance-off, and much shaking of costumed booty ensued.

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You know, I don’t try to pull hacker rank very often, but this seemed like the perfect time to do it. Those guys will probably be telling other geeks how ESR went a-Viking with them for years. There are pictures. And they insisted I keep the helmet.

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diff --git a/20110503113516.blog b/20110503113516.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..25801d9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110503113516.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: With Enemies Like These, Who Needs Friends? +

Android just got a boost it didn’t need. RIM, already staggering after a 5% market-share drop over the last quarter and the Playbook debacle, has just…well, “shot itself through the foot” fails to convey quite the right sort of intensity. In fact it has executed a hitherto-unprecedented form of marketing suicide which can only be characterized as a “double-tap Osborne through the head”.

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Full story at BlackBerry OS 7: How to Osborne your smartphone sales (hat tip to Ken Burnside for the link and the post title). It’s well written, worth reading, and poignant for me because, yes, I myself once owned an Osborne 1. In brief, RIM just murdered the sales prospects of all its existing hardware and software in favor of a new handset that won’t ship for a couple of months and a new OS version that will not be available as an over-the-air update to its existing customers.

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A point I think the authors didn’t emphasize quite enough is how badly this move is going to cheese off RIM’s carrier partners. RIM has just hammered not just its own revenue but the revenue the carriers were expecting from OS 6 handsets they had in inventory, which will now likely go unsold as customers realize they’ll never be upgradable. RIM relies on its carrier partners not just as a sales conduit but for most of its marketing, as well. How eager do you suppose the carriers are going to be to continue that, now?

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It’s truly odd how something about the smartphone business seems to produce epic attacks of suicidal stupidity at formerly well-run companies, and the parallel with Nokia is becoming ever more compelling in this case. RIM’s initial strategic blunder – choosing to fight Android rather than co-opt it – has been followed by an escalating series of screwups in their execution, like the bad joke that is the Playbook.

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Following this one, my previous assessment that RIM might be able to fort up around its more inertia-ridden corporate customers for 5-9% of continuing market share is out the window. They just threw that prospect away. Now I think RIM’s got a year to live, tops, with their best case being a buyout by somebody with a use for their infrastructure.

diff --git a/20110509131244.blog b/20110509131244.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dec8e7a --- /dev/null +++ b/20110509131244.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +The Uses of Cliche +

I’ve done a lot of writing for the game Battle For Wesnoth. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned, and now teach others, is this: genre cliches are your friend. Too much originality can badly disrupt the gameplay experience. This is so at variance with our expectations about ‘good’ art that I think it deserves some explanation and exploration.

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Wesnoth is a fantasy-themed game, and I’ve worked quite hard at bringing the prose in Wesnoth up to the standard of the better grade of fantasy novel. But I have to deal constantly with the fact that Wesnoth is not a novel – it’s a battle game, and the text occurs in rather small dollops as narrative decoration around battles. The purpose of the game is to present those battle scenarios in an appealing and involving way, not to present a work of literature in which there happen to be embedded tactical puzzles.

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One consequence is that writing for Wesnoth is rather like constructing a ship in a bottle. You have to be ruthlessly economical with your prose, because the form and the players won’t tolerate expository lumps – or, really, any kind of lump. You must routinely accomplish a great deal in a very few words. I find meeting this sort of artistic challenge very satisfying when I can pull it off; in one example that I’m particularly proud of, I wrote a love scene emotionally powerful enough to make my wife cry in four lines of dialogue (Kalenz and Cleodil in The Legend of Wesmere; you’ll know it when you see it).

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Another consequence of the hard constraints on length of exposition is that cliche is your friend. When you’re scene-painting with so few words, you have to rely on the reader’s interpretive context for the work and evoke the reader’s pre-existing ideas about and images of elves, orcs, undead and so forth, rather than trying to create novel ones. Too much originality is actually dangerous; it risks leaving players puzzled and stranded in a secondary world they suddenly find they lack the information to understand.

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Creativity is certainly possible under these constraints, but it has to be additive and incremental. For example, my campaign The Hammer of Thursagan begins with Dwarves that are very much ANSI standard and never tries to subvert or reject that Tolkien-derived cliche – but it does explore some ideas about Dwarvish society (the role of loremasters) and psychology (the revulsion against masking and deception, the terror of being outcast) that add levels of complexity and non-human nuance to that cliche.

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And, unashamedly, I steal from good sources in order to enhance the player’s experience. For example, the description I wrote for the death of the lich Mal-Ravanal at the end of Eastern Invasion consciously echoes the death of Sauron in The Return of The King. The imagistic and emotional parallel is a tool with which I make that scene more powerful, more resonant, for anyone who has read the Tolkien and half-remembers it. I had to do it that way, because I couldn’t spend the wordage required to produce a powerful and original death scene!

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The visual art for Wesnoth has similar qualities. Some of it is quite lovely and striking, but very little of it is actually surprising. Likewise the music, which (like the film scores it strongly resembles) is thoroughly situated within genres comfortable to the listener’s ear rather than avant-garde. Like the prose, the visual art and music are support elements for gameplay rather than than ends in themselves; too much originality would be distracting, and would demand a kind of cognitive effort from players that they didn’t really sign up for. They have battles to win and puzzles to solve!

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We’re all so marinated in the 20th-century idea that good art is required to challenge one’s preconceptions and be original that it is perhaps difficult for to receive this sort of deliberately derivative work as art at all. But it’s worth remembering that standalone art intended primarily to express the artist’s personal creativity is a very recent idea, not actually fully developed until the collapse of aristocratic patronage at the end of the 19th century and the “back to zero” impulse of modernism in the early 20th.

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In most cultures at most times, quotation and bricolage have been as important to artists, or far more important, than individual creativity. Art was tied to and primarily generated for non-artistic purposes – as an evocative device for religions, as decoration for craft objects and architecture, as a peacock-tail display tactic for the wealthy and powerful. Individual creativity was restrained, additive, and incremental; as in Wesnoth, too much originality would have separated art from its purposes and alienated its audience.

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It isn’t Wesnoth that is exceptional, it’s art-for-art’s sake. That stance depends on the existence of a specialized audience of aesthetes who are willing to value and consume art-for-art’s sake, detached from any of the purposes that are historically normal for art. Which is all very well, except when art-for-art’s sake decides that it owns the whole domain and that the entire pre-modern history of art can be consigned to irrelevance. Some pretty noxious pathologies develop out of that, as I’ve previously discussed in Terrorism Becomes Bad Art and Deadly Genius and the Back-to-Zero Problem.

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So, on the whole, I’m quite happy that Battle For Wesnoth is a functionally appealing pile of cliches, and quite willing to let my artistic ya yas out by pastiching Tolkien and Dunsany and Howard with the occasional flash of restrained creativity. The truth is I’d rather be part of that conversation than the one the art-for-art’s-sake aesthetes are having; the latter doesn’t seem to lead anywhere good.

diff --git a/20110511053540.blog b/20110511053540.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..254890b --- /dev/null +++ b/20110511053540.blog @@ -0,0 +1,143 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Still It Rises +

I’ve been meaning to put together a running plot of U.S. smartphone marketshare for some time. The monthly press release from the market research firm comScore contain enough information to do it, but you have to stitch a number of them together as they only report the covered month and the third previous month. Stitching all the data together is actually rather revealing.

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First, the raw numbers. All the rows are market share percentages except the last, “Smartphones”, which is the total size of the smartphone userbase in millions. The March 2010 figures are missing because of a retrieval glitch on the comScore website; I’ve been promised the relevant document will be restored and the numbers mailed to me.

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O/S Dec 2009Jan 2010Feb 2010Mar 2010Apr 2010May 2010Jun 2010Jul 2010Aug 2010Sep 2010Oct 2010Nov 2010Dec 2010Jan 2011Feb 2011Mar 2011
Google5.27.19.0-12.013.014.917.019.621.423.526.028.731.233.034.7
RIM41.643.042.1-41.141.740.139.337.637.335.833.531.630.428.927.1
Apple25.325.125.4-25.124.424.323.824.224.324.625.025.024.725.225.5
MS18.015.715.1-14.013.212.811.810.8 9.99.79.08.48.07.77.5
Palm6.15.75.4-4.94.84.74.94.64.23.93.93.73.22.82.8
Smartphones39.442.745.4-48.149.149.953.455.758.760.761.563.265.869.572.5
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It’s unclear what’s going on with Apple, but there are a couple of conspicuous absences in its trend. There’s no bump from the iPhone 4V release at the beginning of February, and no obvious effect from all those cheap 3GS refurbs that AT&T has been flogging. It looks rather as if Apple marketing is running as fast as it can to stay in place, and not very much as though Apple is capturing a lot of dumbphone conversions.

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I’ll update these figures and post another plot when the April report comes out. In the meantime, talk amongst yourselves.

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UPDATES: I was able to get more historical numbers, clear back to December 2009, and one of my records has calculated a good estimate of one I was missing from comScore’s data. The post has been revised accordingly.

diff --git a/20110512185731.blog b/20110512185731.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9e7a7ae --- /dev/null +++ b/20110512185731.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Tracking userbase growth +

I’ve put together a tool to visualize the smartphone market-share data comScore makes available in its monthly press releases. Readers can download both the tool and the raw data in order to check my work. And the first new visualization is quite interesting:

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This was derived in the obvious way; I simply multiplied the market-share percentages by comScore’s number for total smartphone users. The result provides a different perspective from the market-share visualization I posted yesterday. It is, I think, quite revealing.

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We can see that Android is on a qualitatively different growth path than any of the other smartphone platforms. It’s not just that the slope is different, it’s that Android’s growth curve looks less perturbed by short-timescale events. This is probably a consequence of the breadth of the Android product range – market success or failure is a summation of more product bets, which will tend to average. I’m left wondering what happened in May 2010 when the slope increased.

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Apple is the other platform that’s actually growing users. I think, bearing in mind that ComScore reports three-month running averages, that we can actually see the effects of the iPhone 4 and 4V here; there are small slope increases at about the right places in June 2010 and February 2011. Still, there’s not a lot of hope in this graph for anyone who wants to think Apple will catch up to Android.

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I think this visualization increases the mystery around Apple’s market share trend being essentially flat for 18 months, because Apple has gained something like 5 million users in that time. I can’t believe it’s just a fantastic numerological coincidence of market conditions, but I don’t know what it means.

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My has RIM been having a bumpy ride. This visualization makes its situation look less dire than I previously thought; evidently, RIM has been gaining users just a little faster than it’s been losing share. Still, the trend for them since September 2010 hasn’t been good. The visualization also shows how Android and Apple have been sucking the oxygen out of RIM’s atmosphere, and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

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Microsoft’s decline is clearer here than in the market-share plot. What a helpless, screwed-up mess they look like these days! Looks like Linux is doing them in after all, except in smaller cases than we expected and with ARM chips.

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Interestingly, Palm is in the position I thought six months ago RIM might occupy – declining share but a very stable userbase. Perhaps I’ve underestimated their survival odds.

diff --git a/20110516151736.blog b/20110516151736.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..42dd70f --- /dev/null +++ b/20110516151736.blog @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: More fun with statistics +

Today, a prediction about the timing of Android victory. But – more importantly – a discussion of the uses and perils of statistical extrapolation.

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I’ve used gnuplot to do a linear regression against comScore’s history of Android market share and project it into the future. Here it is:

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Looks very neat, doesn’t it? Shows Android crossing 50% U.S. market share right about the end of October. Happy news, if true.

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But there are significant methodological issues about how far we should trust a graph like this. By exploring them, I hope to help my readers become a bit more informed about how to apply rational skepticism to statistical extrapolation. There’s an awful lot of lying with statistics going on out there, much of it on issues weightier than smartphone market share; it is good to learn how not to be fooled.

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I will start by giving you the dead minimum you should accept for confidence in my statistical extrapolation – full access to my dataset and my analysis/visualization code. Deep suspicion would be justified if I did not. I could be hiding dishonest manipulation of the data, or I could simply have made mistakes. Without the ability to check my work, you can’t know – and if I denied you that ability, the safe bet would be that I have something to hide.

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This may seem obvious, but a surprisingly large amount of science (especially politically-loaded science) is done under conditions of nondisclosure that could cover an awful lot of fimflam. Skepticism about such ‘science’ is not merely justified, it’s required – and the higher the public-policy stakes are, the more uncompromising the demand for full disclosure has to be.

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But don’t forget that I am relying on comScore’s primary datasets and code, which I can’t see. The absolute most you can deduce from what I show you is that my extrapolation is correct if comScore’s numbers are correct, and your confidence in that can only be as strong as the value of the business comScore would lose if it got out that its numbers were erroneous or fudged.

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But there are even more fundamental issues that still arise even if you assume that comScore and myself are both honest and without flaw.

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One obvious reason to believe the graph is that the line of extrapolation looks like a pretty clean fit. Indeed, the residuals are quite small, and are comparable to the measurement errors one normally sees in large market surveys. But if we become too seduced by the goodness of the fit we risk missing a more fundamental question: what reason do we have for believing that a linear fit is appropriate?

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Suppose we had a theoretical model of why people buy smartphones that predicted Android’s market share would rise linearly over time as y = ax + b, but the theory didn’t give us the coefficients a and b. The rough linearity of the observed data would confirm this theory; we would then have justification for doing a linear fit to the observed data to get a and b and using that to extrapolate into the future.

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But this isn’t our situation. We have no theory of what drives smartphone marketshare, or at least not one that yields an equation. We have no justification for believing that market shares will tend to rise and fall linearly; in fact, we’ve already seen that over the same period RIM’s certainly does not.

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We’re actually worse off than this, because we’ve seen growth curves in natural systems before and know that neat linearity is rare. The most likely model is that customers pick smartphones by what they see others buying, crowdsourcing the job of evaluating products to each other and leading to a growth pattern that looks like the spread of a contagious disease. Growth by contagion in bounded systems tends to be not linear but logistic.

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There is a theory that could explain linear growth, however. That is this: customers would be buying Androids faster if they could, but the available supply is only growing linearly (because it takes constant dollars for each additive increment of manufacturing capacity). We actually get some support for this from the userbase growth graph, which could be well approximated by two linear segments joined by a slight change in slope.

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In a slightly more elaborate version of such a theory, J. Random Consumer has set a strike price for getting an Android and is buying as soon as his strike price is crossed going downward. The supply of Androids available at any fixed price X, and thus the number of buyers, will also tend to rise proportionately to total manufacturing capacity, and thus to rise linearly.

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Now we have justification for the following statement: If comScore’s numbers are accurate, and Android sales are mainly constrained by supply chain and manufacturing capacity, then a linear fit is appropriate, and it’s highly likely that Android will cross 50% share in late October.

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Other theoretical models that predict linear growth of sales could be plugged in here. The point is that you really need to have such a model – and confirmation of it that is to some degree independent of a pretty graph – before a statistically-based forecast can be any better than numbers pulled out of a hat. Without such a model, applying linear regression or any other sort of curve fit imposes a shape that may look nice but will have no connection to causal reality.

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Of course it could be that the linearity is an illusion. The Android userbase growth graph actually looks like it could be power-law growth. If that’s true, my linear prediction will be too conservative. Alternatively, growth might be about to nose over into the saturation part of a logistic curve. There’s simply no way to know this from the data; you have to have a model underlying your curve-fit, an independently confirmed theory about the future.

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Such a theory needn’t be super-elaborate to make useful predictions. For example, if we consider that fewer than 50% of cellphone users have converted to smartphones, its seems much less likely that smartphone sales are going to reach saturation in the next year. Under these conditions, the entire Android army would have to be afflicted by some Android-specific design or execution failure for sales growth to go sublinear. (Yes, this is possible; worst case, a junk-patent lawsuit leading to a temporary restraining order could be pretty bad in the U.S. market, even if it had little effect intertnationally.)

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Let’s review our premises here:

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  1. ESR has conducted an honest analysis which is not significantly compromised by errors.
    2. +
  2. comScore’s numbers are accurate.
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  3. Android sales growth is constrained primarily by supply or some unknown input with linear growth.
    4. +
  4. The Android Army is not going to be hit by some kind of huge gotcha like a massive design failure or patent TRO.
    5. +
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My point right now isn’t to argue for any of these premises, just to point out how much model construction has to go on before a curve-fit means anything real. The data is what the data is, but the curve it’s fit to is laden with assumptions. Whenever someone throws a curve at you without being explicit about the assumptions and their failure points, be very, very wary of it.

diff --git a/20110518131812.blog b/20110518131812.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..43d7fd7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110518131812.blog @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +Maybe science is my religion, after all +

In a recent comment thread, I wrote that I am revolted by the corruption and politicization of science. After I wrote that, I experienced a moment of introspective surprise during which I realized that my feelings about people who commit scientific fraud for personal or political ends are in tone and intensity very much like a deeply religious person’s feelings about people who commit sacrilege.

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This realization made me quite uncomfortable. I’m a hard-shell rationalist; what I have in my life that corresponds to religion I carefully chose to not involve me in faith-holding or the other kinds of emotional attachments that religious people form as a matter of course. I regard religion, in the sense the term is normally used, as a dangerous form of collective insanity – and I want above all to be sane.

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Because I felt uncomfortable, I decided that I needed to perform the exercise I have elsewhere described as killing the Buddha – in this case, killing the premise that I am not like a religious person by examining and embracing all the ways that my relationship to science makes me like one.

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I’m performing the exercise now. I’m going to write to clarify my thinking, as I think. I’m not sure where this will take me; if I were, it wouldn’t be killing the Buddha.

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I should probably start by dashing one set of false hopes. I have some readers who are conventionally religious, and at least a few of them probably hope that I’m about to confess that science isn’t special – that it’s at least co-equal to or on the same epistemic footing as religion, if not inferior to it. Sorry, but no. Science is different in one vital respect: ‘belief’ in it cashes out as predictions about observables. Religion is mostly vacuous because it mostly fails to do this, and where it does make predictions about observables they are generally indistinguishable from delusional insanity.

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However…human beings seem to be hardwired to have psychological needs that are fulfilled by religion. Or perhaps it would be better to invert that and say that religion is an invention fulfilling needs that arise from essential features of our psychology. So even while I still regard the belief content of religion as crazy, I perhaps should not be surprised – or even necessarily upset – to find that my mind falls into the sort of emotional grooves that usually go with religious belief content.

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In sorting out these feelings, I start from the datum that scientific fraud feels to me like sacrilege. Plausible reports of it make me feel deeply angry and disgusted, with a stronger sense of moral indignation than I get about almost any other sort of misbehavior. I feel like people who commit it have violated a sacred trust.

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What is sacred here? What are they profaning?

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The answer to that question seemed obvious to me immediately when I first formed the question. But in order to explain it comprehensibly to a reader, I need to establish what I actually mean by “science”. Science is not a set of answers, it’s a way of asking questions. It’s a process of continual self-correction in which we form theories about what is, check them by experiment, and use the result to improve our theories. Implicitly there is no end to this journey; anything we think of as ‘truth’ is merely a theory that has had predictive utility so far but could be be falsified at any moment by further evidence.

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When I ask myself why I feel scientific fraud is like sacrilege, I rediscover on the level of emotion something I have written from an intellectual angle: Sanity is the process by which you continually adjust your beliefs so they are predictively sound. I could have written “scientific method” rather than “sanity” there, and that is sort of the point. Scientific method is sanity writ large and systematized; sanity is science in the small personal domain of one’s own skull.

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Science is sanity is salvation – it’s how we redeem ourselves, individually and collectively, from the state of ignorance and sin into which we were born. “Sin” here has a special interpretation; it’s the whole pile of cognitive biases, instinctive mis-beliefs, and false cultural baggage we’re wired with that obstruct and weigh down our attempts to be rational. But my emotional reaction to this is, I realize, quite like that of a religious person’s reaction to whatever tribal superstitious definition of ‘sin’ he has internalized.

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I feel that scientists have a special duty of sanity that is analogous to a priest’s special duty to be pious and virtuous. They are supposed to lead us out of epistemic sin, set the example, light the way forward. When one of them betrays that trust, it is worse than ordinary stupidity. It damages all of us; it feeds the besetting demons of ignorance and sloppy thinking, and casts discredit on scientists who have remained true to their sacred vocation.

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Even now I feel queasy using these religious metaphors and these analogies, because they are so pregnant with horror and oppression and mass death – Muslims screaming “Allahu akbar!” as they detonate suicide bombs, Christians with “Kill them all, God will know his own.” But this Buddha must be faced and killed for the sake of my own sanity. If I do not acknowledge and deal with the ways in which I feel like a religious person, I increase my risk that those emotions will sneak up on my thinking and make it unsane.

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So I will say it out loud: science is the functional equivalent of worship for the rational human. In contemplating the wonder and vastness of the universe as it is, I find the equivalent of religious awe before the face of God. In struggling to understand the universe, scientists perform work as dedicated, heartfelt and ecstatic as religious devotion. Humility and self-discipline are even more proper to the scientist than they are to the believer; as the true believer seeks to know God’s will without the obstruction of ego, the true scientist seeks understanding of what is without the obstruction of ego.

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Religion makes us the offer that if we believe, it will lift us out of ourselves – perfect us, teach us what is mere transient illusion and what is real and eternal. Science makes almost the same offer; that if we accept the discipline of rationality, we can become better than we are and learn what is really true. These two offers rest on very different ground, and religion’s offer is essentially false while science’s is essentially true – but psychologically, we receive both offers in the same way. They both plug into the same basic human fear of death and the unknown, and the same longing for transcendence.

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So maybe science is my religion, after all. The question is definitional. Is it ‘religion’ if it duplicates the emotional constellations of religious feeling without investment in the supernatural, or faith, or revelation, or dogma, or any of the usual content of religious belief?

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This is a question I, personally, have asked before about neopaganism and the aspects of Buddhist thought that attract me. Intellectually, I think my answer about science is the same; “is this a religion” is a question about map, not territory. It’s about the terms I use to explain myself to others, not what I think or do. The corresponding question about territory would “does this belief system support or hinder my rationality?”, and in the case of scientific method the answer is “it helps” because sanity and science are hardly even separable.

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But this time around the question nevertheless has more sting. Because I’m not very emotional about my neopaganism or quasi-Buddhism; if someone tried to commit sacrilege against those in my presence, I’d merely laugh at the fool’s cluelessness. My quasi-religious feelings about science have more weight than my non-religious feelings about what passes for my religion.

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Also, like all Western rationalists, I live at the near end of a long struggle to reduce the viciousness of Christianity to a tolerable level – one that is not yet finished while the Pat Robertsons of the world openly advocate witch-burning. And we face a lethal struggle with Islamism, one in which I have been personally threatened with assassination twice. Under these circumstances, even though I know don’t think anything like these fanatics it is disquieting to me to discover that I can feel like them.

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This is why I began this stream-of-consciousness essay feeling uncomfortable with my own passion about scientific fraud, and why it was necessary for me to kill a Buddha. Having left the premise that I am not like a religious person dead on the road, where do I go next?

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(By an eerie coincidence, Pandora just started playing Porcupine Tree’s “Halo”. Listen. The lyrics are frighteningly appropriate.)

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I think I can only fear my religious emotions to the extent I don’t trust my own rationality. My fear of feeling like them springs from what a religious person would interpret as my sense of my own sinful weakness – in my terms, my fear that rationality is hard-won and easily eroded, that I could degenerate into believing and acting like them as well. That would be hell, to have become just another murderous fanatic or acquiescent sheep in the long bloody history of isms.

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Also…if it’s true that we all have the same kinds of emotional attachments to the beliefs that matter most to us, it is also true that the content of belief really matters. I am neither a fanatic nor a sheep, because I have chosen a belief content that puts the highest value on thinking and questioning and evidence, and on the liberty of both conscience and action. I will hold to that, and I will trust in my strength, and I will not be afraid.

diff --git a/20110523082258.blog b/20110523082258.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..eebe8a9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110523082258.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +The Moral Landscape: a critical review +

Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape continues a pattern I’ve noted in the last two books of his I’ve read, Letter To A Christian Nation and The End Of Faith (my review here). Harris is a very capable thinker and a fearless, lucid, forceful writer; at his best, he’s the most accessible of the group he calls the New Atheists (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christoper Hitchens and himself). I generally find myself in strong agreement with the general thrust of his arguments – and yet, I find he sometimes fails to ground them properly or follow them through completely.

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So it is again in this book; the flaws are minor, comparatively speaking, but more than the partisans of rationality can afford in putting forward a case both so important and so certain to be met with stubborn denial.

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Harris’s main point is sound and soundly expressed. What he’s contending against is the notion, long since solidified into a kind of dogma among most Western intellectuals, that normative moral claims can never be derived from the sorts of facts accessible to science – in Hume’s phrasing, you can never turn an “is” into an “ought”. As he did in The End of Faith Harris argues, both correctly and persuasively, that this dogma reduces a lot of otherwise intelligent people to uttering astonishing nonsense (cue Stephen J. Gould babbling about “non-overlapping magisteria”), and that it concedes far too much ground to religions and other peddlers of irrationalism. But in this book Harris goes further and tries to develop a positive account of how science can inform debates about morality.

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The part of the book that’s demolition is nearly flawless. Harris is particularly eloquent in arguing that thinkers who hold forth the lack of universal agreement about moral claims as evidence for moral relativism are applying a double standard. When people disagree about scientific claims, we do not interpret this as evidence that there are no scientifically accessible universals, we take it to mean that some of the disputing parties are objectively wrong. Harris asks, quite properly, why supposedly intelligent people dismiss the possibility that one can be objectively wrong about moral claims as well.

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Harris then goes on to argue that moral claims must of necessity be about the well-being of human beings (and, potentially, other sorts of experiencing beings as well). Well-being is a measure that can be studied by objective means in spite of our lack of a completely generative understanding of well-being (he compares this to the concept of “health”, for which the corresponding claim is universally accepted). Moral claims can be viewed as testable hypotheses about what sorts of behavior will increase well-being, and thus studied consequentially and scientifically.

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So far this is all excellent stuff, but it is after this point that Harris’s argument starts to lose some of the compelling force he could and should have given it. The problem isn’t that he’s wrong, it’s that he fails to cover his flanks against some rather obvious spoiling attacks. Yes, if you’re going to make a case for objective moral truth without just handwaving about the mind of God there is nowhere else to land other than on some form of consequentialism and utilitarianism – but having done that, failing to meet the classic attacks on utilitarianism head-on is just begging to be rubbished by a triumphant religious apologist. Nobody is going to finish this book believing that Sam Harris would torture one child to death to bring about the Millennium…but since Harris halfway acknowledges that difficulty without ever actually making a tight consequentialist case against such atrocities, his whole argument is weakened.

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It’s not like covering that flank would have been difficult, even. All Harris had to do was point out that the means of human action shape its ends – a world in which people torture children to death in order to bring about paradise is one in which “paradise” is very likely to be a hideous charnel house. But he never does this; instead his talk of “increased well-being” becomes abstract and disconnected at exactly the points where it has the strongest criticisms to answer. He leaves openings to attack his utilitarianism that he didn’t have to.

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There are other curious lapses. When Harris says on page 109 that “The urge for retribution, therefore, seems to depend on our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior,” I felt gobsmacked. How can Harris have missed the justification of retribution as a forward signal to potential wrongdoers in the future? In this account it doesn’t matter whether or not we ascribe intention to those we punish, because the purpose is to deter others in similar circumstances to the retributee from doing the wrong thing.

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Similarly, on page 111: “Clearly, a full account of the causes of human behavior should undermine our natural response to injustice.” Huh? Supposing we have a “natural” response to injustice, it’s going be “natural” because it’s shaped by two million years of successful adaptation to living with other hominids. That’s a lot of field-testing. While it’s certainly possible in principle that our “natural response to injustice” has wandered into a maladaptive cul-de-sac and gotten stuck, that’s not a bet I’d care to cover and it’s a claim Harris badly needs to justify rather than leave hanging as a big fat target.

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The problem here seems to be that Harris has an emotional aversion to the idea of punishment which he allows to cloud his thinking. Conservatives will land on him with both feet about this, and they’ll be right to do so even though the conservative attitude that willingness to inflict punishment is a mark of virtue doesn’t stand close examination very well either. It is worthy that Harris is trying to be rational on all levels, but to be fully convincing he needs to examine his own premises a bit more closely than he sometimes does.

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In a different sort of error, Harris’s attachments sometimes prevent him from following his own insights as far as he ought. He writes on page 5 “Multiculturalism, moral relativism, political correctness, tolerance even of intolerance–these are the familiar consequences of separating facts and values on the left.” He develops the theme that these consequences create a moral vacuum to be filled by zealots, or by tyrants operating from an amoral will to power. He notes correctly that this a deep sickness that may yet prevent us from coping with Islamic fascism, unless we can cure ourselves of it. But because he has the emotional commitments of a left-liberal, he doesn’t take the last step to recognizing that the same large portions of the western Left that sided with Communism during the Cold War years are pushing these toxic ideas precisely because they have enlisted on the side of today’s enemies of Western civilization.

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There are also odd minor factual glitches that make Harris look bad. He tosses out “some people will die if they eat peanuts, for instance” – but it’s actually material to his analogy that what’s toxic is a fungus that lives on the nuts, not the peanuts themselves. That’s exactly the kind of pertinent fact about well-being that he asserts is the proper basis for argument! (UPDATE: Harris may have this right after all. I had read that what had been mistaken for allergic anaphylaxis is actually aflatoxin poisoning, but have been unable to verify this or recover my source.)

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Harris is on much sounder footing when he responds (page 173 and following) to criticism of himself and the other New Atheists for daring to take the anti-scientific claims of religion seriously in public. When he points out that prominent American secularists tend to suffer from both moral cowardice and a deeply condescending attitude towards the reasoning capacity of the average American, he is dead on target.

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But that indictment, justified though it is, also exemplifies a structural problem with the book. In particular, Harris spends more time and verbiage on this particular topic than he ought, creating some appearance (I think a false one) that he’s more interested in the dispute than the underlying issues. In general, the book seems too long and too digressive – both prose and ideas have a tendency to sprawl. A leaner, more disciplined presentation would have served Harris’s purposes better.

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Still, despite these minor problems, this is very much a book worth reading. It is too bad that, as with The End Of Faith, those who need its instruction most badly are the least likely to read it.

diff --git a/20110527014906.blog b/20110527014906.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8042528 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110527014906.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: HTC rejoins the good guys +

Market pressure works. In response to an outcry from customers, HTC has just annnounced that it will return to its policy of shipping handsets with unlocked bootloaders.

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This makes me personally happy because I’ve been a fan of HTC handsets since the G-1; I would have had to stop buying and recommending them if they’d stuck to the lockdown. But the larger reason this story is interesting is because of what it signals about ongoing shifts of power in the Android smartphone market – and throughout consumer electronics, as well.

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There are four major stakeholders in the Android smartphone market: the cell carriers, the consumers, the handset makers, and Google. The carriers want smartphones to be locked-down carrier-controlled devices through which customers obediently buy services on carrier terms. All the other stakeholders, by contrast, gain from unlocked devices. Consumers win because they’re not limited to what the carriers choose to provide them; handset makers win because an unlocked phone is more valuable to a consumer than a locked one (and a little less expensive to ship, too); Google wins because its long-term strategy requires it to commoditize the carriers into a passive channel between the customers and Google.

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Ever since the G-1 shipped in 2008 control of smartphone handsets has been slipping out of the carriers’ hands, a process well-chronicled on this blog. Google has been fighting its corner (and, on this and most other issues, the consumer’s) by taking control of the Android feature list, most notably via the Froyo announcement in May 2010. The carriers have been fighting back by pressuring the handset makers to ship phones with locked bootloaders. (The carriers’ biggest success on this front is undoubtedly the Motorola Droid 2.) But for a couple of years after the G-1 HTC led the way in resisting this pressure.

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So, why did it flip? And why has it now flopped?

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The reasons for HTC’s original no-lockdown policy aren’t hard to deduce. As a new entrant in the handset market back in 2008, HTC didn’t want to subtract value from its phones by locking them down – especially when many of its sales were to technically savvy early adopters who explicitly valued the openness of the phone. HTC’s carrier partner T-Mobile, as the #4 in the U.S. market, was polishing a valuable reputation as the carrier that doesn’t screw you in hopes of gaining market share.

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As HTC gained visibility and began to woo other carriers, the pressure mounted for it to lock its new models. And I think I know what the carriers’ clinching argument was: movies and streaming video. I would bet serious money that the pitch went like this: the MPAA and the content cartel behind it demands DRM the consumers can’t subvert, and if you don’t give us boot-locked phones to build that on you’ll be out in the cold as your competitors sell locked phones that can stream movies. And HTC flipped.

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The fact that HTC has flopped back tells us something very interesting: consumers, just by complaining loudly, were able to exert more pressure on HTC than the carriers and the content cartel. It’s also possible that Google exerted some pressure of its own; the point is, the pro-consumer anti-lockdown coalition won and the carrier/content-cartel alliance lost.

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Power shifts like this are self-reinforcing. It’ll be that much more difficult, now, for the carriers to keep Motorola and Samsung and LG and Sony-Ericsson on the reservation – not that anyone but Motorola had been showing any real enthusiasm for locked bootloaders to begin with. The carriers have a weak hand, and it’s getting weaker. Which was, of course, Google’s plan all along.

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More interesting, perhaps, is that the strong suggestion that the content cartel (the movie studios and record companies, represented by the MPAA and RIAA) may be losing the Svengali-like ability they used to have to make the consumer-electronics industry cripple its own products and screw consumers. There have been other signs of this recently, notably in the ignominious speed with which Netflix grabbed for a deal with Google after Google announced a movie-streaming tie-up with Amazon. I had been saying for months that this was coming, that Google could encourage unlocked phones and pay only the most perfunctory lip service to DRM in the knowledge that time and market share trends are on Android’s side. HTC’s reversal tends to confirm this.

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And of course the MPAA/RIAA is quite right to fear unlocked hardware in the hands of Linux hackers. Netflix tried to keep the cartel happy by refusing to ship a client for Linux desktop machines, but it is almost as exposed now by shipping a client for Android. When the screens on Android tablets reach desktop quality, it will be fully as exposed. And its planners have to know that – but Netflix just can’t leave all that money on the table. Circumstances are driving a wedge between the content cartel and the streaming services, who at the end of the day like DRM only because it appeases the cartel. The streaming services make money by shipping bits, not by locking them up.

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Indirectly HTC’s flop is also bad news for Apple. One of the principal advantages of the iPhone and other iOS devices was Apple’s special relationship with the content cartel. The exclusivity – and thus the market value – of that relationship has begun to erode. As the MPAA/RIAA axis weakens, so does Apple’s value proposition. Eventually this is going to put pressure on Apple’s prices and margins.

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So, celebrate HTC’s decision. It doesn’t just mean that geeks get to heart HTC again; it means that the entire coalition of villains behind locked hardware and DRM is losing its grip. That’s good news for everyone.

diff --git a/20110531124609.blog b/20110531124609.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..db60e75 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110531124609.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Configuration files and switches considered harmful +

Someone on the gpsd-users list asked:

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+I was just wondering why gpsd doesn’t have a configuration file in /etc/gpsd.conf, like most other Unix/Linux software? +

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Because configuration files are evil, and not to be countenanced unless they become an absolutely necessary evil. Which in gpsd’s case is not yet, and I sincerely hope not ever.

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Yes, I know this sounds like heresy coming from a Unix programmer. But the trouble with configuration files is that they too easily become an excuse for not doing the right thing. (The same is true of command-line switches; all of what I have to say here against config files applies to switches as well, which is why gpsd has so few of them.)

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Can’t decide whether that new feature is a good idea or not? Create an option. Can’t settle a design issue? Create an option. Can’t be bothered to figure out how to autoconfigure your software properly? Create an option. Want to double your software’s test complexity? Create an option.

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Lots of options and elaborate config files are sometimes necessary for Swiss-Army-knife-like system utilities; I implemented a boatload of them in fetchmail because I had to. But doing that made me unhappy and I junked a lot of delivery options when I figured out that forwarding fetched mail to SMTP was the right thing.

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It’s better to design so you don’t need a configuration file. One of gpsd’s goals is to be zero-configuration; when it’s installed properly, you plug in a USB GPS and it just works. Nothing to tweak, nothing to configure, nothing you have to mess with.

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While gpsd sometimes departs from this ideal, we treat those departures as bugs to be actually fixed rather than kluged around with an option. So the right question to ask youself is not “how might an option fix this?” but “how can we teach the program to figure out the right thing itself?”.

diff --git a/20110603134314.blog b/20110603134314.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d02a4f1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110603134314.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: No bump, no glory +

The April 2011 figures from comScore are out, and I’ve added them to my time-series plots. There are no surprises here, which is very bad news for anybody not an Android fan.

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Android’s market-share and userbase growth is bucketing along at the same headlong pace it’s been hitting since June 2010. Bullets can’t stop it! Flamethrowers don’t faze it! History shows again and again how nature points up the folly of men…

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Apple is still gaining users slowly with market-share trend looking eerily flat. We now get to laugh, again, at the Apple cultists who thought the Verizon iPhone release in February was going to cut off Android’s oxygen. The very best case they could extract from this data is that growth trends have since shifted about a half-percent per month in Apple’s favor, but that’s within statistical noise and the baseline rates of growth are so wildly different in Android’s favor that it can’t be much consolation.

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RIM is toast. Well, that’s not breaking news, but the only bit of drama in this month’s data is that it has managed to drop past Apple in both market share and userbase. The lead-balloon landing of the much-touted Playbook surely didn’t help.

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Microsoft continues to shed both market-share and users, with this month’s decline (remember, comScore does running three-month averages to smooth jitter) looking a bit steeper than normal.

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HP (relabeled, I used to list this as Palm) hangs in there with amazing persistence, holding on to a nearly static userbase and losing share only as the overall market grows.

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50% market-share crossover for Android still looks like being sometime in October 2011.

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As before, the most interesting thing about these plots is that the trends for different platforms look as though they’re being driven by qualitatively different processes. The largest difference is between Android and everybody else; Android userbase growth looks uniquely close to exponential/logistic. One of my commenters suggested that the data reflects microbursts of exponential growth being flattened to linearity by product-availability constraints; I concur that this seems the most plausible explanation.

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Apple’s essentially flat share trend continues to be mysterious. With another month’s data the slight positive change in userbase growth we saw after January looks like it’s sustaining, but this may just be an artifact of faster overall market growth. The overall picture still indicates a product that has found and near saturated its market, with no rapid growth in the offing or any realistic prospect of catching up to Android. But at least Apple is actually seeing some userbase growth; the other three players aren’t getting even that much.

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RIM, besides being in a crash dive, looks the most perturbed by short-term changes in the business environment. I don’t have any theory about this.

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HP and Microsoft, on the other hand…”gradual inexorable decline” is the phrase that leaps to mind, if very gradually in HP’s case. The CEO of HP is now talking about licensing the platform out to other hardware makers, but since he has failed to acquire the vital clue that closed source will not cut it any more I doubt this maneuver will lead much of anywhere.

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We’ve learned recently that Microsoft is making more money from junk-patent extortion against Android handset makers than it is from its languishing smartphone line. Insert obvious joke about bloodsucking parasite here…it means that the revenue consequences of not having a viable smartphone play will be a long time coming home, and the decline may not matter in more than the long-term strategic sense.

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Another good month for Android growth, another sucky one for everybody else’s. Situation pretty much normal.

diff --git a/20110606101222.blog b/20110606101222.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b01b687 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110606101222.blog @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +A first game of Twilight Imperium +

Twilight Imperium is advertised as “an epic boardgame of galactic conquest, politics, and trade”. The advertising doesn’t lie – the games in progress I’ve occasionally tripped over at SF conventions were sprawling affairs with huge fleets of starship models swirling about on a tile map representing the explored galaxy of a far future. Designed for six players, and play sessions commonly run seven or eight hours (!).

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The coordination cost of setting up such a game is high, and though I’d wanted to try it for years I was never present at exactly the right time. Until this last weekend, when a bunch of the harder-core types from my Friday night gaming group got it together to play a game Saturday. It was quite an experience.

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To minimize setup time we used one of the balanced map templates from the TI rules rather than going through the normal drafting phase where players accrete tiles representing solar systems and other features (nebulas, supernovas, wormhole entrances and exits) in concentric hexagonal rings around the Imperial throne-world of Trantor Mecatol Rex.

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We’d planned for the regular six players, but because Rob brought along two of his kids we actually had eight. Each of us got a homeworld on the periphery of the extra-large map. The premise of the game is that the players are species contesting for dominance of a galactic empire abandoned by its masters, the Lazax of Mecatol Rex. Each of us randomly got a species card conferring some limitations and special abilities that slightly bend the basic rules of the game.

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As it happened, I got the humans – the Federation of Sol, with the blue pieces. The main human special ability initially seemed unimpressive; my expendable command tokens, controlling how many actions I can take per round, refreshed at three per round rather than the normal two. But I was to find that this was actually very useful, as other players stalled out for lack of them and (unlike me) had to spend precious strategy actions gathering more.

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To my left was my wife Cathy with the Yssaril Tribes (green), a race of slippery Gollum-like critters with the main ability to draw two action cards per round rather than one; this too could be significant, as action cards could be used interfere with other players’ tactics, score critical hits on other players’ starships, cancel political and trade actions, and so forth.

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To my right was Rob Junior, one of the kids, with the Brotherhood of Yin (purple). Kamikaze monks, basically; their main ability was to be able to suicide a destroyer during a fleet battle to inflict a second, killing hit on a Deadnought or War Sun. Since War Suns (er, yes, your basic Death Star) are very expensive to build and likely to be the pride of a fleet, this is a significant threat.

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To Cathy’s left sat Tom, with the Clan of Saar (orange). These guys are nomads. The rule they get to break is that their spacedocks (floating shipyards where you produce all your other units) aren’t tied to orbiting the planet where they were built. They can move with the Saar fleets. Tom would make effective use of this during the game.

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Eight races is a lot to keep track of and I don’t remember the four further across the board from me, except that I was definitely keeping an eye on the Embers of Muaat (red) being run by Marco, the owner of the game. He was running them as brute militarists, which works because they start out with the ability to buy War Suns and producing other warships at a ridiculous rate. I knew they were going to be serious trouble if the game ran long enough for their fleets and mine to be in contact.

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Everybody also got a random Secret Objective card. Winner of the game is the first to reach 10 Victory Points, and you get most of your VPs from fulfilling publicly-visible objectives – “Control five systems other than your homeworld”, “Have five technology advances”, “Spend six trade goods”, that sort of thing. The Secret Objectives mean that each player has a special goal that nobody else knows about.

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Mine was “Control six worlds with Technology Specialties”. This was lucky for me since the five planets adjacent to my homeworld (two doubles and a single) all had a tech specialty. This is indicated by a little colored icon that gives you a discount equivalent to one resource point when buying one of the four classes of tech – General, Military, Biotech, and Propulsion. This told me two things: (1) that my first tactical goal had to be to seize one more system with a tech specialty, and (2) my overall strategy should be to focus on climbing the technology tree, which I could do probably faster than anyone else in the game due to that large concentration of specialty planets.

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This further implied that I would be trying to avoid early conflict with my neighbors, because warfighting would suck away resources I should be using for tech development. My diplomacy would be full of absolutely sincere assurances that my neighbors’ borders were safe from me and egging them on to fight other species further away. That is, until I had developed an unstoppable tech advantage and could crush their primitive fleets like toys, bwahahaha!

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Unbeknownst to me, Cathy was eyeing my near worlds covetously because her Secret Objective card specified controlling three worlds with the same tech specialty, and her stellar neighborhood was tech-poor with only one blue-specialty world. I had two blue-specialty worlds next to my home system. This neatly illustrates the important role of the Secret Objectives in stirring up trouble.

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The turn mechanics of the game are kind of like a fusion-powered version of Puerto Rico. At the berinning of each round, the Speaker picks one of eight strategy cards; then the other players choose from the remaining strategy cards in clockwise order (and one of the cards selects the next Speaker). Each strategy card gives a substantial advantage for a particular kind of player action – warfare, trade, technology research, etc. – via its Primary Ability. But when that Primary Ability is used, all players get to exercise the Secondary Ability on the card.

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For example, the Technology card gives a player the Primary Ability to buy a technology advance for free. But all other players then get to buy a technology advance for six resources, which they can pull together by exhausting controlled planets for the round or by spending Trade Goods. As in Puerto Rico, it’s important to time actions so you get maximum benefit from them while other players get the minimum.

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But there are other things that go on during a round, of which the most important are fleet movement and battles. The mechanics are cleverly designed so nobody has enough downtime to get bored, even in an eight-player game. After strategy cards have been chosen, you go around repeatedly with each player having the option to either invoke a Strategy Card, move a fleet, or pass. Fleet movement can trigger a space battle or planetary invasion. This continues until everyone has passed. Then you have a Status Phase during which victory objectives are claimed, planets are un-exhausted, and various other game-mechanics housekeeping takes place.

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In the first couple of rounds everyone is naturally preoccupied with seizing control of the neutral system tiles immediately adjacent to their homeworld. To do this, you need to either have or build a ship type called a Carrier, which can freight up to six each of Fighters, Ground Forces, or Planetary Defense Systems. To grab a planet, you need to drop a Ground Force on it. If you think someone might try to take it away from you, you might also want to drop a PDS (Planetary Defense System) on it. These can do a pretty good job of shooting the crap out of enemy fleets entering the system.

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Fighters don’t individually pack much of a punch, but swarms of them are quite effective. And yes, there is a special mechanic for fighters attacking Death Stars War Suns. Destroyers are relatively light warships that are effective against fighters. Cruisers have a good balance of range and combat powers and are often used for surprise attacks or blockades. Dreadnoughts are your basic Imperial Star Destroyer, big and slow but hard to kill and dangerous to all lesser ships. And the aforementioned War Suns are even more so, with delightful capabilities like saturation planetary bombardment.

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Not all units of a type are necessarily equivalent; this is where tech comes in. For example, if you have Cybernetics (which Sol Federation starts with) your fighters get +1 in combat; if you have Hylar V Assault Lasers (which Sol Federation doesn’t start with but militarists like the Sardakk N’orr do) your cruisers and destroyers get +1 in combat. Propulsion technologies can also boost the ranges of your ships.

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The first war to break out began when Dan, two places to my right past the Yin Brotherhood, unwisely jumped a border system of the Embers of Muaat to his right. He had been unlucky in his astrography; his near systems were resource-poor, leaving him few options other than aggression. The Embers and the Yin Brotherhood promptly attacked him from both sides. This suited me just fine, as the Yin Brotherhood’s other aggressive option – fighting me – would have interfered with my plans.

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Meanwhile, on my left, the Yssaril and Saar were both pushing straight inwards towards Mecatol Rex. I had an inkling that Cathy was thinking about turning to stab me in my left flank, but I forestalled that my putting one of my two task groups there. My other task group drove inwards, not directly for the Imperial throne world but rather for the double-planet system of Starpoint/New Albion and the sixth tech specialty I needed.

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Three places to my left, past the Saar, was Rob running the black pieces (update: Cathy tells me he was the Lizix MindNet); his younger son Will, who couldn’t have been more than about eight years old, was on the other side of him with the gray pieces (update: the Xxcha Kingdom). I never quite figured out what Rob was doing; I don’t think I saw him fight anyone, and something he said at the wrapup implied that he had been pursuing a tech-centered strategy similar to mine.

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Will, Rob’s younger child, was having a high old time with the blow-shit-up aspect of the game. He too attacked the Embers of Muaat, but unlike the hapless yellow player he actually had enough ships to pose a real threat to them. He did remarkably well, playing intelligently with minimal help from his dad and showing more sitzfleisch than I really expected in a kid that young. There was actually a point at which by copping a particularly difficult public objective (“Have more political influence points than both your neighbors put together”) he managed to surge to a 2VP lead over everyone else. This was really substantial, as normally you can only claim one victory objective per turn even if you could qualify for more than one.

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Dan the hapless yellow guy had to leave early but his last move was a beauty. He built three PDSes on his homeworld. What made this effective was that his tech included Deep Space Cannon, giving the PDSes the ability to shoot into systems one hex away. This made the bubble of hexes adjacent to his homeworld a death trap for anyone incautious enough to send a fleet in. Nobody did. Even the Embers of Muaat backed away from that action.

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Marco’s Embers of Muaat had better things to do, anyway, like cheerfully trashing the Kingdom of the Xxcha. Oh yes there were serious battles, War Suns against capital-ship fleets. I knew I would catch some significant grief if Marco’s empire expanded enough to touch mine. Tom, running the Saar clan, made that a bit less likely by seizing Mecatol Rex and parking a spacedock and a ridiculous number of capital ships on it (obviously this had something to do with his Secret Objective). Cathy visibly wavered between attacking Tom or me, and didn’t commit soon enough to do either before we hit our time limit.

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I eventually won in a sneaky and half-accidental way. I noticed that if I bought a red technology advance I would qualify for both “I have 5 advances” and “I have an advance in each of the 4 colors”; I also had 7 trade goods, enough for “I now spend 6 trade goods”, and by seizing Starpoint/New Albion I could gain a sixth tech specialty and achieve my Secret Objective.

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So I took strategy card #8, Imperial Leadership, which gives you the ability to claim multiple victory objectives in one Status Phase (and a bonus VP for control of Mecatol Rex, if I’d had that). This scored me 4VP in the fourth Status Phase, putting me 2VP up on the next nearest…and it was 20 minutes before the game store’s closing time. No time for another round, barely time to pack away the pieces.

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The session lasted nine hours, with maybe an hour spent on setup and basic rules instruction and 45 minutes or so for a dinner break. We played four full rounds in seven hours and change, which by what I’ve read online is pretty impressive considering we had six raw newbies including one young child and only two people (Rob and his older son Rob Jr.) who’d played once before.

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Everybody, including Dan the Doomed, had a good time. Cathy, who had been a bit dubious about a game that marathon-huge up front, enjoyed it. (In retrospect I figure she probably should have attacked me; Tom, preoccupied with taking and holding Mecatol Rex, probably wouldn’t have jumped her from the other side before she could reposition. Rob Junior never knew it, but I had his Yin Brotherhood picked as my first victim if and when I went aggressive.) Will the seven- or eight-year-old kid actually stuck to it for seven hours of play, which says a lot about the game’s ability to hold player interest.

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The best news about Twilight Imperium is that it actually backs up the brag it makes on its box. The designer was clearly out to create an epic-scale slugfest that would evoke every classic of space opera from Doc Smith’s Lensman novels through Star Wars to Walter John Williams’s Dread Empire’s Fall. The homage to the genre is pretty explicit, and it works.

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The mechanics, too, are clearly derivative of previous games. The species-varying powers of Cosmic Encounter; the role/round mechanic from Puerto Rico; the geomorphic variable tile layout from Settlers of Catan; the tech tree and much of the overall feel from Masters of Orion. But the effect is of judicious quotation rather than uninspired imitation; the whole hangs together well, and the game theme never gets lost in the machinery.

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I think this game also exemplifies the sort of good things I have previously (in The Golden Age of Wargaming is Now) noted can happen when old-school simulationism hybridizes with new-school Eurogame design. I haven’t seen it, but the first addition of TI, from 20 years ago is reported to have been a much fiddlier game, closer in spirit to the elaborate simulationist games I cut my teeth on in the 1970s. The designer says in his notes that he consciously rebooted the game to take advantage of the design tropes that have developed in the Eurogame community, and that works, too.

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I’d play it again. In fact I almost certainly will…as early as next week, maybe. There’s talk of a second session this coming Saturday, and since several of us grasp the mechanics it seems likely to go faster. We might even *gasp* finish the game this time.

diff --git a/20110607164546.blog b/20110607164546.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..84d2c83 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110607164546.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: The world turned upside down +

It’s always a good day when you get to wield the Righteous Cluebat of Reality straight into the teeth of dogmatists and downshouters – and no, I’m not talking about being Andrew Breitbart, though I do like to think I’m at least as capable of upending smug certitudes as he is. Today’s cluebatting concerns two developments that, taken together, put paid to a lot of negative mythology around Android.

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In our first swing of the Righteous Cluebat, we cite the news that Samsung just shipped an instance of its new flagship phone to a CyanogenMod dev with the invitation “Get CM7 working, please?” Heh. So much for the theory that having boob-baited the geeks with illusory openness, the handset makers and carriers were collusively scheming to lock us all in again. Yes, there is a school of geek paranoia out there that maintains Android to be a nefarious scam aimed at, I dunno, cramming us back into the carrier-controlled silos of pre-Android days?

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Me, I’m wondering what took Samsung so long. I’ve pointed out before that the interests of the handset makers and cell carriers are not identical. The handset makers want to increase the value of their product to the people who actually buy them, and a non-boot-locked CyanogenMOD-ready phone is more valuable to a customer than a locked one is (duh, because he customer has an upgrade path even if the maker end-of-lifes it). Boot-locking is a customer-control mechanism that is only valuable to the carriers, and an economically rational handset maker will only ship boot-locked phones under carrier pressure.

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As with HTC’s recent reversal back to shipping unlocked phones, this move is a sign that carriers’ ability to dictate terms of trade that are actually injurious to the handset makers (and their customers!) is fast vanishing. This correlates with the rise of Android, the accelerating decay of the carrier contract system, the continuing fall in smartphone prices, and the increase in customers buying handsets through WalMart and other third parties rather than the carrier stores.

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All these trends are mutually reinforcing, and simple analysis of incentives tells us they will lead to a world of smartphones that are both inexpensive and fully open to personalization, rooting, and modding. While it may be that only a small percentage of smartphone customers will explicitly use this capability, the carrier control it denies will be nearly as important as the individual control it affirms.

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Our second swing of the Righteous Cluebat concerns the news from WWDC about the new features Apple has announced for the upcoming iOS version 5. Trade press reaction is well summarized by this story: Apple’s iOS 5 Directly Lifts Features from Android.

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Oh, how delicious a headline that is. After four years of unceasing Apple-cultist insistence that Android is a pallid knockoff of the iPhone and all true goodness in user interfaces flows from Apple, iOS 5 is now reduced to copying actual UI innovations from Android. Mind you, I’m not saying they shouldn’t have done it; the particular lift everyone is noticing most, Android’s event-notification system, is one of the best features of the Android UI. But even the normally Apple-friendly trade press found it pretty hard to point at anything interesting in the iOS 5 announcement that isn’t an obvious lift from Android.

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To say that this bodes poorly for Apple’s self-positioning as the master innovator and premium product is to belabor the obvious. In fact, the iPhone is now chasing Android’s taillights in every area – behind in market share, behind in 4G/LTE support, and now behind in UI as well. It’s not easy to see how Apple will sustain its margins unless the delayed iPhone 5 has something novel and spectacular going for it.

diff --git a/20110608194425.blog b/20110608194425.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7638078 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110608194425.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: China syndrome strikes! +

A few weeks go, I reported a conversation with a Chinese-American investor who confirmed my suspicion that the next game-changer for the smartphone market is going to come out of mainland China.

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He wouldn’t name the company, but I think they’ve just unstealthed. ICube matches the hints he was dropping exactly.

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And what is ICube touting? Unit-cost and power-efficiency advantages from an Android SoC. It’s exactly the scenario I’ve been predicting. No volume production planned until 2012, but it means the SoCs that are supposed to be coming out in 3Q2011 from Broadcomm and Nvidia will, not long after launch, have price competition from an outfit that can tolerate lower margins.

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And that makes three. Not that these will be the last chips in their class. Heck no – color me astonished if we don’t see two or three very similar announcements in the next six months, some from startups and some from players at the scale of ZTE and Huawei and Samsung. Potential unit volume is, after all, in the billions. That’s billions, not milllions.

diff --git a/20110613143823.blog b/20110613143823.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..842bbc7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110613143823.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +Z-Man games is on a roll: two boardgame reviews +

Two important qualities in a good boardgame are an interesting theme and good mechanics. Theme is the narrative of the game – what it’s supposed to be about. Mechanics is the game considered as a pure logic puzzle – what goes in there, what comes out here.

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A subtle but common failure in game design is for theme and mechanics to never really connect to each other, so that the theme is a mere superficial paint job or gloss on what might as well be a purely abstract game. One of my favorite examples is Lost Cities, a game by Reiner Knizia with simple mechanics, deep strategy, and excellent repeated-play value. Its one flaw is that the archaeological theme of the card and box art is completely disconnected from the lovely little jewel that is the game logic. Nothing that you might know about archeology helps you play better or enjoy the game more, nor is there any possibility that you will learn something about archaeology by playing. The result is that the game feels a bit cheesy and contrived even though the game engine is actually an excellent and elegant design.

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Two recent releases from Z-Man Games remind us what it can be like when a designer integrates these aspects really well. They’re on a roll lately, seemingly trying to out-Fantasy-Flight Fantasy Flight games.

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First up: Polish yer cutlasses, strop yer hooks, and welcome to Merchants and Marauders, a game of piracy and trade in the Caribbean Sea.

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There are a lot of pirate-themed games out there; it has been an especially popular genre since the firstPirates of the Caribbean movie busted box-office records in 2003. Most such games are mere fluff, all theme and graphics with shallow and uninteresting game engines. Granted, some are fairly tasty fluff; I probably like Pirate’s Cove, for example, more than I should. But it pales to insignificance set next to Merchants and Marauders.

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In this game, you can raid and trade all through the wide-open Caribbean of the 1600s, contending with other merchants, other pirates, and the warships of the great colonial powers. There are multiple paths to victory; you can strive for glory points as a peaceful merchant or bloody-handed buccaneer, or turn either way as fancy takes you. The tactics of sea fighting are abstracted but present real challenges – how much damage will you risk for a fat prize? You can optimize your ship, captain, weapons, and crew for different styles of play. And yes, attacking other players is an option, sometimes a very lucrative one.

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You’re going to start with a small ship, a sloop of war or flute, and work your way up to larger ships that can carry more cargo and guns. You may be able to acquire a letter of marque, making you an authorized privateer (loosely) attached to a navy. You may chase intriguing rumors or accept special missions that add color to events. And then there’s the odd hurricane to contend with.

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The whole is quite well thought out, with the depth of a middle-weight wargame. The integration of mechanics and theme is, as previously noted, very good; the irregular-region map of the Caribbean and coasts keeps you thoroughly anchored in time and place, and the game’s incentives reward you for crossing from trading to raiding and back. If you find yourself role-playing your captain, nobody around the table will be even a bit surprised.

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The game is not completely without flaws. I found the actual die-rolling mechanics for ship fiddly and difficult to retain, though I was able to make good tactical decisions despite this. And the thing struck me as a wee bit overproduced, visually speaking; big colorful game map and nifty little ship models good, but did we really need the rather cheesy-looking cardboard pirate’s chests? I’d trade away some of the fancy game furniture for a less expensive unit price, if it were my choice.

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Still. It’s great good fun, especially with the game’s maximum of four players. It’s reasonably crunchy, and sets a high mark for future pirate-themes games to beat.

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Next: The even better Yggdrasil. This is a pure cooperative game in which the players, each one of the gods of Norse mythology (Odin, Thor, Tyr, Heimdall, Frey, and Freya), face the final battle of Ragnarok. Together they must defeat an invasion of Asgard by their enemies: Loki, Fenrir, Surt, Hel, Niddhog and Jormungand.

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The board is a gorgeous map of the Nine Worlds of Norse mythology. Each turn, each player must use a limited number of actions to journey among the Nine Worlds. The mechanics of fighting the monsters as they press inexorably inwards towards the high seat at Valhalla is carefully tuned so no opponent can be defeated and thrown backward by a god fighting unaided. The gods must journey among the Nine Worlds to recruit help and gather magic and weapons. But they are fast running out of time…

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If the theme/mechanics integration in Merchants and Marauders is good, here it is superb to a degree I’ve seldom seen matched in any other game. Right from the beginning the mechanics and theme cooperate to produce the sense of tragedy and doom so characteristic of the Ragnarok myth, and if your band of players actually defeats the invasion it will be difficult and really will feel like heroic poetry. The various races of the Nine Worlds (aesir, vanir, men, dwarves, elves, frost and fire giants) all find thematically appropriate places in the game mechanics. Magic weapons do what magic weapons should.

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There’s an extremely clever bit of mechanics for simulating how the Valkyries ride to recruit the Viking dead from Midgard, with the supply becoming depleted in unpredictable ways as the gods draw on it, and some tricky ways to refresh that supply and manipulate the odds. This bit of business is quite unique, and organically connected to the mythic theme of the game in multiple ways. It is the most interesting feature of an excellent game engine.

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To top it all off, the designers did their homework. I think somebody was reading the Poetic and Prose Eddas when this thing was designed, and probably some good secondary scholarship as well. This is not some Marvel Comics version of Asgard, it’s the real thing – well, at least for mythological values of “real”.

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I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mythological-themed game done better than this. In the co-op subgenre, it beats the stuffings out of most previous efforts (Shadows Over Camelot, Pandemic); only Arkham Horror and Betrayal at the House on the Hill can be as interesting, and the latter is rather hit-or-miss depending on the scenario and your group of players.

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I played Yggdrasil at a demo; three of the other five players who weren’t the Z-Man rep bought copies immediately afterwards, and I was seriously tempted. I think Z-Man is going to have a major hit with this game, and completely deserve it. It stretches the boundaries of the Eurogame in a way I hope other designers will emulate, not by slavishly copying its theme or mechanics but by seeking similar originality and thematic resonance.

diff --git a/20110615124752.blog b/20110615124752.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..15956dd --- /dev/null +++ b/20110615124752.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: The invasion begins +

For months I’ve been predicting that a flood of ultra-cheap SoC-based Androids is coming at us from China, motivated by the prospect of Third World and BRIC sales volume in the billions and beginning in 3Q2011. The iCube announcement was one harbinger; today we have some others. It’s worth another look at what this trend is going to do to associated markets.

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First, a telling anecdote. My wife is finally considering getting an Android. She had been refusing this prospect because she found smartphones too big and ungainly; she has small hands and small pockets and wants something not too much larger than her rather tiny dumbphone. She’s willing to trade away display pixels for this. This is not a crazy set of requirements; smartphone makers, focused on marketing ever-jazzier displays, have been underserving people like her.

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Cathy has found a device that tempts her in the T-Mobile store. It’s the T-Mobile Comet, which is specifically designed as a cheap entry-level Android for people transitioning off dumphones. Inexpensive, small, and light are the selling points here, pivoting the relative crappiness of the display from a disadvantage to an advantage. At 240 x 320 pixels it’s no worse than her work-issued Blackberry 8830. Having researched the device, I’ve told her that I approve – it is a good value in current market conditions and does seem well matched to her requirements as I understand them. The street price is $149 and dropping, $99 reconditioned used.

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And what is the “Comet” beneath the T-Mobile branding? It’s a Huawei 8150 aka “Ideos”. It is in fact exactly the kind of cheap Chinese takeout I’ve been expecting. It’s a safe bet Huawei is price-taking in the relatively price-insensitive North American market as it ramps up production for BRICs and the Third World; consequently, we can expect prices for this class of phone to drop by $50 or so over the next 90 days, especially if the 8150 is not yet SoC-based.

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Comes now The Democratization of Android: 13% of All Mobiles Are From Unknown Brands. The article calls out Micromax, Spice Mobile, and Yulong Coolpad, but Huawei and ZTE – neither exactly a household name in the U.S. – could just as well have been included. Read the whole thing, it’s short.

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The invasion begins. And no ESP is required to see what the effects in the U.S. and worldwide are going to be.

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To begin with, cheap Chinese takeout is going to put brutal price and margin pressure on brand-name handset makers. Nokia, Apple, RIM, and Motorola are (for differing reasons) probably the most vulnerable. But even established Asian makers like Samsung are going to feel it. It’s not even going to be safe to assume that the cheap Chinese won’t compete on features; the Democratization article notes, for example, that MicroMax and Spice have made a reputation selling multi-SIM phones.

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The news is most dire for RIM and the Nokia/Microsoft alliance. Nokia, historically a high-volume/low-price player, can’t survive on the lower margins the Chinese will accept. Even if NoWin actually manages to ship a WP7 phone before the market window for that platform slams completely shut (which is in itself highly doubtful), its odds in price competition against dirt-cheap Androids therefore look very poor. RIM, too, is hideously exposed and lacking a convincing product offering since the Playbook launch cratered.

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Apple is exposed in a different way. While it has a brand-loyal customer base at the high end of the smartphone market, the iPhone’s value proposition is weakening in a way well symbolized by the fact that the upcoming iOS 5 will copy some key aspects of the Android UI. Just as the price gap between iPhones and cheap Chinese Androids widens to a chasm, Apple’s vaunted “user experience” is looking like much less of a differentiator than it used to. Apple will face a cruel choice: sacrifice margins or risk disruptive collapse of its market. It may not even be possible for Apple, an American-based company with relatively high baked-in costs and margin requirements, to follow the likes of MicroMax or ZTE far enough down the price curve to remain competitive.

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Motorola is an Android partner, but vulnerable for the same reason Nokia and Apple are – as a U.S.-based company, it has higher baked-in costs and margin requirements than the Chinese. To remain competitive it’s going to have to find ways to increase product value while holding the line on unit costs. This is almost certainly the drive behind experiments like the Atrix oh-look-it’s-a-netbook docking station. Very likely it’s behind the recent policy shift to unlocked bootloaders; that’s a way to increase product value by spending less engineering money.

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HTC, Samsung and other established Asians have a better fighting position because their cost base is similar to that of the Huawei/MicroMax/Spice/ZTE tier. Still, competition at the high-volume end of the market will have its usual effect. It is likely, for example, that HTC’s Sense overlay will fall by the wayside as prices plummet; in a market where carrier skins are on life support, handset-maker skins hardly look any healthier. Motorola’s recent announcement that it’s shitcanning the MotoBlur brand is a leading indicator here.

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Cheap Chinese takeout is also going to be tough on the carriers. The problem here will be the collapse of the contract system and increasing phone sales through third parties like Walmart. The older model – expensive phones sold mainly through carrier outlets with the price spread out in contract-plan charges over multi-year terms – gave carriers a lot of control over handsets and customers. That control is now fast disappearing; the Chinese invasion will probably kill it deader than the dodo.

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Without handset control, increasingly carriers are going to be forced into head-to-head price competition on their voice and data plans. Multi-SIM phones even open up the possibility that consumer-grade devices might begin doing automatic cost-sensitive routing over multiple carrier networks. That development would hammer the carriers flat.

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Who gets good news out of all this? Smartphone consumers, obviously. This is the free market in action, doing its usual relentless smashing of inefficiencies and rent-seeking. Less obviously, this is Google winning the grand-strategic war that Android was designed to fight. As the carriers are flattened into low-margin bit-haulers and the handset manufacturers increasingly sell cheap generic Android devices, Google will suck up through its advertising business a larger share of the profits in the entire value chain.

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And all, mind you, without needing to collect a dime in Android licensing fees. This is what open source triumphant looks like.

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UPDATE: And if this isn’t dramatic enough, contemplate what’s gong to happen when SoCs reach the shanzhai…

diff --git a/20110616130558.blog b/20110616130558.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e46e886 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110616130558.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +The “walled garden” becomes a prison for reality +

A British tabloid revealed today that Apple has filed for a patent on a system for disabling the video camera on an iPhone or iPad when its user attempts to film a concert or other interdicted live event. This is a much more threatening development than most may realize.

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A while back I said this:

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+[The iPad] is not the future of personal computing, because the person doesn’t control it. The iPad is a media-delivery device controlled by Apple and the RIAA/MPAA content cartel, not the person who ostensibly bought it. It’s not empowerment, it’s a glossy-surfaced pretense of empowerment. +

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I caught some crap for sounding like a Richard-Stallman-like extremist when I said that. But those who think I took an ‘extreme’ position should be eating their words now, because Apple’s patent filing perfectly illustrates the risks of relying on computer hardware and software that you don’t control down to the bit level. And not the worst risk, either. Glenn Reynolds aka Instapundit observes “Sounds like totalitarian governments would love this.”

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On their past record, can there be any doubt of Apple’s willingness to quietly slipstream this technology into a future release of iOS, leaving its victims unaware that their ability to record a police action or a political demonstration is now conditional on whether the authorities have deployed the right sort of IR flasher to invisibly censor the event?

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As we become increasingly dependent on computers and the Internet to mediate our communications with others, the integrity of our social and political networks requires that we have complete control of those computers. Without that control, not only are we liable to have our communications with others blocked and filtered, the evidence of reality itself can be suppressed. Concerts, police actions, and political demonstrations can be censored from the Internet-enabled conversation. These events can, in an increasingly important sense, be made unwitnessable – deleted from social memory.

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It is difficult to overstate how dangerous a prospect this is. We come near the territory of Orwell’s “1984” here; Apple’s video-suppressing devices would create memory holes. The “walled garden” would imprison not just its users but reality and history. We must not allow this to happen.

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When I advocate for open-source software, one common form of pushback I get is that only computer geeks ever need care about this issue, because only computer geeks will ever engage in the sort of customization that open source enables. Apple’s patent application is the clearest possible demonstration that this argument is bogus.

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Open source matters to all of us. It matters as a defense against control by others. Even those of us who don’t have the ability or desire to hack software will increasingly rely on the ability of skeptical third parties to audit the software we rely on – to guard against the possibility that our cameras could be disabled by stealth, that the software we rely on could be subverted into an instrument of censorship and repression.

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Apple’s “walled garden” is a prison in which the jailers can change the terms of sentencing at any time – until we break out. But singling out Apple would be to miss the forest for one tree; it is not only the iPhone and iPad that are dangerous to our liberties, it is all closed-source software everywhere in our Internet-connected devices. What we do not control can be – and, as the Apple patent application shows, will be – used to control us.

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You can take back control. Demand Android in your phones, Linux or BSD in your computers, open source in your Internet router and your digital camera and your power meter and game console and voting machines and even your automobile’s control systems. Otherwise…how will you know who they really serve?

diff --git a/20110618184654.blog b/20110618184654.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..91cb8b1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110618184654.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +World Without Web +

Technological change has a tendency to look inevitable in retrospect – “It steam-engines when it’s steam-engine time.” Likely this is true in many cases, but I often think we underestimate the alarming degree of contingency lurking behind ‘inevitable’ developments. To illustrate this point, I’m going to sketch an all-too-plausible alternate history in which the World Wide Web never happened.

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The divergence point for this history is in 1983-1984, when the leadership of DARPA lied through its teeth to Congress about who was being allowed access to the Internet. The pretense being maintained was that only direct affiliates of government-sponsored, authorized research programs were being allowed on. DARPA knew very well this wasn’t true; they had a broader vision of where the Internet might lead, one that wouldn’t be realized for another ten years. They viewed the yeasty, chaotic culture of casual use by all manner of ‘randoms’ (unauthorized people including, at the time, me) as what would later be called a technology incubator – a vast Petri dish from which amazing serendipities would spring in due time.

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This optimistic view was entirely correct. One such serendipity was the invention of the World Wide Web; another, though the causal connections take a bit more work to trace, was the emergence of open-source software as a conscious movement. But what if DARPA had been caught in that lie, funding for its network research scaled back, and a serious effort made to kick randoms off the early net?

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It seems all too likely that internetworking research would have stalled out or reverted to the status of an academic toy and laboratory demonstration. There was increasing demand for wide-area digital communications at the time, but it was being mostly met by pre-Internet timesharing services like CompuServe, AOL, and Genie. Those are barely remembered now because the Web steamrollered them flat in the late 1990s – but the Web depended on the TCP/IP stack and internetworking. Without internetworking, no Web, and without that…

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Welcome to a world of walled gardens. Your digital universe is a collection of competing fiefdoms run by CompuServe, AOL, Genie, and later entrants that came into the fray as demand rose, many of them run by big media companies. Each network has its own protocols, its own addressing conventions, and its own rigidly proprietary access software. You get the services they choose to offer and that’s it – there’s no end-to-end, no access to the bitstream.

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You can only do the equivalent of email and instant-messaging with people on the same provider you are using. Inter-provider gateways are buggy and often nonexistent – some providers think they add attractiveness to potential customers, others think they can shoulder smaller networks aside by making them relatively inaccessible. You see a lot of read-only gateways that allow you to pull messages and content from other providers but not export your own, and there are frequent interdictions of these by targeted providers who view these one-ways as leeching. People who use the nets heavily need to have half a dozen different accounts, sets of credentials, and email-address equivalents.

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Any equivalent of user-controlled websites barely exists; they’re an expensive premium service not available on all networks, and subject to “acceptable use policies” that pretty much exclude any content the provider doesn’t like. And, again, they’re only viewable by others using the same access software from the same provider. There is no hyperlinking across providers. And certainly no search engines!

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There may not even be hyperlinking within most of the walled gardens, because the whole model of a universal flat document space indexed by URIs never developed. A few scattered groups of visionaries like Ted Nelson and the Xanadu Project have the idea, but nobody else understands what they’re driving at.

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Blogs? Forget about it. Again, something like a public-diary or mini-magazine publishing format may be available from some providers, but…no hyperlinks. And there are certainly no third-party blog engines like WordPress or Moveable Type. Audiences are badly fragmented by the walls between providers, and providers exert heavy control over content; if you post something “offensive” on your magazine, your provider will protect its corporate reputation by shutting you down.

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Gradually, over time, the smaller providers are merging or being squeezed out of the market. While this cuts down on the number of accounts serious net users need to have, it also means the content-controlling power of the big-provider oligopoly is becoming more difficult to evade. And the kinds of services available, far from broadening over time, are actually narrowing. A nostalgia for the less fettered early days is already developing, but it’s helpless – the big providers say the niche services are unprofitable resource hogs because not enough people want them enough to pay the add-on fees required to sustain them, and who can argue?

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Even as late as 2011, if you suggested music or movie streaming you’d be dismissed as a loon; the bandwidth isn’t there, because the Internet boom and the big fiber build-out never happened. Networking gear is several generations less advanced, and evolving much more slowly because its market is orders of magnitude smaller. Only the Federal government and handful of Fortune 50 corporations have fiber/coax backbones, and none of those can talk to each other. Ordinary joes have to deal with X.25 over copper and even worse. Even acoustic-coupler modems, a half-forgotten joke in our timeline, are still live technology in this one.

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Smartphones? Google? Pandora Radio? File-sharing? Craigslist? Facebook? Dream on. It’s not just that the technological infrastructure can’t support these things, the conceptual infrastructure is absent. Well, we might have something vaguely like smartphones, but they’d be hardware instantiations of some single provider’s access software. Sealed boxes, no tethering or hotspotting. For that matter I’m far from sure there’d even be anything like WiFi yet in alternate 2011.

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There’s a recognizable version of the hacker culture, but the population explosion of the 1990s never happened; it’s basically frozen in amber at about the stage when we were exchanging tiny source archives via USENET postings. There’s no Linux because there’s no net! Without cheap communications, the social engine needed to support large-scale open-source developments never spins up, and the open-source software catalog amounts to little more than a small range of toy programs. Spared the competitive pressure, proprietary operating systems and applications suck even worse.

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The news isn’t all bad. There are still jobs for travel agents, and this future doesn’t have a spam problem; that may be the one single advantage of the provider oligopoly’s grip on online content. But compared to the Internet we have, the overall picture is pretty damn bleak.

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If you think on-line advertising is obnoxious today, imagine what it would be like if the provider’s access software could shove whatever it chose at you at any time – no alternate browsers, no popup blockers, no escape. Hackers in this alternate history spend a lot of their time trying to write “universal” (cross-provider) clients with user-controlled filtering, but the providers view this as a threat to their business models and conduct an arms race, changing access protocols for greater ‘security’ as often as they can get their ordinary users to download client updates. Using a reverse-engineered client is a violation of your terms of service and can get your account canceled.

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The few people trying to build more open public networks are widely dismissed as scruffy anarchists intent on creating havens for hate groups and child porn. But they’re doomed, anyway; the economic and technological base on which to erect their dreams simply doesn’t exist.

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It could have been like this. The better outcome we got was not inevitable. Maybe, now, you’ll appreciate it a little more than you have.

diff --git a/20110621032451.blog b/20110621032451.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2e51ec3 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110621032451.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Circling the RIM +

It’s been a quiet week in the smartphone wars. The three most interesting developments are (a) stock analysts have begun hanging crepe for RIM’s funeral, (b) HP has priced its WebOS tablet to die, and (c) the iPhone 5 is now not expected in September, being constrained by iOS 5’s ship date.

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RIM’s stock price has been badly hammered in recent weeks by plummeting market share and the failure of the Playbook launch. Layoffs have been announced. Typical coverage these days asks whether RIM can survive. Takeover talk has begun, with Dell and Microsoft mentioned as possible buyers. App developers are bailing out.

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For months I thought there was a strong possibility that RIM would soft-land in a defensible market niche around its business customers. But the last quarter has been blunder after blunder; RIM simply is not behaving like a company with the capability to pull out of a death spiral. I’d say we’re about seven months plus or minus two from a crash or buyout.

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HP’s WebOS-based TouchPad tablet is out, and Jason Perlow is devastating about the problem with it, repeating a theme I’ve been sounding here for months. The TouchPad, and all of the iPad’s other competitors, are priced to sink like stones. Product planners all over the industry are living in a ludicrous fantasy if they think they can compete with the iPad at the iPad’s price point; Apple’s brand strength makes this suicidal. They need to cut margins and prices until it hurts, and then cut a bit more, to get traction. HP is not doing this and consequently HP will fail.

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But Apple has troubles of its own. Word is that the iPhone 5 won’t ship in September because iOS 5 won’t be ready by then. On Apple’s hints about the iOS 5 release date, the iPhone 5 could be delayed as late as November. And it’s not going to be a full update, either, just a processor and camera upgrade; some rumors have it being branded as the ‘4S’, with ‘5’ reserved for a major upgrade in 2012.

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Apple’s problem is that the new iPhone, 4S or 5, is going to be facing brutal competition from upcoming Androids like the Samsung Galaxy S 2, HTC Sensation, EVO 3D, and the rumored Nexus 4G. All these phones will be offering 4G, display technology fully as good as the Apple “retina screen” and probably faster processors.

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A weak iPhone upgrade simply won’t fare well against these phones. Falling behind in 4G/LTE support is particularly likely to lose Apple high-end sales. And a poor 2011 Christmas season could completely finish off the iPhone’s chances of regaining lost ground.

diff --git a/20110624000322.blog b/20110624000322.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..95fb347 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110624000322.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Will software ever be engineering? +

One of my commenters pointed me at an article by John Sonmez over at ElegantCode, Why Software Development Will Never be Engineering. The article makes one very shrewd, well-argued point, but then disappointingly fails to build on it. Read it and see if you spot the problem before I analyze.

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I want to start by praising Mr. Sonmez for very logically and thoroughly arguing against a common kind of excuse-making. Often, when software engineers are asked why software engineering doesn’t have the reliability rates of, for example, bridge-building, the answer is: well, the discipline hasn’t had time to mature yet.

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Sonmez observes that we humans have built a lot more software in the last 40 years than bridges in all of recorded history. His underlying point – which he makes very well by looking at how online play has terrifically accelerated the evolution of poker – is that in thinking about time to maturity in a discipline, cumulative hours of practice by humans matters more than the number of calendar years the techniques have been practiced. In terms of human practice time (Sonmez argues) software engineering has actually had at least as much time to mature as bridge-building.

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I could quibble with this argument if I wanted to. The degree to which more people in a discipline can speed up its evolution is limited by the speed with which they can learn from each other in each round. There’s a diminishing-returns effect from adding more practitioners in parallel; it’s a lot like (and may actually be formally identical to) the Amdahl’s Law limit on speedup from processor parallelism.

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But I think that really would be just a quibble, and that Sonmez’s underlying point about comparative evolutionary times is basically sound. And I wish he had stopped there, because it is just after this point that his reasoning goes all to hell and handwaves.

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Before I get to dissecting that part, I’m going to note one startling detail that is orthogonal to Sonmez’s main arguments. At one point, as an example of change in the methods of software engineering, Sonmez says “Ten years ago waterfall was all the rage.” an assertion to which I can best sum up my reaction by quoting P.J. O’Rourke’s immortal words from Parliament of Whores, to wit: “What the fuck? I mean…what the fucking fuck?”

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Here in the land of open source, waterfall development has been considered a form of doomed, brain-damaged idiocy as long as I can remember, let alone “as recently as ten years ago”. I suppose I could take Sonmez’s aside as a pleasing confirmation that my peers and I were ahead of the curve, but in fact my reaction is of gobsmacked shock at the thought that his peers were that far behind it. It gives me a suspicion that most of the software out there is actually far worse than I realized, a sort of nauseous sinking feeling.

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But that’s not what I’m here to write about this fine evening. It’s probably not mostly Sonmez’s fault that he lives in a cultural surround where “ten years ago waterfall was all the rage”. It is his fault that, having constructed a lovely argument against one of the standard excuses for shoddy software engineering, he immediately begins failing even basic logic immediately thereafter.

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Sonmez wants to argue that, since both disciplines have had comparable times to mature, the fact that they don’t have comparable error rates means software is fundamentally unlike bridge-building. But he has neglected to exclude the simplest possibility: that they are fundamentally alike, but the differing error rates are a consequence of differing complexity scales.

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OK, so what do I mean when I say “they are fundamentally alike”? They are both disciplines in which the local behavior of components is usually simple and easily mentally modeled by a designer. The complexity, in both cases, generally comes from long-range couplings among parts that may interact with each other in unexpected ways. This is a hard distinction from, for example, biology – in which, basically, there are no simple components at any level.

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I didn’t choose biology as a contrast at random. Sonmez appears to think that software engineers are more like surgeons. But that assertion just sort of hangs in the air; not only doesn’t Sonmez actually argue for it, he never even tells us what he thinks it means, beyond some poetic handwaving about software systems being “unruly beasts” and “keeping it alive”. Really, I could say “Software engineers are like blinching flugletharps” and convey exactly the same amount of information, which is to say none at all. What up, does Sonmez want us to wear scrubs and facemasks when we code? What’s the actual point of the metaphor, here?

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The sad part is I don’t think Sonmez really has one. Yes, software has to be maintained. So do bridges, and taking a busily-traveled thoroughfare out of service for repairs has opportunity costs so high that it’s not done a lot more often than taking a large software system out of service for repair.

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Now, it could be that the “fundamentally alike” case is wrong and that software is more fruitfully viewed as being like biology. The trouble is that Sonmez never gives us any reason to believe that. Everything after his “Software development is different” heading is pure handwaving. And, after the buildup, very disappointing.

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I don’t think I know for sure whether or not software engineering is fundamentally different from bridge-building. But it’s a thesis I’m suspicious of precisely because it would in many ways be very comforting, almost an implicit excuse for our dreadful error rates. Sonmez isn’t doing us any favors by making a bad argument for the proposition, and he might not be helping matters even if it were a good one.

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UPDATE: My wife the attorney acidly points out yet another way in which Sonmez’s argument is flawed and unhelpful. “If surgeons had the failure rate of software engineers,” she observes, “they’d all be in jail.”

diff --git a/20110626014042.blog b/20110626014042.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4d6c50a --- /dev/null +++ b/20110626014042.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Nokia’s fallback? +

Here’s an interesting news story alleging that Nokia has ported Android to the N9. There are pictures at engadget.

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It’s unclear what, if anything, this means. If Nokia’s management were sane and competent, it would be easy to conjecture that they’re preparing a fallback strategy in case WP7 continues to bomb. But it would be pretty difficult to sustain any theory that Nokia’s management is sane and competent on the facts of the last two years.

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And it’s just gotten more difficult, since the CEO of Nokia has announced that he will kill Meego on the N9 even if it’s successful! Which of course guarantees that nobody will buy the soon-to-be-orphaned N9, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Good Goddess…after his one moment of insight as he wrote the burning platform memo it it has come to look as though Stephen Elop is so utterly incompetent that he couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse. He’s just gone from mere strategic stupidity to active sabotage of his own company.

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This is really sad. Call me sentimental, but I mourn the Nokia that did a fine job of flooding the world with cheap, well-designed cellphones back in the 1990s. The only good thing about this stumbling, shambolic finish is that the Nokia/Windows alliance probably completely scuppers Microsoft’s already miniscule chances of getting any traction in the smartphone market.

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UPDATE: Changed an idiom that confused several readers.

diff --git a/20110627151537.blog b/20110627151537.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2878548 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110627151537.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Why the political class needs a Greek bailout +

There’s been a lot of ink spilled lately on the likelihood that the nation of Greece will default on its public debt, and why it is utterly necessary for the European Union and the U.S. must ride the the rescue with some sort of fiddle involving a combination of (a) massive taxpayer-funded loans, (b) cramming changes in the terms of Greek government bonds down bondholders’ throats, and (c) stern finger-wagging at the Greeks.

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Lost in the eye-glazing babble about maturity extensions, haircuts, and which acronymic organization is going to funnel the money into place is the real magnitude of the stakes here. It’s not just the Greeks’ opera-bouffé parody of the modern redistributionist state that is circling the structural-insolvency drain; what really terrifies our political class is the prospect that, very soon, the investors simply won’t buy government bonds anymore – and massive borrowing through bond issues is the only thing keeping the redistributionist state afloat.

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As I have documented many times on this blog, the entitlement-spending commitments of the U.S. Federal government, most U.S. state governments, most European governments, and indeed most national governments everywhere exceed the capacity of their economies to generate wealth. And demographic trends are making the imbalance worse over time, not better.

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This is why raising taxes won’t help. The amount of private wealth available to be taxed is insufficient, even if taxation could be raised to 100% without suppressing all economic activity. In practice, raising taxes leads to increases in spending which more than consume the increased revenue (by a ratio of 1.17:1 in the U.S. since the 1940s).

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Cutting military or any other form of discretionary spending won’t work either. If you zero all that stuff out, public pensions and other entitlement commitments still require revenues larger than the taxable private economy can generate.

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Nor will productivity growth do it. Mature economies have annual productivity growth in single digits; mature redistributionist states have annual spending growth in double digits. The problem is structural; the Olsonian interest-group scramble generates pressure for increased spending faster than the underlying economy can grow.

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Everywhere, the gap between political spending commitments and revenue has been covered by borrowing. The entire system of redistributionism, in which the political class buys the consent of the governed with ever-increasing handouts, has come to depend on the assumption that the bond markets will always be there to be tapped for cash to fund next week’s bread and circuses.

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That is the assumption that is now under threat. Greece must be bailed out in order to preserve the illusion that the borrowing can continue indefinitely, that the bill will somehow never come due. When the political class speaks of “contagion”, what they’re really worried about isn’t the solvency of German banks holding Greek paper, it’s a general flight of investors from the sovereign-debt markets.

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Our political class, like the aristocrats of the French ancien regime, believes in nothing so firmly as its own indispensability. Après moi le déluge; but when the bond-investor flight happens – and it is now a matter of when, not if – the teetering Ponzi scheme that funds their self-importance will collapse.

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You think it can’t happen here? You think structural insolvency is only for volatile Mediterraneans with silly folk costumes and ouzo habits? Then I’ve got one word for you: California.

diff --git a/20110630224310.blog b/20110630224310.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3a67b90 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110630224310.blog @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Rumors of demise +

I’ve been chronicling RIM’s death spiral, and much more willing than most to call it as a straight-up suicide by bad planning and management, not just a “bad things happen to good companies” episode. Now comes an open letter from inside RIM describing the unforced errors in excruciating detail.

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In other news, the trade press has been abuzz for the last week with stories of a dramatic turn in Apple’s smartphone fortunes – Android supposedly stalling out, with significant gains for Apple from the Verizon iPhone. This report now looks like a classic case study in how to (a) lie with statistics, and (b) get the trade press to inflate a non-story into a nine days’ wonder.

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The unnamed author of the RIM letter clearly loves the company. He writes from the perspective of a mid-level executive – someone higher up the org chart than a line manager but not one of the board’s direct reports. There are clues in his perspective on things like UI that suggest to me a marketing person with a bit of technical clue; forced to guess I’d say he’s either a senior marketing guy or a product-line manager with a marketing background.

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The letter is candid, fearless, and utterly damning. It calls out the crappy product planning and positioning that I’ve been talking about, and a bunch of other failure modes as well. One of the most interesting is the “run by Canadians” bit – the author says there’s a problem with RIM being too nice and not firing people even for disastrous mistakes. The predictable result is that RIM is clogged with deadwood at all levels.

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And yes, the author does have the cojones to tell Lazaridis and Ballsillie, the co-CEOs of RIM, that they have to go. But it’s too late. By the time a letter like this happens, the rot is terminal and the demise of the company not far off. If anything, RIM’s response confirms the indictment. It’s a classic of clueless, defensive, near-meaningless management-speak. I cannot improve on the reaction of this commenter: “Foot. Bullet. BANG.”.

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On the other hand, rumors of another demise – that of Android’s astonishingly rapid climb in market-share – turn out to have been (as Mark Twain might have put it) greatly exaggerated. The original claim comes from one Charlie Wolf at Needham & Co.; one of the earlier reports of it was in Business Insider on June 21st. The story was subsequently echoed uncritically by any number of other news outlets, and even led to some serious brow-furrowing on Android fan sites.

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I initially ignored Wolf’s claims because the article seemed to me partisan, thinly-sourced and vague. It quickly developed that I was right about the ‘partisan'; according to one of the few critical followups on the story Wolf has a record as one of the biggest Apple cheerleaders on Wall Street and holds a long position in the stock.

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But there were clues right up front that Charlie was, er, crying wolf. One is the claim relayed in the Business Insider piece that “in the March quarter…Android’s share in the U.S. fell from 52.4% to 49.5%”. The problem with this is that Android’s U.S. market share hasn’t yet been as high as 50% – comScore reported 34.7% in that quarter and it’s not believable that they were 18 points off.

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What was being reported as “share” was, clearly, something else – if it wasn’t simply pulled out of Mr. Wolf’s butt. (This and other reports claimed the analysis was based on figures from IDC.). To confuse matters more, the article contained two graphs, one labeled “U.S. market share” and the other “Worldwide market share”, and while the first one bore no resemblence whatsoever to the comScore and Nielsen trends I’ve been tracking, the second one looked familiar.

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Another problem was that we already had comScore’s April figures, and they simply couldn’t be reconciled with any story in which Android lost share in March. In fact comScore indicated a healthy 1.7% Android share growth, exactly on the long-term trend-line fron mid-2010, for the same three-month period in which Wolf was claiming Android had suddenly dropped share.

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One of those sets of numbers had to be wrong. My choice was between believing a pro-Apple surprise being retailed by a notorious Apple partisan and a continuation of an 18-month trend being reported by a neutral – not a tough call. Actually the Business Insider article looked like such a mess of vagueness and wishful thinking that I half-thought Wolf’s claims must have been garbled in transmission and that his original analysis was more connected to reality.

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Subsequently, an Apple fanboy trying to buttress Wolf’s case pointed me at this report of Nielsen results which claimed that Android dropped a point of share, to 36%, in April. A wildly different figure from Wolf’s 49%, but the fanboy blithely ignored that.

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Now come the Nielsen numbers for May. Nielsen says Android share went from 36% to 38%. That’s consistent with the earlier Nielsen report, and if I squint hard I can write off the difference from the comScore numbers as statistical noise. This is the familiar picture of Android rising, with a one-month bobble in the near past that may be just an artifact.

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But the May Nielsen report said something else that gave me furiously to think. It said that Android’s share of recent smartphone acquirers had been flat for three months – and when I read that I realized what Charlie Wolf must have done.

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That 50% to 49% drop wasn’t “share”, it was some measure of share among recent purchasers. Wolf threw those figures on the table, muddying the distinction, thinking he could con a bunch of business reporters into thinking Android’s share growth had gone into reverse. I think he did this deliberately, but I have a nasty suspicious mind when it comes to Apple fanboys and for the rest of this analysis it won’t matter whether or not there was actual intent to deceive on his part.

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The effect was certainly deceptive. Wolf exploited the fact that reporters are in general (a) lazy, and (b) under constant deadline pressure, and thus (c) tend not to question stories that are “too good to check” (like, say, scandalous rumors about Republican politicians). At this point “ZOMG! Sky is falling on teh Android!” is too good to check simply because Android has been riding high for so long that reporters are bored with that narrative line.

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And that, boys and girls, is how you inflate statistical flimflam into a news wave. Give reporters something that combines looking slightly contrarian with telling them a dramatic story. They’ll eat it up like candy, and before you know it J. Random Consumer will see the same bullshit tossed at him from a dozen different secondary sources.

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Meanwhile, Wolf has left himself plausible deniability. “Well, of course I was talking about recent acquirers! My, my, how my innocent words were garbled in transition!” Then he retires to his fainting couch to contemplate the uptick in AAPL.

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But there are substantive questions we shouldn’t toss out with the bathwater here. Is it true that recent acquirers have cooled on Android? Is it a result, as Wolf claims, of the Verizon iPhone? And if so, doesn’t that imply that cumulative Android share growth will stall out in the future?

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About recent acquirers: possibly, but the evidence for this is weak. Retrospective surveys of behavior based on what people remember themselves doing (like, what they had for breakfast or what smartphone they purchased recently) are notoriously unreliable. That is, as opposed to watching people eat breakfast or counting the smartphones they actually have in hand.

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Such “evidence” is also easily manipulated by changing the definition of ‘recent’ in order to cherry-pick a period in which one competitor’s new purchases were up for exogenous reasons. Another commenter here has discussed the effect of sales of dirt-cheap reconditioned Apple 3GS phones in Q1 – these made Apple very little money but would have inflated its new-user share in a way that is not repeatable.

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The truth is, until we know what the time frame of ‘recent’ was, all such figures are basically pretty meaningless.

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As to the Verizon iPhone: in late April I wrote:

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+Even on the very optimistic assumption that Verizon sustains its pace through Q2, Android phones are selling so much faster in aggregate (ratio of about 10:1) that iPhone 4V is barely going to budge the needle on the market share numbers (if that). +

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And, in fact, the needle has barely budged in the comScore numbers. I think I can see a slight Apple-positive trend since February, but it’s so small that it could easily be statistical noise. And Android, according to comScore and Nielsen, is still gaining share at about 2% a month.

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For all the sound and fury around it, the Verizon iPhone has not yet produced any improvement in Apple’s relative market position more dramatic than that in four months.

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Of course, it could still happen. Any number of other unlikely and improbable things could happen, too. But usually if a consumer-electronics product is going to make that kind of splash, it happens sooner after initial release. At this point, any realistic hope for an Apple comeback has to be pinned to the late-Fall release of the iPhone 5 or the rumored 4S.

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The way to bet, though, is that these will be non-events in exactly the same way as the Verizon iPhone and the iPhone 4 were – hugely anticipated, widely touted as the end of Android’s run, and completely unable to derail it.

diff --git a/20110705180014.blog b/20110705180014.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b8dd6ad --- /dev/null +++ b/20110705180014.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Not the expected surprise +

I have plotted the May 2011 comScore data. There are two conspicuous things to notice about it. One is that recent rumors of an Android stallout seem utterly bogus, and the other is that Apple appears to be actually gaining some share rather than simply bouncing around 25% in a random way.

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In my last post, I took apart some tendentious claims that Android’s market share had peaked in March. We now have two months of share data collected with consistent methodology past March and I think we can say this claim is busted. Whether we interpret market share as share of total userbase or of recent adopters, there’s no stallout showing here; after slowing down a bit from the holiday season Android growth has been remarkably steady. Over-50% share still looks like happening in October.

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On the other hand, Apple may be climbing out of a rut. While 1.3% share growth over 18 months is nothing to brag about (especially when compared to Android’s 32.9% gain) it looks to me like during the last 4 months Apple’s competitive position has been improving just enough to be noticeable. Given the timing, this probably is due to Apple going multicarrier in the U.S. – though if I were Apple I’d certainly have been hoping for a more dramatic improvement. Apple’s longer-term problem is that Android continues to gain about two users to every one of Apple’s.

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RIM, Microsoft, and HP continue to tank. Microsoft may be falling a little faster recently. Overall, there are no surprises here.

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UPDATE: Actually, we do get a surprise today. Ars Technica says there will be an iPhone 4S, except it calls it a 5S, with a ship date of September.

diff --git a/20110707235441.blog b/20110707235441.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7144626 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110707235441.blog @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +Recreating the Nutty Buddy +

This is a happy story about how, sometimes, you can go home again.

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When I was a small child (this would have been a good 45 years or so in the mid-1960s), there was a style of ice cream cone with a sort of top cap of solidified chocolate and chopped peanuts on it. They were sold under the brand name Nutty Buddy, but I think it had imitators as well. I didn’t care; I was barely aware of the brand and I liked them all. Ice cream trucks were more common then than they are now, and when I heard the bell on one of them ringing I knew what I wanted. A Nutty Buddy if I could get one, or an ice-cream sandwich if I couldn’t.

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About a year ago my wife and I were out in Michigan for sword training, and one fine day we and Heather the swordmistress rustled up some cold sandwiches and drinks and went for a picnic lunch in a local park. It was a lovely sunny afternoon, and the food was good, and the company was good and – what was that? I heard what could only be the bell of an ice-cream truck! I think it had been literally decades since my last one; I instantly gave chase.

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Now, Eric in hot pursuit of an ice cream truck is doubtless a rather comical sight. I have cerebral palsy and don’t run well, tending to galumph across the landscape in what I’m sure looks like a ludicrously slow and inefficient manner. Fortunately, I am fast enough to catch up with an ice-cream truck that doesn’t actually want to outrun its potential clientele. I caught it about a block away.

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I discovered as my much more fleet-footed companions caught up with me that the truck did indeed have the object of my desire and immediately bought one. Alas, it wasn’t very good. Cardboardish cone, tasteless ice-cream, and some sort of advanced chocolate substitute on the top. The chopped peanuts were OK. There’s not much you can do to ruin chopped peanuts.

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It was one of those cliched moments when you discover you can’t go home again. Either my tastebuds had become more discriminating over the years or the quality of the ingredients had been sacrificed to cut costs – I’m actually betting on both. This was not the stuff of my childhood memories. And so small!

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But I said this story has a happy ending. Fast-forward another year to a few days ago. My wife and I had just eaten dinner at a favorite local restaurant of ours with one minor flaw: the desserts they have there are way too sugary and heavy for my taste. That’s generally true at restaurants these days, but I had a fallback plan. We had a pretty decent grade of vanilla ice cream in the freezer at home, and a few days previously we’d bought some Magic Shell on a lark.

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Magic Shell, for those of you unfamiliar, is a eutectic mixture of liquid chocolate and vegetable oil that tastes just like regular chocolate sauce and is liquid at room temperature, but is engineered to freeze and solidify at the serving temperature of ice cream. It then becomes slightly chewy in a rather pleasant way.

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So we’re tooling home and I had a thought. Ice cream cone! Ha ha! Cathy approved, and we grabbed some from a passing supermarket. When we got home, I figured this was worth doing right. So I built my cone carefully, waited long enough for the Magic Shell to solidify, bit into it – and discovered with a rush of surprise that I had exactly recreated the way a Nutty Buddy is supposed to taste and feel. Excelsior!

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Here’s how you can do it yourself:

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Start with a suitable quantity of Breyer’s vanilla ice cream. Breyer’s used to be extremely good, and though the quality has suffered in recent years due to cost-cutting it’s still better than average.

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Get your hands on some old-fashioned waffle cones. We got some made by the Joy Cone Company in the original 1904 style resembling a rolled-up zalabia waffle; any similar product should do. Do not cheat yourself with the modern styrofoam-light flat-bottomed variety sometimes called a “kiddie cup”; those suck.

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Finely dice some Planter’s cocktail peanuts – a teaspoonful will do.

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Pack ice cream into the cone with a spoon. Don’t try to mound a big scoop of the stuff on the top; the effect works better if you end up with dense-packed ice cream roughly level with the cone top.

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Drizzle Magic Shell on the exposed surface of the ice cream. Spread chopped nuts on top of it. Add another thin layer of Magic Shell on top of the nuts.

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Important! Do not eat this immediately, however tempted you may be – the texture won’t be right. Wait for the phase change in your eutectic chocolate sauce, which will usually happen in 30 to 45 seconds. You will know it’s ready when it is no longer glossy-liquid in appearance but a dull and slightly lighter brown.

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If you try to lick this confection in the way you would an ordinary ice-cream cone you will not have an entirely satisfactory experience. Eat it with your front teeth, biting off sections of cone along with the topping and ice-cream filling. The textural contrasts of waffle pastry, solidified chocolate, nuts, and the smoothness of the ice cream are very much the point.

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And that’s the Nutty Buddy, reloaded. Enjoy!

diff --git a/20110709003815.blog b/20110709003815.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d420049 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110709003815.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Yahtzee — In — Spaaace! +

I’m just back from another session with the Friday night gaming crew, occupied this time with a new game called Alien Frontiers. Summary: It’s Yahtzee — in — spaaace!.

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Alien Frontiers attracted me with its theme. What red-blooded geek doesn’t groove on the idea of colonizing alien planets, after all? The box art made clear that the game was intended as homage to classic SF, and the gameboard briskly carried that forward: Our alien planet, divided into seven regions named after Golden Age SF authors, surrounded by orbiting installations like the Colonist Hub, Raider Outpost, Alien Artifact, Solar Collector, Terraforming Station, and more.

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The actual game mechanics do rather resemble Yahtzee; you have a dice pool, which you commit to perform actions at orbital installations each turn. But instead of directly scoring points as in Yahtzee, some of the actions drop colonists on the planet; others collect ore and fuel (resources required for, among other things, dropping colonists); still others allow you to snag an alien artifact, which may give you victory points or allow you to modify die rolls or teleport colonists around or use various other rule-bending special abilities.

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An unusual feature of the game is that victory points aren’t cumulative – your VP score is a pure function of the board state and the cards in your hand, and victory points can be lost as well as gained. For example, having majority control of a planetary region gains you a VP, and losing control because another player has tied your number of colonist counters in the region loses you that VP. VP leaders can expect to get sniped at a lot in the late game.

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The game is designed for 4 players. There are 3- and 2-player variants in the rules, but I suspect they don’t work as well – part of the tactics depend on players getting crowded out of slots on the orbital stations, and that would be a more difficult outcome to manipulate for with fewer players.

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One virtue of this game is that it will play really fast with players who know what they’re doing. Poorly-organized rules make initial learning more difficult than it should be (the objective really should have been explained before turn flow, for example) but the mechanics are basically pretty simple and once you learn how to read the possibilities in your dice a turn will often take less than 60 seconds.

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Despite the simple mechanics, I think the replay value of this game should hold up pretty well. There are multiple paths to victory, and always options to balance. Early on, should you try for a lead in colonies or concentrate on building ships (enlarging your dice pool) for later? Alien artifacts are expensive but can be game-changers; how much to invest in chasing them? Will raiding net you more than trading?

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Overall this game is perhaps a bit lighter than I normally like, but it’s a fun social gaming experience for four SF fans. I’ll play it again, and I’m definitely going to lean on the Colonist Hub more next time….

diff --git a/20110710081334.blog b/20110710081334.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2047fa3 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110710081334.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +I’ve joined Google+ +

Google+ is interesting. I was persuaded to try it by three things: (1) Circles, so I can structure my contacts rather than having an undifferentiated blob of “friends”, (2) I’m fairly confident that Google’s Data Liberation Front won’t let it turn into a jail, and (3) my best geeky friends seem to be joining en masse.

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I begin to think Facebook might actually have a fight on its hands. I’m getting the feel of tremendous demand for something that’s full-boat social networking but not Facebook finding an outlet, because it’s not just my geeky friends that are signing up.

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This will bear watching.

diff --git a/20110712233324.blog b/20110712233324.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0b52ed7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110712233324.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Heads up: Google+ changes things +

This is a heads-up for all fans of this blog. You probably want to get on Google+ ASAP, because in the future some content I would have shipped as short posts here will be Google+ shared text instead.

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Essay-length stuff will remain here with pointers from Google+ updates. Likely I will lock comments on the Google+ updates.

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UPDATE: Follow me here. Also, since there seems to be some confusion on this score, let me emphasize that I will continue to use this blog for essay-length content.

diff --git a/20110714075545.blog b/20110714075545.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..054394b --- /dev/null +++ b/20110714075545.blog @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +Tau versus Pi +

I’ve recently become aware of an entertaining controversy in the world of mathematics. It seems a dissident faction of mathematicians is advocating the replacement of the mathematical constant π with the related constant τ = 2π. T he self-described ‘Tauists’ are conducting their campaign with a form of ha-ha-only-serious dry humor that gently mocks the conventions of the mathematical literature, but if we receive it only as satire, we risk missing some serious and interesting issues in play.

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For background, you can read The Tau Manifesto and a rebuttal at The Pi Manifesto. I’ve read some of the source arguments these were constructed from, such as Bob Palais’s original “π is wrong! “article; having done so, I think the manifestos sum up the state of play pretty well.

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I was at one time a mathematician with a serious interest in foundational issues; that is, I was interested in studying the axiomatic basis of mathematics itself. One relevant question the π vs. τ dispute raises is what we actually mean when we say that “π is an important mathematical constant”. Is there any sense in which we can say that π = τ/2 is “more special” than τ = 2π, or vice-versa?

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Curiously, though the disputants sidle up to the second question in a sideways manner, I haven’t yet seen anyone tackle the first one directly. Perhaps this is because it hasn’t attracted a foundationalist’s attention yet; most of the mathematical community, so far, seems to dismiss the dispute as trivial. I don’t think it is, though, and even if I’m no longer officially a mathematical philosopher myself I can at least play one on the net.

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The real meat of this dispute is in how we evaluate competing notations for the same mathematical system, and to approach that question we need an explicit theory of what mathematical notation does and what it is for. The π-vs.-τ dispute has legs exactly because mathematicians in general have only a loose and implicit theory of notation; while it leads to broadly shared intuitions most of the time, it does tend in edge cases like the π-vs.-τ dispute to collapse into personal esthetic evaluations that cause a lot of argumentative heat exactly because they can’t really be logically defended.

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In fact it is exactly this collapse that the Tauists are gently parodying, even as they make a serious case for τ. But the Tau Manifesto gets caught up in specific arguments about its controversy enough that it only glances at the more general question: what makes one mathematical notation better than another?

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We can start by noticing that mathematical notation has two broad functions. One is to facilitate computation; the other is to help mathematicians generate intuitions about its subject matter.

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The first of these is relatively easy to think about. In the past, changes in notation have brought about dramatic improvements in ease of computation, leading sometimes to very large consequences in the real world. Perhaps the most dramatic example was the shift from Roman numerals to modern positional notation during the early Renaissance. This made arithmetic so much easier that every human endeavor in contact with it got revolutionized, leading to results as diverse as double-entry bookkeeping, open-ocean navigation, and (arguably) the invention of physics. In more recent times, the invention of tensor calculus in the late 1800s proved essential for helping Albert Einstein and others perform the essential computations of General Relativity Theory.

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The second use, helping generate intuitions, is much less well understood. No mathematician doubts that expressive notation is like wings for the mathematical imagination; nor that a clumsy, poorly chosen notation is like hanging weights on it. But, as in Hollywood, nobody knows what will work for audiences until it’s tried. Our evaluations of “expressive” and “clumsy” can usually be only be made after the fact and in a relatively fuzzy way.

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But the most important property of good notation serves both purposes. Good notation expresses complex ideas in a simple and regular way. And this is something we can actually formalize, because human brains being what they are, “simple” unpacks to “few enough symbols to fit in the brain’s working storage”. Short formulas with large consequences are the greatest achievements of both pure and applied mathematics.

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This gives us a metric. Suppose we have a list of theorems and derivations that we consider important, and two alternative notations for expressing them. There is a known way to map without loss from one notation to the other and back. Which, then, is better?

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The simplest answer is, I think, the fundamentally correct one. Write them all down in both notations and count symbols. The notation with the lower symbol count wins, and not by accident but because handling it will impose lower overhead on the user.

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The Tauists and pi partisans understand this well enough that they argue back and forth partly by listing important formulas or theorems that are simpler in their preferred notation. But lacking any explicit idea that mathematical notation needs to be optimized for the limited short-term memory capacity of human brains, they spend what I think is too little time on such “global” arguments and way too much on “local” ones – that is, whether the ratio that π or τ expresses is “more fundamental”.

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I think this local argument really rests on a sort of lurking Platonism, a belief that a mathematical formula is a kind of statement or claim about ideal forms at least some of which have an existence independent of the formulas. Nobody in the dispute can quite bring themselves to utter the claim that π is “real”, whereas 2π is just a derivative arrangement of symbols; nor does one hear the opposite claim that τ is “real” but τ/2 is not. But that sort of essentialism is stooging around underneath the arguments the disputants do make, denying its own presence but nearly impossible to miss.

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If the last century and a half of mathematics has taught us anything, though, it’s that Platonism doesn’t work. Kurt Gödel put the final bullet through its head with his Incompleteness Theorem in the 1930s, but it had been living on borrowed time ever since Bertrand Russell blew up Frege’s axiomatization of number with a simple paradox in 1902. Mathematical Platonism has since almost disappeared as a philosophical position, but not as a psychological one; I’ve noted before that mathematicians then to be formalists in theory but Platonists in practice. In disputes like τ-vs.-π the tension between these positions surfaces, because arguments about the notation of mathematics have a natural tendency to slide over into arguments about its ontology.

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Having restated the underlying problem in a way that I hope clarifies the dispute, I will now take a position on the merits. I think the Tauists have the better of the argument. I don’t think I’m being influenced too much by the fact that their side gets to make clever puns about Taoism, difficult though that lure seems to be for anyone involved to resist. It really does appear to me that the τ notation yields a net simplification.

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Much more importantly, though, I think the best way to resolve this dispute is to throw out all the essentialism and the arguments about what π and τ “really mean” geometrically. We should focus ruthlessly on the global question: what notation makes our formulas simpler?

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That way of thinking about the problem implies an answer to the question about what we mean when we say “π is an important mathematical constant”. We mean that it shows up repeatedly in simple formulas – and that replacing it with an equivalent expression that is not one symbol (such as, say τ/2) would involve a loss in concision with no gain in expressiveness.

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The Tauists claim that changing to τ would actually gain some concision. Very well then; let’s do a systematic audit. Representatives of the Tauists and the pi partisans should be locked in a mathematics library until they choose a list of books and papers that covers trigonometry, calculus, and analysis. Then, the burden should be on the Tauists to translate the entire pile into τ notation. Then, both sides should count symbols, checking each others’ work. Most compact notation wins!

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Or, to put it a different way, if you’re going to get involved in the τ-vs.-π dispute, beware of circular arguments.

diff --git a/20110718155845.blog b/20110718155845.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8608baa --- /dev/null +++ b/20110718155845.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +Brin on Heinlein on guns is dead wrong +

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions about Robert Heinlein, but not to their own facts. In a blog post on Heinlein’s novel Beyond This Horizon, David Brin advances a number of claims which are disputable, and one that is utterly bizarre. He alleges that the thought behind Heinlein’s famous quote “An armed society is a polite society” was not Heinlein’s but issued from John W. Campbell, the editor who with Heinlein invented science fiction as we know it.

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This claim is not merely wrong, it attempts to traduce a core belief which Heinlein expressed in his fiction and his nonfiction and his personal letters throughout his life. We do not have to speculate about this; as I shall show, it is so amply documented that Brin’s claim passes from being merely tendentious to outright bizarre.

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Brin’s error matters to me personally because, as much as I am anything else, I am one of Heinlein’s children. I have closely studied his works and his life, and that study has shaped me. What I have given to the world through my advocacy of open source is directly tied back to what the Old Man taught me about liberty, transparency, and moral courage. And I am never more Heinlein’s child than when I advocate for an armed (and polite) society.

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Robert Heinlein was a complex man whose views evolved greatly over time. The Heinlein of 1942, who put into the mouth of one of his characters the line “Naturally food is free! What kind of people do you take us for?” was only five years on from having been enchanted by social credit theory, which underpins his “lost” novel For Us, The Living; in later years he was so embarrassed by this enthusiasm that he allowed that manuscript to molder in a drawer somewhere, and it was only published after his death.

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Between 1942 and 1966 Heinlein’s politics evolved from New Deal left-liberalism towards what after 1971 would come to be called libertarianism. But that way of putting it is actually misleading, because Heinlein did not merely approach libertarianism, he played a significant part in defining it. His 1966 novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress was formative of the movement, with the “rational anarchist” Bernardo de la Paz becoming a role model for later libertarians. By 1978, we have direct evidence (from an interview in Samuel Edward Konkin’s New Libertarian magazine, among other sources) that Heinlein self-identified as a libertarian and regretted his earlier statism.

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But if Heinlein’s overall politics changed considerably and wandered down some odd byways during his lifetime, his uncompromising support of civilian firearms rights was a constant on display throughout his life. Brin observes that was already true in 1942, but attempts to attribute this position to John W. Campbell. Multiple lines of evidence refute this claim.

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I have read the volume of John W. Campbell’s collected letters published in 1985. John Campbell had a great many peculiarities and borderline obsessions – many of which he did push his stable of authors to write about – but there is no evidence in those letters that firearms rights was one of them. Nor is it one of the continuing themes in his provocative and sometimes cranky Analog editorials.

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Now, based on what Campbell’s writings reveal about him, I would be astonished if his position on firearms rights was much different from Heinlein’s. Both partook of a strain of flinty, deeply American individualism that regarded the Second Amendment as a central article of the national covenant – a folk wisdom which was common across the American political spectrum until the late 1960s, and not before then associated specifically with libertarian or conservative politics as it later became. But for Campbell this does not seem ever to have became a foreground issue.

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Heinlein, on the other hand, was a vocal and consistent advocate of civilian weapons ownership both during and after his association with Campbell. This is perhaps clearest in his 1949 novel Red Planet, written after their parting of the ways. In that novel, the bearing of personal weapons is explicitly connected to the assumption of adult responsibilities.

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Red Planet is also interesting because, although we might consider the views of Heinlein’s characters an unreliable guide to Heinlein’s own, Heinlein’s letters about the novel reveal much more. His editor at Scribner attempted to delete the section of argument in which weapons-bearing is connected to adult responsibility; Heinlein rejected this, objecting that it eviscerated the book’s ethical core and making very clear that the views of the pro-gun mentor figures in the novel were his own.

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Heinlein was to reiterate similar views not only in his later fiction but in the posthumous nonfiction collection Grumbles From The Grave – by which time they were no surprise to any Heinlein fan. And it would be difficult to overstate the influence they had on firearms-rights activists during the dark years between the Gun Control Act of 1968 and our vindication in the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller ruling.

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Heinlein’s gift to firearms-rights activism during that bleak four decades was to be able to draw on the principled case for civilian firearms going back to the framers of the U.S. Constitution and English Republican sources and restate it in language appealing to the brightest children of post-WWII America. But he did more than that, because in Red Planet and elsewhere firearms rights were presented as an inextricable part of a philosophical whole, with the personal firearm both as instrument and defining symbol of personal liberty and responsibility.

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My own essay on this topic, Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun: What Bearing Weapons Teaches About the Good Life, I freely acknowledge to be in significant part derived from arguments originated or transmitted by Heinlein. It was after reading him that I – and many other firearms-rights activists of my generation – delved backward into the roots of the constitutionalist/republican tradition and found there a splendid affirmation of the liberty Heinlein taught us to value.

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(When time has given us perspective to write really good cultural histories of the 20th century, Heinlein is going to look implausibly gigantic. His achievements didn’t stop with co-inventing science fiction and all its consequences, framing post-1960s libertarianism, energizing the firearms-rights movement, or even merely inspiring me to become the kind of person who not only could write The Cathedral and the Bazaar but had to. No. Heinlein also invented much of the zeitgeist of the 1960s counterculture through his novel Stranger In A Strange Land; it has been aptly noted that he was the only human being ever to become a culture hero both to the hippies of Woodstock and the U.S. Marine Corps. I am told that to this day most Marine noncoms carry a well-thumbed copy of Starship Troopers in their rucksacks.)

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I have been a fan of David Brin’s writing ever since the early 1980s; I honored him precisely because he played a key role in reviving the Campbellian/Heinleinian style of SF after the decay and pointlessness of the “New Wave” years. I know what Brin’s roots in the genre are; they go back to Heinlein just as surely as mine do, and he has no absolutely no excuse for not knowing better. The kindest possible interpretation is that he has deceived himself; but I cannot escape the queasy, unwelcome conclusion that he does know better. Brin’s essay stinks of politically-motivated lying.

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This indictment of Brin matters precisely because of the vast scope of Heinlein’s influence. By attempting to retrospectively divorce Heinlein from firearms rights and libertarianism, Brin bids to make genre SF, the libertarian tradition entwined with it, and all the other social movements Heinlein influenced into something other than what they are. He is trying on an Orwellian distortion of the past in order to deform the future.

diff --git a/20110724103139.blog b/20110724103139.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bc23bbf --- /dev/null +++ b/20110724103139.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Expectation and Surprise +

If style is truly the contrast of expectation and surprise, it’s been a very stylin’ couple of weeks in the smartphone world while I’ve been on vacation.

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Expectation: Nokia’s sales in China dropped 41% year-over-year in the last quarter. This is worse than it looks because China and the the Pacific Rim were Nokia’s big hope for volume sales; the brand has disappeared from Europe and never had much presence in the U.S.

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Nokia’s strategy, insofar as it’s actually had one since the tie-up with Microsoft, has been to hang in there on volume sales of dumbphones until it could deliver world-beating WP7 handsets. The major risk here, other than the wild unlikelihood of WP7 ever becoming anything consumers actually want, was that the Chinese electronics industry would undercut them on price-performance. I predicted this would happen, it is happening, and Nokia’s disastrous July earnings call is the result.

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Stick a fork in Nokia, they’re done. Specifically, their recovery strategy is busted. I’m now projecting that the tattered remnants of this once-proud company will be on the acquisition block within 18 months.

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Surprise: A new study says that worldwide, Android has 30% of the tablet market (with more detailed figures here). It appears that Android tablets have been doing far better than I knew in price-sensitive overseas markets.

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I’ve taken a lot of flak for noting that Android seems to be executing a classic technology disruption on iOS, especially in view of Apple’s record quarter. But this is pretty strong evidence that even where Android has looked weakest in the past it is fast undercutting Apple’s “premium” positioning.

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I’m not surprised this is happening, but I’m surprised it’s happening this fast. Android tablets have on the whole been disappointing to me so far, most of them timidly-designed me-too products that are way too overpriced to compete effectively against Apple’s brand strength.

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But…if they can cop 30% global market share with the indifferent products they have now, they should rapidly be able to double that when the vendor tier gets its act together. Apple, watch out! Because there isn’t going to be much warning before the critical price-performance threshold gets passed. There never is; it tends to come as a shock to both disruptee and disruptor.

diff --git a/20110725195431.blog b/20110725195431.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cc72955 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110725195431.blog @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +A modest proposal for Google+ handles. +

Normally I post essay-length stuff here, but I’ve weighed in on a G+ policy dispute and thought this post should be there. Comments there too please.

diff --git a/20110726131423.blog b/20110726131423.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8b436d1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110726131423.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +Issue analysis of the G+ realnames policy +

Here’s hoping I’ve figured out how to extract a public permalink this time.

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The issue analysis.

diff --git a/20110727180007.blog b/20110727180007.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bfd9c92 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110727180007.blog @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +What I did on my 2011 summer vacation (part one) +

It’s always one of the high points of my year when I get to go to Michigan and play with the sword geeks. This year my wife and I went out for Summer Weapons Retreat 3, run by our friends at the Polaris Fellowship of Weapons Study, with an unstructured several days afterwards for extra hang time. Some of you may have seen my Google+ microbursts about this trip, but I only posted them to circles distribution; here’s the rest of the story, or as much of it as I think is interesting anyway.

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It’s a long haul to southeastern Michigan from Malvern PA, ten hours as the maniac drives. My wife and customarily I do it in five-hour halves with a layover in Pittsburgh, where we overnight with friend and occasional A&D commenter Garrett. I spent much of my passenger time learning the Google+ interface; it had launched about a week before we left, and I’d gotten an invite on about day 2 or 3, but for the first week or so the registration servers were so overloaded that I couldn’t actually connect. But the Android app is pretty well designed, and I had a car-charger for the smartphone; exploration ensued.

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The view from the PA and Ohio turnpikes is bucolic and green and unvarying; I had time to reflect on the way technological change sneaks up on us. It’s not many years ago that the device I held in my hand would have been considered the stuff of a Star Trek episode, but nowadays I grumble when I have to suffer a few minutes of lost data service in the heart of the Alleghenies. Our first year doing the run by car we lost data connectivity barely thirty miles west of our house and didn’t regain it until four hours later in the the Pittsburgh ‘burbs, and then for nearly an hour in the flatlands of northwestern Ohio; next year the Ohio dead zone was gone and the central PA one shrunk by half. Indeed the buildout continueth.

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There’s a little restaurant in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh called the Rose Tea Cafe that’s more than worth a visit if you’re in the neighborhood – Taiwanese cuisine by five sisters who I think must be goddesses descended to earth from the court of the Jade Emperor because nothing else could explain their cooking. That and the thunderstorm we punched through on I-80 were the most excitement of the trip out, though in retrospect a week later the latter was to seem like small change (cue foreboding music).

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The reunion with our friends at Haven, the sprawling rural compound where summer sword camps have been run since 2005, was delightful. I introduced many of these characters in my series of posts about Sword Camp 2008; three years later the original Aegis school has fissioned into Aegis and Polaris but many of the same people are doing very similar things. It was especially good to see Heather and Doug the Death Turtle again; later in the week Lynda Gronlund would reappear. With Rose Massey, who is Heather’s right arm in running Polaris, these ladies make as beautiful and deadly a trio as you could imagine outside a martial-arts anime, or even in one. And Doug, who while always a capable instructor was something of the class clown and perpetual omega/kid-brother at early camps, is unequivocally a man now. It suits him well.

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Cathy and I spent the day before the retreat opened chopping vegetables, shifting logs, and generally helping with camp prep. It is useful in circumstances like these that I like to cook and actually rather like even the more mechanical sorts of kitchen work; there’s the smell and taste of food to enjoy, and the mundane magic of turning ingredients into wholes more than the sum of their parts. I find it all relaxing and meditative, though not in a zero-point way – you get the most out of it not by shutting out sensory input but by dialing your attention way up, so that every small stimulus becomes a story in itself.

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First day morning: glaive work. A glaive is a bladed polearm; our simulation weapons are fashioned to work like the kind called a glaive-guisarme, with a hook on the reverse side for snagging enemy shields and the like. It handles a lot like the Japanese naginata. I am very rusty at the technique – I got off to a good running start last year but haven’t had one to practice with at home. Glaive practice consists of pell work (slashing and thrusting at an upright 7 feet of 4×4 wrapped in layers of carpet) and light sparring.

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Doug and I make my learning plan for the week. Doug is my official mentor, a role that didn’t exist in the old Aegis structure. We’ve been close ever since an afternoon at the first Aegis camp in 2005 when we were teamed in a tactical exercise and synchronized so well that Doug delightedly told the other instructors “Eric can fight beside me anytime!”, which was a pretty encouraging thing for me to hear as a raw novice in the style from one of its instructor-experts. We’ve had a lot of good fights since, both teamed and against each other.

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I’ve come this year without much of a specific plan beyond working on the quals for my next belt level and, as usual, learning two-hand greatsword – a goal which, through scarcity of qualified instructors and time on the event schedule, has been evading me for years. But Doug dangles a shiny thing in front of me. Seems he’s been working up a new core weapons style, a form for hand-and-a-half sword based on German longsword. And, as it happens, I’ve been reading translations of Talhofer and stuff by the German-style reconstructionists at ARMA for years, wondering when if ever I’d get a chance to learn the style.

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It doesn’t take me long to do the minimax calculation. I can see that the style has a lot of the same body dynamics as Japanese katana fencing, which I’m already pretty familar with – not expert, but I have muscle memory for all the basic strikes and guards. This will mean I get a really fast takeoff in it. Thus: I can spend four days on hand-and-a-half with high confidence of being able to fight effectively in the style at the other end, using a sword I already have. Or, I can swing at greatsword, slightly improve my very minimal competence, then not be able to practice for a year because I have no greatsword.

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With a sigh, I put off learning greatsword for another year. I will concentrate on hand-and-a-half, and cut the amount of time I’d been planning to spend on glaive. This will prove to have been an excellent decision; by the end of the retreat I will not only be certified as sparring safely (e.g., without overpowering), but will be using the form naturally and comfortably. I am not yet fully proficient by the school’s exacting standards for a core style, but it is perfectly clear to Doug and myself that I will become so in relatively little additional time. It is unlikely I would have improved nearly as much with greatsword.

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Cathy, too, elects to put significant time into hand-and-a-half. She won’t get as good at it as I become, but this is largely because she’s spending a lot of her effort on improving her two-sword technique, which she’s already much better than me at. Having a two-sword fighter come at you is a lot like being attacked by an enraged threshing machine or a pair of pissed-off helicopters; it’s very impressive, but requires a level of ambidexterity and whole-body coordination that’s more difficult for me.

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The evening’s fighting includes grand melee, which I suck at, and bear pit, which I’m quite good at. The difference is that in grand melee you have to run around like a gazelle on the Great Lawn attacking and being attacked from all sides, while bear-pit is dueling in a confined space. Having the mobility issues that I do because of cerebral palsy, grand melee is about the worst possible combat environment for me; on the other hand, close-quarters dueling suits my physical and psychological capabilities very well and I’ve always fought somewhat above my nominal training level there.

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Afterwards, mead and tales from Norse mythology around the campfire; I tell the tale of Ginnangu-Gap and the creation of the world. The historical theme for this year’s SWR is Vikings, and I fall very naturally into the role of the ‘scop’ or bard. This theme will, as it turns out, work very well for everyone; Heather has used Dr. William Short’s Viking Weapons And Combat Techniques as a main source, a book I recommended to her after reviewing it, and the techniques Short has reconstructed are so similar to our school style that a trained period fighter might have trouble telling the difference.

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Day two: I launch seriously into learning hand-and-a-half. The basic form drill resembles a Japanese two-hand-sword kata because, given the mechanics of the human body and the weapon, it pretty much has to. I feel as instantly at home with this as I expected to; both the physical and mental stances are familiar. The main difference is that the German form uses a sort of hanging guard that is not present in any Japanese style I know of, probably because it wouldn’t work very well with a curved single-edged sword.

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I will learn the following week that Heather had confidently predicted to the other instructors that I would grab onto Doug’s hand-and-a-half-hand style with, er, both hands. This was well before she had any idea I’d been reading Talhoffer et al., and simply because she knows my fighting style, and knows that I learn well from Doug, and knows that what interests him in technique is likely to interest me, too. She was right on every count. This woman heads a school for good reasons.

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The day’s tactical exercise is an obstacle course of gods and monsters. We run it in pairs. Each instructor is a monster with a special power; one can only be killed with a strike to the rear of the body (so you have to attack him coordinated from different directions); another’s first hit freezes the victim for a count of thirty; in the domain of the third it is death to speak, so you have to coordinate using body language and hand signals..and so forth. Each monster presents a different tactical challenge for the pair.

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My wife and I are teamed. The best moment of the exercise is undoubtedly when we’re facing Doug the Invincible Dwarf, who cannot be killed and must be successfully evaded by both of us. This is not easy when I’m slow on my feet and Doug – who is not – is constantly charging at us with manic glee, babbling threats in a demented leprechaun accent like some sort of Lucky Charms commercial gone horribly wrong.

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After a couple of failures and resurrections, we finally beat this one with use of terrain. Doug’s area, which we have to cross, includes a small building with a narrow plank path running along one edge; the other side of the path is dense undergrowth. All three of us are fighting sword-and-shield. Cathy and I manage to dodge to the end of the path before Doug can engage, then back down it while presenting shield-wall to him and being enough of a threat with two swords that he can’t just shock-charge us.

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I remember as we’re backing up flashing on something they teach military officers about a coordinated fighting retreat being the most difficult of all tactical maneuvers to successfully execute. It’s true, and I’m rather amazed we managed it. Afterwards the instructors are full of praise for this. Entertainingly, I judge that the single other person besides my wife with whom I’d have had the best odds of pulling that off is Doug the mad leprechaun himself.

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The evening tourney simulates a Viking raid; the objective for each team is to capture loot that the other team is defending. During the first run Heather gets mildly concussed when a glaive shot bounces her head off the ground; following this the instructors all withdraw from the exercise, leaving student-only teams, one of which I find myself in command of. That’ll happen when you’re (a) the seniormost student in your group of four, and (b) have significant command presence even when you’re not really trying. Everybody gives you this look…I remember saying “OK, we don’t have the numbers or the experience levels for a complicated plan, so we’ll have to run a simple one.”

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We do a slow advance in line to just outside engagement distance, chanting a war-cry as menacingly as we can, and shock-charge the enemy. The fighting is intense and exhausting; the weather is building up to the record heat-wave we’ll have the following week. My team comes out on the short end of the looting, but afterwards my teammates honor me by insisting that I take first pick, which is how I come to own my second cheesy plastic Viking helmet. I was going to pass on it until Heather pointed out that this one would actually fit on my head.

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Afterwards at the fire I tell the second part of the tale of the creation of the world; how Odin and Ve and Vili made the earth and heavens from the slain corpse of the giant Ymir. Not only have I fallen into the role of the teller of myths in my own mind, the other campers are coming to expect it.

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Day three: We start the day by getting acquainted with the Viking axe. This involves both sparring with simulation weapons and throwing steel replica axes at a stump a couple dozen feet away. I have a lot of fun with the latter; nobody is surprised at this, as I have something of a rep for being good with thrown weapons from previous years. Meanwhile, Cathy is falling in love with the short-handled fighting axe used, with a shield, rather like a tomahawk; she declares that she’s going to make herself one. I find the “Dane Axe” a bit more interesting – that’s a larger blade on a polearm-length haft, wielded two-hand in a manner not entirely dissimilar to an Asian long staff. Neither of these are core styles yet; the weapons are new to the school, included because of the Viking theme, and nobody has worked out a form for them. We’re all exploring, instructors as well as students.

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Later, drills on handling multiple opponents. I’m not good at this; my mobility issues are a serious problem when fleeter-footed opponents can get behind me. Afterwards, Heather suggests some drills I can try to do a better job of engaging and disengaging, not getting stuck in one fight long enough to get bushwhacked by the other enemies.

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More fun after lunch with test-cutting. We use actual steel blades on various targets to learn what actually powering through feels like and how much force is required. The sensation of cutting through three pounds of raw pork at speed with a live steel blade is indescribable. Also: I watch Heather slice through a lemon hung from a string (no trivial feat as the lemon will just bounce off your blade if you don’t hit it fast enough) and find myself thinking “She brings death, destruction, and a fresh lemony scent!”

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The day’s tactical exercise has us fighting the magic monsters from yesterday, only this time they’re in the woods at the back of the property and we’re broken up into two teams that are competing to capture a flag from them and get it back to the Great Lawn. Once again I find myself running one of the teams. I survey the terrain, take note of the fact that the woods are fenced off from the Great Lawn and accessible only through two gates, think about how much it’s gonna suck running through the woods in the 95-degree heat, and divvy my team in half to block the gates. Let the other team do the work, we’ll whack them and take the flag as they come out!

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Alas, this plan fails because the other team has glaives and can blow through Cathy and me at the upper gate using local superiority of numbers before our other half can run up from the lower gate to support. Well, that’s why they call it a learning experience. I am, however, praised by instructors for my sneakiness. Gaming the exercise rules like that isn’t really discouraged, because commanders are expected to be creative in achieving the objective rather than simply scoring kills.

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Three days of appalling heat are beginning to take a toll and everybody pretty much falls out after that exercise; the scheduled evening tourney doesn’t happen. At the fire, I tell the tale of how Thor and Loki were tricked by the illusions of the Jotun king Utgard-Hloki.

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Day four: Ragnarok! Well, that’s not the only event of the day – we get to lean some basic archery. Also there’s an interesting workshop on how two people can fight one effectively even if the two have only one sword between them…basically, you have to get pretty good at throwing and catching a sword. And I’m continuing to practice hand-and-a-half sword during personal goal time.

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But it’s all buildup to what everyone knows is coming – the last battle. At the briefing, we learn that all seven of the instructors and black belts will defend Asgard as the Norse gods. The lower-belt students – nine of us – will be the invading Jotuns.

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It doesn’t take long for the student team to shake down, as Lynda Gronlund – a former instructor who’d be a black belt if she hadn’t dropped out of participation for a couple years – is with us. She starts talking about tactics and unit assignments like a CO right away, I point out that she’s doing that, and as she’s doing a double-take the rest of the team elects her commander by acclamation. I explain to her that she has just become Hel the queen of the dead, and she grins and says she’s cool with that. It is almost equally obvious that I’m her most natural line sergeant in this group, which makes me Surtr, more or less. Lynda delegates to me the job of mythologically trash-talking the gods.

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The first battle of the exercise is at Haven’s gate, which is a big old-fashioned fortified gate with a bar that could stop a light truck. (Haven used to be owned by a Michigan Militia guy; the fence around it is serious and is backed by actual, no-fooling tank traps.) We don’t have to force the gate itself, but the gods of Asgard fill the gap pretty well, bristling with weapons.

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Our Jotun team forms shieldwall on the dirt road (watching for oncoming cars). I yell “To wrath, to ruin, and the world’s ending!”, and it is on. Damn, that was a fine fight for as long as it lasted; I love a good shock charge.

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Once we’d won that one, we had to search the grounds for the magic blade that could kill the otherwise invulnerable Baldur, and take out two guards that, like some of the monsters in the previous exercises, could only be killed from behind. Of course while we’re looking for this thing, all seven gods (including the annoyingly invulnerable Baldur) are attacking us constantly. I was very pleased to see that Lynda, who in spite of amazing skills has some self-confidence issues and has been known to freeze up when in command, did an excellent job of running formations under stress; I think this may have been a breakthrough experience for her.

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Once we found the magic blade and whacked Baldur with it, we had to find where Fenris was chained to a tree and take out her two guards. After this Fenris became our ally, making it eight on eight. And it was into the woods and up the hill for the last stand of the gods.

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That was the tough part for me. I don’t move well in the woods and I was badly overheating – and I had reason, as it was pushing 100 degrees and the exercise got delayed two hours into the evening so it wouldn’t kill us. As it was, I temporarily collapsed twice during the exercise and kept moving on sheer willpower. I was in at the end, though, and came damn close to making the battle’s last kill. Would have, too, if Heather hadn’t adroitly throat-punched me as I was landing a side-neck chop; her strike was just a bit faster than mine, but someone else gacked her with a weapon a half-second later.

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All in all, despite the brutal Fimbul-summer weather it was by common consent the best exercise they’ve run in the six years I’ve been coming to these. The variety of tactical challenges, and the fact that we had a bit of time to plan before each one, was greatly pleasing. Dunno how we’ll top it next year.

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Day five and the close of camp: Heather and I co-taught a class on Viking runes and runic symbolism. Students had had the option of kicking in a few extra bucks to get shields with a central metal boss and a Viking-style central hand-grip, and after the runes class we painted ours. Annoyingly, I had taken Heather’s well-meant advice and was thus only one of two people to opt for the larger and heavier 29-inch shield rather than the 26-inch version. Doug was the other, but he gets shield practice several times a week – unlike him, I found that the damn thing was too heavy and awkward for me to actually use in motion with my weaker arm. Going to be arm-curls for me over the next year, I guess.

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The rest of that day was personal goal time (more hand-and-a-half sword practice for me) and some nice relaxing bear-pit fighting. The fighting at the end of these camps is its own special thing; everybody’s exhausted, nobody’s expecting peak performance, so the competitive aspect is dialed way down; people use it as a time to experiment and have fun. After closing ceremonies everybody hauled off to see the last Harry Potter movie together, and I can’t even imagine a better group of friends to have done that with.

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Cathy and I stayed out in Michigan for four days longer as the record heat-wave came down, feeling deeply grateful the retreat hadn’t been scheduled a week later as pretty much all the outdoor activities would have been slagged down by the heat. We got some personal hang-time with the Doug and the Heather, who are just as much fun when they’re not wearing their instructor hats and just being among the most valued friends we have. We built a pair of glaives, so we’ll be able to practice with each other and should be fighting much more effectively in that form next year.

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I’ll pass lightly over the rest of our escapades as they wouldn’t make very interesting reading unless you’re personally acquainted with our friends out there. A couple of nights of boardgaming (Smallworld Underground, Evo, Alien Frontiers, Dominion), lazy mornings eating breakfast at the Pinckney diner and reading books, and watching the insect bites and bruises on our bodies slowly fade. It was a good time.

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The only incident of real note was that we got caught in a truly nasty storm eastbound on I-80 coming back. We’d thought the one we drove through on the way out was bad, but this was a man-killer. We hit the edge on the outskirts of Toledo driving east – monstrous jagged forks miles high on either side of the road and ahead of us. Visibility dropped to near zero and it got too dangerous to drive. We took cover in a rest stop, but minutes after we arrived the storm took out the power. It was emergency lights only, with the shops all shut down. High winds, driving rain, and the radio told us there were flash flood warnings in three neighboring counties.

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As I posted to G+ at the time, “I feel like I’ve walked into someone’s disaster movie. If you’re anywhere near this crap, stay the hell indoors. It looks uncommonly dangerous out there.” I wasn’t joking or dramatizing, but we did survive it and got home.

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This was Part One because we’re going to the World Boardgaming Championships next week. I may report from there.

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UPDATE: I ended up doing a bunch of short-form posts from WBC on G+, so there won’t be a long-form Part Two.

diff --git a/20110728155520.blog b/20110728155520.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5fb9f58 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110728155520.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Those who can’t build, talk +

One of the side-effects of using Google+ is that I’m getting exposed to a kind of writing I usually avoid – ponderous divagations on how the Internet should be and the meaning of it all written by people who’ve never gotten their hands dirty actually making it work. No, I’m not talking about users – I don’t mind listening to those. I’m talking about punditry about the Internet, especially the kind full of grand prescriptive visions. The more I see of this, the more it irritates the crap out of me. But I’m not in the habit of writing in public about merely personal complaints; there’s a broader cultural problem here that needs to be aired.

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The following rant will not name names. But if you are offended by it, you are probably meant to be.

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I have been using the Internet since 1976. I got involved in its engineering in 1983. Over the years, I’ve influenced the design of the Domain Name System, written a widely-used SMTP transport, helped out with RFCs, and done time on IETF mailing lists. I’ve never been a major name in Internet engineering the way I have been post-1997 in the open-source movement, but I was a respectable minor contributor to the former long before I became famous in the latter. I know the people and the culture that gets the work done; they’re my peers and I am theirs. Which is why I’m going to switch from “them” to “us” and “we” now, and talk about something that really cranks us off.

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We’re not thrilled by people who rave endlessly about the wonder of the net. We’re not impressed by brow-furrowing think-pieces about how it ought to written by people who aren’t doing the design and coding to make stuff work. We’d be far happier if pretty much everybody who has ever been described as ‘digerati’ were dropped in a deep hole where they can blabber at each other without inflicting their pompous vacuities on us or the rest of the world.

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In our experience, generally the only non-engineers whose net-related speculations are worth listening to are science-fiction writers, and by no means all of those; anybody to whom the label “cyberpunk” has been attached usually deserves to be dropped in that deep hole along with the so-called digerati. We do respect the likes of John Brunner, Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson, and Charles Stross, and we’re occasionally inspired by them – but this just emphasizes what an uninspiring lot the non-fiction “serious thinkers” attaching themselves to the Internet usually are.

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There are specific recurring kinds of errors in speculative writing about the Internet that we get exceedingly tired of seeing over and over again. One is blindness to problems of scale; another is handwaving about deployment costs; and a third is inability to notice when a proposed cooperative ‘solution’ is ruined by misalignment of incentives. There are others, but these will stand as representative for why we very seldom find any value in the writings of people who talk but don’t build.

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We seldom complain about this in public because, really, how would it help? The world seems to be oversupplied with publishers willing to drop money on journalists, communications majors, lawyers, marketers manqué, and other glib riff-raff who have persuaded themselves that they have deep insights about the net. Beneath their verbal razzle-dazzle and coining of pointless neologisms it’s extremely uncommon for such people to think up anything true that hasn’t been old hat to us for decades, but we can’t see how to do anything to dampen the demand for their vaporous musings. So we just sigh and go back to work.

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Yes, we have our own shining visions of the Internet future, and if you ask us we might well tell you about them. It’s even fair to say we have a broadly shared vision of that future; design principles like end-to-end, an allergy to systems with single-point failure modes, and a tradition of open source imply that much. But, with a limited exception during crisis periods imposed by external politics, we don’t normally make a lot of public noise about that vision. Because talk is cheap, and we believe we teach the vision best by making it live in what we design and deploy.

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Here are some of the principles we live by: An ounce of technical specification beats a pound of manifesto. The superior man underpromises and overperforms. Mechanism outlasts policy. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a pilot deployment is worth a million. The future belongs to those who show up to build it. Shut up and show us the code.

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If you can live by these principles too, roll up your sleeves and join us; there’s plenty of work to be done. Otherwise, do everybody a favor and stop with the writing and the speeches. You aren’t special, you aren’t precious, and you aren’t helping.

diff --git a/20110805135347.blog b/20110805135347.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4355867 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110805135347.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Android development pulls hot chicks. Who knew? +

There I was, within earshot of the smoker’s bench outside the front entrance of the hotel hosting the World Boardgaming Championships, when I overheard the word “Android” from the three college students sitting on and around it, who I mentally tagged the Guy, the Gamer-Girl, and the Hottie. I moved a bit closer, to polite conversational distance for a stranger, and when they noticed me asked if they were talking about smartphones.

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One of them (I think Gamer-Girl) said “Yes” and within about ten seconds I learned that they all had Androids and were huge fans, and had been discussing apps and fun things to do with the device. I smiled and told them I’d written some of the code in their phones.

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The Hottie, a slender but pleasantly curved redhead in a tight black dress and fishnets, sat up a bit straighter and asked me what parts I’d written. I settled as usual for explaining that I wrote significant pieces of the code Android uses to throw image bits on its display. The hottie did a silent “Oooh!” and gave me dilated pupils and a flash of rather nice cleavage.

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So yes, geeky guys, Android development can pull hot chicks. Well, it was either that or my rugged masculine charm; you get to choose your theory.

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I had to run off to lunch, but I did learn one other interesting thing during this interlude. When I said that I was pleased that Android is attracting such loyalty from people who aren’t techies, they assured me that all their friends either have Androids or are planning to get them.

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This being WBC, my sample was probably a bit above average in IQ and likely to lean towards early adoption. Still, it makes me suspect the iPhone is losing its grip on one of its core markets.

diff --git a/20110807170244.blog b/20110807170244.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9d5731a --- /dev/null +++ b/20110807170244.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: 48% and rising +

There’s been a lot of talk in the trade press over the last month by people who believe – or want to believe, or want us to think they believe – that Android’s momentum is slowing, and in particular that the multicarrier release of the Apple iPhone was a game-changer that will eventually pull Apple back into the dominant position in smartphones. Most of these talkers have been obvious Apple fanboys; a few have been contrarians, or tired of reporting the same old Android-wins-again stories, or merely linkbaiting.

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The last week has not been kind to these people. First, Canalys reported that in a survey of usage in 56 countries, Android has reached 48% market share worldwide. Then the comScore figures on US installed base up to June 2011 came out, and report only 40% share here.

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I think comparing these sources is instructive, particularly with the longer-term trends as context. It’s also worth noting a couple of other recent developments that cast doubt on the Apple-comeback scenario.

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The 40% to 48% discrepancy is easily explained. With Nokia and RIM in collapse and Microsoft failing to gain traction, the smartphone market is increasingly just a two-horse race – Android va. Apple. Android does better against Apple in price-sensitive markets; U.S. consumers are the least price-sensitive in the world and so Apple competes better here.

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More interesting, perhaps, is what is not happening in the latest figures. Tragically for the contrarians, it is Apple’s U.S market-share growth rather than Android’s that has stalled. Android share growth continues to bucket along at about 2% a month, while Apple’s shows no increase in the latest figures.

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The future is another country, of course, but right now it looks like those of us who thought that multicarrier iPhone was going to be largely unable to fix Apple’s long-term positioning problem were correct. The iPhone’s market isn’t exactly saturated in the normal sense, but sales volumes are only growing as fast as the smartphone userbase as a whole; the multicarrier ‘breakout’ only netted Apple about a 1% competitive gain, and that gain now appears to be over.

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Apple is now relying on smartphones for 68% of revenue, so they’d be very vulnerable to an actual drop in marketshare. I’ve taken a lot of flak for saying the company looks like a late-stage sustainer with a principal product line about to experience disruptive collapse, but this is yet another straw in the wind. If next month’s figures show an actual share drop, expect it to be self-reinforcing and get the hell out of Apple stock.

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Meanwhile, the whole smartphone market may be undergoing some sort of subtle shift. Microsoft didn’t hemhorrage any share this month, which compared to their performance since the WP7 release is a major victory for them – they even gained a few users. I have no theory about what this means.

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HP’s WebOS has fallen so far (below 2.2%) that comScore has stopped reporting it, probably because it’s now below their normal statistical noise level. Now they’re tracking Symbian instead.

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In other news, Google is buying patents from IBM, doubtless with the intention of turning the confrontations with Sun and Apple into Mexican standoffs. My evaluation continues to be that the smartphone patent wars will be like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury but in the end signifying nothing.

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Finally, there’s really superb article on Android vs. iOS. Anybody still laboring under the delusion that iOS’s toolset for app development is unequivocally better than Android’s should read this.

diff --git a/20110808160825.blog b/20110808160825.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7399bd7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110808160825.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +What ‘privilege’ means to me +

Recently there’s been some back and forth on feminist blogs about the term “privilege”, beginning with “Shut Up, Rich Boy”: The Problem With “Privilege.” and continuing with several responses defending the use of the term.

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Here’s what the feminist term of art “privilege” means to me.

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1. I, as a straight white male, am being what feminists called “othered” – that is, consigned to a category of the threateningly alien that justifies misbehavior ranging from verbal assault all the way up to actual violence and organized political coercion.

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2. The speaker is uninterested in (or outright incapable of) seeing beyond race/gender/ascriptive-identity labels to the individual reality of individuals in the “privileged” category.

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3. The speaker is stuck in an epistemically-closed belief system, and will interpret logical or fact-based criticism of it as a power-seeking maneuver. Reasoned argument with this person is thus essentially impossible.

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4. The speaker has failed to apply power-relations analysis to her (or his) own behavior, and so does not realize that use of the term “privilege” passes all that theory’s tests for a power-seeking maneuver intended to suppress thought under the pretense of provoking it.

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5. If the speaker has not already attempted to kafkatrap me, such an attempt is near certain within the next few minutes.

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That is all.

diff --git a/20110812033214.blog b/20110812033214.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..815ebf4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110812033214.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +The importance of being “ESR” – a sidelight on the G+ nym wars +

This is not actually going to be a post about the G+ nym wars. Rather, it’s about something curious that I discovered while thinking about them.

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I would like G+ to support persistent pseudonyms, so G+ users could say “+ESR” and have it point to my G+ profile. But here’s what’s interesting; I don’t actually want that capability because I want people to address me as “ESR” rather than my real name. I will cheerfully answer to either.

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The reason I want a persistent alias as +ESR is more subtle. I want other people to be able to convey information about how they want to engage me by which label they choose. One might think of this as “aspect naming”, and it’s a slightly different phenomenon from pseudonymy or nicknaming, in a way I will explore in this essay.

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I didn’t actually choose to be known as “ESR”. I do habitually use “esr” as a login name, but “ESR” is different; I got tagged that way by other people because hackers have a tradition of triletterizing people they consider tribal elders or chieftains. The best known other example is of course RMS = Richard M. Stallman, and I’m pretty sure I got triletterized on that model.

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For completeness, I’ll note this is one of two conventions we use for marking tribal elders; the other is reference by plain first name, e.g. Linus = Linus Torvalds, Ken = Ken Thompson, Guido = Guido van Rossum. A sociolinguist might have an interesting time figuring out what the implicit rules are, and why some people who indisputably are tribal elders never get shortnamed.

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Anyway, I accepted being use-named ESR after 1997 because I understood what it meant. Use of that handle was functional for the people who tagged me with it; it was and is part of a sort of social identity game in which, by addressing me that way, they perform a subtle affirmation of their own status as hackers and define the kind of interaction they are having with me.

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I have friends who address me in different contexts as “Eric” or “ESR”, and it is quite predictable which context will elicit which behavior. A personal friend might write in a post visible to me “I was talking with ESR last week…” but would almost certainly say “Hey Eric, want some of this pizza?” in direct address. If I heard “Hey, ESR, want some of this pizza?” it would be from a random hacker who doesn’t know me very well and thus prefers to address me by tribal title of respect rather than personal name.

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Conversely, I don’t expect (say) Tim O’Reilly to address or refer to me as ESR. He’s a friend and ally of the hacker culture (we’ve seldom had a better one!) but he doesn’t live inside it day-to-day and doesn’t use its forms of respect. He makes a particularly interesting contrasting case exactly because he’s so close to us.

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So, where I’m going with this…it actually matters not to me in any status sense whether people address me by “ESR” or my personal name on G+ (or elsewhere). What does matter to me is that people have the option to do either, so they can use the option expressively and as a way of telling me (and themselves!) what social game we are in.

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This isn’t exactly nicknaming in the normal sense, because nicknames usually convey informality rather than being loaded as signifiers of respect. Nor is it the kind of pseudonym that effectively takes over as the person’s working name, as for (say) “skud” = Kirrily Roberts. It’s more like the old-fashioned idea of a nom de guerre, except that there’s no element of concealment.

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I’m calling this “aspect naming” by analogy to aspect programming. I’d like G+ to support it.

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I also invite commenters to develop, if they can, a more complete theory of aspect naming among hackers. Why isn’t Larry Wall just “Larry”? He’s certainly prominent enough. Is there a discoverable rule explaining why Linus Torvalds is “Linus”, rather than “LBT”? I have some guesses, and I’m curious to see what others will come up with without hearing those.

diff --git a/20110815091301.blog b/20110815091301.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4674918 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110815091301.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Google Buys Motorola +

This morning came the news that Google has agreed to buy Motorola Mobile for $12 billion. I was half-asleep when A&D regular Jay Maynard phoned me with a heads-up, but not surprised for a second; as I told him, I’ve been expecting this for weeks.

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We’ll see a lot of silly talk about Google getting direct into the handset business while the dust settles, but make no mistake: this purchase is all about Motorola’s patent portfolio. This is Google telling Apple and Microsoft and Oracle “You want to play silly-buggers with junk patents? Bring it on; we’ll countersue you into oblivion.”

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Yes, $12 billion is a lot to pay for that privilege. But, unlike the $4.5 billion an Apple/Microsoft-led consortium payed for the Nortel patents not too long ago, that $12 billion buys a lot of other tangible assets that Google can sell off. It wouldn’t surprise me if Google’s expenditure on the deal actually nets out to less – and Motorola’s patents will be much heavier artillery than Nortel’s. Motorola, after all, was making smartphone precursors like the StarTac well before the Danger hiptop or the iPhone; it will have blocking patents.

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I don’t think Google is going to get into the handset business in any serious way. It’s not a kind of business they know how to run, and why piss off all their partners in the Android army? Much more likely is that the hardware end of the company will be flogged to the Chinese or Germans and Google will absorb the software engineers. Likely Google’s partners have already been briefed in on this plan, which is why Google is publishing happy-face quotes about the deal from the CEOs of HTC, LG, and Sony Ericsson.

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The biggest loser, of course, is Apple; it’s going to have to settle for an armed truce in the IP wars now. This is also a bad hit for Microsoft, which is going to have to fold up the extortion racket that’s been collecting more fees on HTC Android phones than the company makes on WP7. This deal actually drops a nuke on the whole tangle of smartphone-patent lawsuits; expect to see a lot of them softly and silently vanish away before the acquisition even closes.

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And, of course, now that Google has shown it’s willing to fly cover for Android handset and tablet makers, likely there’ll be more of them signing on. This move will accelerate Android hardware down the price curve.

diff --git a/20110817060459.blog b/20110817060459.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9fcac2b --- /dev/null +++ b/20110817060459.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +A flash at the heart of the West +

I have just seen something lovely and hope-inducing.

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It’s a video of a performance of Ravel’s Bolero by the Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra – manifesting as a flash mob at a train station. Go see it now; I’ll wait.

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What is truly wonderful about this is not the music itself. Oh, the Bolero is pleasant enough, and this performance is competent. What was marvelous was to see classical music crack its way out of the dessicated, ritual-bound environment of the concert hall and reclaim a place in ordinary life. Musicians in jeans and sweaters and running shoes (and one kettledrummer with a silly fishing hat), smiling at children while they played. No boundary from the audience – there were train sounds and crowd noise in the background and that was good, dammit!

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And the audience – respectful, but not because the setting told them they were supposed to be. Delight spreading outwards in waves as the onlookers gradually comprehended the hack in progress. Parents pointing things out to their kids. Hassled businesspeople pausing, coffees in hand, to relax into something that wasn’t on the schedule. It was alive in a way that no performance from a lofty stage could ever be.

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But there was an even more beautiful level of meaning than that.

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These musicians took heritage art, pried it out of its stuffy conventional box, and made it shine again. And the audience understood what they were doing. The 2500-year conversation we call Western civilization is made of moments like this, when we connect with the best of our past and re-purpose it for the present and the future. And that conversation is not over; our capacity for keeping that best, casting off the junk and accretions around it, and using it in fresh ways it is still with us.

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Ravel could not even have imagined the cellphones the musicians used for coordination; our capacity to transvaluate old forms – and our willingness to do so – is unparalleled in human history. What I saw in that video is that embracing this process of perpetual reinvention is what being “Western” means. We have developed more than any previous or competing civilization the knack of using our past without being limited by it.

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I looked at those musicians and that audience, and what I didn’t see was decadence or exhaustion or self-hating multiculturalism. I felt like pumping my fist in the air and yelling “This is my civilization!” It lives, and it’s beautiful, and it’s worth defending.

diff --git a/20110818184752.blog b/20110818184752.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b0b53ef --- /dev/null +++ b/20110818184752.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: WebOS, we hardly knew ye +

The business press is abuzz today with the news that HP is pulling the plug on its WebOS smartphone and tablet lines. This won’t be any huge surprise to people who’ve been following the discussions on Armed & Dangerous; WebOS has looked terminal to us for a long time.

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Still…WebOS didn’t suck, technically speaking. It was certainly better constructed than the turd-with-frosting that is WP7. It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the circumstances of its demise, and what its difficult history tells us about the future.

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The cool thing about WebOS was that its architecture was beautiful. If the scuttlebutt from my friends who grokked it is true, it was the actual realization of Marc Andreesen’s dream of the browser becoming the entire OS. Apps were written in the browser using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.

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WebOS’s problem was that the coolness stopped there. The source was closed, with all the usual bad effects including higher defect rates and lower developer interest. The actual implementation was prone to user-visible bugs. HP lacked the aggression and marketing skill to actually sell the devices to the public – actually, and even more damningly, they never seemed to figure out what the products were for.

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Apple’s smartphones have a narrative hook: “We’re the experience designers for the cool kids.” Android’s smartphones have a narrative hook: “You are in control and the source is open.” RIMs have a narrative hook: “Serious devices for serious business.” Microsoft has one too, even if it’s just “We’re Microsoft. Resistance is futile.” WebOS never found its hook.

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RIM is next to the wall, probably. WP7 should already have been terminated for extreme failure (Samsung’s own-brand Bada OS is actually outselling it), but it isn’t a normal product bet – it’s Microsoft’s forlorn and only hope of staying relevant in the smartphone-centric future of computing. Thus, it will probably continue bleeding cash until it takes Microsoft down with it.

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Apple’s vulnerability shouldn’t be underestimated. Yes, they’re making money hand over fist and there has been adulatory press lately about record market cap and large cash reserves than the U.S. Federal government…but Android tablet market share has climbed from zip six months ago to 20% today, and if I were Apple’s planners I’d be worried about the fact that their smartphone sales aren’t growing any faster than total market volume.

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Some sort of larger shakeout seems to be going on. WebOS kicked the bucket at about the same time that Apple’s recent (and admittedly small) market-share gains petered out and Microsoft actually recorded a tiny gain in its userbase. Only Android’s growth rate seems unaffected.

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Gartner Research, which is generally very conservative and kind to market incumbents, has said it thinks consumers “in mature markets” (whatever that means) have essentially stopped buying dumbphones in favor of low-end Android handsets. Could it be that we’re also passing out of the era that smartphone platforms can grow without directly taking on each other?

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I’ve written before that I wasn’t expecting that transition until mid-3Q2011…but on the unusual occasions that I’ve gone wrong in forecasting this market it has generally been by getting the direction of change right but underestimating the pace. It might be that Android, Apple, Microsoft, and RIM are now entering scorpions-in-a-bottle time.

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If so, the likely outcome is the same as we’ve seen in other technology markets with strong network externalities. There can be only one…major incumbent. A whale, with a minnow or two in its shadow. Maybe Android should invert the Twitter fail whale into a success cetacean?

diff --git a/20110819184646.blog b/20110819184646.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7879663 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110819184646.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +GPSD 3.0 finally ships. It’s been a long epic. +

Protocol transitions are hard.

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Yeah, I know the experienced software developers reading that are thinking “Well, duh!“. Shut up already, I’m venting here. I’ve just spent the better part of two years – actually, if you include design time and false starts it could be closer to five years – designing a new application protocol for my gpsd service daemon, implementing it, getting it deployed, dealing with problems and course-correcting.

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For those of you in the cheap seats, an “application protocol” is a kind of language that a program uses to communicate with other programs. Normally humans never see these, but there’s one big example that non-geeks have often seen bits of. HTML, the Web’s markup language, is an application protocol. Designing these is not easy. There are difficult issues and tradeoffs around flexibility, economy, expressiveness, and extensibility for uses we haven’t imagined yet.

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When you have a whole bunch of programs written by different people communicating with a particular application protocol, changing that entire ecology to use a different one is not easy. A good analogy in the physical world is the difficulty of changing an entire country’s railroad gauge. The long-term benefits may be huge, but the short-term cost in capital and service disruption is daunting.

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Sometimes it has to be done, though. The old GPSD protocol wasn’t extensible enough, and it had some bad design decisions baked into it. Hackers can read a more detailed discussion of the technical issues in my white paper GPSD-NG: A Case Study in Application Protocol Evolution.

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It took me three years of thinking and experimenting to get to the point where I had a new protocol design I was happy with. Took me nearly two years after that to implement it, debug it, get it deployed, figure out where I’d made some minor design errors, and fix those. Did I mention that this sort of thing is not easy? Five years may seem like a long time, but all too many attempts at major protocol transitions fail in messy and expensive ways.

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Mine didn’t because I did a simple thing. I wrote libraries to handle the client side of the protocol handling, and I told all of GPSD’s client developers “Use these! Because if you write or keep your own protocol parser, it’s going to break.” Then I changed the libraries so they could handle either old or new protocol. The theory was that once my client developers linked in a library version that swung both ways, they wouldn’t have to care when the actual protocol transition happened.

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That was the theory, anyway. It didn’t work perfectly, because I didn’t get the library interface design quite right the first time. Or the second. I got the interface right on about the third try, and the structure format right on the fifth. I had a few client developers yell at me, not without justification, about library transition issues. About which I can only say “Sorry. My fault.” The thing is, it could have gone much, much worse – and it usually does. Comparatively speaking I’m actually really good at this – most end-users never saw a service disruption.

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What all this effort bought us, functionally, is that handling new navigation sensors in GPSD and its clients is now pretty easy. The immediate gain is support for the Marine AIS system – and if you’re wondering about the real-world impact of that, GPSD had a role in the remediation of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. We’ll probably do aircraft transponders next. Gradually GPSD is becoming the handler for every kind of sensor that tells a computer where it is and where all the GPS-equipped ships and planes around it are. In the not very distant future GPSD is likely to handle communications from GPS-equipped automobiles, too.

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With 3.0, we reach the point where I expect GPSD’s protocol and the library interface to be long-term stable. There are still a few client applications that haven’t caught up – notably Firefox, which last I heard was still using a roll-your-own parser rather than my C client library. But there’s only so much I can do, really; on the whole, the transition has gone as well as could have been expected.

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Most of the people who rely on GPSD will never know it’s there. It’s not a user-facing application that people actually see, it’s plumbing that the programs they do see relies on. Like physical plumbing, it’s unglamorous and out of sight and essential. I’m OK with that. There’s a quiet kind of satisfaction – not really new to me, since some of my other code is even more ubiquitous – to knowing that the world rests on your software, even if most people will never understand how.

diff --git a/20110821091013.blog b/20110821091013.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0ce9071 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110821091013.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +How Google+ just changed my life +

It is with some bemusement that I report that Google+ – not yet out of beta – has already changed my life. Bear with me because I’m going to talk about diet for a bit, but where I’m actually going is to a discussion of how our means of acquiring information is changing.

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So, I saw Sugar: The Bitter Truth scroll up on G+, watched it, and…ay yi yi. Fructose, a hepatotoxic poison?

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OK, I did some followup research, I’m aware that there’s a countercase and that Dr. Lustig can be accused of oversimplifying some things and there’s dispute about others. But I know a fair bit about biochemistry, physiology, and related fields, enough to make his indictment of fructose as a chronic hepatotoxin far more convincing and frightening than if I were ignorant and all those enzyme-pathway charts meant nothing to me.

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So, I’m cutting way down on the sugar and especially the fructose in my diet. This isn’t the wrench it would be for many Americans, because the fact is I dislike sugar in large amounts – couldn’t stand white cake frosting even as a kid, haven’t drunk mass-market colas or almost any other common soda drinks in significant quantities since the 1970s. And I loathe high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). That crap tastes like burnt plastic to me, and I go to some lengths to avoid any food or drink that has it in the ingredients list.

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There are a few sweetened drinks I do like – apple and cranberry juices, dry ginger ale, Nantucket Nectars and Snapple lemonade, and a couple of cane-sugar-sweetened boutique sodas (GUS and Reed’s ginger beer). Sadly, now I learn that the fructose content of all those nice healthy juices, and the fructose component of the sucrose dimer in the other drinks, could be kicking the crap out of my liver and shoving me towards “metabolic syndrome” – obesity, type II diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.

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This has extra point for me because a friend of mine died of non-alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver earlier this year. Classic presentation, comorbid with obesity, hypertension, and heart disease. This is becoming a disturbingly common pattern – and there came a point at which Lustig was explaining about fructose producing lipid-droplet deposition in the liver, and I realized what had almost certainly killed my gaming buddy. The fructose did it…

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One of Lustig’s critics (sorry, I’ve lost the link) says meta-analysis of different studies suggests that a normal adult can avoid hepatotoxic effects from fructose by holding dosage below 50g a day. And that’s what I’m doing…no more apple cider with meals, halving my nightly dose of Godiva cocoa, being careful about how many lemonades I drink after an MMA class.

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But I didn’t actually post to bore you with details about my diet. OK, I do think Lustig’s warning deserves a lot of attention, and if I’ve interested you in watching his talk I think I’ve done a good deed. But what’s perhaps more interesting than the message is the medium.

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Lustig’s talk is a YouTube video that has gone viral. It came to my attention because someone that I encircled on G+ – that is, someone I thought likely to have interesting things to say – shared it into my stream.

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Both these facts about it are interesting. First, Lustig was able to bypass a lot of gatekeepers and get a damn serious medical-epidemiological message out to the world despite the fact that it flutters a lot of dovecotes. (The food industry, the USDA, the medical establisment, and allied interest groups are enormously invested in fat-is-the-villain theory, for reasons Lustig does a good job of explaining.) Second, I got it because I can now crowdsource the job of finding interesting news to people who I’ve selected for having interests in common with me.

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We’re all used to viral videos by now, but G+ implements a novel kind of filter on those and other sorts of news. It’s more selective than reputation-based systems like Slashdot or Reddit; instead of choosing a karma threshold I’m choosing my filtering population. So far, the resulting quality is quite high. At least, after I screen out the shares that are just political ranting from left-wing advocacy organizations and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself).

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The result of that high quality is that G+ has already changed my life once. And could do it again.

diff --git a/20110822132950.blog b/20110822132950.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1afaea1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110822132950.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Vanished Planet, Innovation, and the luck-swamping problem +

From the gaming front, I report one nice surprise and a couple of disappointments.

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My interest in that old standby Puerto Rico was rekindled by the World Boardgaming Championships tournament a few weeks ago, in which I made quarter-finals only to wash out in a game with a mere 4-point spread. Friday night at our gaming group I scored 56 points with a factory/fast-build strategy finishing with Residence and Guildhall, 6 points ahead of a tie for second. Nothing remarkable about the play, but I’m becoming convinced that if you’re running that strategy it’s vital to never skip a build opportunity even if it means you have to settle for a smaller edifice than you really want – otherwise you lose control of the game tempo and shippers get time to blow past you.

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I won the Power Grid game after that, too, starting with Wien on the Central Europe board and successfully scoring the 30 fairly early (3 Garbage -> 6 cities). The Wien discount was very helpful after that. I believe that low-balling to buy the 3 in the initial auction in order to place first and grab Wien + Bratislava is the strongest opening on that board – besides locking in the garbage discount and enabling you to build nukes, it’s also a central placement that makes it difficult for other players to box you in.

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I’ve been less successful with Innovation, an unusual and initially appealing card game themed around cascading technologies to build up the tech level of a civilization. The game is full of interesting ideas and novel mechanics, and I had a pleasant win streak when first playing it. But my wife and I have been playing it nightly as part of our end-of-day ritual, and having mastered it we’re both noticing the same problem. There are a relative handful of power cards (Code of Laws, Democracy, Metric System, and a few others) and given two players who know what they’re doing the one who melds more of them earlier will generally run away to victory.

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The dominating strategy seems to be to go for card splay as fast as possible in order to become immune to the dogmas on attack cards like City States, Pirate Code, Skyscrapers, and Rocketry that could otherwise be used to stop the leader. This is disappointing. We’re hoping it’s an artifact of the two-hand game and that the runaway effect is decreased in three- and four-hand games; our limited experience of those suggests it might be so.

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This is reminiscent of something I noticed in the Commands & Colors: Ancients Tournament at WBC. I’ve been competing in that for three years now, and most of the players including myself are masters of the game who know every trick and tactic. Perversely, in this tournament environment skill seems to be almost nullified – if neither player makes a gross error victory is determined by dice and card luck. I had the opportunity to meet and talk with Richard Borg, C&C:A’s designer, at this tournament, and he essentially admitted that this is an issue he knows is an issue with C&C:A. Neither of us had a magic fix for it.

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This is a disappointing thing to learn about one of my favorite games. It is not invariably a problem in games with a random element; I don’t experience it, for example, in the Conflict of Heroes WWII tactical games. The key seems to be that while CoH uses die rolls, the deviation of outcomes is smaller (fewer analogs of critical hits and fumbles) so tactics dominates luck.

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(I made a point of describing CoH to Borg in some detail. As I told him, I want to see what happens when his designer brain absorbs the lessons of that game, which I think is hands down the best tactical WWII game to come down the pike in many a year.)

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Since realizing that C&C:A and Innovation have similar problems, I’ve been trying to invent a one-word term for games with this flaw. Ideally it should be self-explaining, or nearly so. The best I’ve come up with so far is “luck-swamped”, which may do.

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Now for the good surprise: Vanished Planet. This is a co-op game for up to six players, the single product of a tiny games company located here in Pennsylvania. In fact the copy I played with was delivered to the door of my friends at the House of Chaos by the designer of the game! He happened to be in our neighborhood on the way to a family event.

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Vanished Planet has been out since 2003, and I’d seen it played at conventions; it piqued my interest. I’ve seen reviews describing it as like Settlers of Catan, but it’s a lot more like a co-op version of Twilight Imperium (which I reviewed recently). Same big hexagonal board scattered with star systems and maneuvering fleets; same focus on a central planet (vanished Earth replaces Mecatol Rex); same sort of per-species quirks; similar issues with resource management and integrating tactics with grand strategy.

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But this is a co-op game – player fleets aren’t fighting each other but a hyperspatial menace that has swallowed Earth and is extending tentacles of doom towards the player homeworlds. Another marked difference is playing time; while it’s not short, it’s half that for a Twilight Imperium game. I played twice, once in a 3-hand learning game and the following day 4-hand; both completed in about four hours.

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Both games were a lot of fun. Your ships run around the board tagging planets, nebulas. trade stations, asteroid belts, and research stations to generate basic resources: Colonists, Energy, Ore, and Research. These are then combined in various ways to build personnel (Soldiers, Doctors, Scientists, Engineers, Diplomats) and technologies like Fusion Reactors, Meta-Translators, Dimensional Shifters, and so forth. You use these things to fulfil missions which give you goal points – a typical mission is, say, build a Meta-Translator and take it to the Alien Ruins.

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The challenge is to complete enough missions (5 goal points per player) before the hyperspatial menace destroys all homeworlds. This isn’t easy, and the players must cooperate effectively to achieve it by trading resources and developing complementary strategies. As the menace’s tentacles grow longer, movement between the board segments gets more difficult, and players must eventually spend most of their capacity building space mines to keep the tentacles off their homeworlds. The finish is likely to be a nail-biter.

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This game exceeded my expectations. The mechanics are simple, the play challenge is very well balanced, and overall it’s quite satisfying. I think it will stand repeated play well, and there are ways to up the challenge level for experienced players.

diff --git a/20110825030154.blog b/20110825030154.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a67ac57 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110825030154.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Exit Steve Jobs +

Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple yesterday, handing the reins to designated successor Tim Cook. It could hardly happen at a more difficult juncture – for though Apple’s cash reserves and quarterly profits are eye-popping, the company faces serious challenges in the near future. Its strategic position rests on premises that are now in serious doubt, and it is on the wrong end of a serious example of what Clayton Christensen has called “disruption from below”.

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Foremost among Apple’s problems is Android. 68% of the company’s profits come from its smartphone business, and another 21% from the iPad, leaving only 11% from other sources. But Android now has #1 market share both in the U.S. and worldwide, and is growing share and customers at twice the rate Apple is.

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Until very recently, the best guess was that Apple and Android have been competing less against each other than for a gusher of dumbphone conversions so vast that both Apple and the Android army were production-limited. But I have been predicting since early 2011 that this would change in mid-3Q2011 – and the first signs of that change may be upon us now. WebOS is no more, Microsoft has arrested its slide, and after a tiny post-February bump Apple’s market share is flat again. There are several possible explanations for this, but one very likely one is that Android is now putting actual downward pressure on Apple’s market share.

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Apple, and its fans, had promised the world that the moment in February that Apple went multicarrier would be when it began to regain ground against the upstart Android. As I also predicted for reasons very fundamental to the one-vs.-many competition of Apple against the Android army, this has completely failed to occur; Android’s sales are still growing faster than the overall smartphone market, and Apple’s are not. Tim Cook and Apple’s board cannot possibly be stupid enough to find this un-worrying.

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For all Apple’s bravado and marketing flair, it now finds itself in a position where it is running second in sales and market share and playing technological catch-up with Android handsets that have 4G capability, faster processors, and more features. Not until October at the earliest will Apple have a product that can reply to where comparably-priced Android phones are positioned now – and in that approximately two-month time Androids won’t be standing still. The launch of the Nexus Prime could easily leave Apple as far behind on the technology curve as it is now, and with no realistic prospect of recovering for many months more.

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Apple’s position in tablets is also weakening. One recent study finds Android-tablet shipments have climbed to 20% of market volume. This is a huge change from three months ago when they were statistical noise. Because Apple reports units sold rather than shipped, that 20% has to be discounted by the return rate on Android tablets – but the return rate would have to be ridiculously high (enough to make front-page technology-press news) in order to drive actual Android share down to a figure that shouldn’t worry Apple.

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Indeed, the tablet market looks right now quite a bit like the smartphone market did in early 2010, with the upcoming release of Android Ice Cream (4.0) ready to supercharge Android tablet sales in much the same way 2.x did for Android smartphones then. Any Apple executive who isn’t nervous about this possibility is asleep and not earning his salary.

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The feeding frenzy surrounding the HP TouchPad is another cause for worry. Nobody wanted them at HP’s SRP (which was, basically, pegged to Apple’s). But when the product was canned and dropped to $150 the stores couldn’t find enough to meet demand even given the unsupported software stack. This tells us something important: it tells us that the first Android tablet with hardware comparable to the TouchPad and a supported software stack that goes below $150 is going to meet even more frenzied demand. If Apple doesn’t get to that price-performance point sooner than Android, it’s going to bleed tablet market share like someone slashed an artery.

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The second of Apple’s major problems is that by opening patent warfare on Android handset makers it may have started a legal battle it can’t win. It is, in effect, claiming to own the critical design elements of modern smartphones. But Google, after having acquired Motorola’s patent portfolio, may well be in a position to reply that it owns critical design elements of all cellphones, including Apple’s.

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In retrospect, Apple may have sown dragon’s teeth when it sued to have sales of Samsung tablets in Germany blocked. Apple is now going to have much more trouble attacking Google for overreach if Google files for TROs on Apple’s entire smartphone and tablet line based on a Motorola blocking patent. This is no longer an implausible scenario – and even if it does not actually happen, the threat must constrain Apple’s behavior. At this point, the best outcome Apple can plausibly hope for is a patent truce with Google that takes IP threats off the table.

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The third problem Apple now has is Jobs’s successor. Tim Cook is, by all accounts, a superb operations guy and has been a perfect complement to Steve Jobs’s vision-centered style of leadership. But there is no sign in Cook’s prior performance of his predecessor’s flair. He lacks Jobs’s hyperkinetic charisma, his ability to will an entire product category into existence and instantly persuade everyone it’s the next big thing.

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Tim Cook’s style is very different; where Jobs obsessed about design and coolness, Cook’s history is of obsession with efficiency and execution – one cannot escape the sense that he is more interested in supply-chain management than in how the product looks and feels. And while Cook’s focus could be a valuable trait in a stable business environment, what Apple now faces is anything but that.

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I’ve said before that I think Apple looks just like sustaining incumbents often do just before they undergo catastrophic disruption from below and their market share falls off a cliff. Google’s entire game plan has been aimed squarely at producing disruption from below, and with market share at 40% or above and Android’s brand looking extremely strong it is undeniable that they have executed on that plan extremely well. The near-term threat of an Apple market-share collapse to the 10% range or even lower is, in my judgment, quite significant – and comScore’s latest figures whisper that we may have reached a tipping point this month.

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For Apple, the history of technology disruptions from below tells us that there is only one recovery path from this situation. Before the Android army cannibalizes Apple’s business, Apple must cannibalize its own business with a low-cost iPhone that can get down in the muck and compete with cheap Android phones on price. Likewise in tablets, though Apple might have six months’ more grace there.

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Of course, this choice would mean that Apple has to take a massive hit to its margins. Which is the perennial problem in heading off a disruption from below before it happens; it is brutally difficult to convince your investors and your own executives that the record quarterlies won’t just keep coming, especially when your own marketing has been so persuasive about the specialness of the company and its leading position in the industry. This is a failure mode that, as Clayton Christensen has documented, routinely crashes large and well-run companies at the apparent peak of their success.

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Does Tim Cook have the vision and the will to make this difficult transition happen? Nobody knows. But the odds are against it.

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UPDATE: I originally set the threshold for making a killing on an Ice Cream tablet at $99, but it has been pointed out to me that the $150 TouchPads with more flash sold out just as fast. And also that the single most important discriminator in “good enough” is probably a decent capacitative (as opposed to resistive) touchscreen. The difference is significant because there is nearly enough room in $150 to cover the bill of materials on such a device now; by 4.0’s release date, it should be possible to make a profit at that price point.

diff --git a/20110827051615.blog b/20110827051615.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6583ead --- /dev/null +++ b/20110827051615.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Night sounds, trains and timepieces +

My house is located less than a hundred feet from the Main Line, the principal passenger-rail artery out of Philadelphia to the west – Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, and ultimately Chicago and points west. Two dozen times a day passenger trains come bucketing by, but they’re barely a murmur through the dense secondary-growth woods between my back fence and the railroad right-of-way.

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The loud ones are the night trains, the big heavy freights they route through when all the passenger cars are put to bed. They come through here rumbling like muted thunder in the still dark, long blasts of airhorns falling away like the mournful cries of vast creatures in a rusty ocean. Some people would find the noise intrusive, but I don’t; it comforts me.

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My house is full of clock displays that tick off electronically perfect time – computers, cellphones, electric wall and table clocks. But there’s only one clock in the house I really cherish, and comparatively speaking it’s a pain in the butt because it has to be wound every week. It’s an 80-year-old antique, a regulator clock with a pendulum, and while it keeps inexact time by any modern standard it has two overriding virtues: it ticks, and it sounds the hours with mellow brass chimes that no computer speaker will ever emulate quite correctly. I find those sounds comforting, too.

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Like many programmers, I do a lot of work and writing while people on more normal schedules are asleep. The night is quiet and aids concentration, but it can get lonely and produce a kind of disassociation, too. In the small hours of morning, when words and symbols on a screen are beginning to seem flat and unreal, the sound of night trains speaks to me of humanity – of vast rivers of commerce and movement, of crowds and built things and bustle, of dreams crafted into hurtling steel, of a world out there vastly larger than myself. I feel more connected to that outside world when I hear it.

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Then the steady tick of the regulator clock speaks of small things. It says: this is your place and things are ordered as they should be. The chimes remind me that time passes and after night will come dawn; there will be talk and breakfasts and sun in the windows and little ordinary pleasures.

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This is my first house so near a railroad track, but I think I will always prefer that now. And I expect I’ll always keep at least one balky antique clock where I can hear it sound. The well-lived life may be full of large ideas and emotions and struggles to build something that will last, but the little details also matter.

diff --git a/20110831142047.blog b/20110831142047.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c1a9de7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110831142047.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Alarums and Mergers +

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This graphic is a bit behind today’s news; the Feds have sued to block the AT&T/T-Mobile merger. As a T-Mobile customer I wasn’t looking forward to it; as a staunch advocate of free markets, I’m not happy that the Feds have the power to stop it.

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My preferences aside, the interesting question is whether blocking this merger can actually prevent further consolidation. I’m not very optimistic about this; the economics are what the economics are, and the real rates of ROI on wireless networks are negative. There is, sadly, every likelihood that smaller carriers like T-Mobile that don’t merge with larger ones will simply go under, leaving their assets to be snapped up by the remaining incumbents at the going-out-of-business sales.

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What we need to fix this situation isn’t antitrust law but some sort of technological break that changes the economics of the business so it favors capital concentration less. Perhaps stealth mesh networking would do it?

diff --git a/20110906130218.blog b/20110906130218.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..30cc44d --- /dev/null +++ b/20110906130218.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Short Takes +

No grand unifying theme in this installment of our smartphone-wars coverage, but a bunch of short takes.

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From Google, muted and conflicting signals about the future of Motorola. I still think journalistic talk of the company trying to run a vertically integrated mobile business a la Apple is hogwash brought on by Jobs-worship, as attempting this would run directly counter to the grand strategy Google has been tenaciously pursuing since 2008. What they will do with the acquisition remains unclear. One patent-law consultant claims Google has blundered and the Motorola patents are a pile of junk, but I think skepticism about that report is warranted – failing in technical due diligence on this issue before the purchase would have been a quite un-Google-like mistake. Most likely Google’s leadership is still wrestling with possibilities.

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Hewlett-Packard says it is exploring ways to get money out of WebOS other than consumer mobile devices, and there is informed speculation that the TouchPad was sacrificed as an internal political maneuver. I agree that talk of a TouchPad resurrection is wishful thinking, and that there has been plenty of incompetence to go around at HP lately.

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The July 2011 comScore results came out a few days ago. Android’s growth rate is on the same 2% per-month rail it has been, and still on track to break 50% U.S. market share this fall. Microsoft resumes its interrupted fall in market share, though the overall market is growing so fast that it actually gained a thimbleful of users. Apple grows a touch faster than the market, too, which it didn’t in last month’s results; this lowers the odds on near-term disruptive collapse a bit. RIM performs as expected, which is to say badly.

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As I noted in a comment a few days ago, the LA Times reported that Android tablet manufacturers are getting the message from the TouchPad frenzy, with Lenovo saying it will debut a $199 tablet at the end of September. While there has been a lot of skepticism about the possibility of non-crappy tablets at that price level, parts breakdowns make it clear that the only serious blocker is the capacitative touchscreen and display assembly – and, as it turns out, multitouch on cheaper resistive touchscreens is possible. Perhaps this is what Lenovo will do.

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Interestingly, the article suggests that consumer price expectations for tablets may be being bounded above by the price of e-readers ($250 range). I think this is very plausible – to non-tech-savvy consumers the distinction between a tablet and an e-reader probably isn’t very prominent. I continue to believe that skeptics are underestimating the amount of capital flowing into reducing component costs, and thus underestimating the rate at which tablet prices will fall in the near term.

diff --git a/20110908053407.blog b/20110908053407.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..83b1b88 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110908053407.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Ecoforming and 1493 +

I enjoy creating useful neologisms. I’ve floated several on this blog: kafkatrapping, collabortage, politicism, chomskyism, and prospiracy. One could argue that my take on the term “error cascade” is neologistic.

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Today, another one: “ecoforming”. By analogy with “terraforming”, this is what humans do when they deliberately modify an ecology to suit their purposes. The term is intended to include the introduction of non-native species, the deliberate use of fire as a technique for ground-clearing, and the sculpting of landscapes by selective planting and suppression of local wild flora, but to exclude cultivation of domesticated plants.

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I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing because I’ve been reading a fascinating book titled 1493 by Charles C. Mann. This is a history of what he calls the “Columbian exchange” (borrowing the term from pioneering biohistorian Alfred W. Crosby), the transplantation of New World species to the Old World and vice-versa after Columbus’s voyage in 1492. Mann makes a persuasive case that the shock of that contact has been reverberating through the Earth’s biosphere ever since, reshaping human societies and much else in its wake. He tells well-known stories such as the way that the introduction of the potato to Europe enabled the rise in population that led to the Industrial Revolution. Also, many more (previously) obscure ones, such as the way that the introduction of American food plants produced ecological catastrophe in China, leading to the fall of the Ming Dynasty.

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But more interesting still is Mann’s discussion of ecoforming, though he doesn’t use the word. He argues that one of the ways European settlement displaced American Indians and destroyed their societies was by introducing not just non-native plants but species such as the European honeybee and the earthworm that actually altered the ecology of settled areas by Europeanizing it. This created a landscape that Europeans could exploit, but which no longer supported the animals and food plants that were mainstays for the natives.

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One of the most interesting points Mann makes is that every human culture does this – even those operating at a Neolithic level. He explains that the Jamestown colonists who thought they were living in an untamed wilderness were wrong; the landscape around them had been ecoformed by the natives for thousands of years. In an extremely eye-opening section near the end of the book, he explains how large sections of the Amazon jungle that appear completely wild to Europeans have actually been ecoformed extensively by the natives and a far larger population of their mixed-race descendents in the covert communities called quilombos. An example he didn’t cite, but could have, is the use of fire-clearing by Australian aborigines to ecoform swathes of the Australian outback.

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But it gets better. Mann proposes that native ecoforming in the Americas was so consequential that a prompt second-order effect of the introduction of European diseases was a radical change in the ecological mosaic of the New World. Here’s how the causation works: Europeans arrive, accidentally transmit smallpox and half a dozen other plagues to the natives, 95% of the Amerinds die off, and regular fire-clearing of inhabited areas ceases. The consequence is that the open, park-like forests reported by the earliest Europeans change character in an eyeblink, becoming near choked with secondary growth. The mix of tree species shifts rapidly, because fire tolerance is no longer an adaptive edge. The mix of fauna changes, too, notably from large game to smaller animals.

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And it gets better still. Mann reports reason to suspect that the drop-off in carbon emissions when New World fire-clearing ended may have caused the Little Ice Age! (Despite my contempt for today’s AGW junk science, I think this is somewhat plausible, though it would be out of scope for this essay to explain why. Mann’s proposal would obviously be less problematic for AGW true believers.) This leads directly to what I think is the most bracing and welcome thing about 1493. To explain it, I first need to set up in opposition to it the romantic view of nature.

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According to the romantic view of “unspoiled nature”, there is a natural equilibrium state of any given ecology (or the biosphere as a whole) which changes only on timescales of a kiloyear or longer. This pristine state is what the ecology tends to return to after major shocks such as volcanic eruptions. Humans are not part of this pristine state. Fortunately, pre-industrial humans have neither the power nor the desire to greatly alter it, and walk lightly on the land. Nevertheless, human presence degrades the pristine state into something that is inevitably less complex, valuable, and natural.

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This romantic view has dominated Western popular culture since the early 1800s and underpins a great deal of the silliness and anti-human hostility evident in the modern environmental movement. It motivates, as one very current example, hostility to “unnatural” GM crops and intensive agriculture in general.

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Without ever announcing the intention to do so, Mann takes a poleaxe to the romantic view of “unspoiled nature” and dispatches it without mercy. First, he shows how pervasive ecoforming is as a cultural practice. Then, he shows how ecoforming or its sudden cessation can lead to rapid, profound transformation of ecosystems on a continental scale. Then he proposes a not-too-implausible coupling between large-scale ecoforming by neolithic-level savages and the entire planetary climate!

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In reality, there is no almost “pristine” nature anywhere on Earth humans can survive with pre-industrial technology. When we look at almost any “wilderness”, part of what we are seeing is the results of millenia of ecoforming by the humans that came before us. And, while attempts at ecoforming sometimes have destructive consequences (salinized soils in the Middle East; rabbits in Australia), as often or more often they lead to a net increase in ecological complexity and resource richness. Mann is not afraid to show us that the world is a better place because, for example, capsaicin peppers native to the New World are now naturalized all over Eurasia and have become important to dozens of Old World cuisines.

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The book has much else in it that is worthwhile. There’s a long digression on the craziness of Imperial Chinese monetary policy and how this led directly both to the silk trade, the opium wars, and an eco-catastrophe with which modern China still struggles. Mann’s observations on the economic history of Spain and the bootstrapping of the first truly global trade networks would fill entire books from less capable historians.

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Good books on really large-scale history are rare, and this is the best I’ve seen since Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. I rather suspected when I read it that Mann had an eye on that book as a model, and he has confirmed this in an email exchange. 1493 stands comparison with Diamond’s book quite well.

diff --git a/20110909095823.blog b/20110909095823.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0ae97fa --- /dev/null +++ b/20110909095823.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +For those who have met Sugar +

I don’t often blog about strictly personal things here. Even when it may seem that I’m blogging about myself, my goal is normally to use my life as a lens to examine issues larger than any of my merely personal concerns. But occasionally, this has led me to blog about my cat Sugar, as when I wrote about the ethology of the purr, the Nose of Peace, the mirror test and coping with anticipated grief.

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But this blog has developed a community of regulars, too, some of whom have met and been charmed by Sugar while being houseguests at my place. It is therefore my sad duty to report that she has entered the rapid end-stage of senescent decline often seen in cats. After days of not eating and signs of chronic pain, she has been diagnosed with hepatic cysts, acute nephritis and renal failure. She’s now on a catheter at the vet’s; they’re hoping to restart her kidneys and treat the nephritis with antibiotics. But in the best case, our vet doesn’t think she has more than six months left, and that much may require heroic measures including daily subcutaneous fluid injections. He has not recommended euthanasia, but if her kidneys don’t reboot within a day or three that will be coming. He hasn’t said, but I don’t think he likes her odds of surviving this crisis.

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None of this is surprising Cathy or myself very much. Signs of senile decay – hyperesthesia, night yowling – have been accumulating over the last six months. We’re both realists who have responded by learning as much about cat geriatrics as web searches will turn up, which is quite a lot. I already had renal failure pegged as the most likely thing to take Sugar out; usually it’s either that or heart failure in very old cats. And Sugar is very old, 18 or 19 depending on her exact age when we inherited her. We’d been hoping for another year, but it is now very unlikely we will get that.

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It will probably not surprise those of you who have met Sugar to hear that she didn’t at any time take out her pain on her humans. While she showed some tendency to half-conceal herself in places she didn’t normally lurk after becoming overtly ill, she still purred at being touched. If she were a human, I’d have said she was being brave and stoical.

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The house feels empty without Sugar in it. Knowing she’s hooked up to a catheter, in pain, and fighting for her life is difficult for us. We may very soon have to make a hard decision about whether prolonging her life is the kindest thing we can do, and that weighs on us. Cathy looks a bit shell-shocked, and I don’t blame her. We both love Sugar, but caring for her has an extra layer of meaning for Cathy because it fulfilled her mother’s deathbed request. Emotionally, for her, I think this is like a replay of watching the end stage of her mother’s terminal cancer.

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I’m not superstitious enough to believe supportive thoughts from others can help our cat survive, but I invite all our friends to think of Sugar kindly and hope for her survival because it is a tribute her life has deserved. She’s been a wonderful cat, unfailingly well-mannered and affectionate to us and friendly to our guests – the visible soul of our home for seventeen years. She’s brightened the lives of at least a couple of dozen other humans as well; at least twice I’ve seen cat-deprived friends on the verge of happy tears because Sugar was so unaffectedly nice to them.

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We’re trying to keep ourselves reminded that seventeen years is a very long run for a cat, she’s had an extremely happy life, and that we have no grounds for complaint or bitterness because it’s nearing a natural and inevitable end. We know we’ve done right by her and have no regrets. Still, this isn’t easy, and not likely to get any easier before it ends.

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UPDATE: Friday afternoon: the vet reports that Sugar is eating again and tolerating the IV drip pretty well. The risk of prompt death seems to be receding. We’ll know more by Monday.

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UPDATE2: Saturday afternoon. Vet says Sugar is eating canned food and behaving normally. This probably means the nephritis is knocked out and her kidneys are functioning again. He sounds a little amazed.

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UPDATE3: Sunday afternoon. Sugar is now moving around enough that the vet’s people have to work a bit to keep the fluid-drip line from kinking. They do not regard this as a bad thing.

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UPDATE4: Monday afternoon. Sugar is coming home. Alive, with her kidneys restarted, and as well as can be expected given the long-term tend of kidney-function decline (she’s a tough little creature!). We’re not going to do sub-cu fluids, as the vet says they might be helpful but are not yet necessary; we’ll re-evaluate in two weeks when she gets her antibiotic booster shot. Thanks everyone for the supportive comments.

diff --git a/20110910225235.blog b/20110910225235.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f2edf28 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110910225235.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Not Eliminating The Middleman +

So, we’re at a some friends’ place for barbecue this afternoon, and friends say “We know you don’t watch much TV, but you need to see this…”

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“This” turns out to be the pilot of The Middleman a peculiar and unusually intelligent TV series that ran for only 12 episodes in 2008 before being canceled. The protagonist is a tough-minded female art student who gets recruited into a sort of “Men In Black” organization that deals with exotic problems – mad scientists, invading aliens, supernatural threats, that sort of thing. Yeah, I know, yet another spin on Nick Pollotta’s Bureau 13 novels – but this version has a sharp, surrealistic edge and the kind of script where no word in it is filler or wasted.

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The writing style of The Middleman kind of got into my head. Here’s how I know this: afterwards, we’re disrobing to go to the hot tub, and I looked at my piles of clothes and stuff and thought this:

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“I carry a smartphone, a Swiss-Army knife, and a gun. What kind of problem do you want solved?”

diff --git a/20110911165927.blog b/20110911165927.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6d6c7b8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110911165927.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Ten Years After 9/11 +

Ten years after 9/11, I find there is little that I need or want to add to what I have already written on this topic. Rereading the essay I wrote the day of the attack, it still seems relevant. So does my explanation of the militia obligation.

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The best tribute we can give to the victims of 9/11 is to stand with those who have risked their lives and (often) died in opposition to Islamic terrorism and tyranny – from Todd Beamer to Neda Soltan to Seal Team 6. On a planet shrunk by modern communications and transport, in a war of shadows in which non-state actors threaten us on a scale previously reserved for national militaries, we must all be vigilant warriors.

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Remember and be ready.

diff --git a/20110919231430.blog b/20110919231430.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5099a05 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110919231430.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Living in Euro-Cloud-Cuckoo land +

I often tell people that I think The Economist is the best news magazine in the English language – and not because they make a relatively frequent habit of quoting me, either. The house style is intelligent, often penetrating, witty, and sober about important things.

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It is very rare that The Economist indulges in wishful thinking to the point of doomed fantasy. But that is exactly where their lead editorial, How To Save The Euro, goes this week. Save the Euro? Really? One wonders what they’re smoking over there.

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The editorial makes hilarious reading, if you have the bleak sense of humor I do about such things, because while The Economist owns up pretty frankly to the large risks of a Euro rescue plan and concedes how unlikely it is to succeed, its wise men are still in denial on some very fundamental points. The most important of these is its insistence that there is a useful distinction to be made between governments like that of Greece – frankly insolvent – and governments like those of Spain and Italy which merely have a liquidity problem.

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The ugly truth, which the bond markets are now waking up to, is that there are no solvent governments in Europe. Every single one (including The Economist’s native United Kingdom) has made political commitments to future entitlement spending that they will be unable to meet, and taken out loans they will be unable to repay. The governments that The Economist persists in regarding as solvent are merely those about which the bond markets have not panicked yet.

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Why are there no solvent governments in Europe? Because the logic of social-democratic politics, both in Europe and the American dare-not-speak-its-name version, leads to a perpetually expanding class of government clients being funneled money that is increasingly outright borrowed, because the ever more taxed and regulated private sector simply cannot generate enough wealth for the redistributors’ political needs.

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“The trouble with socialism,” as Margaret Thatcher observed, “is that eventually you run out of other peoples’ money”. Yes, I’ve made this point before – but it bears repeating, because all the grave mumbling and comic-opera posturing now going on from the state of California to the shores of Greece is designed to obscure that central point. The Economist, along with the elites it sells to, is caught up in ever more frantic efforts to evade the fact that the political fixers have run out of other peoples’ money.

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That’s what the recent downgrade of U.S. Treasuries means. The bond markets are figuring out that no amount of tax-rate fiddling will close our structural deficit. Anyone who thinks “taxing the rich” will do it is a particularly innumerate idiot (but there’s never any shortage of those). “The rich” don’t have enough money for that. Nobody has enough money for that.

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So…don’t expect the Euro to survive another six months. What we’re going to see, over the next few years, is an increasing frequency of sovereign defaults as the big-state system collapses under the weight of the debts it has run up. There will be bank runs, more financial panics, depressive convulsions, and (all too probably) hyperinflation from governments that don’t outright default.

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If we’re lucky, there won’t be more than a lot of civil unrest while this goes down. If we’re unlucky, there will be a war or two and some serious crackups in major nation-states. History does not suggest much ground for optimism here. In reality, there is no such thing as “Too big to fail”; there is only “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

diff --git a/20110921152346.blog b/20110921152346.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ae0dbae --- /dev/null +++ b/20110921152346.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +There is exactly one good use for a toaster oven +

The kitchen in my house has a toaster oven tucked into one corner just under the wall cabinets. It gathered dust unused for years, because toaster ovens were a silly 1970s fad that disintegrated in the face of inexpensive microwave ovens. But I’ve found exactly one use for it that a microwave doesn’t emulate well.

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Improvised garlic bread:

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Your main prerequisite for this is a loaf of Italian or French bread. Works best if the loaf is more or less baguette-shaped so you can cut the bread into relatively small rounds surrounded by crust.

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(1) cut the bread into thick slices,

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(2) shave thin slices of butter off a stick of it and lay them on the bread slices until they roughly cover each one

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(3) sprinkle garlic powder liberally on top of the butter

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(4) place on tinfoil in toaster oven

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(5) toast for 2 minutes.

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Notably, this works OK even if the bread is a bit old, as the butter moistens it nicely.

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Total prep time about 5 minutes. Results: Om nom nom.

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That is all.

diff --git a/20110923175355.blog b/20110923175355.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..583c8ee --- /dev/null +++ b/20110923175355.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +A tribute to Heinlein +

A&D regular Ken Burnside has entered the Woot! derby, a contest to have a T-shirt design featured on that site. Ken’s entry is a tribute to Robert Heinlein.

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Yes, that’s Robert and Virginia Heinlein on the rocket. Yes, the rocket is based on the illustrations from Putnam and Son’s Heinlein juveniles The skyline in the back is Kansas City, MO, though it’s hard to tell – Heinlein’s home town.

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The Heinlein fans among my regulars should consider voting for this entry.

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Only users who have made at least one purchase at any Woot site may vote in the Derby. If that’s you, just click “I’d Want One” next to any designs that catch your fancy. You can vote for as many different designs as you like, but only once per design. If you don’t see the “I’d Want One” buttons next to the designs, you’re either not logged in, or you’ve never bought anything from Woot. Go log in and/or buy something if you want to vote.

diff --git a/20110924155905.blog b/20110924155905.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4a84377 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110924155905.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Community versus collectivism +

Community and collectivism are opposites. Community is valuable and powerful; it is individuals freely choosing to cooperate and identify with each other to achieve more than they can individually, as we do in the open-source community.

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Collectivism is a fraud. It pretends to be about community, but it is actually about the use of force. Collectivists want us not only to bow to their desire for power over others, but to thank them for coercing us and praise them as our moral superiors.

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Compassion is a duty of every individual. Groups of people organizing voluntarily to achieve compassionate ends are deserve admiration and support. Collectivists pervert compassion, speaking the language of caring but committing the actions of criminals.

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It is a crime to rob your neighbor. It is a crime to use your neighbor for your own ends without allowing him or her a choice in the matter. It is a crime to deprive your neighbor of his liberty when he or she has committed no aggression against you.

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These crimes are no less crimes when a sociopath (or a politician – but, I repeat myself) justifies them by chanting “for the poor” or “for the children” or “for the environment”. They do not cease to be crimes just because a majority has been conned into voting for them. The violence is just as violent, the victims just as injured, the harm done just as grave.

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Valid ethical propositions do not contain proper names. What is criminal for an individual to do is criminal for a community to do. Collectivists are not the builders of community, as they pretend, but its deadliest enemies – its corrupters and betrayers. When we fail to understand these simple truths, we board a train to genocide and the gulags.

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(This was originally a comment I left on Google+)

diff --git a/20110926172516.blog b/20110926172516.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..43c714a --- /dev/null +++ b/20110926172516.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Reconsidering sexual repression +

The New York Post has an interesting article up on the price of sex. Summary; more women are giving it up sooner. Between a shortage of men who are marry-up material, competition from other women, and porn, withholding sex to get commitment is no longer a workable strategy Tellingly the article says “those who don’t discount sex say they can’t seem to get anyone to ‘pay’ their higher price. Consequently, younger women are doing an awful lot of first-date or even no-date fucking, and the marriage rate is steadily dropping.

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The author doesn’t think like a science-fiction fan and encyclopedic synthesist, but I do – so a really alarming second-order consequence jumped out at me. But before I get to that, some historical perspective.

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Before 1960, the price of sex was held fairly high by fear of pregnancy and social stigmatization. Then came the Pill; fear of pregnancy receded and social stigmatization of unwed birth effectively collapsed with it. But in the absence of these restraints, we found out something interesting; women, as a group, want nookie now more than is good for their marriage prospects. That is, the operation of female desire is poorly matched to their most effective reproductive strategy – they’re too easily pulled into casual sex and behaviors they can fool themselves aren’t pure hedonism.

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I could go off on a speculative tear about how humans ended up with such miswiring. That would take us on a ramble through evolutionary bio and might even generate an interesting theory or two. But that would be a distraction, because the most interesting consequences of this observation aren’t in the past but in the future.

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The first difficult thing to accept, after the sexual revolution, is this: sexual repression and the double standard weren’t arbitrary forms of cruelty that societies ended up with by accident. They were functional adaptations. By raising the clearing price that women charged for sex, they actually increased female bargaining power and raised the marriage rate.

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Most people can process that one without wincing. But this next one is a hot potato: the ideology of sexual equality made the problem a lot worse in two different ways. The obvious one was that it encouraged women to believe they could and should be able to act like men without negative consequences – including rising to male levels of promiscuity. The less obvious, but perhaps in the long run more damaging consequence, was that it collided with hypergamy.

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Women are hypergamous. They want to marry men who are bigger, stronger, higher-status, a bit older, and a bit brighter than they are. This is massively confirmed by statistics on actual marriages; only the “a bit brighter” part is even controversial, and most of that controversy is ideological posturing.

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OK, so what happens when women get educated, achieve economic equality, etcetera? Their pool of eligible hypergamic targets shrinks; the princess marrying the swineherd is a fairytale precisely because it’s so rare. More women seeking hypergamy from a higher baseline means the competition for eligible males is more intense, and womens’ ability to withold sex vanishes even supposing they want to. Thus, college campuses today, and plunging marriages rate tomorrow.

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The question becomes: what are we going to give up? Family formation? Sexual equality? Sexual liberty? (By sexual equality I mean the presumption that women should be legally, economically, and educationally equal to men. By sexual liberty I mean both an absence of formal legal sanctions and an absence of guilt and psychological repression.) It looks very much as through we can’t have all three of those sustainably, and (this is the thought that really disturbs me) we may not even get to have more than one.

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If we give up family formation it’s game over; we’ll be outbred by cultures that don’t. So that’s off the table. Following out the logic, the demographic future will belong to cultures that give up either sexual liberty or sexual equality, or both.

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But those options aren’t symmetrical. Because, remember, the problem with today’s sexual economics is not symmetrical. It’s not women who are bailing out of the marriage market in droves, it’s men. Accordingly (as the author of the NY Post recognizes) the odds of rolling back sexual liberty are close to nil. Men don’t have to play on those terms for fundamental bioenergetic reasons (release of semen is cheap), and women post-Pill are demonstrating an unwillingness to try to make them. Because, you know, more sex (see “miswiring”, above).

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I am led to a conclusion I don’t like. That is: Sexual equality is unstable. If women can’t buy marriage with sex, they’ll have to bid submission instead. This tactic also combines well with hypergamic desire – if the mean social power of men is automatically higher than that of women, more potential pairings constitute marrying up.

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I don’t have a submissive wife and never wanted one. I like strong and independent women. It therefore horrifies me to reach the conclusion that sexually repressive patriarchies may after all be a better deal for most womens’ reproductive success than the relative equality they have now is. But that’s where the logic leads.

diff --git a/20110929025207.blog b/20110929025207.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b6926de --- /dev/null +++ b/20110929025207.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Sugar’s not fading away, yet +

Judging by comments, a surprisingly large number of my regulars are interested in the medical state of my house’s visible soul. If you’re not of them, go ahead and skip this blog entry.

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It’s now three weeks and change since the crisis that nearly killed Sugar. And it is less clear now than we thought it was two weeks ago what actually happened to her. The diagnosis after the sonogram was a serious kidney infection. After antibiotics and 72 hours of hydration she bounced back amazingly, displaying more physical energy than we’d seen in years. Like, casual three foot jumps to get from chair to daybed.

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But the culture from Sugar’s urine came up negative. That is, no evidence of bacterial infection. So either we’ve had a lab error or something else was going on. Our vets (Drs. Hayduke and Rockwood practice as a team) are puzzled. Dr. Hayduke says he has no explanation. And the really interesting question is whether it was mostly the antibiotics or mostly the hydration that put her back on her feet. We don’t know, and it makes a lot of difference to her prognosis.

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If it was the antibiotics, and she’s still got normal kidney function, she might live quite a while yet. The evidence for this is that her bloodwork suggests her kidneys are functioning almost normally – proteins close to normal ranges, blood pressure not elevated.

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If it was the hydration, then she’s going to need periodic subcutaneous fluid injections to live, and is unlikely to live long. Evidence for this is that she does seem to be drinking more since the attack of whatever it was.

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Dr. Rockwood recommends we start weekly sub-cu, evidently more as a way to take some load off Sugar’s kidneys than because she’s diagnosing final renal failure. We’re going to learn the procedure – and whether Sugar will tolerate it well – on Saturday.

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Meanwhile, Sugar seems happy. Not as energetic as the first few days after she came home, which is a concern and tilts towards the hydration-is-what-helped theory, but she’s alert, not in pain and her appetite is good. Her behavior is reassuringly normal, which is to say cheerful and touchingly affectionate. On the other hand, Cathy thinks she may be losing weight, which is a bad sign in a geriatric cat. We’re both watching her very closely.

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The indicators are confusing and mixed, and the range of plausible outcomes is wide.

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Hm. As I was writing that, Sugar padded into my office, uttered a greeting meow, and jumped up on the guest chair (a couple feet behind my right shoulder) to hang out. She’s now purring quietly, enjoying human company and licking any hand that comes within reach. This is what I mean by “reassuringly normal” — and encouraging, if you know that she did that jump up to the chair a lot as a younger cat but had seemed to lack the energy for it the last couple years. Recently she would sometimes ask in cat language to be lifted into the chair.

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In some ways it seems like the treatment response to her crisis peeled years off Sugar’s age. Besides the jumping coming back, the night-yowling episodes we had been suffering through (and attributing to feline hyperesthesia or mild senile dementia) have entirely stopped. She has stopped meowing at the mirror, too. We don’t know what this means. Did she have some kind of slow infection or chronic inflammatory problem that was inducing dementia-like symptoms? Diagnosis unclear.

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Cathy and I are taking it day by day. We’re giving Sugar plenty of quality time and love. She seems a little more reluctant to have us out of her sight than before. I think all three of us are stealing jewels. They seem more precious than before.

diff --git a/20110930142758.blog b/20110930142758.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..891e986 --- /dev/null +++ b/20110930142758.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Berlios is dying… +

I just got word that berlios.de, where I have several projects hosted including GPSD, is going to shut down at the end of the year.

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This is a huge pain in the ass. It means I’m going to have to bust my hump to get us to new hosting space. Moving the git repo won’t be bad, but moving the mailing list and bugtracker content is going to suck. What’s worse, all the project URLs are going to break.

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Back in 2009 I launched a project called forgeplucker to address this sort of migration problem. It stalled due to a flaky hosting site…

diff --git a/20111003005434.blog b/20111003005434.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..776207d --- /dev/null +++ b/20111003005434.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +…but GPSD will survive! +

Four days after I got the word that Berlios is dying, I have saved GPSD from being pulled under as it sinks. A couple of observations on the project migration follow.

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First, for all those with an interest, the GPSD website is now at http://catb.org/gpsd/ (in my personal space at ibiblio); the repo and mailing lists are on Savannah. The old page on Berlios announces the move.

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The web stuff is on ibiblio because Savannah’s static-web support sucks big time. To update your web pages, they want you to check changes into a per-project CVS repository. Then, some time later, a cron job will check out copies and put them in your visible webspace.

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I know why they’re doing it; they fear security breaches if users can reach the host filesystem with scp or friends. But “clumsy” massively understates the awkwardness of this method; the cron-job delay is injury, and having to tangle with the ancient brain-damage that is CVS adds insult to it. Fortunately they let you point your “Home Page” link offsite as an alternative to dealing with this crap.

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But we must be fair. Yes, Savannah is a data jail and its internals are an architectural disaster area, but as I’ve noted before essentially all existing forges have those problems. Within those limitations Savannah’s UI is quite nice, as I know from years of experience with the close variant at Gna! that’s used by Battle For Wesnoth.

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The worst part of this migration was scraping my mailing list state out of Berlios. Mailman has a decent UI and feature set, and it’s nice that you can mass-subscribe people by uploading a file of email adddresses, but – dammit – you can’t get the list back out as a file! I had to grab each successive HTML page in the user list display sequence and run them through a script to strip out the names.

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Ironically, the tool I wrote two years ago to extract project state from Berlios and other forges was no use because the GPSD bugtracker is empty. Not that it would have been very useful anyway without an injector on the receiving end. That foregeplucker project stalled due to — wait for it — flakiness at the hosting site; I’m thinking I should go back there, hound the admins until they fix the problem, and pick up that project again.

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The temptation to write a forge system myself is returning, too. They all suck so badly. It’s like no decent system architect has ever tackled the problem. I don’t just believe in a general way that I can do better, I know exactly how to go about it. Maybe one of these years…

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diff --git a/20111004205708.blog b/20111004205708.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..880d947 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111004205708.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: How are the mighty fallen +

HP replaces the hapless Leo Apotheker in a manner not very well calculated to reassure anyone that HP has a bright future. Granted, Apotheker’s performance – typified by the now-it’s-dead-oh-maybe-not fumbling around the TouchPad – was dismal. But the new CEO’s first move was to reassure everyone that Apotheker’s cunning plan to turn HP into a low-rent clone of SAP is still on track.

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How are the mighty fallen. HP was a great company once. Then they spun out the instruments division to focus on printers and lost their culture of excellence along with it. Now they’re thrashing. Sad.

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In other news of the stupid, there’s evidence that Nokia (remember Nokia?) is developing a Linux-based OS for its low-end phones. Yes, that’s right, they dropped Meego/Maemo — which actually worked — only to start an entirely new OS development project.

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On a more cheerful note, Samsung is pushing kernel source code out the door. This after hiring the Cyanogen lead. Good stuff; they actually seem to get this open source thing.

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From the excellent StackOverflow site, a report with statistics indicating that Android passed iOS in developer mindshare on that site at the beginning of 2011.

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And Amazon finally moved; the Kindle Fire is out. G+ points us at the funniest tweet about this.

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The business press had already begun to notice that Apple is chasing Android’s tallights. Then Apple announced the iPhone 4S, and it’s a big yawn. iCloud? Me-too voice recognition features? Really, Apple? Is this the best you can do? Gawker has a hilarious post on how overblown the media hype was, but even that fails to convey what a boring, derivative-seeming product the 4S is. How are the mighty fallen.

diff --git a/20111008140856.blog b/20111008140856.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6b37adc --- /dev/null +++ b/20111008140856.blog @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +On Steve Jobs’s passing +

I had been planning to defer commenting on the death of Steve Jobs long enough to give its impact time to cool a little, but Against Nostalgia puts the case I would have made so well and so publicly that it has changed my mind.

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I met Steve Jobs once in 1999 when I was the president of the Open Source Initiative, and got caught up in one of his manipulations in a way that caused a brief controversy but (thankfully) did the organization no lasting harm. The author of this piece, Mike Daisey, does well at capturing Jobs’s ruthless brilliance. Jobs was uncannily perceptive about the interface design and marketing of technology, but he was also a control freak who posed as an iconoclast – and after about 1980 he projected his control freakery on everything he shaped. The former trait did a great deal of good; the latter did a degree of harm that, sadly, may prove greater in the end.

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It’s easy to point at the good Steve Jobs did. While he didn’t invent the personal computer, he made it cool, twice. Once in 1976 when the Apple II surpassed all the earlier prototypes, and again in 1984 with the introduction of the Mac. I’ll also always be grateful for the way Jobs built Pixar into a studio that combined technical brilliance with an artistic sense and moral centeredness that has perhaps been equaled in the history of animated art, but never exceeded.

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But the Mac also set a negative pattern that Jobs was to repeat with greater amplification later in his life. In two respects; first, it was a slick repackaging of design ideas from an engineering tradition that long predated Jobs (in this case, going back to the pioneering Xerox PARC WIMP interfaces of the early 1970s). Which would be fine, except that Jobs created a myth that arrogated that innovation to himself and threw the actual pioneers down the memory hole.

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Second, even while Jobs was posing as a hip liberator from the empire of the beige box, he was in fact creating a hardware and software system so controlling and locked down that the case couldn’t even be opened without a special cracking tool. The myth was freedom, but the reality was Jobs’s way or the highway. Such was Jobs’s genius as a marketer that he was able to spin that contradiction as a kind of artistic integrity, and gain praise for it when he should have been slammed for hypocrisy.

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Nearly a quarter-century later Jobs would repeat the same game with the iPhone. The people who did the actual innovating in smartphones – notably Danger with their pioneering Hiptop – got thrown down the memory hole by Jobs’s mythmaking (though in this case some of its principals would later achieve a kind of revenge by designing Android). And the iPhone “ecosystem” became notorious not merely for the degree of control and rent-seeking it imposed, but for the Kafkaesque vagueness and arbitrariness of Apple’s policies.

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The velvet glove over Jobs’s iron fist was thinner that second time around; like most people who attract a cult following, he became increasingly convinced of his own infallibility. It was an error that eventually killed him; the kind of pancreatic cancer he had was essentially curable with early surgical intervention, but Jobs insisted on treating it with “alternative medicine” that didn’t work.

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But by all accounts, when Jobs wasn’t deliberately mythologizing as a marketing gesture he was brutally honest about his own successes and failures. Mike Daisey thinks (and, on my limited exposure to the man, I agree) that Jobs would have mocked most of the hagiography now being directed at him. Daisey writes this in summary towards the end of his piece:

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+Mr. Jobs’s magic has its costs. We can admire the design perfection and business acumen while acknowledging the truth: with Apple’s immense resources at his command he could have revolutionized the industry to make devices more humanely and more openly, and chose not to. If we view him unsparingly, without nostalgia, we would see a great man whose genius in design, showmanship and stewardship of the tech world will not be seen again in our lifetime. We would also see a man who in the end failed to “think different,” in the deepest way, about the human needs of both his users and his workers.

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I think that’s a fair assessment. For me, the emphasis would be slightly different. I’m less bothered than Daisey about the nasty conditions at Foxconn, because those workers can quit any time they choose (a lot of other manufacturing jobs in China are competing for their hours). I’m more concerned about the lock-in Jobs has inflicted on Apple users – subtler, but in its own way much more difficult to escape.

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And I’m most concerned about the way that the example Jobs set affects people who aren’t Apple users at all. I don’t mind so much that Jobs made the walled-garden model of computers and smartphones immensely profitable for a while; the lure of that will pass because the economic fundamentals of software are against it, and I never had anything against the profit motive to begin with.

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What’s really troubling is that Jobs made the walled garden seem cool. He created a huge following that is not merely resigned to having their choices limited, but willing to praise the prison bars because they have pretty window treatments.

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I’m not in doubt that this is what exercises Richard M. Stallman, as well. RMS, who is quite like Jobs was in that he’s brutally honest when he’s not mythologizing himself for marketing reasons, has caught a lot of flak for his unsparing take on Jobs’s legacy. Certainly RMS’s remarks were rude, intemperate, and ill-timed – so much so that one of his more prominent former supporters has called for forking the FSF as a result.

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But, though it’s often been my job in the past to be a peacemaker after RMS has made the open-source community look bad in public, I can’t disagree with the actual substance of what RMS wrote, and I won’t pretend to. Mike Daisey’s article, though written from a perspective well outside the open-source community’s, does a good job of explaining why I have to agree with RMS on this one.

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Commerce is powerful, but culture is even more persistent. The lure of high profits from secrecy rent can slow down the long-term trend towards open source and user-controlled computing, but not really stop it. Jobs’s success at hypnotizing millions of people into a perverse love for the walled garden is more dangerous to freedom in the long term than Bill Gates’s efficient but brutal and unattractive corporatism. People feared and respected Microsoft, but they love and worship Apple – and that is precisely the problem, precisely the reason Jobs may in the end have done more harm than good.

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RMS, for all his flaws, understands that the stakes in this argument go beyond narrow issues like what computer or smartphone to buy. Human cognition is messy and all sorts of ethical and aesthetic reasoning run together in peoples’ heads; we cannot expect people to love tyranny in small things like smartphones without becoming less resistant to tyranny in larger matters. That is why Appleolatry has implications for more than just what goes on in consumer-electronics stores — and little wonder that RMS lost his temper over it.

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RMS is, finally, right about one last thing. Our best hope to keep the good parts of Jobs’s legacy and shed the bad is that his successors will prove far less competent. Tim Cook is not the raucous buffoon that Steve Ballmer is, but neither has he ever been accused of grand vision or the kind of dangerous charisma that Jobs wielded like a blade. Without the Jobs magic, it seems likely that the cultism around Apple will subside. Perhaps the threat to freedom will subside with it.

diff --git a/20111013190929.blog b/20111013190929.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c7474e1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111013190929.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +You can tank me later +

I have interesting friends. Two of them, who shall remain nameless because it is possible they have let slip to me information that is technically classified, recently told me the best GPSD deployment story since the robot submarine.

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So, Friend A says “Hey, Eric, did you know GPSD is used in the on-board nav system of the Abrams tank?” Friend A is in a position to know, because Friend A has done troubleshooting of that nav system – once, over the phone with a tank actually in combat in Iraq. It seems GPSD is used as part of IFF (identification friend or foe) and without that module they are at unpleasant risk of heaving a shell at a friendly. (And no, I am assured the bug was not in GPSD itself.)

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No. In fact, I did not know that GPSD helps run the Abrams main battle tank. (I told one of my lieutenants and he, ever practical, said “Hey, ESR, can you get us a tank ride?” Alas, this is beyond my powers.) But then it got better…

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Friend B said. “Oh, that’s interesting.” Because while Friend B didn’t know about GPSD and the Abrams, friend B happens to know something Friend A didn’t – that the U.S. Army has standardized on just two GPS service modules for all its vehicles. Basically, there’s one less expensive package for soft-skinned vehicles and one more expensive for the tanks and the Bradleys and the Strykers – anything armored.

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What’s good for the Abrams is good for other AFVs, apparently. It follows as the night the day that GPSD is in the IFF/nav system of every current AFV the U.S. fields. That is pretty cool. And cooler because the use doesn’t present ethical difficulties – they use it for not shooting at people!

diff --git a/20111015183015.blog b/20111015183015.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f787342 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111015183015.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark +

I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 a week or so back in order to get a more recent version of SCons. 11.04 dropped me into the new “Unity” GNOME interface. There may be people in the world for whom Unity is a good idea, but none of them are me. The look is garish and ugly, and it takes twice as many clicks as it did before to get to an application through their supposedly “friendly” interface as it did in GNOME Classic. No, dammit, I do not want to text-search my applications to call one up!

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But the real crash landing was when I found out that the Unity dock won’t let you manage two instances of the terminal emulator separately. Oh, you can click the terminal icon twice and get two instances, and even minimize them separately, but they’re tied to the same dock icon when minimized. If you click it to unminimize, both pop back up. That did it; clearly Unity is a toy, not intended for anybody doing serious work.

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I was miserable until I found out how to fall back to GNOME Classic. But then a few days later I upgraded to 11.10 and my real troubles began.

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Yes, there’s an 11.10 option that called itself “GNOME Classic”, but it’s a lie. What you get with it is a sort of half-hearted, crippled emulation of the 2.x look and feel with none of the actual Classic themes. So crippled, in fact, that you can’t even set up focus-follows-mouse properly; there’s an option for it, but you have to change that through an obscure utility (not installed by default) called “gnome-tweak-tool” – and there’s no autoraise option to go with it, so the option is effectively useless. Your focus changes but your window-stacking doesn’t!

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It gets worse. While you can add applets to the fake GNOME panel, you cannot remove them or shuffle them around. Eventually, by making a fresh account, taking checksums of its dotfiles, adding an applet, and taking checksums again, I found out that the new panel configuration lives in a file called .config/dconf/user that is an opaque binary blob. There’s a resource editor for the blob, but I could find no way to edit the panel applet list in it. Eventually I was reduced to deleting the blob to return to a default configuration.

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There are so many things wrong with the new GNOME that it’s hard to know where to begin. I’m going to pass swiftly over the evaluation that Unity looks like a candy-coated turd, because many people will dismiss that a mere esthetic quibble. It would be petty of me, perhaps, to grouch about losing my astronomical wallpapers. But the whole direction of GNOME – emphasizing slick appearance over function, stripping control away from the user in the name of “simplification” – is perverse. They’ve now managed the worst of all worlds – crippled, ugly desktops that meet neither the needs of end-users nor of techies.

+

The worst, though, is that .config/dconf/user file. One can haggle back and forth about esthetics, and argue that my judgment about what end-users want may be faulty. But burying my configuration inside an opaque binary blob – that is unforgivably stupid and bad engineering. How did forty years of Unix heritage comes to this? It’s worse than the Windows registry, and perpetrated by people who have absolutely no excuse for not knowing better.

+

I’ll spell it out explicitly because there are a few non-programmers in my audience. User configuration data goes in plain text files, not binary blobs. There are many reasons for this, and one is so they can be hand-edited when the shiny GUI configurators turn out to be buggy or misdesigned. No programmer who doesn’t grasp this bit of good practice has any business writing a window manager, especially not on a Unix-derived system. The fact that this botch shipped in GNOME 3 tells me the GNOME system architects are incompetents who I cannot trust with my future.

+

Me? I’ve bailed out to KDE. And I may be bailing out of Ubuntu. I want control of my desktop back. I want an applet panel or dock I can edit, I want my focus-follows-mouse-with autoraise back, I want to be able to set my own wallpaper slideshow. Most of all what I want is a window manager that will add to my control of my desktop with each future release rather than subtracting from it. Suggestions, anyone?

+

UPDATE: XFCE looks like where I’m landing.

diff --git a/20111019131433.blog b/20111019131433.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..26c1291 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111019131433.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Return of the reposturgeon! +

reposurgeon 1.2 is shipped.

+

This is the repository editor I wrote about back in 2010; description here, architectural lessons here.

+

I did a conversion of the repo for the Roundup issue tracker, which had a messy history. It started out as CVS, got up-converted to Subversion, and I grabbed it with git-svn. Cleaning up the geological strata of conversion artifacts taught me some useful things.

+

Accordingly, a main feature in this release is a command that finds and removes zero-content commits created by cvs2svn->git-svn conversions. Also, the repository merge operation is no longer confused by out-of-order commits.

diff --git a/20111023095752.blog b/20111023095752.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b96c8c2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111023095752.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Looking for reposurgeon test cases +

I just released reposurgeon 1.2 and am continuing to develop the tool. In order to test some of the newer features, I’m looking for repository conversions to do. If you run an open-source project that is still using CVS or Subversion, or some odd non-distributed VCS, I may be willing to lift it to git for you (and from git to any other DVCS you might prefer is a pretty small step). Details of this offer follow; limited time only, first come, first served.

+

(Why have me do it? Well…especially for older projects with a complex revision history, it’s a messy and daunting job. The tools are somewhat flaky, the difference between a sloppy conversion and a good one is significant, and good conversions require experience and judgment.)

+

+

The ideal test for reposurgeon is a Subversion repository of a project that was formerly CVSed and contains a lot of junk commits and artifacts generated by cvs2svn conversion. I’d also like to lift at least one project now in CVS so I can get a good feel for how cvs2svn behaves today (I know it has it has substantial improvements from older versions because I wrote at least one of those improvements myself).

+

The conversion process will look like this:

+

1. If starting from CVS, I’ll make a preliminary conversion with git-cvsimport. If starting with Subversion, I’ll do the preliminary conversion with git-svn. If your repository is in something weird, I’ll need to either find a lifting tool, or possibly build one, or tell you it’s more work than I’m willing to do.

+

2. This is the interesting part: clean up the mess. Up-converted repos tend to be full of conversion artifacts. For example, many versions of cvs2svn mechanically generate commits to represent CVS release tags; a high-quality conversion should create actual tag objects corresponding to the junk commits and delete the junk. Also, any commit references in the change comments need to be fixed up (generally I convert things like Subversion revision numbers to committer + date stamp).

+

The result of a really good after-conversion cleanup looks as though the project had been using git from day one. I’ve done several of these now, mostly on my own projects but recently for the Roundup bug tracker. Each time I do one of these reposurgeon gets better – more features, bugs exposed and fixed. That’s the point; reposurgeon is a good tool, and I want to case-harden it into a great one.

+

There are some conditions on this offer.

+

First and most importantly, I want the result to be used. A conversion typically involves three to four days of hard work. If your repo has a kind of cruft or malformation in it that I haven’t seen before, well, teaching reposurgeon to deal with that is the point of the exercise but it also means the conversion may take longer. A precondition for me to put in that kind of work is that the political ducks have to be lined up first – the project has to have decided to move and be willing to use the results. (Yes, the project should exercise due diligence to verify that I haven’t screwed up; that’s a different issue.)

+

I’m only willing to do a limited number of these, so if I get a flood of requests I’m going to be choosy. Preference will go to projects that are older and/or more important and/or larger. The ideal candidate would be an important piece of open-source infrastructure with a long, messy history rooted in CVS or RCS or SCCS.

+

If you want it, conversion from git to another DVCS (hg, bzr, whatever) is your problem. I’ll point you at tools, but the only part I’m interested in is already done when you have your git repo.

+

Again, the sort of capability I’m looking to improve in reposurgeon is automated recognition and cleanup of conversion cruft. I may experiment with features like branch merge detection if conditions seem right.

+

UPDATE: When you make your request, please have the following things ready:

+

1. A repository-access URL.

+

2. An authors file mapping local user IDs to email addresses and user names (the git up-conversion needs this).

diff --git a/20111025060136.blog b/20111025060136.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..05763b0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111025060136.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Bride of the reposturgeon! +

Another big repository conversion – the Hercules project – brings with it some new bug fixes and features, so reposurgeon 1.3 has shipped.

+

+

The cvspreen command has been renamed to cvslift. cvslift now generates real tag objects corresponding to cvs2svn-generated tags. Comments that read ‘*** empty log message ***’ are no longer coalesced (cvs2svn generates these). There are various bug fixes, including for a crash bug in rebuild after expunge. The default set of files to be preserved is now set properly in a repository-type-dependent manner.

+

I’ve moved the code to Python 3 (but don’t worry as it will run in 2.7.2 under the -3 option). No real reason except that it was about time for me to get familiar with 2to3 and the forward-porting process.

+

The general offer to convert your project’s repo is still open. It may not be for long. however; the Hercules conversion turned up fewer bugs and deficiencies than my last one (as expected) and the next will probably turn up fewer still.

diff --git a/20111025155435.blog b/20111025155435.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6503242 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111025155435.blog @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +A DVCS migration howto +

This is a consequence of my recent adventures in repository conversion – a detailed discussion of how to do a high-quality lift of a CVS or Subversion repo to DVCS-land, how to make both git and hg users happy, and what sorts of good practices to teach to keep things tidy.

diff --git a/20111027051547.blog b/20111027051547.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0c10633 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111027051547.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +On not being destroyed by travel +

On G+, Stephen Shankland links to RMS’s travel rules. He faintly praises their transparency but finds them a bit bizarre. For contrast, here are my travel rules, from back when I was accepting a lot of speaking engagements:

+

Yes, mine are much simpler, but don’t be quick to judge RMS until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes. The kind of constant travel and speaking he does, and that I used to do, is more psychologically exhausting than anyone who hasn’t done it will ever understand. Even the smallest details of comfort start to matter a lot after a few months of it; it’s like your nerves get scraped raw.

+

+

I used to think rock bands on tour were just being primadonnas when their tour contracts specified minute details about their dressing room setups and what small luxuries promoters should lay on. Now I know better – it’s a psychological and even physiological survival tactic, minimizing cortisol stress.

+

So: conditions such as RMS and I insist on may look like we’re demanding to be coddled in odd and arbitrary ways just because we can (IIRC Perl Jam’s tour contract actually specified the color of the M&Ms in the bowl in the singer’s dressing room) but don’t you believe it. After a while such exactness becomes brutally necessary, and even so you still get weary unto death. This is high on the list of reasons I don’t tour any more.

+

And it’s doubtless harder on RMS than on me. At least I’m an extrovert.

diff --git a/20111027155204.blog b/20111027155204.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..667bbca --- /dev/null +++ b/20111027155204.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Sprint Doubles Down on Dumb +

One of my regular commenters points out an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal,
+Sprint Could Yet Strike Out With iPhone. “SPQR” interprets it as follows:

+

+The article states that Sprint’s cost to run the iPhone is $15.5 billion over four years. Unclear to me what that “cost” means from the article. The iPhone won’t have a positive impact on Sprint operating income before depreciation and amortization until 2015. The article then implies that outside of that cost are the costs of upgrades to network to support iPhone data useage on its unlimited plans, resulting in a “cash shortfall of up to $5 billion” through 2013. Again, vague what that exactly consists of. Sprint says that the estimated wholesale cost of the iPhone is 40% or $200 more than other smartphones.

+

If Apple is running margins that essentially suck the profit out of the wireless phone telcos and into its own pockets, then there is another way that dropping market share can rapidly attack Apple’s margins – and that is by removing their leverage against the wireless phone companies

+

The article is oriented around a reference made by Hesse, CEO of Sprint Nextel, in a earnings call where he made a reference to “Moneyball” about how smart the iPhone is to him. But the article points out, that the Moneyball theory is low wage value players not high wage players, and claims that Hesse got his metaphor backwards. +

+

SPQR is quite right, but to understand the degree of wishful thinking Hesse is exhibiting here you have to bear in mind the huge Damned Fact that drives the behavior of Sprint and other telcos: the real rates of return on carrier cell networks are negative! The carriers are burning capital, all day, every day.

+

When ROI is negative, you become desperate to drive down costs or pull up margins. Desperation makes CEOs stupid; Hesse is exhibiting that kind of stupidity by placing a bet that even if he shovels most of Sprint’s present profits down down Apple’s throat, the iPhone will push Sprint’s margins up soon enough for the deal to be a net positive in four years.

+

Meanwhile, in the real world, Android’s U.S. market share is probably passing 50% right about now. I wonder how long it will take for Sprint’s board to realize they’ve been had and fire Hesse’s ass?

diff --git a/20111029172206.blog b/20111029172206.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8d75eff --- /dev/null +++ b/20111029172206.blog @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +Repositories in Translation +

I’ve been doing a lot of repository conversions recently, lifting ancient project histories from Subversion or even CVS into modern distributed version control systems. I’ve written about the technical problems with these conversions elsewhere but they also raise issues that are almost philosophical – and not unlike, actually, the challenges natural-language translators face moving a literary work between human languages.

+

+

In translations between human languages, there’s always an issue with constructions and idioms that are present in one language but not the other. This leads to a fundamental question about whether to prefer a literal or figurative translation. For example consider the French phrase “mon petit chou”; translating it literally gives you “my little cabbage”, which sounds very silly in English even if you know enough French to be well aware that it’s a term of endearment analogous to, say, “sweetie”. So most translators will opt for a free rendering that conveys authorial intent rather than wording – and then perhaps find they’re in technical trouble a few paragraphs later if another character makes a pun about cabbages.

+

Repository conversions raise startlingly similar issues. For a really low-level example of idioms mismatching, consider changeset references. In Subversion, a changeset reference is a number that increments from one; the conventional way of writing a reference just looks like “r235″ for the 235th commit. All the commits take place on one server and are time-ordered, so monotonically increasing commit numbers make sense.

+

This isn’t so in DVCSes, which are built around history merging. They’re like moving from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics; there’s no reliable linear time ordering from a single clock anymore, just lots of change histories in different peer repos diverging and reconverging. A commit ID is a hash of the contents of an entire code tree (and the hashes of its parents); it describes content, not sequence.

+

So, when you’re converting a Subversion repo to a DVCS, and the change comments contain references to other changesets – like, say, “r235″ – what do you do? You can’t leave it untranslated, it would just be a meaningless tag that would impair the readability of the history. That would be bad, because project histories (in a way more literary works never do) have a function. People read them to understand code and fix bugs. We never want to throw away the information that the author of commit A intended to refer to a specific other commit B in his comment; that could be important.

+

The tactic I use is to replace commit references in the language of any given VCS with a combination of committer name and commit timestamp (or unambiguous part thereof). In principle I could use the target DVCS’s hash for the commit, but why translate to a magic cookie that’s going to break – and need to be retranslated – if the codebase is ever moved to another DVCS?

+

So…”Reverted r235, it introduced a crash bug”, becomes “Reverted Fred Foonly’s commit at 2011-05-19T03:30:26Z, it introduced a crash bug.” I’m doing what a literary translator has to do: render intent instead of wording. And I’m justifying it in detail because hackers get weirdly twitchy about “rewriting history”.

+

There’s actually good reason for this twitchiness. People irresponsibly or maliciously messing with change histories threaten all the reputation incentives that make the whole hacker social machine hum. The weirdness and emotional intensity about it comes partly from how vitally important those incentives are, and partly from the fact that many hackers understand them only half-consciously and not very well. Consequently, they overprotect; I’ve actually had people accuse me of having made an evil tool because reposurgeon can easily edit comment histories.

+

Pressed, a hacker will admit that you pretty much have to rewrite commit references during a repo translation in order for them to make sense – but odds are he’ll feel uncomfortable, as though by modifying the original comment you’ve done something vaguely unclean or disreputable.

+

Now, one could translate like this: “Reverted Fred Foonly’s commit at 2011-05-19T03:30:26Z, it introduced a crash bug. (This reference was to ‘r235′ in the Subversion history.)” But, really, there wouldn’t be much functional point to this. The r235 is still meaningless in the new context; adding that parenthetical would be at best a ritual gesture of appeasement towards Thou Shall Not Rewrite History.

+

There is actually good reason not to perform that gesture. It’s a functional reason; the comment is there to convey a meaning, which the gesture distracts from. We’re actually near the territory of literary translation here, where one of the things a translator is not supposed to do is obtrude between the reader and the author.

+

Here’s another idiom mismatch where we don’t even have an equivalent of the ritual gesture available: tag names. A tag is just an arbitrary name for a version in the repository history. The most common use for tags is to identify shipped releases. So, for example, in the GPSD repository there’s a tag “3.3” for the release 3.3 I just shipped. (One wants this, of course, so that when someone reports a bug in public release 3.3 one can see exactly what that code was and what has changed since.)

+

The reason there’s a translation issue here is because older VCSes often had limitations on the form of a tag name – had to begin with a letter, couldn’t contain dots or other punctuation, that sort of thing. So tags from older systems tend to look like this: “release-3-3″.

+

When I translate a tag like that into modern, less restrictive VCS, I change it into “3.3”. It’s not what the original committer wrote, but it is probably what he/she was actually thinking. Intent, not wording. More generally, a really high-quality conversion of a Subversion or CVS repo into (for example) git should, as much as possible, look like what the developers would have created if they had been using git from day one – as opposed to carefully preserving Subversion/CVS idioms in amber because that’s more authentic.

+

Why? Again, repo translations are not primarily history or literature; they are intended to support the difficult work of understanding the code history so problems can be solved. The best translation of ancient history in a repo interferes as little as possible with the process of understanding the actual code.

+

Fortunately, this rule doesn’t collide with the social requirement that past hackers be properly credited (or blamed!) for their work. Nothing in a repository translation will ever require that anybody’s name be struck from the annals. Actually, translating to a modern DVCS requires that committers be identified by an unambiguous internet-wide identifier (an email address) rather than the old-style local usernames of CVS and Subversion. Thus, the attribution information in a DVCS is actually better than in older systems. It is impossible for hackers to object to this :-).

+

The rule that a good translation minimizes the reader’s cognitive friction – actually hides the degree to which it is a translation, except in a discreet note up front – is parallel to good practice in literary translation as well. But when you start applying it seriously, you will do things that make hackers twitchy.

+

Here’s one: When I’m reviewing old changeset comments during a repository lift, I fix obvious typos. Just one less thing for future hackers to trip over in the history when they’re trying to get serious analysis done. Intent, not wording!

+

Here’s another: On some translations where I was able to deduce the right referent for missing release tags, I silently added them…and attributed them to the project lead or release manager, back-dating them to the proper changeset. I chose to treat the repo as a slightly incomplete or damaged representation of the good practice its developers were trying to achieve, rather than authentically leaving the omissions in place.

+

One reason to take this attitude is that older automated repo-conversion tools such as cvs2svn really did have a tendency to damage that representation – often you just can’t tell whether the absence of a tag or slight garbling of other metadata was the result of a human slipup or a bug in a conversion tool.

+

The place where free translation raises the most issues is massaging comments into the form DVCSes prefer. Modern systems have log-summary tools that strongly encourage formatting change comments not as running paragraphs but as one standalone summary line optionally followed by a blank line and running paragraphs.

+

Most comments are one-liners anyway. Many of the multiline comments can be
+turned into summary-line-plus form by inserting whitespace after the first sentence. But in extreme cases (about 0.5% of the time) I find I have to write entire summary sentences myself. (Yeah, that’ll send some of my readers to their fainting couches!)

+

The gods of Thou Shalt Not Rewrite History should not go entirely unappeased. I think it is a good idea to embed some indication of what you’ve changed in the repo history. Which is why the very first commit comment in the git translation of the Hercules repo now reads like this:

+

+Initial repository setup

+

{You are actually looking at the result of two history lifts. This
+ project started out in CVS. In January of 2009 it was moved to
+ Subversion. On October 24 2011 it was moved to git, with the comment
+ history edited to turn Subversion commit references into references by
+ content and/or commit date, and massage comments into git form with a
+ summary line. Here and elsewhere, comment portions in curly braces
+ without preceding $ were added at conversion time.} +

+

I’ve tried to hold the number of curly-brace comments to a minimum. I still haven’t decided whether I should sign my name in this one.

+

UPDATE: A commenter persuades me of two things:

+

1. The square brackets often used to mark ellipses and editorial comments may be a better convention – doubled, to avoid ambiguity with square brackets used in code snippets that might appear in comments. So: [[Note from the translator: ...]]

+

2. For the sake of future browsing tools, inserted commit IDs should be in a uniform format, like this: “[[2011-10-25T15:11:09Z/fred@foonly.com]]“. This is an ISO8601 timestamp followed by an RFC822 mail address – unambiguous and easy to machine-parse. The brackets indicate a translation note and are not intended to be part of the ID format.

diff --git a/20111030082444.blog b/20111030082444.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..18b3ce9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111030082444.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +RFC: Action stamps +

This is a request for comment on a convention for uniquely identifying user actions on the Internet. The motivating context was identifying commit changesets in version-control systems in a way independent of the specific VCS. It is anticipated that this format will have uses in recording many other similar sorts of transactions, including actions on web interfaces, where we want a simple cookie identifying “who did this and when”.

+

+

The proposed format is designated an “action stamp” and consists of an RFC3339 timestamp in Zulu time, followed by an exclamation point, followed by an RFC822 address (technically, an “addr-spec” as defined in 6.1).

+

Thus: 2011-10-25T15:11:09Z!fred@foonly.com

+

Advantages of this format include:

+

* Uniqueness: In distributed VCSes and elsewhere, email addresses are widely accepted as primary identity keys. The timestamp can be extended to subsecond precision to lower collision probability as far as desired.

+

* Well-definedness: RFC3339 and RFC822 are well-written, widely accepted standards with lots of existing software support.

+

* Ease of parsing: The format is textual, syntactically unambiguous, and easily mined from surrounding text. It is readily distinguishable from (a) a plain timestamp, (b) a filename, or (c) a standalone email address. Humans can read it easily.

+

* Good sorting properties: RFC3339 is a profile of ISO8601, which is designed so that lexical sort order coincides with timestamp order. Action stamps inherit this.

+

* Simplicity and compactness: Really, how could it get any simpler? Exactly one character of overhead.

+

Now I’ll address some possible points of contention with this proposal.

+

1. Why an exclamation point? Because nothing else uses it. Not since bang-path addresses went out of style, anyway.

+

2. Bletch. The T in the timestamp is ugly. Yes, it is. Live with it; whitespace there would break the action stamp into two tokens, which is undesirable for a cookie that we want to be readily machine-parsable. Also the T is a useful cue that the reader is looking at RFC3339/ISO8601.

+

3. Is the trailing ‘Z’ on the timestamp really necessary? Yes, it is. Local times are ambiguous without a location – you want something in the action stamp that makes it clear what timezone is intended and the easier way to do that is to mandate Zulu time (UTC/GMT) in the format. The Z is a reminder that it’s Zulu time.

+

4. Email addresses change, expire, and one person may have several. True, but the same would be true of any other identity token we could use in these. Email addresses have the desirable properties of being simple, universal, and implicitly describing a communication channel to the person. Experience with DVCSes, PGP keys, and ssh keys has taught us that the edge cases are manageable.

+

5. Er, there isn’t really much to this proposal, is there? That’s right. Brutal simplicity is part of the point.

+

Comments and criticism welcome. If reaction is positive I might try to turn this into an actual IETF RFC.

diff --git a/20111030141816.blog b/20111030141816.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..09cf929 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111030141816.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +Dennis Ritchie day +

Tim O’Reilly proposes that we designate the 30th of October as “Dennis Ritchie day”. That works for me. Pass it on.

+

Since my readers are probably wondering: Yes, I knew Dennis slightly. He contributed to The Art Of Unix Programming and was very supportive of the project. He was indeed as pleasant and gracious as others report…a true gentleman and, of course, a hacker of such stratospheric accomplishment as to have few or no peers. But he treated me like one anyway — and that was an honor.

diff --git a/20111030222932.blog b/20111030222932.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ee5f4b5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111030222932.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +The pros and cons of tethering +

Until Tuesday (2011-11-01), I am sort of half-cut-off from the Internet. I can browse, I can blog, and I can push commits to my project repos, but I can’t do IRC or mail. This is a heads-up for my GPSD and other collaborators; I’m still here.

+

How this happened is a case study in 21st-century Internet vicissitudes…

+

+

That freak early storm that dumped heavy snow up and down the East Coast took out the FIOS line to my house on Saturday night. I was half-panicking at the thought of no Internet when I realized that I could solve p[art of the problem by tethering my desktop machine to my smartphone.

+

Thus, browsing and blogging and repo pushes. However…because of spam coming off T-Mobile’s network, Freenode blocks connections from it; no IRC for me. I also have no incoming mail because thyrsus.com is the downstairs server connected to my FIOS line.

+

Sigh…won’t be fixed until Tuesday.

diff --git a/20111102200717.blog b/20111102200717.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0908c38 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111102200717.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +Revenge of the reposturgeon! +

Reposurgeon 1.5 is out. This is a major release based on experience gained converting the roundup repository.

+

+

The main new feature is code to help in fixing up fossil CVS and SVN commit references, turning them into action stamps. I had to think about the design carefully here, because the task combines a front end that humans do better than machines with a back end that machines do much better than humans.

+

The problem: You’ve lifted your Subversion repo to git with git-svn or some similar tool. But the comments still have references in them that look like, say, “r2317″. You want to replace these to point to the corresponding changesets in the git repo, but there may be lots of them, and even if patching each one by hand weren’t a huge pain in the ass it’s a fiddly job at which your error rate is likely to be significant.

+

The part of this task humans are good at is recognizing from context all the random forms a reference can take. There’s the canonical “r2317″, “SVN#2317″, “commit 2317″, “rev 2317″, and other variants. Machines aren’t good at reduciing ambiguity; I passed on solving the strong-AI problem and designed for a workflow in which the human first replaces all these variants with a uniform machine-parseable cookie – to wit, “[[SVN:2317]].

+

Then the machine does what it’s good at, which is crunching through the logic to replace that cookie with an action-stamp pointing at the same changeset. A human doing this by hand would be prone to boredom-induced detail errors and typos.

+

How does it get the mapping from revision number to time!committer? One way is if the repo comments contain metadata put in changeset comments specifically to support this, which git-svn does. (reposurgeon also has a command to strip out all that metadata when you’re done with it.)

+

Or – and here’s the tricky part – reposurgeon will sometimes be able to mine that information out of CVS keyword expansions. So, to take a real-world example from the roundup repo, let’s say a blob in the repo has this string in it:

+


+$Id: ru.po,v 1.6 2004-07-03 13:51:03 a1s Exp $
+

+

Then reposurgeon knows that the reference cookie [[CVS:ru.po:1.6]] should be replaced by an action-stamp pointing at whatever commit this blob is attached to (if there are two or more such commits it just grabs the first; this is a bug and I’ll fix it in 1.6).

+

UPDATE: Duh…I had already fixed it to throw an error in that case! What I need to do is try to correctly handle cases where all but one of the possibilities can be discarded because they refer to the wrong branches.

+

Fear the reposturgeon!

+

UPDATE: Mike Swanson pointed out a Python 3 compatibility problem, so I snap-released 1.6 about a day later.

diff --git a/20111103084213.blog b/20111103084213.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9bcab72 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111103084213.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Names and consequences +

freshmeat.net abruptly changed its name to freecode.com a couple of days ago. As a consequence, the little program I wrote to submit release announcements to it is now renamed freecode-submit.

+

People who ship releases frequently enough to find freecode-submit essential might also want to look at shipper, which I wrote to automate other aspects of release shipping as well.

+

shipper is how, when I want to ship a release of one of my projects, I can normally just type “make release” and the right things will happen – webpage updates, freecode release notification, SourceForge release, and release-tagging in the project repository.

diff --git a/20111103172227.blog b/20111103172227.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2b09d4e --- /dev/null +++ b/20111103172227.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Son of the reposturgeon! +

Somebody said “Release early, release often.” once…and, just a day after reposurgeon 1.5, reposurgeon 1.6 is out, with a bug fix and a tasty new feature.

+

+

The bug fix should prevent Python 3.2 from blowing up on the code. More significant is that I found a way to eliminate a fiddly step in my migration guide.

+

git-svn creates a local repository that is arranged for use as a live gateway to the remote Subversion repo. So it preserves information about the mapping between git commits and Subversion commits. But it also keeps all the branches as remotes, not what you want for a fully-converted local git repo.

+

Because of this, there are at least two programs named svn2git floating around that are wrappers around git-svn, existing mainly to move those branches. I give directions for doing this by hand, but it’s an error-prone step that humans really shouldn’t do.

+

Now they don’t have to. reposurgeon’s 1.6 gitsvnparse command – which you’d run in this situation anyway to build the map of Subversion commits – does it automatically. This is safe, because the operation is information-preserving and idempotent.

+

In a future release I’ll probably do something about converting the local lightweight tags this produces to real tag objects.

+

Fear the reposturgeon!

diff --git a/20111105081906.blog b/20111105081906.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c7a228d --- /dev/null +++ b/20111105081906.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Signs and Portents +

The September comScore numbers are out, and the market transition hinted at by the June numbers seems to be under way. Growth in the U.S. smartphone market is slowing, and the flavor of the competitive game is about to change.

+

+

Since early 2011 I’ve been writing that the U.S. smartphone market didn’t look like its players were in a zero-sum game. In particular, both Android and Apple were spared having to compete head-to-head in each others’ core markets by the huge volume of dumbphone conversions and customers bailing out of RIM and Microsoft. But I also expected this to change in 3Q2011 as the U.S. smartphone market neared saturation; this change was hinted at in the June numbers and I think the September ones show it arriving right on schedule.

+

Comparing the first and third graphs at statistics page tells the story. Apple and Android userbases are continuing to grow on their usual trendlines, but RIM and Microsoft seem to have found some sort of floor; their decline has notably slowed and (if you’re prepared to trust the last decimal digit, which I’m not) Microsoft may even have picked up a handful of users.

+

This means it’s going to be a tougher game from now on. Android and Apple have captured the easy switchers; now they’re going to have to fight harder for increased share, and more against each other.

+

Apple fans will want to spin the flat Apple share numbers as people holding off purchases for the 4S, and will predict a big spike in Apple’s October numbers. The trouble with this a narrative is that we could equally interpret the fall-off in Android share growth as people waiting for Android 4 – and meanwhile, the ratio between share growth rates has actually increased in Android’s favor.

+

Again, it’s helpful to compare with the userbase graph; there’s no sign of weakness in Android’s competitive position there. The longer-term U.S. trend is still that Android is growing twice as fast as Apple, and in fact the difference in growth rates is widening rather than narrowing.

+

For some perspective, let’s hop across the pond. In England, Android utterly crushes its competition. The article doesn’t specify whether “market share” is installed base a la comScore or new sales, but either way it’s nor a pretty picture for competitors. RIM has seen a slight recent uptick, but everybody else – including Apple – has gotten kerb-stomped.

+

Of course, the 4S could still surprise everyone in the holiday season. But we’re now in the third cycle of “Oooh! Oooh! the New Apple phone will crush Android and restore Cupertino’s rightful dominance…” and we all know what became of those blithe and wishful imaginings the first two times. The smart bet is that this time won’t be different.

diff --git a/20111107191602.blog b/20111107191602.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..84d1973 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111107191602.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +Night of the living reposturgeon! +

reposurgeon 1.7 is out. Fewer obvious changes this time; the big feature is that it knows how to read and use the CVS revision maps generated by the -R option of git-cvsimport. This means that it can patch CVS revision references into an action-stamp form that makes sense in a VCS-independent way.

+

Fear the reposturgeon!

diff --git a/20111110161239.blog b/20111110161239.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..162a869 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111110161239.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Reposturgeon from the Black Lagoon! +

reposurgeon 1.8 is out, and with this release it has all the conversion features I’ve been able to think up while doing the last couple of conversions. This version creates real tags from the lightweight tags generated by git-svn, and also consolidates matched D/A pairs from Subversion into renames.

+

An “edit multiline” variant of the “edit” command zeroes in on commit comments that need to be tweaked into the approved form for hg and git (summary line, plus optional blank line, plus optional details).

+

The selection-set syntax has a new element: =H selects tip (or H for head) commits.

+

A new ‘sort’ command can make the DAG after a graft or merge display better in tools such as gitk.

+

With this release, I think I’m done for a while – barring bug reports, of course. I’m shipped a new version of my DVCS Migration Guide to go with it.

+

Fear the reposturgeon!

diff --git a/20111114085016.blog b/20111114085016.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8523dce --- /dev/null +++ b/20111114085016.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Attack of the 50-foot reposturgeon +

Well, I thought I was done hacking on this for a while. Then one of the projects I did a conversion for disclosed the existence of a second repo for their website, which I had to merge into the code repo. As a subdirectory. Which meant pushing all the file paths into a subdirectory. Which meant the new “paths sub” command; I wrote “paths sup” as its natural dual.

+

Also in this release: automatic preservation of untracked files under git and hg.

+

Fear the reposturgeon!

diff --git a/20111114195844.blog b/20111114195844.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4fe07e7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111114195844.blog @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +Sneaking up on the forge problem +

I’ve written before about the problems with today’s software-forge sites – how they’re craptacular piles of PHP driving direct SQL queries with almost zero scriptability that become data jails for open-source projects. I’ve hinted that I think there’s a potential solution based on Roundup, a brilliantly simple and powerful message queue manager disguised as a mere issue tracker.

+

+

Two years ago I started an effort to address the data jail called “forgeplucker”. This project has since stalled, partly due to problems (irony alert!) at the hosting site I put it on, and partly because there was a basic problem with it that I acknowledged at the time: it doesn’t do a lot of good to have working project state extractors if none of the forges are writing injectors. Nobody has stepped up to do that, leaving forgeplucker a useful learning experience but something of a dead end in itself.

+

One of my regulars recently predicted that I would do something dramatic about the forge problem within two years. That prediction was correct; in fact, I’ve already begun the preparation work.

+

However, I’m not announcing a new forge. Yet. The path I’m pursuing is sneakier and more interesting than that. It relies on the fact that there is a mature, stable, and field-tested implementation of Roundup already in existence in fact, the Python development group uses it as their issue tracker.

+

Roundup has a number of interesting properties. One is that every capability in it can be scripted via a mail robot or an XML-RPC interface. Another is that the message queues are accessible through either a web-forum-like interface or email – content is separated from presentation. Most importantly, it already works – it’s got ten years of history, tested code, happy users, and a development community.

+

Some weeks ago I joined the Roundup development list, explaining my interest in using it as a platform for a future forge system. As a first contribution I explained about reposurgeon and offered to lift the project repo from Subversion to a DVCS; the project founder accepted this offer, and I have done the job. As a nice side effect, reposurgeon grew a nice list of new capabilities in the process, essentially everything in releases 1.3 to 1.10.

+

So now I’m a dev on the Roundup project, in fact an administrator (which was needed so I could do the repo manipulations). My plan is to add certain new primitive capabilities to Roundup. Each of these capabilities is orthogonal to the others and can be functionally justified on its own terms. Here are the big ones:

+

Extract/inject: Extract will dump the state of a Roundup instance as a big hunk of (yes) JSON; inject will take that JSON and use it to populate a live Roundup instance. The standalone justification for this is that it can be used for tracker state backups.

+

Namespaces: Presently, each Roundup instance hosts just one tracker (message queue). It should be possible for a Roundup instance to host multiple named message queues. The standalone justification for this is…itself.

+

Network-wide identities: Presently, Roundup identities are login-name/password pairs. It should move to being based on email addresses coupled with ssh and PGP keys – network-wide credentials the way DVCSes handle identity. The standalone justification for this is to reduce the number of credentials Roundup users need to manage.

+

A repository-management class. Roundup has a role-based permissions system. A primitive object type could be added to Roundup that would use that permissions system to control access to a DVCS repository.

+

There’s no mystery intended about where this is going. If all these features were successfully added to Roundup, it would have all the capabilities of a forge. The message queues would span the functions of issue trackers and mailing lists. The “forge” part would be some management logic for associating a group of message-queue namespaces and repository objects with a project name and giving them all one set of access permissions.

+

But I don’t want or need to promise a forge yet. The plan is to add these primitive orthogonal features to Roundup. At each stage they’ll get actual testing in real deployments. Rather than trying to design a forge now, what I aim to do is push these capabilities into Roundup until one of two things happens:

+

1. I hit a wall. The underlying architecture isn’t robust enough to carry these features. (I regard this as possible but very unlikely.) If this happens, I have to think up another approach.

+

2. All these features are successfully integrated. Then a forge could be written as a thin layer over the enhanced Roundup – and, functionally speaking, it would nuke every existing forge from orbit. Just the complete XML-RPC scriptability alone would make it a category-killer.

+

I have not started coding yet, mainly because I have a writing project I’ve promised I’d finish before I dive into this. But the existence of Roundup will save immense amounts of coding and community-building. The project has a ten-year history; I estimate it would take four to five person-years to duplicate the capabilities it already has in a stable and tested codebase.

+

With Roundup to start from, on the other hand, I think we could get to a world-beating platform for forge-building in nine months to a year. I’m going to do extract/inject as my first bit, building on experience with ForgePlucker. One of my blog regulars, Susan Stewart aka HedgeMage, has already joined the Roundup project with the intention of doing the network-identity piece. We’d love to have somebody working on implementing namespaces; all these things should be doable in parallel.

+

If you want to help, please join the roundup-devel mailing list, introduce yourself, and explain which part you want to work on.

diff --git a/20111116173857.blog b/20111116173857.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a860cea --- /dev/null +++ b/20111116173857.blog @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +Against decentralized bugtracking +

I’ve spent a lot of time and bandwidth on this blog thinking out loud about version-control systems and software forges. In my last post, I announced that I was going to try to sneak up on the problem of designing a better software forge by enhancing Roundup.

+

Over the last three years I’ve gotten a couple different versions of the following response to my thinking-out-loud: “Centralized forges and bugtracking are old-school thinking, as hoary as centralized VCSes. Why shouldn’t all that metadata live in the project repo and be peer-merged on demand the way code is?”

+

This is a good question, but I think the people advocating systems like Bugs Everywhere, scmbug, and ticgit have invested a lot of cleverness in the wrong answer.

+

+

In order to see why, we need to look at a very basic question: Why do DVCSes work? And more to the point, why did it take us so long to figure out that they would work?

+

The original, oldest-school RCS/SCCS model of source control used locking. When you wanted to modify a file. you checked it out and locked it. Then you modified it, then you checked it back in and released the lock.

+

The locking model was founded on two assumptions. First, that that modification conflicts would be frequent and severe enough that they could only be prevented by granting programmers temporary keep-out exclusions. Second, that the timescale of whole coherent changes – the interval between “I start working on this thought” and “I’m done” would generally be pretty short.

+

The people who wrote these early version control systems believed, in other words, that source code has locality and contention patterns a lot like a database. Databases beg to have access to them carefully serialized, with reliable locking, because their usage pattern is one that involves frequent access contention over small pieces of data.

+

But both database-centric assumptions were incorrect. Actual experience showed that modification conflicts in source code are rare, usually mechanically resolvable, and if not almost always easily resolvable by eyeball and hand. On the other hand, the actual time scale of coherent changes is long enough that locking all the files required for them over the whole span would frequently cause conflicts, even though conflicts over the actual individual small spans of code being modified within them are so rare.

+

As we gradually figured this out over a span of about twenty years, conflict resolution in VCSes moved from lock-based to merge-based, with DVCSes at the end of that evolution.

+

DVCSes are based on the assumption that a programmer can clone a repo, disappear into a cave, and spend days or weeks coding in isolation in the sublime confidence that when he/she wants to rejoin the world, peer-merging with other repos will still be pretty easy. And…usually…it is easy. Large projects like the Linux kernel depend especially heavily on this assumption – they’d collapse if it weren’t true.

+

Code, it turns out, is not like a database. Strictly serializing access to source code isn’t that important, because most changesets are mutually irrelevant and mutually commutative. (Though when you put it that way, a programmer will be apt to gulp and boggle before eventually conceding the point.)

+

OK, so, the people who advocate decentralized forges and bugtracking have on the face of it a strong historical case. Decentralization worked big-time for managing code changes; isn’t it silly, a repetition of old-school locking-VCS narrow-think, to doubt that it will work just as well for…say…bug-tracking?

+

Indeed, a stupid person could reject distributed bug-tracking for stupid reasons. But that doesn’t make all reasons for doubt stupid – and the right question to ask is whether bug records (and other pieces of project metadata) have an access pattern more like source code or a database.

+

I think bug trackers are more like databases than like source code in almost all relevant ways. It’s not necessarily relevant that they’re normally implemented on top of databases; I’m talking about the human workflow around them.

+

The difference is this: When you check out a revision of software, you need to have a coherent state of it, but it’s not necessary that you have every single bleeding-edge changeset of every developer hacking on it everywhere. If J. Random Neckbeard is off in a cave somewhere refactoring a major subsystem, you don’t even want to see his changes until he decides he’s reached a good point to merge up to the public repository.

+

The natural cycle on conversations around bug reports is a lot tighter. If you’re part of a issue-tracker thread that is trying to characterize a bug, and someone else posts critical test results, you want to know about that right now.

+

It’s not that modification conflicts are important in this context; generally they aren’t. No, the issues are (a) timeliness, and (b) having a defined rendezvous point where you can browse fresh metadata, chatter, and attachments related to your bug. All these pull in the direction of centralization, or at the very least a single aggregated event feed at a known location – something more like a blog or social network than a flock of DVCS repos passing around changesets.

+

Other things pull this way as well. Consider this very apt quote from Jonathan Corbet in 2008:

+

+A bug tracker serves as a sort of to-do list for developers, but there is more to it than that. It is also a focal point for a conversation between developers and users. Most users are unlikely to be impressed by a message like “set up a git repository and run these commands to file or comment on a bug.” There is, in other words, value in a central system with a web interface which makes the issue tracking system accessible to a wider community. Any distributed bug tracking system which does not facilitate this wider conversation will, in the end, not be successful. +

+

He’s got a strong point. The perceived technical elegance of distributed bug-tracking gains us nothing if it locks out people who aren’t developers.

+

Corbet also reminds us of an interesting fact when he brings up to-do lists. This is that projects normally have several different kinds of to-do-lists that are managed in different ways.

+

At one extreme, we have roadmap and design documents that change infrequently and have code-like access patterns – that is, modification conflicts are unusual, and having the version of the design document matched to your code is usually much more important than having the latest version.

+

At the other extreme, we have the implicit to-do queue provided by an issue tracker. Items on this tend to change much more quickly and have shorter lifetimes.

+

Somewhere in the middle is the traditional TO-DO file, which tends to be a sort of grafitti wall describing medium-scale tasks.

+

The point I’m driving at here is that the differing ways we manage these to-do lists are a consequence of the workflow around them. To-dos with code-like access patterns want to live in the repository with your code; to-dos with database-like access patterns want to live in a bug tracker or something else like a specialized database engine (blog, wiki, whatever).

+

There’s a more general point here about software forges. Software forges – centralized rendezvous points where project metadata lives in something that is not your repository – make sense precisely to the extent that some project metadata is not like code.

+

Bug databases are the most obvious example. Another one is wikis. Also mailing lists (when you’re on a mailing list, you really want the latest state of the conversation, not just the state your repo happened to get on the last pull.)

+

To sum up: there are natural roles for both the DVCS and the bugtracker/forge, defined by the workflows around them. If we try and force either tool to cover the entire role of the other, the “solution” won’t be comfortable for developers and users, won’t scale well, and just plain won’t fit – no matter how much love and ingenuity we expend on a sweet technical hack.

diff --git a/20111117085640.blog b/20111117085640.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4ef527d --- /dev/null +++ b/20111117085640.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Samsung Busts a Move? +

Well, now, this is interesting. Cyanogen hints via Twitter that we may get a 4.0 Cyanogen ROM in two months.

+

The news coverage I’ve seen so far misses what I think is the most important bit of context – that Cyanogen’s eponymous founder and lead developer got hired by Samsung a few months back. Samsung is subsidizing this move.

+

+

There are obvious reasons for Samsung to have hired Cyanogen that don’t have anything to do with this tweet…heck, if I were running an Android port team he’d certainly be at the top of my list.

+

But I wonder. Is this, maybe, in part Samsung turning up the heat on its competition? Or preparing to?

+

There’s been a lot of disgruntled talk about laggy and skipped upgrades for Android phones. Up to now I think this has mostly been a non-issue, because the app developers’ API compatibility target was really 2.2 or later and upgrades since then have mattered very little in other than cosmetic ways.

+

But with 4.0 issuing this could change. So…watch Samsung’s tempo on over-the-air upgrades, and watch to see if the Cyanogen project executes on making installation of its ROM on EOLed Samsung hardware substantially easier, perhaps with some sort of look-ma-no-hands PC-based universal installer.

+

Yes, I’m just speculating. But Cyanogen with Samsung’s backing is a different and more formidable creature than Cyanogen as some guys in garages. What, if anything, does Samsung hope to gain from that alliance? An underexamined question; perhaps the 4.0 cycle will bring us some answers.

diff --git a/20111123142309.blog b/20111123142309.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dcb2c5e --- /dev/null +++ b/20111123142309.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +“All [our] models are wrong” +

It’s Climategate II, with another email dump from the CRU team, and Phil Jones writing that “All [our] models are wrong”

+

+

I haven’t read the new dump yet. But the quotes journalists have been pulling out are enough to tell me there are no surprises here.

+

Well, that is, no surprises if you’ve read my previous posts about error cascades and the sociology of AGW alarmism.

+

What we’re seeing in these emails is exactly the phenomenon I described; the “team” launched an error cascade that is now hooked into green-shirt political agendas. Peter Thorne: “The science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run”.

+

Thorne also confirmed what I’ve written about several times on this blog: “Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous.”

+

That is, the CRU team itself understands that empirical confirmation for greenhouse warming is lacking. The atmosphere is not doing what the AGW models predict. “Basic problem is that all models are wrong”, writes Phil Jones, bluntly, “not got enough middle and low level clouds.”

+

That’s a fitting epitaph for anthropogenic global warming.

diff --git a/20111124154537.blog b/20111124154537.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..53a77f1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111124154537.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +A relative achievement +

Spencer Lehman. At age 75, a U.S. national champion pole-vaulter. My favorite uncle.

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+

Mother’s brother, for you Norwegian-speakers (update: I misremembered, it turns out to be Swedish that distinguishes ‘morbror’ from ‘farbror’). And you know that archetype of the Malibu-dwelling hippie stockbroker that shows up in comic novels about California? That would be him.

diff --git a/20111124234358.blog b/20111124234358.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f3a73cc --- /dev/null +++ b/20111124234358.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Breaking into writing +

I just tried to post this as a comment on Sarah Hoyt’s post about breaking into writing. Dunno if it went into moderation or just got eaten

+

Sarah, who I esteem very highly and is full of pungent and sensible advice on writing and other matters, left out two rules:

+

+

1. Write the book *before* you sell it.

+

2. The probability that your manuscript will be accepted varies directly with the size of the pre-existing fanbase the editor knows you have.

+

OK, this might just be me. But I’m a successful writer of nonfiction, with four solo books and two collaborations under my belt – all of which have done well. One of the four solo books cracked the NYT bestsellers’ list, and all but the very first of the solo books are still in print. So there’s reason to believe I’ve been doing something right.

+

1. Write the book *before* you sell it.

+

When editors don’t have to deal with the risk that you’ll blow a deadline or not deliver at all, they become amazingly compliant (well, for editors).

+

And it puts you in a power position come contract time. When we’re talking terms, I never have to speak the possibility that I might take the *completed* manuscript down the street to another publisher, but it’s there. Pulling me extra royalty points, and the ability to cross out any clause in the contract that claims rights other than “you get to print and sell this edition of this book” without fuss from the editor.

+

(In particular, *never* sign away the copyright. Nor “ancillary” rights like electronic publication. And if they tell you “standard practice”, your proper reply is “Fuck that noise!”)

+

2. The probability that your manuscript will be accepted varies directly with the size of the pre-existing fanbase the editor has reason to believe you have.

+

It is possible that the most powerful words a writer can say in today’s market is “Look at these site stats! My blog has X thousand readers”, for X high enough that at a 10% or so nibble rate the publisher can count on selling out a normal print run.

+

The most effective way of becoming a famous writer is to be famous for something else, first. Even if it’s just Internet fame – that can be enough.

+

UPDATE: It was in moderation. It has appeared now.

diff --git a/20111127224626.blog b/20111127224626.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7f20647 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111127224626.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +Seven Eight Warning Signs of Junk Science +

I’ve written before about scientific error cascades and the pernicious things that happen when junk science becomes the focus or rationale of a political crusade.

+

The worst example of this sort of thing in my lifetime, and arguably in the entire history of science, has been the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) panic. Now that the wheels are falling off that juggernaut, I’m starting to hear ordinary people around me wonder how I knew it was bullshit and hot air so much in advance…

+

+

Some of the answer to that is complicated and not easily replicable. I happened to have the right sort of knowledge base to know that, for example, specific AGW-panicker claims about historical climate were impossible to reconcile with primary evidence – wine grapes grown at 59 degrees north around the year 1000, that sort of thing. This motivated me to dig for other problems with their narrative well before they were really on the public’s radar.

+

But a lot of it was more general. I’ve seen a lot of “scientific” panics ginned up from nonexistent or scanty evidence over the last several decades. There’s a pattern to these episodes, a characteristic stench that becomes recognizable after a while. I’ll describe some of the indicia, which I’ve culled from episodes like the Alar scare, the ozone-hole brouhaha, the AIDS panic (are you old enough to remember when it was predicted to become endemic among heterosexuals in the U.S.?), acid rain, and even the great global cooling flap of 1975.

+

So. Here is a non-exclusive list of seven eight symptoms to watch out for:

+

Science by press release. It’s never, ever a good sign when ‘scientists’ announce dramatic results before publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. When this happens, we generally find out later that they were either self-deluded or functioning as political animals rather than scientists. This generalizes a bit; one should also be suspicious of, for example, science first broadcast by congressional testimony or talk-show circuit.

+

Rhetoric that mixes science with the tropes of eschatological panic. When the argument for theory X slides from “theory X is supported by evidence” to “a terrible catastrophe looms over us if theory X is true, therefore we cannot risk disbelieving it”, you can be pretty sure that X is junk science. Consciously or unconsciously, advocates who say these sorts of things are trying to panic the herd into stampeding rather than focusing on the quality of the evidence for theory X.

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Rhetoric that mixes science with the tropes of moral panic. When the argument for theory X slides from “theory X is supported by evidence” to “only bad/sinful/uncaring people disbelieve theory X”, you can be even more sure that theory X is junk science. Consciously or unconsciously, advocates who say these sorts of things are trying to induce a state of preference falsification in which people are peer-pressured to publicly affirm a belief in theory X in spite of private doubts.

+

Consignment of failed predictions to the memory hole. It’s a sign of sound science when advocates for theory X publicly acknowledge failed predictions and explain why they think they can now make better ones. Conversely, it’s a sign of junk science when they try to bury failed predictions and deny they ever made them.

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Over-reliance on computer models replete with bugger factors that aren’t causally justified.. No, this is not unique to climatology; you see it a lot in epidemiology and economics, just to name two fields that start with ‘e’. The key point here is that simply fitting historical data is not causal justification; there are lots of ways to dishonestly make that happen, or honestly fool yourself about it. If you don’t have a generative account of why your formulas and coupling constants look the way they do (a generative account which itself makes falsifiable predictions), you’re not doing science – you’re doing numerology.

+

If a ‘scientific’ theory seems tailor-made for the needs of politicians or advocacy organizations, it probably has been. Real scientific results have a cross-grained tendency not to fit transient political categories. Accordingly, if you think theory X stinks of political construction, you’re probably right. This is one of the simplest but most difficult lessons in junk-science spotting! The most difficult case is recognizing that this is happening even when you agree with the cause.

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Past purveyers of junk science do not change their spots. One of the earliest indicators in many outbreaks of junk science is enthusiastic endorsements by people and advocacy organizations associated with past outbreaks. This one is particularly useful in spotting environmental junk science, because unreliable environmental-advocacy organizations tend to have long public pedigrees including frequent episodes of apocalyptic yelling. It is pardonable to be taken in by this the first time, but foolish by the fourth and fifth.

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Refusal to make primary data sets available for inspection. When people doing sound science are challenged to produce the observational and experimental data their theories are supposed to be based on, they do it. (There are a couple of principled exceptions here; particle physicists can’t save the unreduced data from particle collisions, there are too many terabytes per second of it.) It is a strong sign of junk science when a ‘scientist’ claims to have retained raw data sets but refuses to release them to critics.

+

It would be way, way too easy to list the ways these symptoms have manifested with respect to the AGW panic. It’s a more useful exercise for the reader to think back and try to recognize them in previous junk-science flaps. Go and learn. And don’t get fooled again.

diff --git a/20111202164445.blog b/20111202164445.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0e5f9fe --- /dev/null +++ b/20111202164445.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: A Night in the Lonesome December +

The December comScore results are out, covering up to October 2011. I’ve updated my page on smartphone marketshare statistics.

+

+

There’s no drama this month; we’re seeing a pretty straight-line continuation of previous trends. Android continues to gain users and market share at about twice the rate of the iPhone, and the other players continue to dwindle towards insignificance.

+

Which is interesting in a dog-didn’t-bark sort of way; the October 14th launch of the iPhone 4S had no noticeable impact at all. Which is not really a surprise at this point; we’ve been through enough rounds of breathless hype followed by ho-hum before to know better.

+

I’m guessing the November release of Android 4.0 isn’t going to have any noticeable impact on the user numbers either. Evidently the forces driving the growth of this market are too large and distributed to be much perturbed by individual product releases, as fondly as corporate marketing departments might like to think otherwise,

diff --git a/20111203024334.blog b/20111203024334.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3664eb6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111203024334.blog @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +Bad at languages? +

I had a very international childhood – lived in Venezuela and Rome and London, and visited lots of other places in Europe (Paris, Athens, Venice, Barcelona). The cause was my dad working for a multinational; the result was that I learned and forgot three languages before I was thirteen.

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+

OK, maybe 2.5 languages would be a better count; I never thought I was very fluent in spoken French, though I could read it well enough (in the late 1960s, when the available English renditions of the Asterix comics were pretty bad, I translated them myself for fun). I was a crib bilingual in Spanish, though, and my Italian became passable.

+

This had some interesting though minor effects on my later life. One is that, like many crib bilinguals, I am much better at hearing and correctly reproducing phonological features outside the inventory of my native language than most monolinguals. (There’s recent research showing that crib bilinguals organize the language-processing circuitry in their brains slightly differently.)

+

When I traveled in Asia I found this gave me a useful knack. Chinese and others who deal with Westerners often take Western nicknames to, er, make themselves pronounceable; I, noticing this, developed the habit of asking them for their real name and then pronouncing it back at them. This invariably produced delighted smiles.

+

(Note: This doesn’t work in Japan, Japanese phonology is too simple. You need to go somewhere that pronouncing the language is actually difficult for English-speakers.)

+

OK, so, crib bilingual, spoke three languages besides English, good ear (like Frodo) for foreign sounds. Here’s the funny part. I thought I was bad at languages.

+

The handful of polyglots in the audience are now laughing at me, I know. As well they should; I didn’t begin to get a clue until I tested out of my French-language requirement at college. Um, that was six years after studying it and not having used it at all.

+

But I didn’t really clue in until I started doing my second round of traveling as Famous Internet Guy in the late 1990s. And noticed that when I was with a group of monolinguals, I was pretty much always the one who clued in on street signs and bits of the local language the fastest.

+

I think it really hit home when I visited Warsaw for a Linux conference. Polish is not closely related to any language I’d ever spoken, yet…after a day on the ground I was starting to get bits of it. And the other visitors – weren’t. Indeed, they behaved as though it never occurred to them that they could, as though the language barrier was impermeable without concentrated and effortful study.

+

Yes, go ahead, chuckle at my naivete. But it was a bit of a wrench when I realized that they were the normal ones. It’s my ability to absorb languages through my skin that is unusual in an adult. (Children, of course, do it routinely.)

+

The point of this rant is actually the question that preoccupied me for a bit once I thought through my observations and did a little research, enough to realize how very mistaken I had been. How in the hell did I develop the belief that I was bad at languages?

+

Because what I found out, of course, is that this is the history and behavior of somebody who is really good at languages – a natural polyglot. Crib bilinguals tend to be like this more than others, but it’s a tendency rather than a rule.

+

This, too, made a (minor) difference in my life. By the time I visited Taiwan a couple years into the new century I was confident enough to set myself the goal of learning to hear and reproduce the tones in Mandarin Chinese during the few days I’d be there. And I succeeded, though that’s not really the point I’m driving at here.

+

No. The point is, I did eventually figure out why I thought I was bad at languages for so long. It was because I was bad at language classes. Found them boring, didn’t get good grades at them, got shut of them as soon as I could, and felt greatly relieved when I tested high enough to fulfill the foreign-language requirement at Penn.

+

So my conclusion is this: the foreign-language instruction methods in our schools suck horribly. I mean, really horribly. I think it must constitute something near a worst-case definition of suck when you take a crib bilingual with a good ear and a strong knack in one end and spit him out the other with a belief that he’s bad at languages so fixed that it lasts nearly thirty years.

+

What makes this funnier, in a way, is that I cultivated an interest in linguistics over those three decades and still thought I was bad at languages…

+

I don’t really know what can be done about this. But I started reading The Polyglot Project recently, motivated by a conjecture that I’d find I’m more like those people – the sort who eat languages like bonbons – than like most monolinguals. And indeed it seems that I am, but that’s not my point either.

+

My point is more like this: Jesus H. Christ and his bastard brother Harry on a pogo stick, why isn’t the educational establishment listening to these people? What in the hell are we doing numbing childrens’ brains to insensibility with the 413th repetition of a textbook drill about la plume de ma tante when it is utterly clear that immersion and motivation through native-speaker materials is both more effective and more fun?

+

I know, I know…our educational system is very broken in general, I shouldn’t be surprised at yet another symptom. I managed it, though; thus, this rant. The best I can hope is that it might set somebody to thinking.

diff --git a/20111203223937.blog b/20111203223937.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..68733b0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111203223937.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Why I love Walmart despite never shopping there +

In a discussion thread that wandered to the subject of Walmart and its enemies, I said “Scratch a Walmart-basher and you’ll find a snotty elitist, a person who hates capitalism and consumption and deep down thinks the Wrong People have Too Much Stuff.”

+

The commenter replied: “You know, I don’t think you need to be an anti-capitalist in order to disdain over-consumption and its enablers.”

+

No, certainly not. My own preference is to live simply, getting and spending little and putting my energy into creative work. Much of what we think of as “normal” behavior in a consumer society strikes me as wasteful and vulgar. But it’s a disdain I tend to keep quiet about, for at least two reasons:

+

+

I find that, as little as I like excess and overconsumption, voicing that dislike gives power to people and political tendencies that I consider far more dangerous than overconsumption. I’d rather be surrounded by fat people who buy too much stuff than concede any ground at all to busybodies and would-be social engineers.

+

But there’s more than that going on here…

+

Rich people going on about the crassness of materialism, or spouting ecological pieties, often seem to me to me to be retailing a subtle form of competitive sabotage. “There, there, little peasant…” runs the not-so-hidden message “…it is more virtuous to have little than much, so be content with the scraps you have.” After which the speaker delivers a patronizing pat on the head and jets off to Aruba to hang with the other aristos at a conference on Sustainable Eco-Multiculturalism or something.

+

I do not – ever – want to be one of those people. And just by being a white, college-educated American from an upper-middle-class SES, I’m in a place where honking about overconsumption sounds even to myself altogether too much like crapping on the aspirations of poorer and browner people who have bupkis and quite reasonably want more than they have.

+

I was less reticent when I was younger, until I noticed what I sounded like. I’ll still snark freely about vulgar ostentation and overconsumption in people who are richer than me, but I don’t do the other direction any more. It’s…unseemly.

+

Which is a reason I tend to mute any criticisms I have of Walmart. I basically don’t ever shop there – I think I bought a specific $13 tacklebox once because I knew by seeing an example that it was right for a use I had in mind. I do not love the ambience of Walmarts; by my standards they’re loud, cheerless, and tacky – and that describes a lot of their merchandise and their shoppers, too.

+

But my esthetic and aspirational standards are those of a comparatively wealthy person even in U.S. terms, let alone world terms. To the people who use Walmart and belong there, Walmart is a tremendous boon that stretches their purchasing power, enabling them to have things that don’t suck.

+

That’s why I love the idea of Walmart, and will defend it against its enemies.

diff --git a/20111212123919.blog b/20111212123919.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5a4380c --- /dev/null +++ b/20111212123919.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Coming soon: reposurgeon does Subversion +

For those of you who have been following the development of reposurgeon, a pre-announcement: the next version, probably to be numbered 2.0, will directly read Subversion dumpfiles and repositories.

+

I’ve got this feature working now – it’s why my blogging has been scant recently – but I intend to have a really good regression-test suite in place and at least one large repo conversion done before I ship it for general use.

+

Note an important limitation: it will not write Subversion repos. So it will be useful as a conversion tool but not directly as an editor.

+

Fear the reposturgeon!

diff --git a/20111216182200.blog b/20111216182200.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e8e20d7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111216182200.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +SOPA and the oblivious +

A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything away from you – including your Internet freedom.

+

That’s the thought that keeps running through my head as I contemplate the full-scale panic going on right now about SOPA, the “Stop Internet Piracy Act”.

+

+

It’s a bad bill, all right. It’s a terrible bill – awful from start to finish, idiotic to the core, corruptly pandering to a powerful special-interest group at the cost of everyone else’s liberty.

+

But I can’t help noticing that a lot of the righteous panic about it is being ginned up by people who were cheerfully on board for the last seventeen or so government power grabs – cap and trade, campaign finance “reform”, the incandescent lightbulb ban, Obamacare, you name it – and I have to wonder…

+

Don’t these people ever learn? Anything? Do they even listen to themselves?

+

It’s bizarre and entertaining to hear people who yesterday were all about allegedly benign and intelligent government interventions suddenly discovering that in practice, what they get is stupid and vicious legislation that has been captured by a venal and evil interest group.

+

Yeah, no shit? How…how do they avoid noticing that in reality it’s like this all the time?

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The depressing part is how safe a bet it is that they’ll go back to being oblivious the moment their direct interests aren’t threatened. They’ll cheer for the next tax hike, the next round of environmental feel-goodism, the next political “fix” for the next transient market failure – and never notice that by doing so they’re creating the political conditions in which malignant growths like SOPAs inevitably flourish.

+

So here’s a clue: the only way to keep your freedom – on the Internet or anywhere else – is to defend everyone else’s freedom as well, by keeping your government tiny and starved and rigidly constrained in what it can do. Otherwise, the future you’re begging for is SOPAs without end.

diff --git a/20111220234646.blog b/20111220234646.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e557298 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111220234646.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Andy Rubin brings the news +

Over on Google+, Andy Rubin says:

+

+There are now over 700,000 Android devices activated every day…and for those wondering, we count each device only once (ie, we don’t count re-sold devices), and “activations” means you go into a store, buy a device, put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service. +

+

This does clear up some points people have been wondering about, but it raises larger questions. Like, why aren’t those users showing up in the comScore statistics?

+

700K users per day ought to translate to about 21M a month. But Android has only been gaining 2M U.S. smartphone users and change per month. If comScore isn’t way undercounting, that implies than a bit less than 9/10ths of daily Android activations are tablets or overseas.

+

That percentage seems pretty high to me. But I don’t have any alternate theory.

diff --git a/20111221110406.blog b/20111221110406.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..efcaa6c --- /dev/null +++ b/20111221110406.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Are threads still a menace? +

An interesting question showed up in my mailbox today. So interesting that I think it’s worth a public answer and discussion:

+

+In chapter 7 of The Art of Unix Programming, you classified threads under the section “Problems and Methods to Avoid”. You also wrote that with the increased emphasis on thread-local storage, threads are looking more like a controlled use of shared memory. This trend has certainly continued; recent programming languages like D, Scala, and Go encourage the use of threads as mostly isolated lightweight processes with message passing. Observing this trend, I have often wondered, why not go all the way and use multiple OS processes? I can think of two reasons to use threads in this newer, controlled way rather than using full processes:

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1. Portability to Windows, which doesn’t have an equivalent of fork(2)

+

2. Performance, particularly because message passing between real processes requires serialization and deserialization, whereas message passing within a process can be done with shared memory and (maybe) locks

+

So what do you think? Are threads still a menace to be avoided in favor of full OS processes? Or has the situation improved since 2003? +

+

I think it has, and I think you’ve very nearly answered your own question as to why. Bare threads were dangerously prone to deadlocks, livelocks, context-trashing, and various other sorts of synchronization screwups – so language designers set out to encapsulate them in ways that gave better invariants and locality guarantees without sacrificing their performance advantages. I think Scala’s transactional memory stands out as a particularly elegant stab at the problem.

+

I don’t develop for Windows or communicate much with people who do, so I’m not equipped to judge how important Windows portability is in motivating these features. But the performance issue you called out is real and quite alive on Unix systems.

+

UPDATE: Matt Campbell, who has materialized in the comments here, send the original question and has given me permission to cite him. Thanks for a good question!

diff --git a/20111225190031.blog b/20111225190031.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2f99d3e --- /dev/null +++ b/20111225190031.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +A Christmas cat +

The best Yule present my wife and I are getting this year is that our beloved cat Sugar is not dying.

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Since her medical crisis in September that hasn’t been anything we could take for granted. She bounced back amazingly afterwards, but the vet’s sober best guess at the time was that she’d be lucky to live another six months.

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That was a little under three months ago. But she seems extremely healthy – lively, sociable, inquisitive, eyes bright, fur glossy and tail held high. One of the blog’s regulars was visiting this weekend and remarked that Sugar didn’t even seem elderly.

+

The cat in question materialized under my desk a few moments ago to nuzzle my foot and meow companionably at me. Now, after a nice ear-scratching, she’s padding over to Cathy’s office, probably to do likewise. She’s happy. She’s good at happy. And, it would seem, at being indestructible…

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Well, we’ll see. We’re supposed to take Sugar back for another sonogram soon. I’m worried about those apparent hepatic cysts that showed up on the last one; they could do her in even if the nephritis stays beaten.

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But whatever may be wrong with Sugar, she’s clearly not in pain or weakened. She’ll be with us for a while yet, doing what she does best – purring at her humans, guarding them from the insidious bathroom demon, curling up next to us at night to sweeten our dreams, making us proud every time she welcomes a houseguest to our home.

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The best Christmas wish I can think of for all of you out there is this: may you have a blessing in your life as lovely as our cat – and the wisdom not to take it for granted while it lasts.

diff --git a/20111228075209.blog b/20111228075209.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..099d1d2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111228075209.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: a bit of Christmas cheer +

On Google+, Andy Rubin reports: “There were 3.7M Android activations on 12/24 and 12/25.”

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That’s a 170% spike over the 700K activations per-day Rubin announced on 20 Dec. I’ve previously observed that only about 1 in 10 of Android activations show up in the smartphone statistics for the U.S. so Android is probably looking at about 370K new U.S. smartphone users for Christmas, the way comScore counts them.

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I’m guessing Apple won’t be releasing the corresponding number, because on previous trends it would only be about 185K Christmas users for their smartphone – and that wouldn’t look good. Well, it could be worse; they could be RIM.

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UPDATE: My spike-percentage calculation was wrong. Way too low.

diff --git a/20111229140526.blog b/20111229140526.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5cb70c6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20111229140526.blog @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +The Varieties of Anti-Intellectualism +

One of the recurring features of American intellectual life is hand-wringing over “anti-intellectualism” by, of course, intellectuals.

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One of my regular commenters has pointed out that the term and concept of anti-intellectualism are used to describe several distinct phenomena that are relatively easily confused. He’s right, and I think it could bring some clarity to the murkier corners of the culture wars to develop the point.

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Note: The term “intellectual” is not infrequently applied to me. By the end of this essay it should be clear why, though I recognize the justice in that application, I’m not completely happy with it.

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One kind of “anti-intellectualism” is opposition to “intellectuals” considered as an interest group or social class in the Marxian sense – what Russian writers called the intelligentsia. The only more specific term I can think of for this is anti-intelligentsianism, an ugly coinage which will have to do for the duration of this essay.

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Another kind is what I’ll call traditionalism. The traditionalist believes that intellectuals discard or undervalue what Russell Kirk called “the organic wisdom of institutions” (in England and continental Europe this position is associated with Edmund Burke). The traditionalist opposes intellectuals not because they form an interest group but because he believes their ceaseless questioning carelessly damages the organic fabric of society, woven by history and supporting human happiness in ways not understood until it is torn asunder.

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Next we come to what I’ll call the epistemic-skeptical anti-intellectual. His complaint is that intellectuals are too prone to overestimate their own cleverness and attempt to commit society to vast utopian schemes that invariably end badly. Where the traditionalist decries intellectuals’ corrosion of the organic social fabric, the epistemic skeptic is more likely to be exercised by disruption of the signals that mediate voluntary economic exchanges. This position is often associated with Friedrich Hayek; one of its more notable exponents in the U.S. is Thomas Sowell, who has written critically about the role of intellectuals in society.

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Less commonly, we encounter what might be called totalizing anti-intellectualism. Where the traditionalist wishes to preserve what is or was, the totalizing anti-intellectual wants to remake the world by any means necessary. He is a partisan for a specific totalizing system of thought which regards the methods and habits of intellectuals (and possibly the traditionalist’s fabric of society, too) as its enemy. In Europe the totalizing system is likely to be romantic blood-and-soil nationalism, Marxism, or Fascism; in the U.S. it is likely to be fundamentalist Christianity. Elsewhere, under the influence of the anti-rationalism of Al-Ghazali, Islam teaches a particularly violent and exclusive variant of totalizing anti-intellectualism.

+

Finally, we have what I’ll call the thalamic anti-intellectual. The thalamic anti-intellectual’s opposition is not ideological but personal and gut-level. There can be many reasons for this, but one that will stand for all is that intellectuals make him feel inferior and personally threatened.

+

These are five different phenomena with different sources. So, when American intellectuals rail against “anti-intellectualism”, it’s important to pin down which kind they are actually talking about. And a major, related problem is that intellectuals sometimes pretend to be talking about one kind of anti-intellectualism as a way of discrediting another against which they don’t actually have good arguments.

+

For example: when an intellectual is attacking traditionalist anti-intellectualism, he or she is quite likely to pretend that the opponent’s position is totalizing or thalamic. Secular intellectuals in the U.S. frequently dismiss religious traditionalists in exactly this way.

+

Two red flags to watch for are the words “idiocracy” and “Dominionist”. When an American intellectual speaks of the former, he is very likely to be trying to tar a traditionalist as a thalamic, while the latter is usually an attempt to mischaracterize a traditionalist as a fire-breathing zealot for fundamentalist Christianity.

+

Mind you, real Christian Dominionists do exist; it should be no news to any of my regular readers that I think Christianity is totalizing and evil at its core. Nevertheless, in our historical moment that tendency is well enough suppressed that accusations of Dominionism are almost always false, revealing ignorance and (often) rhetorical dishonesty on the part of the accuser.

+

Because it’s extremely difficult to make people like F. A. Hayek or Thomas Sowell look stupid enough to be thalamic or totalitarian enough to be totalizers, the usual form of dishonest attack intellectuals use against epistemic skeptics is to accuse them of being traditionalists covertly intent on preserving some existing set of power relationships. Every libertarian who has ever been accused of conservatism knows about this one up close and personal.

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But the most pervasive form of dishonesty in intellectuals’ attacks on anti-intellectualism is to pretend that anti-intelligentsianism doesn’t exist, anything that looks like it has to be one of the other four kinds, and the history of the intelligentsia as a political interest group is not even a legitimate topic of discussion.

+

But it needs to be. Because the intelligentsia has displayed a consistent political pattern over the last 150 years: believing in its own intellectual and moral superiority, it has sought a leading role in politics, promoting a vision of itself as benign philosopher-kings who can steer society to virtue, equality, and fulfillment.

+

The vehicles of this belief have been many. At its worst, it has led the intelligentsia to endorse and propagandize for totalizing systems like Communism, which the intelligentsia conceived could be guided to good ends in its use of power by – who else? – intellectuals. It is forgotten, but true, that before World War II many intellectuals were attracted to Fascism for the same reason. In this way much of the intelligentsia of the 20th century became accomplices in and apologists for the most hideous mass murders in human history.

+

This is why I am not entirely comfortable with being called an intellectual. To many people who never went to college, “intellectuals” still equates to “those people who tried to betray us to the totalitarians”. There is enough justice in that charge to make me flinch. And it is not yesterday’s charge, either; the intelligentsia’s determined persecution of refugees from Islamic oppression and anyone else who dares speak truthfully about it are as disgraceful today as Walter Duranty’s paeans to Stalinism were in the 1930s.

+

I have argued elsewhere that the West’s intelligentsia were successfully subverted by Soviet memetic warfare, and I believe that Gramscian damage remains a central problem in Western politics. But my charge here does not depend on that model. The desire of the intelligentsia to become philosopher-kings predates the Soviets or even Marxism per se; it is already visible in the early 19th century, tangled up in debates about meritocracy and the establishment or disestablishment of religion.

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Even where the intelligentsia has not attached itself to totalizing political ideologies, the effects of its belief in its own superiority have been consistent. Technocratic, credentialist, and statist – the intelligentsia perpetually urges us to cede control of our lives to the smart people, the educated ones, the experts, the selected elite – if not the intellectuals, then the bureaucratic machines guided by intellectuals.

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There’s a nearly extinct political tendency called “clericalism” which held that society should be guided by priests, considered as a disinterested non-hereditary elite with better education and morality than possessed by mere laypeople. The intelligentsia’s political instincts can be best described as a sort of neo-clericalism in which education substitutes for ordination.

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To every action, a reaction. Much “anti-intellectualism” is a reaction against intellegentsian neo-clericalism. Of course the intelligentsia, sensing this, caricatures the opposition as yokels, know-nothings, and reactionaries. But the uncomfortable questions won’t go away. If you’re so bright, why the constant sucking up to dictators? If you’re so bright, why are modern art and literature such a depressing wasteland? If you’re so bright, why do so many of your grand social-engineering schemes end in corruption and tears?

+

If “intellectuals” really want to understand and defeat anti-intellectualism, they need to start by looking in the mirror. They have brought this hostility on themselves by serving their own civilization so poorly. Until they face that fact, and abandon their neo-clericalist presumptions, “anti-intellectualism” will continue to get not only more intense, but more deserved.

diff --git a/20120103144609.blog b/20120103144609.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d28cced --- /dev/null +++ b/20120103144609.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Through a mirror, darkly +

Today the New York Times is carrying a story on Chinese fears of “cultural encirclement”.

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“We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration,” Mr. Hu said. “We should deeply understand the seriousness and complexity of the ideological struggle, always sound the alarms and remain vigilant and take forceful measures to be on guard and respond,” he added.

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This quote reminds us of something too easily forgotten, which is that Communists have always taken ideological struggle seriously. Communist theory teaches them to believe that the most effective way to break the will of the opposition is to de-legitimize its ruling class, degrade its culture, destroy its confidence in its own institutions and its own way of life.

+

Hu Jintao believes that the West is waging a conscious memetic war against Communist China – because he knows that Communists including himself have been waging a conscious memetic war against Western civilization since the 1840s. Sadly, this is not yesterday’s news.

+

+

What Jintao can also see, and the reason he is actually right to fear memetic warfare, is that the West has been seriously damaged by Communist successes at memetic subversion. The damage didn’t end when the Soviet Empire collapsed, because too many people in the West internalized and naturalized Soviet attack propaganda. Many of its tropes have become tribal shibboleths of major Western political tendencies, despite being just as wrong and just as toxic as when they were first uttered.

+

Hu Jintao holds up a dark mirror to our own situation. What he fears happening to the world’s last major Communist state is exactly what he knows the Communists did – more successfully than is generally understood – to us.

+

Now go read my essays on Gramscian Damage and Suicidalism. And, if you’re tempted to dismiss me as a paranoid, ask yourself this: why does Hu Jintao believe the things he does about “ideological struggle”? If you were he, or his ideological predecessors, what would you have been trying to accomplish during the long nuclear standoff?

+

Next, look hard at the West’s politics. And if you are a “conservative”, resist the urge to gloat that your kind was right all along. Because your kind were useful idiots just as thoroughly as Western “liberals” have been. You were incompetent at propaganda, fixated on silly irrelevancies like who was putting tab A in sexual slot B, and addled by religious particularism. You destroyed your own credibility with Chicken-Little ranting over porn, rock music, and games. Thus, when the Gramscians did their long march through academia and the media and Hollywood, you saw the danger well enough but you failed to stop them.

+

You conservatives had just one duty that mattered: to conserve, to be Western civilization’s antibodies – and you blew it. The wages of that failure is that the U.S. has a sitting President who spews Marxist propaganda tropes as though they were the laws of nature, and neither he nor far too many Westerners can any longer tell the difference.

+

Hu Jintao reminds us that ideological struggle still matters. I hope it’s not too late for us to profit from the reminder.

diff --git a/20120105230856.blog b/20120105230856.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..772c9e3 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120105230856.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Dinosaurs mating? +

Just when you thought the smartphone industry couldn’t get any more soap-operatic, everybody’s favorite pair of aging drama queens – Microsoft and Nokia – may be at it again. There’s a rumor, from a gossip with a good track record, that Microsoft intends to buy Nokia’s Smartphone division.

+

+

Inexplicably, there are even some people writing about the rumor who think this might even be a good idea. I mean, a good idea for Microsoft. It probably really would be a good idea for Nokia – they’d get shut of their idiotic alliance with Redmond and unload a crappy, chronically underperforming division for a pile of cash (the rumormonger says $19 billion).

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But for Microsoft? Nokia’s brand strength was probably the only thing keeping Windows-phone share as high as 5.2%. It hasn’t been Microsoft’s software doing it, that’s for sure. Botched upgrades and a pathetically weak app ecosystem have only been the most obvious problems.

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If Microsoft bought Nokia’s smartphone division, they’d mismanage it into smoking rubble within two years. “But wait, Eric…” I hear you cry, “they haven’t done too badly with the X-Box!” Quite right they haven’t – but that’s because Microsoft runs that division as a cash generator, mostly hands off.

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Smartphones, on the other hand, are strategic. That means that if Microsoft buys itself a smartphone division, Steve Ballmer’s going to poke his prong into it. Repeatedly. To, um, what’s the B-school jargon? “Maximize the synergies”. They might even be treated to more demented-monkey ranting. Two years. Smoking rubble.

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On a different subject, what are we to make of the latest comScore figures? I have to say I don’t know. Android has fallen off the roughly 2%-per-month rate of share increase it had been sustaining for 18 months. Even at the lower rate, though, it’s still probably going to surpass 50% U.S. market share within a month or two – actually, some of the more excitable market-research outfits think it’s already there.

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Apple fans would like the reason for the slowdown to be Apple, but there hasn’t been any corresponding improvement in Apple’s relative position. Both Android and Apple now seem to be tracking overall smartphone market growth pretty closely. Neither the iPhone 4S nor Android 4.0 shows any sign of being a game-changer.

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The most likely possibility is that the U.S. smartphone market has reached a sort of initial saturation point – that while there’s still growth in the offing, the first frantic rush to smartphones has finally spent itself.

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I rate this only “likely” because the holiday sales figures could still shock everybody. Apple had a flat month in September which might have been people deferring purchases until they could get a 4S; it’s just possible that the larger Android wobble was their considerably larger prospective-buyer pool holding out for Ice Cream Sandwich – currently only available on a Verizon phone.

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The saturation theory has a near-term consequence we can watch for: decreasing consumer willingness to pay premium prices for high-end smartphones. Watch for the more market-savvy vendors to start emphasizing value pricing and low-end to midline products more in 1Q2012.

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The purchase-deferral theory has a more obvious near-term consequence we can watch for, too; huge Christmas-morning sales for Verizon. Andy Rubin was on G+ talking up Christmas activations recently, which suggests that Google thinks it’s going to have a good story for its next quarterlies.

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Meanwhile, the non-sucky low-cost Android tablets that I was predicting six months ago are beginning to trickle in now, two months later than I was expecting but hey, prediction is hard. There’s a fair amount of buzz about Velocity Micro’s T507, an Android 4.0 tablet with a 7-inch display for $150.

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Significantly, this is less than an iPad. The vendors may be getting a clue that to complete with Apple they have to offer something as good for less money. “Premium” pricing simply will not work in that market, not for anyone but Apple now and probably not even for Apple in the longer-term future.

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I don’t want a T507. But the specs on it hint that we’re only one product-development cycle – three or four months – from something I and a whole lot of other people will want. If the iPad’s product manager isn’t starting to get nervous about this, he should be fired and replaced with somebody with enough sense to be worried.

diff --git a/20120115042651.blog b/20120115042651.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5bc5df9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120115042651.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Sugar is in ultrasound health +

This is a status update for those of you among my regulars who have been following the saga of Sugar, our cat. She had her 90-day followup ultrasound today.

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The doctor tells us Sugar’s kidneys look stable and OK – the nephritis that nearly killed her is well and truly beaten. She has a liver cyst that may eventually cause difficulties, but it’s growing slowly enough that he doesn’t think it poses a near-term threat. The cyst could be surgically removed if it starts to cause problems; there are obvious symptoms to watch for – loss of appetite, difficulty urinating – none of which she is having now.

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Indeed, the feline in question continues to be quite active and healthy. She’s not going to get any younger and may still be living on borrowed time, but the prospect that anything specific will kill her has receded into the indefinite future. We are grateful.

diff --git a/20120115212201.blog b/20120115212201.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..44eba74 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120115212201.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Calling all hackerspaces +

This is a shout out to all hackerspaces and engineering schools within easy reach of Philadelphia. I’ve got a nice little design-and-build project that would do the world some good, but I don’t have the skills or facilities to do it myself.

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The problem: build a ruggedized special-purpose test enclosure to be mounted on a roof or utility pole and host a bunch of GPS sensors. The tricky part is that it needs to be outside and not under top cover (for good skyview) and thus weatherproof, but also transparent to the GPS radio frequencies. Another part of the design problem is getting data and power cabling back to my development computer.

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UPDATE: I’m now pursuing a different path – trying to figure out how to build a GPS repeater on the cheap so I can effectively pipe the RF from a roof antenna to be retransmitted in my office. This has the obvious advantage that the GPS test rack will be able to live inside, near my desk, rather than outside in an enclosure that can only be reached with a ladder. So now I’m looking for a hackerspace frequented by radio hams.

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I need this because I’m the lead programmer of GPSD, responsible for the correctness and robustness of software used in hundreds of thousands of deployments in GIS software worldwide. GPSD is used for navigation, fleet tracking, scientific telemetry, autonomous-vehicle guidance systems, and disaster response. Lives may depend on our quality.

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Most GPSes can be simulated with canned datafiles run through a test framework. A few cannot be, because the handshaking between host software and device is too complex to be reliably simulated. These problem children need frequent live testing to avoid regressions, and the problems with doing that have made for a troubling weak spot in our test regime. I want to be able to push a button and get test results every time I perform a potentially sensitive commit.

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The test enclosure needs to be able to host a minimum of four RS232 devices and four USB devices; more, up to a maximum of 16 each, would be better. Cooling isn’t an issue as they’re all milliwatt devices. Swapping in new test devices needs to be easy. There are a bunch of practical issues about where to site the test enclosure for both good sky-view and serviceability, how to power it, and so forth.

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I’m looking for student and hobbyist EEs that would enjoy developing such a design and the real-world experience of building and deploying it. The deliverables for the project would (1) be a set of blueprints, to be published under Creative Commons, (2) two working copies of the test enclosure (one for me, one for my test guy on the West Coast), and (3) an installation expedition to mount one of the copies out here where I live.

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This would make a good practical engineering project for a class in power and signals engineering. Anybody interested?

diff --git a/20120119004808.blog b/20120119004808.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0546a2e --- /dev/null +++ b/20120119004808.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Hollywood vs. Obama +

The huge groundswell of opposition to SOPA and PIPA is having some interesting ripple effects. Barack Obama announced he would veto these bills if they came to his desk, and now it seems that Hollywood is pissed off over this.

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In the words of one unnamed studio chief, “God knows how much money we’ve given to Obama and the Democrats and yet they’re not supporting our interests”. Other unnamed Hollywood bigwigs speak darkly of turning off the campaign-donations tap in this presidential cycle.

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From a certain deeply cynical perspective the moguls’ outrage is sort of understandable. How dare Obama curry favor with Silicon Valley and the Wikipedians when he should have stayed bought? It’s not as though Obama actually cares about the “civil liberties” those damned anti-copyright anarchists are screaming about – anyone suffering from that delusion has forgotten that he signed the NDAA. So forget “principle”; from the moguls’ point of view this is a pure betrayal of the basest kind.

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Meanwhile, we can almost hear the psephological wheels clicking at Obama campaign headquarters. With his approval rating underwater and the economy showing no sign of climbing out of the shitter before November, The Won’s odds presently look pretty poor even against the sorriest specimen in the Republican-candidate clown show. Obama needs the “youth vote” desperately; his strategists must figure they can sacrifice Hollywood’s money to shore it up and still come out ahead.

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All this puts me in mind of a famous if apocryphal line by Henry Kissinger about the Iraq-Iran war back in the 1980s. I want to see both sides lose! The more damage Obama does the Hollywood moguls, and vice-versa, the happier I’ll be.

diff --git a/20120120141625.blog b/20120120141625.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7aedf33 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120120141625.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +Site statistics are enabled +

I finally got around to installing a site statistics plugin on this blog, about 20 minutes ago. There have since been 94 views.

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I’m mainly interested in the order of magnitude. Do I have 1K readers per day? 10K?, 100K? My wild-ass guess is on the order of 10K. Now we’ll see.

diff --git a/20120123114047.blog b/20120123114047.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4a2795a --- /dev/null +++ b/20120123114047.blog @@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +Another bite of the reposturgeon +

Five weeks ago I wrote that direct Subversion support in reposurgeon is coming soon. I’m waiting on one final acceptance test before I ship an official 2.0; in the meantime, for those of you kinky enough to find the details exciting, description follows of why this feature has required such a protracted and epic struggle. With (perhaps entertaining) rambling through the ontology of version control systems, and at least one lesson about good software engineering practice.

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Scene-setting: reposurgeon is a command interpreter for performing tricky editing operations on version-control histories. It gets a lot of its power from the fact that it knows almost nothing about individual version-control systems other than how to turn a repository into a git-style import stream, and an import stream back into a repository. And it expects to call helper programs to do those things – in the git case, git fast-export and git fast-import.

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What looks like editing of repositories is actually editing of import streams. By leaving serialization and deserialization to be somebody else’s problem, reposurgeon avoids getting entangled in a lot of low-level hairiness about how individual VCSes store and represent files and versions.

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The benefit of this strategy is that reposurgeon gets to concentrate on the interesting part: high-level surgical operations on the repository’s metadata and changeset DAG. The cost is that reposurgeon has a lot of trouble editing any metadata that won’t fit into the import-stream representation. In practice, because import streams do a pretty good job of capturing the right abstractions, reposurgeon can win big.

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Well, that’s how the model looked two months ago. There have been some changes since. The reposurgeon 1.x model that I’ve just described fails on Subversion because the pre-existing tools for exporting a Subversion repository to an import stream are either weak or broken or both. But no blame attaches; it turns out that these tools suck because the problem is really quite difficult. Two months, people – two months of my concentrated attention.

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The symptoms of the problem are this:

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1. Subversion doesn’t have a native exporter to import-stream format. I have pretty good zorch with the Subversion developers (I’m a past code contributor with commit access, though never a core dev) and I’ve campaigned hard for them to write an official exporter, but it has never happened.

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2. Many of the third-party export tools out there only handle linear repositories (no branching). There’s a strong tendency for people writing these to get to the point where they need to do the mapping from Subversion branches to gitspace branches, pull up short, leave an embarrassed “to be done” comment in the code or README, and disappear never to be heard from again.

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3. There are a few export tools that do support branchy repositories; the git project’s own git-svn is probably overall the least bad of these. These require the user to pre-declare the repository’s branch structure rather than deducing it. Goddess help you if you skip those declarations or get them wrong.

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4. Even if you do the right thing, the tools often don’t. They are brittle, slow, and lossy.

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Example: in Subversion it is possible to commit a changeset that modifies files in multiple branches. This is a bad idea and people seldom do it on purpose, but it can happen by accident too – every sufficiently large and old Subversion repository has a few such accidents in it, and they confuse conversion tools horribly.

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Example: The right way to create a Subversion branch is “svn copy”; the wrong way (which not infrequently happens by finger error) is an ordinary directory copy followed by an svn add of the directory. If you do this, later checkouts will look right but the internal information linking the new branch to the rest of the repository will be missing. When you try to convert such a repo (with anything other than reposurgeon), you’ll end up with a detached branch floating in midair.

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Example: In Subversion it is possible to delete a branch or rename it, then immediately create another branch with the same name. But if you feed such a repository to a conversion tool, the result is almost certain to unpleasantly surprise you.

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I could go on at book length about more symptoms. Underlying them, Subversion’s model of how version control works is tricky and complicated, with edge cases that sneak up on you. It allows combinations of operations that are rather perverse (cross-branch mixed commits being one of the easier cases in point to understand).

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The import-stream model is much simpler – there are fewer combinations of primitive operations and thus less to go wrong there. This is good, but moving content and metadata from one to the other in full generality is a stone bitch. My criticisms of the pre-existing tools may seem harsh, but having grappled with this problem myself I have nothing but sympathy for the people who failed at it previously. The difficulties are very like what hardware people call an impedance mismatch.

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My first real step to solving this problem was to let Subversion itself do as much of the work as possible. It has no import-stream exporter. but it does have the ability to serialize a repository into a dumpfile not totally dissimilar from an import stream, and relatively easy to parse. What reposurgeon does is parse this dump file.

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Actually, in a very early version of the code I didn’t parse the dumpfile; instead, I used Subversion’s own client tools to mine information from each repository. There turned out to be two problems with this: (1) piecing all the data together from different tool reports is complicated, and (2) the Subversion tools are horrifyingly slow. I finally gave up on this approach when I discovered that mining a 3K-commit repository this way took eight hours.

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In retrospect I should have started with a Subversion dumpfile parser sooner; I was distracted from that approach by the prospect of building a general history-replaying framework that could be applied with minor changes to mining other repository types as well. I had to give up on that objective to make real progress with Subversion, though the replay framework still lives, unused, inside of reposurgeon. It might get used for something else someday, if it hasn’t bit-rotted first.

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Those of you familiar enough with Subversion might be wondering, at this point, why I didn’t use Subversion’s client API rather than writing a dumpfile parser. Three reasons: (1) complexity, (2) stability, and (3) documentation.

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(1) Holding the markup features and semantics of a relatively simple plain-text dump format in your head is generally easier than remembering all the ins and outs of a complicated API accessing the deserialized version of the same data. It’s more concrete; you can visualize things.

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(2) APIs change. Subversion’s client API has changed on a faster scale than the dumpfile format, and that can be expected to continue. By parsing the dumpfile directly I avoid a whole class of completely artifactual version-skew problems with the API. (Actually, APIs – there are two competing ones for Python.)

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(3) The APIs are thinly and poorly documented. So was the dumpfile format. But because it’s easy to see all the way down to the bottom of the latter, I liked my chances of coping with the poor documentation of the dumpfile better.

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One of the things I ended up doing as a side effect of this project, actually, was writing much more complete and detailed documentation of the Subversion dumpfile format than had existed before – I plied the Subversion developers with questions in order to do this. The results now live in the Subversion repo.

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If you take no other lesson from this essay, heed this one: Should you ever find yourself in a similar situation (exploratory parsing of a poorly-documented textual format), stop. Stop coding immediately. Document the format first. Check your conjectures with the host program’s developers, make sure you know what’s going on, push the resulting document upstream, and get it accepted.

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This may sound like a lot of work, but I guarantee you that a few days of pre-documenting will save you weeks of arduous debugging time. Writing that documentation is not just a worthy service to other programmers in the future, it’s an implicit specification of what your parser has to do that will save you from flailing around in the dark.

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Once I fully grokked the dumpfile format, syntax and semantics both, I could tackle the actual meat of the problem – mapping Subversion’s ontology to the ontology of import streams. This is where “impedance mismatch” starts to be a relevant concept. It’s where the pre-existing tools fall down badly.

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The differences between these ontologies cluster around two large ones: (1) Subversion has flows, while import streams do not, and (2) the treatment of branching is quite different.

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A “flow” is what internal Subversion documentation rather confusingly calls a “node” – a time series of changes to a single file or directory considered as a unit for purposes of change tracking. If you create a file, modify it several times, delete it, and then again create a file with the same name, that will be two different flows that happen to have the same path.

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In the import-stream world there are no flows – just file paths pointing to blobs of content. The practical difference is that the semantics of some legal Subversion operations – notably directory deletes and renames – are difficult to translate into the language of import streams. In fact import streams don’t have any notion of “directories” in themselves; they’re expected to be automatically created when the creation of a file requires it, and to be garbage-collected when they become empty due to file deletions.

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(I’m not actually very clear about why Subversion has flows; the obvious guess would be to help in deductions about history-sensitive merging, but that’s something Subversion has never actually handled very well. On the other hand, it’s only fair to note that nobody was handling it well when Subversion was designed.)

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While the existence of flows in Subversion mainly just produces a few odd edge cases that you have to be careful of, the other major difference – in the semantics of branching – is a much bigger deal. Its effects are pervasive.

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In Subversion, a branch is nothing more or less than a copy of a source directory, made with “svn copy” so it preserves an invisible link back to the source directory and the revision when the copy was done. All branches are always visible from the top level of the repository. Some branches are used to represent tags (release states of the code) and are never touched by commits after the copy; others represent lines of development and are changed by later commits. A branch copy is an operation that stays visible in the commit history.

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Conventionally there is a “trunk” branch directly under the repo root that represents the main line of development, tags live under a “tags” subdirectory, and branches live under a “branches” subdirectory – but nothing enforces these conventions. Hello, cross-branched mixed commits!

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In git (and other version-control systems that speak import streams) the model is completely different. Branches are always used for lines of development, never for tags – the import-stream model has real annotated tags instead. Only one branch is available for modification at any given time – there’s no possibility of a cross-branch mixed commit. Branch creations don’t show up as operations in the commit history.

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It took quite a bit of time and thought to figure out how to map smoothly from the Subversion branch model to the import-stream one. One of my requirements was that the user should not have to declare the branch structure! You’ll be able to read the detailed rules on reposurgeon 2.0’s manual page; the short version is that if trunk is present, then trunk, branches/*, and tags/* are treated as candidate branches, and so is every other directory immediately under the repository root. But: a candidate branch is turned into a tag if there are no commits after the copy that created it.

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If trunk is not present, no branch analysis is done – that is, the repo is translated as a straight linear sequence of commits. There’s an option to force this behavior if your repo’s Subversion branch structure is so weird that the above rules would mangle it. In that case you’ll need to do your own post-conversion surgery.

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The rules I ended up with are simple, but implementing them is not. Analysis of the Subversion copy operations is the trickiest and most bug-prone part of the dumpfile analyzer. I had a pretty fair idea going in how hairy this part was going to be, which is why I approached the Network UPS Tools project and asked to convert their Subversion repo for them.

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As a past contributor, I knew that the NUT Subversion repo is large, complex in branch structure, and old enough to have begun life as a CVS repo. That last part matters because some of the ugliest translation problems lurking in the back history of Subversion projects are strange Subversion operation sequences (including combinations of branch copy operations) generated by cvs2svn.

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So: I explained to the NUT crew what I’m doing. I told them they’d get a better quality conversion to git than any of the existing tools will deliver … eventually. I was up front about the conversion code being a beta that would probably break nineteen different ways on their repo before I was done, and that’s sort of the point. Fortunately, I got support from the project lead (thank you, Arnaud Quette!) and active cooperation from the project’s internal advocate for a git switchover (thank you, Charles Lepple!).

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Setting up this real-world test turned out to be a Good Thing. Charles Lepple has pointed out more than a dozen bugs that turned out to be due to my code not handling strange cases in the Subversion metadata well enough, cases that a smaller and younger and less grungy repository history might never have exhibited. I fixed another one this morning. There is a realistic chance it will have been the last one…but maybe not.

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I’ll ship reposurgeon 2.0 when Charles and Arnaud sign off on the NUT-UPS conversion. Besides stomping all the branch-analysis bugs we can find, there’s one more feature to make work. I want to add a surgical primitive that can find and perform merges back to trunk for Subversion branch tips that are in a mergeable state. This would not actually be a Subversion-specific feature, but applicable to any import stream.

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If I shipped 2.0 today, reposurgeon would already blow every other utility for lifting Subversion repositories clean out of the water. I’m not satisfied with that; I want it to be bulletproof. But for those of you itching to get your hands on the beta:

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git@gitorious.org:reposurgeon/reposurgeon.git

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No warranties express or implied, etc. I have documented it all, however. Throw it at the gnarliest repo you can find and let me know if you spot bugs.

diff --git a/20120124031948.blog b/20120124031948.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d876c58 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120124031948.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: CyanogenMOD Rising +

CyanogenMOD, the third-party, fully-open, bloatware-free port of Android, has recently passed a million installs. And there’s talk of creating an underground Market app for CyanogenMOD to distribute apps that the cell carriers and the MPAA/RIAA don’t want you to have.

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Set this against Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil new Eula for iBooks, and it couldn’t be clearer what the ultimate stakes in the smartphone wars are.

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Even in the short term, CynogenMOD’s numbers, and the plan for the Underground Market, and the wideapread revulsion against the iBooks EULA are a big deal – they’re going to crank up the pressure on cell carriers and various other malefactors in interesting ways. But maybe the most important thing CyanogenMOD’s numbers tell us is that there is, in fact, a mass market for freedom.

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Lots of people, including all the world’s Apple apologists, contend that it isn’t so. They insist that almost everyone is actually contented and better off in walled gardens – that the only people who care about software and device freedom are a tiny fringe of grognards. A million installs are now saying “Fuck that noise!”

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Objectively, a million isn’t greatly different from 900K – and it’s only one percent of even the U.S. smartphone userbase. Still, “million” is an important psychological threshold. It’s where marketers and product planners and even politicians start to take you seriously. And it won’t stop there; a million installs recruited without marketing and in the face of the effort required to install CM means we can expect strong endogenous growth in the future.

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About a million people – actually, when I checked just now, it was 1,096,279 – have said “Enough!”. They’re not even willing to tolerate even the relatively light restrictions of carrier Android, let alone Apple’s beautifully-decorated jail cells. A million people!

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This renews my hope – not that I was feeling defeated before, mind you, not with Android probably reaching simple majority market share right about now. But it’s always nice when reality confirms that the downshouters and control freaks and MAAFIAAsi and glassy-eyed evangelists for the Cult Of Steve Jobs Or Someone Like Him are wrong. Hugely, desperately, finally wrong. There really is a market for liberty out there; it’s vast and it’s growing. This genie is not going to be stuffed back in the bottle.

diff --git a/20120127182414.blog b/20120127182414.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..28121e0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120127182414.blog @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Mystery of the Android tablets +

Some new market research says Android tablets have now taken 39% of global market share. There are reasons to suspect that Nook and Fire tablets account for a bit more than half of that, but we’re still left with something of a mystery to explain.

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We know why people are buying the Nook and Fire; they’re media-consumption devices tied to strong brands – book and movie viewers with web access as an additional draw. The mystery is this: Who has been buying the general-purpose Android tablets, and for what uses?

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Somebody is buying them. We know this because retailers and distributors keep restocking newer models; if the sell-through percentage on the older ones was bad, that wouldn’t happen. There’s a lot of talk of “channel-stuffing” which ignores a salient fact: electronics retailers aren’t in business for their health. Carrying inventory costs money, and non-performing product categories aren’t cut a lot of slack these days. When you see vendor shipment reports rising as fast as they have been in this category, a hell of a lot of product has to be being bought off of retailers’ shelves somewhere.

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More generally: a sufficiently determined vendor can maintain an illusion of steady or only slightly declining sales by channel stuffing if they’re willing to pay enough marketing support that they are, in effect, covering the cost of goods and shelf space for the retailer. (Hello, Windows Phone 7!) What they can’t do in the absence of actual sell-through is induce the retailer to dramatically increase his exposure. Android retailers have been doing that.

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The mystery deepens because until quite recently Android tablets could be divided neatly into two groups: a handful like the Galaxy Tab that were acceptable designs at ridiculously high price points, and a bunch of shoddy crap with no obvious use cases at all. It wasn’t like early Android smartphones; even the G-1, the very first, was a respectable design that was useful the day it shipped and is still useful today. In the tablet category, “low-end” meant 4-to-7-inch Taiwanese devices with weak processors, streaky displays and only intermittently functional single-touch sensing.

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Yet, the behavior of vendors and retailers tells us this shoddy crap actually sold, and sold in ton lots. The handful of high-end Galaxy-Tab-like devices that were not crap were simply too pricey to be driving the market volume.

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Only at the end of 2011 did this begin to change in a significant way. I had predicted on this blog that it would, but was about two months too optimistic about the timing. Now we have a bunch of midrange designs that are no longer crap but I don’t think are quite good enough yet, and I’m still wondering – who is buying these things, and for what?

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The afterlife of the HP TouchPad may provide a clue, if of a negative kind. When HP released the discontinued hardware to retailers in order to cut its losses. there was a popular run on the product that was frenzied enough to attract media attention. I observed at the time that this suggested a large pent-up demand for tablets below the iPad price point.

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Now it’s time to go back for another look at the TouchPad. Because likely, it’s an index of the same demand that was grabbing crappy tablets off the shelf before the TouchPad, and is buying this month’s so-so tablets. Thus, what those were being bought for is partly defined by the things that the discontinued TouchPad couldn’t do.

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Internet over the cellular network? No. The TouchPad, and low-end tablets in general, are only useful as WiFi devices.

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Privileged access to a trove of tied content? No. That’s what’s selling the Nook and the Fire, but the TouchPad sold without that kind of hook and low-end Android devices don’t seem to need it either.

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The usage profile we’re left with is, basically, (1) web browsing, (2) YouTube, and (3) gaming. Or, to be even more concrete: Facebook, LOLcat videos, and Angry Birds. Do not underestimate Angry Birds – every time I’ve seen a tablet being used in public by kids, they’ve been playing Angry Birds on it.

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If this is what’s been going on, what does it imply about the future?

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I think the most obvious implication is cautionary for Apple, B&N, and Amazon and even Google: the behavior of early adopters may be leading them to overestimate the mass-market value of their walled gardens. The mobs of people who bought out the TouchPad stock within a day of release were signaling a lack of interest in iTunes; likewise, whoever have been buying crappy Android tablets in mass quantities clearly don’t care much about Amazon or B&N e-books or even the Google Android market (many of the low-end devices don’t license it).

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It’s only going to get more interesting out there as the generic Android tablets improve. The trends are clear; we’re probably no more than 5 or 6 weeks from general availability of Android 4.0 tablets with 10-inch capacitative multitouch displays at $250.

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When that happens, I think life is going to get more than a bit precarious for the Nooks and Kindles of the world. Those are being sold near or below cost because the vendors expect to make back the margin on tied media, but I suspect they’re fooling themselves – misreading demand for the generic abilities of the devices as demand for their particular gold-plating. Until now the distinction hasn’t mattered much, but they’re going to be increasingly vulnerable to disruption from below.

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Yes, that goes for the iPad, too. We’re already seeing erosion of its share, 10% over the last year according to Strategy Analytics. That’s more ominous than it might seem precisely because in most objective ways the iPad’s competition has been pretty weak sauce. That’s changing now; in the near future, better hardware capacity than the iPad will be available at a lower price point.

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At that point, we’re going to find out exactly how much tablet consumers are actually willing to pay Apple for its software and its brand. Interesting times…

diff --git a/20120128235556.blog b/20120128235556.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a862b54 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120128235556.blog @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +Power Grid: The Robots – a review +

Friedmann Friese’s Power Grid is one of the acknowledged classics of the modern Eurogame genre. It embroils 2 to 6 players in a simulation of running power companies, competing to light up the most cities. Strategy involves a mix of positional play, resource management, and (most entertainingly) competition for new plants in an auction every round.

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Since the game’s original release in 2004, Rio Grande Games has published an alternate power-plant deck and five pairs of expansion mapboards, introducing minor rules variations and new tactical challenges. My wife Cathy and I own all of these; we have been fans of the game since almost the date of release, and regularly compete in the World Boardgaming Championships Power Grid tournament.

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With Power Grid: Robots, the game’s developers take off in a completely new direction. This expansion introduces robot players, assembled at random from tiles that define how they will behave in the auction, resource-buying, and city-building parts of each turn. With six possibilities each for five behavioral slots, one may face almost 7776 robot variations.

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To give the flavor of the expansion, here are a couple of the easier-to-understand behavioral rules:

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(Always bid for) plant using cheapest resources

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Special ability: Start game with 100 Elektro (game money – 50 is normal)

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In step 1, build one city: in step 2, build 2: in step 3, 3 cities (up to the limit of the robot’s cash).

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My wife and I have played three 2+2 games – two human players plus two robots. We’ve seen 29 of the robot tiles in action, the 30th being disallowed in games with two or more robots. While there is a lot more behavioral space to be explored in other combinations, this is enough experience for some generalizations.

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First: is this expansion worth your money? At less than $15 SRP we think the answer is an unequivocal yes. While it’s difficult to imagine the robots actually winning a game, they are surprisingly effective as spoilers and complicating factors even against players as experienced as Cathy and myself. They make it possible for two people to play a “honeymoon game” that is nearly as interesting as having four humans at the table.

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Power Grid is one of those games that generally gets more interesting with more players. Four or five is generally considered optimal (most of the players I know rather prefer the five-hand game), and the most obvious use of this expansion generalizes what Cathy and I did with the honeymoon game for play sessions where you can only round up three or four players. I’m quite looking forward to trying a 3+2, 4+1 or 5+1 game with our Friday night group.

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I shall at some point try playing a solitaire game against 4 robots just to find out how that goes, though I’m a little skeptical that the challenge level will be high enough to be interesting – seems to me you need human competition for spice at least in the auction round. In general I’d recommend at most a 50-50 robot/human ratio.

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Second: Another promising use for the robots is as an instructional aid – you can invite a new player to start by running a robot until he or she feels competent enough to abandon the algorithm.

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Third: Do the robots affect game balance? Yes, they do. They make being first up in the power-plant auction something to be more sought and less feared than in the base game. The reason: because you know the robots’ bidding rules in advance, you can manipulate them to buy junk plants you don’t want. Obviously this makes it easier to bring up plants you do want. In combination with the “Buy all resources” rule some robots have, you may even be able to throw the robots plants that will induce a fuel-scarcity squeeze for your human opponents.

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Because the robots mitigate the risk of being first in the auction round, they tilt strategy towards building cities fast to get out front of your opponents on that curve, and then letting your capacity catch up. In the base game, of course, this strategy can crash hard if several successive auction rounds lead off with crappy, low-efficiency plants – but the robots give you a place to dump those.

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On the other hand, the robots’ rules for Phase 3 tend to make them as prone to resource-hogging as the most rapacious human players. That aspect makes play a little more difficult, especially for the top-of-the-order player who must buy resources last. On the whole I don’t think that completely negates first player’s auction-manipulation advantage, but reasonable people could differ on this.

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The result of these changes is a slightly different game, though not a less complex one. I think it will appeal especially to hard-core strategic minimaxers (er, like myself) who enjoy having more tools with which to manipulate the game state and more different pathways to victory.

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Fourth: Are there any bugs in this expansion? Well…it does suffer from the chronic Power Grid problem of poorly-organized rules written by people who were thinking in German rather than English. It is not difficult to patch the rules for places where they’re a bit ambiguous, but if you have to do that it definitely helps to think like a computer programmer. My wife, a practising attorney who is thus no stranger to carefully parsing complex legalese, was nevertheless a bit at sea early on.

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The production values are an improvement over the scratchy B&W printing of some previous expansions, and the robot tiles are done in an appealingly goofy retro-techno look.

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All in all, if you are a serious Power Grid player – or even a casual one who has trouble putting together a table of 5 – you want this expansion. It’s fun, different, and genuinely adds something to the game.

diff --git a/20120129223327.blog b/20120129223327.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..85ccdaf --- /dev/null +++ b/20120129223327.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Junk science double fail +

Two bits of science news appeared on my radar today with not much in common except that they’re both exceedingly bad news for the political class. That more or less guarantees that they’ll get poor or nonexistent coverage in the mainstream media and is a good enough reason for me to write about them.

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First, the British Meteorological Service and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia are now admitting that global warming stopped in 1997 – there’s been no net rise in the Earth’s temperature in 15 years. And no, this isn’t an illusion produced by the 1997 El Nino peak – if you look at the chart accompanying the article you’ll see that GAT has dropped to pre-el-Nino levels.

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The source makes this a particularly difficult pill for AGW alarmists to swallow – for of course, the CRU is the home of the infamous “team” whose work has been at the center of the panic. If they’re wrong now, what warrant do we have that they weren’t equally wrong then?

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And, actually, it gets worse. Solar observations suggest we may be headed for an insolation minimum ever deeper than the one in 2008 that wiped out the entire 20th-century GAT rise – in fact, some NASA meteorologists are muttering darkly about a near-term recap of the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age!

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This of course, is bad news for the political class because AGW panic was so useful for raising taxes and increasing central control of the economy. The general public has been increasingly skeptical of late, but popular reaction so far has been nothing compared to what will be unleashed if it turns out the real climate problem of the next two decades is how to keep our crops from freezing.

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Our other news today is of a study apparently showing that the heritability of IQ increases with age.

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IQ, and its heritability, has been a major irritant to would-be social engineers. Because – no matter how much propaganda they sponsor to the effect that IQ is meaningless, or multifactoral, or the tests are culturally biased – IQ assessments done in the traditional way aimed at approximating Spearman’s g keep turning out to be about the single most valuable statistical measure for predicting not just academic performance but all kinds of other interesting things like lifetime earnings and propensity to criminality.

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This new result is another turn of the screw. Because now it turns out that while you can raise childrens’ measured IQ with all the usual nostrums (better family circumstances, intensive schooling, etc) the effects of such interventions vanish in the adults that the children become. A particularly strong finding is that while adoptive children tend towards the IQ distribution of their foster families, the adults they become revert to the IQ distribution of their biological families.

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This matters because poverty is correlated with and often caused by low intelligence. This is even more true today than it used to be, because we have a whole meritocratic apparatus aimed at scooping up poor-but-bright kids and tracking them into good schools and good jobs so they don’t stay poor. (And, as cynical as I sound in the rest of this post, be in no doubt that I think this meritocratic apparatus is a good thing and among the proudest achievements of our civilization.)

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But: Our political class is heavily invested in the ideology that all the factors driving poverty are environmental. Because that means we can social-engineer our way to an egalitarian utopia by methods which – surprise! justify raising taxes and increasing central control of the economy. It’s bad news for them that adult IQ is genetically heritable and intractable to the sorts of interventions that employ thousands upon thousands of bureaucrats and busybodies.

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To be fair, neither the prospect of a cooling earth nor the intractability of IQ are good news for the rest of us either. It would be nicer, in many ways, if we really lived in the political class’s fantasy world – the place where all our troubles are self-created, there’s always someone to blame, and always a political fix.

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But at least, since we don’t live in that fantasy world, we can tell the political class to stuff its coercive utopianism up its own ass and demand our liberty back.

diff --git a/20120202140940.blog b/20120202140940.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1bc9bf0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120202140940.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Does “Corporation X” follow the hacker way? +

Got a query from a journalist today working on a major story about a certain large corporation that’s been much in the news lately. Seems the corporation’s founder has been talking up his organization’s allegiance to “the hacker way”, and she not unreasonably wanted my opinion as to whether or not this was complete horse-puckey.

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So as not to steal the lady’s thunder, I won’t reveal the identity of Corporation X. I will, however, repeat a version of my answer with its identity lightly obscured – because I think these are questions we should ask any corporation that talks like that.

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I answered:

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I have never used Corporation X’s website myself. Therefore, rather than directly opining about what Corporation X espouses, I’ll suggest some criteria your readers can apply for themselves.

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As a user of Corporation X’s site, do I have control of the data Corporation X keeps about me? Concretely: can I examine and modify that data using tools of my choosing which are built for my needs?

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Does Corporation X act as though I own my on-line life, or as though it does? Concretely: Can I control what data it shares with other users, with advertisers, and with business partners?

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Does Corporation X behave like a tool in my hand, or a firehose designed to spew at me in accordance with other peoples’ agendas? Concretely: can I write my own client to present a filtered view of the Corporation X data stream, or have other people do that for me?

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No prize for guessing that “the hacker way” is to give control to the individual, to respect his or her privacy, to create tools for autonomy and liberty, and to encourage creative re-use of software.

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And yes, one of the most basic questions is “Does Corporation X publish the source code of its user-facing software in a form that can easily be understood, modified, and reused?” Because if the answer to that question is “no”, it is very unlikely that users will or ever can have the control of their on-line lives that they deserve.

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UPDATE: Now that the article has been published, I can confirm that “Corporation X” is indeed Facebook.

diff --git a/20120207124547.blog b/20120207124547.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d3f7894 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120207124547.blog @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Hold on to your hats… diff --git a/20120208192546.blog b/20120208192546.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a68a7a5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120208192546.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: The market share scramble and Apple’s long con +

Mobile phone carriers have a crappy record of strategic planning – the history of the industry is rife with massive overinvestment in services consumers didn’t actually want, partly redeemed by massive unanticipated revenue from accidents of technology (I’m looking at you, SMS!). I’ve explained elsewhere that inflation-adjusted carrier ROI is negative.

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Even so, the latest news from the analysts is pretty mind-boggling. Remember all those carrier execs rhapsodizing about how iPhone is the awesomest invention since sex? Well, it seems Apple is sucking all the profits out of the carriers that went for it. That has interesting implications for the future. Like, what happens when the carriers decide they’re done being conned?

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The story begins:

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The price of Apple’s iconic smartphone is heavily discounted by carriers. Those subsidies almost single-handedly devastate profit margins for Verizon, AT&T and Sprint.

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The money quote is probably this:

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“When we look at the direct and indirect economics that Apple has managed to extract from the carriers, the carrier-level value destruction is quite evident.”

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Yeesh…”Value destruction”. The implication, which is backed up by the rest of the article, is that the iPhone is wreaking enough havoc on carrier margins to be seriously damaging. While this neatly explains Apple’s record quarter in 4Q2011, it also makes harder to understand why the carriers are standing still to be milked.

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We know what the carriers think they’re buying – increased profits through increased market share. The problem with this theory is that it no longer makes any sense at all. Three of the four major carriers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint) now carry the Apple product. How can the iPhone be a winning differentiator when almost all of your competitors have it too?

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OK, so there might be a second level to the argument: each carrier might be thinking that if it doesn’t carry the iPhone it will have its marketshare eaten by others that do. The trouble with this theory is that Android is still growing userbase and marketshare faster than the iPhone. And though T-Mobile (the one carrier without iPhone) ain’t doing so well, nobody in the industry thinks lack of iPhone – as opposed to, say, weak execution and lack of the capital mass to pursue its buildout – is its problem.

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From any carrier’s point of view, the case for dumping iPhone, or at least threatening to do so in order to renegotiate Apple’s subsidy requirement away, seems pretty open and shut. Apple has things all its own way right now – skimming the lion’s share of the profits off the carriers’ business without having to shoulder their risks. But this is an unstable situation, because the carriers’ investors won’t tolerate it indefinitely. What happens when they revolt?

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That’s not hard to figure, actually. Best case, Apple is going to have to give up the carrier subsidies, taking a serious hit on volume and profits. Because the alternative is that one or more of the majors will stop carrying the iPhone entirely, which would be much worse. Likely Apple’s market share would actually drop noticeably if that happened. And that would be disastrous, because the other carriers would probably run for the exits.

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The bottom line is that Apple’s current performance isn’t sustainable. The losses the carriers are presently eating on the iPhone are going to get squeezed out one way or another, almost certainly re-manifesting as significantly higher unit prices to the consumer. This, of course, will increase Android’s competitive advantage.

diff --git a/20120209114210.blog b/20120209114210.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f9ded0d --- /dev/null +++ b/20120209114210.blog @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Reverting to the old theme… diff --git a/20120209212708.blog b/20120209212708.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8b21000 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120209212708.blog @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Admire this? diff --git a/20120211105143.blog b/20120211105143.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..346363e --- /dev/null +++ b/20120211105143.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +I’ve settled on “Admired” +

I’ve settled on Brad Thomas’s “Admired” with the light white skin as the new theme for this blog. It’s a relatively new theme and is being actively maintained with a support forum. which relieves my main worry about my old Live Steam theme – it’s not going to fall out of sync with the WordPress engine any time soon.

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I put a significant amount of effort into finding a theme that could carry forward the clean, minimalist look of Live Steam. It wasn’t easy; most WP theme designers are in love with styles I find fancy, fussy, and overproduced. Even the default skin on this one is a bit too heavy for my taste, but the light white skin and a bit of font tuning has produced a look I find satisfactory.

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Not perfect, though. The designer made a common mistake – too much use of px dimensions in the CSS. The result is poor presentation on displays that are either extra large or have a higher than 72dpi pixel density, like my Samsung SyncMaster 1100DF. Also the design is a bit too whitespacey, though not nearly as bad as the WordPress default TwentyEleven theme I had previously been experimenting with.

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I’ll be doing some bug-fixing and tuning to fix these problem (and will push the changes upstream to the designer, if he’ll take them). So you may notice the look of the blog shifting and tightening up in subtle ways.

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For those of you interested, I’ve put my variant of the theme on gitorious at

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+git://gitorious.org/wordpress-themes-collection/admired.git
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If you tried to clone one of my previous theme repos and got a permissions failure, it’s because I slipped up and gave out the form of the repo URL that only a committer can use. The above should work for anyone, not that there are any changes there yet. There will be shortly, I’m going to start on the px dimension cleanup today.

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(Yes, I do install new theme versions in my blog’s copy of the theme with git pull. Run remotely via ssh – look, ma, no hands!)

diff --git a/20120213113402.blog b/20120213113402.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5aae8e8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120213113402.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Generative science +

I’m thinking about writing another book. I won’t disclose the title or topic yet, but there’s a bit of research for it I think can be usefully crowdsourced, and may also give a clue about the book for those of you interested.

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I’ve written before about the difference between descriptive and generative theories. To recap and simplify, a descriptive theory accounts for what is; a generative theory finds causal regularities beneath a descriptive account and predicts consequences not yet observed.

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Now I want to zero in on a parallel difference among entire sciences. Some scientific fields – like, say, evolutionary biology – are tremendously productive of models and insights that can be applied elsewhere. On the other hand, some other sciences – like, say, astronomy – seldom export ideas or models.

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Note that while it is appropriate to think of sciences that export lots of ideas as ‘generative’, the class of sciences that don’t are not merely descriptive. Astronomy, for example, has lots of generative theory inside it; astrophysics, for example makes predictions about stellar spectra and elemental abundances. But astronomy as a whole is not generative because none of its theory really informs anything outside astronomy.

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So I’m going to start with a (non-exhaustive) list of scientific fields, indicating roughly how generative I think they are and what if anything they export. I invite additions and corrections from my readers.

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Evolutionary biology – extremely generative. Principal exports: evolution by selective pressure on random variation, adaptive radiation, genetic drift, mutation, and many others.

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Mathematics – not an empirical science but extremely generative nevertheless. All kinds of abstract mathematical models end up suggesting applied-math models of the real world with interesting testable consequences.

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Economics – highly generative. Principal exports: supply/demand equilibria, satisfaction under constraint, implicit knowledge, deadweight losses, search costs, coordination overhead, rational ignorance.

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Linguistics – not very generative at all except for a small corner near psycholinguistics that exports some provocations about the relationship between thought and representation.

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Physics – highly generative. Principal exports: conservation laws, principles of least action, entropy, state spaces, symmetry and symmetry-breaking, energy levels.

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Astronomy – gorgeous, but almost completely non-generative.

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Geology, zoology, agronomy – non-generative

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Additions? Corrections?

diff --git a/20120215133537.blog b/20120215133537.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5f5bf67 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120215133537.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Eclipse: raising the bar for the 4X game +

I’m a big fan of the game genre called “4X” – “explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate.”. I’ve been playing these ever since the ur-progenitor of the genre in the 1980s, Empire, and I actually still maintain an open-source C version of that game. Civilization is my favorite computer game ever, and by what I hear of it Master of Orion – the game “4X” was coined to describe – would have hooked me even harder if I’d known of it when it came out.

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I particularly like SF-themed 4X games. I have previously posted a favorable review of Twilight Imperium (hereafter “TI”), a big sprawling epic of a contending-galactic-empires 4X game. But now I write to report on a game that effectively makes TI obsolete – a new design called Eclipse which I think is going to permanently raise the quality bar in 4X games.

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When you unpack the components for Eclipse, you’re going to immediately get the impression that it’s Twilight Imperium lite. Hexagonal starsystem tiles for variable board layout – check. Plastic ship models in different sizes – check. Playing mats, describing human and alien species one per – check. This impression is not exactly wrong, but the differences turn out to be more important than the similarities.

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One difference is that the game doesn’t start with all the board tiles down. Instead, player homeworlds are arranged in a broken ring with unexplored space between and around them. Unlike TI, which has exploration only as a bolted-on afterthought with the Distant Suns option, exploration is central to this game and one of the ways to win is to explore more aggressively and successfully than your neighbors.

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Another difference is that instead of a huge pile of available ships you have only a relatively small handful. Interestingly, this actually encourages combat, because losing your fleet-in-being isn’t a catastrophe that will take you half the rest of the game to recover from.

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But the most important difference is not local to one aspect of the game, it’s a global fact about the style of the entire game. Eclipse is as tightly constructed and carefully interconnected as a Swiss watch. By contrast, TI is a huge sprawling pile of game mechanics that make terrific thematic sense but don’t integrate all that well and in some cases are only half-realized (hello, politics subgame, I’m looking at you!).

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Here’s an example of what I mean by tight construction. Your player mat has a track with disc-shaped pieces on it. You have to expend one of these temporarily (getting it back at the end of the round) to take a game action such as moving ships performing research, etc. You have to expend one of these permanently to control a solar system. This matters because the track beneath the pieces has numbers on it representing the upkeep cost for your empire; as you take actions and seize systems, it rises. If at the end of a round you can’t cover that upkeep from your money reserve, you have to give up solar systems (taking back disks to cover numbers) until you can.

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That one mechanic (somewhat reminiscent of the resource market in Power Grid) creates a delicate multi-way tradeoff between seizing territory, taking actions, and building a money reserve that you can use to finance a late-game surge. Because it does so with very little state, you can reason about your option tree more quickly and effectively than in a game with heavier mechanics. This nets out as faster turns and shorter overall playing time; where a 6-player game of TI can easily take 8 or 9 hours, I’ve seen a 5-player game with mostly newbies take about 5 hours and a following 6-player game take about 4:30. After another play or two I expect my group will get down to the designer’s estimate of a half hour per player.

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Most of the the people in both games had previous experience playing TI with each other, and after the first game the consensus was already becoming clear; this game pretty much obsoletes TI. You give up some thematic chrome; the real draw in TI’s sprawling elaborateness is the way it ticket-punches every trope from battlestars to the Galactic Council in a loving tribute to all those classic space operas you read as a kid.

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What you get in return is a much better game – tighter, faster-playing, less vulnerable to runaway-leader effects, packing just as much tactical and strategic depth and multiple paths to victory but with much lower total complexity overhead. Eclipse is elegant in the way a mathematical theorem can be elegant – minimal premises worked to a powerful and satisfying conclusion.

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I learned this morning that Eclipse, though only released in 2011, has shot up through BoardgameGeek’s game rankings to make #7 in the top ten. I’m not even a little surprised, and expect that game designers will be studying it as an innovative example for years to come.

diff --git a/20120215231301.blog b/20120215231301.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f073956 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120215231301.blog @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +VMS Empire 1.9 released +

Recent discussion of the 4X game Eclipse reminded me of a responsibility. I’ve just shipped VMS Empire 1.9. This is a close descendent of the original solitaire Empire computer game that was the ur-ancestor of all 4X computer games, including Civilization and Master of Orion.

diff --git a/20120216184153.blog b/20120216184153.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3b190a6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120216184153.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +Super Star Trek 2.1 +

I guess it’s paleo-game theme week. For your retrocomputing pleasure, here’s my Python forward-port of the 1973 University of Texas FORTRAN Trek game: Super Star Trek.

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Anybody old enough to remember TTYs probably played this on one. While it has accreted some features over time, it’s still functionally pretty close to the original FORTRAN Star Trek. You kids should get off my lawn try it, too – it retains considerable play value despite the primitive interface.

diff --git a/20120221014302.blog b/20120221014302.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..caed1ca --- /dev/null +++ b/20120221014302.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +The Grey Lady weeps for Peter Gleick +

So, all last week on one of my favorite mailing lists I was hearing various climate alarmists crowing about a document leak from the Heartland Institute that supposedly prooooved that it (and by extension all other anthropogenic-global-warming skeptics) was engaging in a nefarious campaign to suppress its opponents and trash the teaching of science in the U.S.

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You may, therefore, imagine my amusement when it turned out that the key, incriminating document in the Heartland dump is pretty certainly a fake. Several separate lines of evidence lead to this conclusion, including both content analysis of the document and some smelly things about the PDF metadata.

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My initial reaction was: ho hum, more fraud by climate alarmists, good that they got caught again, should be entertaining to watch the mainstream media trying to suppress the story just as assiduously as they were hyping it when it looked like a good score against the eeeevil Heartland Institute and the eeevil denialists. In the normal course of events I’d have let all this pass without comment; it’s not surprising, and other than some entertaining resonances with Dan Rather’s forged TANG document back in 2004 it’s not very interesting.

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That is, until yesterday’s unintentional hilarity at the New York Times.

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Earlier in the day, Peter Gleick, a well-known climate alarmist, had blogged on the Huffington Post an admission that he obtained the Heartland documents by fraudulent means. The Heartland Institute (which has steadfastly maintained the incriminating summary document is fake) had already said it would sue whoever snookered the documents out of one of its employees before Gleick fingered himself; now it looks pretty likely they’ll win that suit.

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So, according to the NYT, how should we feel about this? The column admits it now looks likely that that Gleick outright forged the incriminating summary document. Should we be:

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(a) Angry with Peter Gleick for attempting a fraud, the intent of which was to poison and muddy the AGW debate. And more skeptical in future of attempts to demonize “denialists”.

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(b) Sad that Peter Gleick, wonderful human being that he is, has damaged his reputation.

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Well, if you thought (a) was even possible, you don’t know your Pravda-on-the-Hudson very well. (I know, I’m dating myself. Pravda actually stopped being a hard-left propaganda rag after the Soviet Union fell, a possibility that doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone running the NYT yet.) No, the Gray Lady weeps for Peter Gleick. Poor, poor Peter Gleick.

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“That is his personal tragedy and shame (and I’m sure devastating for his colleagues, friends and family)” says the NYT. I could, if I were so minded, now launch into an extended rant about how this is not merely personal, but yet another thread in a continuing pattern of alarmist fraud. But let’s just take that as read, shall we? Because right now, I’m not angry, I’m laughing.

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I’m laughing at the weird sort of insularity exhibited in this column. It’s beyond infuriating and well into pathetic. Andrew Revkin, the particular partisan in the NYT struggle brigade who wrote this piece, clearly has no concept of how ridiculously it reads. The establishment-media bubble has become a black hole that even one of its own writers can’t see out of.

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Perhaps next week the singularity around NYT headquarters will actually hive off into a pocket cosmos with several good restaurants and no Republicans. Then they could spend the rest of eternity writing mash notes to Fidel Castro and the rest of us could get on with our lives. Well…I can dream, can’t I?

diff --git a/20120223215641.blog b/20120223215641.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d882e06 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120223215641.blog @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +An Open Letter to Chris Dodd +

Mr. Dodd, I hear you’ve just given a speech in which you said “Hollywood is pro-technology and pro-Internet.” It seems you’re looking for interlocutors among the coalition that defeated SOPA and PIPA, and are looking for some politically feasible compromise that will do something against the problem of Internet piracy as you believe you understand it.

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There isn’t any one person who can answer your concerns. But I can speak for one element of the coalition that blocked those two bills; the technologists. I’m not talking about Google or the technology companies, mind you – I’m talking about the actual engineers who built the Internet and keep it running, who write the software you rely on every day of your life in the 21st century.

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I’m one of those engineers – you rely on my code every time you use a browser or a smartphone or a game console. I’m not exactly a leader among them as you would understand the term, because we don’t have those and don’t want them. But I am a well-known philosopher/elder of the tribe (I’ll name two others later in this letter), and also one of our few public spokespersons. In the late 1990s I helped found the open-source software movement.

+

I’m writing to educate you about our concerns, which are not exactly the same as those of the group of firms you think of as “Silicon Valley”. We have our own culture and our own agenda, usually coincident with but occasionally at odds with the businesspeople who run the tech industry.

+

The difference matters because the businesspeople rely on us to do the actual technical work – and since the rise of the Internet, if we don’t like where a firm’s strategy is going, it tends not to get there. Wise bosses have learned to accommodate us as much as possible and pick the few fights they must have with their engineering talent very, very carefully. Google, in particular, got its huge market capitalization by being better at managing this symbiosis than anyone else.

+

I can best introduce you to our concerns by quoting another of our philosopher/elders, John Gilmore. He said: “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

+

To understand that, you have to grasp that “the Internet” isn’t just a network of wires and switches, it’s also a sort of reactive social organism composed of the people who keep those wires humming and those switches clicking. John Gilmore is one of them. I’m another. And there are some things we will not stand having done to our network.

+

We will not have it censored. We built the Internet as a tool to make every individual human being on the planet more empowered. What the users do with the Internet is up to them – not up to Hollywood, not up to politicians, and not even up to us who built it. Whatever else we Internet geeks may disagree on among ourselves, we will not allow our gift of fire to be snuffed out by jealous gods.

+

Because we will not have the Internet censored, we are also implacably hostile to any attempts to impose controls on it that could be used for censorship – whether or not that is the stated intent of the controls. That is why we were absolutely unanimous against SOPA and PIPA, and a significant reason that you lost that fight.

+

You speak as though you believe that the technology industry stopped SOPA/PIPA, and that by negotiating with the industry you can set up the conditions for a successful second round. It won’t work that way; the movement that stopped SOPA/PIPA (and is now scuttling ACTA) was much more organic and grass-roots than that. Silicon Valley can’t give you the political firepower or cover you’d need. All you’ll get from them is a bunch of meaningless press conferences and empty platitudes from CEOs who have nothing actually to gain by helping you and really wish you’d go away so they can get back to their jobs.

+

Meanwhile, the engineers inside and outside those companies will take it as their duty to ensure that you lose that battle again if you try to fight it again. Because there aren’t a lot of us, but the vast mass of Internet users – who do vote in numbers large enough to swing elections – have figured out that we’re on their side and we’re their early-warning system. When we sound the tocsin – as we did, for example, by blacking out Wikipedia – they will mobilize and you will be defeated.

+

Accordingly, one of the cardinal rules for any politician who wants to have a long career in a 21st-century democracy has to be “don’t screw with the Internet”. Because it will screw you right back. At least two primary challenges to SOPA/PIPA sponsors are in the news right now because they wouldn’t have happened without the popular outrage against it.

+

Hollywood wants you to screw with the Internet, because Hollywood thinks it has problems it can solve that way. Hollywood also wants you to think we (the engineers) are foes of “intellectual property” and in willing cahoots with criminals, pirates, and thieves. Neither of these claims is true, and it’s important that you understand exactly how they’re not true.

+

Many of us make our living from “intellectual property”. A few of us (not including me) are genuinely opposed to it on principle. Most of us (including me) are willing to respect intellectual property rights, but there’s a place where that respect abruptly ends. It stops at exactly the point where DRM threatens to cripple our computers and our software.

+

Richard Stallman, one of our more radical philosophers, uses the phrase “treacherous computing” to describe what happens when a PC, or a smartphone, or any sort of electronics, is not fully under the control of its user. Treacherous computers block what you can see or hear. Treacherous computers spy on you. Treacherous computers cut you off from their full potential as communications devices and tools.

+

Treacherous computing is our second line in the sand. Most of us don’t actually have anything against DRM in itself; it’s because DRM becomes a vehicle for treachery that we loathe it. Not allowing you to skip the advertisements on a DVD is a small example; not allowing you to back up your books and music is a larger one. Then there was the ironically pointed case of the book “1984” being silently disappeared from the e-readers of customers who had paid for it…

+

Some companies propose, in order to support DRM, locking up computers so they can only only run “approved” operating systems; that might bother ordinary users less than those other treacheries, but to us would be utterly intolerable. If you imagine a sculptor told that his new chisel would only cut shapes pre-approved by a committee of shape vendors, you might begin to fathom the depths of our anger at these proposals.

+

We engineers do have an actual problem with Hollywood and the music industry, but it’s not the one you probably assume. To be blunt (because there isn’t any nice way to put this) we think Big Entertainment is largely run by liars and thieves who systematically rip off the artists they claim to be protecting with their DRM, then sue their own customers because they’re too stupid to devise an honest way to make money.

+

I’m sure you don’t agree with this judgment, but you need to understand how widespread it is among technologists in order to get why all those claims about “piracy” and lost revenues find us so unsympathetic. It’s bad enough that we feel like our Internet and our computers are under attack, but having laws like SOPA/PIPA/ACTA pushed at us on behalf of a special-interest group we consider no better than gangsters and dimwits makes it much worse.

+

Some of us think the gangsters’ behavior actually justifies piracy. Most of us don’t agree that those two wrongs add up to a right, but I can tell you this: if you make the technologists choose between the big-media gangsters and the content pirates, effectively all of us will side with the content pirates as the lesser of the two evils. Because maybe both sides are stealing on a vast scale, but only one of them doesn’t want to screw with our Internet or cripple our computers.

+

We’d really prefer to oppose both groups, though. Our sympathies in this mess are with the artists being ripped off by both sides.

+

Consider this letter our “Don’t tread on me!”. Our agenda is to protect our own liberty to create and our users’ liberty to enjoy those creations as they see fit. We have no give and no compromise on either of those, but long as Hollywood stays out of our patch (that is, no more attempts to lock down our Internet or our tools) we’ll stay out of Hollywood’s.

+

And if you’d like to discuss some ways of fighting piracy that don’t involve trampling on us and our users, we do have some ideas.

diff --git a/20120225142713.blog b/20120225142713.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..490c2b3 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120225142713.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +From Dave in my basement +

Dave Taht is in my basement trying to use GPSD to set up NTP-independent time service on an WNDR3700 router, and having some problems. I’m upstairs teaching GPSD to emit a clock-drift message – both projects are because we’re trying to build a monitoring framework for accuracy-checking NTP. The following IRC exchange ensues:

+
+[11:31]	dtaht2	looks like I have an underconfigured gpsd, miscompiled gpsd or ntp
+[11:32]	dtaht2	OR does gpsd not provide time until it gets a full fix?
+[11:32]	esr	That's correct.
+[11:33]	dtaht2	yes, in terms of 'or' statements, the above evaluates to 'true'. However... which?
+[11:33]	esr	Some devices report time from one satellite but you can't count on that. Most won't report time without 3 sats in view and good enough SNR.
+[11:34]	dtaht2	cgps does report the time, so this particular device is
+[11:35]	esr	OK, you have a problem somewhere else in the chain. And a learning experience just ahead of you.
+[11:35]	dtaht2	and a dark tunnel ahead. There may be grues.
+[11:36]	esr	Take your flashlight.
+[11:36]	dtaht2	w;w;w;
+[11:36]	esr	You see a rusty wand with a star on one end.
+[11:37]	dtaht2	get wand; wave aimlessly
+[11:38]	esr	Nothing happens.
+
+

Actually, I went downstairs and said the last line to Dave rather than typing it. He then laughed immoderately.

+

If you failed to understand the above, you are probably a normal human being and not an unregenerate geek who spends too much time in basements. This is sad for you.

diff --git a/20120227123440.blog b/20120227123440.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e952ea7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120227123440.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Ignoring the 5% +

A thoughtful commenter objected in a procedural way to my open letter to Chris Dodd. He praised the letter and affirmed that I spoke for him in it, but said:

+

+

+One significant concern I have is your claim, explicit and implicit, that you speak on behalf of all the many technologists and geeks who work to build and defend the Internet. You don’t. You no doubt speak for many, and as I said above, to a significant extent you speak for me, but I’m sure there will be many thoughtful dedicated contributors to Internet technology who disagree with at least some of what you write. +

+

I’m well aware of this issue. But worrying too much about about the N% who are going to disagree with any given representation I make on behalf of our tribe would leave me unable to serve the (100-N)% who do agree. And somebody has to do that, especially when the issues are public and political. The alternative is that we aren’t heard in the public conversation at all.

+

N=0 is an impossible standard. The best any of our public faces can hope for is to represent us to 95% confidence and speak up knowing that some 5% are going to be disgruntled about it.

+

I know that our values push us towards so much respect for individual dissent that we tend to think unanimous consent is required before anyone can speak for the group. You’re expressing that very well when you report that you agree with me but feel a need to speak up for those who don’t. Trust me, I feel similar doubts about my standing to represent us every time I have to write something like that open letter.

+

The trouble with those thoughts is that they’re a counsel of paralysis. They’d be great if my objective were to feel virtuous and pure and I didn’t mind that making me ineffective. But that’s lousy practical politics – and practical politics is what we need to keep from having SOPA/PIPA/ACTA and worse rammed down our throats. I can only serve our actual, practical interests by making a deliberate decision to ignore the 5%.

+

You suggest language that works around the problem by being more explicit and contingent about who agrees. Again, this is a counsel of self-destructive virtue, and terrible practical politics. It’s great for an audience of individualistic intuitive-thinker personalities (people who think like hackers) but for general audiences it’s meaningless noise or worse. And by “worse” I mean they have a strong tendency to read such disclaimers as actually meaning “this ‘spokesman’ has no confidence in his own legitimacy, he’s a waste of our time, we should ignore him”.

+

I had to unlearn that mistake fifteen years ago. It’s simply one of the hazards of my position that in order to effectively address mainstream audiences I have to adopt a communications style that is inevitably going to put some people’s backs up within our tribe. I live with that because I understand very clearly that the alternatives – not speaking up, or using self-defeating language – would be worse.

diff --git a/20120301230151.blog b/20120301230151.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a86868f --- /dev/null +++ b/20120301230151.blog @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +Calling all open-source hardware engineers +

How would you like to help fix the Internet?

+

One of the efforts I’ve been contributing to during the last year is the Bufferbloat project, a group of experienced Internet engineers who believe that excessive buffering and poor queue-management strategies may be the real villains behind a lot of network problems commonly attributed to undercapacity.

+

Before we can solve the problem, we need to measure and map it by collecting a lot of packet-propagation-time statistics. Awkwardly, we suspect that one of the services being screwed up by bufferbloat-induced latency spikes is the Network Time Protocol. So…Dave Täht (aka Dave from my basement) is trying to build a device he calls the Cosmic Background Bufferbloat Detector. The CBBD would be a flock of routers scattered all over the world, watching NTP packet timings using a common timebase independent of NTP, and sending data back to a collection server for analysis and visualization.

+

That’s where I, as the lead of the GPSD project, come in. GPSes are an obvious candidate for a high-precision NTP-independent time service. But there’s a problem with that…

+

+

With rare and extremely expensive exeptions, GPSes only report time to a hundredth of a second, at most, in their data stream. And we’ve found by experiment that SiRFs, the chip used in 80% of consumer-grade GPSes, has about a long-period wobble of up to 170 milliseconds in its time-reporting latency. This is no good; NTP time is supposed to be accurate to 10 milliseconds, so for diagnostic purposes we therefore want a timebase about an order of magnitude better than that or at about 1ms accuracy.

+

There is a way to get this from GPS. GPS chips have an output called 1PPS, a pulse that’s emitted at the start of each GPS-clock second with accuracy to 50 nanoseconds. So, in theory, simple: you use the 1PPS to trigger an interrupt on your host machine, latch that as top of the second, and use it to condition your clock. Even with the expected amount of interrupt-processing overhead you can expect this to keep your local clock accurate to the common timebase to about 10 microseconds – two orders of magnitude finer than our 1-millisecond accuracy goal.

+

GPSes, or at any rate the sort of inexpensive GPSes you’re limited to when you’re contemplating deploying a hundred or more attached to CBBD routers, are simple beasts. They’re built around a module like the SiRFStar II or III that’s basically a single chip with RF and signal-processing stage for the GPS. That module ships TTL-level serial data, with two lines for TX/RX, a ground, RTS, and a fifth wire carrying the PPS strobe (usually mapped as the DCD or Data Carrier Detect line).

+

Typically these wires are carried to a serial-to-USB converter such as a PL2303 which provides the data path off the device. Yes, some GPSes go to RS232, but that’s increasingly uncommon and we couldn’t use those anyway because the inexpensive routers we can afford to deploy by the hundred only have USB ports. Yes, serial-to-USB adaptors do ship an event corresponding to a change in DCD line state; turns out USB latency costs you about 50 microseconds of slop, which is well within our maximum error budget.

+

This is where it gets messy.

+

You see, in order to cut costs (or something) most GPS manufacturers drop the 1PPS strobe line on the way out. They could connect it to the DCD input on the serial-to-USB converter, but they don’t.

+

Now let me introduce you to two devices. Exhibit A is the Globalsat BR355. I have one on my desk. This is an extremely typical consumer-grade GPS mouse based on the SiRFStar III. It doesn’t ship 1PPS, though older versions sold under the same name apparently did – removed to cut costs.

+

Exhibit B is the ZTI Z050, advertised as a USB navigation and timing dongle. It fits a GPS chip and serial-to-USB converter in a thumb-drive case. It uses a different, non-SiRF chip called a Trimble, but that’s a detail; it ships to the converter over TTL just like the SiRFStar. But the ZI050 does carry the 1PPS trace to the serial-to-USB converter, and you can see PPS events on the USB bus. ZTI advertises 1ms accuracy,

+

Essentially, the logical differences between these devices come down to the presence or absence of one trace on the circuit board.

+

The BR-355 costs $36. The Z050 says “call for quote” and I was told $950. Yes, that’s right; that one PPS trace costs $914.

+

Now, part of this is the North American distributors marking the device up insanely. A European friend caled ZTI direct and was quoted €175 or about $225. That’s not the highway robbery the distributor was attempting (they’re called “Omnicor” – try not to give them your business) but it’s still bloody ridiculous.

+

So I’m trying to think up a solution, and it occurred to me that building your own USB GPS from parts and a custom circuit board isn’t that complicated. One of my GPSD devs has actually done it. We can’t use a homebrew GPS for this deployment, that wouldn’t scale to a hundred units, but …

+

…isn’t there an opportunity here? It ought to be possible to manufacture a timing dongle like the ZI050 really cheaply; remember, the PCB-level difference is between it and that $36 BR-355 is basically one trace. One design engineer with connections to a Taiwanese job shop ought to be able to get a thousand of these cranked out at barely $10 a pop.

+

That’s what I’m looking for. These clowns should have competition. So, calling all open-source hardware engineers – can we do this thing? Spec a parts list, design a PCB to fit in a thumb drive, publish it as an open design, and then actually get the little sucker manufactured?

+

There might even be money in this. The Bufferbloat project wants at least a hundred of these for the CDDB, and the thumb-drive form factor could make it really popular with laptop users.

+

Anybody feeling entrepreneurial?

diff --git a/20120305184936.blog b/20120305184936.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b3fc6b0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120305184936.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +A civil rights victory +

Today we scored what may be the most important civil-rights victory since the Heller ruling in 2008. Woollard v. Sheridan was found for the plaintiffs, and
+Maryland’s law requiring concealed-carry applicants to show “good and substantial reason” for their permit applications has been found unconstitutional.

+

+

Consitutional carry – no permit at all required, as in Vermont, Alaska, Wyoming, and Arizona – would of course be better. But the remarkable thing about this decision is the judge’s language in striking down the Maryland restrictions.

+

Key sentences: “The Court finds that the right to bear arms is not limited to the home” and “A citizen may not be required to offer a ‘good and substantial reason’ why he should be permitted to exercise his rights. The right’s existence is all the reason he needs.”

+

The standard the judge is setting up for the constitutionality of firearms laws comes very near the “strict scrutiny” standard associated with First Amendment law. While the judge did not use the phrase “strict scrutiny”, he cited among reasons to strike down the law that it is not sufficiently narrowly tailored to the state’s public safety interests – a classic strict-scrutiny argument.

+

The decision will be appealed to the Fourth Circuit appellate court, which has only a mixed record on Second-Amendment issues. But the plain and powerful language of the judge’s opinion will be difficult to overturn without outright ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling in D.C. vs. Heller, setting the appellate court up for reversal.

+

This is a major victory for civil rights, argued by the same Alan Gura who won the D.C. vs. Heller case. With eleven mores states considering constitutional carry and a national right-to-carry reciprocity bill live in Congress, the legal climate around firearms rights is steadily improving.

diff --git a/20120306102001.blog b/20120306102001.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b7ec8b1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120306102001.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Penguicon 2012 party for friends of the blog +

For those of you who will be in or near the metro Detroit area in late April of 2012, announcing…the Penguicon Friends of Armed & Dangerous party!

+

+

The FoA&D party will be held on the opening Friday evening of Penguicon 2012 a science-fiction convention and Linux conference to be held April 27-29 at the Regency Hyatt Dearborn in Dearborn, MI. Room number and exact times to be announced here closer to the event.

+

Besides myself and Catherine Raymond as your hosts, attendees are expected to include A&D regulars Jay Maynard aka Tron Guy, Susan Stewart aka HedgeMage, Ken Burnside, and NotGump aka Eric Baskin. Dave from-my-basement Täht hasn’t committed but has mumbled that he’ll be in the Detroit area around then. Also possible but not yet confirmed is Garrett Kajmowicz.

+

While a Penguicon membership will not be strictly required, we encourage you to get one and enjoy the con with us. Among other things, it’s likely members of the A&D crew will spend a fair amount of time in the Penguicon game room, and some of the resulting Eurogames are likely to be epic showdowns not lightly to be missed.

+

Please note in the comment thread if you expect to be attending so we can estimate the munchie requirements. And don’t be deterred from coming just because you’ve never been face to face with any of us; this just means we’d especially like to meet you.

diff --git a/20120306164738.blog b/20120306164738.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..00ce3f4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120306164738.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Back to the Old Normal +

It begins to look like the 2012 holiday-season was an anomaly. comScore’s new numbers (for Jan 2012) are out; Android is resuming its long-term growth rate after a temporary slowdown, and Apple’s market share actually dropped slightly.

+

+

I refused to overinterpret Android’s relatively poor performance in the last quarter then, and I’m not going to read too much into Apple’s fall in market share now – it’s probably within the statistical noise limit for comScore’s numbers. I’ll leave the hyperventilation to the fanboys.

+

I wasn’t the only observer to doubt that the sales spike produced by the 4S was sustainable, and that skepticism now appears to have been well justified. Android phones were outgrowing iPhones even at the hight of the giddy hype; now we’re back to situation normal, with Android posting about three times iPhone’s growth rate.

+

So what happened last quarter? I have to say I don’t know. The most intriguing bump in the trendlines, I think, was that RIM – poor, doomed RIM – pegged a slight gain in its userbase in December, after having watched that erode steadily from a high in late 2010. This suggests to me that the quarter’s numbers got bent by a surge of smartphone newcomers that were exceptionally lacking in the ability or knowledge to scope RIM’s future prospects – and, by extension, poor at evaluating the prospects of Apple and Android as well.

+

But now RIM’s trend curves have resumed their long-term decline. That surge is over. It’s an interesting time for Apple’s growth to be weakening. The census Bureau gives the current population of the U.S. as 311,591,917 and comScore says there are 101,300,000 smartphone subscribers in the U.S. That means about one in three Americans now has a smartphone.

+

If I were a zealot, I’d be crowing about the Trump of Doom for Apple as vociferously as the Apple fanboys were predicting same for Android three months ago. But no; while I still think Apple is headed for disruptive collapse, this probably isn’t it. Yet. This is probably just a lull after an unsustainable holiday frenzy. But if Apple continues to look as uncompetitive next month, the end of its giddy run might indeed be drawing nigh.

+

Tablets, you say? Tablet dominance will save Apple’s planners from the disruption jitters? Probably not. This announcement – a 7″ capacitive (so, full multitouch) tablet running full Android 4.0 for $89 – heralds the next stage in the disruption. It’s now a safe bet that before the end of Q2 there will be a dozen varieties of Android 4.0 tablet on sale at price points below $100. In the $150 range we’ll see 10″ screens and retina displays. That price point is a recipe for increasing pressure on the iPad.

diff --git a/20120308014548.blog b/20120308014548.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9e742bb --- /dev/null +++ b/20120308014548.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Return of the hacker ribbons +

Penguicon (venue of the upcoming Friends of Armed & Dangerous party) is a combination science-fiction convention and Linux/open-source conference, two geek tastes that taste great together.

+

One of Penguicon’s customs is that people wander around handing out affinity-group badge ribbons to those they deem worthy (or simply to be funny). In many past years I handed out a silver-on-blue ribbon that simply says “hacker”. But the last couple years I’ve been busy and distracted and my stash of ribbons had run out.

+

+

I’ve felt a little bad about that, because there are people out there for whom getting a “hacker” ribbon from ESR is a kind of gold star that they want and deserve. Little social rewards and identity validations like that are important to every culture, including ours, and one of the reasons humans elect tribal elders (and ESRs) is so there will be people with the authority to dispense them.

+

For a particularly dramatic example of this, read about Terry Pratchett’s geek ribbon. That wasn’t one of mine, but it could have been (I think I started handing mine out the following year, partly in reaction to that incident).

+

And now a round of applause for those of you who have been dropping money in my brand-new Paypal tip jar. You made it easy for me to buy “hacker” ribbons this year and I will be once again giving them out at Penguicon.

+

But not casually – wouldn’t do to devalue the currency, you know. I deliberately had made only a limited number. If you want one, show up at Penguicon and impress me. But you probably won’t impress me by trying to impress me. The hacker nature is like being one with the Tao – a posture of mind, not a thing that can be forced. Too much ego investment ruins the flavor.

+

(The hacker ribbons didn’t cost a lot. The rest of what’s in the tip jar will probably get spent on test hardware for the GPSD project, eventually.)

diff --git a/20120311091434.blog b/20120311091434.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3b2e5e9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120311091434.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +John Carter: the movie +

I was pretty dubious about John Carter. It was one of those movies which, as a serious SF fan and historian, I have to see even given a quite high likelihood that it was going to offend me with aggressively stupid handling of its source material. Therefore I am surprised and pleased to report that it is actually quite good!

+

+

I’ve read all of the Barsoom novels the movie was based on, but they’re not important in the furniture of my imagination in the way that (say) Robert Heinlein’s books are. They’re very primitive pulp fiction which I sought out mainly because of their historical importance as precursors of later and more interesting work. Still, they are not without a certain rude, innocent charm. The heroes are heroic, the villains villainous, the women are beautiful, dying Mars is a backdrop suffused with barbaric splendor, and the prose is muscular and vigorous.

+

This translation to movie form retains those virtues quite a bit more faithfully than one might have expected. In doing so it reminded me very much of the 2009 Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey Junior (see my review, A no-shit Sherlock). I didn’t get the powerful sense Sherlock Holmes gave me of the lead actors caring passionately about the source material, but the writers of John Carter certainly cared as much. A surprising amount of Burrough’s Barsoomian mythology and language made it into the movie. The barbarian Green Martians are rendered with gratifying unsentimentality, and the sense of Barsoom as an ancient planet with time-deep history and ancient mysteries is well conveyed.

+

If you’re me, reading the Barsoom novels is also an entertaining exercise in in origin-spotting tropes that would recur in later planetary romances and space operas clear down to the present day. The designers and writers of John Carter are alive to this; there are a number of points at which the movie visually quotes the Star Wars franchise in a funny, underlined way that reminds us that Barsoom was actually the ur-source for many of the cliches that Star Wars mined so successfully.

+

An ironic result of this is that a straight-up rendition of Burroughs would have seemed terribly dated. The filmmakers avoided this by playing to today’s Hollywood conventions in various places where they judged (mostly correctly, I think) that the Burroughs material wouldn’t work well for modern audiences. The only point at which I found this a bit obtrusive was Dejah Thoris, who was a cardboard-thin rescue object in the original and decidedly not the brainy and butt-kicking superwoman we get in this version. While this is in some ways clearly an improvement (and kudos to Lynn Collins for a charismatic and powerful performance that rather upstaged Taylor Kitsch’s John Carter) the savant stuff felt a bit overdone. Also I could have done without Woola, the obligatory cute animal companion.

+

But some of the changes were unequivocally good. One of the major flaws in the original, to modern eyes, is that John Carter’s transportation to Mars was not explained or rationalized in any way – it’s a weird acausal miracle which pitches us into universe which, because anything can happen, everything that actually does happen is arbitrary and insignificant. Campbellian SF, with its affirmation of a fundamentally knowable universe behind the fantastic material in the foreground, wouldn’t be invented until a quarter-century after Burrough’s first Barsoom novel.

+

The filmmakers do a nice job of repairing Burrough’s acausal plot-hole in a Campbellian fashion. In their version, Carter is accidentally telegraphed to Mars by exotic technology wielded by the villains of the piece, which same technology functions as a MacGuffin later in the movie. As a bonus, this sets up an implicit threat to Earth which begins to develop in this movie and will doubtless be exploited in the sequels.

+

And sequels there will almost certainly be, unless John Carter does much less well at the box office than I expect. (And a raspberry to Disney marketing, whose trailer and publicity almost completely fail to convey the movie’s strengths.) In this case turning the film into a franchise would be faithful to the spirit and form of Burroughs’s original. We can at least hope the followups will be better than the superficially watchable but obscurely disappointing 2011 sequel to Sherlock Holmes.

+

It’s nearly a requirement of reviews like this that I urge you to read the book that the movie is based on before seeing it. I am not actually certain I want to recommend that in this case. If you have anything like my scholarly interest in the history of SF, then, yes – the original Barsoom novels are worth finding and contrasting with this movie if only as a study in how much the expectations of audiences have changed since then, and how those changes influenced the filmmakers’ choices.

+

On the other hand, if all you want is the sort of thalamic thrill ride that Burroughs intended to deliver, the movie can stand alone. Burroughs’s writing evolved quite a bit during his lifetime; while, like many pulp writers, he never made the intellectually demanding transition to modern SF in the late 1930s, the Tarzan of the last tales around 1940 is rather more complex than his earliest incarnation in 1915 (for some related thoughts, see Reading Racism Into Pulp Fiction). I think Burroughs would recognize what the filmmakers have done and approve.

diff --git a/20120312062053.blog b/20120312062053.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f753e91 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120312062053.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +The moral equivalent of witchcraft +

The New York Times is carrying an unusually in-depth story “What Happened to the Girls in Leroy? on an epidemic of twitching, stuttering, and tics among the high-school girls of a small town in upstate New York.

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The reporter didn’t go there, but I couldn’t help noticing strong parallels to what we know about the run-up to the Salem witch trials. The symptoms reported from LeRoy are very like the “sickness of astonishment” which, in the belief context of Puritan Massachusetts in the 1690s, led to accusations of witchcraft and the torture and hanging of twenty people.

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Today’s verdict on the epidemic in LeRoy matches what historians generally believe about the causes of the Salem witch trials. Mass hysteria – or, in more modern clinical language, an epidemic of “conversion disorder” in which psychological stressors turn into physical symptoms through unconscious neurological mechanisms that are not yet well understood.

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What is yet more interesting, but not as closely examined by the reporter as it should have been, is the secondary illness the girls induced in the community around them. Parents reaching for explanations in Salem in 1692, living within a strongly religious world-view, seized on Satan and hostile witchcraft to explain the twitching, stuttering, and tics. The parents of Leroy, in a more secular world, instantly invented an equally unfalsifiable explanation – one which tells us a great deal about the native insanities of our own time.

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Yes, it’s 2012, and trace chemical pollutants have become the new witchcraft.

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They’re perfect for the role. Because they’re believed to be able to cause harm in sub-microgram amounts, absence of evidence can never be evidence of absence. They’re just like Puritan sinfulness – if you don’t find them, it’s because you’re not looking hard enough. Worse, your failure to find witchcraft pollutants can and will be taken as evidence that you are in league with Satan the polluters.

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By the time Erin Brockovich and a media posse come to your town (which actually happened in Leroy, yes) rationality is out the window. Nobody has the capability or the desire to confront the actual demons haunting these children – the long dying of the town’s economy and pride, fraying trust networks, disintegrating neighborhoods, absent or abusive parents – so hate and fear is displaced onto “chemicals” and unspecified but sinister corporations who might as well be standing in for the Princes of Hell.

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I’ve written before that environmental panics often seem like a sort of sorcerer hunt – a frenzy for finding someone to blame, a human cause that can be punished so that we can evade the truth of our ignorance of and powerlessness over impersonal causes. The Leroy case illustrates this exceptionally well – and it shows us something else as well. When those causes might in fact be partly under human control – when our children are ill and failing because we have failed them – the frenzy can get even worse.

diff --git a/20120318233126.blog b/20120318233126.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..29828cf --- /dev/null +++ b/20120318233126.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Holding up the sky +

During the last few years I’ve noticed a change in the meaning of my life – well, my life as a hacker, anyway. I had an exchange on a mailing list last night that made me think it’s not just me, that the same change has been sneaking up on a lot of us.

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It’s part of the hacker ethos to (as Alan Kay put it) predict the future by inventing it – to playfully seek solutions to problems people outside our culture are not yet even thinking about. We still do that, and I think we always will.

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But increasingly, as the world of pervasive networks and ubiquitous computing hackers imagined decades ago has become reality, we’re not just the innovators who thought of it first. Now we’re responsible; having created the future, we have to maintain it. And, as the sinews of civilization become ever more dependent on the Internet and software-intensive communications devices, that responsibility gets more serious every year.

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This makes for a subtle change in our duties and our relationship to our work – a gradual shift from merry prankster to infrastructure gnome.

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+

What started me thinking about this seriously is the Bufferbloat project. Those of us working on it believe we’ve identified a cluster of serious problems deep in the Internet’s implementation, and we’re working hard on diagnostic tools and mitigation methods.

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Sometimes, as we work on this, it’s difficult to wrap our minds around the implications of the worst-case scenarios. We’ve identified problems that plausibly could trigger a congestion collapse of the entire Internet. The one previous time the Internet suffered a congestion collapse, in the late 1980s, almost nobody but a handful of geeks noticed. Today, a service interruption of the same relative magnitude would be a civilization-challenging disaster.

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Nobody is panicking about this. We’ve got a remediation job to do, and we’re about as competent to do it as any team could be, and the odds that the Internet will random-walk into an unrecoverable crash before we can fix the vulnerabilities seem acceptably low. But damn. This isn’t an aspect of the future we were expecting, though in retrospect we probably should have. I look at us and wonder: when did we join the people who have to hold up the sky?

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While an Internet congestion collapse is still a high-end extreme, it is no longer a particularly rare thing even for smaller projects to be life-critical. My own GPSD is a good example. Maybe it was all about mapping WiFi hotspots and geocaching and research applications a decade ago, but nowadays the known deployments include the IFF systems of armored fighting vehicles in wartime. Bugs in my stuff could kill people.

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I don’t lose sleep over this, because I know I’m very good at what I do. If it weren’t me obsessing about our regression-test suite and our portage tests and annotating our code for static checking it would probably be someone less experienced and skilled than I am, and the odds of consequent avoidable deaths would go up. But, again, damn. This is not exactly what I was expecting thirty years ago, when I signed on to the whole hacker-ethos thing to push on the frontiers of possibility.

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And it’s not just the bufferbloat guys, and it’s not just me. Think of Linux on embedded systems, diffusing its way into medical equipment. And the flight avionics of airliners. And thousands of other invisible deployments where crashes and errors can kill. Hackers didn’t go looking for the job of holding up the sky, but as ephemeralization and distributed machine intelligence become more and more critical to the way human civilization functions, and open source takes over ever-larger pieces of that infrastructure, that job is finding and settling on us.

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There may be transitions like this associated with every new technology. But it’s happening faster now. Newcomen and Watt didn’t live to see the day when the world’s factories and commerce became dependent on steam engines, but I’ve lived to see my code become ubiquitous on almost everything that lights up pixels on a digital display. And I’m far from the only hacker who can say similar things.

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Ubiquity, like great power, requires of us great responsibility. It changes our duties, and it changes the kind of people we have to be to meet those duties. It is no longer enough for hackers to think like explorers and artists and revolutionaries; now we have to be civil engineers as well, and identify with the people who keep the sewers unclogged and the electrical grid humming and the roads mended. Creativity was never enough by itself, it always had to be backed up with craftsmanship and care – but now, our standards of craftsmanship and care must rise to new levels because the consequences of failure are so much more grave.

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But that’s OK. We’ve always had an ethos of service, an other-directed component to our idealism. I believe hackers, as a culture, can handle these new demands; the adjustment required is not a break with our traditions but a broadening and deepening of them.

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And then there’s this. Back when what we did on computers was more exclusively playful exploration and those computers were less ubiquitous in everyday life, it was easy to wonder sometimes if our hacking – as much fun and as challenging as it was – would ever be actually mean anything outside of research labs and universities and corporate server rooms.

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Now there is no longer doubt; what we do matters. Today hackers are, in fact, among the unacknowledged maintainers of civilization. There is honor in that.

diff --git a/20120320101404.blog b/20120320101404.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3afefc9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120320101404.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +On becoming a machine +

A regular, TomA, asks: “If you could replace your organic body (in its entirety) with a machine, would you do it?”

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This is one of those questions where examining the implied premises is the most interesting thing about answering it…

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My shortest answer is “No, unless I were dying and it was the only way to escape mortality.” I have a strong hunch that being embodied as a human is required to understand the minds of other humans. Being posthuman might get pretty lonely. I’d also hate to give up eating and sex.

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A slightly longer answer is that the question as posed neglects important issues about the capabilities of the machine. If I get to be an android with a fully human sensorium, that’s a very different and more acceptable case from being a mobile computeroid with tank treads and grippers.

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An interesting counter-question is: “How am I not a machine already?” I’m not a vitalist. I regard my body as a machine that happens to use organic molecules and assemblies thereof as parts. This observation takes me back to the question of how much transforming me into a different kind of machine would alienate me from human experience.

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I’m not asserting this is true of TomA, but I think people who ask this question often have a sort of clanking Robbie-the-Robot stereotype about what becoming a machine would be like. Well, it would beat dying, but please hurry up the upgrade with the syntheflesh and genitalia, would you?

diff --git a/20120321121731.blog b/20120321121731.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bdedb71 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120321121731.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +The infrastructure gnomes of tomorrow +

Regular TomA continues a hot streak by asking, in response to my post on Holding Up The Sky, “Is the hacker support system robust?”

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That is: having noticed that open-source volunteers now have a large and increasing role in maintaining critical shared infrastructure like the Internet, is there a sustainability issue here? Once the old guard who were involved in the early days (people like Jim Gettys and Dave Taht and myself) dies off, are we going to be able to replace them?

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I shall set forth my reasons for optimism.

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+

My principal reason for optimism is that the hacker culture has gotten extremely good at recruiting new talent. By “hacker culture” I mean anybody for which this is either a look in the mirror or an aspiration. Another good test is, as I’ve written before, is RFC1149. If you find it funny you may be part of the hacker culture, and if you find a report of implementing it with actual pigeons hilarious you almost certainly are.

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Consider: in the late 1970s when I first began to identify with this culture, you could almost certainly have fit every hacker in the United States in a medium-sized auditorium. If you were willing to have people standing in the aisles, every hacker in the world.

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Today, many Linux user groups can easily fill a hall that size, even in a Third World country. I know because they do it when I give talks! Those people aren’t swooning over my rugged masculine charm; they come to hear me because they want to be a part of what I represent to them (I know this directly from audience reactions). Even if only one in ten of the people in my audiences writes code, and only one in a hundred dedicates him- or herself to a piece of key software infrastructure, we’ll be able to sustain the numbers to meet our responsibilties.

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Now go watch #commits on freenode for a while. CIA only monitors a small fraction of the active projects out there, but watching will give you a feel for the huge volume and breadth of commits to public repositories going on all the time. This is shit getting real, people not just yakking on chat channels or listening to the likes of me rant at a LUG but writing code. Hacking. Creating. Perfecting their craft.

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There’s a helluva lot of momentum out there, and if anything the pace is increasing in tandem with Internet deployment, rather than slowing down. I think we’re also seeing a positive network effect; as the hacker culture gets larger and more diverse, the attractive value of the options it presents to potential hackers rises. Today’s flood of newbies will give us tomorrow’s coders and the next decade’s hard-core infrastructure gnomes.

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Thus my optimism. The social machine that trains and motivates our sky-upholders is in rude, vibrant good health. if anything we can live with a lot more lossiness in the long pipeline from newb to infrastructure gnome today than we could have decades ago when our intake was orders of magnitude smaller.

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I think it would take a disruption of historic proportions to stop that social machine from cranking out upholders of the sky. And it’s actually pretty difficult for me to think of a disruption in the right intensity range – that is, large enough to stall out the hacker-culture social machine without being a civilization-wrecker so total that not being able to find skilled help for stuff like the Bufferbloat project would be the least of our problems.

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The usual run of everybody’s favorite looming threats don’t worry me in the long term. We’ve survived software patents and the Microsoft monopoly in style. We just handed Big Media its ass over SOPA/PIPA and now we know how to do that again if we have to. Overtly political repression by any single government or plausible coalition of governments would just push activity to jurisdictions where it’s less controllable. Pirate Bay isn’t us, but it’s a useful straw in the wind; even the weight of Big Media and several cooperating governments couldn’t take them out, and our network is much better dispersed.

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Actually the only kind of disrupter I can imagine actually screwing up the supply of future infrastructure gnomes would be some kind of superstimulus that would be so much more attractive than the hacker culture that it would outcompete us for geek attention. I could sort of distantly imagine the hackerspace crowd and their 3D printers doing that, maybe, except that (a) atoms are harder to push around than bits, creating friction costs we don’t have, and (b) they’re actually us anyway!

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Maybe garage nanotech? But I have a strong hunch that when that gets here, the people who make it happen will be us, too. What the hacker culture has actually become is an attractor that both pulls into itself and seeds the maker communities around any new software-intensive technologies that arise near it. Early minicomputers, the Internet, Unix, microcomputers, smartphone modding, 3D fabrication, open-source software and hardware – the hacker posture of mind, and the cultural signifiers that have evolved to express and transmit it, spans all of these not as a matter of accident but of essence.

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This, too, helps explain the population explosion. And gives me confidence about the answer to TomA’s question. Crossover among the technologies we hack is constant, and everyone drawn into this attractor is implicitly in training to hold up a piece of the sky.

diff --git a/20120322031245.blog b/20120322031245.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ca828f6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120322031245.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +Eggs a la ESR +

For no particular reason, my recipe for scrambled eggs.

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Ingredients:

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6 eggs
+A heaping tablespoon of turmeric
+A teaspoonful of chipotle powder
+3 or 4 stalks of scallions
+About 5 ounces (one large link) of andouille sausage

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Tools:

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One large non-stick frying pan
+A glass measuring cup
+A spatula and a sharp paring knife.
+A fork or eggbeater for scrambling with.

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Remove the sausage casing and mince the meat. Dice the scallions. Scramble the eggs in the measuring cup, mixing in the turmeric and chipotle powder.

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Brown the sausage. Once it is evenly browned, pour the eggs over it and scramble everything with the spatula. Add the scallions as the eggs are beginning to solidify – not earlier or they will cook down too much.

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A decent grade of chorizo works as well as andouille. Shallots will do instead of scallions and some people like that taste better, but if you do that cook the shallots down a bit in olive oil before browning the meat (and if you’re going to do that, adding some sliced mushrooms is not at all a bad idea). Hotter varieties may be substituted for the chipotle to good effect; on one occasion I made this with powdered scorpion peppers.

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Makes a generous breakfast for two. We usually accompany it with Italian sourdough toast.

diff --git a/20120323141423.blog b/20120323141423.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1e056a1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120323141423.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Michael Meets Mozart +

I love classical music. It was my first musical vocabulary; I didn’t start listening to popular music until I was 14. When I grew up enough to notice that I was listening to a collection of museum pieces and not a living genre, that realization made me very sad.

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But go listen to this: Michael Meets Mozart.

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Now, if you’re a typical classical purist, you may be thinking something like this: “Big deal. It’s just a couple of guys posing like rock stars, even if there’s some Mozart in the DNA. Electric cello and a backbeat is just tacky. Feh.”

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I’m here to argue that this attitude is tragically wrong – not only is it bad for what’s left of the classical-music tradition today, but that it’s false to the way classical music was conceived by its composers and received by its audiences back when it was a living genre.

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Mozart didn’t think he was writing museum pieces…

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…and neither should we. Once upon a time, classical music communicated with the popular music of its day. Composers mined the folk music they had grown up with for ideas. And ‘classical’ music was popular; adulation of its virtuosi and the electricity surrounding live performances was intense. By period accounts it is not hyperbole that Franz Liszt has been described as “the first rock star”.

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The avant-gardists strangled classical music in the early 20th century precisely by driving away its popular audience, reducing it to a arid landscape of theory, manifesto, and demonstration (I have written about this before). New composition found a fragile refuge in film scores, while dwindling concert-hall audiences of the increasingly old and elite settled for museum exhibits. Some time back I wrote this:

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+My favorite piece of recent classical music is a particular section of Hans Zimmer’s Pirates of the Caribbean score. It combines kettledrums in 5/4 time, somewhat reminscent of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps with a wood flute being played microtonally.

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I second Tom DeGisi’s recommendation of Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Their Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24 is a setting of a well-known Christmas carol that combines high-Romantic orchestration and electric guitars played with savage elegance.

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Another standout from a few years back was the soundtrack for an otherwise forgettable movie called Hidalgo made as a Viggo Mortensen vehicle. Lovely classical music mixed with North African hand drums and what I think might have been griot singing.

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If you notice a pattern here of co-opting modern instruments to achieve a wider tonal range, good. I have a personal fondness for polyrhythmic hand drumming. But more generally, this is what “classical” sounds like as a living genre willing to experiment rather than a dead set of museum pieces! +

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And this is what the Piano Guys give us in in Michael meets Mozart – straight up, not a film score but standalone music that dares us to take it on its own terms as boldly as a pop album and co-opts the language of modern popular music for its own ends. This is the sound of classical music climbing out of its grave, spitting out the goddamned embalming fluid, and kicking ass.

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A while back I wrote about how moving I found Ravel’s Bolero played in a train station. The Piano Guys give me the same feeling of hope and pride. The nihilists and the downshouters and the politically-correct multi-culti zombies haven’t done for Western civilization yet, not while we can regenerate ourselves like this. And that, as much as the music itself, is something to celebrate.

diff --git a/20120329081612.blog b/20120329081612.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4c41a8f --- /dev/null +++ b/20120329081612.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Remembering the future +

I own a rather large library of paperback SF which I have been collecting since the late 1960s; it includes a lot of stuff that is now quite rare and half forgotten. I owe a great deal to SF and consider these books cultural treasures, The last few years I’ve been wondering if there’s any way to ensure that this treasure won’t be lost as conventional printed books get left behind and the remaining copies of the more obscure stuff crumble.

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Maybe there is the beginning of an answer. Singularity & Co. – Save the SciFi! is a Kickstarter project aimed specifically at rescuing out-of-print genre SF from oblivion. It is not yet clear whether their methods will scale; scanning is easy but untangling the IP around these old books can be difficult. But the response to the project has been encouraging; they’re already 240% over their initial funding goal.

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I have contributed $25, and offered them the use of my library. If it looks like they have developed a sustainable set of methods I will contribute a lot more. I think this is a worthy project and deserving of support from everyone who loves science fiction.

diff --git a/20120329122608.blog b/20120329122608.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d2a2038 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120329122608.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Where your contributions go +

This is a thank-you to my tip-jar contributors.

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Today I spent $88.76 directly out of the tip jar on engineering samples of GPS dongles specially modified to carry the 1PPS signal out to USB. I will test them, and if the modification succeeds it is quite likely that the company I am cooperating with will begin shipping this mod in a volume product shortly. This will, for the first time, make time sources with 1ms accuracy available for less than $100 each. The application I have in mind is fixing the Internet; there are many others.

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This is the sort of thing that happens when you donate money to support my open-source projects. Thank you; you are helping me make the world a better place.

diff --git a/20120330093339.blog b/20120330093339.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..75f82f5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120330093339.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Penguicon 2012 Geeks With Guns +

The party for Armed & Dangerous readers is still on for Friday night at Penguicon, and we have a new event – actually, the return of an old favorite: Geeks with Guns.

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This year’s GWG is scheduled for 2:00PM on Friday the 27th; it will take place at the Firing Line range. We will be teaching basic firearms safety, handling, and pistol marksmanship; first-time shooters are welcome. Experienced shooters are also welcome and may be drafted as range officers and assistant instructors. Yes, I’ve done this before, and no, we’ve never had an injury – pistol shooting is statistically safer than golf.

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Important: please mail guns@penguicon.org with your intention to attend. We need to give the range advance notice of roughly how many people will be showing. Two dozen is pretty typical.

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Thanks to regular John D. Bell for organizing. John will be passing around the hat for a few bucks each to cover the range fees. Bring your own weapon if you have one, otherwise you can rent at the range or possibly borrow a friend’s. Newbs seeking instruction will be expected to buy their own ammunition.

diff --git a/20120330110818.blog b/20120330110818.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3e08878 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120330110818.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Exit Blackberry, pursued by a bear +

Comes today the news that Blackberry is giving up on the consumer market. Of course this means the company will be as dead as Antigonus shortly.

+

+

Why do I say this? Because one of the most ironclad rules of the tech industry is this: retreat upward never works. If your company is failing, withdrawing from mass markets to focus on the high end may look like a smart move for a few quarters but it makes eventual doom more certain. The decline and fall of Sun Microsystems is probably the most recent major example but far from the only one.

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Retreat upwards fails because it leaves space for your competitors to attack you from the low end – in effect, you’re pinning a sign on your backside that says “DISRUPT ME!” Also, in any hardware-centered business, process improvements happen fastest where volume is highest (that is, at the low end); retreat upwards means your competitors will capture those gains faster than you do.

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More grim details. Company is not profitable and will no longer be issuing financial projections. Balsillie is leaving. The COO and CTO are bailing out.

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Everything about this smells of death. Not that it should come as a surprise to regular readers, because I’ve been saying RIM was doomed and explaining why since last June.

diff --git a/20120402222418.blog b/20120402222418.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..436ae4f --- /dev/null +++ b/20120402222418.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Trayvon Martin and the grievance factory +

Even to a person as cynical and jaded as I have become about American politics, the brouhaha around the Trayvon Martin shooting is rather shocking. Usually, in past instances of even the most determined attempts to inflame racial hatred, there’s been at least a fig leaf of plausible deniability over the manipulation. Not this time. Not with MSNBC getting caught editing its presentation of the 911 tape to make it sound like the shooter uttered a racial slur. Not with Trayvon Martin’s photo obviously photoshopped to make him look younger, less threatening, and (ironically) more white.

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I’m not going to utter or argue for a conclusion about whether or not Zimmerman shot in self-defense. We don’t know that. Perhaps he was, in fact, motivated by race hatred. The facts of the shooting will have to come clearer before that can be judged. We have more than enough facts, though, to observe and indict the operation of the racial-grievance factory, and to point a finger squarely at those who are dishonestly battening on Trayvon Martin’s death.

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+

The progress of civil rights in the U.S. can be measured by the extent to which real racial outrages have been displaced by trumped-up fake ones. The year I was born, in 1957, segregation was still a cruel and oppressive fact in the American South; thirty years later, in 1987, Tawana Brawley’s false rape accusations would certainly not have had to be pimped to the max by Al Sharpton if he’d had any true ones to work with.

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With the Trayvon Martin shooting the fakery has reached dizzying heights. Beginning with the fact that a hispanic man shoots a black and we are immediately urged to see this as evidence of pervasive evil and prejudice in a racial group of “whites” which, according to their IDs, neither man thought he belonged to.

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Personally, I think the distinction between “white” and “hispanic” is a rather silly one to be insisting on in 2012, especially for anybody named “George Zimmerman”. But I’m not him – apparently George thought his hispanicity/non-whiteness was important enough to put on his documents. The racial-grievance industry, which thrives on assigning each of us to a place in an ever-more-ramified hierarchy of “victim” and “oppressor” groups, has no excuse in its own terms of reference for ignoring this.

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And is anyone but me noticing the irony of whitening Trayvon Martin in his hoodie photograph? We’ll pass over quickly the blatant flim-flam of publishing five-year-old photographs that make him look like a chubby-cheeked kid rather than the sullen, angry teenage gangbanger (Twitter handle “NO_LIMIT_NIGGA”) in the more current ones. But the first time I saw the photoshopped version of the “hoodie” photograph, my instant thought was “My Goddess – they’ve Michael-Jacksonized him!”

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That’s right, in covering a story that was, for them, ostensibly all about race, the mainstream media more than half bleached out Trayvon Martin’s blackness. To make him seem less threatening and more sympathetic. Thereby, implicitly, confirming and validating the exact stereotype of “black = danger” about which we are all being lectured!

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But such thoughtless gaslighting should not surprise us. Because even supposing that Zimmerman pulled the trigger for racial reasons (which isn’t established), the media-approved post-shooting spin is only pretending to be about racial justice. And the pretense is a thin one. What’s actually going on is a load of grunting and posturing as stylized and disconnected from reality as a Kabuki drama, and directed to ends that had nothing to do with Trayvon Martin’s life or death. Let’s review some of the actual axes being ground here:

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First on the scene to abuse Trayvon’s corpse were the jackals from the “Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence”, who have been fighting an increasingly desperate rear-guard action against civil-rights progress ever since the Heller ruling in 2008 reaffirmed the Second Amendment as an individual right. Their goal was to throw as much mud as possible at Florida’s recently-passed “stand your ground” law in hopes that some of it would stick, and never mind that it would probably be irrelevant to Zimmerman’s defense if he were charged.

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But the gun-grabbers were quickly jostled aside by the usual gang of race hustlers, Al Sharpton being the most obvious but far from the only example. The last thing the race hustlers want is “racial justice”; their whole loathsome con depends on guilt-tripping Whitey, inflaming blacks, and profiting as both sides bleed. With actual racism as near dead as it is in the U.S., their game depends on being able to regularly construct white-on-black “injustice” out of nothing, and if that means editing George Zimmerman into a “white” racist, they’ll do it.

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The race hustlers are small-time, though, compared to the White House, the Democratic National Committee, and the mainstream press. When Barack Obama said he though that Trayvon Martin looked like the son he doesn’t have, this had everything to do with his weak position going into the 2012 presidential elections. At all cost blacks must be mobilized to vote and everybody given a gaudy distraction from $5 gas prices, “green energy” cronyism, and the limping wreckage of the administration’s economic policy.

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If this means Trayvon Martin has to be whitewashed and George Zimmerman gets a public lynching, then the mainstream press is showing itself eager to comply, supplying all the photoshopping and fake-but-accurate 911 audio the DNC could actually want. The actual facts of the case, and the actual meaning of Trayvon Martin’s death? Irrelevant. And, of course, the fact that George Zimmerman was a registered Democrat goes down the memory hole.

diff --git a/20120403181941.blog b/20120403181941.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..157454e --- /dev/null +++ b/20120403181941.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +The smartphone Wars: Finally, Android breaks 50% +

The newest comScore figures, for February 2012, are out. Android has finally achieved majority market share in the U.S.. This is three months later than a linear fit to most of 2010 and 20111 predicted, but whatever happened in 4Q2011 to throw everybody off their previous long-term trend curves seems to be over. Android, in particular, is back to pulling about 2% of additional market share per month – actually, its growth rate seems to have increased a bit from before the glitch.

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I was right not to overinterpret Apple’s very slight loss of market share last month. The iPhone is back to very, very slowly gaining share. Apple fans should resist the temptation to overinterpret that, though, since the gain is within statistical noise level.

+

RIM and Microsoft continue to go down in flames, losing not just market share but total userbase as well.

+

What does it all mean?

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+

The main thing I see in these numbers is that despite all the sound and fury about Apple’s record quarter, the 4S has failed to improve the iPhone’s competitive posture against Android. The fourth or fifth iteration of “this time for sure!” fizzled yet again. I’m sure we’ll hear the same breathless hype when the iPhone 5 issues, though, it seems to be evergreen.

+

In fact, the pressure on Apple has increased. What we know about winner-take-all effects in markets with positive network externalities suggests that when you’re facing supermajority competition, even slight erosions in market share tend to turn into self-reinforcing cascades as users defect to the safe majority choice.

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Now, this could happen to Apple at any time. Apple no longer has margin for screwing up; it can’t even afford a stumble. To be specific, just one botched product launch could easily cost it 15 points of share that it will never get back.

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RIM has given up, withdrawing from the consumer market with high-ranking execs fleeing the sinking ship. Dead company walking, not that this will be any surprise to anyone following my analyses. Last June I predicted seven months plus or minus two to a crash or buyout; I was a little off, but not by much.

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Microsoft is just bleeding cash and credibility at this point. There is zero possibility that they can recover against competition as strong as Apple and the Android army. And, as predicted here, they’re taking Nokia down with them.

diff --git a/20120407022956.blog b/20120407022956.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4bb8b79 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120407022956.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Feline health update +

A brief update for those of you who were following the saga of our cat Sugar’s brush with death and remarkable rebound early last September.

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At the time of Sugar’s episode of acute renal failure and emergency hydration, our vet told us we’d be lucky if she survived another six months. The good news is, that was just about seven months ago now and she’s still reasonably healthy, happy, and affectionate. This wouldn’t be anything to take for granted even without that brush with death, given that she’s just over 19 years old now. That’s an uncommonly long lifespan for a cat.

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The bad news is, her latest bloodwork shows indications of slow-motion progressive renal failure. This is not a surprise; given her age and history we’re quite fortunate that it’s not rapid renal failure. She yowls at night sometimes – not with nearly the frequency she did before the nephritis was diagnosed and cured, but enough that we know that not all is quite right in Sugar-land.

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Other than that it’s not easy to tell that she’s a geriatric cat. Eyes continue to be bright, coat continues to be glossy and full, the purr is ready and resonant, and she still clearly considers it an important part of her duties to greet humans at the door and charm all houseguests into worshipping her.

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We’re trying to keep her hydrated, making sure she always has plenty of water and getting a subcutaneous hydration needle into her when we can manage it – which isn’t often as, while she doesn’t seem traumatized by it or particularly fearful of it, she definitely doesn’t like it.

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Ah, and Sugar has materialized at my feet, making greeting noises. This is not as coincidental as it sounds; when she’s not asleep she has a tendency to oscillate between Cathy and me, emitting happiness and (usually very polite) requests for attention. Which we are generally quite pleased to grant.

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Time out for cat-petting….

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Not much news beyond this. We’re enjoying Sugar’s company, and letting her enjoy ours, as much as we can. Maybe it’s silly to imagine that keeping her happy and well-loved is extending her lifespan, but – hey, it seems to be working so far.

diff --git a/20120407200926.blog b/20120407200926.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5123ce7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120407200926.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +An intelligence test +

Heads up, gentle reader. I’m about to give you an intelligence test. To begin the test, read “The Talk: Nonblack version“.

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The single most important kind of intelligence is the ability to see past your own strongly-held preconceptions and your tribe’s conventional wisdom and engage reality as it actually is and facts as they actually are.

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Now I’m going to ask you some questions about your response to the article.

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1. Did you fail to notice that the key paragraph in it is this one: “Thus, while always attentive to the particular qualities of individuals, on the many occasions where you have nothing to guide you but knowledge of those mean differences, use statistical common sense:”

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2. Did you recoil from refuse to accept any claim in the article that you recognized as true or probably true because it would hurt peoples’ feelings?

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3. Did you at any point refuse to believe a fact claim in the article because you think the world would be a worse or uglier place if the claim were true?

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4. Did you finish the article believing that John Derbyshire (the author) is a racist?

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5. Do you believe I am a racist for having asked the previous four questions?

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If you answered “Yes” to any of the above questions, you failed the test.

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EDIT: Changed the phrasing of question 2 slightly as some people found it confusing.

diff --git a/20120410185155.blog b/20120410185155.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d2ff8cd --- /dev/null +++ b/20120410185155.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +On not ceding the truth to racists +

One of the most important reasons not to tell ourselves pretty lies about unpleasant realities is so that we do not hand evil people the power of being the only ones who are willing to speak the truth.

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+

In my last post, I gave my readers an intelligence test based on John Derbyshire’s deliberately provocative article about The Talk: Nonblack version. I am pleased to report that more commenters passed the test than I expected, engaging and critiquing Derbyshire’s survival advice rationally rather than foaming at the mouth in fits of political correctness. This shows that my readers are brighter and saner than Derbyshire’s former employers at National Review Online – but I already knew that.

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In the debate that followed, only a small number of exceptionally stupid people averred that I am or might be a racist myself. A rather larger number accused of me of holding to a standard for “racism” and “racist thinking” that is too narrow, because I reject ever describing as “racist” people who speak beliefs that are factually justified – even if those beliefs are negative about specific racial groups and even if they are expressed with intent to provoke. I hold that truth should be considered a sufficient defense against charges of racism just as it is against slander and libel.

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But because Derbyshire pointed at unpleasant statistics about criminality, violence and IQ, and described the logical consequences of those statistics in unsparing detail, many commenters were willing to condemn him as a racist even though they conceded that his fact base is largely sound and there is no evidence that his errors (if any) are dishonest. I even had one person defend this expansive definition of “racist” on the grounds that this is how almost everyone understands the word.

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I am writing to argue that such a loose definition of “racist” is a dangerous mistake.

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Imagine that you live in a universe X where the following claim is true: “Black people, at roughly 12% of the U.S. population, commit over 50% of the U.S.’s. violent crime – and when you stratify by socioeconomic level they still have dramatically higher levels of crime, delinquency, and other measures of social deviance.”, but this fact is suppressed from public discourse and unmentionable. It will not matter to the rest of my argument whether that claim describes our universe.

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Now suppose you have spent all your life in universe X being told that black people are just like you, and no more likely to be criminals than anyone else. Until one day an actual racist, a bigot, a person who has a fixated hate of black people, says to you “They’re lying, and I can prove it. Look at this abstract from the Uniform Crime Reports!”

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And you see the evidence, and absorb it. The first question you’re going to ask, if you have even one brain cell working, is “What else have the ‘anti-racists’ and the diversity enthusiasts been lying to me about?” And the bigot will have answers, many of which are fantasy and bullshit and bizarre distortions of history. But even his fantasy and bullshit will be credible to you, because he began by showing you a truth that nobody else was willing to speak.

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Nobody sane wants to hand power and credibility to neo-Nazis or the Christian Identity movement or Confederate revanchists or any of the other tiny clusters of bigoted wack jobs at the fringes of American politics. But that is exactly what we do every time we tell pretty lies about race. It is exactly what we do every time we use “racist” as a verbal cudgel against people who deviate in the slightest from politically-correct thinking. And it is exactly what we do when we honk endlessly about the need for a “national conversation about race”, then run the likes of John Derbyshire out of town on a rail for speaking honestly.

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To avoid putting bigots and racists on the right and truthful side of the argument, we need a strict definition of “racist” claims as those which (a) prejudice individual judgment of individuals, and (b) are based on false generalizations. We cannot allow true generalizations to be considered racist. If we do that, either (a) we can no longer condemn racism as such, or (b) we get stuck in a situation where we’re not allowed to notice that white men can’t jump and black men can’t swim, wondering why our our sports teams aren’t “balanced”, and falsely ascribing to bigotry what arises from natural differences in distributions of ability. And the poison spreads.

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Only the haters and creeps and race-hustlers of all colors win under either of those outcomes. So please do not give evil people the gift of being sloppy in your thinking and your language.

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Oh, and if you’re wondering whether you actually do live in Universe X? Do some googling. Be prepared not to like what you find.

diff --git a/20120412175222.blog b/20120412175222.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..28b8a5f --- /dev/null +++ b/20120412175222.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +Making simple connections +

About six weeks ago I asked How would you like to help fix the Internet? It was an open invitation to help develop a cheap millisecond-precision time source for instrumented routers, so we can do delay tomography on the Internet and measure the bufferbloat problem.

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The discussion thread on that post was lively, but eventually moved to a thumbgps project mailing list out of public view. I’m going to summarize what has gone on here because parts of it are very interesting in a “Wow…it really is the 21st century!” sort of way, and illustrate that there can be a lot of power in making simple connections.

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My call went out on 1 March. Dave Täht launched the mailing list on 10 March. Early discussion consisted mainly of a lot of kicking around of concept designs for time hardware. While this was going on, I was holding on to the idea of a simple mod to one of the existing cheap-ass GPS designs, just wiring the 1PPS pin from the GPS to DCD or RI on the serial-to-USB adapter chip and getting PPS with at worst one USB polling interval’s worth of jitter. There’s one simple connection for you

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On 15 Mar I discovered alibaba.com. This is a site that make connections in mainland China through which you can chat in real time with trade reps from Chinese electronics fabricators. Turns out these guys are constantly looking for OEM/ODM business, and I was able to interest two different companies that already make cheap GPSes for export – UniTraq and NaviSys.

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During the following week I exchanged email with these companies describing in detail the required single-trace hardware mod, explaining exactly how and why I believe it would work, and what the potential market is. I explained all the relevant obscure technicalia – 1PPS, handshake input pins on USB-to-serial adaptors, USB notification events, effects of polling on latency.

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It helped that on 16 Mar one of the thumbgps guys breadboarded a test setup and reported measured jitter of 300μs with 1PPS from a Garmin 18 feeding a common serial-to-USB chip, the FTDI SIO. OK, yes, you can in fact crowdsource some of the critical test engineering on a project like this.

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And the people in Shenzhen went for it – started modding prototypes and reporting progress.

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Now I want to pause for a moment so you can really take this in. In effect, I became the lead designer on a new electronics product by email. Just me. No corporate-backing, no million-dollar development budget, one guy saying “Hey, if you connect this to that, cool things will happen!” – negotiating directly with people on the other side of the planet who’ll never meet me face to face. And it’s more interesting because I’m not famous to these guys and not even a hardware geek.

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All that SF/future-shock speculation about disaggregated manufacturing, contract and trust networks replacing corporations, Coasian effects disappearing as communications get cheaper? It’s here. Now. I’m living it. I’m using it.

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So, the current state of play is that both companies are working on minor technical glitches. One outfit used a USB-to-serial adaptor, the CP2101, that turned out to be unusable for our purposes when I tested the engineering samples. The chip vendor persistently refused to release enough interfacing info to allow the open-source Linux driver to wait on a change in the state of an emulated handshake line. Now they’ve effectively EOLed the chip. We’re going to have to move to something like a PL2303.

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The other design, which does use a PL2303, has been tested with GPSD in China and works – they emailed me the test logs. But they did it with a patch wire, and there’s some internal connector issue they have to work out for the production design.

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These are solvable problems. The important point is that (a) the basic concept of adding one PCB trace to pass out 1PPS over USB has been shown to work to sub-1ms accuracy, and (b) the design and communication process is working. Nothing but a little elbow grease and routine product engineering stands between where we are now and multiple-source availability of 1ms-accuracy time sources for about $30 each quantity 100.

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Connections are powerful things. This is a novel capability, and a dramatic improvement in the price-performance ratio of existing precision-time sources as finished products that can be deployed immediately. From one PCB trace! Which the GPS vendors could have added years ago if they had known just a little more about their chipsets.

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Sometimes the most important connection of all is just knowing that a given thing is possible.

diff --git a/20120415142237.blog b/20120415142237.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c8cbc80 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120415142237.blog @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +Open source warfare != open source software +

One of my commenters brought up John Robb, a former SpecOps pilot who has made a name for himself as a counter-terror theorist by writing about “open-source warfare”. Mutual acquaintances confirm what Robb’s own writings suggest, which is that his notions of open-source warfare are heavily influenced by what I have called the bazaar model of software development.

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When I learned this in 2004 I attempted to begin a conversation with John Robb by email. The remainder of this post is my email to him – to which, for whatever reason, he never replied. I have edited the one link reference into a live link.

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A friend pointed me at THE BAZAAR’S OPEN SOURCE PLATFORM. I had been previously aware of the application of social network theory to counterinsurgency and half-expecting my work to show up in that conversation at some point, but this is the first time I actually know of it happening.

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You analogy between terrorist networks and the open-source community is thought-provoking but, I think, flawed. The flaws are good news, as they offer guidance towards ways to disrupt and hinder terror networks.

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There are at least four traits that make the the network of open-source hackers structurally different from the terror network.

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1. Visibility is safe

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The first difference is that the hacker network can be entirely visible without risk, but the terror network must remain almost entirely invisible (except at the edges, where it recruits through deniable cut-outs).

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Thus, communication between terrorists is much riskier than it is between hackers. (There have already been some well-publicized incidents in which tapped cell-phone conversations led to portions of the terror network being rolled up.) This matters, because it means that every attempt at coordination has to be traded off against the probability that it will result in exposure.

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You have already noticed that this tradeoff implies a maximum feasible network size. It also implies a minimum feasible action-reaction loop; the riskier communication is, the longer coordination at an acceptable risk level will take. (Thus Al-Quaeda’s observed pattern of long latency periods between attacks.)

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2. Outcomes are easy to measure

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Second, success is easier to measure for hackers than for terrorists. A program either runs and gives the expected output, or it doesn’t. Of course there are important kinds of programs for which you cannot predict the output, but it is usually possible to check that output for correctness by various means and be confident that you know whether or not it meets your objectives.

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Terrorists have more difficulty measuring outcomes. Let’s take the Chechen separatists as an example: presuming their outcome is to break the Russians’ will to fight in Chechnya, how are they to know whether the massacre at Beslan succeeded or not?

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3. The cost of failure is low

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There is very little downside risk in what hackers do. If aparticular way of writing a program fails, you throw it away and write a new one. Failure can be sad for individuals or project groups but does not threaten the network as a whole.

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The terror network, on the other hand, can be badly damaged by the blowback from its actions. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attack, Al-Qaeda lost its base camps in Afghanistan, and state sponsorship of terrorism became covert rather than overt.

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No analogous loss is really imaginable for hackers. They are protected partly by the fact that there are large demand sinks for what they do in the aboveground economy — our equivalent of state sponsorship is the Fortune 1000.

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4. Attack methods are perfectly transmissible

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When hackers successfully attack a problem, they produce an algorithm that can be cheaply replicated anywhere. Terrorists, on the other hand, rely on skills that are difficult to replicate (such as bomb-making) and materiel that isn’t easy to get (consider the relative cost of a personal computer versus an RPG).

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The bazaar model will only work for terrorists insofar as they can suppress these differencies — e.g., be safely visible, measure outcomes, control the cost of failure, and transmit attack methods.

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It follows that counterterror strategy must be aimed at amplifying these differences. Here’s how we can do that:

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1. Make it more dangerous for terrorists to be visible.

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Terrorists can afford to be visible only where either (a) no local authority can suppress them, or (b) they are sponsored by the strongest local authority. (It is immaterial whether the local authority is a nation-state; this analysis applies equally to Iran, pre-liberation Iraq and Somalia.)

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Thus, raising the perceived risk from sponsoring terrorism will force terrorists to operate undercover, making their network less like a bazaar in both communication richness and action/reaction time.

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2. Make it more difficult for terrorists to measure outcomes

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The most effective step we could take towards this is probably for responsible news media to voluntarily stop covering individual terrorist attacks. Note that this would not be the same as denying or covering up the phenomenon; monthly aggregate statistics on terrorist attacks, for example, would suffice for purposes such as risk evaluation by commercial travelers.

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Unfortunately, responsibility by the news media seems rather unlikely.

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3. Make the cost of failure high

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This can be best achieved by the traditional method of giving no quarter — killing terrorists swiftly and without mercy whenever they present targets by mounting an operation.

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4. Make it more difficult to transmit attack methods.

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This implies that disrupting terrorist training facilities should be a priority in counter-terror.

diff --git a/20120421123723.blog b/20120421123723.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9d48740 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120421123723.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +giflib: everything old is new again +

In 1994 I handed off the maintainership of giflib, the open-source library used by pretty much everything in the universe that displays images for the single most widely used icon and image format on the World Wide Web, because patent issues made it unwise for the project to be run by someone in the U.S. Now, eighteen years later, Toshio Kuratomi (the hacker who took it over then) has asked me to resume the lead. I have accepted his request.

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I don’t expect this to involve a lot of work. The code is very mature and stable; I left it in good shape and it’s coming back to me in good shape. I asked to rejoin because I thought it would be a good idea to run some auditing tools on the code to check it for correctness, and polish it into more modern C if that’s needed. Major changes seem highly unlikely.

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Toshio has lost interest in the project, and was looking for someone to hand it to. Eighteen years is a long time, much longer than I myself spent on the project. He’s owed everyone’s thanks for his responsible stewardship of the code.

diff --git a/20120424190240.blog b/20120424190240.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1ceae03 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120424190240.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +Penguicon party 2012! +

Reminder: The Armed & Dangerous party at Penguicon 2012 is now barely more than 72 hours away. Begins 9:00PM Friday night, room number to be announced on this blog and probably tweeted too.

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All readers of this blog will be welcome. See the real faces behind the Gravatar icons! Pursue discussion threads in person! Refrain from actual physical violence! Wheeee….

diff --git a/20120425000206.blog b/20120425000206.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..141f71c --- /dev/null +++ b/20120425000206.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +The long past of C +

Hacking on the C code of giflib after an absence of nearly two decades has been an interesting experience, a little like doing an archeological dig. And not one that could readily be had elsewhere; nowhere other than under Unix is code that old still genuinely useful under any but carefully sandboxed conditions. Our reward for getting enough things about API design right the first time, one might rightly say. But what’s most interesting is what has changed, and giflib provides almost ideal conditions for noticing the changes in practice that have become second nature to me while that code has stood still.

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I mean, this is code so ancient and unchanged that it still had a macro to hide the difference between C compilers that have void pointers and those that don’t – it wasn’t assuming even C89, let alone C99. I only resolved the uses of that to “void *” last night, and I’ve left the definition in the header just in case.

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But the largest single executable-code change I found myself making was introducing C99 bools where the code had simulated them with old-style TRUE and FALSE macros. Only internally, I might add – there are a couple of pseudo-bools in the externally visible API that I haven’t touched so as not to risk breaking source compatibility. That and counting on stdint.h to supply uint32_t were two of the big three; I’ll get to the third in a bit.

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The fact that editing in now-standard typedefs was the largest change in executable code is a testament to the remarkable stability of C, I think. I can barely think of any other language in which bringing code across an eighteen-year gap would be anywhere near that easy, and you would not want to use any of the handful of partial exceptions for systems programming on a modern machine.

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Something else I noticed is that there was no point at which I looked at my old code (or code from Gershon Elber, the original author of the DOS version) and had a “What the fsck were you thinking?” moment. Which is good: I guess I was already a pretty good programmer 20 years ago, and the proof is that this code ended up deployed everywhere that displays pixels, including the phone on your hip, without my ever hearing barely a bug report. On the other hand, it’s a little disconcerting to think that I might not have learned anything about practical C in two decades…

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There were some moments of pure amusement in the quest as well, such as my rediscovery of gif2epsn – a utility for dumping GIFs to Epson dot-matrix printers, actually using the individual print head wires as scanning pixels. Just what the world needs in 2012. I removed it; it’s still in the repo history in the unlikely event that anyone ever cares about that code again.

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In general a lot of what I’m going to be doing for the upcoming 4.2 release is removing stuff. Back then, it made sense for giflib to carry a fairly elaborate set of image viewing, image capturing, and image format conversion tools, because relatively few other codebases spoke GIF. Of course that’s all changed now, with multiformat viewers and editors the norm. I’m probably going to throw out several more utilities because it doesn’t make any sense to compete with the likes of ImageMagick and the GIMP in that space. In a sense, giflib is a victim of its own success at making its format ubiquitous.

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I’ve saved what I think is the most interesting change for last. When I’m not looking at code this old I tend to forget what a thicket of #ifdefs we had to manage back in the day. Cross-platform portability was hard, and it made our code ugly. Just the huge numbers of conditional includes of header files was bad enough; we used to be nibbled to death by a thousand little ducks like the stdargs.h/varargs.h skew. It’s easy to forget how much cleaner and lighter C code is in the era of full POSIX conformance (well, everywhere except the toxic hell-swamp that is Windows, anyway) and C99 required headers – that is, until you go looking at code as ancient as giflib and it all comes flooding back.

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I had almost forgotten how liberating it felt four or five years back when I made a policy decision about GPSD. Yes, we’re going to assume full POSIX/C99/SuSv2 and if that chaps your ass you can damn well fix your broken toolchain! The giflib code is much older and more encrusted. Well, it was until about 48 hours ago. I ripped all that gunge out. The code almost doesn’t need autotools now, and if I chisel a little harder and drop the X viewer and Utah Raster Toolkit support it won’t need autotools at all.

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That is, in itself, interesting news. The autotools suite began life because the combinatorial explosion of feature tests and #ifdefs back in the day was too difficult to manage by hand. Over the years autoconf and friends got hairier and hairier (to the point where I got utterly fed up with it), but at the same time increasingly good standards conformance in C and Unix implementations attacked the problem from the other end. So, during the last couple of days, I’ve found that the sort of platform #ifdefs that used to be autotools’s raison-d’etre can all be yanked out – what’s left is feature switches, and only two of those.

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That whole standardization thing…actually worked. Though because it snuck up on us by stages, old farts like me have half- to three-quarters forgotten the problems it was solving, and younger programmers barely ever saw those problems to begin with. This is called “progress”.

diff --git a/20120427110036.blog b/20120427110036.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4c61255 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120427110036.blog @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Penguicon 2012 party location +

As promised, the Penguicon 2012 Friends of Armed & Dangerous party location: room 370. Begins 9PM tonight.

diff --git a/20120506004247.blog b/20120506004247.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..633ceef --- /dev/null +++ b/20120506004247.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +Falling through the cracks: why GPSD sometimes bogarts non-GPS devices +

In a recent Google+ comment, H. Peter Anvin grumped about GPSD using “braindead heuristics” to determine which USB devices it should sniff as possible GPses when it gets a hotplug notification saying that one has connected. I was going to reply in a comment there, but the explanation ran too long for that.

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Short version: yes, GPSD will very occasionally sniff at a device that is none of its business. We’re stuck in a bad place because of deficiencies in the USB standard, But it doesn’t happen often, and all the alternative behaviors I’ve been able to imagine would be worse in very obvious ways. Detailed explanation follows.

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USB devices are supposed to present a “device class” number that clues in the host system what kind of thing it is and how to talk to it. In an ideal world, there would be a “GPS” device class which every GPS would present, and GPSD would cheerfully ignore anything that didn’t present it, and all would be gladness and joy.

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We don’t live in that world. Look at the list of USB device classes and notice that none of them is “GPS”. Lacking any defined GPS class, the standard tells vendors that GPSes have to sit in the stupid corners labelled “00h” and “FFh”. Along with every other USB devices type lacking an assigned class number, including in particular serial-to-USB adapter chips.

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You may recall from some of my previous rants that your basic bog-standard USB GPS consists of a GPS chip shipping data over TTL-level RS232 lines to a serial-to-USB adapter chip. And that’s the root of GPSD’s problem right there. GPSD will never mess with your mouse or your mass storage but here’s no way that a USB GPS is distinguishable from some random other device that happens to be lurking behind a serial-to-USB adapter – it’s classes 00h/FFh all the way down.

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So GPSD goes to the next level and watches for the specific Vendor-ID/Product IDs of serial-to-USB adapters that usually mean aha that’s a GPS. The most common VID/PID combination is 067b:2303 which is a Prolific Logic 2303; GPSD also recognizes nearly a dozen other specific VID/PID pairs mostly corresponding to various serial-to-USB adapter chips.

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And 99% of the time “that’s a GPS” is exactly what these VID/PID pairs do in fact mean; for end users, anyway. The exceptions are things like Arduino prototyping boards that will only ever be hooked up by a tiny minority of geeks like…H. Peter Anvin. Who will grumble.

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This sucks in a minor way, but watcha gonna do? With this behavior. GPSD has very nice autoconfiguration in almost all cases – you plug in the GPS, hotplug wakes up the daemon, it autobauds and autoconfigures, and location data magically appears on port 2947 without the user having had to hand-tweak a blessed thing. This is good!

+

Unfortunately, the only way to prevent GPSD from occasionally sniffing at a device that turns out not to be a GPS would be to disable hotplug startup and require users to manually launch GPSD when they want to run it and know what their device inventory is. This would end the muttering from people like H. Peter Anvin, but at the cost of requiring hundreds of thousands of bewildered end-users to hand-lunch GPSD and remember details like device names, rather than having things Just Work.

+

This would not, in my view, be an acceptable tradeoff. This is one time I’m afraid I have to tell the hard core to live with the occasional glitch; greatest good for the greatest number and all that. Even adding a GPS class to the USB standard wouldn’t solve the problem at this point – too many GPSes already fielded, and many of the vendors are such sketchy low-margin operations that it’s not clear they’d add the production step to do the right thing even if it were available.

+

UPDATE: Several commenters had the usual Unix-programmer reaction: just add a config switch! They’re not thinking the problem through; no config switch can solve enough cases to be worth the freight.

+

One very common suggestion whenever this comes up is a blacklist option for particular VID/PID pairs, like –no-probe=067b:2303. The trouble with this is that there are too many different devices using so few different USB-to-serial adapters, and this option would only be useful when you have multiple class 00/FF devices using different VID/PID pairs. In particular it’s quite likely that your GPS and your serial-port adapter dongle will both be using a PL2303, so blacklisting by VID/PID will make both invisible.

+

Another common but futile suggestion is blacklisting by device path. USB device-path assignments aren’t stable in the presence of hotplugging, enough said.

+

Not only isn’t there enough information for autoconfiguration to work perfectly, the same missing information makes it (so far) impossible to specify a config option that I judge to be than a feel-good gesture or wishful thinking.

+

Also, people looking at this problem often jump to the conclusion that the failure cases are much more frequent and dangerous than they actually are. GPSD typically is not sending config strings to random devices it hasn’t identified as GPSes yet; it’s just sniffing data, and only immediately after a hotplug event. The worst case is that another class 00/FF loses a second’s worth of data, not that it gets accidentally told to self-destruct or something.

+

UPDATE2: Another safeguard, which I had forgotten writing, is that under Linux GPSD uses a sadly non-portable hack which determines if a device has been opened by another process and if so ignores it. So the only way gpsd even reads from an unknown device is when to other application has claimed it.

diff --git a/20120508004531.blog b/20120508004531.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..312bed2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120508004531.blog @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +Some figures that make me happy. +

I got emailed summaries from a Coverity scan of the repo head version of GPSD today.

+

+
+Analysis summary report:
+------------------------
+Files analyzed                  : 86
+Total LoC input to cov-analyze  : 72824
+Functions analyzed              : 585
+Classes/structs analyzed        : 128
+Paths analyzed                  : 125590
+Time taken by Coverity analysis : 00:01:22
+Defect occurrences found        : 45 Total
+                                   2 BAD_SIZEOF
+                                   2 CHECKED_RETURN
+                                   4 CONSTANT_EXPRESSION_RESULT
+                                   3 DEADCODE
+                                  12 FORWARD_NULL
+                                   1 INFINITE_LOOP
+                                   1 NEGATIVE_RETURNS
+                                   1 NULL_RETURNS
+                                   1 OVERRUN_DYNAMIC
+                                   3 OVERRUN_STATIC
+                                   6 RESOURCE_LEAK
+                                   1 REVERSE_INULL
+                                   7 UNINIT
+                                   1 UNREACHABLE
+
+

Those of you who’ve seen Coverity scans before will know that (1) a defect rate of 1 per 1.68KLOC is pretty damned good to begin with, and (2) some of those reports are probably false positives.

+

I am extremely pleased, and looking forward to analyzing the detail logs.

+

UPDATE: Oops. Misplaced a decimal point on first post.

diff --git a/20120511040157.blog b/20120511040157.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4e1dcba --- /dev/null +++ b/20120511040157.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +The “Plain Jane” timing GPS is real +

The GPS with my magic modification that makes it into a 1ms-accurate time source over USB arrived here last week. And…wow. It works. Not only is it delivering 1PPS where I can see it, it’s the best GPS I’ve ever handled on a couple other axes as well, including superb indoor performance. Despite the fact that it’s been sitting on my desk five feet from a window blocked by large trees, it acquired sat lock in seconds and (judging by the steadily blinking LED) doesn’t appear to have lost it even transiently at any time since.

+

+

(Fun fact about that blinking LED on your GPS – that’s actually being lit up by the 1PPS pulse! Yes, the dumb flashing LED telling you your GPS has a fix is actually marking top-of-second with 50ns atomic-clock accuracy – kind of like using an F16 to deliver junk mail.)

+

I’m kind of boggled, actually. This device, my very first hardware hack, went from from mad gleam in my eye to shipping for production in less than ten weeks. No, you can’t easily buy one yet, but that’ll change within a few weeks when the first U.S. retailer lands a shipment.

+

Um, so maybe I really am Manfred Macx after all? I have spent an awful lot of time pulling people into agalmic positive-sum games, and the hypervelocity hack of the market I’ve just done (make a bunch of other people rich and empowered with a simple idea and some connective juice) is very much the same sort of thing Manfred does all through Charles Stross’s novel Accelerando. The guys on the thumbgps-devel list think this is hilarious and have talked the Chinese into nicknaming the device the Macx-1. Two of them are now addressing me as ‘Manfred’ in a ha-ha-only-serious way; I am not sure I approve of this.

+

The Chinese we’re dealing with (the company is Navisys) seem to be enjoying all this. Of course they make agreeable noises at customers as a matter of commercial reflex, and it’s not easy to be sure through the slightly stiff Chinglish they speak, but…I think they actually like us. I think they’re not used to having customers that are interesting and know their engineering and make jokes at the same time. It seems to have been a fun ride for all parties involved.

+

The non-Plain-Jane concept designs that the thumbgps list was kicking around haven’t completely died as topics of discussion, but the existence of real hardware for cheap does tend to concentrate minds on it. The other company I was talking with, UniTraq, hasn’t been heard from in a couple of weeks; perhaps they lost interest after we downchecked the CP2101 USB adapter in their prototypes.

+

Dunno what the quantity-one retail price in the U.S. will be yet, but a little birdie tells me Navisys is quoting less than $30 qty 100, so make your own guess about retailer markup. No, it’s not on the Navisys website yet, but they are taking bulk orders. Ask for the Macx-1 by name – formally it’s a revision of the GR601W, but they had to shift from a dongle to a mouse enclosure for the prototypes at least and it’s unknown to me whether the older designation will survive. I suspect the Chinese are still thinking out how exactly to market this thing.

+

There’s an opportunity here for anyone in the retail consumer-electronics biz. This is a great product – inexpensive, well designed, almost uniquely capable, My opinion of uBlox (the GPS chip’s vendor) has gone way, way up; this beats the snot out of the SiRF-II- and SiRf-III-based designs I’m used to even if you ignore the timing-source use.

+

It’s pretty hard to see how this project could gone better, actually. Now it’s time for phase II, where we use a hundred or so copies of the Macx-1 to build the Cosmic Background Bufferbloat Detector and fix the Internet.

diff --git a/20120513011940.blog b/20120513011940.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..26c611a --- /dev/null +++ b/20120513011940.blog @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +Engineering zero-defect software +

I’ve been pounding on GPSD with the Coverity static analyzer’s self-build procedure for several days. It is my great pleasure to report that we have just reached zero defect reports in 72.8KLOC. Coverity says this code is clean. And because I think this should be an example unto others, I shall explain how I think others can do likewise.

+

+

OK, if you’re scratching your head…Coverity is a code-analysis tool – an extremely good one, probably at this moment the best in the world (though LLVM’s open-source ‘scan-build’ is chasing it and seems likely to pass it sometime down the road), It’s proprietary and normally costs mucho bucks, but as a marketing/goodwill gesture the company allows open source projects to register with them and get remote use of an instance hosted at the company’s data center.

+

I dislike proprietary tools in general, but I also believe GPSD’s reliability is extremely important. Navigation systems are life-critical – bugs in them can kill people. Therefore I’ll take all the help I can get pushing down our error rate, and to hell with ideological purity if that gets in the way.

+

Coverity won’t find everything, of course – it’s certainly not going to rescue you from a bad choice of algorithm. But it’s very, very good at finding the sorts of lower-level mistakes that human beings are very bad at spotting – memory allocation errors, resource leaks, null-pointer dereferences and the like. These are what drive bad code to crashes, catatonia, and heisenbugs.

+

Excluding false positives and places Coverity was being a bit anal-retentive without finding an actual bug, I found 13 real defects on this pass – all on rarely-used code paths, which makes sense for reason I’ll explain shortly. That’s less than 1 defect per 5 KLOC (KLOC = 1000 logical lines of code) which is pretty good considering our last scan was in 2007. Another way to look at that data is that, even while adding large new features like AIS support and NMEA200 and re-engineering the entire reporting protocol, we’ve introduced a bit fewer than three detectable defects per year in the last five years.

+

Those of you who are experienced software engineers will be picking your jaws up off the floor at that statistic. Those of you aren’t – this is at least two orders of magnitude better than typical. There are probably systems architects at Fortune 500 companies who would kill their own mothers for defect rates that low. Mythically, military avionics software and the stuff they load on the Space Shuttle is supposed to be this good, except I’ve heard from insiders that rather often it isn’t.

+

So, how did we do it? On no budget and with all of three core developers, only one working anywhere even near full time?

+

You’ll be expecting me to say the power of open source, and that’s not wrong. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, many eyeballs make bugs shallow, etc. etc. While I agree that’s next to a necessary condition for defect rates this low, it’s not sufficient. There are very specific additional things we did – things I sometimes had to push on my senior devs about because they at times looked like unnecessary overhead or obsessive tailchasing.

+

Here’s how you engineer software for zero defects:

+

1. Be open source.

+

And not just because you get helpful bug reports from strangers, either, all though that does happen and can be very important. Actually, my best bug-finders are semi-regulars who don’t have commit access to the code but keep a close eye on it anyway. Like, there’s this Russian guy who often materializes on IRC late at night and can barely make himself understood in English, but his patches speak clearly and loudly.

+

But almost as importantly, being open source plugs you into things like the Debian porterboxes. A couple of weeks ago I spent several days chasing down port failures that I thought might indicate fragile or buggy spots in the code. It was hugely helpful that I could ssh into all manner of odd machines running Linux, including a System 390 mainframe, and run my same test suite on all of them to spot problems due to endianness or word-size or signed-char-vs.-unsigned-char differences.

+

Closed-source shops, in general, don’t have any equivalent of the Debian porterboxes because they can’t afford them – their support coalition isn’t broad enough. When you play with the open-source kids, you’re in the biggest gang with the best toys.

+

Invest your time heavily in unit tests and regression tests

+

GPSD has around 90 unit tests and regression tests, including sample device output for almost every sensor type we support. I put a lot of effort into making the tests easy and fast to run so they can be run often – and they are, almost every time executable code is modified. This makes it actively difficult for random code changes to break our device drivers without somebody noticing right quick.

+

Which isn’t to say those drivers can’t be wrong, just that the ways they can be wrong are constrained to be through either (a) a protocol-spec-level misunderstanding of what the driver is supposed to be doing, or (b) an implementation bug somewhere in the program’s state space that is obscure and difficult to reach. Coverity only turned up two driver bugs – static buffer overruns in methods for changing the device’s reporting protocol and line speed that escaped notice because they can’t be checked in our test harnesses but only on a live device.

+

This is also why Coverity didn’t find defects on commonly-used code paths. If there’d been any, the regression tests probably would have smashed them out long ago. I put in a great deal of boring, grubby, finicky work getting our test framework in shape, but it has paid off hugely.

+

Use every fault scanner you can lay your hands on.

+

Ever since our first Coverity scan in 2007 I’d been trying to get a repeat set up, but Coverity was unresponsive and their internal processes clearly rather a shambles until recently. But there were three other static analyzers I had been applying on a regular basis – splint, cppcheck, and scan-build.

+

Of these, splint is (a) the oldest, (b) the most effective at turning up bugs, and (c) far and away the biggest pain in the ass to use. My senior devs dislike the cryptic, cluttery magic comments you have to drop all over your source to pass hints to splint and suppress its extremely voluminous and picky output, and with some reason. The thing is, splint checking turns up real bugs at a low but consistent rate – one or two each release cycle.

+

cppcheck is much newer and much less prone to false positives. Likewise scan-build. But here’s what experience tells me: each of these three tools finds overlapping but different sets of bugs. Coverity is, by reputation at least, capable enough that it might dominate one or more of them – but why take chances? Best to use all four and constrain the population of undiscovered bugs into as small a fraction of the state space as we can.

+

And you can bet heavily that as new fault scanners for C/C++ code become available I’ll be jumping right on top of them. I like it when programs find low-level bugs for me; that frees me to concentrate on the high-level ones they can’t find.

+

Be methodical and merciless

+

I don’t think magic or genius is required to get defect densities as low as GPSD’s. It’s more a matter of sheer bloody-minded persistence – the willingness to do the up-front work required to apply and discipline fault scanners, write test harnesses, and automate your verification process so you can run a truly rigorous validation with the push of a button.

+

Many more projects could do this than do. And many more projects should.

diff --git a/20120517003533.blog b/20120517003533.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..74489c2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120517003533.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Announcing coverity-submit +

My regular readers will know that (a) I’ve recently been pounding bugs out of GPSD with Coverity, and (b) I hate doing stupid clicky-dances on websites when I think I ought to be able to shove them a programmatically-generated job card that tells them what to do.

+

So, here’s a side-effect of my recent work with Coverity: coverity-submit. Set up a config file once, and afterwards just run coverity-submit in your project directory and stand back. Supports multiple projects. Because, manularity is evil.

+

Here’s the HTML documentation.

diff --git a/20120518012958.blog b/20120518012958.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cbf0aca --- /dev/null +++ b/20120518012958.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +giflib 4.2.0 released +

First giflib release since I reassumed the lead. Short version: lots of useless old cruft thrown out, everything Coverity-scanned, one minor resource leak found and fixed.

+

+

As I’ve previously noted, this code was in astonishingly good shape considering its great age. I vigorously beat the dust out of it with Coverity and cppcheck, but found only one very minor bug that way – a malloc leak following a malloc failure in the code that makes color-table structures. I think it is rather likely this case has never actually been triggered.

+

I retired six utilities, added a bunch of documentation and made it HTML-able, fixed a minor bug in how output GIF versions are computed in an upward-compatible way, and fixed a thread-safety problem. I added a rudimentary regression-test suite; this could use some more work. All tracker bugs have been resolved and closed.

+

Next release, 5.0, will make one very minor change in the API near extension blocks.

diff --git a/20120523155525.blog b/20120523155525.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..91e7f22 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120523155525.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Beginning of the end for the patent wars? +

It’s all over the net today. As I repeatedly predicted, the patent claims in the Oracle-vs.-Java lawsuit over Android have completely fizzled. Oracle’s only shred of hope at this point is that Judge Alsup will rule that APIs can be copyrighted, and given the extent of cluefulness Alsup has displayed (he mentioned in court having done some programming himself) this seems rather unlikely.

+

+

Copyright damages, if any, will almost certainly be limited to statutory levels. There is no longer a plausible scenario in which Oracle gets a slice of Android’s profits or an injunction against Android devices shipping.

+

This makes Oracle’s lawsuit a spectacular failure. The $300,000 they might get for statutory damages is nothing compared to the huge amounts of money they’ve sunk into this trial, and they’re not even likely to get that. In effect, Oracle has burned up millions of dollars in lawyers’ fees to look like a laughingstock.

+

Surely it has to be dawning on CEOs who think they can monetize junk software patents that their hit ratio has been pretty dreadful. The SCO-vs.-IBM lawsuit in 2003 set the pattern; victories have been few and small, losses frequent and much larger. Nobody is winning this game except the lawyers.

+

It’s not just the legal fees that will hurt Oracle’s bottom line; Oracle’s reputation for competence and good strategy took a hit today. Side-by-side with SCO in the gallery of big-time losers is not anywhere a technology company wants to be.

+

Could this be the beginning of the end for the software-patent wars? The outright trolls won’t cease trolling, because patents are the only assets they have. But we may be nearing the end of the era when major technology companies find patent litigation to be cost-effective. Speed the day.

diff --git a/20120531190746.blog b/20120531190746.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6e113ee --- /dev/null +++ b/20120531190746.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Oracle becomes SCO redux +

To the surprise of nobody who was actually familiar with the underlying law and precedent, the judge in the Oracle-vs.-Google mega-lawsuit ruled today that Oracle’s claim of copyright protection on the Java APIs is contrary to law.

+

This means Oracle’s claims against Google are toast. Their best case is now that they’ll get $300K in statutory damages for two technical copyright violations, almost noise compared to what Oracle spent in legal fees. The patent claims went just as thoroughly nowhere as I predicted back when the lawsuit was launched.

+

+

In a previous post I speculated that this lawsuit might signal the beginning of the end of the patent wars, as business managers wake up to the fact that IP litigation is usually a spectacularly expensive way to accomplish nothing. Today’s ruling, though it’s about copyrights, increases these odds. Here, as in the SCO lawsuit, copyright issues were pushed harder as what was initially a patent case failed.

+

My headline is admittedly a bit of an exaggeration; unlike SCO, Oracle still has a viable business to run. But the history and outcome of this lawsuit – huge stakes, shifting claims, apocalyptic press coverage all leading to a spectacular and humiliating debacle – certainly recalls the SCO lawsuit. It seems unlikely that many more of these will be required before corporate America gets the lesson.

diff --git a/20120601023653.blog b/20120601023653.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3e3e7bd --- /dev/null +++ b/20120601023653.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +API copyrights are dead +

I’ve now read Judge Alsup’s ruling in the Oracle vs. Google lawsuit addressing the copyrightability of the Java APIs as a matter of law. This is a bigger win for the good guys than appears at first glance; Alsup has subtly but definitely driven a stake through the heart of API copyrights. The interesting part is how he did it.

+

+

Some early commentary has been claiming that Alsup wrote a narrow opinion specific to the fact pattern of this particular case. And indeed that is how it may appear on first reading, especially since Alsup made no general assertion in the ruling that APIs (other than the specific ones at issue in this trial) cannot be copyrighted.

+

Actually, the opinion reads exactly as though Alsup wanted to make that more general assertion, but specifically avoided it in order to bulletproof his finding against appeal – overreaching, in a case like this, is one of the more common causes of a remand.

+

Instead, Alsup did something subtle and clever. Under the guise of writing an exhaustive dissection of Oracle’s claims, he actually wrote a sort of roadmap or how-to manual explaining how to demolish claims of API copyrightability in general. If and when such a claim is again litigated in a U.S. jurisdiction, you can bet a vital organ that this ruling will be cited – and even though it’s not claiming to decide anything but the instant case, it is near certain that the judge will treat it as precedential for that future case in exactly the same way that (for example) Computer Associates vs. Altai has been repeatedly cited.

+

In fact, what Alsup has done here is extend the line of case law deriving from Altai in a way that applies the abstraction-filtration-comparison test specifically to APIs. I am extremely familiar with this line of case law – I’ve been a consulting expert in a case where it was central – and as I read his opinion I found myself repeatedly nodding and grinning as doctrines like scenes a faire and merger made appearances exactly where I expected them to and Alsup applied them exactly as I expected he would. To oversimplify only a little, where Alsup effectively comes out is “You can’t copyright APIs. Idea and expression merge here.”

+

But there are no actual surprises here. Which is a good thing; surprises might have meant weaknesses in the application of precedent that a sufficiently clever lawyer could exploit. I don’t detect any such weaknesses. Instead, I see a very tight, clear argument that is going to be at least a serious and probably a fatal obstacle to anyone pushing an API copyrightability theory in the future.

+

As it turns out, we got the right judge for this case in at least two major ways. My read is that having done some programming himself, Alsup understood the stakes and the issues, and did what he could to kill off API copyrightability for good. And he framed his ruling in exactly the way that would maximize the ruling’s downstream impact while minimizing the chances of reversal.

+

This was an excellent outcome – probably the best the open-source community could hope for, and better than a more aggressively phrased, less subtle ruling would have been. We have reason to celebrate.

+

UPDATE: Worth a mention that Boies Schiller, the firm that got its ass handed to it in this lawsuit, were also the losers in the SCO lawsuit. If there is a next time around for this kind of litigation, let’s hope the plaintiff is stupid enough to hire them.

diff --git a/20120602065744.blog b/20120602065744.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..77d39d1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120602065744.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Android loses share? +

The April 2012 comscore results are out, and something very odd has happened. If they’re to be believed, Android has actually lost U.S. market share over the last three months – albeit by a statistically insignificant amount of 0.2% – for the first time in its history.

+

+

This is so grossly at odds with the way the market has been moving for three years that I have to wonder if it’s a tabulation mistake. I’ll be looking into other market surveys over the next week to see if they confirm this.

diff --git a/20120606184437.blog b/20120606184437.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a4efb98 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120606184437.blog @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +Evaluating the harm from closed source +

Some people are obsessive about never using closed-source software under any circumstances. Some other people think that because I’m the person who wrote the foundational theory of open source I ought to be one of those obsessives myself, and become puzzled and hostile when I demur that I’m not a fanatic. Sometimes such people will continue by trying to trap me in nutty false dichotomies (like this guy) and become confused when I refuse to play.

+

A common failure mode in human reasoning is to become too attached to theory, to the point where we begin ignoring the reality it was intended to describe. The way this manifests in ethical and moral reasoning is that we tend to forget why we make rules – to avoid harmful consequences. Instead, we tend to become fixated on the rules and the language of the rules, and end up fulfilling Santayana’s definition of a fanatic: one who redoubles his efforts after he has forgotten his aim.

+

When asking the question “When is it wrong (or right) to use closed-source software?”, we should treat it the same way we treat every other ethical question. First, by being very clear about what harmful consequences we wish to avoid; second, by reasoning from the avoidance of harm to a rule that is minimal and restricts peoples’ choices as little as possible.

+

In the remainder of this essay I will develop a theory of the harm from closed source, then consider what ethical rules that theory implies.

+

+

Ethical rules about a problem area don’t arise in a vacuum. When trying to understand and improve them it is useful to start by examining widely shared intuitions about the problem. Let’s begin by examining common intuitions about this one.

+

No matter how doctrinaire or relaxed about this topic they are, most people agree that closed-source firmware for a microwave oven or an elevator is less troubling than a closed-source desktop operating system. Closed source games are less troubling than closed-source word processors. Any closed-source software used for communications among people raises particular worries that the authors might exploit their privileged relationship to it to snoop or censor.

+

There are actually some fairly obvious generative patterns behind these intuitions, but in order to discuss them with clarity we need to first consider the categories of harm from closed-source software.

+

The most fundamental harm we have learned to expect from closed source is that it will be poor engineering – less reliable than open source. I have made the argument that bugs thrive on secrecy at length elsewhere and won’t rehash it here. This harm varies in importance according to the complexity of the software – more complex software is more bug-prone, so the advantage of open source is greater and the harm from closed source more severe. It also varies according to how serious the expected consequences of bugs are; the worse they get, the more valuable open source is. I’ll call this “reliability harm”.

+

Another harm is that you lose options you would have if you were able to modify the software to suit your own needs, or have someone do that for you. This harm varies in importance according to the expected value of customization; greater in relatively general-purpose software with a large range of potential use cases for modified versions, less in extremely specialized software tightly coupled to a single task and a single deployment. I’ll call this “unhackability harm”.

+

Yet another harm is that closed-source software puts you in an asymmetrical power relationship with the people who are privileged to see inside it and modify it. They can use this asymmetry to restrict your choices, control your data, and extract rent from you. I’ll call this “agency harm”.

+

Closed source increases your transition costs to get out of using the software in various ways, making escape from the other harms more difficult. Closed-source word processors using proprietary formats that no other program can fully handle are the classic example of this, but there are many others. I’ll call this “lock-in harm”.

+

[Update, two days later] A commenter points out another kind of harm from closed source: secrets can be lost, taking capabilities with them. There are magnetic media from the early days of computing – some famous cases include data of great historical interest recorded by the U.S. space program in the 1960s – that are intact but cannot be read because they used secret, proprietary data formats embodied only in hardware and specifications that no longer exist. This typifies an ever-present risk of closed-source software that becomes more severe as software-mediated communication gets more important. I’ll call this “amnesia harm”.

+

Finally, a particular software product is said to have “positive network externalities” when its value to any individual rises with the number of other people using it. Positive network externalities have consequences like those of lock-in harm; they raise the cost of transitioning out.

+

With these concepts in hand, let’s look at some real-world cases.

+

First, firmware for things like elevators and microwave ovens. Low reliability harm, because (a) it’s relatively easy to get right, and (b) the consequences of bugs are not severe – the most likely consequence is that the device just stops dead, rather than (say) hyper-irradiating you or throwing you through the building’s roof. Low unhackability harm – not clear what you’d do with this firmware if you could modify it. Low agency harm; it is highly unlikely that a toaster or an elevator will be used against you, and if it were it would be as part of a sufficiently larger assembly of surveillance and control technologies that simply being able to hack one firmware component wouldn’t help much. No lock-in harm, and no positive externalities. [There is some potential for amnesia harm if the firmware embodies good algorithms or tuning constants that can't be recovered by reverse-engineering.]

+

Because it scores relatively low on all these scales of harm, highly specialized device firmware is the least difficult case for tolerating closed source. But as firmware develops more complexity, flexibility, and generality, the harms associated with it increase. So, for example, closed-source firmware in your basement router can mean serious pain – there have been actual cases of it hijacking DNS, injecting ads into your web browsing, and so on.

+

At the other end of the scale, desktop operating systems score moderate to high on reliability harm (depending on your application mix and the opportunity cost of OS failures). They score high on unhackability harm even if you’re not a programmer, because closed source means you get fixes and updates and new features not when you can invest in them them but only when the vendor thinks it’s time. They score very high on agency harm (consider how much crapware comes bundled with a typical Windows machine) and very high on lock-in [and amnesia] harm (closed proprietary file formats, proprietary video streaming, and other such shackles). They have strong positive externalities, too.

+

Now let’s talk about phones. Closed-source smartphone operating systems like iOS have the same bundle of harms attached to them that desktop operating systems do, and for all the same reasons. The interesting thing to notice is that dumbphones – even when they have general-purpose processors inside them – are a different case. Dumbphone firmware is more like other kinds of specialized firmware – there’s less value in being able to modify it, and less exposure to agency harm. Dumbphone firmware differs from elevator firmware mainly in that (a) there’s some lock-in [and amnesia] harm (dumbphones jail your contacts list) and (b) in being so much more complex that the reliability harm is actually something of an issue.

+

Games make another interesting intermediate case. Very low reliability harm – OK, it might be annoying if your client program craps out during a World of Warcraft battle, but it’s not like having your financial records scrambled or your novel manuscript trashed. Moderate unhackability harm; if you bought a game, it’s probably because you wanted to play that game rather than some hypothetical variant of it, but modifying it is at least imaginable and sometimes fun (thus, for example, secondary markets in map levels and skins). No agency harm unless they’re embedding ads. No lock-in harm, [low odds of amnesia harm,] some positive externalities.

+

Word processors (and all the other kinds of productivity software they’ll stand in for here) raise the stakes nearly to the level of entire operating systems. Moderate to high reliability harm, again depending on your actual use case, High unhackability harm for the same reasons as OSes. Lower agency harm than an OS, if only because your word processor doesn’t normally have an excuse to report your activity or stream ads at you. Very high lock-in [and amnesia] harm. If the overall harm from closed source is less here than for an OS, it’s mainly because productivity programs are a bit less disruptive to replace than an entire OS.

+

So far I haven’t made any normative claims. Here’s the only one I really need: we should oppose closed-source software, and refuse to use it, in direct proportion to the harms it inflicts.

+

That sounds simple and obvious, doesn’t it? And yet, there are people who I won’t name but whose initials are R and M and S, who persist in claiming that this position isn’t an ethical stance, is somehow fatally unprincipled. Which is what it looks like when you’ve redoubled your efforts after forgetting your aim.

+

Really, this squishy “unprincipled” norm describes the actual behavior even of people who talk like fanatics about closed source being evil. Who, even among the hardest core of the “free software” zealots, actually spends any effort trying to abolish closed-source elevator firmware? That doesn’t happen; desktop and smartphone OSes make better targets because they’re more important – and with that pragmatism, we’re right back to comparative evaluation of consequential harm, even if the zealot won’t acknowledge that to himself.

+

Now that we have this analysis, it leads to conclusions few people will find surprising. That’s a feature, actually; if there were major surprises it would suggest that we had wandered too far away from the intuitions or folk theory we’re trying to clarify. Conclusions: we need to be most opposed to closed-source desktop and smartphone operating systems, because those have the most severe harms and the highest positive-externality stickiness. We can relax about what’s running in elevators and microwave ovens. We need to push for open source in basement routers harder as they become more capable. And the occasional game of Angry Birds or Civilization or World of Warcraft is not in fact a terrible act of hypocrisy.

+

One interesting question remains. What is the proper ethical response to situations in which there is no open-source alternative?

+

Let’s take this right to an instructive extreme – heart pacemakers. Suppose you have cardiac arrhythmia; should you refuse a pacemaker because you can’t get one with open-source firmware?

+

That would be an insane decision. But it’s the exact kind of insanity that moralists become prone to when they treat normative rules as worship objects or laudable fixations, forgetting that these rules are really just devices for the avoidance of harm and pain.

+

The sane thing to do would be to notice that there are kinds of harm in the world more severe than the harm from closed source, remember that the goal of all your ethical rules is the reduction of harm, and act accordingly.

diff --git a/20120611095433.blog b/20120611095433.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6060b4b --- /dev/null +++ b/20120611095433.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Why I think RMS is a fanatic, and why that matters. +

One of my commenters reports that he showed my essay on evaluating the harm from closed-source software to Richard Stallman, who became upset by it. It shouldn’t be news to RMS or anyone else that I think he’s a fanatic and this is a problem, but it seems that every few years I have to explain the problem again. I make the effort not because of personal animus but because fanaticism does not serve us well – we’ve made huge progress since 1998 by not repeating RMS’s mistakes, and I think it’s important that we continue not to replicate them.

+

+

When I was say that I judge RMS is a fanatic, I mean something very specific by that. I cite Santayana’s definition: “Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim”. By his own account of his road-to-Damascus experience, RMS started out attempting to solve a problem; there was this broken printer driver that he couldn’t fix because he couldn’t get the source. RMS correctly identified source secrecy as a damaging practice leading to bad outcomes.

+

Unfortunately, RMS made an early decision to frame his advocacy as a moral crusade rather than a pragmatic argument about engineering practices and outcomes. While he made consequentialist arguments against closed source (and still does) his rhetoric and his thinking became dominated by terms like “evil”, to the point where he repeatedly alienated potential allies both with his absolutism and his demand that anyone cooperating with him share it.

+

I think this is precisely the sort of displacement Santayana had in mind – means overwhelming ends, rhetoric taking over and trapping the fanatic in a position where the harm he was originally reacting against is forgotten. Instead the language of revelation, virtue, sin, purity, corruption, and redemption dominates. RMS parodies this aspect of his own propaganda when he presents himself as “St. Ignucious”, but the parody does not banish the fact that he is in fact living the role of ascetic holy man bent on purging sin from the world.

+

There are some advantages to this strategy. It taps into old, powerful emotional responses in human beings – the same responses that give messianic religions their power. As a way of recruiting a small hard core of dedicated followers it’s tough to beat, and sometimes – if you’re, say, the Gautama Buddha or Jesus or Mahavira – you can make it scale up. But I described it as a trap for a reason – most such attempts do not scale, remaining tiny marginal cults.

+

By the late 1990s, after having observed RMS’s behavior for more than a decade, I had long since concluded that the Free Software Foundation’s moralistic rhetoric was serving us badly. The problem with it is the same problem with messianic religions in general; for people who are not flipped into true-believer mode by any given one, it will come off as at best creepy and insular, at worst nutty and potentially dangerous (and this remains true even for people attached to a different messianic religion).

+

I was not the first or only person to diagnose this problem, and note that it was severely damaging our ability to talk people outside the hacker community into giving up code secrecy. I was the first person to devise a solution, an entire discourse that could compete with the FSF’s – the rhetoric of “open source”, and determinedly pragmatic arguments for it centered in engineering and economics.

+

Fifteen years later I think it is clear from results that teaching the hacker community to stop alienating potential allies with terms like “evil” and the rhetoric of sin and redemption was very effective. Understanding that RMS is a fanatic matters, because it reminds us that we have achieved an unprecedented measure of mainstream success by not replicating his rhetoric and his mistakes, and that we need to continue not to replicate them.

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It shouldn’t need saying, but this criticism is not personal. I still try to be a friend to RMS on the rare occasions that he permits it. He’s done amazingly good technical work, and is without doubt one of the heroes of our culture. He has the virtues of his vices; he’s a man of unshakable honesty and integrity. But for the sake of the future – indeed, for the sake of RMS’s own original objectives – I have to call him on his fanaticism. There is too much at stake for me to be diplomatically dishonest about this – it did immense damage to the cause of openness, and I had to spend a good many years remediating that damage.

+

Its is still theoretically possible that RMS and the FSF could clean up its act. A good first step would be to stop characterizing people who refuse to use the rhetoric of moral evil as unprincipled and traitorous. It would be better to drop the quasi-religious rhetoric entirely. But I don’t expect this to happen; too much history and personal investment locks RMS and the FSF into their position. Thus, I expect to have to keep pointing out periodically that it’s fanaticism and that such fanaticism does the open-source community more harm than good.

diff --git a/20120618150544.blog b/20120618150544.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4d68026 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120618150544.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Beware the vampire app! +

This is a heads-up for all smartphone owners out there. A few days ago I read Buggy Apps Killing Your Smartphone Battery. And I can now certify that the problem is real.

+

+

I’d been having what looked like serious battery issues on my HTC G2 for about the last 60 days. It was unclear whether the battery had lost its ability to hold a full charge or whether it was somehow draining at an abnormally high rate. But it was pretty bad – forcing me towards getting a new phone before I really wanted to.

+

Then I read this article. Short version: buggy apps can eat the battery, presumably through failing to terminate or sleep themselves properly when they should. OK, what the heck – I walked though my download list, deleting a bunch of apps I had downloaded and then decided weren’t interesting, but failed to delete.

+

To my delight, this cleared the problem up immediately. My phone once again readily takes a full charge and can run for a day or more on it. I haven’t been able to pin down which apps were the problem – I deleted about a dozen – but I can say this much: none of them was one I’m actually using. Hacker’s Keyboard is OK, the Angry Birds games and Coloroid and Spider are OK, the Fandango client is OK, Nexus Torch and OpenRecorder are OK, and (despite a hint in the article) none of the preinstalled Android stuff seems to have been implicated in the excess power drain.

+

So…if you think your battery is going south, don’t panic. Houseclean all those junk apps off your phone and see what happens. It worked for me.

diff --git a/20120619083458.blog b/20120619083458.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6a5b8ab --- /dev/null +++ b/20120619083458.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +GIFLIB 5.0.0 is released +

I’ve just shipped the 5.0.0 release of GIFLIB, a graphics service library that is deployed pretty much everywhere that throws pixels on a display. Older versions live in your browser, your game console, and your smartphone. I have written about what it was like to go back to this code after 18 years previously, in The Long Past of C; also in my 4.2.0 release announcement.

+

+

This version, as promised, fixes the portion of the API handling GIF extension blocks. I made one other change that is visible and not backward-compatible; the GIF file opener functions now take a final pointer-to-int where they’ll deposit an error code if they fail.

+

The reason for this change was to make the library fully thread-safe. The old API featured a shared static error cell analogous to Unix errno, but I actually got a bug report reminding me that is really not good design practice in the 21st century. Functions that operate on an existing (GifFileType *) set a new Error member when they fail, but the file-openers can’t do that – they return a null (GifFileType *) on failure, and changing that would have caused all kind of subtle problems for which client-application developers would rightly have cursed me.

+

Other new features include direct support for editing GIF89 graphics control blocks (yes, this is a feature we should have had in 1990), interlace handling in the DGifSlurp()/EGifSpew() high-level interface, and better handling of trailing extension blocks not attached to an image.

+

I also tossed out a lot more utility code. Basically, if a utility duplicated something that ImageMagick convert(1) or the Python Imaging Library can do, I threw it away. Those projects specialize in image composition and transforms and they do it very well; there’d be less than no point in trying to compete with them, especially since they’re using GIFLIB internally anyway.

+

Another important feature is that GIFLIB now has a really stringent regression-test suite (I spent a lot of the last couple of weeks on this). It’s also Coverity and cppcheck clean. So I’m expecting this code to be pretty stable. It would suit me fine if I didn’t have to think about it for another 18 years.

diff --git a/20120619173524.blog b/20120619173524.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1cf075d --- /dev/null +++ b/20120619173524.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +freecode-submit 2.4 is released +

Yes, two software releases in a day is an unusually rapid tempo even from me. But freecode-submit is part of my release machinery for other projects, and when I shipped GIFLIB 5.0.0 I discovered it had gone all pear-shaped on me. Problem turned out to be an unannounced change in freecode’s JSON interface. I hate it when that happens…

+

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Here it is: freecode-submit 2.4. Enjoy. This project was brought to you by Python and JSON, two technologies that make this kind of specialized client tool as little hassle to write as it’s ever going to be.

diff --git a/20120620163838.blog b/20120620163838.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..152ffa5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120620163838.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Oracle lawsuit’s final fizzle +

OK, this is just weird. “Oracle agrees to ‘zero’ damages in Google lawsuit, eyes appeal” That vast lawsuit that, according to some idiots (including a few of my commenters), was going to destroy Android and sow the earth with salt in its wake? It’s done – but in a bizarre way that makes me question the sanity of Oracle’s lawyers at Boies Schiller.

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My regulars will recall that I’ve been saying this lawsuit was doomed since day one, a bad joke. Nor was I just handwaving; happens I’m intimately familiar with the case law in this area, because I’ve been involved in a lawsuit with a similar fact pattern. I expected it to end with a whimper, but…Oracle stipulating to zero damages so they can get on with the appeal?

+

Ow. My head hurts. What are they thinking they can win on appeal once they’ve conceded that the value of Google’s putative infringement was zero? I suppose it’s possible that they’re trying for an appellate ruling that their APIs are indeed copyrightable so they can use it as a competitive weapon against someone else other than Google, but that’s an extremely unlikely outcome. Alsup’s finding is as near bulletproof as they get – well reasoned, well written, and a very conservative extension of the Altai ruling.

+

I can’t make any sense of what Oracle is doing. My wife the attorney can’t make any sense of it. And Judge Alsup apparently can’t either – when both parties agreed to an assessment of zero damages, he asked “Is there a catch I need to be aware of?”

+

I dunno, maybe Boies Schiller is huffing the same glue they were during the SCO lawsuit. It’s either that or they’ve got video of the appellate judge buggering a goat. You choose.

diff --git a/20120622070334.blog b/20120622070334.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..09daead --- /dev/null +++ b/20120622070334.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +The smartphone wars: Inauspicious exits and debuts +

RIM’s death rattle became audible a few days ago when its manufacturing partner announced that it would no longer be manufacturing Blackberries. And Nokia is entering the final stages of one of the most spectacular implosions in the history of business, taking the Windows phone down with it.

+

So what’s Microsoft doing? Announcing a brand-spankin’-new Windows 8 phone line with no upgrade path for its Windows 7 customers. Riiiight. Then, stiff-arming its PC and smartphone business partners by telling them it’s going to do an Apple and ein-Volk-ein-Reich-ein-Führer its new tablet – it won’t be licensing “Windows RT”, and nobody else is going to get a piece of the hardware revenue. So let’s see – Microsoft is throwing away both its historic strengths – backward compatibility and a multi-vendor ecosystem that needs it to succeed – and replacing them with, what exactly?

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You know, at this point Microsoft’s board ought to replace Steve Ballmer with an orangutan. Screaming a lot and flinging feces in all directions seem to be the job requirements; the orangutan would cover that for a few bunches of bananas a week, and its strategic decisions couldn’t possibly be worse.

+

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My friends who do IT consulting for businesses are telling me that the compatibility break between desktop Windows 7 and 8 is a big enough disruptor that it may actually drive a lot of their customers to move to all Linux, all the time. Which makes sense; if you know all your old application software is going to break no matter what you do, why not bail out to where you’ll never be a victim again?

+

Nokia is about to lay off 10,000 people, and investors are no longer pricing the stock above the company’s breakup value. According to some hints that have been leaking out of the company, Nokia thinks it has a bright future as a patent troll. Meanwhile, Microsoft is hinting that it might buy Nokia outright, which would be doubling down on stupid. Nothing about Nokias’s strategy, product or brand-deterioration issues is going to be solved that way; “more Microsoft” is the problem, not the solution.

+

Contemplating these antics there comes a point at which you just want to clutch your head and mutter, in the immortal words of P.J. O’Rourke, “What the fuck? I mean, what the fucking fuck?” Nokia and RIM used to be sound, well-managed companies with earned and enviable reputations. Microsoft was always evil, but it used to be competent evil – not so much at software engineering, but at least its business strategy was ruthlessly effective. Now, what’s become of these three companies may add up to the biggest destruction of shareholder value in history.

+

UPDATE: Microsoft may not be planning to freeze out OEMs after all. I was relaying a press rumor based on some ambiguous statements from Redmond, but now a top executive at Acer claims Microsoft only plans to be in the tablet market for a short time. If true, this would make more strategic sense – but the real take-away here may be that Microsoft’s messaging is confused, and possibly the company’s planners don’t themselves know which way they intend to jump.

diff --git a/20120625000904.blog b/20120625000904.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2d1dd18 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120625000904.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +doclifter 2.8 is released +

In response to a bug report that was relatively easily fixed, I’ve just shipped release 2.8 of doclifter, a program that takes troff-based document markups – including man page markup – and lifts them to DocBook XML.

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In doclifter I’ve come as close as I probably ever will to building an AI :-). Automatically lifting the grotty presentation-level goo in man pages (and other troff macro sets) to structural markup is hard – actually, the DocBook user community thought high-quality translations without extensive manual intervention by a human were impossible until I did it. But it turns out that clever parsing and a whole lot of cliche analysis are good enough for about 97% of the real-world cases, and doclifter can throw useful warnings for the other 3%.

+

This is, by the way, a useful tool even if you’re not interested in DocBook, because DocBook is kind of like Earth orbit – it’s halfway to anywhere. In particular, man to DocBook via doclifter followed by
+Docbook to HTML with the stock stylesheets produces better HTML than any of the half-dozen direct man-to-HTML converters out there. This is because none of them actually do much structural analysis – they’re mostly converting presentation-level cliches in troff to presentation-level cliches in HTML. They’re also deficient in handling troff special characters, which doclifter maps to XML Unicode literals.

+

If you run an open-source project, and your documentation masters are still in troff, please use doclifter to fix this (yes, you will be able to make man pages from the XML after lifting them). That’s why I wrote it – every project that switches to DocBook XML improves our ability to present good-looking and properly hyperlinked documentation over the Web.

diff --git a/20120625115452.blog b/20120625115452.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..47fb351 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120625115452.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Abusing Alan Turing +

The centennial of Alan Turing’s birth brings us the news that Alan Turing probably did not commit suicide by eating a poisoned apple, was not depressed at the time of his death, and that the hormone treatments intended to suppress his homosexual urges had been discontinued a year before he died. I am not in the least surprised by any of this; in fact I have been half-expecting such inversions ever since I began noticing, twenty years or so ago, the increasing mythologization of Turing’s life.

+

This centennial seems a good time to consider how we re-invent – and sometimes abuse – the great figures of our past to suit the needs of the present. When biography turns into a packaged morality play, it is always wise to suspect that the actual facts and complexities of the subject’s life are being lost. When that morality play satisfies obvious propaganda needs for political or cultural factions in the present, we should be even more suspicious. And when certain recurring mythological themes – such as holy martyrdom – develop increasing prominence in interpretation of the subject’s life over time, it’s a red flag signalling that contact with the facts and the subject is probably being lost.

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+

Over the last couple of decades I have watched this process take hold of and transform our cultural memory of what Turing’s life was about. I titled this essay “Abusing Alan Turing” because I think the process has twisted that narrative into a shape Turing himself would have found belittling and barely recognizable. I do not think the man who wrote “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” would have wanted to be remembered as a holy victim, with the defining event of his life being a suicide invented by future partisans. It is worth examining how we came to this pass.

+

I see several reasons for the mythologization of Alan Turing. The most benign one – of which Turing might have approved – is that computer science has been scrambling to achieve the kind of respectability and professional status long afforded to fields like medicine and the law. One of the characteristics of such professions is that they have hero-myths about great figures in their past who can be seen as foundational or exemplary. Doctors have Hippocrates; lawyers have Thomas More. Each profession seems to need to develop its own exemplars, and the young field of computer science has sought its own.

+

If this were all that was going on around Turing, though, it wouldn’t be necessary to distort his life. Turing’s intellectual work really did make him a worthy exemplar of the field by about any standard one could conceive. It is instructive to compare him with Ada Lovelace, whose reputation as “the first programmer” is undeserved, resting on a common but severe misrepresentation of the facts.

+

Ada Lovelace has been falsely mythologized as the first programmer because she was a woman. In a present struggling with issues of sexual equality, her femaleness has served propaganda purposes too obvious to need rehearsing. Turing’s homosexuality, too, has become a sort of marker or talking point in today’s culture wars. The difference is Ada Lovelace was a figure of little consequence in her own time who would probably enjoy her enhanced modern reputation if she could experience it. Turing, on the other hand, is increasingly diminished by the uses we now put him to.

+

It is not just that the common account of Turing’s death is probably false, it’s that even if it were true it would risk submerging the man’s staggering accomplishments in political correctness and tawdry cliche. Yes, yes, repression, anti-gay prejudice, I know all right-thinking people are supposed to be horrified by such things – but the man who (more than any other single person) cracked the Enigma code and unified computer programming with mathematical logic deserves to to be remembered for those things, not for the accident of his sexual preferences or a myth of final martyrdom later forcibly grafted onto his life.

+

But the queasiest thing about the myths of Turing-the-exemplar and Turing-the-victim is how they’ve become intertwined. It says no good thing about the year 2012 that Turing’s supposed marginalization by the society of his time has become in many popular accounts a perverse credential for his greatness. In fact he was not marginalized at all – he was a prominent Cambridge don and a hero of his country.who had been awarded the Order of the British Empire. Rather than confront Turing’s homosexuality, the British authorities from the arresting constable on up tried to look the other way and gave every easy out they could; Turing, through some combination of carelessness and self-destructiveness, took none of them.

+

More: behind much of today’s hagiography there seems to lurk a sort of perverse insistence that if Turing hadn’t been gay and a suicide he would be less apt for veneration, as a founder of computer science or anything else. In what is now made of Turing’s life we see an implicit claim that virtue can only be found in the outsider, the failure, the martyr, the victim of oppression. That is perhaps the most important reason (beyond respect for the man himself) to remember that Alan Turing was none of these things.

diff --git a/20120629172134.blog b/20120629172134.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ca89437 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120629172134.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +The handwriting on the wall is Chinese +

Comes the news that Nvidia just lost an order for 10 million graphics cards to AMD because it wouldn’t open the source for its driver. At a very conservative estimate, that’s north of $250 million in business Nvidia just threw to a major competitor because it couldn’t get its head out of its rectum. Somebody’s quarterlies are going to suck.

+

The really interesting aspect of this isn’t the amount of money Nvidia’s idiotic secrecy fetish just cost it, but why it happened – and why it’s likely to happen again, soon and repeatedly, to other hardware companies with equally idiotic secrecy fetishes.

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+

Seems the Chinese are rolling their own Linux-based operating system for educational PCs. China is big – their pilot project is 10 million units. The Chinese offered Nvidia the graphics card business on all of these; Nvidia’s negotiators, being utter morons, tried to charge the Chinese for the cost of porting NVidia’s binary drive blob from x86 to the MIPS processor the school PCs will use.

+

The Chinese apparently didn’t even bother telling Nvidia to fuck off. They just ended the meeting and handed AMD the business. Feel the burn, Nvidia!

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Now look at the bigger picture. China now has an economy roughly the size of the U.S.’s – by some measures larger. And a bigger population than the U.S.’s. And no patience for the bullshit companies like Nvidia spew defending their closed-source policies. This wasn’t the last such blow-off we’re going to see, but the first of many.

+

The message has been sent. Do you work for a hardware company with a closed-source driver policy? If so, tell your boss that policy is going to lock your company out of the biggest market in the world, starting now. And not just that one market, either; word of this will spread. With the Chinese to break trail, we’re going to see the same no-compromise stance from the rest of Pacific Rim and emerging markets all over the world.

+

Pass the popcorn. Heads will be rolling at Nvidia shortly – and if the company’s top management hasn’t got enough clue to fire the addled fuckwits who just cost it China and change its source-disclosure policy, short the stock because the company itself won’t have a long future.

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And everything I’ve written about how economics makes the triumph of open source inevitable? This is what it looks like when those pressures are no longer from the future. This is what it looks like when they burst into the now.

diff --git a/20120702134717.blog b/20120702134717.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2e125ee --- /dev/null +++ b/20120702134717.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: comScore loses the plot? +

I’ve come to the depressing conclusion that I can’t trust comScore’s share numbers any more.

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+

The problem isn’t that they’re showing a second month of effectively no change in userbase share for Android. That, in isolation, I could manage to believe (though I would find it very puzzling). The problem is that I can’t reconcile that with other lines of evidence.

+

One of my commenters has pointed out that Android activation numbers are up to 900K a day. That’s 27 million devices a month, and I can’t imagine any plausible percentage of tablet activations to discount that by that would leave Android smartphone activations unable to swing the needle in a market that comScore estimates at just 110M users.

+

Other market-research outfits were already quoting Android global market-share figures ranging from 56% to 60% two months ago. Yes, global market share isn’t the same as U.S. share, but historically those trendlines have been distinguished by timelag rather than having different slopes. And just to drive that point home, NPD already had Android at 61% of U.S. share in May.

+

Finally, there’s the curious fact that when you multiply out comScore’s own numbers it looks like Android is still gaining smartphone users a little faster than iOS (though not by a statistically significant amount.)

+

I don’t know what’s going on here. I trusted comScore’s numbers for a long time because they showed a continuous and regular set of measurements that was in sync with more sporadic indications from other sources. Overall it made a coherent picture. Now the other sources are still suggesting rapid Android growth, but comScore thinks it ain’t happening.

+

This is a bummer. It means I’m going to have to be a lot more skeptical of comScore’s numbers in the future even supposing they turn happy for Android again.

diff --git a/20120703010751.blog b/20120703010751.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..37d92a9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120703010751.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Why I won’t be signing the “Declaration of Internet Freedom” as it is +

There’s been some buzz in the last few days about the Declaration of Internet Freedom penned by some prominent libertarians.

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I wish I could sign on to this document. Actually, considering who appears on the list of signatories, I consider the fact that the composers didn’t involve me in drafting it to be a surprising mistake that I can only ascribe to a collective fit of absent-mindedness.

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But, because neither I nor anyone else from the hacker tribe was involved, it has one very serious flaw.

+

+

Humility, yes, Rule of Law yes, Free Expression, yes, Innovation, Competition, Privacy…most of this document is good stuff, with exactly the sort of lucidity and bedrock concern for individual freedom that I expect from libertarians.

+

But it all goes pear-shaped on one sentence: “Open systems and networks aren’t always better for consumers.” This is a dreadful failure of vision and reasoning, one that is less forgivable here because libertarians – who understand why asymmetries of power and information are in general bad things – have very particular reasons to know better than this.

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In the long run, open systems and networks are always better for consumers. Because, whatever other flaws they may have, they have one overriding virtue – they don’t create an asymmetrical power relationship in which the consumer is ever more controlled by the network provider. Statists, who accept and even love asymmetrical power relationships as long as the right sort of people are doing the oppressing, have some excuse within their terms of reference for failing to grasp the nasty second, third, and nth-order consequences of closed-system lock-in. Libertarians have no such excuse.

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In the context of this Declaration, this defect is particularly sad because the composers could have avoided it without damage to any one of the other pro-market positions they wanted set forth. I actually agree that, as proposed in their next sentence, closed systems such as iOS should be free to compete against open systems such as Android; as the Declaration says, “let technologies evolve and intervene, if at all, only when an abuse of market power clearly harms consumers”. The proper libertarian stance in these contests is to tell government to butt out and then vote with your dollars for openness.

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I am disappointed in the Declaration’s failure to get this crucial issue right. I hope there is still the option to amend it; and if not, that my objection and correction will reach as many people as the Declaration itself, and the two together will convey important lessons about what we must do to preserve and extend liberty.

diff --git a/20120705002321.blog b/20120705002321.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ff5f351 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120705002321.blog @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +Cisco provides a lesson +

In my last blog post, I made a public stink about language in a so-called Declaration of Internet Freedom, which turned out to be some libertarians attempting to expand and develop the ideas in this Declaration of Internet Freedom. Mostly they did pretty well, except for one sentence they got completely wrong: “Open systems and networks aren’t always better for consumers. ”

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That’s wrong. Open systems are better, always. Cisco has just provided us with a perfect lesson in why that sentence is completely backwards, and why we can never trust closed-source software vendors not to do evil under the cover of their code secrecy.

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For those of you who have missed the news, last a few days Cisco pushed a firmware update to several of its most popular routers that bricked the device unless you signed up for Cisco’s “cloud” service. To sign up, you had to agree to the following restrictions:

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+When you use the Service, we may keep track of certain information related to your use of the Service, including but not limited to the status and health of your network and networked products; which apps relating to the Service you are using; which features you are using within the Service infrastructure; network traffic (e.g., megabytes per hour); internet history; how frequently you encounter errors on the Service system and other related information (“Other Information”). +

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So in order to continue using the hardware you bought and paid for and own, you have to agree to let Cisco snoop your browser history and monitor your traffic – a clickstream they would of course instantly turn around and sell to advertising agencies and other snoops. Those terms are so loose (“including but not limited to”) that they could legally read your email and sell that data too.

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Disgusted enough yet? Wait, it gets better. The cloud terms of service also includes this gem:

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+You agree not to use or permit the use of the Service: (i) to invade another’s privacy; (ii) for obscene, pornographic, or offensive purposes; (iii) to infringe another’s rights, including but not limited to any intellectual property rights; (iv) to upload, email or otherwise transmit or make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, spam, junk mail or any other form of solicitation; (v) to transmit or otherwise make available any code or virus, or perform any activity, that could harm or interfere with any device, software, network or service (including this Service); or (vi) to violate, or encourage any conduct that would violate any applicable law or regulation or give rise to civil or criminal liability. +

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Translated out of lawyerese, this gives Cisco the right to brick your router if you use it to view anything Cisco considers pornography, or do anything that it might consider IP theft – like, say, bit-torrenting a movie. Or even if you send anything it considers unsolicited advertising – which doesn’t have to mean bulk spam, see “any other form of solicitation”?

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The sum of these paragraphs is: “We control your digital life. We can spy on you, we can filter your traffic, we can cut off your net access unilaterally if you do anything we don’t like, and you have no recourse.”

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And why can they do that? Because there’s a blob of closed-source software in that router that you can’t modify, that only Cisco can modify. You don’t own it, it owns you.

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When I wrote yesterday of closed source trapping users at the wrong end of an asymmetrical power relationship, that was abstract. This is concrete – this is the shit getting real. This is why anyone who makes excuses for closed source in network-facing software is not just a fool deluded by shiny marketing but a malignant idiot whose complicity with what those vendors do will injure his neighbors as well as himself.

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Now, if you have been following the news, maybe you’ve heard that Cisco backed off from the most egregious language in these terms of service under public pressure. Reassured? Don’t be – because Cisco keeps its control of the software and reserves the right to change the terms of service whenever it likes.

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Cisco could change the terms of its service to give it even more sweeping and arbitrary privileges at any time. Or Apple could do that, or Microsoft could. The power relationship remains dangerously asymmetrical; the closed source remains their instrument of control over you.

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This is why you should demand open source in your router, open source in your operating system, and open source in any application software that is important to your life. Because if you don’t own it, it will surely own you.

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This is also why people who make excuses for or actively advocate closed-source OSs and network software (and yes, Apple/iOS fanboys, I’m looking at you) are not merely harmlessly misguided cultists. They are enemies of liberty – enablers and accomplices before the fact in vendor schemes to spy on you, control you, and imprison you. Treat them, and the vendors they worship, accordingly.

diff --git a/20120710150404.blog b/20120710150404.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..85d99c1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120710150404.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Tomi Ahonen carpet-bombs Stephen Elop +

The best strategic analysis of Nokia’s parlous position I’ve ever seen comes to us from ex-Nokia-executive and longtime company-watcher Tomi Ahonen: The Sun Tzu of Nokisoftian Microkia. It’s thorough, entertainingly written, and includes some instructive diversions into military history.

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It’s long and really can’t be summarized well – you need to plow through Ahonen’s detailed analyses of things like the impact of Microsoft’s Skype purchase on Nokia’s carrier relationships to understand how royally Elop has screwed the pooch.

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I see only one thing that I think Ahonen gets wrong. I think he is too complacent about what the actual medium-term prospects for Symbian were at the time Elop took the helm at Nokia; he understimates the speed of transition to smartphones and overestimates the stickiness of Symbian as a platform under that pressure.

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Thus, I think Ahonen’s evaluation that Elop’s “Burning Platforms” memo wasn’t diagnosing a real problem is incorrect. On everything else, though, his indictment of Elop seems dead on target. He persuades me that Elop’s later blunders (beginning with tying Nokia to the Windows phone) were even larger and stupider than I thought at the time.

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This essay changes my mind about something significant. I thought at the time of the Burning Platforms memo that Nokia’s best move would have been to ride the Android tide, that MeeGo was a noble but doomed effort that could never have gained any traction. Ahonen does a good job of arguing that Nokia had the marketing reach and good carrier relationships needed to make MeeGo seriously competitive. This, in retrospect, makes Nokia’s cancellation of MeeGo seem like even more of a tragic blunder than it did at the time.

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Yes, I know that some Nokia alumni have just launched a MeeGo startup aimed at making it competitive on smartphones. I wish them every bit of luck, but they don’t have the co-factors for success that Ahonen ably describes, so I cannot think much of their chances.

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Finally…who knew Ahonen was so well-versed in military history? That’s something I know more than a little about myself, and I’m here to certify that where my knowledge overlaps with his I find his command of facts excellent, and his judgment sound and incisive. Thus, I’m going to go read up on the Battle of Suomussalmi sometime soon.

diff --git a/20120719012306.blog b/20120719012306.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..153d891 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120719012306.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Napier’s Lesson +

In the 1840s, Hindu priests complained to Charles James Napier (then Commander-in-Chief of British forces in India) about the prohibition of suttee by British authorities. Suttee was the custom of burning widows alive on the funeral pyre of their husbands. According to Napier’s brother William, this is how he replied:

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+“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.” +

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This incident, perhaps the finest single moment in the history of Britain’s relatively benign imperialism, teaches two lessons still profoundly relevant today.

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The first lesson is for the various sorts who call themselves “multiculturalists” and “moral relativists”. Napier showed us that these ostensibly liberating doctrines actually translate into “might makes right” – that, in the absence of a common normative ethical framework, disputes about “custom” will be won by the tribe with the most ability and will to use force.

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The second lesson is for people who, having noticed than relativism and multiculturism are a road to ruination and blood, then argue that we must fall back on religion as the only possible source of truly universal ethical norms (If God is dead, is anything permissible?). Notice that the would-be widow-burners are priests? The “custom” they are arguing for is exactly their bid in the game of if-you-accept-my-religious-premises.

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Napier, in promising those priests a hanging, says nothing of any religious counter-conviction of his own. And it would make no difference to the lesson if he had – except, perhaps, to underline the point that religion is just another form of tribal particularism and thus fundamentally unable to lift us away from the bloody muck of might-makes-right.

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Those Hindu priests, being polytheists, are at least better equipped to understand this inability than a Christian or Muslim would be – they don’t pretend to a universal normative ethic, just one that is binding on those who live within their tribal custom. Monotheists, on the other hand, miss the point – they think everyone else’s religion is mere tribal particularism, while their own is uniquely and miraculously true. In this monotheists are essentially similar to any occupant of a hospital ward for delusional psychotics, and it is thus unsurprising that their capacity for consequential ethical reasoning is badly damaged.

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Napier’s lesson doesn’t tell us where to find a universal normative ethic that isn’t dependent on religion. But it does tell us that until we do, the only “solution” to conflicts of custom will be this: rules get made by those with the most power to threaten and murder and the will to use that power.

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And here is where the irony of Napier’s last sentence really stings. “Let us all act according to national customs.” Illusions about the logic of these conflicts can only lead to more bloodshed, not less.

diff --git a/20120719132657.blog b/20120719132657.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cb23440 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120719132657.blog @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +Saga Iceland and “thar” +

In the comments on my previous post, someone linked to Steven Dutch’s essay The World’s Most Toxic Value System, in which he discusses the many evils that flow from a complex of values that he labels with the Arabic word “thar” (blood vengeance).

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Dutch’s essay is in many ways insightful, and a welcome corrective to the mush-minded notion that all cultures have equally valid ethical claims. But it suffers a bit from the author’s lack of anthropological breadth – while he is commendably clear-eyed about what he has seen, there is much he has not seen that bears on and could be used to improve his thesis.

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I think it is particularly instructive to apply Dutch’s criteria to the culture of saga Iceland, which we may take as a literate representative of the pre-Christian Norse and more generally of old tribal Germanic culture. This tradition should be especially interesting to English-speakers, as the Anglo-Saxon version of it was foundational to Anglo-American common law and notions of liberty.

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To see what makes the saga Icelanders so interesting in this context, let’s first test them against both Dutch’s criteria for a “thar” culture and the consequences he expects from “thar”:

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Extreme importance of personal status and sensitivity to insult. Yes, this is well attested by the sagas.

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Acceptance of personal revenge including retaliatory killing. This also. So far, the Icelanders seem to be fitting the “thar” pattern.

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Obsessive male dominance. But here we swerve off the track. The sagas are full of strong female characters who are primary actors. Icelandic women were far from subjugated; indeed, they sometimes commanded ships and armed bodies of men, and it is clear that they enjoyed even more equality in custom than they did under formal Icelandic law.

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Paranoia over female sexual infidelity. There is barely even a detectable trace of this in the sagas – in fact saga Icelanders seemed less concerned about it than their modern descendants are.

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Primacy of family rights over individual rights. No. While honor was a concern of families and blood feuds tended to be among familial lines, rights and obligations definitely attached to individuals in both law and custom. Family authority over individuals was correspondingly weak.

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I think it’s also instructive to follow Dutch and apply Ralph Peters’s additional criteria for “loser” cultures, which Dutch correctly notes are strongly correlated with his “thar” complex.

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Restrictions on the free flow of information. I believe if you had proposed this to a saga Icelander as a mechanism of cultural control that was even possible, let alone appropriate, he (or she) would have thought you were barmy.

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Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure. Absolutely not. One of the most marked traits of saga Icelanders in adverse situations was a sort of stoic responsibility, and a mental toughness about failure that accepted it as a datum and moved on. It is difficult for Americans and Britons to see how exceptional this made the saga Icelanders among preindustrial cultures precisely because we inherited this stance and are ourselves exceptional among modern cultures in exactly the same way.

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The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization. This one is interesting. Peters says “Where blood ties rule, you cannot trust the contract, let alone the handshake.” and it is very clear what he is reacting to in the culture of (for example) Arabs and Sicilians. But, while the extended family was the basic unit of social organization in saga Iceland, there was an equally strong ethos of reciprocal individual contract that was basic to law and the chieftainship system. The saga Icelanders were one of the few pre-modern societies in which you could trust a handshake – indeed, blood feuds seem to have ended that way as often as they were resolved by formal legal process.

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Domination by a restrictive religion. Early saga Icelanders didn’t have this problem. Later ones did as Christianity became more important. The scale and intensity of intercommunal violence increased accordingly.

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A low valuation of education. Again, no. The saga Icelanders clearly respected the sorts of education they had available to them. They had a strong sense of cultural patrimony, and there is direct evidence in the spoken boasts of saga characters that the cultivation of intelligence through media including poetry and board games was considered a desirable trait even in high-status warrior males. Exceptionally for a pre-modern society, even female intelligence was valued: one of the Icelandic praise-names that comes down to us was of an early female settler called “Aud the Deep-Minded”

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Low prestige assigned to work. And again, no. Saga Icelanders are famous to us as fighters and explorers, but their economic base was as smallholding farmers. They worked hard and valued hard work.

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Now I will note some other respects in which the saga Icelanders (and their Norse and Anglo-Saxon kin) diverged from the “thar” pattern. They didn’t disdain trade or have sharp notions of low-status work to be done only by women, thralls and foreigners. They didn’t suffer from technological stagnation – indeed, the recorded evolution of ships and weapons over the entire Norse cultural complex shows these people to have been flexible, innovative and highly pragmatic in their technological choices.

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So. We have seen that saga Icelanders (representing the Norse/Anglo-Saxon/old-Germanic culture complex) had what Dutch considers the central traits of the “thar” complex – notably, (1) touchiness about personal honor and status, (2) institutionalized blood feud, and (3) family-centered social organization. Yet they, like the other Norse and the Anglo-Saxons, evaded the poverty and stagnation that Dutch correctly describes as typical of “thar” cultures; they got better.

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In fact, they got so much better that their memetic descendants in the modern Anglosphere evolved the wealthiest and most forward-looking cultures in human history. Here’s a telling fact about that continuity: England and the U.S. kept the Norse/old-Germanic pattern of agricultural land use – individual family farms on their own land – long after continental Germans, Frisians, and Dutch adopted village-centered agriculture with complicated collective-ownership structures. (This is interesting not least because it tells us that genetics and “race” are probably not important causes here.)

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So, what is this evidence trying to tell us?

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I think one lesson is that Dutch has mistaken essence for accident. There is a very real pathology that he’s pointing at – having lived in Italy I can certify, for example, that his comparison of Northern with Southern Italians is both telling and correct. But I think the high incidence of blood feud and personal violence in these sick cultures is a consequence of the pathology, not its actual cause. Dutch’s “thar” is thus a mislabeling, there is something deeper in play.

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If we compare Arabs, Sicilians, or Albanians to saga Norse, a couple of psychological differences stand out. One is impulse control. The Norse highly valued self-command; it was thought supremely manly to be master of one’s passions, and to seek violent revenge with forethought and methodical planning. In Dutch’s “thar” cultures, on the other hand, men expect to be overwhelmed by their emotions. They have, by Norse and modern Western standards, deficient impulse control – in fact, they tend to consider impulse control effete. Thus, they plan poorly and are brittle and panicky under adversity.

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Another marked difference is the level of social trust. I have already noted that saga Iceland appears to have been one of the few pre-modern cultures in which you could generally count on a handshake deal to hold. Honesty and keeping one’s sworn oath were considered bedrock virtues, trade transactions with strangers were normal, and loyalties were readily formed across kin-group lines. These are marks of a high-trust society. Indeed, the most perplexing and fascinating thing about the Norse to modern eyes is how they combined high trust with what to moderns seem shockingly high violence levels.

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By contrast, Dutch’s “thar” societies are tragically low-trust. They have the violence, touchiness, and feuding families of the Norse, but the ability of the Norse to cultivate reciprocity across kin-group lines is lacking. It is difficult for modern Westerners to understand how crippling this is. One observable consequence in the 21st-century Arab world is that military command structures have to be organized so that superiors are either of the same clan as inferiors or can apply immediate and overwhelming coercion – otherwise orders will be subverted as often as they are followed.

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What I think the example of saga Iceland tells us is that these holes in cultural capital – low trust and low valuation of impulse control – are more fundamental to the “thar” pathology than blood feud and personal vengeance. Low trust and poor impulse control imply blood-feud and revenge, but the Norse show us that the reverse does not seem to be true.

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How the subjugation of women and sexual paranoia fit into this – whether as causes or consequences – is less clear to me. It may be as simple as this: if you can’t trust your neighbor to control his impulses to seduce or rape your wife, and you can’t directly coerce him, isolating and controlling your wife may be the only way to keep the peace (and secure her scarce reproductive capacity).

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To sum up this level of explanation, blood-feud and honor aren’t the trap. Low trust is the trap; stagnation and endemic blood-feud (“thar”) are the consequence. Exhibit A is the Arab world and the portions of the Mediterranean and Balkans long under Arab dominance (Sicily being a notable example).

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Is there a level of explanation below this? I’m not sure, though I’m strongly tempted to believe that population differences in average intelligence are causative. It’s been observed that average IQ in a population varies directly with the latitude of its genetic homeland, and convincingly speculated that this is because colder climates require more cooperative behavior and a more elaborate technological toolkit than warmer ones do. The Norse may have been just bright enough…

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It may not even take thousands of miles of latitude to make a noticeable selective difference. Northern Italians think they’re brighter on average than southern Italians, and on the evidence they’re probably not wrong. But guesses about population genetics aren’t really necessary to the main point; Dutch has it slightly wrong, the problem with “thar” is not actually “thar” itself.

diff --git a/20120721181951.blog b/20120721181951.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..817a19b --- /dev/null +++ b/20120721181951.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Feline health update +

This one is for the surprisingly large number of my blog readers who have sent inquiries about the health of Sugar, Cathy’s and my cat, following her near-death experience late last year. The rest of you can proceed about your business…

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Sugar bounced back amazingly after the acute kidney infection was treated and seemed like she’d shed a few years off her age. But it’s clear from her blood work that she has compromised kidney function and we were advised to do regular subcutaneous hydration if we wanted to keep her alive.

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It took us a while to work out an M.O. for this, and at first our frequency was spotty. But hydrations about twice a week are now part of the routine, and Sugar tolerates them very well. She’s still eager to jump onto Cathy’s lap in her office chair and become a relaxed cat-puddle there, despite the fact that every few days or so this results in a whacking big hydration needle being poked through the loose skin behind her neck. (Cathy does the insertion with her right hand, holding the cat in place with her left; I work the valve below the hydration bag.)

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Sugar will squawk indignantly when the needle goes in, but is then pretty compliant for about 7 or 8 minutes after, which typically allows us to get about a unit and a half of fluid into her. Eventually she decides she’s had enough, at which point she starts seriously squirming to get out from under Cathy’s hand and I know it’s time to shut the valve. Cathy lets go, she jumps off Cathy’s lap in a huff…and ten minutes later she’s back to purring at us as per normal.

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It would still be hard for anyone who didn’t know it to guess that Sugar is an ancient with kidney trouble. She’s still bright-eyed, active, curious, and very outgoing to our guests. She seemed to be gradually losing weight for a while, which is a bad sign in an elderly cat, but that’s reversed in the last couple weeks – she’s gained a pound or two, maybe, and has a healthier layer of fat over her ribs and spine than she did in late spring. Our vet thought she was looking fine at her last examination.

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Sugar is now about 6 months shy of being 20 years old. It looks like she’ll make it to 20 in style. Every day is a blessing – she was curled up against my bare right foot in my desk pigeonhole while I wrote most of this, half-asleep and tribbling contentedly to herself.

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We know the clock can’t be turned back. If heart failure or a stroke doesn’t kill her, the day will come when Sugar has deteriorated so much that the last gift we can give her is a painless death. But that day is not today, and doesn’t look like it’s coming soon. Sugar continues to amaze us with her fortitude and delight us with a heart as big as all outdoors.

diff --git a/20120722131338.blog b/20120722131338.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..10f2462 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120722131338.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Gun-free fantasy zones +

After the Aurora theater shooting, it was of course inevitable that the jackals at the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy vendor would be trying to make a political meal from the victims’ corpses before they had even had time to cool to room temperature. The usual round of inane honking about “common-sense gun control” ensued just as if this psycho (like most others) hadn’t cheerfully violated several laws well before he pulled the trigger.

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But enough about the usual idiots; let’s talk about “Gun-free zones”. We’re told the movie theater had a sign up announcing its “gun-free” policy. Yeah, and how well did that work out for ya?

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Try as I might, I am unable to comprehend the thinking of people who put “gun-free zone” signs in theaters, or on homes, or anywhere. How do they not get that criminals and madmen will read this as “Get your tasty defenseless victims, right here?”

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At least “gun-free” signs on homes generally only jeopardize people stupid enough to put them up. “Gun-free” signs and policies in public spaces are another matter; whatever gibbering moron at Cinemark mandated this one painted bull’s-eyes on a theater-full of innocents.

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Two fantasies caused that massacre. The obvious one was James Holmes’s delusional identification with the Joker. The less obvious one was the pious belief that wishing firearms out of sight will keep bad people from doing bad things. Holmes is an obvious psychotic who’s still trapped in the first fantasy; to prevent needless deaths, the rest of us must get free of the second.

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For myself, from now on I plan to willfully violate every “gun-free zone” policy I run across. If enough sane people do likewise, perhaps the next massacre can be prevented.

diff --git a/20120726171500.blog b/20120726171500.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bf871df --- /dev/null +++ b/20120726171500.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +The strategy behind the Nexus 7 +

The Nexus 7 I ordered for my wife last week arrived two days ago. That’s been enough time for Cathy and me to look it over closely and get a good feel for its capabilities. It’s a very interesting device not just for what it does but what it doesn’t do. There’s a strategy here, and as usual I think Google is playing a longer game than people looking at this product in isolation understand.

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The Nexus 7 seems to me to be very obviously designed to be an inexpensive web terminal for use with home and small-business WiFi networks. Look at what’s missing: cellular modem, rear-facing camera, SD card. These are exactly the things you’d want in a road-warrior device intended to compete both at the high end of the cellphone market and against notebook/netbook PCs at their low end.

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That having been said, the Nexus 7 does the limited job it’s designed for extremely well. It’s easy to configure, easy to use, and the audiovisual presentation is slick without being gratuitously flashy. We found the voice-search capability particularly effective and well integrated. We were able to watch a movie at our kitchen table (The Black Shield of Falworth, a classic piece of 1950s swashbuckler cheese) without lag, artifacts, or dropouts.

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The device is selling like crazy and has spectacular buzz. After I had already privately decided to get Cathy one, Linus Torvalds gave it a public thumbs-up and I got completely unsolicited “buy one now!” raves from two friends of mine not previously noted for anything but jaded cynicism about the consumer-electronics gadget of the week. It is clear that Google and Asus have a mega-hit on their hands – analysts are already describing it as the Kindle-killer and I think there’s no hype at all in that assessment.

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The really interesting question about the Nexus 7 is why it’s not a more ambitious device. It’s clear from looking at the components that Asus could have built a full-featured tablet that could compete head-to-head with the iPad 3, had Google wanted that; the obvious inference is that Google didn’t want it. Which is interesting and revealing.

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What the Nexus 7 looks like to me is that it was designed to meet a specified price point rather than a specified feature set. It’s what you’d come up with if you told the engineering team “It’s gotta retail under $250 with tax and shipping – start with your dream tablet, cut out features that won’t fit that budget, and give me the best device that fits a plausible use case. Then we’ll design the marketing around that.”

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What kind of product and market strategy does this fit? I don’t think that’s complicated. This is also exactly what you’d do if your goal were to disrupt the iPad’s market from the low end. You’d identify a large class of potential iPad customers and target their use case (home and small-business web terminal) with a device that’s a substantially better value for the dollar. The goal would be to play for the highest-volume segment of the market in order to put downward pressure on the iPad’s growth rate without challenging it directly, the latter being something Asus/Google may not be able to do yet.

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Thus: IPS display nearly as good as the iPad’s (216ppi to 264pp). A replaceable battery, and a case with clip closures rather than glue. Google wants any random PC shop to be able to service this thing; it’s part of the value proposition. That aspect of the design also says to me that it’s aimed at low-cost fleet deployments. Certainly if I were a Fortune 500 IT manager I’d look hard at it as a way to lower my whole-lifecycle costs.

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My prediction is testable. If it’s correct, the Nexus 7 won’t be a one-off. Within four months or so we’ll see a followon that ramps up the pressure – probably a 9-inch screen, possibly SD card support, and (crucially) price point no higher. I don’t think, along this line of attack, we’ll see a cellular modem being added any time soon; it’s in Google’s interest to avoid conflict with its smartphone partners, who have been doing a good job of pushing Android – that is, as opposed to its tablet partners who’ve been doing a relatively crappy one.

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Remember Google’s long game. For Google’s advertising and content businesses to flourish, Google needs web access (and especially mobile web access) to be thoroughly commoditized, with nobody else in a position to collect rent on the path to your eyeballs. This is why they don’t need to make a dime of licensing income on Android – it’s a strategic play to prevent rent-seeking.

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The design and positioning of the Nexus 7 is perfectly consistent with this goal. It’s a patient, well-thought-out play that will amortize fixed costs for other firms in Google’s partner network (Asus, Tegra, whoever’s ODMing the display) so that follow-on devices can issue at the same or a lower price point.

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That result will be good for everybody. I don’t think I really need to tell the open-source community to get behind this product and push it, because the buzz says that’s already happening. It’s not the iPad-killer, but the road forward to something that will be is not difficult to discern.

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UPDATE: Cathy’s thoughts on the device

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UPDATE2: Contrary to myth, Tony Curtis does not at any point in The Black Shield of Falworth say “Yonder lies the castle of my fadda da king.” His New York accent is, however, hilariously obtrusive throughout the movie.

diff --git a/20120729150346.blog b/20120729150346.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..24d2e69 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120729150346.blog @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: The iPhone Design Was Inspired by Sony diff --git a/20120730211517.blog b/20120730211517.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..952ccb9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120730211517.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +doclifter 2.9 is released +

I’ve released doclifter 2.9, and as part of that process I’ve been testing it on the entire collection of manual pages on my system again. Because doclifter does mechanical translation of troff-based markups to DocBook-XML, one of the side effects of testing it is that I find lots of broken markup. I’ll ship over 700 fix patches back to maintainers this time, though maybe not until after I get back from World Boardgaming Chapionships next week.

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Release here, report on markup bugs found is here. Yes, over 700 patches, but that’s actually a drop from previous passes.

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My last rampage through the man-page universe with fire and sword was in 2007. Most (I’d say about 85%) of the patches I shipped then were accepted. One particularly noticeable change is that in 2007, only a handful of pages identifiably had DocBook masters and could thus be skipped; in 2012 fully 7% of the entire corpus is like that.

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Which is good news – why, at that rate, we’ll be fully converted before the end of this century. :-)

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(For any of those who are wondering what the practical consequence is, think Web availability. DocBook renders into HTML much more cleanly than conventional manual-page markup does.)

diff --git a/20120806214209.blog b/20120806214209.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f79f902 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120806214209.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +An open letter to The Economist +

In “Who’s Afraid of Huawei?” you point out the need for the telecoms industry to adopt transparency guidelines to head off risks from kill switches, spyware, and back doors covertly installed in their equipment.

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One minimum necessary condition of such transparency is that all software and firmware in these devices must be open source, with customers permitted to install their own software images from published source code and development toolchains that can be audited by third parties.

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While open-source software cannot completely head off the possibility of Trojan horses embedded deep in telecoms hardware, it at least reduces the management of aggregate security risks to a tractable problem. No lesser measure is or can be even remotely as effective, even in principle.

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Telecoms customers should insist on open source – and, as any competent counter-espionage agency would do, should consider vendors’ insistence on information asymmetry to be indicative of an unacceptable security risk.

diff --git a/20120808172552.blog b/20120808172552.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..578310d --- /dev/null +++ b/20120808172552.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Shopping for a new martial-arts school +

For some months now my wife Cathy and myself had been the only regulars showing up for the MMA classes at our local dojo, Iron Circle. While this meant we got a lot of quality instructor time, I did wonder how the school could afford to run classes fotr two students.

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Well, it turns out they can’t. Two days ago, Master Maybroda emailed us to tell us the MMA program was being canceled. Too many people, it seems, show up expecting it to be like what they see on UFC and bail when it isn’t. “You two outlasted all the wannabes” he wrote.

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This leaves us with a problem. Where and how shall we train? We wouldn’t even consider just stopping. We’re martial artists – and, though my wife denies that this has become part of her self-identification in the way it is for me, she is no readier to give it up than I am.

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Looking over the local Yelp listings for martial arts, and discarding schools we’ve trained at before but left for various reasons, we seem to be down to three alternatives…

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Stay at Iron Circle and switch to the Tang Soo Do program. I considered moving us over to the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu track, but Master Maybroda doubts that would be a good fit because of the cereberal-palsy-induced range-of-motion issues in my legs and hips, and – sadly – he’s probably right.

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Tang Soo Do would be a pretty easy road for us, as we already have black belts in Tae Kwon Do (which is closely related). I think all we’d have to do do to make black belt there is learn a handful of relatively simple forms. Indeed, the biggest issue with Tang Soo Do is that it might not be challenging enough to be interesting.

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On the other hand, the instructors already know us and have a pretty good idea of our capabilities. We like and respect the head of school, and he likes and respects us. And the place is an easy 5-minute drive from here. These are not advantages lightly to be dismissed.

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Another alternative is a place called (oddly) “Mr. Stuart’s” in West Chester, about fifteen minutes away. That’s where we’ll go, probably, if we decide our priority is to continue with MMA. They teach a mix of MMA, boxing, and an Israeli fighting system called “Haganah” which appears to be somebody’s branded variant of Krav Maga.

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That’s interesting; I’ve had my eye on Krav Maga as a possible next style for a while now. It’s an aggressive, upper-body-focused power style with a lot of emphasis on improvised weapons and creative use of the tactical environment. A very good fit for my build and combat psychology, I think.

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Our third possibility is a Shaolin kung-fu school in Berwyn, again about fifteen minutes away. I’m interested in this because my previous experience with Chinese kung fu (in wing chun style) was very positive; I’d like to get deeper into that.

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We’re going to take time and audit a couple classes before committing to anything.

diff --git a/20120817033403.blog b/20120817033403.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..adcfcb7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120817033403.blog @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +A martial-arts trilemma +

So, nine days ago the Mixed Martial Arts program my wife and I had been training in was canceled, and we’ve been shopping for a new school in our area. We’re serious students, twenty years deep in empty-hand and weapons, so the general run of strip-mall karate and TKD joints just isn’t going to do it for us. We require a school with high-quality instruction that can teach us stuff we haven’t seen before.

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Fortunately, the area where we live (Chester County in southeastern Pennsylvania) an affluent section of the Boswash metroplex and thus probably nearly as good as it gets in the U.S. for choice. Internet searches turned up two strong possibilities, in addition to the third which is to stick with our current dojo and switch to Tang Soo Do.

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We’ve now been to do evaluation classes at both. This is an after-action report likely to be of interest to martial artists of any description, and I’m hoping that the process of writing will help me clarify my thoughts about an interesting trilemma.

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A bit of digging with Google actually turned up three possibilities that looked interesting. One place called “Mr. Stuart’s Martial Arts” in West Chester, about 15 munutes from here, teaching MMA and boxing and a system called Haganah F.I.G.H.T that appears to be a variant or close relative of Krav Maga. Another: a local branch of “Steve DeMasco’s Shaolin Studios” 15 minutes in the opposite direction. A third was a location in West Pikeland, about 20 minutes away, teaching Systema.

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Alas, the Systema teacher is probably out as a place for steady training. Small school, one class a week on Tuesday nights, conflicts with Cathy’s twice-monthly Borough Council meetings. We’re going to go audit one class, though, in case he schedules more time slots. Haven’t been there yet.

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We went to Mr. Stuart’s first to check out Haganah F.I.G.H.T. The place is a converted garage in the poorest end of West Chester – actually, the bit just north of it is a rougher neighborhood than I knew the town even had before I went there. (West Chester is both the county seat and a college town, prosperous and tidy and middle-class – full of red-brick Federal architecture and shade trees.) Inside the place has something of the atmosphere of an old-time boxing gym, including a regulation sized platform ring and a lot of hard-used punching bags.

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The students are an interesting mix. A large contingent of college kids and twentysomething white-collar workers (good number of these female), a slightly smaller contingent of shaven-headed would-be hard guys with a lot of ‘tude who aren’t nearly as intimidating as they’d probably like to think they are, and a smallish group with no ‘tude at all who you can spot as the serious martial artists by the way they move and their complete disinterest in looking obviously badass.

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Mr. Stuart himself turned out to look like one of the tattooed would-be hard guys, but in his case I don’t think that’s writing any check he can’t cash. Likes to loudly simulate being an asshole, but there’s a twinkle in his eye and all his students are in on the joke. Cathy and I both liked him instantly; I suspect he has that effect on a lot of people.

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The training was interesting. Certainly matched the descriptions I’ve read of Krav Maga; close fighting with a lot of brutal soft-tissue strikes (crotch kicks, fingernail rakes, ear smashes, eye gouges). No kicks above waist level (good news for me; with my palsy issues I suck at high-kicking). The style rewards aggression and upper-body power, making it a good match for me both physically and psychologically.

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Whether by chance or design, I ended up paired for combat drills with three assistant instructors and a woman who’s obviously a long-term student. All four were impressively capable – smooth moves, excellent physical control, excellent awareness and analytical eye (all four quickly made me as someone who’d been around the track a few times). The three I had opportunity to make the request of cheerfully honored my wish to spar to light contact, and showed no hesitation at all about taking light strikes from me (even the woman mixed it up with me at breath-on-the-cheek range and seemed to enjoy same). An excellent time was had by all.

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Cathy and I left feeling like we’d be respected and welcomed by the core group there. Reasonably so, as they probably don’t get walk-ins with our experience level very often; still, it was a nice feeling. And it says a lot about Mr. Stuart, all of it good, that his assistant instructors are so capable.

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Nor did I mind having Mr. Stuart publicly tease me about my Asian stances and guard reflexes (“You’ve been studying way too much martial arts – that shit’ll get you killed.”). I got the point; for various functional reasons, fighters in this style guard more like Western boxers, and don’t want to do anything that telegraphs them as martial artists until they actually have to go in and take out an opponent. I actually think a boxing-style close guard is a gloves-induced adaptation that’s a mistake when fighting bare-knuckled, but my first class in a new style isn’t the right time to have that argument with anybody.

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Overall, I like the style. It suits me, I think I suit it. I think I’d pick it up quickly and effectively, and it may well be the most brutally practical art I’ve ever seen. The only detail I can complain about is that the place has no changing rooms, which will complicate our logistics a bit if we continue there.

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Our second visit was to the Shaolin studio, on Route 30 in Berwyn, which means too upscale to have strip malls; the building looked like a converted dance studio.

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It appears they teach very traditional five-animal-style kung fu – again, nothing surprising to me; I’ve seen a lot of the moves before though not done them. Dan Simmons the instructor made a point of telling us he doesn’t teach in the traditional hard-ass style, though, and it was pretty obvious why; the students are mostly suburban upper-middle-class kids who’d be yanked by their parents in a heartbeat if anybody went all old-school on them. Less…gritty…than the crowd at Mr. Stuart’s; I couldn’t imagine any of the would-be hard boys from West Chester walking in here, or even wanting to. Perhaps the most serious knock on the place is that they don’t spar to contact in regular classes – you have to go to the Saturday sparring class for that.

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Still, these people weren’t just dancing. Shaolin is a beautiful art that is obviously lethal in the hands of a skilled practitioner – more obviously than, say, wing chun (which I’ve trained in before). You could see some of that deadly elegance starting to manifest in the more advanced students.

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I learned a new move, the “crane strike” – same body dynamics as a tae kwon do ridge hand, but hitting with the forearm bone. I also noticed that the moves I found most natural were tiger form – palm hand and rake, especially. I’m pretty sure that’s going to turn out to be “my” animal if I work this style.

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The drills include a fair amount of kicking (often well above the waist) which is unfortunate for me. And I’m dubious about the style being as practical as Krav Maga. The instructor asserts confidently that it is, but such claims always need to be taken with several grains of salt. Still…what fun it would be!

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I mean, if what you want to do is your classic impressive-as-hell chop-sockey moves with nifty exotic names, Shaolin has got your satisfaction right here. Pure crack for anybody who digs on wuxia movies and has been harboring a sneaking desire to be Kwai-Chang Caine since, like, 1972. Which category, I blushingly admit, includes me.

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Not as much depth on the instructor bench as Mr. Stuart’s, which is a consideration (this is a smaller and younger school). Also, there’s a changing room, but just one, and it’s barely bigger than a phone booth. Which creates certain problems at beginning and end of class, though the students are cheerful about it. I’m beginning to think maybe I’ve been unaware of a certain degree of luxury at my previous schools.

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Our third alternative is to stay where we are at Iron Circle, a convenient seven minutes from home (with changing rooms!) and do Tang Soo Do. We know and trust Master George Maybroda (the chief of school there) and the other instructors; we’ve seen enough of those classes to know what we’d be getting.

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And that’s the problem, really. Cathy and I earned tae kwon do black belts at a school that was pretty good – enough so that the two times I went to Korea and sought out martial-arts demonstrations I didn’t see many people at all who were trained up to our standard. And tang soo do is not very different – a bit softer and more circular, maybe, emphasizing speed a bit more and power a bit less.

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We could do Tang Soo Do. I asked, and the chief instructor (who knows us quite well and likes us) agrees that starting us at white belts would bore the crap out of us and waste everybody’s time. Likely we’d test in at some mid-belt level and then, alas, I fear we’d squeeze the available juice out of the style in eighteen months to two years. I’d like to be wrong about this, but the structure and the people to take us much past first dan just don’t seem to be in place here.

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Thus our trilemma. Each of the choices available to us maximizes something; what we need to do is decide what we want. If it’s just to maintain the skills we already have and stay fit in a setting that is maximally convenient, Iron Circle. For practical combat training, Mr. Stuart’s probably has the edge. For nifty exotic variations and mad-fun wuxia badassery, neither of the other places could touch the Shaolin studio.

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I’m a bit amused with myself, really. My head says “Go do Haganah F.I.G.H.T.”, because my personal threat model still includes a way-outside chance of Iranian assassins, and being able to take out a crazed jihadi hand-to-hand is more or less exactly what that style was designed for. My heart says “Fool, that’s why you carry a gun. Go act out your wuxia fantasies at that Shaolin place. You know you want to.” Then some other random organ whispers that Iron Circle is so conveeenient…

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Cathy’s having trouble with this too. She’s less drawn by the Shaolin studio than I (though obviously willing to do it if I really want to) and perhaps a bit more swayed by the advantages of not having to change schools and drive further. But she liked Mr. Stuart’s, a lot, too.

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How to choose? This will take some meditation.

diff --git a/20120819081719.blog b/20120819081719.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cfc4c6c --- /dev/null +++ b/20120819081719.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: The Limits of Lawfare +

It’s beginning to look like Apple’s legal offensive against Android might backfire on it big-time. Comes the news that Judge Koh has declined to suppress evidence that Apple may have copied crucial elements of the iPad design from prototypes developed by Knight-Ridder and the University of Missouri in the mid-1990s.

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Those of us aware enough of computing history to be aware of early work by XEROX PARC and others have always been aware that Apple’s claims of originality were highly dubious. Apple’s history is one of adroit marketing and a facility for stealing adapting ideas from others, wrapping them in admittedly excellent industrial design, and then pretending that all of it originated de novo from the Cupertino campus.

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The pretense has always galled a little, especially when Apple’s marketing created a myth that, footling technical details aside, the whole package somehow sprang like Athena from Steve Jobs’s forehead. But it didn’t become intolerable until Apple began using lawfare to suppress its competition.

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The trouble with this is that there’s actually a lot of prior art out there. I myself saw and handled a Sharp tablet anticipating important iPhone/iPad design tropes two years before the uPhone launch, back in 2005; the Danger hiptop (aka T-Mobile Sidekick) anticipated the iPhone’s leveraging of what we’d now call “cloud services” in 2002-2003; and of course there’s the the Sony design study from 2006, described by one of Apple’s own designers as an important influence.

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If only Apple were honest about what it owed others…but that cannot be, because the company’s strategy has come to depend on using junk patents in attempts to lock competitors out of its markets.

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On one level this is understandable. The iPhone’s global market share has been plummeting – hammered nearly everywhere but the U.S. by Android, and apparently sustained in the U.S. only by carrier subsidies that at least one carrier (AT&T) has has wearied of paying. The Google Nexus 7 has recently taken off fast enough to pose a real threat to the iPad’s tablet dominance, and that problem will only become worse as other Android vendors meet or exceed the price-performance benchmark that it sets.

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But lawfare is a brittle counter-strategy. Patents are more effective as threats than if you have to invoke them in court. In the presence of prior art, every patent lawsuit carries a risk that your weapon will blow up in your face. This happened to Oracle in its attempt to extract rent from Android; their case was found to be sufficiently without merit that the main argument left in play is now over how much of Google’s legal fees they’ll have to reimburse.

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Apple may well be headed for a similar bruising – the fact that an amiable-looking professor is going to be able to show the jury two-decade-old mockups that remarkably resemble an iPad is certainly not a good sign for them.

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The underlying problem, of course, is that the U.S. patent system is hideously broken. Despite some recent signs of sanity (in re Bilski) it is still far too easy for well-lawyered-up companies to cartelize markets, stifling innovation and suppressing consumer choice. It’s too much to hope that this will be fixed soon, but if Apple’s junk “design patents” are taken away from it, at least one great wrong perpetrated on Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart and the other pioneers who actually invented the “Apple Interface” will have been partly righted.

diff --git a/20120821041055.blog b/20120821041055.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1ffc253 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120821041055.blog @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +How To Choose A Martial-Arts School +

The responses to my progress report on searching for a new martial-arts school made it clear that many people are interested in advice on this topic. The problem is especially difficult for new students choosing a first school, as they have yet to develop the kind of trained eye that can evaluate technique.

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I have been training in empty-hand combat and contact weapons since 1982; more or less continuously since 1990. I have studied shotokan, tae kwon do, aikido, wing chun kung fu, and Mixed Martial Arts at five different schools and trained in sword-centered Western Martial Arts at two more. Along the way I’ve picked up bits and pieces of iaido, kenjutsu, escrima stick fighting, penjak silat, shaolin kung fu, Greco-Roman wrestling, Okinawan karate, naginata-do, and lua. I hold a black belt in tae kwon do and have been an instructor in multiple styles. I report these things to establish that my experience of styles and schools is very broad, equipping me to give useful advice on how to choose one.

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This how-to will be aimed mainly at people new to the martial arts trying to choose a first school, but the questions I suggest can usefully be asked even if you are a much more experienced student.

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The first thing you need to do is decide what you actually want.

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Different schools and styles answer to different purposes. When speaking of these, martial artists commonly describe three categories: combative (practical self-defense), sport (competitive fighting), and do (self-control and self-improvement; this may just mean physical fitness, but in some arts shades into meditation and mysticism, most often of a Buddhist or Taoist variety).

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The very first thing you should do is to figure out the relative importance of these paths to you, so you can judge each style and school on whether the priorities of the school match your own. Styles vary on this, and individual schools within any given style vary among themselves.

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Suppose, for example, you’re like me (strong interest in the combative aspect, secondary interest in the self-improvement end, no interest in sport competition). A wall of trophies and ribbons at the school suggests that the art will have artificial technique restructions to make it safer for tournament fighting. This may be a bad sign; sumi-e paintings or Buddhist imagery on the walls would be better.

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But in our internetted age, the first active step in your search (especially if you’re a newbie) is probably going to be a web search for schools near you. That’s OK, just bear in mind that the marketing glitz (or absence of same) conveyed by a school’s web presence is not at all correlated with the quality of the school. Start by shortlisting three or four that are conveniently located near you.

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The next thing about choosing a school is that you must do it hands- and eyeballs-on. Visit each candidate school and least watch a class; if the school will allow it (and they usually will) participate in a class. Call to schedule this so you can be a guest in one that is suited to your skill level. You may need to sign a liability waiver; do not be over-concerned, as serious injuries are very rare (more rare than in, for example, golf).

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The first and most important thing to watch for is quality of instruction. A style that is otherwise not a great match for you can be worth pursuing if the teaching is exceptionally good; conversely a style can be an excellent match for you but its school a poor choice if the instruction is inferior.

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Evaluating the quality of teaching is especially important for newbies, who don’t yet have the eye to evaluate things like quality of motion. Here are some things to look for:

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Do the instructors attend to individual students and solve problems, or are they running canned drills with little feedback?

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Do the students look focused and attentive? (Bad sign if adults don’t, but don’t mark the school down if children look a bit scattered.)

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Are senior instructors on the floor teaching, or have they delegated the grunt work to less-capable junior instructors?

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Do you see the students helping each other? (This is generally a good sign, but if you don’t see it, it may only be that the school is strict about who can give instruction.)

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Closely related to these are questions are about the general atmosphere of the school. Trust your gut about this; if something looks or feels particularly wrong – or particularly right – you may well be picking up on important information unconsciously.

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Do the students treat their instructors and each other respectfully? Are they smiling when they start class, and when they leave? Is the school clean? Does it smell good? (Don’t discount this; humans emit different pheromones when they’re under negative stress than they do when they’re happily adrenalized, and your nose can tell that difference.)

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Is the median age close to yours? This matters because physical capabilities change significantly as we age, and the instructor will be teaching to the median. Mixing preadolescent children with adults doesn’t work at all well; while you won’t see that often, less extreme age differences can create some issues if you happen to be among the outliers.

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If it’s a striking art, do the students spar to contact – that is, are they actually touching each other when they strike? I think this is quite important. Without regular contact sparring, developing precise force control and the ability to deliver power is difficult. Some schools avoid this either for liability reasons or because students (or the parents of students) find it too intimidating. I think you should avoid such schools.

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If it’s a grappling art, the analogous question is: are people actually throwing each other around? Without this, throwers don’t learn how to do it right and throwees don’t learn how to fall properly (that is, dissipating the force so the fall doesn’t hurt them).

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Beginners often think that choosing the right style is extremely important. Relax about this, if only because empty-hand arts tend to converge with each other at their high ends – style defines where you start, not so much where you finish. And, overall, quality of instruction is the most important metric.

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That said, you may need to be careful about style choice if you have an actual physical handicap. (I, for example, have a mild case of cerebral palsy that gives me range-of-motion issues in my legs and hips. This makes me a poor fit for a style that involves a lot of high kicking.) If you have a handicap, don’t try to struggle with it by choosing a style that relies on motions difficult for you; trust me, you’ll eventually get quite enough challenge advancing in an art you’re equipped to do well.

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There are several qualities of martial-arts styles that can help you decide how well they will fit you. One important one is how well a style fits your build and the distribution of your strength. You should get a read on this by watching or (better) participating in a class and learning whether the movements are comfortable for you; but here are some principles:

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If your strength is mostly in your arms and shoulders, you are likely to be served best by a striking art such as karate or boxing or kung fu. If your strength is more in your legs, a style with a lot of kicking (tae kwon do, muy thai, savate) may suit you better. If you have a lot of core (hip and torso) strength, a grappling style (ju jitsu, judo, aikido) may be for you.

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Psychology is important, too. Do you like to fight at range or close in? Are you naturally aggressive, or does the idea of flowing like water and using the opponent’s force against him/her appeal more? Do you like using your strength, or prefer to move with precision and delicacy and apply minimum force for maximum result? There are styles that match every combination of these. If you can’t read where a style falls on these axes by seeing it done, ask a practitioner.

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For example: If you’re aggressive, like to use strength, and like to fight close, the tiger form of Five Animals kung fu probably fits you. If you like to fight close but prefer to flow and use minimum force, on the other hand, aikido or judo will probably suit you. If you like to fight at more distance but are aggressive, tae kwon do or kyokushinkai karate may be the right sort of thing.

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Yet another important variable (especially if your focus is combative) is how long it takes to achieve practical combat proficiency in the style. This is difficult to quantify because it depends in part on how frequently you train. But some styles have a reputation for fast takeoff to proficiency – krav maga and wing chun, for example, are often said to get a reasonably diligent student to combat proficiency in less than 18 months; at the other extreme, aikido and Shaolin and others among the more elaborate kung fu varieties are notoriously “10-year” styles. Most styles are intermediate, with combat proficiency developing at 3 to 6 years in.

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So, why would you study a long-takeoff style at all? Mainly because the short-takeoff styles also top out sooner; they get you to proficiency faster by focusing on a handful of techniques, sacrificing breadth and finesse. Long-takeoff styles will often give you a bigger toolkit and more tactical options.

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So far I’ve been mainly speaking of Asian martial arts. But there is a western martial arts tradition, too: boxing, wrestling, and various weapons arts centered on European medieval and Renaissance swordsmanship. Do not discount these as potentially interesting styles; they are increasingly cross-pollinating with Asian arts in interesting ways. Mixed Martial Arts combines Western boxing with Asian grappling. I train at a school of Western sword that combines Western historical sources with Asian-derived hand-to-hand and awards Asian-style belts. This sort of thing may be available to you; all the same considerations in choosing a school apply.

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Now I’ll get into some areas of controversy. All schools insist that their practice is safe, and generally speaking this is true – serious injuries are very rare. But there is an unavoidable opposition between complete safety and learning to be combat-effective. I expressed one aspect of this when I noted that some schools won’t routinely spar to contact or do actual throws, and recommended they be avoided.

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A related controvery is over how much safety equipment should be worn when you spar in a striking art. The advantage of wearing a lot of padding is that you’ll probably never get a bruise, and it makes the dojo’s insurance company happy. I, on the other hand, consider the right amount to be very little – maybe a groin cup, maybe a mouthpiece, maybe light gloves, but I frown on body or head padding – because I think that if I don’t at least occasionally take or give a hit that hurts, I’m not actually learning anything but dancing. And neither is my partner.

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I think (and I’m speaking as a fairly experienced instructor, here) that this applies even to white belts. Good force control – delivering exactly the power you want to to exactly the place you want – is something you should be learning from the beginning. Taking hits and throws, and learning to tell pain that’s just pain from pain that means you have taken damage and should stop doing that, is also something you should be learning from the beginning. I think sparring ‘bare’ or with minimal protective gear promotes both objectives. But plenty of people disagree with me on this – though I also suspect that for many the ‘disagreement’ is largely a pretense that’s a form of appeasement to the liability insurers.

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If you choose a striking art, one of the things you need to decide – and choose your school for – is whether you’re willing to take a few lumps to actually learn how to fight. If so, you’re closer to my philosophy and are going to want to find a school that goes light on the padding, or is at least willing to look the other way when more advanced students spar without it. If you’re not willing to take lumps, schools that will pad you up enough that you can barely move lurk in every other strip mall.

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There is controversy of a completely different kind about martial arts “traditions”. I’m not going to get into all of the complicated reasons that martial arts erect elabrate mythologies around their own history, but I will say this: if a school you’re evaluating makes a big deal about being the One True and Only Traditional Lineage of the Foo Bar Style…ignore that. You might want to even give the school minus in your evaluation points for trying to flimflam you; you’ll be right about that far more often than you’ll be wrong.

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A note about chain and franchise schools. They’re not all bad – I’m considering one now – but you’ll generally get better instruction at a standalone school where the founding master is in residence.

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Finally: the days when having a round-eye as an instructor in an Asian art automatically meant you were getting second-best were already nearing their end when I first dipped my toe in these waters, thirty years ago. By the time I started steady training in 1990 those days had ended. Today many “Asian” arts are in better shape here in the U.S., with more students and more capable instructors, than they are in their home countries. (I have seen evidence for this first-hand in Asia – I think it’s related to the larger size of the U.S. market and the higher average wealth level here, which means we can support more specialists than they can.)

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This doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of junk out there, but your instructor’s ethicity no longer correlates with junkiness in any significant way. That’s one less thing to worry about when you’re evaluating a school.

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UPDATE: Some worthwhile suggestions for women.

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diff --git a/20120822090857.blog b/20120822090857.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..12f8509 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120822090857.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +ciabot for git version 3.5 is released +

I shipped an updated version of the ciabot hook scripts for git to the git maintainers this morning.

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The cool new thing in this release is that the script no longer needs to be modified for installation as a hook. You can install one copy where any number of git repositories can see it; when it’s run it will collect the information it needs either by autoconfiguring or by looking at variables set in each project’s .git/config file.

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UPDATE: Once I started looking at the code…I found a way to make it completely self-configuring in the normal case. So I’ve shipped 3.6. This will be helpful for forge sites like Savannah, because it means they’ll be able to install one standard git hook that Just Works.

diff --git a/20120823231341.blog b/20120823231341.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..22b9860 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120823231341.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +Defense Distributed +

I suppose it was inevitable, in a good way. Some friends of freedom have begun a project dedicated to developing and sharing open-source designs for firearms that can be manufactured with a 3D printer. Read about it here at Defense Distributed.

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I approve, of course. I approve of any development that makes it more difficult for governments and criminals to monopolize the use of force. As 3D printers become less expensive and more ubiquitous, this could be a major step in the right direction.

diff --git a/20120829233329.blog b/20120829233329.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..69421a7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120829233329.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Shopping for a martial-arts school: the adventure continues +

A few days ago I posted “A martial-arts trilemma” about Cathy’s and my search for a new school to train with following the demise of our MMA program. We’ve since gotten one nice surprise and struck two alternatives off our list. And thereby hangs a tale.

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Tonight we went back to Iron Circle for a Tang Soo Do class. And, OK. the last 10 minutes of hapkido joint locks were interesting. But the previous 50…not good. We’d been prepared for the possibility that the Tang Soo Do techniques would be enough like our old times in TKD that they wouldn’t be very interesting to do again, but it was actually worse than that. Because we’ve changed. We discovered that the style of teaching they use chafes the hell out of us now.

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What I’m talking about is the whole scene of unison drills, chanted responses, belts and uniforms, and heavy padding on people who can barely deliver any power. It all felt like going back to kindergarten. Stifling. Stupid. And they couldn’t fight – we had to just watch the sparring because we hadn’t brought the requisite silly amounts of padding with us, but: even though Cathy tends to be uncertain and self-deprecating about her fighting skills, she couldn’t help but notice that either of us would have gone through most of that crowd like a laser through candyfloss. The way she put it – quite well I thought – was that there wasn’t any intention in their fighting.

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That lack, at least, I don’t consider the school’s fault. Master Maybroda is a very capable instructor and good with the kids, but the difference between people who’ve been training for twenty months and people like Cathy and myself who’ve been at it for twenty years is major and not easily bridged. We just don’t fit in a setting designed for beginners any more, and this class rubbed our noses in that fact pretty hard.

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It didn’t help that the only actual challenge in the Tang Soo Do part of the class was purely physical, mainly the old familar problem that Eric can’t kick for shit because of the palsy. So I was both physically miserable and bored – worst possible combination. I handle physical challenge much better when my mind has something to chew on, but until the last bit of hapkido I wasn’t getting any of that.

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I think Master Maybroda was reading my mind. He actually spent a couple minutes at the end of class explaining that there aren’t any pure hapkido schools in the U.S. because the training is physically punishing on the joints at a level Americans aren’t willing to handle. He didn’t add “And Eric, that’s why you can’t just do the bits I saw you come alive for” out loud, but I heard it plainly nevertheless.

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Bummer. Scratch Iron Circle – we like the people, but we won’t go back to kindergarten for that.

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But there has been good news. Checking out the Systema school turned out to be a big, big win. Instructor very good, and clearly happy to be teaching advanced students with a multi-style background. Class size all of three, so we got individual attention. And the techniques, fascinating.

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Systema originated as a military form (the house style of Russian spec-ops troops) and mixes modern weapons with empty-hand. As an example, one of the drills was forward-rolling while maintaining control of a pistol (my rolling predictably sucked, but by Goddess I never lost full control of the weapon). Several of the others involved knife attacks or knife threats to a protectee.

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One exercise I particularly enjoyed was this: slow-strike your partner to light contact, then do two more strikes without rechambering, for a continuous flow of three. Partner is to respond to the strike as if it were combat-speed, folding over on a gut punch and that sort of thing. Any hand or elbow strike allowed, no rules except don’t actually damage your partner, freeform variation in striking patterns not only permitted but encouraged. I collect exotic hand strikes because I think they’re fun, and I can meter the amount of power I deliver with my hands and arms very precisely – so this was great playtime for me.

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Systema, I was told, does a lot of training at slow speed. Their theory is that if you can do it slow, fast is easy. And this certainly does seem to improve kinesthetic awareness; during the three-strikes drill I was aware of fine details of my striking motions that I would have missed at speed.

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All in all, a very good experience. From reports, I had expected to find the style to my liking; the surprise was that Cathy really liked it. She was grinning ear-to-ear when we left.

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Our search process is having an interesting effect on Cathy. I noted previously that she has tended to be uncertain and self-deprecating about her skills. But visiting different schools in an analytical frame of mind is teaching her important lessons about how very much she has actually learned. It’s an affirming experience to walk into a strange school, do a first class, and discover that you can do a good percentage of the techniques better than most of the established students – and it’s one Cathy has been having repeatedly over the last couple of weeks. She’s walking a little taller now, showing some pride that she has well earned. It’s a good thing to see.

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I have reluctantly given up on the Shaolin studio in Berwyn. The style attracted me a lot, but I just can’t get past the fact that they don’t normally spar to contact. I’d love to study it with an all-adult class targeted more to experienced martial artists and with contact sparring and more emphasis on combat drills, but that’s not what I can get there. Cathy was never as excited by the whole Kwai-Chang Caine vibe as me, so it was less difficult for her to give this up.

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So. Remaining in contention are Mr. Stuart’s and the Systema school. We’ve learned of a Northern Shaolin school about 20 minutes north of here and we’re going to investigate. If that turns out to be Shaolin for adults it too may be a serious contender.

diff --git a/20120831165719.blog b/20120831165719.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6a74b44 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120831165719.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +Ground-truth documents +

Sometimes good terminology, by making a distinction that wasn’t easily articulated before, can be very clarifying. I was in an IRC conversation about software engineering with A&D regular HedgeMage earlier today and found myself inventing a term that I think may be useful: the ground-truth document.

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The context was this: HedgeMage has observed a lot of haphazard practices at software shops that have to deal with hardware interfaces. Very often these interfaces are poorly documented by the hardware vendor, with serious gaps and ambiguities in what little description they give you.

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To cope with this, S.O.P. for most shops is what HedgeMage described as “observe what it’s doing, then throw inputs at it and observe what you get back, and try to puzzle out what the patterns are”. Which is OK, except that it’s also normal to go through this process while trying to write production code.

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And that is a bad, bad mistake. The result is often code that sort of worked, once, but is buggy and unmaintainable because nobody actually remembers what their assumptions were at the time it was written. They’re baked into code in cryptic ways, and trying to fix problems is terrifying because it’s so hard to tell when a change will break an undocumented assumption.

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There is way to avoid this kind of mess. It’s to write down your assumptions before you write code, and treat that document as the authority of which the code is an implementation.

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Later in the IRC thread, HedgeMage explained this to someone else by saying “So given the example of the hearing device from my interview question, [the document] would show all the control codes we’ve been able to pass to the device and what the device does in response to those codes, but would leave out the three that the company insists are there but that the device doesn’t actually respond to.” I added “It would list those as ‘documented, but no response'”.

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At the earlier point in the discussion when I first advocated writing one, I was referring to this thing as a “design document”. But then I realized, and said, that calling it a “design document” is a problem. Programmers often associate that term with waterfall-model practices in which they’re expected to implement a bloated specification that’s wildly out of contact with reality. The point of the kind of document I was trying to describe is that it’s totally in contact with reality and not trying to describe or mandate anything else.

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Here is an example: AIVDM/AIVDO protocol decoding. It describes the behavior of Marine AIS radios; I wrote it as preparation for coding the GPSD project’s AIS driver. It isn’t exactly or completely a hardware-interface specification, and some of its claims are derived from standards documents and not yet tested – but the point is that it tells you which claims have been tested and which have not. It also tells you where the observed behavior of AIS doesn’t match the standards.

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Casting about semi-consciously for a way to distinguish this from a “design document”, I found one. What this is, is a “ground-truth document”.

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The thing about ground-truth documents is that they don’t make promises, don’t erect requirements, and don’t talk about the future. They’re just the facts, ma’am. They describe what is, warts and all. Mine evolved into the best single reference on the AIS protocols anywhere, and has since been used as a spec by at least three decoder projects other than GPSD itself.

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The practice that goes with this term is simple: always put your ground-truth document together before you start on production code (test tools to reverse-engineer the device are not production code). Maintain it with the code, treat it as the authority for how the code should behave, and when the code doesn’t behave that way treat the divergence as a bug. When your knowledge about how the device behaves changes, change the code second; change the ground-truth document first. (Of course you have it under version control, so you also have a history of your knowledge of the device.)

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This a form of knowledge capture that will save you immense amounts of pain, hassle, and rework over the entire life cycle of your project. For even greater gains, write your ground-truth document in a form that can be machine-parsed and then generate as much code as you can directly from the specification tables. (Yes, GPSD does this. So does the X windows project).

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The other thing not to do (besides starting on production code too soon) is to entangle the process of writing the ground-truth document with the process of writing the specifications for your software. Wishes, plans, and hopes don’t belong in this thing.

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Ground-truth documents can also have other, more political uses besides knowledge capture. Having one can help you hold a balky vendor’s feet to the fire, or short-stop an attempt to pass the buck back to your team when it belongs elsewhere. “Yeah? You say that transfer should run at 30MB/s? Well, here’s exactly what happened when we shipped it the control code for high-speed mode.”

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For best effect in this kind of situation you hand the vendor your test-jig software along with the ground-truth document in which you recorded the results of running it. (Yes, this is another reason to write your test tools well before you start on the production code.)

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In extreme cases (and yes, I’ve seen this happen) you can wind up documenting things about the hardware that the vendor’s engineers as a group once knew but have partly or totally forgotten. This is good. It’s great negotiating leverage.

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I broadcast this term and concept so that software development teams can use it to rethink their processes and do better work. Have fun with it, and stay safe out there!

diff --git a/20120903215144.blog b/20120903215144.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ee33bf5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120903215144.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +This is a tease. +

Yesterday I applied for allocation of a new public port number from IANA. It’s 6659. When the allocation is confirmed, I’ll publish the source code for a reference implementation of the server. It’s a bit over 300 lines of Python.

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Let the speculation begin. :-)

diff --git a/20120905100715.blog b/20120905100715.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..194eb6e --- /dev/null +++ b/20120905100715.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +coverity-submit 1.2 is released +

Coverity simplified their remote-submission procedure. Because of this, I have been able to remove the ugliest bits of configuration cruft from coverity-submit; you no longer have to specify either a public drop directory for your results tarball or a URL that advertises it.

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Get your remote-static-checking goodness here.

diff --git a/20120906063634.blog b/20120906063634.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..73ba330 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120906063634.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +A shout to the world’s technical journals +

So, after my post on ground-truth documents, one of my commenters argued eloquently that I ought to clean it up and submit it to a journal read by people who manage programming projects. He suggested Software Practice and Experience.

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This seemed like a pretty good idea, until I read SP&E’s submission procedures and was reminded that (like most journals) they want me to assign the copyright of my submission to the publisher.

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My instant reaction was this: Fuck. That. Noise. I’m certainly willing to cede publication rights when I want to be published, but copyright assignment ain’t going to happen. Ever. Nobody gets to own my work but me. (Yes, I insist on this with my book publishers too.)

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I have a message to all you technical journal publishers out there…

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There is probably still a place for journal publishers in today’s Internetted world. The peer-review networks you maintain and the impact score of your journal still have value to authors. But the explosion in alternate channels for reaching an audience of technical peers means your value proposition has seriously eroded. You don’t have enough to offer me, any more, to buy my compliance to a copyright assignment.

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In fact, the balance of power has shifted so much that I cannot but consider that requirement offensively stupid. Insulting. And that’s not my problem, it’s yours. I have a blog with a readership that probably exceeds the subscriber base of most technical journals; achieving that isn’t even difficult, these days, for any competent writer. So who in the bleeding hell are you to think you can still treat me (or any other author) like some sort of peon dependent on your good graces to reach an audience?

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These are my terms. My writing goes out under my copyright, with a Creative Commons or equivalent license. You can have any additional quitclaim you want to reassure your lawyers that I’m not going to sue you for publishing me. You get to use my content as an inducement to people to buy your journal, but I still own it.

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That’s what you get, and that’s all you get. If that isn’t enough, take your pretensions to power that you no longer possess and ram them up the bodily orifice of your choice.

diff --git a/20120907073007.blog b/20120907073007.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..65ab803 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120907073007.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +CC-NC considered harmful +

I just left the followiing comment on a Creatice Commons blog thread debating the NonCommercial and NoDerivatives options:

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I speak as founder and President Emeritus of the Open Source Initiative. The NC option in Creative Commons has always been a bad idea and should be removed.

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The reasons it should be removed have nothing to do with any of the deep philosophico/political positions usually argued in the debate, and everything to do with the fact that there is no bright-line legal test for “commercial activity”. This ill-definedness is reflected in community debates about whether commercial means “cash transactions” or “for profit”, and it is the exact reason the Open Source Definition forbids open-source software licenses from having such restrictions.

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The founding board of OSI, after studying the possibility, judged that an “NC” option in open-source licensing would create too much confusion about rights and restrictions, too many chilling effects on behaviors we did not want to discourage, and too many openings for vexatious litigation. What is only a source of contention within our community could prove very damaging to it if unsympathetic courts were to make even mildly adverse rulings.

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I have seem no reason to change that judgment, and I think it applies with equal force to Creative Commons. The NC option is a dangerous trap and should be removed.

diff --git a/20120915215525.blog b/20120915215525.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f9b0538 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120915215525.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +From Dave in my basement, redux +

Dave Taht is crashing in my basement again. While he’s here Dave is planning to cut another release of CeroWRT (the third one to issue from this basement, actually), and he has decided it needs a name.

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And, well, “the release from ESR’s basement” just lacks a certain…zing.

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Obviously, this means my basement needs a name. Something it probably should have acquired sooner, actually, as it is a rather storied locale. Often a resting place for traveling hackers weary of the wars; home to one of the larger collections of SF east of the Misty Mountains, and (as a commenter once noted) “obviously part of a previously unmapped tunnel between the Great Underground Empire and Colossal Cave”

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So we have decided to name the basement after its most frequent inhabitant. Yes, that would be the entity most likely to sleep on top of you if you’re sleeping in the daybed…our very own fuzz elemental and companion-to-hackers, Sugar. (Who must telepathically know I am writing about her as she has just materialized in my desk well to snuggle up to my right foot.)

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So, um, when you see that the next CeroWRT release is tagged “Sugarland”, do not think of a town in Texas or a valley in the Great Smoky Mountains. Somewhere in Malvern, a cat is purring. And she purrs just for you. Or your router. Whatever….

diff --git a/20120917222509.blog b/20120917222509.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4802817 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120917222509.blog @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +Culture hacking, reloaded +

My last four days, at the Agile CultureCon split between Philadelphia and Boston, have thrown more new ideas and techniques at me than I’m used to encountering in a normal four months. Or more. It was very challenging and exciting, the more so because I was immersed in a culture at some distance from those where I usually hang out.

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The organizers (Dan Mezick & Andre Dhondt) and various friends (now including me) are launching from agile software development into new ways of organizing work and communication that dynamite a lot of common assumptions about the necessity of power relationships and hierarchies. What makes this really interesting is not the theory but the working examples. They’re not dealing in vague platitudes, but in methods that can be taught and replicated. (And yes, I will describe some of them later in this post.)

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Nobody in this crowd thinks politically (or at least if they do, it doesn’t show); it’s all framed as ways to fix corporate cultures to make them more productive and happier. But what this was, underneath occasional freshets of vaguely new-agey language, was a three-day workshop in practical anarchy.

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Pulling me in was the result of a nearly last-minute brainstorm by Dan Mezick, who is a leading figure among agile-development coaches in the Boston area. He approached me by email a few weeks ago reporting that he’d read How To Become A Hacker and considered it (his words) “foundational wisdom”. It gave him the idea that my experience of articulating and shaping the hacker culture might be useful information for what the would-be culture-hackers at the conference are trying to do.

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(Dan didn’t know when he decided to invite me that the hacker-culture connection with agile development goes right back to agile’s beginnings. I had been invited to the Snowbird gathering where the Agile Manifesto was hammered out in 2001, and if not for a schedule conflict I almost certainly would have been one of the signatories myself. My occasional conversations with people like Kent Beck and Martin Fowler have since confirmed that other signatories were pretty strongly influenced by my articulation in 1997-1998 of of what the hacker culture had been doing. So, in one important sense, the hacker culture is part of agile’s ancestry.)

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Their initial problem, as Dan puts it, is that so far agile development hasn’t been scaling very well. Techniques like unit testing and TDD, design by story, pair programming, scrum, planning poker and the like have amply proven themselves at the small-group level (up to, say, a dozen developers). Properly applied they do boost the hell out of the effectiveness of product teams. But evidence that they can be scaled up effectively to much larger projects or coordinated enterprise-wide development is lacking. Dan sees a lot of snake oil being peddled under the “enterprise agile” label, and he doesn’t like it.

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So what has gone wrong? Why aren’t agile techniques scaling? Takes no genius to diagnose that problem: agile, trying to scale up from the bottom, collides with the top-down-imposed conventional corporate habits of death marches, rigid hierarchy, and waterfall planning. And loses, because the imperatives behind all that sludge are wired too deep into the culture of most corporations to be displaced by mere productivity improvements, however dramatic.

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Where Dan and Andre and their friends get radical is in the cheerful conclusion that conventional corporate culture needs to be blown up – or, to put it more diplomatically, re-engineered to enable higher productivity. Where they get effectively radical is that they’re not willing to stop at slogans and exhortation. Instead, they want to write a how-to manual. How to meme-hack your corporation so it’s not wasting most of its energy on authoritarian bullshit and territorial games, how to make it a place where more value is added and people are happier. Oh, and where agile techniques can be applied throughout.

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The conference had some noise and nonsense in it, including one fuzzy-sweatered wack-job who wasn’t ignored as roundly as she should have been. But with that filtered out, the theme was very clear: we need to learn how to change the cultures that hold people and productivity back so they’ll stop doing that. This is a larger mission than simply “make agile development work” and potentially a far more transformative one.

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The contrast with the hacker culture is interesting. We opted out and formed our own big tribe, with members in but not of the places where they work; later (after 1997) we built bridges back to the corporate culture from outside it. The agile people were, in a way, braver than us – they never left and never formed a big tribe of their own; instead, they’ve been trying to reform the corporate/institutional world from within, operating as a whole bunch of parallel microinsurgencies with some common ideas but not a lot of sense of shared purpose.

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Well, up to now, anyway. Dan asked me in because he thought the experience of the hacker culture might be relevant, and – it is. Because what this conference showed me is that the agile folks are beginning to struggle their way through the same transition we went through between 1990 and 1998. Once again, I see a culture that had been diffuse, mostly unconscious and local trying to wake up. Thinking about shared purpose; moving from craft practice to intentional technique; asking itself questions about what the things it does mean in a larger context – and beginning to find answers.

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Dave Taht (aka Dave in my basement) was along with me on this anthropological journey and disagrees. He thinks these people are at a much earlier stage corresponding to us in the 1970s, because they don’t yet have as much shared cultural capital to build on. He’s got a point; they don’t have a significant common corpus of slang or jokes or hero stories – there’s no agile-culture analog of the Jargon File or the joke RFCs.

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For good or ill, they also have no equivalent of the Free Software Foundation. That is, there haven’t been any previous attempts to create a unifying “what we’re about” that failed to take on the majority of people in the culture. Their one previous try, the Agile Manifesto, was a success – at least at naming the movement and articulating very broad principles. In effect, they got their “agile” equivalent of the term “open source” a decade before fully understanding their mission, rather than after that awareness had already almost fully developed as happened with us.

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Still, the parallels are powerful. People there ate up the material I brought about advocacy tactics and meme-hacking and leadership (about an hour and fifteen minutes split over three 25-minute sessions) and clearly thirsted for more. My value to them was that I had already successfully pulled off culture hacks on a large scale at least twice – and could explain how I had done it.

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Since my blog audience mostly knows that story already I won’t rehearse any of it here, but rather write about what I learned from the interaction.

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I’ll start with something relatively simple. I got enough exposure to agile techniques during this conference to figure out something I’d been puzzled about for a while. I knew that the Agile Manifesto described values very similar to those of the hacker culture. I also knew that wasn’t accidental. I also knew that some agile practices – notably unit testing, test-driven development, and design by story – have easily been absorbed and naturalized by hackers. But others (pair programming and scrum, for example) have not been. And I have wondered why this is. The separation between hackers and agile developers seems largely a matter of historical accident, so why has the cross-fertilization not gone further?

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The answer is not complicated and perhaps I should have seen it sooner. Most of the agile stuff is designed to improve the quality of the interactions within teams that meet face to face and have stable membership. The hacker culture, on the other hand, evolved to support remote teams in which partipants commonly never meet each other and membership is unstable. The agile techniques we’ve picked up on are precisely those that can be applied in our communications environment.

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When I describe the typical workflow of an open-source project to agile-development people they tend to look like they’ve been hit by a truck. Almost all communication by email and IRC, with only sporadic use of even voice phones? People join projects and cooperate for years without ever meeting each other? We take drive-by patches from people who pop up once, then disappear and are never heard from again? How can that possibly work?

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One thing that got through to them and stimulated a lot of talk and thought is the idea that how far inside you are on a project is defined by whether and how frequently you push commits to the project’s repository. More generally, we nowadays define membership in the hacker community basically by who is pushing commits to public repositories (yes, I noted that the criteria used to be fuzzier and there are some interesting exceptions and edge cases).

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Several people responded to this by observing that the agile community doesn’t have this objective kind of in/out criterion because it doesn’t have shared projects, and mused that maybe it needs to start some.

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But let’s get to the fun stuff. Some of the techniques the agile people are playing with and thinking about now make me wonder “how can that possibly work?” But I’ll start with the easy ones.

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The problem all of these are aimed at solving is that coercion and power hierarchies waste huge amounts of time and energy, block an organization’s ability to learn, do needless harm to people, and squander resources that could otherwise be turned into productive outcomes. Evil is not just evil, it’s stupid! Not being stupid pays off, therefore not being evil pays off. These are ways to not be stupid.

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Before the conference, Dan educated me about the Core Protocols. This is a set of communications practices to be used among humans that are designed to suppress a lot of the bullshit and primate politics that commonly get in the way when we try to do and decide things together. I got to see and use them both by email with Dan and face-to-face in groups at the conference.

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The Protocols have at least two results. One is to create psychological safety, largely by guarding the right of participants to opt out of a transaction rather than be subjected to power trips or other forms of manipulation. Another is to make it easy for participants to model each others’ intentions and desires. The consequence is that groups using them can learn more effectively and make good decisions more rapidly.

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The Core Protocols are very clarifying – that much is obvious to me even from limited exposure. One of the authors calls them “software for your head”, and they’re a building block that can be used with other kinds of software for your head, including ways to re-invent how we organize groups larger than will fit in a single meeting room.

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Two of these got an airing at the conference. One, actually the less radical one, is a kind of organizational design called sociocracy. Yes, I know the name is horrible – actually, its English-speaking practitioners agree it’s horrible, but think they’re stuck with it for historical reasons. No, it’s not socialist or anything like socialist; in fact, a core part of the theory is concerned with using free-market incentives to reward efficient collective behavior.

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A sociocratic organization consists of a set of interlocking working circles. The rules of interaction within circles are constructed to support egalitarian behavior within the circle, suppressing normal primate-political bullshit through means recognizably similar to the Core Protocols (they also include interesting procedures for supporting consensus-based decision-making). There is expected to be a control hierarchy among the circles, but the damaging effects of the power relationships that sets up are mitigated by a clever hack called “double linking”.

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Each circle has an operational leader appointed by the parent circle it reports to, and each circle has an elected representative to the parent circle, but they are not allowed to be the same person. The pass-requirements-downwards function is disconnected from the report-problems-upwards function.

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There’s a Discordian maxim called the “SNAFU Principle” states that true communication is only possible between equals – because where there is a power asymmetry the inferior will tend to tell the superior what the superior wants to hear, and the superior will tend to tell the inferior only that which preserves his superiority. In hierarchical organizations the SNAFU effect leads to a progressive disconnection of decision-makers from reality as information passed up and down the command chain becomes progressively more distorted by this effect.

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Sociocratic double-linking is a clever pre-emptive strike against the effects of the SNAFU principle. The existence of a reporting chain separated from command authority at least removes much of the normal incentive for command chains to distort information passing between levels.

+

There’s still hierarchy in the system, though. The more radical path is to flatten the firm entirely – no bosses, no subordinates, not even sociocratic circles. And this is just what two of our presenters, from a firm called Morning Star, told us about.

+

At Morning Star, they practice “self-management”. Your job isn’t defined by who you report to, but by your commitment agreements with your colleagues. In effect, everyone in the firm has horizontal contracts with other firm members. The business runs on a painstakingly-maintained process model and objective performance indicators. The contracts include performance targets, and your pay is tied to how you meet them. More details in the book Beyond Empowerment, which lightly fictionalizes the history of Morning Star and then presents supporting factual case studies.

+

Morning Star must be doing something right – it’s the top company in its market niche and robustly profitable. And it’s far from what most people would think of as the best case for radical experiments in corporate governance – capital-intensive manufacturing using a lot of unskilled seasonal labor. But perhaps the most intereresting thing about Morning Star’s organization is that they’ve scaled it past the Dunbar Limit.

+

Sufficiently small groups with sufficiently good leadership can make almost any theory of organization work. But human beings have only a limited ability to scoreboard the behavior of acquaintances, which tops out at the Dunbar limit of about 150. Above that size more formal lines of authority and obligation become necessary. Or so goes the theory, anyway. Morning Star seems to be a counterexample.

+

I shall finish my report by noting that I learned a new way to think about prophecy. Well, a specific and interesting meaning of the word “prophet”, anyway. This was at a keynote address by one David Logan, who has spent years studying what he calls “tribal leadership”. His “tribes” are social networks, usually (though not always) below the Dunbar size limit.

+

In Logan’s analysis, a firm – or an entire society – is best understood as a mosaic of interlocking tribes, each with its own microculture. Logan distinguishes five culture types or stages: Stage 1 = “Life sucks”, Stage 2 = “My life sucks”, Stage 3 = “I’m great (and you’re not)!”, Stage 4 = “We’re great!”, and Stage 5 = “Life is great!”. The whimsical titles conceal some heft; see Logan’s TED talk about how tribes evolve (or fail to evolve) from the highly dysfunctional Stage 1 (normally found only among criminals) to the high-creative Stage 5.

+

In Logan’s model, a “prophet” is a person who moves a tribe from one stage to another by – and this is what caught my attention – “preaching the inevitability of values-based change”. If this were a movie, tension-inducing music would be starting to play…

+

To do this, the prophet first has to understand what the tribe actually wants. Tribes form in the first place because of an alignment of values. The alignment may be around something trivial like rooting for a sports team, or something functional like doing a particular job, or something more profound like a shared aesthetic or political idea.

+

The point is that a tribe does, at least epiphenomenally, want something. But (the music is getting louder) not every tribe knows what it wants. The shared desire and values may be partly or wholly unconscious, and point to something larger than the tribe understands. The prophet’s job is to reflect the tribe’s values back at it in such a way that it changes stage – wakes up and starts to function at a higher level.

+

At this point in the exposition hairs are beginning to stand up on my arms. It only gets spookier when he talks about tribes organically growing their own prophets out of themselves to transform themselves – exactly expressing the feeling I’ve often written about that the hacker culture created me in order to be able to see itself better.

+

And what does a prophet do to transform the behavior of a tribe? He tells stories about what it was, is, and might be. He reminds people in it who they are. And this is the point at which I’m muttering I’ve been here. This guy is talking about me. I never thought of myself as a “prophet” before – I preferred to leave that kind of imagery to RMS – but it is undeniably true that I’ve written mystical poetry for hackers.

+

Huh. So other tribes create their own equivalents of “ESR”, do they? Interesting. Never thought about that before either. Perhaps we could form a mutual-support group for extruded polyps of tribal consciousness. Or something.

+

I was so energized by Logan’s keynote that when Dan Mezick told me he had an open session slot because a speaker had canceled it, I stormed into it and delivered an extended rant on practical prophecy 101 – not just what a prophet does but how to do it. With major tactics like giving things the right names as a source of power. Dave Taht recorded at least part of that talk; might be it will make it onto the net.

+

There’s lots more I was originally going to write about – the epic of the party bus that linked the Philadelphia and Boston halves of the conference, for example, and some of the very colorful people I met, and the exciting beginning of our attempt to create a culture-hacker’s manifesto which I think might someday be considered as important as the Open Source Definition.

+

But, on reflection, this report has been mostly about ideas, and I think I want to keep it that way rather than wandering further off into personal narrative, no matter how interesting that might be.

+

So I’ll finish by repeating that I think these are really important ideas. I’m glad I was there for this beginning; there are, I think, many more discoveries ahead of us on this path.

+

We may yet succeed in culture-hacking not just individual institutions but society as a whole into something saner, kinder, less hierarchical, and more productive on all levels. It’s worth a good hard try, anyway.

diff --git a/20120919134355.blog b/20120919134355.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2efc6f4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120919134355.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +Who were the prophets of the early hackers? +

I learned a new way of thinking about social behavior at Agile CultureCon last week – Dave Logan’s taxonomy of tribal stages and his interestingly specialized notion of what a “prophet” is. For review, see Logan’s TED talk.

+

Logan explains the distribution of tribal stages as follows: Stage 1, “Life Sucks”, is the violent and profoundly dysfunctional tribalism of gangs and prisons (approximately 2% of tribes); Stage 2, “My life sucks”, is bureaucracy (about 22% of tribes); Stage 3, “I’m great (but you’re not)!” is most of business and academia (about 48% of tribes); Stage 4: “We’re great!” is where you start to see serious creativity, tribal self-awareness, and collective sense of mission (about 22% of tribes); and Stage 5 “Life’s great!” is high-creative behavior totally driven by values rather than ego or struggle against some adversary (about 2% of tribes).

+

A “prophet”, in Logan’s model, is somebody who expresses the deepest shared values of a tribe and invites people in it to change stage (and fuse with other tribes at the new stage). Because most people, most of the time, live in tribes with a stage 3 culture, the most common upward transition (and the most common kind of prophet) is from stage 3 to stage 4.

+

I noted in a previous post that hearing this in a talk made the hair on the backs of my arms stand up. Because I have lived through, and was one of the prophets of, the hacker culture’s transition from largely unconscious mixed stage-3/stage-4 to fully conscious mostly Stage 4 behavior (“We’re great!”) in the 1990s.

+

But. I am by no means sufficiently ignorant or egotistical to think I was our only prophet. Most obviously there was Richard Stallman a decade before me, issuing a stage 4 call to higher values around “free software”. But because I was a historian before I was a prophet, I can’t really stop there. I find myself asking who the earlier prophets were!

+

+

I think I’ve identified one. Remember that technical excellence is not sufficient; a prophet has to be a person who speaks the desires and deep values of the tribe around him, and enlarges it by forming links with other tribes which then fuse together, displaying a higher stage of behavior.

+

(Logan is not very explicit about the fusing part; he notes that it happens and is an important function of tribal leadership, but in none of his talks does he get explicit about the fact that fused tribes must frequently crack the Dunbar limit. I mean, if a prophet fuses two large and individually successful tribes that are each hanging out near the Dunbar limit of population, this has to happen.)

+

So, thinking about this in the context of the hacker culture, the pre-RMS name that jumps out at me is Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl and the patch utility, in the early 1980s. Then and now, he has spoken in prophetic terms about art, beauty, play, and service to others. In retrospect it seems to me that the early Perl hackers were among the first of our subtribes to start exhibiting Stage 4 “We’re great!” most of the time, following Larry into that.

+

Larry is the first prophet I think I can definitely identify in our tradition. But that may only be because in the early 1980s I was a relative n00b and possibly not clued in enough to notice other prophets operating at more social distance from me. Various questions occur to me:

+

The IETF. I’m certain I saw it exhibiting stage 4 behavior in 1983, when the leaders of what was then the Network Working Group egolessly processed my one-sentence demolition of their plan to abolish the functional domains. If that had been a stage 3 tribe they’d probably have just booted the smart-alec kid I then was out of the room.

+

So, who was their prophet; who, in that tribe, said “We’re great!” and lifted them out of stage 3? My suspicions fall on Jon Postel or Fred Baker, but I don’t know enough about the early IETF to be sure.

+

Who were the prophets of the Model Railroad Club and MIT AI Lab, 1959-1969? Was one of them RMS in an earlier phase of his life? I’m trying to reach Slug Russell so I can ask relevant questions.

+

Oddly, I’m not sure I can identify a prophet in the early Unix tradition. It’s possible that whole crew was already at Stage 4 when Ken Thompson had his brainstorm – collaboration, playfulness and high creativity certainly seem to have been already well-established traits of the Bell Labs culture when Unix incubated.

+

I throw this one open to my readers. Where is there evidence of other early Stage 4 transitions in the various subtribes that eventually amalgamated into today’s open-source culture? In what cases can we identify a prophet, the person who said “We’re great!” and made people believe it?

diff --git a/20120924000454.blog b/20120924000454.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cf41ec7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120924000454.blog @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +Practical prophecy +

Inspired by Dave Logan’s keynote on tribal leadership at AgileCultureCon, I did a breakout session and then an open-space followup on “Practical Prophecy 101″.

+

Recall that in Logan’s terms a “prophet” is a person who moves the behavior of his tribe towards greater cooperation and creativity by (his words) “preaching the inevitability of values-based change”.

+

Venessa Miemis took notes on my talk. Here’s a lightly edited and expanded version of those notes. In each item I have replayed a quote of mine that she recorded; where appropriate I have expanded a little on the thinking behind it.

+

+

1. Right names are powerful

+

“Shaping the vocabulary and linguistic map of a culture (what postmodernists call its “discourse”) is a particularly effective way to re-engineer it.”

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“One of the most effective ways to shape the discourse of a culture is to find a concept that is central to it but unarticulated, and give it a name.”

+

Christine Peterson and I did this in 1998 when she proposed the term “open source” in 1998 and I popularized it. I believe the reason the transition in majority usage from “free software” happened so rapidly (over about the following 4 months) is that the semantic field of “open source” was a better fit to what most hackers wanted from their effort than the pre-existing “free software”.

+

I guess the more general advice for would-be prophets is to look for terms of art in your culture that don’t quite fit, that lots of people have spoken or unspoken reservations about. If you can invent better terms, resolving that emotional tension and discomfort will become energy for your cause.

+

2. Find the Deepest Yearning

+

“Cultural engineering works best when you are nudging a culture in a direction it wants to go anyway, but hasn’t yet found the right terms to express. If you find what the people in your culture hunger for and articulate it, you will gain power to shape that culture.”

+

The other side of this coin is well expressed by a quote from Lao-Tzu: “The wicked leader is he who the people despise. The good leader is he who the people revere. When the best leader’s work is done, the people say, ‘we did it ourselves!'” The true depth of that quote, I think, is that the people are not wrong to think that – the best leader unleashes the creative potential of his tribe, directing only to the minimum degree required to get the tribe’s mission done.

+

3. Use Cultural Capital

+

“Cultural engineering works best when it has a stratum of preexisting cultural capital to build on. Can you find or co-opt such a base?”

+

What I had in mind here as an example was the rather large stock of cultural capital that hackers own – the joke RFCs, the Jargon File, stories about famous hackers, other things of that sort.

+

The agile tribes don’t have nearly as rich a stratum to build on yet. Which is a problem for them, because it makes acculturating people a more difficult and chancy process. I was intending to suggest that they need to discover or create such capital.

+

“Technologies acquire meaning and transformative power through stories people tell themselves about their use cases.”

+

My favorite example of this is that the Maya had the wheel – but they only used it for children’s toys! They had no narratives or metaphors that connected the wheel with the idea of transportation or travel. This seems incomprehensible to Europeans because those narratives have been embedded in Old World cultures since our early Bronze Age, but the example of the Maya demonstrates that this is not an inevitable development.

+

4. Change behavior before theory

+

“Co-opting people is more effective than moralizing at them. Give people selfish reasons to behave the way you want them to; their beliefs will follow. Outside the tiny minority of people neurally wired to be intellectuals this works much better than trying to change beliefs first.”

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5. Give people permission to be idealists.

+

(Venessa had this header attached to the next item.)

+

My gloss on Logan’s definition of a prophet as “preaching the inevitability of value-based change” is that a prophet gives people permission to be idealists – to believe and feel as though their work has a larger meaning than they have understood before, that it connects to history, that it’s part of a vast and wonderful story.

+

Humans have a strong need to belong – to form tribes, chase ideals, partially submerge their individual identies in something larger. Manipulating this need can lead to great evil (from mob violence up to totalitarian societies) so it’s something we need to be ethically very careful about. Still, a prophet who can harness this effect can achieve good outcomes.

+

When I’ve been troubled about whether I was using this effect ethically, the question I’ve always asked myself was “Am I increasing individuals’ options or decreasing them?” A prophet who uses this desire-to-belong to impose a narrowing vision of right conduct on others is doing wrong; a prophet who opens up possibilities, giving people more different ways to create meaning in their lives, is doing right.

+

6. Steer by your values

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“Your ability to steer for specific results will be limited. When you don’t know where or how to aim, [speak and] act in accordance with your highest values. As a matter of self-protection, you must develop and maintain clarity about what those values are.”

+

Developing and maintaining this kind of clarity isn’t necessarily easy. A lot of people have trouble telling the difference between what they actually want and what social conditioning tells them they should want. If you want to be an effective prophet, you have to get shut of this sort of confusion.

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And it’s not just self-protection. Because human beings are actually quite good at detecting deception and dissimulation, truth – speaking what one believes with honesty and passion – is the most powerful form of persuasion. The most effective prophets are those who wield overwhelming sincerity and pureness of purpose like a weapon. Pureness of purpose requires an exact consciousness of one’s goals and values.

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Sincerity, alas, does not guarantee that the content of a prophet’s message is good or even sane. That problem, however, is beyond the scope of this essay.

diff --git a/20120927002023.blog b/20120927002023.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3de70f0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120927002023.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +An emergency replacement for the CIA service is coming. +

A few hours ago I learned that, due to a virtual-server mishap, the cia.vc notification service is dead. And not coming back.

+

This was not entirely unexpected. The CIA codebase was a shambles, the service has been flaky and subject to outages, and the server-site operator who inherited it has for some time been muttering darkly that the end was probably nigh.

+

I’ve been sitting on a lightweight replacement for CIA since late August, holding off shipping until it was clear whether or not a salvage effort on the codebase was going to succeed. That option is off the table now, so I’m going into emergency overdrive to get a release out.

+

The main thing that still needs to be done is for me to finish and test a hook script for git repos, so that when I ship the admins at places like SourceForge and GitHub will be able to drop in both a server instance and the correct hook code. This script will also be a model for hooks serving other VCSes such as Mercurial, Subversion, and (ugh) CVS.

+

I’m working on that now and expect to ship within 48 hours. Watch this space.

diff --git a/20120927170601.blog b/20120927170601.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d790e2a --- /dev/null +++ b/20120927170601.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +irker 1.0 (a functional CIA replacement) is shipped +

OK, I’ve been hacking intensely for most of the last 24 hours and here’s the payoff: irker-1.0 is shipped. Code and documentation are at http://www.catb.org/esr/irker/.

+

Out of the starting box we have a hook script with tested support for git and (rather clumsily) Subversion; hg should be a piece of cake for anyone who wants to step up. Forge-site operators can begin installing the relay daemon and the repo hook immediately, and should do so.

+

Coming soon: a long essay I’ve been sitting on analyzing the now-dead CIA service as a case study in over-engineering. It’s not really very surprising that it collapsed under its own weight.

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Also note that there is an XML-RPC proxy for people who have limited ability to change their hook scripts. I haven’t looked at the code myself but there’s a pointer in the irker README file.

diff --git a/20120927183755.blog b/20120927183755.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8b46737 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120927183755.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +CIA and the perils of overengineering + +

But long before I saw this diagram there were several aspects of the design that seemed rather iffy. Why one centralized server? Why the elaboration of XML-RPC? Why do you have to register your project on cia.vc to use the notification, with the mapping from your project to IRC channels lurking in an opaque database on a distant server, rather than being simply declared in the (arguments to your) repository hook?

+

The answer seems to be that the original designer fell in love with the idea of data-mining and filtering the notification stream. It is quite visible on the CIA site how much of the code is concerned with automatically massaging the commit stream into pretty reports. I’m told there is a complicated and clever feature involving XML rewrite rules that allows one to filter commit reports from any number of projects by the file subtrees they touch, then aggregate the result into a synthetic notification channel distinct from any of the ones those projects declared themselves.

+

Bletch! Bloat, feature creep, and overkill! With chrome like this piled on top of the original simple concept of a notication relay, the resulting complexity collapse should no longer be any surprise. Additionally, this is a near-perfect case study in how to make your service scale up poorly and be maximally vulnerable to single-point failures – if that one database gets lost or corrupted, everybody’s notifications will go haywire. The CIA design would have been over-centralized even if the implementation weren’t broken.

+

Of course the way to prove this kind of indictment is to do better. But once I got this far in my thinking, I realized that wouldn’t be difficult. And started to write code. The result is irkerd, a simple service daemon. One end of it listens on a socket for JSON requests that specify a server/channel pair and a message string. The other end behaves like a specialized IRC client that maintains concurrent session state for any number of IRC-server instances. All irkerd is, really, is a message bus that routes notification requests to the right servers. (And is multithreaded so it won’t block on a server stall, and times out inactive sessions.)

+

That’s it. Less than 400 lines of Python replaces CIA’s core notification service. The code for a repo hook to talk to it is simpler than any existing CIA hook. And it doesn’t require a centralized server. The right way to deploy this thing will be to host multiple instances of irker on repository sites, not publicly visible (because otherwise they could too easily be used to spam IRC channels) but available to the repository’s hooks running inside the site firewall.

+

Filtering? Aggregation? As previously noted, they don’t need to be in the transmission path. One or more IRC bots could be watching #commits, generating reports visible on the web, and aggregating synthetic feeds. The only agreement needed to make this happen is minimal regularity in the commit message formats that the hooks ship to IRC, which is really no more onerous than the current requirement to gin up an XML-RPC blob in a documented format.

+

I must note one drawback to this way of partitioning things. Because IRC has a message length limit, naively shipping commits with very long metadata (due to for example, large lists of modified files) would make only a truncated version available on IRC (and thus, to an IRC watcher bot gathering statistics).

+

It might be that this was the original motivation for using an XML-RPC transport on CIA’s input end. Indeed, when I first recognized the problem I started sketching a design for a auxiliary daemon that would do nothing but accept XML-RPC requests in something very close to CIA’s preferred format, then forward short digests of them to an irker instance for shipping to IRC. This auxiliary could collect statistics based on the un-truncated metadata…

+

Fortunately, I experienced a rush of good sense before I actually started coding this thing. It would have hugely complicated deployment and testing to handle an unusual case – observably from #commits, most commit messages are short and touch few files. We get a much simpler system if we accept two reduction rules:

+

1. If a commit notification would be longer than 510 bytes, we omit the filenames list. An empty filenames list is to be interpreted by filtering software as “may touch any file in the project”.

+

2. Then…we just ship it. If the IRC server truncates it at 510 bytes, so be it. Humans watching the commit stream won’t need more than that to put the commit in context (especially not for projects which use git’s first-line-is-a-summary convention) and the hypothetical statistics-gathering bots won’t understand natural language well enough to care that it’s truncated.

+

This is how you keep things simple. And that is how you prevent your projects from collapsing under complexity.

+

I wrote irkerd to accomplish two things: (1) Light a fire under the CIA salvage crew, attempting to speed up their success, and (2) provide a viable alternative in case they didn’t succeed. To this I now add (3) illustrate what healthy minimalism in software design looks like. Antoine de St-Exupéry said it best: Perfection (in the design of software, as well as his airplanes) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.

+

Accordingly, note the nonexistence of irkerd configuration options and the complete absence of anything resembling a control dotfile. I even, quite deliberately, omitted the usual option to change the port that irker listens on. Because if you think you need an option like that, you actually have a problem you need to solve at your firewall.

+

But releasing irkerd, of course, is not the end of the story. For it to do any good, instances of the daemon and its repo hook will need to be running and documented at sites like SourceForge, GitHub, Gitorious, Gna, and Savannah. As I noted at the beginning of this essay, I expect pushing the deployment along will eat up a lot of my time in the near future – probably more time than it took to write and test the code. These forge sites are all chronically understaffed and have long issue backlogs.

+

Still, at least we now have a simple and robust design, and working code. And – this can’t be emphasized enough – single-site outages will no longer be fatal. If there’s one thing the history of the Internet should have taught us, it’s that you get robust and scalable services not by centralizing but by distributing them. It’s too bad the designer of CIA never internalized that lesson, and there can be no better finish to this tale of failure than by reinforcing it.

+

UPDATE: I’ve changed my mind about statistics-gathering. I no longer think a bot watching the #commits channel is any kind of good idea – the notifications are too easily spoofed, or could just be garbled by software or configuration errors. If you want activity statistics, Ohloh shows the way – analysis tools operating on the repositories.

diff --git a/20120930024519.blog b/20120930024519.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..595ca92 --- /dev/null +++ b/20120930024519.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +irker takes off like a rocket +

It was just three days ago that I shipped irker 1.0, but the project is already a huge hit out there in hackerland. It’s clear from traffic on the freenode #commits channel that irker installations are springing up everywhere. There’s already one symbiote, a proxy that takes XML-RPC requests in the CIA format and passes them to an irker instance (you have to supply your own mapping of projects to IRC channels for it to use). And at least one custom hook already written and in production – by the Python development list, as it happens.

+

I’m a bit boggled, actually. I don’t think I’ve ever had a project go from launch to all over the freakin’ landscape this fast before. Guess that’ll happen when you step up with a clean replacement for a service that lots of people were habituated to and have suddenly lost.

+

There’s more work to be done, of course. (There’s a public repository, and an #irker IRC channel, for people interested in following development.)

+

+

A&D regular Daniel Franke did a really good security-vulnerability analysis, which I’ve expanded on and is now in the repository. Launching from that I just added some DoS prevention to the code.

+

The repo hook component needs work as well (this is the Python script you make your repository’s post-commit hook call in order to generate a notification). At present it has support for git and Subversion; it could support Mercurial, CVS, and other version-control systems as well. An important feature of the code is that the VCS-dependent stuff lives in extractor classes well separated from the generic stuff; thus, adding support for more VCSes will be easy when someone steps up to do it.

+

I’m also a little worried about the multithreading – a technique I normally fight shy of because it’s so prone to subtle race conditions, but it had to be done here. It seems to work, but…if any of you reading have experience at reviewing this kind of design, please critique mercilessly.

+

We’ve had one annoying deployment issue. Some people have been reporting irker crashes on session disconnect due to a bug in the stale version of irclib up on SourceForge. The actual project home has moved to PyPI, the Python Package Index, but the maintainer hasn’t gotten around to updating his documentation and web pages yet. If you want to run this code, get the PyPI version of the IRC library to do it with.

+

But, these relatively minor issues aside…three cheers for classic Unix minimalism! Total LOC of the codebase is just 503 lines exclusive of comments. I chased St. Exupéry’s definition of perfection (“…when there is nothing left to take away.”) pretty hard this time, and it seems to have worked out well.

+

UPDATE: I just shipped 1.2.

diff --git a/20121003230841.blog b/20121003230841.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5fc4898 --- /dev/null +++ b/20121003230841.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +How not to engage me +

Considering the extent to which I’m still a public figure, it is perhaps surprising how seldom I get email that deserves a thorough, up-one-side-and-down-the-other flaming. I got one today which I shall reproduce here as a perfect example of how not to engage me.

+

+

+I just finished skimming through your guide: “How To Ask Questions The Smart Way“.

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I am sorry to say I am alarmed by the kind of immature mentality that runs through it.

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I will not begin to analyze how many of the assertions you make are simply illogical and unjust, because it upsets me to think about them.

+

I would like to ask you to consider the reasons why you are taking this stance. If it’s out of sympathy for the superior caste of ‘hackers’, an idiotic and misapplied term if ever there was one, do you realize that you are describing real people with serious psychological problems, and that you are feeding their pain by your writings?

+

I hope you can balance the effort you have put behind this document with some social responsibility, +

+

I swear to all of you I did not invent or modify even a word of this. I wouldn’t have been capable; I can’t simulate galloping stupidity that well. Here was my response:

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+Thank you, this email is easily the most unintentionally risible thing I’ve read in the last week. I could say I’m “alarmed” by your appalling ignorance and more-concerned-than-thou condescension, but I’m laughing too hard to be alarmed.

+

“Upsets me to think about them”, eh? Poor, poor, fluffy, *precious* you. I’m positively vibrating with sympathy. Not. And, oh look, you used the magic cant phrase “social responsibility” – a sign infallible that the speaker is either a tender-minded idiot or a manipulative thug. In your case my money is definitely on tender-minded idiot.

+

Actually, if you had labored for weeks with the conscious intention of writing something that would earn my derision and contempt, you could hardly have done better than this.

+

I might have to post this outpouring of yours on my blog as a perfect example of Not Having A Clue. But I won’t attach your name to it; I’m not cruel enough to expose you to the public mockery that would ensue. +

+

In case the lesson isn’t clear, my automatic response to attempts at moral bullying is “Fuck you and the pretensions you rode in on.” If you want to get my attention in any but the most negative way, don’t even try it.

diff --git a/20121006223352.blog b/20121006223352.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..afeb82d --- /dev/null +++ b/20121006223352.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +irker is feature-complete +

I’ve just shipped irker 1.8, and I think this brings the wild ride I’ve been on for the last eleven days approximately to a close. I consider this release feature-complete; it achieves all the goals I had in mind when the CIA service died and I decided it was up to me to rescue the situation. I expect the development pace to slow down a lot from the almost daily release I’ve been doing.

+

The last really major feature was irkerhook support for Mercurial repositories. I’d be mildly interested in a bzr extractor class if anyone wanted to contribute one, and that probably wouldn’t be hard – the git and hg extractors are about 70 lines each. But with git, hg, and Subversion covered it’s good enough.

+

Uptake of irker continues at a pleasingly rapid pace. There’s now a second symbiote application, a poller daemon that watches the log of a specified Subversion repository and uses irkerd to ship notifications from it. This can be useful if you don’t have write access to the repo hooks and thus cannot install irkerhook.

+

Time for a pause and some reflection on lessons to be learned.

+

+

I think the most interesting aspect of the project, after I got the basic irkerd design in working shape, was hardening the implementation against denial-of-service attacks. I got some high-powered volunteer help with this, including from A&D regulars Daniel Franke and Peter Scott. Reasoning out the attack paths and the simplest possible countermeasures was just plain fun, possibly more fun because I’ve never had to do this kind of analysis before.

+

The willingness of hackers to step up and contribute to a project like this continues to be a wonderful thing about which I hope never to become jaded. Because this project spun up so fast and still doesn’t have a mailing list, I know many of my contributers mainly by IRC nicks. Thank you, AI0867, birkenfeld, KingPin, laurentb, dak180, nenolod, and everybody else who showed up on #irker to help and contribute and critique and report bugs and ask questions. It has been a pleasure working with all of you and watching a healthy micro-community form around this project within hours of my first release.

+

irker does have some has competition for its goal of replacing the CIA notification service. Some Debian people dusted off a project called “KGB”; I gave its principal designer a bit of a hard time when he showed up in A&D’s comments because KGB is heavier and more elaborate than it needs to be, but in truth it’s not actually horrible. CIA’s spaghetti architecture was horrible; KGB is merely somewhat overweight.

+

KGB is also, judging by the traffic on freenode #commits, losing the adoption race. They got to the party late with software that’s more difficult to grok and get running than irker is. Though, to be fair, irker’s minimalistic design might not have gained an advantage without also having better documentation. I never consider high-quality documentation a mere optional extra on my projects. This is certainly a lesson more developers could stand to learn…

+

I will admit, however, that one KGB feature I initially scoffed at turned out to be sufficiently useful and lightweight that I added it – that is, support for color-highlighting notication lines. The key to that decision was that I found a way to implement it in a handful of lines of code in irkerhook.py; the feature doesn’t touch irkerd at all.

+

This is an example of a larger theme in irker’s design – policy/mechanism separation. The irker daemon is pure mechanism; it has no options or control knobs of any kind (other than one to enable debugging messages and another to dump the version and exit). It’s just a message bus. All the policy stuff (choices about what to put in a notification) lives in irkerhook.py. And you damn betcha that I plan to keep it that way!

+

Because all irkerhook.py does is gather information that it ships as JSON, the addition of one simple option – to dump the JSON to stdout rather than trying to ship to the configured irker instance – makes changes in the the policy stuff very easy to test. Which is as unlike the huge, nigh-untestable and thus extremely failure-prone hairball that was CIA as it is possible to be and do an even remotely similar job.

+

Generally, policy needs to change more often than than mechanism. So, when you partition your system into a mechanism part (irkerd) and a policy part (irkerhook.py), the policy part is the part where there is greater need for testability. Or, to put it differently: when you partition your code and you find that the least stable part is most amenable to testing, you’re doing it right.

+

Yes, this is the old-time Unix gospel of minimalism and design for testability I’m preaching here, brothers and sisters, and I’m doin’ it for a reason. The total line count of irkerd and irkerhook.py code is 689 LOC (measured by sloccount), compared to 1957 LOC for KGB and probably tens of thousands of lines for CIA (I haven’t measured that). When you pay proper attention to separation of function and separation of policy from mechanism, your code gets not larger but smaller. With virtuous consequences, the most important of which is fewer failure modes.

+

Comprehensibility helps deployment, too. It’s not that I think every project administrator who has adopted irker has actually read the daemon code, but I’m certain its smallness and lightness – and the fact that you can read through irkerhook.py and grok what what it’s doing in just a couple of minutes – has made it an easier sale to people who are chronically short of time and attention to get all their tasks done.

diff --git a/20121007215054.blog b/20121007215054.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4293612 --- /dev/null +++ b/20121007215054.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Adventures in kuntao +

My regulars will be aware that, since the Mixed Martial Arts program we were in folded up, my wife Cathy and I have been having an interesting learning adventure checking out various schools in our area as possibilities for our next style. We’ve had some more adventures since.

+

+

We did indeed visit the Northern Shaolin school I alluded to in my last installment. But we were not impressed. The forms we saw were pretty, but the movements seemed less practical for combat than what they were doing at the first Shaolin studio we visited, in Berwyn. And I saw no evidence of contact sparring there, either.

+

We’ve reluctantly given up on the Systema guy. We’d love to train with him – we liked both his technique and his teaching style – but he only teaches one night a week and that night would conflict with Cathy’s Borough Council meetings half the time.

+

However, one of the people at the Northern Shaolin school mentioned the existence of a school of Philippine martial arts in Phoenixville, which is just within reasonable driving distance of us. This caught our interest, because (a) we’ve done a little training in Philippine stick-fighting and enjoyed it, and (b) the Philippine arts have a well-earned reputation for brutal practicality. The Phillipines was and still is an extremely violent place, between criminals and pirates and several simmering insurgencies.

+

What we found, in a drab concrete building in Phoenixville, was most interesting. It’s a style called kuntao (Hokkien Chinese for “way of the fist”) that blends Southern Chinese kung fu with native Filipino blade and stick techniques. Developed by emigre Chinese in the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos, it’s a rare art in the U.S. – I’d never heard of it before this – with only a handful of schools here.

+

Five minutes into the weapons drills I whispered to Cathy “These people are serious!” and she nodded definite agreement. Most (though not all) of the students actually moved like fighters, with real intention behind their strikes. I noticed one in particular because the quality of his movement was both forceful and amazingly fluid, almost dancelike in a way I’ve seen before from really advanced Filipino players. Analyzing his movement, I had a sudden realization.

+

I’ve read a fair amount of theory about Philippine arts, and one of the core concepts is most of them is what’s called “live hand”. The “live hand” is the one without the weapon, and the idea is that it’s actually supposed to be the more dangerous – trapping, blocking, and setting up kills for the weapon hand.

+

My realization was “This is what ‘live hand’ looks like!” Regardless of which hand he was striking with, both sides of this student’s body were fully involved in every move. The live hand was constantly searching for openings, presenting a threat, or at least moving in opposition to put more power into the “dead” hand’s strikes. When I quietly pointed this out to Cathy, she grinned and informed me that she believed I was looking at the principal instructor’s son. So indeed it proved.

+

The inventory of techniques we saw wasn’t too surprising given their blend of influences. The empty-hand moves are mainly from wing chun, which we’re somewhat familiar with from previous study. We saw, as expected, kali with both single and double sticks. We also saw quite a bit of knife work. Weapons handy but not lifted on this particular evening included six-foot staff and machete.

+

I’m by no means a bad hand with a knife, but the kuntao technique I saw made me feel like mine is crude – not ineffective, necessarily, but certainly not at their level of precision and artistry either. Perhaps not surprising since what I was trained in was based on what the military can teach in a 12-week training cycle at U.S. Marine boot camp. It would be good to learn what the kuntao people know if only so we can take it back to our sword school.

+

The quality of teaching looked high; I saw a lot of initiative and mutual help among the students. My only reservation was about doing stretches on that cold concrete floor…Cathy and I walked out of there with an excellent impression of the place. We’ve been invited to actually do a sample class next week, and we will.

+

It’s down to either Mr. Stuart’s for Israeli military kickass or this for exotic Oriental deadliness straight out of a Sax Rohmer novel. We’re leaning towards kuntao, if only because we both think stick-fighting is really cool. The final decision will probably be next week.

diff --git a/20121012081343.blog b/20121012081343.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ad01774 --- /dev/null +++ b/20121012081343.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +End-to-end arguments in software design +

My title is, of course, a reference to the 1984 paper End-to-End Arguments in System Design by Reed, Saltzer, and Clark. They enunciated what has since become understood as perhaps the single most central and successful principle of the design of the Internet. If you have not read it, do chase the link; it well deserves its status as a classic.

+

The authors wrote mostly about the design of communications networks. But the title referred not to “network design” but to system design, and some of the early language in the paper hints that the authors thought they had discovered a design rule with implications beyond networking. I shall argue that indeed they had – there is a version of the end-to-end principle that applies productively and forcefully to the design of (non-networked) software. I shall develop that version, illustrating it with a case study from experience.

+

+

To apply the end-to-end principle to software design, we need a way to state it that is general enough to be lifted out of the specific context of network design. The network-design version is this: intelligence belongs at the network endpoints, not in the pipes. Trying to make the pipes “smart” duplicates functions like error correction and receipt acknowledgment that the endpoints are going to have to do anyway to ensure end-to-end integrity. Trying to make the pipes smart also introduces tricky failure modes when the smarts inevitably go wrong.

+

Now I’m going to tell a story about a software failure. As I write, I have spent most of the last two weeks spinning up a replacement for a widely-used social-computing service that irreperably crashed on us. The replacement involves a service daemon I named “irkerd”, which is expected to relay notification requests submitted as simple JSON objects on a listening socket to Internet Relay Chat channels.

+

To do this, irkerd (which is written in Python) relies on a Python IRC library designed to speak the client end of the message protocol defined by RFC2812. The library is pretty good; without it, the irkerd implementation would have taken much, much longer. In turn, irkerd has stressed the library in ways it hadn’t been stressed before. I’ve been contributing fixes and patches back to the library, and the maintainer has shipped a couple of point releases as a result.

+

Yesterday, just as the irkerd codebase was stabilizing after some early problems with thread safety, some of my test users on the irker chat channel began reporting a new fatal bug – a Unicode decoding error being thrown from deep inside the IRC library. Investigation and an email query to the maintainer revealed that this was the result of a recent design decision and a consequent change to the library internals in the previous day’s point release.

+

Previously, the IRC library had made no assumptions about the character encoding of the chat data it received from IRC servers. It simply passed those strings as uninterpreted payloads of events made visible by the library to the calling application (in this case irkerd). Because irkerd is a sending relay rather than an interactive client, it just threw that received chat data away. The only received traffic it cares about is the IRC server’s responses to login and message-transmission commands, which are plain ASCII.

+

In this point release, the maintainer changed the library to perform UTF-8 decoding early in the processing of the chat strings, so the event payloads would be guaranteed Unicode. Which was fine and dandy until a server shipped irkerd a chat line with a bad continuation byte. At that point the early UTF decode threw an exception from deep inside the library, crashed one of irkerd’s main threads, and hung the daemon.

+

The library maintainer thought he’d be doing calling applications a favor by performing UTF-8 decoding so they don’t have to. What he did instead was introduce a new fatal failure mode on bad chat data – a particularly annoying one for irkerd, which only sees that data because the protocol requires it to, and really wants to just ignore the chat lines.

+

Assumptions about character encoding properly belong not in the IRC library but in the calling application. There are several reasons for this, but they all come down to two points: (1) only decoding exceptions raised locally can be handled locally, and (2) how to handle them is a policy decision that the application must make – so the library should not try to pre-empt it.

+

The library maintainer violated a software version of the end-to-end principle. It reads like this: in any software data path, whether networked or not, interior components that can be indifferent to the nature of the data they are handling should remain indifferent. Every assumption introduced while handling data implies new exceptions and failure cases; to minimize your failures, minimize your assumptions.

+

I will finish by noting that I wrote this essay because web searches on “end-to-end arguments” and “end-to-end principle” suggested that the above software-generalized version of it may not have been written down before – all the references I could find were about network design. I believe that this is one of those folk theorems that every sufficiently experienced software system designer eventually learns without necessarily becoming conscious about it. I hope that by writing it down, so it can be learned more rapidly and explicitly, I will have helped improve the practice of software design.

diff --git a/20121021064136.blog b/20121021064136.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..766cc20 --- /dev/null +++ b/20121021064136.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +I hate having to be the heavy… +

I nearly issued a forking threat a few minutes ago. Only the second time I’ve felt a need to do that and the first was in 1993, so this is not something I do casually. And I drew back from the brink.

+

But I may have to if the maintainer I’m dealing with doesn’t clean up his act. His library is critical to one of my projects, but his behavior has been increasingly sloppy and erratic lately. He made a serious design mistake which he’s been trying to paper over with kluges; the kluges have made the code unstable and the latest shipped version is actually broken to the point of unusability without a patch.

+

+

Some standards have to be maintained, and this guy is breaching most of them. I told him by email “you have set yourself up for serious public embarrassment, which I will (reluctantly) deliver if you don’t resume behaving like a responsible maintainer.”

+

I hope he gets the message…because I don’t want to threaten him with a hostile fork, but he’s backing me into a position where I think it may be my duty to aim that nuke at him. His library has other users, after all; he’s not just failing me but that whole community.

+

I’ll do what’s necessary…but I hate having to be the heavy. *Grumble.*

diff --git a/20121025120837.blog b/20121025120837.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4b9af66 --- /dev/null +++ b/20121025120837.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Announcing autorevision +

autorevision extracts metadata about the head version of your repository. This program is meant to be used by project build systems to extract properties that can be used in software version strings. It can create files containing variable and macro definitions suitable for C, C++, sh, Python, Perl, PHP, lua, Javascript, and header files suitable for use with preprocessing Info.plist files.

+

This was a sort of spinoff from irker, though I’ve decided it not to use it there because I want to keep irkerd and irkerhook.py in single self-contained files.

+

No, I don’t know dak180’s real name. He’s a pretty good collaborator, though.

diff --git a/20121028072220.blog b/20121028072220.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f25b408 --- /dev/null +++ b/20121028072220.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Storm warning +

By now you’ve doubtless heard about Hurricane Sandy; the record-breaking superstorm hype has been pretty hard to miss. Well, I just got a look at the latest NOAA track projection, and it looks like the storm center is going to pass directly over my house sometime Tuesday night. The center track on that map couldn’t hit me more accurately if it had been aimed.

+

+

The good news is Sandy will have dissipated over about 60 miles of land by the time it gets here; NOAA is projecting only severe (39-73mph) winds rather than hurricane force. The bad news is…73mph winds and torrential rain aren’t anything to sneeze at. We’re on high ground and won’t be flooded out, but tree-fall damage is a distinct possibility and we’re pretty much expecting a power outage – the main question is whether it will last hours or days.

+

We’re battening down the hatches. Emergency food and water have been laid in, and we’ve arranged mutual retreat options with friends who live a couple of miles away on a different power subnet. We’re about as prepared as we can be short of boarding up the windows. I keep meaning to install a generator…

+

Wish us luck. This is probably going to be no more than inconvenient, but the potential for significant physical danger is definitely present. In particular, if the freak synergy with that cold air mass over the Appalachians pulls Sandy over land fast enough, it could still be a true hurricane-force storm when it gets here. That would seriously suck.

+

UPDATE: I’ve posted followup storm bulletins on G+.

diff --git a/20121028154516.blog b/20121028154516.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8d2a2d0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20121028154516.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +The microzen: a unit of enlightenment +

Earlier today one of my commenters caused me to realize that it would be entertaining to try to define a unit for the intensity of “aha!” experiences – moments of sudden insight.

+

+

In honor of said commenter (who, synchronistically enough, signs himself “Foo”) I define the “microzen” (μz) as follows: the amount of enlightement achieved when one realizes that “spinward” and “antispinward” are useful terms on planets as well as ringworlds. Because, well, global atmospheric circulation patterns – the context was a discussion of the incidence of cyclonic storms.

+

(I’d have preferred “microsatori”, but μs is taken.)

+

Of course, there’s a scaling problem here. Even if you have a good way to estimate relative magnitudes, you need two fixpoints to define a linear scale. (You in the back there just shut up about logarithmic already, I’m having to wave my hands hard enough as it is.) I therefore arbitrarily set 100 μz as the amount of aha required for somebody to write The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

+

Now, I hear you out there saying “You fool! That’s entirely too ill-defined!” But here’s my clever plan: if people have broadly similar intuitions about relative degrees of aha, we can crowdsource the problem! That is, we ask a bunchaton of people to consider some specific enlightenment experience – like, say, grokking how anonymous lambdas work in a functional-programming language – and rate that relative to our 1μz and 100μz scale pegs.

+

There you have it. Comments are open; let the crowdsourcing begin.

diff --git a/20121102141618.blog b/20121102141618.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a032d76 --- /dev/null +++ b/20121102141618.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Terror of the Reposturgeon! +

I’ve just shipped reposurgeon 2.0, a power tool for editing and interconverting version-control repositories. This is a major release, adding the capability to read Subversion dump files directly.

+

+

I’ve blogged about this project before, highlights at 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.

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Development had gotten stalled for six months because of a really insidious bug in the handling of Subversion dumps with certain odd sorts of multibranch histories. But recently one Greg Hudson sent me a performance-enhancement patch that enabled me to get rid of an O(n**2) lookup function deep in the code – and, as I had suspected since it first popped up, the bug was in that lookup function. (No, I still don’t know exactly where – it was something subtle.)

+

I’m shipping this now, before my previous target of when the NUT project guys sign off on their repo conversion, because I want people to stop using the older versions. 99 out of 100 times they would be OK, but that 100th time could be nasty.

+

Fear the reposturgeon!

diff --git a/20121104115800.blog b/20121104115800.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7cc721b --- /dev/null +++ b/20121104115800.blog @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +reposurgeon 2.0 announcement – the full-orchestra version +

I shipped reposurgeon 2.0 a few days ago with the Subversion support feature-complete, and a 2.1 minor bugfix release this morning. My previous release announcement was somewhat rushed, so here is a more detailed one explaining why anybody contemplating moving up from Subversion should care.

+

To go with this, there is a new version of my DVCS Migration HOWTO.

+

+

reposurgeon can now read and analyze Subversion stream dumps, and can translate them to git fast-import streams. This brings with it the ability to export not just to git but to any DVCS that can speak that stream format; reposurgeon currently has direct support for hg and bzr.

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    +
  • Branchy repos are automatically handled correctly, with trunk mapped to master and Subversion branches maped to gitspace branches.
    • +
  • Subversion tags are automatically mapped to git annotated tags (or to branches with tagged ends if the tag directory was modified after the copy).
    • +
  • Multibranch commits are automatically split into annotated per-branch commits.
    • +
  • Various kinds of meaningless cruft and artifacts generated by older versions of cvs2svn are automatically cleaned up. (But no potentially interesting comments or metadata are ever thrown away.)
    • +
  • Ersatz branch copies consisting of a plain directory copy followed by multiple adds are detected and treated like intentional branch creations.
    • +
  • svn:ignore property settings and clears are automatically translated to equivalent creations and removals of .gitignore files.
    • +
  • There is semi-automated support for lifting CVS and Subversion commit references in change comments to a VCS-independent date!committer format.
    • +
  • svn:special properties are translated to git symlink references.
    • +
  • It is never necessary to hint to reposurgeon or give it branch-rewrite rules to get a clean lift. In some very unusual theoretical cases, post-lift surgery to sort out branches might be required, but no example of this has yet been observed in the wild.
    • +
  • What reposurgeon does is carefully and exhaustively documented, even in the strange edge cases.
    • +
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Most of the pre-existing conversion tools don’t do any of these things properly. reposurgeon does them all, with an extensive regression-test suite to demonstrate correctness. The code has also been field-tested on several large Subversion repositories (notably for the gpsd, Hercules, NUT, and Roundup projects) with good results.

+

I believe reposurgeon now does almost as good a job of lifting as is possible given the ontological differences between Subversion and git. I say “almost” only because there is still some room for improvement in recognizing Subversion branch-merges-by-copy and translating them as gitspace DAG merges.

+

Note one important restriction: reposurgeon can read Subversion dumps, but cannot write them – the downconversion from fast-import streams would be too lossy to be safe.

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I started working on the Subversion-stream support about a year ago. What took so long was getting the multibranch support to automatically do the right thing in various semi-pathological merge cases.

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Fear the reposturgeon!

diff --git a/20121117141547.blog b/20121117141547.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..67a3b5e --- /dev/null +++ b/20121117141547.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +A secret of game-fu +

Last night I utterly trounced three opponents at the slick new Fantasy Flight reissue of a classic interstellar trade and exploration game, Merchants of Venus. My end score was nearly three times that of the runner-up, and I had acquired so many fame points (which each become 10 victory points at game end) that we ran out of fame tokens.

+

One of the other players half-humorously protested that I had gotten incredibly lucky. “Nonsense”, I said, “it was planning”. He sputtered that I had frequently had the victory conditions for lucrative missions apparently drop in my lap. Which was true, and he was right to view those individual occurrences as luck. But it was also true that I planned my way to victory.

+

I made chance work for me. Pay attention, because I am about to reveal why there is a large class of games (notably pick-up-and-carry games like Empire Builder, network-building games like Power Grid, and more generally games with a large variety of paths to the win condition) at which I am extremely difficult to beat. The technique is replicable.

+

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I have a rule: when in doubt, play to maximize the breadth of your option tree. Actually, you should often choose option-maximizing moves over moves with a slightly higher immediate payoff, especially early in the game and most especially if the effect of investing in options is cumulative.

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This rule has many consequences. In pick-up-and-carry games, it means that given any choice in the matter you want to start by deploying or moving your train or spaceship or whatever to the center of the board. You minimize your expected distance over the set of all possible randomly-chosen destinations that way. You give yourself the best possible chance to “get lucky” by finding a fattest possible contract or trade opportunity that you can deliver in minimum time.

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More generally, in games with multiple paths to victory, open as many of those paths as you can. And heavily favor moves that help you explore the possibilities faster than your opponents. In Empire Builder, buy the faster train as soon as possible. In Merchants of Venus, the first ship upgrade I bought was better engines.

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In games with an exploration mechanic, like Merchants of Venus or Eclipse, push it hard in the early game. Again, the payoff here is that you’re generating options for yourself. This effect is particularly strong in Merchants of Venus because on a first-contact planetfall you get to do two buys and sells with the natives rather than the normal one – you have that much better a chance of a trade good you previously bought on spec being highly valuable, or of picking up a spec load that will pay off large at your next first contact. (Of course, when this happens, it looks like luck.)

+

Look for other ways to broaden your option tree. In the Merchants of Venus game one of my other early purchases was a second mission-card slot. From early in the game to shortly before the end, this meant I had a choice of two missions to work on rather than just the one other players were pursuing. So of course I fulfilled them more often! It looked like I was getting lucky; what I was actually doing was maximizing the number of possible ways I could get lucky.

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In network-building games like Power Grid and Empire Builder, bias towards moves that make your network closer to a minimal spanning tree for all destinations of interest – that is, accept somewat lower immediate payoffs and/or higher costs for building such links. This maximizes your chances of being able to reach anywhere quickly in the later game.

+

Power Grid is an instructive example of a game with positional, network-building strategy in which maximizing your option tree can also be done in some ways that aren’t at all positional. One relatively obvious one is to buy hybrid plants, which increase your options for both price-taking in the fuel market and (less obviously) manipulating it.

+

Another one is to be willing to pay what you have to to get a game-ender plant (a 5 or 6) within the first few rounds, even if it means you don’t get to build cities in that turn and your revenue doesn’t go up. The real payoff here is being able to sit out several auction rounds while other players are scrambling for plant capacity to match their city-building. Their options are narrow in each round; yours aren’t – you can pile up money or opportunistically grab only the most efficient plant buys as they go by.

+

I rely particularly heavily on the latter tactic. I made the national Power Grid finals with it this year.

+

If you are in a game where other opponents can directly mess with you, maximizing your option tree also makes it more difficult for them to correctly predict which countermoves will damage you the most. And even if they close off one tactical path, you’ll have others. More generally, you may overwhelm their capacity to model your behavior, so the game looks to them like constant surprises with you coming at them from very direction at once. Weak players often fail a morale check in this situation and become even weaker.

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(This happened last night – one total morale collapse and one partial out of three opponents. Unsurprisingly to me, the third guy, the one with the most sitzfleisch, came in second.)

+

Afterwards, they think you “got lucky”. This is an illusion they foist on themselves through picking a single path to victory and working it as hard as possible. Because this makes their range of usable lucky breaks smaller and less likely to occur, they overestimate the element of chance in your victory – they judge it by how lucky they would have had to be to win by a similar margin.

+

And why am I OK with telling you this secret? Because ha ha, Grasshopper, I have other secrets. Perhaps I will share some of them in future posts.

diff --git a/20121119161459.blog b/20121119161459.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..451f0b2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20121119161459.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +The wages of secrecy +

One of my regulars, contemplating the increasingly pathetic series of clusterfucks that have passed for exciting new products at Microsoft, wonders why a company with all its advantages – more money than $DEITY to hire the best developers, lots of experience, dominant position in a major technology market – can’t seem to release a decent product any more.

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The answer is simple and deep. It’s because evil is inefficient.

+

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Ethical behavior and sustainability are connected in both directions; the wages of sin are self-damage.

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When you pursue a business model based on secrecy rent and control of your customers, you must become the kind of organization that an obsession with secrecy and control requires. Eventually, this will smother your ability to do decent engineering as surely as water flows downhill and the sun rises in the morning.

+

This is why Microsoft looks so doomed and desperate. Yes, Steve Ballmer is a colossal fool who has never met a strategic decision he couldn’t bungle, but in an important way that is symptom rather than cause. Dysfunctional leaders arise from dysfunctional cultures; the problem behind Ballmer is that Microsoft’s culture is broken, and the problem behind that is that the monopolistic/authoritarian goals around which Microsoft’s culture was constructed are incompatible with any other kind of excellence.

+

A more poetic way to put this is Tolkien’s “Oft evil will shall evil mar.” Google’s “Don’t be evil” isn’t mere idealism or posturing, it’s an attempt to sustain the kind of culture in which excellence is possible. (Whether and how long this will be a successful attempt is a different question.)

+

Apple’s turn is next.

diff --git a/20121128021134.blog b/20121128021134.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..06ae056 --- /dev/null +++ b/20121128021134.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +English is a Scandinavian language? +

Here’s the most interesting adventure in linguistics I’ve run across in a while. Two professors in Norway assert that English is a Scandinavian language, a North Germanic rather than a West Germanic one. More specifically, they claim that Anglo-Saxon (“Old English”) is not the direct ancestor of modern English; rather, our language is more closely related to the dialect of Old Norse spoken in the Danelaw (the Viking-occupied part of England) after about 865.

+

The bolster their claim by pointing at major grammatical traits which English shares with Old Norse rather than West Germanic languages – notably, consistent SVO (subject-verb-object) word order rather than the SOV (subject-object-verb) or V2 (verb-second) orders that dominate in languages like German, Dutch and Anglo-Saxon. The practical consequence they point out (correctly – I’ve experienced this myself) is that English and Norwegian or Swedish are quite a bit closer in mutual intelligibility than any of this group is with German or Dutch or Anglo-Saxon. I had actually noticed this before and been puzzled by it.

+

The professors think the reason for this is that rather than evolving into Modern English, Anglo-Saxon actually died out during the two centuries between the invasion of the Great Army in 865 and the defeat of Harold Godwinsson in 1066. They propose that Anglo-Saxon influenced, but was largely replaced by, the Norse dialect of the Anglo-Danish Empire. Which, SVO North Germanic grammar and all, then collided with Norman French and evolved into English as we know it.

+

This isn’t crazy. It may be wrong, but it isn’t crazy. Two centuries is plenty of time for an invading language to reduce a native one to a low-status argot and even banish it entirely; we’ve seen it happen much faster than that when the invaders are as culturally and politically dominant as the Anglo-Danes were in England at the time of Cnut (1016-1035).

+

Even in the conventional account of the evolution of English, modern English is supposed to have derived from the Anglo-Saxon spoken in the East Midlands – which, as the professors point out, was the most densely settled part of the Danelaw!

+

All of this gave me an idea that may go beyond the professors’ hypothesis and explain a few other things…

+

+

Previously on this blog my commenters and I have kicked around the idea that English is best understood as the result of a double creolization process – that it evolved from a contact pidgin formed between Anglo-Saxon and Danelaw Norse. The creole from that contact then collided, a century later, with Norman French. Wham, bam, a second contact pidgin forms; English is the creole descended from the language of (as the SF writer H. Beam Piper famously put it) “Norman soldiers attempting to pick up Anglo-Saxon barmaids”.

+

This is not so different from the professors’ account, actually. They win if the first creole, the barmaids’ milk language, was SVO with largely Norse grammar and some Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. The conventional history of English would have the girls speaking an SOV/V2 language with largely Anglo-Saxon grammar and some Norse vocabulary.

+

So I’m thinking about this, and about the political-cultural situation in East Anglia at the time historical linguists suppose it to have been the cradle of modern English, and I thought…hey! Diglossia! Basilect and acrolect!

+

OK, for those of you not up on your linguistic jargon, these are terms used in modern linguistics to describe the behavior of speakers in a creole continuum. Often, in a contact culture where an invading language has partly or wholly displaced a native one, you get a continuum of dialects between the acrolect (“high” language, of the invaders) and basilectal (“low” dialects) preserving more of a native language which may or may not still be alive in its original form.

+

A type case for this is modern Jamaica, where there’s a dialect continuum between acrolectal standard English and basilectal Jamaican patois with a lot of survivals from West African languages and Arawak. Outsiders tend to oversimplify this kind of situation into diglossia – one population speaking two languages, one “outside” and prestigious, one “inside”, intimate and tied to home and ethno-cultural identity.

+

But it isn’t that simple in Jamaica. Individuals are often fluent in both acrolectal and basilectal forms and mix usages depending on social situation. Husband and wife might speak acrolectal English on business, a mesolectal light patois among a mixed-race group of friends, but a deep patois with a grammar significantly different than standard English when cooking or making love. (I have a teenage nephew who lives on St. John’s, another Caribbean island, who – though tow-headed and blue-eyed and perfectly capable in American English – sometimes busts out a deep-black island dialect at family gatherings. It’s mischievous and barely intelligible, but it’s affectionate, too.)

+

I think, now (and this is where I go beyond those professors in Norway) that East Anglia between the invasions of the Great Army and Willam the Bastard must have been a lot like Jamaica today. Nothing quite as neat as one language dying out, but rather a creole continuum – with Danelaw Norse at the top, a remnant Anglo-Saxon at the bottom, and a whole lotta code-switching going on. There’s your cradle of English! (Well, before the Normans added their special sauce, anyway…)

+

This would explain much that the conventional Anglo-Saxon-centric account doesn’t, like why I can read a Norwegian newspaper far more readily than a German or Dutch one. It’s more nuanced than the professors’ version, but leads to the same top-line conclusion. English better classified as a Scandinavian rather than a West Germanic language? OK, twice creolized and later heavily infiltrated by Latin and French…but yeah, I’ll buy that description.

diff --git a/20121129172721.blog b/20121129172721.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..472de64 --- /dev/null +++ b/20121129172721.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Don’t overinterpret the Sorrell Doctrine! +

I have submitted an essay to the Stanford Law Review for publication. I didn’t tick the box for “exclusive”, so I think I can blog it as well. It’s a reply to Andrew Tutt’s essay on Software Speech.

+


+Andrew Tutt’s essay “Software Speech” rightly points out that the Sorrell and Brown cases set up inconsistent standards for whether software is to be considered “speech” and entitled to First Amendment protection. The logic of his essay goes astray, however, when he projects the consequences of Sorrell; they need not be so sweeping as he might suppose, and in fact a software engineer (someone working in the field) would not expect them to be.

+

I am a software engineer, not a constitutional attorney. But, as the founding president of the Open Source Initiative (the generally recognized certification authority on what licensing terms can be considered “open source”) I have been frequently required to grapple with questions about law, policy, feedom of speech, and intellectual property. I was also an individual amicus in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, the successful 1996 case against the Communications Decency Act. The territory of Mr. Tutt’s essay is not strange to me.

+

There is a colorable distinction, one obvious to any software engineer, between software considered as an act of speech versus software considered as an instrument of speech. Those of us (including myself) who hold that “software is speech” are insisting that the creation of software is a form of creative and expressive speech act with a result entitled to all the protection against coercive interference that we would extend, say, to a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Mein Kampf.

+

The consequences we would draw from that claim are significant. At present it is technically illegal to publish or convey software that constitutes a “circumvention device” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1997. As a matter of principled civil disobedience in support of First Amendment liberty, I carry a link to such software on the front page of my website even though I have never used it. If Sorrell were applied consistently, that provision of the DMCA would be annulled.

+

But Mr. Tutt is wildly off the mark in supposing that Sorrell would preclude any regulation of speech in which software functions as instrument rather than itself being the speech act. He worries that “Apple’s wish to exclude disfavored books from the iPad eBook reader, or banish Adobe Flash from its iPhone browser, would simply be Apple’s speech.” There is a case for that position, but it has nothing to do with Sorrell; Sorrell would only protect Apple’s right to publish the eBook and browser software.

+

I can perhaps make this distinction clearer with a roughly parallel case. The right to publish instructions for building a pipe bomb is constitutionally protected as an expressive act; this does not mean we relinquish any regulation of actually detonating such devices!

+

Declaring my interest, I’m concerned to rebut Mr. Tutt’s overinterpretation of Sorrell not merely because I think it is fallacious but because such overinterpretation might cause a damaging reaction against it. All expressive speech, in whatever medium, deserves Constitutional protection; Sorrell merely affirms that software is not an exception.

+

Mr. Tutt’s confusion is understandable, and that the Supreme Court shares this confusion is suggested by the implicit conflict he points out between the Sorrell and Brown decisions. It can be difficult to reason crisply when act and instrument are both intangible and are closely entangled. But software engineers have to do this all the time. The legal academy might benefit, on this and related issues, if it listened a bit more to the engineers and a bit less exclusively to itself.

+

UPDATE: Don Marti points at an excellent analysis along similar lines, Publishing Software as a Speech Act.

diff --git a/20121202222923.blog b/20121202222923.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f0d3915 --- /dev/null +++ b/20121202222923.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Beware! The Reposturgeon! +

I had said I wasn’t going to do it, but…I experimented, and it turned out to be easier than I thought. Release 2.7 of reposurgeon writes (as well as reading) Subversion repositories. With the untested support for darcs, which should work exactly as well as darcs fast-export and fast-import do, this now brings the set of fully-supported version-control systems to git, hg, bzr, svn, and darcs; reposurgeon can be used for repository surgery and interconversion on any of these.

+

+

There are some significant limitations in the write-side Subversion support. For various ugly reasons having to do with the mismatch between Subversion’s ontology and that of git import streams, Subversion repositories won’t usually round-trip exactly through reposurgeon. File content histories will remain the same, but the timing of directory creations and deletions may change. The pathological things known in the Subversion world as “mixed-branch commits” are split apart at Subversion-read time and not reassembled when and if the repo state is written back out in Subversion form. Custom Subversion property settings (basically, everything but svn:ignore, svn:executable, and svn:mergeinfo) are lost on the way through. There are other problems of a similar nature, all documented in the manual.

+

A particularly unfortunate problem is that mergeinfo properties may be simplified or lost. Mapping between gitspace and Subversion merges is messy because a Subversion merge is more like what gitonauts call a “cherry-pick” than a git-space merge – I don’t have a general algorithm for this (it’s a research-level problem!) and don’t try to handle more than the most obvious branch-merge cases.

+

It could fairly be alleged that the capability to write Subversion repositories is more a cute stunt than anything that’s likely to be useful in a production situation. While I have regression tests for it that show it works on branching and merging commit graphs, I don’t think I’d actually want to trust it, yet, on a repository that wasn’t linear or only simply branching. Arcane combinations of branching, merging, and tagging could reveal subtle bugs without surprising me even slightly.

+

Still…having it work even as conditionally as it does seems something of an achievement. Not one I was expecting, either. I really only did it because someone on the Subversion dev list asked about write support, I wanted to reply by listing all the reasons it wouldn’t work – and then I found that I couldn’t actually make that list without trying to implement the feature. It was ever thus…

+

The only unconquered frontier of any significance in open-source VCSes is CVS, really. No way I’ll do write-side support for that (and I mean it this time!) but I’ve sent the maintainer of cvsps a proof-of-concept patch that almost completely implements a fast-export stream dump for CVS repositories. We’ll see where that goes.

+

Fear the reposturgeon!

diff --git a/20121211185104.blog b/20121211185104.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a4e89c5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20121211185104.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +Heavy weapons +

I should have known it. I really should have expected what happened.

+

So it’s about week 7 at kuntao training, the tasty exotic mix of south Chinese kung fu and Philippine weapons techniques my wife and I are now studying, and we’re doing fine. The drills are challenging, but we’re up to the challenge. Our one episode of sparring so far went very well, with Cathy and I both defeating our opponents decisively in knife duels. The other students and the instructors have accepted us and show a gratifying degree of confidence in our abilities. Our first test approaches and we are confident of passing.

+

The only fly in the ointment, the one silly damn thing I’ve had persistent trouble with, is spinning my escrima sticks. Last night I found out why…

+

+

Fast wrist spins are a move in several of the drills. The combat application, of course, is that a wrist spin is a way to put kinetic energy into the stick when you don’t have room or time to swing it. Intermediate-level students are expected to be able to do them casually and so fast that the stick is hard to see moving. Cathy, of course, picked this up like it was nothing – which means everybody in our normal classes can do it except me.

+

I’ve been working at this diligently, but making only slow progress. This is exceptionally difficult for me, and it’s not the first time I’ve had problems this way, either; there’s a similar technique in Western sword called an “inside return”, which you’re supposed to use to dissipate the reaction energy from a sword strike so it doesn’t injure your tendons, and I’ve never been very good at that one either.

+

A significant part of the problem is just that I have thick, muscular wrists – they looked like swordsman’s wrists before I was a swordsman. Usually this is a good thing, but the extra power comes bundled with minor range-of-motion issues as an unwelcome extra. Spinning escrima sticks is one of the few contexts where this actually matters.

+

Last night we’re doing prep for the upcoming test, and I’m working with the pair of escrima sticks they issued me when I joined the school. They’re relatively lightweight rattan, a bit less than an inch in diameter, 26in long. I’m having my usual troubles – I can strike with them, but I have the devil’s own time controlling them when I try to spin them. The move just doesn’t feel right, and it doesn’t work right.

+

We get to a point in the test prep where the instructor tells us we’re going to need a third stick (not for wielding, to lay on the floor as a marker). I hustle over to the pile of fighting sticks under the target dummy and grab one. It feels…different.

+

I look at it. It’s thick – easily a half-inch more outside diameter than mine. It’s longer, too, and finished in some kind of glossy lacquer. And it’s heavy, at least half again and maybe twice the weight I’m used to. I heft it experimentally, and think “Hey. This feels pretty good. I wonder if…”

+

It spins beautifully. All this time, what I’ve needed to make the move work was a heavier weapon.

+

And I could kick myself. The clues were all there, if I’d put them together. I remember what a miserable time I had trying to control training-weight nanchaku, then what it was like when I picked up a fighting-weight nanchaku and it was easier. I remember that I’ve changed swords twice, each time for a heavier and longer weapon, and my sword-handling improved both times.

+

Might be the larger diameter is part of it, too. I have to slightly clench my hands to hold the smaller sticks; my grip on the bigger ones is less tense, which makes it easier to move them fluidly.

+

In a state of happy excitement I went to sifu Yeager and said “Look at this!” and spun the stick. “Can I get two of these? They’re just what I need!”.

+

He contemplates the thing dubiously and informs me that it’s a master’s stick, far too heavy for a newb student to use in training. Bummer. I see his point – it wouldn’t take a lot of effort to crack someone’s skull with what I’m holding. Well, not a lot of effort for me, anyway, and that’s the problem – he reckons I could easily over-power the thing against a training partner in a moment of inattention. In fact that is highly unlikely – my force control is extremely precise and reliable – but he hasn’t been training me long enough yet that I can reasonably expect him to know that.

+

But he sees my point, too. The standard training sticks are clearly just too light and skinny for me to handle well. It’s not my technique at fault after all, something about the physics and physiology has been messing me over. He promises me a pair that’s thicker and longer, at least, and then grins and makes a John Holmes joke.

+

Now I’m looking forward to my new sticks. And wondering how common a problem this is.

diff --git a/20121214103808.blog b/20121214103808.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..48ca6e4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20121214103808.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Refuting “The Mathematical Hacker” +

Evan Miller’s essay The Mathematical Hacker is earnest, well-intentioned, and deeply wrong. Its errors begin with a serious misrepresentation of my views and my work, and fan out from there.

+

+

Miller chracterizes my views as “Mathematics is unnecessary [in programming] except in specialized fields such as 3D graphics or scientific computing.” But this is not even a good paraphrase of the quote he cites, which says hackers “won’t usually need trigonometry, calculus or analysis (there are exceptions to this in a handful of specific application areas like 3-D computer graphics).”

+

What I am actually asserting in that quote is that continuous, as opposed to discrete, mathematics, is not generally useful to programmers. I sharpen the point by continuing thus: “Knowing some formal logic and Boolean algebra is good. Some grounding in finite mathematics (including finite-set theory, combinatorics, and graph theory) can be helpful.”

+

This (which Miller blithely ignores) is very far from asserting that hackers can or should be indifferent to mathematics. Rather, it is me, as an erstwhile mathematician myself, attempting to point aspiring hackers at those domains of mathematics that are most likely to be useful to them. Much of theoretical computer science builds on these; automata theory and algorithmic complexity theory are among the more obvious examples.

+

Having gone wrong right at the start, Miller swiftly compounds his error: “If you are a systems and network programmer like Raymond, you can do your job just fine without anything more than multiplication and an occasional modulus.” This is somewhat too narrow about the scope of what I do, and even if it were accurate Miller would be arguing against his own case by taking far too narrow a view of what mathematics a “systems and network programmer” can use.

+

In fact, it is routine for systems programmers to have to grapple with problems in which graph theory, set theory, combinatorial enumeration, and statistics could be potent tools if the programmer knew them. If Miller knows this, he is being rhetorically dishonest; if he does not know it, he is far too ignorant about what systems programmers do to be making any claims about what they ought to know.

+

Thus, when Miller asserts that I would agree with the claim “from a workaday perspective, math is essentially useless”, he is ludicrously wrong. What he has done is conflate “math” with a particular kind of mathematics centered in calculus and continuous analysis – and as a (former) mathematician myself, I say this is a form of nonsense up with which I do not intend to put.

+

Miller perpetrates all these errors in his five opening paragraphs. Sadly, it only gets more dimwitted from there. Consider this gem: “One gets the impression reading Raymond, Graham, and Yegge (all self-styled Lisp hackers) that the ultimate goal of programming is to make a program that is more powerful than whatever program preceded it, usually by adding layers of abstraction.”

+

This is superficially profound-sounding, but nonsense. I admit to not being familiar with Steve Yegge’s work, but Paul Graham is hardly lost in layers of abstraction; he used his Lisp-programming chops to build a company that he sold for $50 million. One of my best-known projects is GPSD, which gets down in the mud required to do data analysis from navigational sensors and is deployed on millions of embedded platforms; another is GIFLIB, which has been throwing pixels on all the world’s display devices since 1989. Neither of us inhabits any la-la-land of pure computational aesthetics; this is Miller misreading us, wilfully ignoring what we actually code and ship.

+

From here, Miller wanders off into knocking over a succession of straw men, contrasting a “Lisp culture” that exists only in his imagination with a “Fortran culture” that I conjecture is equally fantastical. Not absolutely everything he says is nonsense, but what is true is not original and what is original is not true.

+

Miller finishes by saying “Lastly, we need the next generation of aspiring hackers to incorporate mathematics into their program of self-study. We need college students to take classes in physics, engineering, linear algebra, statistics, calculus, and numerical computing…”

+

This is true, but not for the reason Miller wants us to believe it is true. The bee in his bonnet is that continuous mathematics is generally useful to programmers, but that claim remains largely false and has nothing to do with the real utility of most of these fields. Their real utility is that they require their practioners to think and to engage with the way reality actually works in ways that softer majors outside science/technology/engineering/mathematics seldom do.

+

That kind of engagement we could certainly use more of. Arguments as bad as Evan Miller’s are unlikely to get us there.

diff --git a/20121216223912.blog b/20121216223912.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..18fa0ee --- /dev/null +++ b/20121216223912.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +The Reposturgeon That Ate Sheboygan! +

Well-designed software suites should not only be correct, they should be able to demonstrate their own correctness. This is why the new 2.10 release of reposurgeon features a new tool called ‘repodiffer’. And yes, that is what it sounds like – a diff tool that operates not on files but entire repository histories. You get a report on which revisions are identical, which are different, and in the latter case where the differences are, down to which files don’t match. Commits to be paired are matched by committer and commit date. Like reposurgeon, it will work on any version-control system that can emit a fast-import stream.

+

+

If you tried running repodiffer on two repositories for different projects the output would be noise and coincidences. What it’s really useful for is comparing two different attempts to lift a repository. Don’t trust reposurgeon? Fine – lift your repo twice, once with git-svn or whatever tool strikes your fancy, then run repodiffer to see the differences. All the differences, not just those in the master tip state. I’ve already found one bug in git-svn this way.

+

There are few other new goodies, like automatic translation of .cvsignore to .gitignore files (trivial, really – the syntax is upward-compatible). Also, translations from Subversion now emulate Subversion’s default ignore-pattern behavior.

+

Also note the new web page comparing reposurgeon to other translation tools. To be extended…

+

Fear the reposturgeon!

diff --git a/20121220160643.blog b/20121220160643.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4895e26 --- /dev/null +++ b/20121220160643.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Reposturgeon Attacks Tokyo! +

Well, er, no. Actually, it attacks CVS.

+

Yes, that’s right, the just-shipped reposurgeon 2.11 can now read – though not write – CVS repositories. To get it to do this, I got my lunch-hooks on a relatively old program called cvsps that assembles changesets out of CVS repositories for human inspection. I gave it a –fast-export reporting mode that emits a fast-import stream instead, so now CVS has a universal exporter that will talk to any version-control system that speaks import streams. Oh, yes, and I’m maintaining cvsps now too – applause to David Mansfield, who both did a very good job on that code and sees clearly that its original use case is obsolete and –fast-export is a better way forward.

+

Two substantial releases of different projects in a day is a fast pace even for me. cvsps-3.0 and reposurgeon-2.11; two great tastes that taste great together.

+

Fear the reposturgeon!

diff --git a/20121221153529.blog b/20121221153529.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e1cf1ee --- /dev/null +++ b/20121221153529.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +robotfindskitten – the Mayan Apocalypse Edition! +

Today’s very special non-world-ending software release, triggered if not originated from here at Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories is the amazing Zen simulation, Robot Finds Kitten. I bow in respect before Leonard Richardson and the other giants of kitten-finding history and am humbly proud to be counted among the select few who have contributed to this monumental, er, monument.

+

Get yer hot fresh tarball right here. It will improve your sex life, clear up your financial problems, cure your acne, and make you as a god among men. Would I lie?

diff --git a/20130103180356.blog b/20130103180356.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..105378c --- /dev/null +++ b/20130103180356.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Solving the CVS-lifting problem +

Last month I added CVS-reading support to reposurgeon. The reason I haven’t blogged in ten days is that this pulled me down a rathole out of which I am just now beginning to emerge. And now I have a a request for help – I need to collect some perverse CVS repositories, preferably relatively small ones.

+

+

Y’all might recall that the program I adopted as a CVS-repository-reading front end was cvsps, after I had hacked it to emit a git fast-import stream. Sadly, cvsps (which had been basically untouched by its former maintainer since 2008) turned out not only to have a whole bunch of unintegrated fix patches pending, but to be seriously buggy even after those were applied. There was a showstopper in the branch-analysis code that would often put gitspace branch points at the wrong place to represent the CVS history, and attribute files added just before the join to the wrong branch. Ugly stuff.

+

The worst bugs are fixed now, and I can prove it, because I built a regression-test suite and have been adding bug cases to it. But the process basically forced me to rewrite the cvsimport tool in the git suite. It uses cvsps, and it relies an ancestry-tracking option that I had to remove because it was broken. On top of that, testing revealed that git-cvsimport was itself a source of several kinds of conversion bugs which my new export code entirely eliminated.

+

So, then I had to do a round of politics to sell that fix to Junio Hamano and the git list. That negotiation seems to be done now; I expect to be able to ship a patch tomorrow that will be merged with a minimum of fuss. Alas, though, CVS is not yet done with me. Because through a peculiar accident I’m now the maintainer of yet another CVS lifter, parsecvs.

+

parsecvs is the code my occasional friend and ally Keith Packard – one of the co-designers of X – wrote to lift the X repositories from CVS to git. I found out when I was looking for a CVS-reading front end that Keith had abandoned it after it got its job done, after which it got picked up by somebody named Bart Massey who lost interest in it in turn. I had written them explaining that I wanted to dust it off turn it into something that could ship a fast-import stream to standard output.

+

Bart and Keith were radio silent, so I found cvsps, did a bunch of fixups, and its maintainer (Dave Mansfield) dropped it in my lap. Then, a week later, Bart gets back to me to convey me that he’s lost interest and I should probably take over parsecvs.

+

OK, now I have a duty. Both of these dusty hunks of code have fallen into my hands; I should figure out which one can do a better job, polish it up, and publicly end-of-life the other one so nobody puts future effort into a dead end. Which is when I started thinking about writing a CVS torture test.

+

Now my goal is to assemble a rogue’s gallery of CVS perversities, then test them against cvsps, parsecevs, *and* cvs2git (the spinoff of cvs2svn). Use the test to pick a winner by objective success, then end-of-life anything I’m maintaining that lost and pour my effort into improving the winner.

+

Though, actually, there’s another possible outcome for parsecvs; even if it doesn’t do CVS as well as one of the other two, it does collections of RCS files without CVS metadata. In one possible future, I test parsecvs against the Ruby rcs-fast-export maintained by Giuseppe Bilotta, which can only do RCS collections that are either multi-branch or multi-file but not both. If parsecvs turns out to be better, I’ll make the case to Giuseppe that the Ruby rcs-fast-export should be EOLed and replaced with a renamed parsecvs.

+

Anyway, this is a general request for the location of perverse and nasty CVS repositories that I can snarf and add to my torture test. Bonus points if they’re relatively small.

diff --git a/20130108085743.blog b/20130108085743.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..830239b --- /dev/null +++ b/20130108085743.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +Reposurgeon Killed The Radio Stars! +

The 2.13 release of reposurgeon has in it maybe the coolest new feature I’ve ever implemented in five minutes of programming – graphical visualization of a repository’s commit DAG.

+

+

In yet another episode of “The Awesome Power of Combining Unix Tools”, the way this actually works is that the new “graph” command emits to standard output a description of the commit graph in the DOT language used by the open-source graphviz suite. To turn this into an image view, just create the following little reposurgeon script and call it something like “show”:

+ +graph $% >/tmp/foo$$
+shell dot </tmp/foo$$ -Tpng | display -; rm /tmp/foo$$ + +

+

Now you can say “script show”; reposurgeon will call the graph command, redirecting the output to a tempfile (the reposurgeon interpreter knows that $$ in a script should be expanded to the process ID). Then it will spawn a shell and run a pipeline using the main graphviz rendering program, dot, to make an image from the DOT markup. That is then fed to the viewer of your choice, in this case display(1) from the ImageMagick suite.

+

Oh, and that $% in there? That says “substitute the selection set, if any, given the script command”. So you can use this to view selected subsets of the commit graph – useful for large repositories.

+

The stupid way to implement this feature would have been to hardwire assumptions about the image renderer and viewer into reposurgeon itself, or (slightly less stupidly) pass them in via environment variables or a dotfile. By using reposurgeon’s script feature I avoid all that sort of nonsense – the only graphics-specific thing reposurgeon itself knows how to do is emit DOT markup, which took me all of about five minutes to write after I read the graphviz documentation.

+

I added in-script expansion of the $$ and $% cookies once I knew ‘graph’ was a good idea (I already had ‘shell’ and > output redirection for reposurgeon commands). The $$ cookie is of course modeled on how Unix shells expand it – a perfectly reasonable notation that there is no reason not to re-use here, and which will be helpful for any other reposurgeon script in the future that needs to use tempfiles.

+

This is how it looks when you design your application as a domain-specific language and think in terms of adding simple, combinable, orthogonal primitives to it rather than big lumps implementing idiosyncratic features with code that never gets re-used for anything else. Total lines of code to implement DOT output plus $$ plus $% was certainly less than it would have been had I tried to write the equivalent of that script in Python inside reposurgeon, and this way each of these three little featurelets can pay off its complexity cost in the future by being useful in ways I’m not trying to anticipate now.

+

This design has one drawback, however. The reposurgeon scripting facility was really designed for writing regression tests and per-project repository-lifting scripts; there is at present no place reposurgeon looks for scripts like this that should be shared among all your projects – for the excellent reason that this is (probably) the first such shareable script ever written. I need to think about that; this will probably turn into another addition to the language.

+

Fear the reposturgeon!

diff --git a/20130108224420.blog b/20130108224420.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3072600 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130108224420.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +How do you bait a trap for the soul? +

You bait a trap for a mouse with tasty food. How do you bait a soul-trap for people too smart to fall for conventional religion? With half-truths, of course.

+

I bailed out of an attempt to induct me into a cult tonight. The cult is called Landmark Forum or Landmark Education, and is descended from est, the Erhard Seminars Training. The induction attempt was mediated by a friend of mine who shall remain nameless. He has attended several Landmark events, praises the program to the skies, and probably does not realize even now that he has begun to exhibit classic cult-follower symptoms (albeit so far only in a quite a mild form – trying as hard as he did to to recruit me is the main one so far).

+

“But Eric. How did you know it was a cult?”

+

Oh, I dunno. Maybe it was all the shiny happy Stepford people with the huge smiles and the nameplates and the identical slightly glassy-eyed affect greeting us several times on the way to the auditorium. Maybe it was the folksy presenter with the vaguely Southern accent spewing pseudo-profundities about “living into your future” and “you will get Nothing from this training” (yes, you could hear the capital N). Maybe it was the parade of people telling stories about how broken they were until they found Landmark.

+

+

Dear Goddess, hasn’t everybody seen this movie by now? It wasn’t even subtle. They might as well have put up a nine-foot-high neon sign announcing “HI, WE’LL BE YOUR BRAINWASHERS FOR THE EVENING.” The only uncertainty left in my mind is how pathological this particular gang is – whether their cult induction machinery is mainly mechanism for vacuuming money out of wallets or they actually have a core group that gets off on the processing-people-into-compliant-zombies thing.

+

What makes outfits like this truly dangerous is that they aren’t entirely wrong. That is, their theory of how human beings tick (a jigger of Neuro-Linguistic Programing, a dash of cognitive behavior therapy, a few skooches of transactional analysis, and generally a substratum of Zen-by-any-other-name) actually works well enough that if you do the process you are in fact likely to clean up a bunch of the shit in your life. Even Scientology, the biggest and nastiest of the cult groups traveling as “therapy”, teaches some useful things – Hubbard’s model of the “reactive mind” is pretty shrewd psychology.

+

The trouble with cults is that they aren’t actually about the parts that are true. They’re about using the true parts to hook you, to condition you into an becoming an eager little propagator of their memetic infection. For that to happen, your ability to think critically about the doctrine has to be pretty much entirely shut down. Fortunately the behavioral signs of this degeneration are quite easy to spot – I would have learned to recognize them back at the dawn of the New Age movement around 1970 even if I hadn’t gone to Catholic schools before that.

+

I bailed out after about 20 minutes. It was just too drearily obvious where it was all going.

+

The evening wasn’t done with me yet, though. It was a cold walk from 7th Street to the 15th-Street train station, and my path took me past a Philly cop on the beat and through City Hall. I think the cop spotted the .45 on my hip under my A2 jacket and that could have become unpleasant – carrying concealed is legal in Philly but the police have been known to hassle carriers pretty hard. This one just nodded at me as I walked by. Maybe he’d read the Heller decision.

+

Pholadelphia’s City Hall is a huge rococo pile of Second French Empire gingerbread with one redeeming feature – four archway entrances lead to a huge central courtyard where, at the exact center of Philadelphia, there’s a big lovely compass rose in the pavement stonework. Well, there used to be. It’s gone. You can see traces of it around the outside. There’s a big rectangular concrete patch where the center was. I mourn – it’s like they ripped the symbolic heart out of my city. By the wear on the concrete it’s been like that for some years, and I didn’t know.

+

I was still thinking about this when I descended into the 15th-Street station. I was slightly hungry, having not had dinner, and – aha – I spotted an Au Bon Pain, aka “McDonalds for foodies”. So there I am standing at the counter waiting for night-shift guy to make my sandwich. Night shift guy is what you’d expect behind this kind of service counter in this city: black urban dude in his late twenties. Maybe a bit more alert-looking than average but nothing at all remarkable about him.

+

So I said “I just bailed out of an attempt to induct me into a cult”. He replied – and I will now channel Dave Barry and assure you that I am not making this up:

+

“The Obama administration?”

+

Maybe there’s hope for us yet.

diff --git a/20130113185912.blog b/20130113185912.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b5bac85 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130113185912.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Announcing cvs-fast-export +

For those of you who have been following my work on tools to muck out the swamp that is CVS, a new shovel: cvs-fast-export. Note, this is an alpha release for testing purposes; double-check the quality of any conversions you do with it carefully.

+

+

Actually, in some ways this is an old and trusty shovel. Keith Packard wrote the analysis code in 2006 to lift the X repos to git. After that the code gathered dust; when I found it it was in a broken state due to changes in the git library API. Some of you may have seen that version as “parsecvs”.

+

I sawed off the direct interface to git and replaced it with a back end that emits a git fast-import stream. This is much more useful; it means other version-control systems that have importers for this format can use the tool. It also means reposurgeon can use it.

+

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that this is the second CVS exporter I’ve shipped recently. And you’re probably wondering why I’m maintaining two of these beasts. The answer is that they both fell into my lap at nearly the same time and I’m not yet sure either dominates the other.

+

One of the larger items on my near-term to-do list is to write a really good test suite for both of these, then use it to compare them with each other and cvs2git.

+

Just from reading the code of both I suspect that cvs-fast-export will do a better job than cvsps – Keith’s analyzer looks more powerful, less ad-hoc. But cvsps has one major feature lacking in cvs-fast-export; it can be used to lift repositories to which you have only remote access.

+

Depending on what the test-suite comparisons tell me, I may have to fix that by transplanting cvsps’s client code into cvs-fast-export (after which I would scrap cvsps). We’ll see. There’s a fair bit of work still to be done before I’ll know enough to make that decision.

+

In the meantime, those of you interested in this problem can test. And here’s a shiny thing I dangle before you: with the flip of a switch, cvs-fast-export can generate a graphical visualization of the commit DAG.

diff --git a/20130121100553.blog b/20130121100553.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8e88e8e --- /dev/null +++ b/20130121100553.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +How to fix cable messes + +

I have invented an algorithm for fixing this kind of mess. Probably other people have developed the same technique before, but it wasn’t taught to me and I’ve never seen it written down. Here it is…

+

+

First, start by assembling your equipment. You will need a labeling gun (the kind that can put lettering on a short length of sticky-backed plastic tape), a bunch of cable ties (a couple dozen for this mess), a pad of paper (ideally, blue-lined graph paper), a clipboard, and a pencil. Finally, a bunch of patch cables in 12-inch and 6-inch lengths.

+

For some jobs, like this one, you’ll want a nice sturdy stepladder, something you can use to put the bulk of the cable tangle at or below shoulder height. If you need to reach above shoulder height to get at the connectors, the job is going to fatigue you faster than you realize – and that can easily lead to mistakes that are quite difficult to recover from. Hard work is not a virtue here; make the job easy on yourself so you’ll get it right.

+

The tangle pictured is about a three-hour job using this method, maybe four; scale appropriately for your mess . Allocate time so you can do it all in one go, otherwise you may have trouble fully recovering intermediate state.

+

Your first step (and the longest part of the job) is the crucial one. Trace each individual cable through the mess without removing it. Now label both ends of the cable, right near each connector, with a unique code. Same code for both ends.

+

Second step: Make a sketch of the patch panels. The reason graph paper helps is that usually the equipment racks will be laid out so the cable connectors fit on a rectangular grid. Sketch in each connector as a little box, and each rack unit as a surrounding frame. Leave enough room in the boxes to write inside; if there are unused connectors on the units, X them out in your diagram. When you are done, your sketch should resemble a crude plan of the racks.

+

Third step: Pick a cable. Note the code at one end in the corresponding box on your sketch. Unplug that end. Work the cable end through the rest of the mess until it is fully untangled and you can see the entire length. Identify the end still attached and add its code to your sketch. Unplug the other end and lay the cable aside. Repeat this procedure until all cables are removed. If you can recruit someone to help you, the single most useful thing that person can do is eyeball-check each code pair on your diagram as you pencil it in.

+

Step Four: At the end of this step, you should have a filled-in diagram that will tell you exactly how to rebuild your patch network. Do that. But this time, you’re going to do three things differently. First, you’re going to use shorty cables wherever you can to avoid hanging loops that can get tangled. Second, you’re going to use cable ties to bundle together parallel runs.

+

Thirdly, and most importantly, each new cable gets a label at both ends. Once you’ve done this, your patch network will no longer be a nightmare to manage. And the next poor sod who has to cope with it (quite possibly yourself in six months) will bless your foresight.

diff --git a/20130124162057.blog b/20130124162057.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..61ece85 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130124162057.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Charisma: a how-to +

A couple of weeks ago a friend asked me how he could become more charismatic.

+

Because the term “charismatic” has unhelpful religious connotations, let’s begin by being clear what he was actually asking. A person is “charismatic” when he or she has the ability to communicate a vision to others in a way that makes them sign up for making it real. Sometimes the vision is large (“Change the world!”) sometimes it is relatively small (“Become as cool as me!”).

+

My friend asked me how he could become more charismatic because he has seen me do the charisma thing a lot. This relates to my previous blogging on practical prophecy. A prophet has to be charismatic, it’s a requirement to get people to actually move.

+

Before he asked me about it, I would not have thought charisma was something that could be explained in detail. But questions properly posed sometimes elicit knowledge the person answering was not consciously aware of holding. That happened in this case; I found myself explaining four modes of charisma.

+

Here is what I told him.

+

+

The first way to be charismatic is non-attachment, the way sociopaths do it. To a sociopath, other humans are meat robots with emotional handles sticking out of them ready to be grabbed. Desire, fear, shame, status-seeking, loyalty – a sociopath sees all these and other emotions clearly in others exactly to the extent that, lacking the ability to empathize with those others, he has no skin in the game. People who aren’t sociopaths can sometimes learn this kind of perception through rigorous self-awareness and mystical disciplines that teach extreme emotional detachment as a learned state.

+

The second way is just the opposite of non-attachment – extreme empathy for others. The empathic charismatic works his mirror neurons hard, identifying with his targets in order to motivate them by tapping into their strongest emotional currents. Externally, the behavioral signals the empathic charismatic emits to affect others may be the same as the non-attached charismatic uses, but the internal representations they use are very different. The empath isn’t merely pretending to care; his behavior is not brittle and he can’t be “found out” the way a sociopath can.

+

The third way to charisma is channeling. The channeler, instead of identifying with their target(s), identifies with some figure or personified idea that is emotionally powerful for the targets. In a religious context, the charismatic may evoke a saint, a previous prophet with high prestige, or a god. In a more secular context, a channeling charismatic may appear to embody the characteristic virtues of a profession, a tribe, a nation, or some other group in which the targets have a large emotional investment.

+

The fourth way is the call to excellence. Whatever else a would-be charismatic does or fails to do, he can succeed with one simple, powerful message: “You can be more than you are.” The charismatic who calls to excellence invites people to grow, to take charge of their lives, to attend to what is best in themselves. In some but not all versions, this becomes “You can be part of something larger than yourself.”

+

In practice, most charismatics use mixed strategies. I myself rely mostly on a combination of channeling with the call to excellence. While I’m not particularly deficient in empathy, I’m not enough sigmas above the mean for that mode of charisma to be more effective than the two I lean on. If I put the required effort in to alter my consciousness, I can inhabit a sociopath-like state of detached manipulation, but I find it deeply uncomfortable to remain there for long.

+

Perhaps the most important thing to know about these strategies is that they are not inexplicable magic, but skills that can be learned and practised and improved. The most effective way to learn them is by mimesis: studying the behavior of charismatics, imitatiting it, and putting yourself inside the behavior (allowing yourself to notice that the behavior induces a mental posture and going there, as in method acting).

+

That’s what I told my friend. Now, on reflection, I would add two more important tools to the charismatic’s kit: honesty and fearlessness. I speak of these as instruments rather than virtues because I am mainly concerned with their effect on the charismatic’s audience.

+

Most people are half-aware that they are almost constantly surrounded by a net of lies. The big lies of politics and religion; the medium-sized lies of advertising and marketing; and all the little lies of the workplace and normal social interaction. Many people constantly pretend, even to themselves, to believe things that in other and deeper parts of their minds they know aren’t true – but they dare not confront those truths because they think the social and personal costs of doing so would be higher than they can bear.

+

The charismatic who is honest and fearless brings a gift. By thinking unthinkables and saying unsayables and getting away with it – not being struck dead by lighting or instantly lynched – he offers his audience, too, a psychological release from the relentless tension of everyday lies. He gives them at least temporary permission to be more honest in their own thoughts.

+

This is extremely powerful. So much so that many people will follow a charismatic to his goal just for this. Most people who hear the old saw “Honesty is the best policy” doen’t realize that it dates from a time when the word “policy” had slightly different connotations than it does today; what the proverb meant then might be better translated as “Honesty is the most effective strategem.” Now you know why.

diff --git a/20130128072846.blog b/20130128072846.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3aac4fb --- /dev/null +++ b/20130128072846.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Coding Freedom: a review +

My usual audience is well aware why I am qualified to review Gabriella Coleman’s book, Coding Freedom, but since I suspect this post might reach a bit beyond my usual audience I will restate the obvious. I have been operating as the hacker culture’s resident ethnographer since around 1990, consciously applying the techniques of anthropological fieldwork (at least as I understood them) to analyze the operation of that culture and explain it to others. Those explanations have been tested in the real world with large consequences, including helping the hacker culture break out of its ghetto and infect everything that software touches with subversive ideas about open processes, transparency, peer review, and the power of networked collaboration.

+

Ever since I began doing my own ethnographic work on the hacker culture from the inside as a participant, I have keenly felt the lack of any comparable observation being done by outsiders formally trained in the techniques of anthropological fieldwork. I’m an amateur, self-trained by reading classic anthropological studies and a few semesters of college courses; I know relatively little theory, and have had to construct my own interpretative frameworks in the absence of much knowledge about how a professional would do it.

+

Sadly, the main thing I learned from reading Gabriella Coleman’s new book, Coding Freedom, is that my ignorance may actually have been a good thing for the quality of my results. The insight in this book is nearly smothered beneath a crushing weight of jargon and theoretical elaboration, almost all of which appears to be completely useless except as a sort of point-scoring academic ritual that does less than nothing to illuminate its ostensible subject.

+

This is doubly unfortunate because Coleman very obviously means well and feels a lot of respect and sympathy for the people and the culture she was studying – on the few occasions that she stops overplaying the game of academic erudition she has interesting things to say about them. It is clear that she is natively a shrewd observer whose instincts have been only numbed – not entirely destroyed – by the load of baggage she is carrying around.

+

+

I should give a representative example of the kind of theoretical smother I mean. A major theme in Coleman’s analysis is a contrast between two notions of individualism: one of which she labels “liberal” and associates with economic minimaxing and rational selfishness, and another which she describes as “Millsian” or “romantic” and associates with ideals of self-expressiveness and the Aristotelian idea of eudaemonia. She detects both these notions in hacker culture, and spills a lot of ink discussing what she supposes to be a tension between them.

+

What Coleman never notices is that this is not a tension the hackers she is observing actually experience – there isn’t any sort of unresolved personal or cultural problem here for her subjects, who cheerfully go on both pursuing their rational self-interests and expressing eudaemonia without feeling any strain between the two. The ‘problem’ is entirely an artifact of her theory; she thinks there must be tension or paradox because the words in her head insist that these are opposing ideals that are in conflict. Her maps have rendered her unable to see the territory.

+

There is another, larger failure in the same vein. The thesis that eventually becomes the center of the book is that hackers have revealed “a conflict between cherished liberal values” with respect to software, one value being property rights and the other being freedom of expression. Coleman then hares off into political science and history without noticing that, again, her map fails to match the territory – the critique of intellectual property uttered by many of her hacker subjects has nothing to do with this supposed opposition.

+

What she misses is the libertarian critique that so-called “intellectual property” rights are illegitimate because they grant state-enforced monopolies that would neither arise nor be defensible as natural property rights in a free market. I am not sure I buy this one myself, but my skepticism and the grounds for it aren’t relevant here; the relevant fact is that many other hackers do buy it, and that this critique attacks IP in a more fundamental way than a free-speech objection does.

+

On this account there is no contradiction, merely a failure of liberal values to successfully assert themselves against overweening statism (or, in versions flavored with left-wing language, corporate oligopoly). The “free speech” argument ceases being the principled ground of objection and becomes a tactical hack of the legal system, parallel to the way the GPL repurposes a copyright system that it in principle rejects.

+

Coleman is so busy churning up abstractions about “liberalism” and “neoliberalism” that she never notices any of this. My point here is not to argue that the libertarian critique is more correct than the free-speech one she is valorizing (I’m not sure I believe that, anyway) but to point out that not noticing or engaging it at all is a failure of ethnographic method, another place where she mistakes her own incomplete map for the territory and stops seeing what is actually there.

+

Far too much of the book exhibits this kind of theory-induced blindness. I am inclined to blame not Coleman for it but rather the people who trained and indoctrinated her in how to think and write like a ‘real’ anthropologist. If Coding Freedom is really the sort of book anthropology wants its bright young things to emit, the field is in desperately bad shape – far too inward-looking, over-abstract, mired in self-reference and tail-chasing, obsessed with politicized modes of non-explanation. I would actually prefer the theory that Coleman is a dimwit who has emitted a sort of unintentional parody of real anthropology if I could make myself believe it, but I can’t – her best moments seem too lucid for that.

+

She is very perceptive, for example, about the central role of hacker humor in promoting social bonding and affirming the culture’s values (I’ve explored this theme myself). Her ground-level reporting about the emotional atmosphere of hacker conferences and demonstrations is acute. Her discussion of how hackers as a culture have bootstrapped themselves to a state of legal literacy in order to fight their corner of the intellectual-property wars gives one of the gifts that ethnography should – to help us see how remarkable and interesting are practices we might otherwise take for granted.

+

There is even one significant thing I learned from this book, or at least learned to see in a new way. I hadn’t noticed before how ritualized the practice of writing damning comments about bad code is. Coleman is right that they display a level of pointed and deliberate rudeness that their authors would not employ face-to-face, and she is right about how and why the culture gives permission for this behavior.

+

What these good parts have in common is that they are far less theory-laden than the rest. When observation wins out over abstraction Coleman is well worth reading. But this happens too seldom.

+

I still want the book this should have been. It would have been better with all refererences to literary theorists and philosophers brutally ripped out of it and much more of the unaffected reportorial eye. But it may well be that a book less determinedly flogging empty signifiers of academic erudition would have been a functional failure for Ms. Coleman, as it wouldn’t have earned her a doctorate. If so…so much the worse for the academy.

diff --git a/20130202012959.blog b/20130202012959.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..53140db --- /dev/null +++ b/20130202012959.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Is closed source worth it for performance? +

The following question appeared in my mailbox today:

+

+If a certain program (that you need) was proprietary, and its open-source counterpart was (currently) 40% slower. Which would you use, the open-source one or the proprietary one? +

+

The answer is: it depends. I’m going to answer this one in public because it’s a useful exercise in thinking about larger tradeoffs.

+

+

The first subsidiary question I’d have to ask myself is, how much does that 40% speed increase matter? If the answer is “not much” (say, because even the ‘slower’ program runs pretty fast, or because even though it’s noticeably slower I won’t use it often) then I’ll use the program I can read the source code for. Because what if I trip over a bug, or need to extend what the program does to get my task finished?

+

The more general point here is that by using the closed-source program I’m giving up some significant options, including (a) asking the open-source program’s maintainers for help, and (b) fixing or enhancing it myself. There is a tradeoff between the value of those options and the value of the additional performance which I have to evaluate on the facts in each case. (And yes, valuing these open-source options highly is based on the assumption that help is effectively unavailable from the maintainers of the closed-source program. Sadly, this is usually the case.)

+

From now on, then, we’re only talking about the case where that 40% is really important. Let’s consider a couple of easy subcases.

+

It might be the case that what these programs do is very simple and well-defined, so it’s easy to verify that they’re functionally equivalent except for speed. If that’s the case, my risk of getting locked in by the closed-source program is low – so I’ll go right ahead and use the closed-source one, knowing I can fall back to the open-source program at any time.

+

It might also be the case that buying faster hardware will make the open-source program fast enough for my purposes. Hardware is cheap and the benefits from improving it extend across a broad range of tasks, so I’d probably rather upgrade my hardware than accept the risks of using the closed-source program.

+

Another easy case is when the closed-source program jails my data, so I cannot examine or modify it with other tools. It is hard for me to imagine any scenario in which I would swallow that for a mere 40% performance boost. Forget it; no sale.

+

Could I make the open-source program go faster? I would at least spend an hour or two looking at the possibility.

+

Beyond these the decision process starts to get more difficult. I don’t think I can utter a completely general rule for when I will use closed-source software, but I hope I have illuminated some of the tradeoffs.

diff --git a/20130203094759.blog b/20130203094759.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..92d1c56 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130203094759.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Sugar turns twenty +

This is a bulletin for Sugar’s distributed fan club, the hackers and sword geeks and other assorted riff-raff who have guested in our commodious basement. The rest of you can go about your business.

+

According to the vet’s paperwork, our cat Sugar turned 20 yesterday. (Actually, the vet thinks she may be 19, but that would have required her to be only 6 months old when we got her which we strongly doubt – she would have had to have been exceptionally large and physically mature for a kitten that age, which seems especially unlikely because her growth didn’t top out until a couple of years later.)

+

Even 19 would be an achievement for any cat – average lifespan for a neutered female is about 15, and five years longer is like a human hitting the century mark. It’s especially remarkable since this cat was supposed to be dead of acute nephritis sixteen months ago. Instead, she’s so healthy that we’ve been letting the interval between subcutaneous hydrations slip a little without seeing any recurrence of the symptoms we learned to associate with her kidney troubles (night yowling, disorientation, poor appetite).

+

+

We’re trying not to let our hopes about Sugar’s continued lifespan rise too high, but she’s making it difficult not to be optimistic. She does not look or act like a doddering relic. She is cheerful, active, and bright-eyed – more so than many cats half her age, if the truth be known. Some days her arthritis makes the basement stairs a little difficult, but not most days – and that’s still about the only obvious sign that she’s geriatric for a cat. Her amiable disposition, exceptional sociability and ability to charm humans have diminished not at all.

+

This is an occasion for quiet celebration. Go, I say to you, find a friendly cat and make nice at it. And hope with us that Sugar keeps beating the odds.

diff --git a/20130208220134.blog b/20130208220134.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0382230 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130208220134.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +The Reposturgeon from Beyond Space! +

I released reposurgeon 2.20 today, with various minor improvements in the graph command and the behavior of repodiffer. Which, mainly, gives me all the excuse I need for this:

+

+

Image composed using Pulp-O-Mizer.

diff --git a/20130211002332.blog b/20130211002332.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..91c2326 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130211002332.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +Why I don’t accept would-be disciples +

Every few months I get a letter from a would-be hacker petitioning me to accept him (always a “him” so far) as my disciple. Happened again today; I think this time I’ll share part of the request, and my response, so I have it to point to next time this happens.

+

+

The aspirant writes:

+

+Thus, I started my search for Master Foo, who will accept me as disciple. A master whom I can look at, follow, walk with, see through and ultimately become a master myself. A master in front of whom I can empty my cup. One who will introduce me to computer considering me a newbie.

+

I know it might take decades or even my lifetime to achieve what I pursue. But, it’s worth it.

+

I have written this email to ask a very simple and the most sophisticated question:

+

“Will you accept me as your disciple and teach me all you know ?” +

+

Here is my reply:

+

No, because the communication path between us doesn’t have the required bandwidth. Sorry.

+

Yes, there are important aspects of being a hacker that are best learned by mimesis (actually this is true of any really skilled craft). If you lived near enough to a master hacker to be social with him face-to-face, or you worked with one day to day, you might benefit greatly from observing what he does and what kind of person produces those behaviors.

+

Unfortunately, the most valuable parts of those interactions won’t pass over an email link. Jokes, spontaneous reactions, small and at first sight unimportant behavioral examples that fit together into significant wholes, all the things the master is teaching when he is not thinking about teaching and the student is learning when he is not thinking about learning.

+

I can’t give you that experience; I don’t run an ashram for you to live in. Trying to create a counterfeit of it over email would only cheat you and frustrate me.

+

And that pretty much disposes of “disciple”, unless you’re a billionaire’s kid whose parents are willing to offer me enough money to persuade me to uproot my life for a few years so you can have what you want. The “you Alexander, me Aristotle” scenario wouldn’t be utterly impossible, but it would be very expensive.

diff --git a/20130214182937.blog b/20130214182937.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..484edc8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130214182937.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +Penguicon Party Preannouncement +

No details yet, but this is a heads-up: I will be at Penguicon 2013, 26-28 April in Pontiac Michigan…and there will be a second annual paty for friends of Armed & Dangerous (or FOAD – now where have I seen that before?)

+

Convention info at http://2013.penguicon.org/

diff --git a/20130216153128.blog b/20130216153128.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0eac1e4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130216153128.blog @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +Why I want to confiscate every programmer’s * key +

I just sent mail to the Battle for Wesnoth developer list titled “Why I want to confiscate every dev’s * key”. The points in it probably deserve a wider audience.

+

+

I want to confiscate every dev’s * key because while converting the Wesnoth repo I’ve just fixed about the hundredth comment that does this:

+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+Fossil-ID: 29314
+
+* Document weapon/second_weapon addition and changes on RC imagepath
+* function
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+

The obvious thing that is wrong with this is the second ‘*'; the bare word ‘function’ is not a list entry.

+

The unobvious thing that is wrong with this is the first ‘*’. This entire comment should not have been written as a bullet item. Because there aren’t any other items in it! There’s no list here!

+

A change comment like this is OK:

+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+A summary of what I did to fix a random bug
+
+* This is the first thing
+
+* This is the second
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+

A change comment like this is not OK:

+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+* This is a random thing I did.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+

That leading ‘* ‘ is just a hindrance to readability, a visual bump in the road. When your comment history is over 50K commits long this sort of small additional friction matters.

+

The following is also *not* OK:

+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+* This is one random thing I did.
+
+* This is another random thing I did.
+
+* This is a third random thing I did.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+

Why is this not OK?

+

Well, the obvious reason is that there is no summary line tying all the items together. This matters more in git-land because so many of the tools just show first summary lines.

+

The less-obvious reason is that if you write a comment like this, your single commit is almost certainly doing too much. You should break it up into several commits, each with one topic that becomes a single (non-bullet) item in its own change comment.

+

The next time you are tempted to press your ‘*’ key when writing a change comment, stop and think. Is it just going to be noise? If so, stop and slap your own hand.

+

More generally, give a little thought to what the shape of your comment says about the shape of your commit. Is it trying to describe too many different and unrelated changes in one go? Does it have a proper first summary line that will minimize the overhead of reading it for someone six months down the road?

+

There’s a programmer’s proverb: “Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. Code for readability.”

+

That applies to comments, too. At the scale of this project [8 years, over 55K commits], such details really matter.

diff --git a/20130224141357.blog b/20130224141357.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6850067 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130224141357.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Norovirus alert – how to avoid spreading it +

For about 24 hours beginning last Wednesday evening I had what I thought at the time was a bout of food poisoning. It wasn’t, because my wife Cathy and then our houseguest Dave Täht got it. It was a form of extremely infectious gastroenteritis, almost certainly a new strain of norovirus that is running through the U.S. like wildfire right now. Here’s what you need to know to avoid getting it and giving it to others:

+

+

We think it was norovirus because the symptoms match its clinical profile perfectly. They are: vomiting, diarrhea, muscle pain. Duration is about 24 hours. It is difficult to convey how hard and fast this hits – you go from feeling fine to violent nausea in 20 minutes. I experienced the progression myself and watched it in two others.

+

1. If you experience fast-onset gastroenteritis that mimics food poisoning, it is quite likely to actually be norovirus.

+

2. This bug is extremely infectious and can be spread by skin contact, aerosol droplets, or virus on food-preparation sufaces.

+

3. Careful hygiene in the bathroom and frequent hand-washing before and after contact with other people is important to help you keep from getting it and passing it on. Sources differ on how effective conventional hand sanitizer fluid is against this bug, but it can’t hurt to use it.

+

4. If you get it, isolate yourself. Avoid contact with other people. Do not go out in public if you can possibly avoid it. Do not handle food that will be eaten by others; do not touch food-preparation surfaces or cookware or utensils that will be used by others.

+

5. It is not lethally dangerous (except to the very old, the very young, and people with compromised immune systems) and it doesn’t last long (about 24 hours).

+

6. Those will, however, probably be 24 of the most most miserable and disgusting hours of your life. The symptoms include violent vomiting and (sometimes uncontrollable) diarrhea. You do not want to have this.

+

7. Do not try to hold down the initial vomiting any longer than it takes you to get to somewhere sanitary to barf into. You will feel better after you have emptied your stomach. You may, in fact, feel almost normal – until the diarrhea hits.

+

8. You will be losing water rapidly via the vomiting and diarrhea; you will be more miserable, and recover more slowly, if you let yourself get dehydrated. Take small drinks of water at relatively frequent intervals.

+

9. Washing contaminated clothes, towels and surfaces with a light chlorine solution will kill the virus.

+

10. Important: Continue isolation until you have been without symptoms for a minimum of 48 hours! I cannot emphasize this point enough – failing this because I didn’t know I was infectious is probably how Cathy and Dave got it.

+

If we had known it was infectious when I got it, Cathy and Dave might have been spared a lot of unpleasantness. Play safe and don’t infect those near you.

diff --git a/20130225170702.blog b/20130225170702.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..41210bf --- /dev/null +++ b/20130225170702.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +MIXAL is dead +

I terminated one of my open-source projects today. MIXAL is dead; it has been replaced by the GNU MIX Development Kit, alias MDK. Open-source projects die so seldom that the circumstances deserve a minor note.

+

+

I didn’t actually write MIXAL; somebody named ‘Darius Bacon’ (probably this guy) did it, under DOS. I stumbled across it in 1998, ported it to Unix, and fixed some minor bugs. Later, when I was in semi-regular contact with Don Knuth, he contributed two of his test programs and a text description of MIX from The Art of Computer Programming. Don gets open source; he was careful to arrange with his publisher terms that allow this material to be redistributed not just by me but by any project shipping under an open-source license.

+

I’m not sure when the MDK project started. When I first ran across it, it seemed to me to be not as capable as MIXAL; I made a note of it in my README file but did not consider simply handing off to it. That might have been as much a decade ago; when I re-encountered it recently, it looked a great deal more polished and mature. I, on the other hand, had barely touched MIXAL since I first ported it.

+

The world needs one competently-written MIX interpreter, but it doesn’t need two. So I looked up MDK’s maintainer and negotiated a handoff; he got the material Don Knuth donated to MIXAL, and I got to put MIXAL to a tidy end.

+

This what the open-source version of what musicologists call “folk process” looks like. Re-use, improve, contribute – and when someone else is clearly doing a better job, let go.

diff --git a/20130226074052.blog b/20130226074052.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4aa62a8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130226074052.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Mode of the Reposturgeon! +

It was inevitable, I suppose; reposurgeon now has its own Emacs mode.

+

The most laborious task in the reposurgeon conversion of a large CVS or Subversion repository is editing the comment history. You want to do this for two reasons: (1) to massage multiline comments into the summary-line + continuation form that plays well with git log and gitk, and (2) lifting Subversion and CVS commit references from, e.g., ‘2345’ to [[SVN:2345]] so reposurgeon can recognize them unambiguously and turn them into action stamps.

+

In the new release 2.22, there’s a small Emacs mode with several functions that help semi-automate this process.

+

Fear the reposturgeon!

diff --git a/20130324194131.blog b/20130324194131.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b73fa75 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130324194131.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +Python speed optimization in the real world +

I shipped reposurgeon 2.29 a few minutes ago. The main improvement in this version is speed – it now reads in and analyzes Subversion repositories at a clip of more than 11,000 commits per minute. This, is, in case you are in any doubt, ridiculously fast – faster than the native Subversion tools do it, and for certain far faster than any of the rival conversion utilities can manage. It’s well over an order of magnitude faster than when I began seriously tuning for speed three weeks ago. I’ve learned some interesting lessons along the way.

+

+

The impetus for this tune-up was the Battle for Wesnoth repository. The project’s senior devs finally decided to move from Subversion to git recently. I wan’t actively involved in the decision myself, since I’ve been semi-retired from Wesnoth for a while, but I supported it and was naturally the person they turned to to do the conversion. Doing surgical runs on that repository rubbed my nose in the fact that code with good enough performance on a repository 500 or 5000 commits long won’t necessarily cut it on a repository with over 56000 commits. Two-hour waits for the topological-analysis phase of each load to finish were kicking my ass – I decided that some serious optimization effort seemed like a far better idea than twiddling my thumbs.

+

First I’ll talk about some things that didn’t work.

+

pypy, which is alleged to use fancy JIT compilation techniques to speed up a lot of Python programs, failed miserably on this one. My pypy runs were 20%-30% slower than plain Python. The pypy site warns that pypy’s optimization methods can be defeated by tricky, complex code, and perhaps that accounts for it; reposurgeon is nothing if not algorithmically dense.

+

cython didn’t emulate pypy’s comic pratfall, but didn’t deliver any speed gains distinguishable from noise either. I wasn’t very surprised by this; what it can compile is mainly control structure. which I didn’t expect to be a substantial component of the runtime compared to (for example) string-bashing during stream-file parsing.

+

My grandest (and perhaps nuttiest) plan was to translate the program into a Lisp dialect with a decent compiler. Why Lisp? Well…I needed (a) a language with unlimited-extent types that (b) could be compiled to machine-code for speed, and (c) minimized the semantic distance from Python to ease translation (that last point is why you Haskell and ML fans should refrain from even drawing breath to ask your obvious question; instead, go read this). After some research I found Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) and began reading up on what I’d need to do to translate Python to it.

+

The learning process was interesting. Lisp was my second language; I loved it and was already expert in it by 1980 well before I learned C. But since 1982 the only Lisp programs I’ve written have been Emacs modes. I’ve done a whole hell of a lot of those, including some of the most widely used ones like GDB and VC, but semantically Emacs Lisp is a sort of living fossil coelacanth from the 1970s, dynamic scoping and all. Common Lisp, and more generally the evolution of Lisp implementations with decent alien type bindings, passed me by. And by the time Lisp got good enough for standalone production use in modern environments I already had Python in hand.

+

So, for me, reading the SBCL and Common Lisp documentation was a strange mixture of learning a new language and returning to very old roots. Yay for lexical scoping! I recoded about 6% of reposurgeon in SBCL, then hit a couple of walls. Once of the lesser walls was a missing feature in Common Lisp corresponding to the __str__ special method in Python. Lisp types don’t know how to print themselves, and as it turns out reposurgeon relies on this capability in various and subtle ways. Another problem was that I couldn’t easily see how to duplicate Python’s subprocess-control interface – at all, let alone portably across common Lisp implementations.

+

But the big problem was CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System. I like most of the rest of Common Lisp now that I’ve studied it. OK, it’s a bit baroque and heavyweight and I can see where it’s had a couple of kitchen sinks pitched in – if I were choosing a language on purely esthetic grounds I’d prefer Scheme. But I could get comfortable with it, except for CLOS.

+

But me no buts about multimethods and the power of generics – I get that, OK? I see why it was done the way it was done, but the brute fact remains that CLOS is an ugly pile of ugly. More to the point in this particular context, CLOS objects are quite unlike Python objects (which are in many ways more like CL defstructs). It was the impedance mismatch between Python and CLOS objects that really sank my translation attempt, which I had originally hoped could be done without seriously messing with the architecture of the Python code. Alas, that was not to be. Which refocused me on algorithmic methods of improving the Python code.

+

Now I’ll talk about what did work.

+

What worked, ultimately, was finding operations that have instruction costs O(n**2) in the number of commits and squashing them. At this point a shout-out goes to Julien “FrnchFrgg” Rivaud, a very capable hacker trying to use reposurgeon for some work on the Blender repository. He got interested in the speed problem (the Blender repo is also quite large) and was substantially helpful with both patches and advice. Working together, we memoized some expensive operations and eliminated others, often by incrementally computing reverse-lookup pointers when linking objects together in order to avoid having to traverse the entire repository later on.

+

Even just finding all the O(n**2) operations isn’t necessarily easy in a language as terse and high-level as Python; they can hide in very innocuous-looking code and method calls. The biggest bad boy in this case turned out to be child-node computation. Fast import streams express “is a child of” directly; for obvious reasons, a repository analysis often has to look at all the children of a given parent. This operation blows up quite badly on very large repositories even if you memoize it; the only way to make it fast is to precompute all the reverse lookups and update them when you update the forward ones.

+

Another time sink (the last one to get solved) was identifying all tags and resets attached to a particular commit. The brute-force method (look through all tags for any with a from member matching the commit’s mark) is expensive mainly because to look through all tags you have to look through all the events in the stream – and that’s expensive when there are 56K of them. Again, the solution was to give each commit a list of back-pointers to the tags that reference it and make sure all the mutation operations update it properly.

+

It all came good in the end. In the last benchmarking run before I shipped 2.29 it processed 56424 commits in 303 seconds. That’s 186 commits per second, 11160 per minute. That’s good enough that I plan to lay off serious speed-tuning efforts; the gain probably wouldn’t be worth the increased code complexity.

+

UPDATE: A week later, after more speed-tuning mainly by Julien (because it was still slow on the very large repo he’s working with) analysis speed is up to 282 commits/sec (16920 per minute) and a curious thing has occurred. pypy now actually produces an actual speedup, up to around 338 commits/sec (20280 per minute). We don’t know why, but apparently the algorithmic optimizations somehow gave pypy’s JIT better traction. This is particularly odd because the density of the code actually increased.

diff --git a/20130328232827.blog b/20130328232827.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7835691 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130328232827.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +What does crowdfunding replace or displace? +

In How crowdfunding and the JOBS Act will shape open source companies, Fred Trotter proposes that crowdfunding a la Kickstarter and IndieGoGo is going to displace venture capitalists as the normal engine of funding for open-source tech startups, and that this development will be a tremendous enabler. Trotter paints a rosy picture of idealistic geeks enabled to do fully open-source projects because they’ll no longer feel as pressed to offer a lucrative early exit to VCs on the promise of rent capture from proprietary technology.

+

Some of the early evidence from crowdfunding successes does seem to point at this kind of outcome, especially near 3D printing and consumer electronics with a lot of geek buy-in. And I’d love to believe all of Trotter’s optimism. But there’s a nagging problem of scale here that makes me think the actual consequences will be more mixed and messy than he suggests.

+

+

In general, VCs don’t want to talk to you at all unless they can see a good case for ploughing in at least $2 million, and they don’t get really interested below a scale of about $15M. This is because the amount of time required for them to babysit an investment (sit on the company’s board, assist job searches, etc.) doesn’t scale down for smaller investments – small plays are just as much work for much less money. This is why there’s a second class of investors, often called “angels”, who trade early financing on the $100K order of magnitude for equity. The normal trajectory of a startup goes from friends & family money through angels up to VCs. Each successive stage in this pipeline is generally placing a larger bet and accordingly has less risk tolerance and a higher time discount than the previous; VCs, in particular, will be looking for a fast cash-out via initial public offering.

+

The problem is this: it’s quite rare for crowdfunding to raise money even equivalent to the low-end threshold of a VC, let alone the volume they lay down when they’re willing to bet heavily. Unless crowdfunding becomes an order of magnitude more effective than it is now (which seems to me possible but unlikely) the financing source it will displace isn’t VCs but angels.

+

On the face of things, this would seem to sink Trotter’s optimism – if VCs don’t see any competition for investments in their preferred range there’s no obvious reason that VC pressure for proprietary rent-collection should decrease at all. But I think there will be significant second-order effects of the kind Trotter envisions via another route. That’s because crowdfunders are unlike angels in one very important respect: they’re not buying equity. Typically they’re contributing to buy an option on a product that can’t be built without startup capital. There’s no pressure on the company to produce a return to “investors” beyond that option, and in particular nobody pushing for a fast cash-out.

+

What this does is improve the attractiveness of a growth path that doesn’t pass through an IPO or the VCs at all. I think what we’ll see is a lot more startups crowdfunding to angel levels of capital investment, then avoiding the next round of financing in favor of more crowdfunders and endogenous growth. But think about this: how will the VCs adapt to this change in incentives?

+

They’ll still want to turn their ability to nurse early-stage companies into cash, but their power to set the term of that trade will be weakened precisely to the extent that crowdfunding makes the low-and-slow, no-IPO route more attractive. In another way, though, crowdfunders make a VC’s job easier. VCs can monitor the results of crowdfunding to measure the size and estimate the stickiness of the startup’s market, then see how effectively the startup executes on its promises. (You can bet that the smarter VCs are already doing this.)

+

Now look at the sum of these trends. If a startup has a successful crowdfunder, its bargaining power with the VCs increases in two ways. First, it’s going to be less desperate for capital than a company that can’t run out and do another crowdfunder for the next product. Second, the VC’s uncertainty about its ability to build and sell will be reduced. These changes will both increase the startup’s ability to bargain for doing things its way and reduce the VC’s pressure for an early IPO.

+

At the extreme, we might end up with a new normal in which VCs compete with each other to court startups that have done successful crowdfunders (“Hey! Think about what you could
+do with fifteen megabucks and call us back!”), neatly inverting the present situation in which startups have to compete for the attention of VCs. That, of course, would be a situation in which open source wins huge.

diff --git a/20130401175530.blog b/20130401175530.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4e16eac --- /dev/null +++ b/20130401175530.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +AGW panic ending with a whimper +

This is how the AGW panic ends: not with a bang, but with a whimper.

+

The Economist, which (despite a recent decline) remains probably the best news magazine in the English language, now admits that (a) global average temperature has been flat for 15 years even as CO2 levels have been rising rapidly, (b) surface temperatures are at the lowest edge of the range predicted by IPCC climate models, (c) on current trends, they will soon fall clean outside and below the model predictions, (c) estimates of climate sensitivity need revising downwards, and (d) something, probably multiple things, is badly wrong with AGW climate models.

+

Do I get to say “I told you so!” yet?

+

+

The wheels are falling off the bandwagon. The Economist has so much prestige in the journalistic establishment that it’s going to become difficult now for the mainstream media to continue averting their eyes from the evidence. Honest AGW advocates have been the victims of a massive error cascade enlisted in aid of a vast and vicious series of political and financial scams; it’s time for them to wake up and realize they’ve been had, taken, swindled, conned, and used.

+

I can’t but think the record cold weather in England has got something to do with this. Only a few years ago AGW panicmongers were screaming that British children would never see another snowfall – now they’re struggling with nastier winter weather than has been seen in a century. Perhaps the big chill woke somebody at The Economist up?

+

And if you think I’m gloating now, wait until GAT actually falls far enough below the low end of IPCC projections that the Economist has to admit that. I plan to be unseemly and insufferable about it, oh yes I do.

diff --git a/20130402193027.blog b/20130402193027.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1e5247a --- /dev/null +++ b/20130402193027.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Natural rights and wrongs? +

One of my commenters recently speculated in an accusing tone that I might be a natural-rights libertarian. He was wrong, but explaining why is a good excuse for writing an essay I’ve been tooling up to do for a long time. For those of you who aren’t libertarians, this is not a parochial internal dispute – in fact, it cuts straight to the heart of some long-standing controversies about consequentialism versus deontic ethics. And if you don’t know what those terms mean, you’ll have a pretty good idea by the time you’re done reading.

+

+

There are two philosophical camps in modern libertarianism. What distinguishes them is how they ground the central axiom of libertarianism, the so-called “Non-Aggression Principle” or NAP. One of several equivalent formulations of NAP is: “Initiation of force is always wrong.” I’m not going to attempt to explain that axiom here or discuss various disputes over the NAP’s application; for this discussion it’s enough to note that libertarians take the NAP as a given unanimously enough to make it definitional. What separates the two camps I’m going to talk about is how they justify the NAP.

+

“Natural Rights” libertarians ground the NAP in some a priori belief about religion or natural law from which they believe they can derive it. Often they consider the “inalienable rights” language in the U.S.’s Declaration of Independence, abstractly connected to the clockmaker-God of the Deists, a model for their thinking.

+

“Utilitarians” justify the NAP by its consequences, usually the prevention of avoidable harm and pain and (at the extreme) megadeaths. Their starting position is at bottom the same as Sam Harris’s in The Moral Landscape; ethics exists to guide us to places in the moral landscape where total suffering is minimized, and ethical principles are justified post facto by their success at doing so. Their claim is that NAP is the greatest minimizer.

+

The philosophically literate will recognize this as a modern and specialized version of the dispute between deontic ethics and consequentialism. If you know the history of that one, you’ll be expecting all the accusations that fly back and forth. The utilitarians slap at the natural-rights people for handwaving and making circular arguments that ultimately reduce to “I believe it because $AUTHORITY told me so” or “I believe it because ya gotta believe in something“. The natural-rights people slap back by acidulously pointing out that their opponents are easy prey for utility monsters, or should (according to their own principles) be willing to sacrifice a single innocent child to bring about their perfected world.

+

My position is that both sides of this debate are badly screwed up, in different ways. Basically, all the accusations they’re flinging at each other are correct and (within the terms of their traditional debates and assumptions) unanswerable. We can get somewhere better, though, by using their objections to repair each other. Here’s what I think each side has to give up…

+

The natural-rightsers have to give up their hunger for a-priori moral certainty. There’s just no bottom to to that; it’s contingency all the way down. The utilitarians are right that every act is an ethical experiment – you don’t know “right” or “wrong” until the results come in, and sometimes the experiment takes a very long time to run. The parallel with epistemology, in which all non-consequentialist theories of truth collapse into vacuity or circularity, is exact.

+

The utilitarians, on the other hand, have to give up on their situationalism and their rejection of immutable rules as voodoo or hokum. What they’re missing is how the effects of payoff asymmetry, forecasting uncertainty, and decision costs change the logic of utility calculations. When the bad outcomes of an ethical decision can be on the scale of genocide, or even the torturing to death of a single innocent child, it is proper and necessary to have absolute rules to prevent these consequences – rules that that we treat as if they were natural laws or immutable axioms or even (bletch!) God-given commandments.

+

Let’s take as an example the No Torturing Innocent Children To Death rule. (I choose this, of course in reference to a famous critique of Benthamite utilitarianism.) Suppose someone were to say to me “Let A be the event of torturing an innocent child to death today. Let B be the condition that the world will be a paradise of bliss tomorrow. I propose to violate the NTICTD rule by performing A in order to bring about B”.

+

My response would be “You cannot possibly have enough knowledge about the conditional probability P(B|A) to justify this choice.” In the presence of epistemic uncertainty, absolute rules to bound losses are rational strategy. A different way to express this is within a Kripke-style possible-futures model: the rationally-expected consequences of allowing violations of the NTICTD rule are so bad over so many possible worlds that the probability of landing in a possible future where the violation led to an actual gain in utility is negligible.

+

My position is that the NAP is a necessary loss-bounding rule, like the NTICTD rule. Perhaps this will become clearer if we perform a Kantian on it into “You shall not construct a society in which the initiation of force is normal.” I hold that, after the Holocaust and the Gulag, you cannot possibly have enough certainty about good results from violating this rule to justify any policy other than treating the NAP as absolute. The experiment has been run already, it is all of human history, and the bodies burned at Belsen-Bergen and buried in the Katyn Wood are our answer.

+

So I don’t fit neatly in either camp, nor want to. On a purely ontological level I’m a utilitarian, because being anything else is incoherent and doomed. But I respect and use natural-rights language, because when that camp objects that the goals of ethics are best met with absolute rules against certain kinds of harmful behavior they’re right. There are too many monsters in the world, of utility and every other kind, for it to be otherwise.

diff --git a/20130404080410.blog b/20130404080410.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..37e8d92 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130404080410.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +No, GPSD is not the battery-killer on your Android! +

Today, while doing research to answer some bug mail, I learned that all versions of Android since 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) have used gpsd to read the take from the onboard GPS. Sadly, gpsd is getting blamed in some quarters for excessive battery drain. But it’s not gpsd’s fault! Here is what’s actually going on.

+

+

Activating the onboard GPS in your phone eats power. Normally, Android economizes by computing a rough location from signal-tower strengths, information it gathers anyway in normal operation. To get a more precise fix, an app (such as Google Maps) can request “Detailed Location”. This is what is happening when the GPS icon appears on your status bar.

+

Requesting “Detailed Location” wakes up gpsd, causing it to power up the on-board GPS and begin interpreting the NMEA data stream it ships. Somewhere in Android’s Java code (I don’t know the details), the reports from gpsd are captured and made available to the Java API that apps can see. Normally this mode is a little expensive, mainly because of the power cost of running the GPS hardware; this is why Android doesn’t keep the GPS powered up all the time. Normally the gpsd demon itself is very economical; we’ve measured its processor utilization on low-power ARM chips and it’s below the noise floor of the process monitor. As it should be; the data rate from a GPS isn’t very high, there’s simply no reason for gpsd to spend a lot of cycles.

+

Nevertheless, instances of excessive battery drain have been reported with the system monitor fingering gpsd as the culprit, especially on the Samsung Galaxy SIII. In some cases this happens when the onboard GPS is powered off. In every case I’ve found through Googling for “Android gpsd”, the actual bad guy is an app that is both requesting Detailed Location and running in background; if you deinstall the app, the battery drain goes away. (On the Galaxy SIII, the ‘app’ may actually be the “Remote Location Service” in the vendor firmware; you can’t remove it, but you can disable it through Settings.)

+

I suspect that there’s something else going on here. The fact that gpsd is reported to be processor-hogging when the GPS is powered off suggests that it’s spinning on its main select(2) call. We’ve occasionally seen behavior like this before, and it has always been down to some bug or misconfiguration in the Linux kernel’s serial I/O layer (gpsd exercises that layer in some unusual ways). This is consistent with the relative rareness of the bug; likely it’s only happening on a couple of specific phone models. If every background app using the GPS caused this problem, I’d have had a mob of pitchfork-wielding peasants at my castle door long since…

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TL;DR: It’s not gpsd’s fault – find the buggy app and remove it.

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All this having been said, why, yes I do think it’s seriously cool that gpsd is running in all newer Android phones. My code is ubiquitous and inescapable, bwahahahaha! But you knew that already.

diff --git a/20130407094501.blog b/20130407094501.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3a25954 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130407094501.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Out on the tiles +

I’ve been experimenting with tiling window managers recently. I tried out awesome and xmonad, and read documentation on several others including dwm and wmii. The prompt cause is that I’ve been doing a lot of surgery on large repositories recently, and when you get up to 50K commits that’s enough to create serious memory pressure on my 4G of core (don’t laugh, I tend to drive my old hardware until the bolts fall out). A smaller, lighter window manager can actually make a difference in performance.

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More generally, I think the people advocating these have some good UI arguments – OK, maybe only when addressing hard-core hackers, but hey we’re users too. Ditching the overhead of frobbing window sizes and decorations in favor of getting actual work done is a kind of austerity I can get behind. My normal work layout consisted of just three big windows that nearly filled the screen anyway – terminal, Emacs and browser. Why not cut out the surrounding cruft?

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I wasn’t able to settle on a tiling wm that really satisfied, though, until my friend HedgeMage pointed me at i3. After a day or so of using it I suspect I’ll be sticking with it. The differences from other tiling wms are not major but it seems just enough better designed and documented to cross a threshold for me, from interesting novelty to useful tool. Along with this change I’m ditching Chatzilla for irsii; my biggest configuration challenge in the new setup, actually, was teaching irssi how to use libnotify so I get visible IRC activity cues even when irsii itself is hidden.

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One side effect of i3 is that I think it increases the expected utiliity of a multi-monitor configuration enough to actually make me shell out for a dual-head card and another flatscreen – the documentation suggests (and HedgeMage confirms) that i3 workspace-to-display mapping works naturally and well. The auxiliary screen will be all browser, all the time, leaving the main display for editing and shell windows.

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It’s not quite a perfect fit. The i3 model of new-window layout is based on either horizontally or vertically splitting parent windows into equal parts. While this produces visually elegant layouts, for some applications I’d like it to try harder to split space so that the new application gets its preferred size rather than half the parent. In particular I want my terminal emulators and Emacs windows to be exactly 80 columns unless I explicitly resize them. I’ve proposed some rules for this on the i3 development list and may try to implement them in the i3 codebase.

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I’m not quite used to the look yet. On the one hand, seeing almost all graphics banished from my screen in favor of fixed-width text still seems weirdly retro, almost as though it were a reversion to the green screens of my youth. On the other hand, we sure didn’t have graphical browsers in another window then. And the effect of the whole is … clean, is the best way I can put it. Elegant. Uncluttered. I like that.

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Even old Unix hands like me take the Windows-Icons-Mouse-Pointer style of interface for granted nowadays, but i3 does fine without the I in WIMP. This makes me wonder how much of the rest of the WIMPiness of our interfaces is a mistake, an overelaboration, a local peak in design space rather than a global one.

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I was willing enough to defend the CLI for expert users in The Art of Unix Programming, and I’ve put my practice where my theory is in designing tools like reposurgeon. Now I wonder if I should have been still more of an – um – iconoclast.

diff --git a/20130409092153.blog b/20130409092153.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0f30c94 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130409092153.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +What if it really was like that? +

If you read any amount of history, you will discover that people of various times and places have matter-of-factly believed things that today we find incredible (in the original sense of “not credible”). I have found, however, that one of the most interesting questions one can ask is “What if it really was like that?”

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That is, what if our ancestors weren’t entirely lying or fantasizing when they believed in…say…the existence of vampires? If you’re willing to ask this question with an open mind, you might discover that there is a rare genetic defect called “erythropoietic porphyrinuria” that can mimic some of the classical stigmata of vampirism. Victims’ gums may be drawn back on the teeth, making said teeth appear fanglike; they are likely to be photophobic, shunning bright light; and, being anemic, they may develop a craving for blood…

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I think the book that taught me to ask “What if it really was like that?” systematically might have been Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes observed that Bronze Age literary sources take for granted the routine presence of god-voices in peoples’ heads. Instead of dismissing this as fantasy, he developed a theory that until around 1000BC it really was like that – humans had a bicameral consciousness in which one chamber or operating subsystem, programmed by culture, manifested to the other as the voice of God or some dominant authority figure (“my ka is the ka of the king”). Jaynes’s ideas were long dismissed as brilliant but speculative and untestable; however, some of his predictions are now being borne out by neuroimaging techniques not available when he was writing.

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A recent coment on this blog pointed out that many cultures – including our own until around the time of the Industrial Revolution – constructed many of their customs around the belief that women are nigh-uncontrollably lustful creatures whose sexuality has to be restrained by strict social controls and even the amputation of the clitoris (still routine in large parts of the Islamic world). Of course today our reflex is to dismiss this as pure fantasy with no other function than keeping half the human species in perpetual subjection. But some years ago I found myself asking “What if it really was like that?”

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Let’s be explicit about the underlying assumptions here and their consequences. It used to be believed (and still is over much of the planet) that a woman in her fertile period left alone with any remotely presentable man not a close relative would probably (as my commenter put it) be banging him like a barn door in five minutes. Thus, as one conseqence, the extremely high value traditionally placed on physical evidence of virginity at time of marriage.

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Could it really have been like that? Could it still be like that in the Islamic world and elsewhere today? One reason I think this question demands some attention is that the costs of the customs required to restrain female sexuality under this model are quite high on many levels. At minimum you have to prevent sex mixing, which is not merely unpleasant for both men and women but requires everybody to invest lots of effort in the system of control (wives and daughters cannot travel or in extreme cases even go outside without male escort, homes have to be built with zenanahs). At the extreme you find yourself mutilating the genitalia of your own daughters as they scream under the knife.

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I don’t think customs that expensive can stay in force without solid reason. And it’s not sufficient to fall back on feminist cant and say the men are doing it to oppress the women, as if desire to oppress were a primary motive that doesn’t require explanation. For one thing, in such cultures women (especially older women out of their fertile period) are always key figures in the control system. It couldn’t function without them being ready to take a hard line against sexual “impurity” – often, a harder line than men do.

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And, in fact, a large body of historical evidence suggests that it is possible to train most women to be uncontrollably lustful with strange men. All you have to do is limit their sexual opportunities enough, as in a system of purdah or strict gender segregation that almost totally prevents close contact with males other than close relatives.

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What I’m suggesting is that the they’ll-fling-themselves-at-any-male model of female behavior believed by strict patriarchal societies is actually a self-fulfilling prophecy – that is, if your society begins to evolve towards purdah, women (who have only a limited fertile period) adapt by becoming more sexually aggressive. This in turn motivates stricter customs.

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The effect is a vicious circle. At the extreme, the societies in which everyone expects women to bang strangers on five minutes’ notice find they elicit exactly that behavior with the methods they employ to suppress it. Well, except for clitoridectomy; that probably works, being your last resort when you’ve noticed that social repression is making your fertile women ever more uncontrollable when they can get at men.

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We can find some support for this theory even in present time. I’ve noted before that in our modern, liberated era women seem not to be demanding as high a clearing price for sex as they should. In traditional terms, they’re being lustful. And this is in a culture that probably encourages sex mixing as much or more than any in history, driving the opportunity cost associated with not randomly humping strangers to an unprecedented low.

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I’m not writing to suggest any particular thing we should do about this. What I’m encouraging is a variant of the exercise I’ve previously called “killing the Buddha”. Sometimes the consequences of supposing that our ancestors reported their experience of the world faithfully, and that their customs were rational adaptations to that experience, lead us to conclusions we find preposterous or uncomfortable. I think that the more uncomfortable we get, the more important it becomes to ask ourselves “What if it really was like that?”

diff --git a/20130411120008.blog b/20130411120008.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7e3a345 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130411120008.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +National styles in hacking +

Last night, in an IRC conversation with one of my regulars, we were discussing a project we’re both users of and I’m thinking about contributing to, and I found myself saying of the project lead “And he’s German. You know what that means?” In fact, my regular understood instantly, and this deflected us into a discussion of how national culture visibly affects hackers’ collaborative styles. We found that our observations matched quite closely.

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Presented for your amusement: Three stereotypical hackers from three different countries, described relative to the American baseline.

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The German: Methodical, good at details, prone to over-engineering things, careful about tests. Territorial: as a project lead, can get mightily offended if you propose to mess with his orderly orderliness. Good at planned architecture too, but doesn’t deal with novelty well and is easily disoriented by rapidly changing requirements. Rude when cornered. Often wants to run things; just as often it’s unwise to let him.

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The Indian: Eager, cooperative, polite, verbally fluent, quick on the uptake, very willing to adopt new methods, excessively deferential to anyone perceived as an authority figure. Hard-working, but unwilling to push boundaries in code or elsewhere; often lacks the courage to think architecturally. Even very senior and capable Indian hackers can often seem like juniors because they’re constantly approval-seeking.

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The Russian: A morose, wizardly loner. Capable of pulling amazing feats of algorithmic complexity and how-did-he-spot that debugging out of nowhere. Mathematically literate. Uncommunicative and relatively poor at cooperating with others, but more from obliviousness than obnoxiousness. Has recent war stories about using equipment that has been obsolete in the West for decades.

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Like most stereotypes, these should neither be taken too literally nor dismissed out of hand. It’s not difficult to spot connections to other aspects of the relevant national cultures.

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A curious and interesting thing is that we were unable to identify any other national styles. Hackers from other Anglophone countries seem indistinguishable from Americans except by their typing accents. There doesn’t seem to be a characteristic French or Spanish or Italian style, or possibly it’s just that we don’t have a large enough sample to notice the patterns. From almost anywhere else outside Western Europe we certainly don’t.

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Can anyone add another portrait to this gallery? It would be particularly interesting to me to find out what stereotypes hackers from other countries have about Americans.

diff --git a/20130412030518.blog b/20130412030518.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a5be81f --- /dev/null +++ b/20130412030518.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +The Agony, the Ectasy, the Dual Monitors + + +

That finally got things working the way I want them.

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What are our lessons for today, class?

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Here’s the big one: I will never again install an nVidia card unless forced at gunpoint, and if that happens I will find a way to make my assailant eat the fucking gun afterwards. I had lots better uses for 3.5 days than tearing my hair out over this.

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When your instincts tell you not to trust closed source, pay attention. Even if it means you don’t get instant gratification.

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While X is 10,000% percent more autoconfiguring than it used to be, it still has embarrassing gaps. The requirement that I manually adjust the virtual-screen size was stupid.

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UPDATE: My friend Paula Matuszek rightly comments: “You missed a lesson: When you have a problem in a complex system, the first thing to do is check each component individually, in isolation from as much else as possible. Yes, even if they were working before.”

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Now I must get back to doing real work.

diff --git a/20130414025812.blog b/20130414025812.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..db29ef6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130414025812.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Thanks again to those of you who hit the tip jar +

This is a postscript to my saga of the graphics-card disaster.

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Thank you. everybody who occasionally drops money in my PayPal account. In the past it has bought test hardware for GPSD. This week I had enough in it to pay for the Radeon card, the one that actually works.

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Your donations help me maintain software that serves a billion people every day. Thank you again.

diff --git a/20130415032913.blog b/20130415032913.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0776957 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130415032913.blog @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +Destroying the middle ground +

Here’s a thought experiment for you. Imagine yourself in an alternate United States where the First Amendment is not as a matter of settled law considered to bar Federal and State governments from almost all interference in free speech. This is less unlikely than it might sound; the modern, rather absolutist interpretation of free-speech liberties did not take form until the early 20th century.

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In this alternate America, there are many and bitter arguments about the extent of free-speech rights. The ground of dispute is to what extent the instruments of political and cultural speech (printing presses, radios, telephones, copying machines, computers) should be regulated by government so that use of these instruments does not promote violence, assist criminal enterprises, and disrupt public order.

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The weight of history and culture is largely on the pro-free-speech side – the Constitution does say “Congress shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”. And until the late 1960s there is little actual attempt to control speech instruments.

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Then, in 1968, after a series of horrific crimes and assassinations inspired by inflammatory anti-establishment political propaganda, some politicians, prominent celebrities, and public intellectuals launch a “speech control” movement. They wave away all comparisons to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, insisting that their goal is not totalitarian control but only the prevention of the most egregious abuses in the public square.

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So strong is public revulsion against the violence of 1968 that the first prohibition on speech instruments passes rapidly. The dissidents used slow, inexpensive hand-cranked mimeograph machines and hand presses to spread their poison; these “Saturday Night Specials” are banned. Slightly more capable printers still inexpensive enough to be owned by individual citizens are made subject to mandatory registration.

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A few civil libertarians call out warnings but are dismissed as extremists and generally ignored. Legitimate media and publishing corporations, assured by speech-control activists that their presses will not be affected by any measures the speech-control movement has in mind, raise little protest themselves.

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Strangely, the ban on Saturday Night Specials fails to reduce the ills it was intended to address. Violent dissidents and criminals, it seems, find little difficulty in stealing typewriters, copiers, and more expensive printing equipment – none of it subject to registration.

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The speech-control movement insists that stricter laws regulating speech instruments are the answer. By about 1970 convicted felons are prohibited from owning typewriters. A few years later all dealers in printing supplies, telephones, radios, and other communication equipment are required to have federal licenses as a condition of business, and are subject to government audits at any time. The announced intention of these laws is to prevent dangerous speech instruments from falling into the hands of criminals and madmen.

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In 1976 the National Writers’ Association, previously a rather somnolent social club best known for sponsoring speed-typing contests, is taken over in a palace coup by an insurgent gang of pro-free-speech radicals. They display an unexpected flair for grass-roots organization, and within five years have developed a significant lobbying arm in Washington D.C. They begin pushing back against speech-instrument restrictions.

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But the speech-control movement seems to be winning most of the battles. In 1986 ownership of automatic so-called “class 3″ press equipment is banned except for federally-licensed individuals and corporations. The media is flooded with academic studies purporting to show that illicit speech instruments cause crime and violence, though for some reason the researchers making these claims often refuse to publish their primary data sets.

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In unguarded moments and friendly company the speech-control movement’s leadership describes its goal expansively as confiscation and bans on all speech instruments not under direct government control or licensing. For public consumption, however, they speak only of “common-sense regulation” – conveniently never quite achieved, and always requiring more restrictions designed to increase the costs and legal risks for individuals owning speech instruments.

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Free-speech advocates begin referring to the speech-control movement’s tactics as “salami-slicing” – carving away rights one “reasonable” slice at a time until there is nothing left. Document leaks from major speech-control lobbying organizations confirm that this is their strategy (they call it “incrementalism”), and that they intend to continue lying about their objectives in public until the goal is so nearly achieved that admitting the truth will no longer prevent final victory.

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But much of the general public, the American moderate middle, takes the speech-control movement’s public rhetoric at face value. Who can be against “reasonable restrictions” and “common-sense regulation”? Especially when pundits assure them that free speech was never intended by the framers of the Constitution to be interpreted as an individual right, but as a collective right of the people to be exercised only as members of government-controlled or sponsored corporate bodies.

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But by 1990 many individual private owners of telephones and computers, though themselves still almost untouched by the new laws, are nevertheless becoming suspicious of the speech-control movement and increasingly frustrated with the NWA’s sluggish and inadequate counters to it. Awareness of the pattern of salami-slicing and strategic deception by the other side is spreading well beyond hard-core free-speech activists.

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In 2001, an eminent historian named Prettyisland publishes a book entitled “Printing America”. In it, he argues that pre-Civil war Americans never placed the high value on free speech and freedom of expression asserted in popular history, and that ownership of speech instruments was actually rare in the Revolutionary period. He is awarded a Bancroft Prize; his book receives glowing reviews in academia and all media outlets and is taken up as a major propaganda cudgel by the speech-control movement.

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Within 18 months dedicated free-speech activists led by an amateur scholar show that “Printing America” was a wholesale fraud. The probate records Prettyisland claims to have examined never existed. He has systematically misquoted and distorted his sources. Shamefaced academics recant their support; his Bancroft Prize is revoked.

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The speech-control movement takes a major loss in its credibility, and free speech activists a corresponding gain. Free-speech advocacy organizations more willing to confront their enemies than the NWA arise, and find increasing grassroots support – Printer Owners of America, Advocates for the First Amendment, Jews for the Preservation of Computer Ownership.

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The members of these organizations know that many people advocating “reasonable restrictions” and advocating “common-sense regulation” are not actually seeking total bans and confiscation. They’re honest dupes, believing ridiculous collective-rights theories because that’s what all the eminent people who gave Prettyisland’s book glowing reviews told them was true. They honestly believe that anyone who doesn’t support “common-sense regulation” is a dangerous, out-of-touch radical.

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Free-speech advocates also know that some people speaking the same moderate-sounding language – including most of the leadership of the speech-control movement – are lying, and are using the people in the first group as cat’s paws for an agenda that can only honestly be described as the totalitarian suppression of free speech.

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Increasingly, the difference between these groups becomes irrelevant. What has happened is that four decades of strategic deception by the leadership of the speech-control movement has destroyed the credibility of the honest middle. Free-speech activists, unable to read minds, have to assume defensively that everyone using the moderate-middle language of “common-sense regulation” is lying to hide a creeping totalitarian agenda.

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The moderate middle, unaware of how it has been used, doesn’t get any of this. All they hear is the yelling. They don’t understand why the free-speech activists react to their reasonable language with hatred and loathing.

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The preceding was a work of fiction. But I’d only have to change a dozen or so nouns and names and phrases to make it all true (some of the dates might be off a little). I bet you can break the code, and if you are “moderate” you may find it explains a few things. Have fun!

diff --git a/20130416093308.blog b/20130416093308.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c3ca075 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130416093308.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Building a better IRC client +

I’ve been thinking about how to build a better IRC client recently.

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The proximate cause is that I switched to irssi from chatzilla recently. In most ways it’s better, but it has some annoying UI quirks. Thinking they’d be easy to fix, I dug into the codebase and discovered that it’s a nasty hairball. We’ve seen projects where a great deal of enthusiasm and overengineering resulted in code that is full of locally-clever bits but excessively difficult to modify or maintain as a whole; irssi is one of those. Even its maintainers have mostly abandoned it; there hasn’t neen an actual release since 2010.

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This is a shame, because despite its quirks it’s probably the best client going for serious IRC users. I say this because I’ve tried the other major contenders (chatzilla, BitchX, XChat, ircii) in the past. None of them really match irsii’s feature set, which makes it particularly unfortunate that the codebase resembles a rubble pile.

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I’m nor capable of stumbling over a situation like this without thinking about how to fix it. And yesterday…I had an insight.

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Probably the single most annoying thing about today’s IRC clients is that if you don’t leave them on all the time you miss some of the channel traffic. There’s no way to join a favorite channel and look at the traffic for the last half hour to get context that happened while you were gone, other than leaving your client actively watching it. And sometimes you don’t want a client distracting you with chat and urgent notifications.

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So, I thought, OK, what if I built a client that logs all your IRC traffic for you? You’d still have the dropout problem, but at least it could always use the log to show you the last part of the conversation you were actually present for. Hm…but what about when you weren’t there?

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That’s when I got it. I realized that because people think of IRC clients as ways to watch network traffic, they build them all wrong. Here’s how to do it right…

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First, build a little client daemon whose job it is to watch channels for you and log their traffic, aggregating it into a message timeline that’s stored as a logfile on disk. The daemon gets started if it’s not already running, whenever you fire up your client. But exiting the client doesn’t kill the daemon. If you really don’t want to miss anything, you launch the daemon from your login profile well before you start your client.

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Your client is just a browser for the message timeline. It doesn’t actually talk to IRC servers because it no longer has to. When it wants to send traffic, or join a channel, or leave a channel, it ships a request to the daemon, which is managing all the actual server connections. The response gets appended to the message timeline just like every other traffic and is then visible by the client.

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Then I realized…I’ve already written this daemon! Almost all of it, anyway. It’s irker, my replacement for the defunct CIA service. Add an option to log traffic. Add options to set your nick and its nickserv password. Done!

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Those features are in the irker repo now. Not released yet because the code for nickserv authentication is untested, but that’s a detail. The point is that adding about 20 lines of trivial code has amped up irker so that it’s now a generic chat-logging back end that could be used by a whole family of IRC clients – every one of which could be functionally superior to what’s now out there.

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To paraphrase XKCD: Code reuse. It works, bitches!

diff --git a/20130419174100.blog b/20130419174100.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6c5f5ee --- /dev/null +++ b/20130419174100.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Iranian connection in the Boston bombing +

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the terrorist who died in a firefight with the Boston police with a kettle bomb strapped to him, had a YouTube page. Examining an image of it, I found an approving link to a movie titled “The Black Flags of Khorasan”.

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Because, unlike the politically-correct idiots who infest our nation’s newsrooms, I’ve actually studied the history of Islam in some detail, that title had immediate resonance for me. I thought I knew what it meant, and I googled.

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What I found confirmed my hunch. Not just that Black Flags from Khorasan is a jihadist propaganda movie, but that it’s a jihadi movie of a particularly interesting kind – Mahdist, and almost certainly radical Shi’a. Mahdism is present in Sunni but much less central, and in any case the region of Khorasan has been the heart country of Shi’a for nearly a thousand years.

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Domestic terrorism, my ass. As usual, the mainstream media was slavering to pin this on some Richard-Jewell-like native-born conservative (bonus points if they get to say “Tea Party”). As usual, it’s a jihadi atrocity in which fundamentalist Islam was causal.

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But that film is a more specific clue. If the investigators have even a microgram of brains, they’re looking for an Iranian connection now.

diff --git a/20130426101137.blog b/20130426101137.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..89aea60 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130426101137.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Penguicon party 2013! +

My blogging will be light or nonexistent over the next week. I’m on the road in Michigan, at Penguicon; the Friends of Armed and Dangerous party will be here at 9:00 tonight.

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It really is the 21st century. Yesterday I merged a bunch of patches, ran acceptance tests, and then polished and shipped a reposurgeon release – while in the passenger seat of a car tooling down I-80. The remarkable thing is that this no longer seems remarkable.

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I discovered in the process that while i3 is the best thing since sliced bread on a 2560×1440 display, a tiling window manager is pretty uncomfortable on a laptop-sized 1366×768 display. The problem is that even dividing the laptop screen only in half produces shell and Emacs windows that are narrower than their natural 80-column size rather than wider as on the larger display; one gets the text in email and source code wrapping unpleasantly. I’ve fallen back to XFCE for laptop use.

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In two hours, Geeks With Guns. Going to be a full day.

diff --git a/20130502012724.blog b/20130502012724.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5d233b6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130502012724.blog @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +The true meaning of moral panics +

In my experience, moral panics are almost never about what they claim to be about. I am just (barely) old enough to remember the tail end of the period (around 1965) when conservative panic about drugs and rock music was actually rooted in a not very-thinly-veiled fear of the corrupting influence of non-whites on pure American children. In retrospect it’s easy to understand as a reaction against the gradual breakdown of both legally enforced and de-facto racial segregation in the U.S.

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But moral panics are by no means a monopoly of cultural conservatives. These days the most virulent and bogus examples are as likely to arrive from the self-described “left” as the “right”. When they do, they’re just as likely to be about something other than the ostensible subject.

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In Lies, Damn Lies, and Rape Statistics a college newspaper does a little digging through U.S. crime statistics and finds that the trendy “anti-rape” movement is exaggerating the rape risk of college women by two full orders of magnitude – as it concludes, “the ‘one in four’ chant should be abandoned and replaced with the more appropriate, albeit less catchy, 1 in 400.”

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What can explain such gross distortion? I’ve looked into this issue myself and discovered a lot of flim-flam. Still, even the the best-case figures I arrived at apparently overestimated the actual risk on campuses by a factor of 50. (Barbarian zones – like, say, inner-city Detroit – might be a different story.)

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If the rape panic runs parallel to the the now nearly forgotten drugs-and-rock panics of the 1950s and 1960s (and many others like them, before and after) we should expect it to actually be be rooted in an attempt to assert control of or cultural dominance over some threatening Other. And there is indeed evidence that points in that direction.

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Recently, Meg Lanker-Simmons, a left-wing activist at the University of Wyoming, faked a rape threat. The agenda seemed obvious: smear Republicans, confirm feminist narratives about male hostility to ‘uppity’ women, confirm women as morally superior creatures who rightfully dictate the content and style of male behavior.

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This, together with the crazy inflation of rape statistics, suggests that the campus “anti-rape” movement has little or nothing to do with preventing rape. It has become an instrument of the sort of political warfare in which truth is most likely to be the first casualty.

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We’ve seen this sort of thing before, of course. Playing the “racism” card has become such a cliche of left politics that even the reliably lefty Jon Stewart now spoofs it as overdone and busted. In that case the threatening Other is working-class white men, especially rural and most especially Southern, and the aim is clearly to prevent them from pushing back against the culture and politics of elite bicoastal left-liberals.

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But there’s actually something a bit more puzzling about the campus-rape panic. College campuses are far from a threatening environment for feminists. Nowadays women outnumber men in every department outside STEM fields. At many colleges mandatory ‘sensitivity training’ heavily privileges female and feminist perspectives. By federal encouragement, female students can now accuse men of rape and expect the claim to be evaluated under circumstances that deny the man any right to due process and the presumption of innocence.

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On campus, the Other seems so thoroughly controlled that some academics now attribute declining male enrollments to an unwillingness to enter a hostile work environment. What are women like Meg Lanker-Simmons really pushing against? What in their environment do they not already own?

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I think the answer is…themselves. The increasing intensity level of the campus-rape panic seems well correlated with the erosion of college womens’ position in sexual bargaining.

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The key concept here is hypergamy: womens’ wired-in desire to mate with men who are taller, smarter, richer, a little older, and higher-status than they are. Hypergamy is at the core of the human female mating strategy in exactly the way that seeking physical attractiveness (signs of fitness to bear) is at the center of male strategy.

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An increasing number of hypergamically-aspiring college women are competing for a decreasing pool of higher-status male peers. The consequences are well documented; in the “hookup” culture that now pervades many campuses, sex has become a woman’s opening bid rather than a prize men must compete strenuously to attain. This was a more or less inevitable result once premarital sex stopped being strongly tabooed and the campus sex-ratio flipped over to majority female.

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It is not surprising that women like Lanker-Simmons should resent this situation, because it’s almost exactly the reverse of the instinctively K-type mating strategy common to females in humans and most other mammalian species. It’s sex on male r-type terms, and women have DNA going clear back to the Cretaceous that pushes against it.

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(This logic also implies that today’s campuses should be among the last places to expect rapes rather than the first. I’ll leave that demonstration as a very simple exercise for the reader.)

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This Other, alas, will not be so easily banished. To reverse the dynamic, one of the following things would have to happen:

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(1) Premarital sex again becoming strongly enough tabooed that effectively all women cannot offer it as an opening bid. (It has to be effectively all; otherwise the defectors get a large enough advantage in competing for men to make the withholding strategy unstable for the rest. We’ve seen this movie before.)

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(2) Sex ratios on campus flip back to a large enough majority of males so that each woman has multiple hypergamic targets who must compete for her. Under these circumstances “not till we’re married” becomes viable again.

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(3) Women as a group revert to having much less economic autonomy and social power than men – enough less, anyway, that almost any nominal SES peer or near-peer is a hypergamic target. There’s a tradeoff between this and move 2; the fewer males there are in the nearly-peer population, the more status and autonomy women must implicitly sacrifice to have a constant number of eligible hypergamic targets.

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I leave the reader to imagine the screams of rage that would issue from feminists if any of these were even seriously proposed, let alone attempted. And I am not actually advocating any of them, just pointing out that women like Meg Lanker-Simmons are caught in a trap that has nothing to do with (mythically) rape-minded men and everything to do with the world easy contraception and feminist ideology have given us.

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I think that underneath the obvious political maneuvering, screaming about a nonexistent rape pandemic is a displacement activity. Campus feminists do it because confronting their actual powerlessness and the jaws of the dilemma that created it would be too painful for them to face.

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At bottom, the problem is that female hypergamic instinct and the ideology of sexual equality are inevitably in collision. (Men don’t have the symmetrical problem because their instinctive mating strategy is to just bang women who turn them on physically without regard for differential status.) Short of genetically re-engineering humans to change their mating instincts, there is probably no fix for this.

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Of course the implications of this logic go way beyond college campuses. It’s a fundamentally tragic situation and I don’t know what we as a culture or a species are going to do about it.

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One thing I am sure of is that displaced moral panic and silly, counterfactual yabbering about “rape culture” will not solve the problem.

diff --git a/20130504155248.blog b/20130504155248.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1e9c904 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130504155248.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Destroying the middle ground, redux +

A few weeks ago I blogged an alternate-history story in which the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was abused and distorted in the same ways the Second Amendment has been in our history. The actual point of the essay, though, was not about either amendment; it was about how strategic deception by one side of a foundational political dispute can radicalize the other and effectively destroy the credibility of moderates as well.

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Now comes the news that the head of the Department of Homeland Security officially thanked the Governor of Missuri for violating state law by illegally passing to the DHS Missouri’s list of concealed-carry permit holders. The Governor then lied about his actions.

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The Feds, meanwhile, continue to illegally retain transfer records from federally licensed firearms dealers past the statutory time limit, among several other continuing violations of a 1986 law forbidding the establishment of a national gun registry.

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The BATF also criminally violated its authorizing laws by transferring over 2000 firearms to Mexican drug gangs through illegal straw purchases (google “ATF gunwalking scandal”). Over 150 Mexican citizens and United States Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry were killed with these guns.

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Meanwhile, following scandals about “drop guns” at the sites of police shootings, some big-city police forces (notably in LA and NYC) are strongly suspected of routinely using planted guns to frame suspects they can’t otherwise nail on firearms-possession charges.

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Any trust that “gun control” will be administered with even minimal respect for civil rights is long gone, destroyed by the behavior of the enforcers themselves.

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This is yet another way to destroy the middle. Anti-firearms activists speak of “common-sense regulation”, knowing that the agencies enforcing these have engaged in a series of criminal conspiracies to evade and ignore safeguards against abuse of such regulations. By doing so, they annihilate any trust firearms owners might have once felt that “common-sense regulation” is anything other than a prequel to those abuses.

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In the absence of trust there can be no compromise. This is how you radicalize gun owners into the Second-Amendment absolutists most of us are today. After four decades of bad faith the only position left to us is “No more ‘gun-control’ laws. Ever.”

diff --git a/20130511093956.blog b/20130511093956.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7f45845 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130511093956.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +On the road, blogging limited +

Blogging will be limited for the next week.

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I’ve received several requests for posts on a bunch of meaty topic, including (a) Adobe’s Creative Cloud move, (b) The Defence Distributed takedown notice, (b) the utility of power-projection navies, (d) current state of the terror war, and others. I won’t get to all of these anytime soon, because I’m swamped with work and will be travelling today to an undisclosed city for a meeting I can’t talk about yet.

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Sorry to go all international-man-of-nystery on everybody but all will be revealed later this year. It will have been worth the wait.

diff --git a/20130511105258.blog b/20130511105258.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..70f7579 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130511105258.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Adobe in cloud-cuckoo land +

Congratulations, Adobe, on your impending move from selling Photoshop and other boring old standalone applications that people only had to pay for once to a ‘Creative Cloud’ subscription service that will charge users by the month and hold their critical data hostage against those bills. This bold move to extract more revenue from customers in exchange for new ‘services’ that they neither want nor need puts you at the forefront of strategic thinking by proprietary software companies in the 21st century!

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It’s genius, I say, genius. Well, except for the part where your customers are in open revolt, 5000 of them signing a petition and many others threatening to bail out to open-source competitors such as GIMP.

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Fifteen years ago I pointed out in The Cathedral and the Bazaar and it sequels that buying proprietary software puts you at the wrong end of a power relationship with its vendor. And that this relationship will almost always evolve in the direction of more control by the vendor, more rent extraction from your wallet, and harder lock-in. Adobe’s move illustrates this dynamic perfectly.

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But the response from its customer base highlights something else that has happened in those 15 years; open-source applications like the GIMP, and the open-source operating systems they run on, actually offer users a practical way out of these increasingly abusive relationships. Adobe’s customers aren’t being shy about pointing this out, and the company is going to feel heat that it wouldn’t have before 1998.

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It’s not clear which side will back down in this particular confrontation. But the underlying trend curves are obvious; even if Adobe wins this time, sooner or later the continuing increases in the rent Adobe needs to claw out of its customers are going to exceed the customers’ transition costs to get out of Adobe’s jail.

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The problem is fundamental; one-time purchase payments can’t cover unbounded downstream support and development costs. They can only even appear sufficient when your market is expanding rapidly and you can always use today’s new revenue to cover support costs from last year’s sales. This stops working when your markets near saturation; you have to somehow move customers to a subscription model to survive.

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But doing that doesn’t solve an even more fundamental problem, which is that the stock market doesn’t actually reward constant returns any more; it wants an expectation of rising ones in order to beat the net-present-value discount curve. Thus, in a near-saturated market, the amount of rent you extract per customer has to perpetually increase.

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But what can’t go on forever won’t. Eventually you’ll have to squeeze your customers so hard that they bolt. This may be happening to Adobe now, or it could take a few more turns of the screw. But it will happen. And as with Adobe, so with all other proprietary software.

diff --git a/20130606185808.blog b/20130606185808.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1f7616e --- /dev/null +++ b/20130606185808.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +Hugh Daniel is dead – in frighteningly familiar circumstances +

Hugh Daniel, a very well known hacker and cypherpunk, was found dead in his apartment a few days ago. Hugh was a terrific guy and a friend of all the world, the kind of cheerfully-larger-than-life personality that makes things a little merrier and more interesting wherever it goes. He’s going to leave a big Hugh-shaped hole in a lot of lives, including mine.

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But I had a presentiment when I heard the first report of Hugh’s death, which was borne out when the first information came out about probable cause. Friends report that the coroner is fingering stroke or heart disease – but I’ve seen this movie before.

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Because I’ve seen this movie before, I make a prediction. If they autopsy Hugh, they will find evidence of undiagnosed type II diabetes, non-alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver, serious coronary plaque, and probably marginal function in the kidneys and other organs. He will present similarly to a victim of long-term, low-grade poisoning.

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About three years ago, another friend of mine, a gamer named Richard Butler, died with these symptoms. The two were about the same age when they died; both physically large men with big booming voices, happily extroverted geeks with a knack for making friends wherever they went, and the kind of zest for life that can make someone seem unkillable.

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And both looked prematurely aged in photographs I saw shortly before their deaths. The energy was still there, but in retrospect the body was beginning to fail.

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I think I know what actually killed Hugh and Richard. I don’t think it was old age in the normal sense; neither of them was even 60, if I’m any judge. I’m sounding an alarm because I think a significant number of my peers could die the same, preventable death.

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The medical establishment calls it “metabolic syndrome”. Or, sometimes, “cardiometabolic syndrome”, “insulin-resistance syndrome”, “Reuven’s syndrome” or “syndrome X”. It’s associated with hypertension, cardiac disease, obesity, and diabetes.

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A significant thing about Richard and Hugh is that they were both large-framed men who carried, rather gracefully, an amount of overweight that would have looked morbid on a smaller physique.

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Most doctors would observe this, shrug and say that the overweight is what killed them. And, as far as that goes, it’s probably not wrong. But I have come to believe that the actual underlying cause of such overweight and metabolic syndrome is fructose poisoning.

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When I first heard that Richard had fatty cirrhotic deposits in his liver when he died, I didn’t know what that meant. A few months later I learned that this is what happens when the liver becomes overloaded with hepatotoxic compounds and secretes encapsulating fat to defend itself. Alcohol stimulates this response; so does the fructose component in sugar. If an autopsy opens Hugh’s liver, that’s what I’d bet they’ll find signs of.

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The hepatic poisoning deranges half a dozen critical metabolic pathways. The secondary effects of the derangement are the whole range of metabolic-syndrome symptoms, including cardiac disease and diabetes and probably stroke as well.

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People look at this and think “It’s just old age.” It isn’t. It’s almost certainly fructose poisoning. I think I’ve just lost my second friend to it. I don’t want to lose a third.

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If you’re reading this, and you’re overweight, please cut the goddamn fructose out of your diet before it kills you. No more HFCS-laden sodas. No more white-sugar-from-hell desserts. You even need to back off the fruit juices; I used to drink a lot of apple juice, but don’t any more.

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Watch the ingredients lists on what you eat. The liver’s ability to process fructose non-toxically is limited; nobody’s sure what the limit is and it probably varies, but most people who have looked into this think about 50g of fructose per day is the most you should risk. Sucrose (cane sugar) is 50% fructose; convert accordingly.

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Becoming a no-sugar fanatic isn’t required. Whole fruit is reasonably safe because the fiber slows the fructose uptake, making it unlikely that you’ll hit your liver’s conversion limit. I have a cup of cocoa most nights, about 16g of fructose. Occasionally I treat myself to cheesecake or even baklava. The point isn’t ritual self-denial, it’s to not go over 50g a day.

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Please do these things to live. And to not be fat as a whale. It’s not complicated or difficult, it just takes a little attention. And I’m tired of watching friends die needlessly.

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UPDATE: I misremembered. Richard Butler wasn’t found dead, he died in a hospital.

diff --git a/20130623114927.blog b/20130623114927.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..41445c0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130623114927.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Announcing: Keyboards with crunch +

I’ve founded a G+ community for fans of the Model M and other buckling-spring keyboards. Here it is:

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Keyboards with crunch

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Buckling-spring keyboards are wonderful devices for the discriminating hacker, vastly superior to the mushy dome-switch devices more common these days. But for various reasons (including the mere fact that they contain a lot of mechanical switches) they can be tempermental beasts requiring a bit of troubleshooting and care.

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This community is for people who want to know how to find, care for, and troubleshoot their clicky keyboards.

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UPDATE: After research and feedback, the name is now “Tactile Keyboards”.

diff --git a/20130625125136.blog b/20130625125136.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..22d01ea --- /dev/null +++ b/20130625125136.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Indestructible cat is indestructible +

Those of you not in our cat’s fan base can ignore this.

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Sugar, at twenty years and five months of age, had her annual checkup today and was pronounced almost indecently healthy. The usual chorus of “Wow, she doesn’t look old!” occurred.

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Yes, we do have to hydrate her about once a week. And we can tell she needs it when the night yowling starts – but, in general, indestructible cat continues to be indestructible. Nobody expected her to live this long, much less as an active cat who looks about half her actual age.

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Cathy and I are pleased and proud. Of course this is is probably mostly good genes, but we like to think all the affection Sugar has collected from us and our geeky ailurophilic friends has contributed to her longevity.

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Looks like she’ll be entertaining visiting hackers in our basement for some time to come.

diff --git a/20130625152154.blog b/20130625152154.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dca2978 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130625152154.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +More tales from the tip jar +

People do occasionally put money in my blog’s tip jar. To encourage this behavior, I like to explain what I’m spending it on – always, so far, test equipment or hacking tools.

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A few minutes ago I spent $16.50 of those donations on one of the special thin-walled 5.5mm nut drivers you need to loosen the recessed bolts on a Unicomp Model M keyboard.

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We have have two of these in our house; they’re my wife’s and my regular desktop keyboards. (If you don’t understand why, read my Tactile Keyboard FAQ).

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One of them, my wife’s, is somewhat flaky. When it works it works perfectly, but it drops its connection to her host USB hub quite frequently and has to be unplugged/replugged to reinitialize the device.

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There are several possible causes of this; investigating any of them is going to require that I verify some facts about the keyboard hardware that I can really only check with the case removed.

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In particular, it is rumored that some variants of the Unicomp are prone to cabling problems brought on by insufficient strain relief where the USB cable is attached to the motherboard.

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I intend to check for this design flaw on both keyboards, add a report on its presence or absence to the Tactile Keyboard FAQ, and broadcast that over at Tactile Keyboards so it can become part of the troubleshooting lore generally available to people interested in these devices.

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This is a representative example of what you enable when you donate to my tip jar. The more you give, the more I can spend on small public benefits like this without concern about my survival budget.

diff --git a/20130627221715.blog b/20130627221715.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2cc76fc --- /dev/null +++ b/20130627221715.blog @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +Keyboards are not a detail! +

I’ve been thinking a lot about keyboards lately. Last Sunday I founded the Tactile Keyboards community on Google+ and watched it explode in popularity almost immediately. Spent most of the next couple of days boning up on keyboard lore so I could write a proper FAQ for the group.

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On my journey of discovery I learned of geekhack.org, a site for people whose obsession with keyboard customization and modding makes my keen interest in these devices seem like the palest indifference by comparison. Created an account and announced myself in the manner they deem proper for new members. Got a reply saying, more or less, that it’s nice “ESR” attends to details like keyboards.

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What? What? What? Your keyboard is not a detail, dammit!

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For anybody who does programming or writing on a computer, your keyboard is your most important tangible tool. It’s the one part of your machine that you touch constantly, the most physical interface you have with the computer. Tiny details about it can have a measurable impact on your productivity. A bad one won’t just slow you down, it will hurt you – causing or aggravating RSI (repetitive strain injuries) in the hands and arms.

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Given the amount of passion and pickiness hackers pour into their choices of software tools, it’s downright weird that more of us don’t pay better attention to choosing a decent keyboard. Yeah, we all grumble that the Caps-Lock is an anachronistic waste of space but for many of us that’s as far as it goes. We freaking damage ourselves using the shoddy, cheap-shit keyboards attached to most machines nowadays, too often get painful RSI as we age, and never make the connection.

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OK, so here’s a pop quiz for you: what is the one, single, only kind of computing equipment that is still sought after for production use thirty years after it was made – sometimes commanding higher prices today even in inflation-adjusted dollars than it did when it was new?

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If you guessed “keyboards”, you got it right. Everything else about computing has improved by dizzying orders of magnitude since the 1980s, but modern keyboards suck. Enough people already get this to create a vigorous auction and resale market in vintage keyboards. I’m here to insist that if programmers in general woke up about keyboard ergonomics that market would be much, much larger – and the few companies still making keyboards that aren’t shit wouldn’t be struggling to sell enough volume to support new-product engineering.

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How we ended up in this mess is a tragedy. But before I get into that, here’s the main thing that makes a good keyboard: tactile feedback at the engagement point of the keyswitch, so you don’t have to bottom out the key and have the reaction force reflected up into your fingers and hands. Millions of those reflections over the years inflict a lot of unnecessary fatigue and are one of the ways programmers get RSI.

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There are other ways that matter, too. The arms-parallel position you have to assume to touch-type on a rectangular keyboard is bad for you. So is holding your wrists so your palms are exactly horizontal. More people get this than understand about tactile keyswitches, which is why the Microsoft Natural has a larger and more visible market presence than vintage keyboards.

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But. The keyswitches in the Natural are crap. They’re the commonest kind, the dome switch – actually worse than if it had no tactile feedback at all; it clicks before the engagement point, which trains you to bottom out your keys even on devices that have a bump correctly at the engagement point. I’d snort something about typical Microsoft perversity here if not for the fact that almost all modern keyboards are just this bad.

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Some people get so thoroughly conditioned by years of typing on crappy keyswitches that they can’t break the habit of bottoming out when they encounter decent ones. A&D regular Jay Maynard (sometimes known as Tron Guy) is like this; he gets why tactile-feedback switches theoretically ought to improve his experience, but can’t stand them in practice. Tactile feedback doesn’t work for everybody.

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But the vintage keyboards that savvy users still chase are the ones that have the tactile feedback – the bump as you engage a key – in the right place. Most revered of these is the Model M, shipped with IBM PCs beginning in 1984. It had a unique kind of keyswitch called a “buckling spring switch” that serious tactile-keyboard fans consider the best ever. The Model M is a true classic; like Algol-60 and the 1911-pattern 45ACP, it was an improvement over most of its successors.

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(For completeness and to demonstrate that I’m not being cultishly attached to a single brand, I will now mention the Northgate OmniKey, a superb mechanical-switch keyboard made by an otherwise undistinguished PC manufacturer. Nearly as good as the Model M by all accounts, and having used one I don’t laugh at people who think it was better. After Northgate folded in 2005, the keyboards were for a few years sold under the “Avant” trademark. OmniKeys and Avants would command even higher resale prices than Model Ms now, because fewer were made – but good luck finding any at all, their owners are not letting go of them ever.)

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Model Ms, on the other hand, are still manufactured today, by an outfit called Unicomp that bought out the factory from Lexmark after Lexmark had bought it from IBM and uses the original tooling and designs. I’m typing on a Unicomp right now. Despite some drawbacks (which I’ll get to) it’s still odds-on the best keyboard design ever shipped.

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But Unicomp is struggling and in constant trouble. Doesn’t take much examination of their website and product line to see the outlines; they’re cash-strapped, unable to do a lot of new-product engineering or marketing because the volume of demand for their product is too low. The few changes they have made to the Model M – like bolting on USB support – have been kluged in on the cheap, which created problems that damage the brand. The UB404LA has interoperability problems with some USB chipsets; ours has dropped connection with the hub on my machine once and flakes out every few minutes when connected to my wife’s machine (which is why she’s using the nipple-mouse-equipped UB40PGA that’s actually mine). The buttons for the integrated trackball have never worked reliably.

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Thus we return to the tragedy. Unicomp knows how to make the best computer keyboards ever shipped. Why is it struggling and letting its quality slip?

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In brief, because mechanical-switch keyboards are significantly more expensive to produce than all the crappy rubber-dome-switch keyboards we’re surrounded by. Relentless cost pressure by volume buyers pushed PC manufacturers and integrators to ship the cheapest possible components; there came a day when the once-ubiquitous mechanical-switch keyboard was quietly shunted aside and became a specialty item individual users had to seek out.

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That would have been sometime in the early 1990s, but I don’t remember exactly when. Because on first exposure dome-switch keyboards didn’t necessarily seem obviously bad – I might have noticed that newer keyboards seemed unpleasantly mushy but then shrugged and adapted. It usually takes change in the other direction – trying a truly tactile keyboard after years of dome-switch nastiness – to notice how good it feels.

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Another problem with Model Ms is that they’re well-nigh indestructible. You’re basically only ever going to sell one to a customer, barring house fires or coffee spills. There’s little repeat business. (Other mechanical-switch keyboards don’t have this problem quite as severely; the build quality and ruggedness even on latter-day Unicomps is exceptional.) Everybody else in the PC value chain makes more money by selling you a dirt-cheap keyboard that needs to be replaced every few years.

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Thus, Unicomp is stuck. Ironically, there’s now a thriving new market for tactile keyboards that Unicomp could own if it had a decent product-development budget: on-line gamers.

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Yes, gamers. Some of them have noticed that they can type faster and with less fatigue on mechanical switches – perhaps shaving a few vital milliseconds off reaction time. Enough of them, in fact, to sustain a handful of boutique companies selling keyboards with mechanical switches marginally inferior to the Model M’s – but with snazzy slick black cases and LED backlights and names like “Devastator”.

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And Unicomp? No backlights, nonexistent or profoundly inept marketing, a website that looks like amateur night, and case designs that look like they’re phoning it in from 1985. It’s deeply sad.

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I wish I could buy the company, fire everybody but the production crew, and hire on people who actually get product marketing and how to facelift the case designs and field a website that doesn’t make me embarrassed for them every time I look at it. Unicomp’s buckling-spring keyswitches are still the best in the world (even the more clueful gamers sort of know that), and they have the kind of decades-deep goodwill and fan loyalty that most companies would kill for.

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Lacking the bimpty-bump million dollars it would take to buy and fix Unicomp, all I can do is urge everybody reading this to wake the fsck up. Keyboards are not a detail! If you’re using a dome-switch keyboard you are probably in the majority who, unlike Tron Guy, would find their quality of life and work significantly improved by a tactile keyboard. You might save yourself from Richard Stallman’s fate as your tendons age; his RSI is so bad he has to hire people to type for him. The price of a Unicomp could be the best $79 you ever spent.

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If you already use a Model M, show it to a friend. Hell, give one to a friend! Well, give a Unicomp, anyway – I can well understand holding on to your armor-plated old faithful if you have an original. You’ll be doing a good thing for your friend and for a product which, despite Unicomp’s minor latter-day faults, is far too good to be left to die.

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If they get enough of a sales bump, maybe they’ll be able to afford to fix a few things. In the meantime, stay away from the trackball variant (which, now that I look, is marked out of stock anyway). The vanilla Classic and the nipple-mouse variant seem to be OK.

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If they really get enough of a sales bump, maybe they’ll get brave enough to make the holy grail of serious keyboard connoisseurs everywhere – a buckling-spring keyboard with a new-school, well-thought-out ergonomic layout like the Truly Ergonomic or ErgoMagic. Hey, I can dream, can’t I?

diff --git a/20130706223350.blog b/20130706223350.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..54fdff7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130706223350.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +After such knowledge… +

I have read very little in the last few decades that is as shocking to me as this: Essay by a teacher in a black high school.

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My first reaction was that I wanted to believe it was a bigot’s fabrication. I’d still like to believe that, but it was reposted by a black man who claims it is representative of “dirty laundry”: bad stuff [known among blacks] about black folk never to be said around whites.

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My second reaction, afterwards, was: for those of us who insist that people ought to be judged by the content of their characters rather than the color of their skins, what emotionally compelling argument do we have against anti-black racism that reading this doesn’t blow to smithereens?

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This is a question with more point now than it would have had thirty or fifty years ago, because of one thing this account makes harrowingly clear. White people didn’t impose the depraved, thuggish underculture it describes on black people; they did it to themselves, using a debased form of the rhetoric of white “anti-racists” and multiculturalists as rationalization.

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Of course, all the rational arguments against racism are still sound; I’ve written about them pretty extensively on this blog. The mass is not the individual, etcetera, etcetera. Nothing about the ugly, barbaric rampaging of these high-schoolers predicts the behavior of the blacks of the same age or older I know from martial-arts schools, SF conventions, and other places where the lives of black individuals intersect with mine.

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But if this is really where they came from – if this is what they’re right-end-of-the-bell-curve exceptions to, and that reality becomes widely known or believed – rational argument won’t be enough. How can we keep the bigots from winning?

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UPDATE: I’ve replaced the link I got from the blog “Maggie’s Farm” with a link to what seems to be the original. The Maggie’s-Farm link is now behind the word “reposted”.

diff --git a/20130717000940.blog b/20130717000940.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..df921e6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130717000940.blog @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +Objective evidence against racism +

A theme I have touched on several times in my blogging is that the best way to defeat racism and other forms of invidious discrimination is to develop and apply objective psychometric tests.

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Usually I make this argument with respect to IQ. But: one of my commenters, an obnoxious racist who I refrain from banning only on free-speech principle, recently argued that drug use should be (as, in fact, it now often illegally is) treated differently by police depending on the subject’s race.

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His argument (if you want to call it that) is that blacks, due to a low baseline level of self-regulation, are significantly more prone to criminality and violence than whites when intoxication further impairs that ability. Thus, the law should treat these cases differently as a matter of public safety.

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As presented, this prescription is racist, repugnant, and wrong. Because even if you believe that blacks as a group have less ability on average to self-regulate, this belief tells you nothing about any individual black person. Acting on it would infringe the foundational right of individuals to be treated equally by the law.

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But now let’s perform a thought experiment. Actually, a couple of related ones.

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Let us suppose that scientists were able to develop a behavioral test that reliably and repeatably measures an individual’s ability to self-regulate as a number, which we’ll call RQ. In fact there have been attempts at this.

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For purposes of this thought experiment, suppose that (a) we have such a test that is highly repeatable, (b) the distribution is like most psychometric scores Gaussian, and (c) there is a range of low scores on the left tail of the Gaussian that is known to correlate strongly with criminal and violent behavior.

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If you don’t know much about psychometry, you might think these premises are implausible. Follow the logic anyway, because I’m really chasing a point about how we should perform ethical reasoning. Besides, they’re actually quite plausible – there are known psychometrics with these properties.

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Our test divides the population into low-RQ and high-RQ contingents naturally, because if you plot both Gaussians the place where they intersect defines equal likelihood that a person with that RQ score is or is not part of the criminal population.

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Now suppose that we consider drug-fueled crime a sufficiently present danger that all citizens are required to have their RQ measured and registered with the police. (I’m not advocating this, but it’s necessary for the thought experiment. If you like, assume instead that it appears on driver’s licenses along with height and weight.)

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What would the ethics be of a law treating as a crime or disorderly conduct public intoxication of any person who cannot exhbit an RQ score above a specified minimum?

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(Note that we can, in principle, deal with measurement uncertainty by contracting the low-RQ range. That is, if we believe with 95% confidence that an individual’s score on RQ tests won’t vary by more than N points over a series of tries, we simply reduce the defining bound of the low-RQ cohort by N below wherever the RQ distributions for our defined criminal and noncriminal populations intersect.)

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Would this violate the principle of equal treatment under law? No, not any more than (for example) forbidding people with epilepsy from driving cars. In both cases, any reasonable person (including the offender himself) would know that the combination of his condition and behavior made him a danger to those around him. Legal discrimination against epileptics is therefore justified.

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The epileptic-in-the-driver’s-seat case enables us to dispose of another objection. Should our attitude about the laws disqualifying epileptics from driving change if we learn that epilepsy is not evenly distributed across racial groups, however we define race?

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Actually this isn’t a hypothetical; racial minorities in the U.S. do in fact have higher incidence of epilepsy than whites. But no civil-rights lawsuits on a disparate-impact theory have been filed, because that would be too insane for even the most extreme demagogues in our racial-grievance industry. The intent and effect of keeping epileptics off the roads is to avoid preventable injury and death due to a medical condition that can be unambiguously diagnosed.

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By the same reasoning, temporarily jailing low-RQ people for disorderly conduct while only monitoring high-RQ people for actual crime would not be racially discriminatory even if different races turn out to have different mean RQs.

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The key point in the conditions of our thought experiment is that an RQ is not assigned to a person on the basis or race or other ascriptive grouping; it is an individual measure of an individual used to make rationally justified inferences about that individual’s behavioral risks.

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Having got this far, we now reach the part of the hypothetical that is likely to truly upset the tender-minded. Suppose RQ turns out to be highly heritable? Does that change the soundness of the law at all, or make it racially discriminatory?

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Well, suppose epilepsy turned out to be highly heritable? Would that render our prohibition on epileptics driving instantly unsound and racist? Clearly not; it does not matter to the intent or effect of the law why they occasionally zone out or have convulsions, just that you do not want that happening behind the wheel of a car on a public road.

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By the same reasoning, legal discrimination against low-RQ persons based on RQ would not become invidious if we knew RQ were heritable.

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Now we come to the worst case: RQ is highly heritable, and the means differences among racial groups are large. Summing up the argument, I have shown that legal discrimination on the basis of RQ should even so not be considered racist or wrong.

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Now we come back to where I began this post and consider again the difference between racist and non-racist thinking. The least prejudiced and nasty version of my commenter’s argument would read like this:

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“People with poor ability to self-regulate should be arrested and jailed when they get drunk, because they’re dangerous to themselves and others. Black people have low mean ability at self-regulation. Therefore, blacks should be presumptively arrested and jailed when drunk in public.”

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The point I’ve been working up to this whole essay is this. Many people think the racist part of this argument is the assertion “Black people have low mean ability at self-regulation.” In fact, I expect many of my readers type that as racism so strongly that they would consider any attempt to measure RQ automatically suspect.

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But this is silly. That claim is no more racist than the following: “Black people have a higher incidence of epilepsy than white people.”

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These claims may be true or false: we know the latter is true, we don’t know if the former is. But neither claim is ‘racist'; or, to put it another way if either claim is racist then both are and we have emptied the predicate “racist” of any meaning a serious person should care about.

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No. The racism in the argument happens after the “therefore”, at the place where it leaps from a claim about the statistical distribution of RQ to a pre-judgment about all blacks and about whatever individual blacks we might encounter.

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I have said it before, and I expect I’ll have to say it again. The individual is not the mass. The point is not the distribution. Racism is not merely hatred, it is a fundamental failure of reasoning. It is not just vicious, it is stupid.

diff --git a/20130726011514.blog b/20130726011514.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8e8d1a6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130726011514.blog @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +Preventing visceral racism +

I’ve been writing about race and politics a lot recently. Now I’m going to reveal the reason: in the relatively recent past I had a very disturbing, novel, and unwelcome educational experience. For the first time in the fifty-five years of my life I found out what it was like to feel racist, from the inside.

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I think I now understand the pathology behind racism better than I did before, and have some ideas about what is required to prevent and cure it. And no, my prescription won’t be any of the idiotic nostrums normally peddled by self-described “anti-racists”; in fact what I have to say is likely to offend most of them – which I don’t mind a bit.

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I’m going to obscure most of the details for reasons that I think will become clear as I write about this. I will say that the racial minority involved was one not commonly encountered in the U.S., and in particular not descendants of sub-Saharan Africans or any group much related to them. It is relevant that this minority X has facial features and skin tone quite unlike Europeans.

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I was near surrounded by these people, for the first time in my life, at a sort of ethnic-pride gathering which I was attending for reasons not relevant to this essay. And found myself experiencing disgust. Not anger, not hatred, but a visceral feeling of revulsion similar to being exposed to sewage or rotten food.

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Something in my hindbrain was pushing me hard in a direction perhaps best verbalized as “these people are greasy, filthy monkeys and I despise them and I loathe them”.

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But. I’m an experimental mystic. I’ve been accustomed for decades to the knowledge that, often, thoughts and feelings that present themselves in my phenomenological field are generated by what Robert Anton Wilson called “the Robot” – eruptions of the instinct machine that underlies my consciousness. Sometimes I can notice these eruptions happening and not get caught up in them.

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That happened this time. I was able to notice that, when paying attention with the top of my brain, I could not notice any rational reason for me to even dislike these people, let alone feel disgusted and revolted by them. I began to analyze my revulsion as though it were a specimen on a laboratory slide – because when you’re an experimental mystic and your exercises include killing the Buddha, that’s what you do in this kind of situation.

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So let’s start eliminating hypotheses…

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No member of minority X has ever individually done me any harm. Nor are they any sort of social problem in the U.S. – they’re not conspicuously prone to crime or welfare dependency, and they’ve never developed the habit of whining for privileged treatment.

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Minority X does have some tendency to hang out in lower socioeconomic strata, and if forced to it I’d guess they’re at a bit of a mean-IQ disadvantage relative to the American average. But there are lots of other minority groups, of which those things could be said far more strongly, that I’ve never felt viscerally revolted by.

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Now I’m going to explain my feelings about black people; bear with me, this is analytically relevant. The most important point is that black people in particular have never made me feel repelled in the way minority X does. I’ve had black girlfriends and might not implausibly have ended up married to one of them, whereas I cannot easily imagine circumstances under which I would be sexually attracted to a minority X woman; my “ick” reaction would be too strong.

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Scrupulous honesty requires me to report here that there is a small subset of blacks to which I do have a twitchy hindbrain reaction something like “Animal; unsafe; avoid.” But I’ve noticed that blacks outside this subset have that reaction too. so I’m probably not reacting to “race” in this respect. It may be related that I perceive a lot more variety among blacks than I do among minority X.

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Now the uncomfortable part: by any objective measure, blacks as a group are a problem of a kind minority X is not. Lower mean IQ, more crime and violence, more welfare dependency, lots of whining for privileges, etcetera etcetera. And I have had the experience of feeling like I was in physical danger when isolated with a group of black people (just once, on a night train in New Jersey, but that once was more than enough).

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So, if feelings of racial revulsion are in general driven by some sort of tribal or individual threat perception (I asked myself), why didn’t I have a similar response a lot sooner with respect to blacks? Can’t have been familiarity from childhood exposure; I grew up in places, mostly outside the U.S., were there weren’t any black people. Didn’t meet one until my mid-teens.

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OK, so it looks like we can discard sociological theories and rational threat responses. What else could be going on here?

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To find that out, I started paying closer attention to my sensory experiences and gut reactions as I dealt with this group. Which individuals bothered me less, which more. And in what specific ways.

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It only took a few minutes of this for me to identify specific sensory stimuli that were triggering my feelings of revulsion. I’m not going to describe the specific stimuli in detail because I really don’t want anybody to be able to figure out which minority is X. But I can identify three specific triggers.

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One was: their skin color looks fecal. The other was: their bone structure doesn’t look human. And they’re just off-reference enough to be much more creepy than if they looked less like people, like bad CGI or shambling undead in a B movie. When I paid close enough attention, these were the three basic data under the revulsion; my hindbrain thought it was surrounded by alien shit zombies.

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My forebrain, meanwhile, was all like “What is up with you, hindbrain?” Apparently my human-recognition template needed some updating.

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The pressure on me eased a bit when I realized that what I was experiencing was a really severe case of Uncanny Valley reaction, and that more exposure to minority X might well stretch my template to the point where they didn’t seem so creepily repulsive any more.

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One of the many, many things I learned from Robert Heinlein is encapsulated in this quite from Assignment In Eternity: “Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.” Most people, most of the time, construct theory to justify their gut feelings rather than actually reasoning from facts. If you do reliably reason from facts – and can continue reasoning even when you are angry, tired, upset, or feel threatened, then you are the homo novus of that story, and it is up to you to save the world for your less able human kin.

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That story influenced my thinking a lot as a child and young man. And I am proud to say that this time, at least, I was homo novus. I didn’t let my Robot run me. I kept analyzing until I was able to isolate and identify the glitch in my wetware, and I coped. Thank you, RAH.

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But…what if I hadn’t been so self-aware?

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If I hadn’t been training myself in applied rationality and experimental mysticism so hard for so long, I might very well have rationalized. That is, unthinkingly accepted that revulsion experience against minority X as part of me and then begun to construct justifications around it. Like, reaching to invent reasons to hate minority X.

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I now think this is how racism colonizes peoples’ brains (or one major way it happens, anyhow; I can’t rule out the possibility of other vectors). People fall into the Uncanny Valley reaction, don’t realize they have a wetware glitch, and then accrete layers of rationalization and hatred around that reaction. It’s much like the way primary mystical experiences make people vulnerable to capture by insane religions.

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Now we get to the part where I piss off the “anti-racist” crowd.

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We actually have an implicit cultural prescription for dealing with circumstances like this. It begins with feeling guilty. What you’re supposed to do, especially if you’re white, is transvaluate that revulsion into a sense of mortal sin, then expiate it with huge amounts of compensatory behavior like canonizing Trayvon Martin and hating anybody who even questions affirmative action, minority set-asides, or any other feature of our government-mandated racial spoils system.

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But this is exactly backwards. The last thing you ought to do with feelings of irrational revulsion, whether directed at racial groups or anything else, is emotionally entangle yourself with them and assign extra importance to the memories that involve them. Doing that just invites additional self-damage to no good purpose. It’s what a Buddhist would call akusala, usually translated as “unskillful” or “unwholesome”.

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Better to solve the problem by understanding what is really going on. Your brain is a pile of kluges messily wired together by evolutionary selection. As hard as you try to be rational, it’s going to glitch on you sometimes. When it does that, the right thing to do is notice that you are not the Robot and the glitch is not you.

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I’m not saying guilt is entirely useless. It can be a valuable form of self-regulation when you make a conscious decision that causes unnecessary harm. But that’s not what we’re talking about here; you don’t decide to experience weird apparently-sourceless revulsions against some minority X, it’s just a thing that happens when the dice come up snake-eyes. You’re responsible – and guilty – only if you let the Robot run you.

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For preventing visceral racism, and all the nasty things that flow from it, what we need to do is simple: be sane and be self-aware. I mentioned “akusala” for a reason; this is the kind of problem where guilt doesn’t help, but some grasp on the Buddhist psychology of non-attachment does.

diff --git a/20130728171408.blog b/20130728171408.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..65bd7ea --- /dev/null +++ b/20130728171408.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Victory is sweet +

Ever since the open-source rebranding in 1998, I’ve been telling people that “open source” should not be capitalized because it’s an engineering term of art, and that we would have achieved victory when the superiority of (uncapitalized) open source seeped into popular culture as a taken-for-granted background assumption.

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There’s a thriller writer named Brad Thor who I never heard of until he publicly offered to buy George Zimmerman any weapon he likes as a replacement for the pistol the police impounded after the Trayvon Marin shooting. What Thor was really protesting, it seems, was the fact that Zimmerman didn’t get his pistol back when he was acquitted; instead, the federal Justice Department has impounded it while they look into trumping up civil-rights charges against Zimmerman.

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This made me curious. The books are pretty routine airport-novel stuff, full of exotic locations and skulduggery and firefights. Like a lot of the genre, they have a substantial component of equipment porn – lovingly detailed descriptions of weapons and espionage devices.

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Amidst all this equipment porn the characters casually use “open source” (specifically of encryption software) as a way of conveying that it’s the best available. And the author writes as though he expects his readers to understand this.

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Victory is sweet.

diff --git a/20130814121734.blog b/20130814121734.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2347db5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130814121734.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Summer vacation 2013 +

The last couple of weeks have been my vacation, and full of incident.This explains the absence of blogging.

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First, World Boardgaming Championships. I did respectably, making quarter- and semi-finals in a couple of events, but failed in my goal to make the Power Grid finals again this year and place higher than fifth.

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I did very well in Conflict of Heroes, though; my final game – with the tournament organizer – was a an epic slugfest that attracted the attention of Uwe Eickert (the game’s designer) who watched the last half enthralled. I lost by only 1 point and was told I’d be put on the Wall of Honor. I like my chances at the finals next year.

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Then Summer Weapons Retreat. Huge fun as usual; I spent most of the week working on Florentine (two-sword) technique. with some excursions into polearm and hand-and-a-half sword. I’ve posted a few pictures on my G+ feed.

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First full day I was home, a thunderstorm blew out the router in my basement. Yes I had it on a UPS, but ground surges (though rare) do happen; this one toasted the Ethernet switch. Diagnosing, replacing, and dealing with the second-order effects of that ate most of yesterday.

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Now life is back to relatively normal, though it will take a few days for the muscle aches from a week of hard training to entirely subside. Blogging will resume.

diff --git a/20130823001908.blog b/20130823001908.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8a6e592 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130823001908.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +vms-empire 1.10 released +

There’s a genre of computer games called 4X (explore/expand/exploit/exterminate). well-known examples of which include the Civilization series and Master of Orion.

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Ever wonder what the ur-progenitor of this genre was, the game at the root of 4X in the way Colossal Cave Adventure created the genre of dungeon-crawl games? It was Walter Bright’s game “Empire” from the early 1970s. You can read about it at his page on Classic Empire.

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Since 1994 I’ve maintained an early Empire workalike written by Chuck Simmons in 1987 to run under the now-extinct VMS operating system; it was ported to Unix immediately, and remains to my best of knowledge the only open-source version or variant of Empire available.

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Walter Bright does not acknowledge this version’s existence on his Empire page, which is fair because he didn’t write it and probably doesn’t consider it to be “Empire” at all. But it is close in gameplay and style to the earliest of Bright’s versions, except for being able to display its crude character-cell maps in color (I added that back when color terminals were cutting-edge technology).

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If you love Civ or MOO, try this out for a look at what the computer 4X game was like before pixel graphics. The display and command interface are primitive by today’s standards, but the AI and general gameplay have held up surprisingly well. It’s instructive to see how many of the core tropes of later 4X games are already present in this one.

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You can get version 1.10 of VMS-Empire here.

diff --git a/20130824035645.blog b/20130824035645.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cf4be2e --- /dev/null +++ b/20130824035645.blog @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +Questioning transsexuality +

In Bradley Manning Is Not a Woman, Kevin Willamson makes a case that feeling like a transsexual – that is, that one is either a man in the body of a woman or vice-versa – should be regarded as a mental illness to be treated by therapy rather than with sex-reassignment surgery.

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The article surprised me by presenting a coherent case for this position that I cannot dismiss as garden-variety social-conservative chuntering. I found the parallel with what Willamson calls BIID particularly troubling. If we treat people who desire to electively amputate their own arms and legs as mentally ill, why do we judge people who want to amputate the genitals they were born with any differently? What makes one an illness and the other a lifestyle choice?

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As a libertarian I’m inclined to think that people have a right to mutilate their own bodies any way they like, provided that the surgical and after-care costs aren’t forcibly extracted from anybody else. But libertarian respect for autonomy cannot entirely banish the concept of mental illness either. Some people have minds that are broken and need treatment; respecting their autonomy too much to deliver treatment condemns them to lives full of needless and avoidable pain.

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In the rest of this essay I’m therefore going to ignore, on purpose, the question of how to reconcile libertarian values with a theory of mental illness. I feel justified in this by a particularly interesting feature of Willamson’s argument.

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Williamson’s contribution is to show that it’s quite difficult to construct a theory of “mental illness” that includes BIID but excludes transsexuality. Given the high frequency with which post-op transsexuals commit suicide, Willamson even could have argued that people with BIID are less ill than transsexuals, evidenced by the fact that they’re less self-destructive. Tellingly, suicide rates are not significantly lower among transsexuals who cannot get reassignment surgery.

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Thus: if libertarians are going to have a theory of mental illness at all, we will be required to grapple with the philosophical issues raised by transsexuality in the same way as non-libertarians for whom “mental illness” is a much less fraught and suspicious concept. And that is he last thing I will have to say about libertarianism here.

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I’ve known two transsexuals well enough to believe I have some idea of what their inner life is like; I’ve met, I think, four others. I’ve felt sympathy for all of them – but Willamson reminds me that sympathy may be as easy but serious a mistake here as it would be with respect to a paranoid schizophrenic. (This is my thinking, not his; Williamson never discusses paranoid schizophrenics or whatever the DSM is calling them this week.)

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How is Bradley Manning’s expressed belief that he is a woman trapped in a man’s body epistemically distinguishable from a paranoid schizophrenic’s belief that (say) he is pursued by invisible demons who compel him to burn his own flesh? I’m a predictivist and judge truth claims by how they cash out as observations of future events; what Williamson forces me to recognize is that I can’t really formulate a consequential test for either claim.

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Furthermore, I can’t trust what the “transsexual” Bradley Manning tells me about his situation any more than I can trust what the demon-haunted paranoid tells me about his. In neither case are the referents of their claims located anywhere but inaccessibly within their own skulls.

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Accordingly, I can’t find principled grounds to classify one as a delusional system and the other as not. Now, one might say: there are no such things as invisible demons! But: where is the evidence that there is any such thing as “women trapped inside mens’ bodies” or vice-versa?

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Willamson reminds us that the concept of a psychological gender identity separate from one’s physical one actually has about the same confirmation status as invisible demons. The only warrant for it is a gallimaufry of speculation based on reports from a population that by objective measures seems to be highly disturbed and dysfunctional (and the 18-20% suicide rate is only the the most obvious indicator).

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So, why do we not treat self-reported transsexuals as insane and in need of treatment for a delusional disorder? I can anticipate a lot of possible replies; the trouble is that all of them apply just as well (or just as poorly) to the case of BIID or delusional paranoia.

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One of the stupidest possible counters is also probably the most common one: if you don’t accept transsexuals’ reports of their own condition, you’re being nasty and unfeeling to them. Um, OK, how does this apply to paranoids? Am I required to believe in invisible tormenting demons on pain of being considered cruel to those people?

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Another, possibly even stupider argument is that if I don’t believe that physiological and physical gender identities can be opposed I am taking the side of Bad People – conservatives, phallocrats, whatever. I don’t really see this as being any different than the religious argument my ancestors might have been given for the existence of invisible demons. It’s just as obviously fallacious.

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Back in more religious times, belief in invisible demons was not helpful to people we would now categorize as delusional paranoids; a hefty dose of Thorazine, while not a cure, at least manages their condition, bringing down the incidence of suicides and self-mutilation and other violence.

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I don’t actually see, now that Williamson has slapped me upside the head enough so I notice the issue, that a belief in separated psychological and physiological sexual identities is any more helpful to transsexuals. The objective check is that acting on this belief doesn’t seem to reduce their suicide rates significantly.

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First, do no harm. We’ll know we have a rationally and ethically sound way of handling “transsexuality” when we find one with sequelae significantly less grim than doing nothing. Right now, gender reassignment surgery doesn’t qualify – Williamson quotes a British research group affiliated with NHS reporting “no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is clinically effective.”

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I think Williamson is right that it’s time to be much more critical about the theory and ideological fashions that led us to where we are now. A good place to start would be to ask how we might establish that “transsexuality” exists and what it means, after applying the same skepticism that we do to self-reports by other people who report an urge to lop off their body parts.

diff --git a/20130826132007.blog b/20130826132007.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7737d5e --- /dev/null +++ b/20130826132007.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Linus’s secret revealed! +

Yeah, that whole Finland thing? It’s just a cover story.

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Back in the early Seventies an otherwise unassuming professor of philosophy named John Norman had a minor succes de scandale with a series of books set on a planet called Gor, a sort of counter-Earth in the same orbit as our planet but on the exact opposite side of the sun. These were quite like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “John Carter of Mars” novels and probably patterned after them – sword-and-planet swashbucklery in a miliieu that mixed tropes from Earth history with plot hooks involving aliens and exotic super-science.

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What made them scandalous was Norman’s sexual ideology. On Gor, women are slaves, and like being slaves. A lot. Norman had this idea that the unacknowledged heart of female psychology is a desire to be dominated into a state of ecstatic sexual surrender. It is fair to note that this isn’t completely crazy; studies of female sex fantasies consistantly report rape and domination as the #1 most popular theme (a female friend of mine, commenting on this fact, calls these the “It’s not my fault” fantasies). But fantasy isn’t reality, and the firestorm of indignation you’d expect eventually got Norman quietly blacklisted at all of the major SF imprints.

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I read the first four of the Gor books so long ago that I had almost completely forgotten them. If you’re wondering why, three reasons. First, Norman’s worldbuilding was pretty good, considering; the man knows a lot of history and ethnography and I had fun playing spot-the-references. Second, this was before the post-Star-Wars boom in SF publishing, when the total published output of SF and fantasy was so much smaller that anyone who read as fast as I did more or less had to take anything they could get. Third: while I never believed Norman’s ideology or identified much with his unintentionally funny caricatures of masculinity, it was sort of clinically interesting to watch him unfold the ideas and see how far he’d push them.

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But I lost interest pretty quickly and forgot about these books for nigh-on forty years. Until last night, when I dropped a joking reference to John Norman on someone much younger than me, found myself explaining it, hopped on over to Wikipedia, and discovered a shocking fact!

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Er, no, not that Norman is still cranking out Gor e-books and up to #32 (“Smugglers of Gor”). No. The Wikipedia Gor page has a map. A map, not featured in any of the paperbacks, that reminded me of a toponymic detail meaningless to me at the time, but which since 1992 must assume ominous new significance.

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Like Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Norman frequently played with the fabulation that the Gor books are no fiction but an actual chronicle of a counter-Earth, and that his heroes are real people who traveled, through the instrumentality of the alien Priest-Kings, from Earth to Gor…or from Gor to Earth. Even now, Goreans may walk among us, marvelling at our decadence and pitying our unhappy, undominated women. Perhaps exhibiting strange powers of interplanetary techno-wizardry born of civilizations more ancient and advanced than our own.

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Strange powers of interplanetary techno-wizardry, I say. And there, on the map of known Gor; far to the north, beyond the Sardar Mountains where the Priest-Kings have their impenetrable fastnesses; north as well of the port city of Lydias at the edge of civilization; between the vast boreal forests and the frigid arctic; there is a place where hardy Vikingoids do the hardy Vikingoid thing with the huge battleaxes and furs and drinking horns and yeah, you know the drill.

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And on the map of Gor, the name of that place is writ clearly: Torvaldsland

diff --git a/20130827201100.blog b/20130827201100.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..94366c8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130827201100.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Hunger Games for real +

“Students can only have one serving of meat or other protein. However, rich kids can buy a second portion each day on their own dime.” This is from coverage of Michelle Obama’s national school-lunch regulations.

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Protein-starving the peasantry so it will remain docile and biddable is a tyrant’s maneuver thousands of years old. I was unaware until today that this has become official policy in the American public school system.

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How clever of them to sell it as a healthy-eating measure! That’ll get all the gentry liberals on board; of course, their kids will be buying that second serving.

diff --git a/20130830084404.blog b/20130830084404.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..27aa59f --- /dev/null +++ b/20130830084404.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +Fixing the fast-food strike +

So, thousands of fast-food workers are out on strike against the national burger chains, demanding that their wages be doubled to $15 per hour. But the national chains don’t control employee wages; how much to pay their people is in the hands of local franchise owners,

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Therefore, if you are one of the concerned, caring, and vastly indignant activists behind this strike, I’m here to tell you that your social-justice problem has a simple solution. Take out a loan (or put together the money from your like-minded activist friends), buy a franchise from one of the chains, and hire workers at $15 an hour.

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There, that was simple, wasn’t it? You’ll make money hand over fist and demonstrate to all those eeevil corporations that they can too pay a “just wage”; they just don’t want to because they’re greedy.

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Or…maybe not. If it were that simple, everyone would be doing it. The commercial landscape would be alive with virtuous workers’ collectives paying their members fat wages and thumbing their noses at top-hatted plutocrats. Why doesn’t this happen?

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Because in order for you to pay a worker $15 per hour, that worker has to net you more than $15 an hour in revenue. Otherwise your business runs at a loss until it crashes and the job goes away.

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But it’s actually worse than that. Employer Social Security “contributions” approximately double the costs per burger-flipper right away; other tax and regulatory burdens push it up further. To sustain $15 an hour in wages, your employees have to pull $35 an hour or more in revenue each.

+

That kind of revenue per employee is relatively easy to arrange in a profession or a skilled trade, or even at a really chi-chi restaurant. But we’re talking flipping burgers here, which raises two serious problems.

+

One is that flipping burgers is not neurosurgery. The job procedures are simple and mechanical; adding a lot of value with a human touch is hard. In truth the main reason burger joints have human employees at all (other than maybe one machine-tender) is that people like to have their food handed to them by a human being rather than catching it off the end of a conveyer belt.

+

The other problem is that price competition in the fast-food industry is brutal. The name of the game is fast and cheap; that means your franchise has to run on a razor thin margin. If you try to charge significantly more over your cost of the basic inputs (meat, potatoes, cooking oil, electricity) than your competitors do, your customers will desert you.

+

Which is why the workers’ collective scenario fails. Your social-justice intentions won’t change the cost of those inputs one bit; the only way you can generate enough revenue per hour to cover that $35 or more in cost per employee is to raise prices. A lot. At which point your customers will instantly bail out.

+

Franchise owners aren’t demons. What they can do is constrained by economics. The wages they can pay are effectively bounded above by the amount of revenue each employee can capture, which in turn is bounded by price competition. If that amount is low, the wages will be too, and no amount of political screaming can fix that.

+

This is why minimum wages kill jobs. In the U.S. of 2013, the magic threshold is abour $14.50 an hour – if an employee can’t generate that much gain, the job either won’t exist at all or will only exist illegally off the books where taxes and regulation can’t more than double its cost.

+

But if you’re illiterate, unskilled, or just young, you may not be able to net $14.50 per hour for an employer. In that case you get the shaft. You might be willing to work for less, but the system will “protect” you by keeping you unemployed and desperate.

+

How this logic applies to other low-wage service jobs – in places like (say) big-box retail stores – is left as an easy exercise.

diff --git a/20130903112150.blog b/20130903112150.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9ac99bb --- /dev/null +++ b/20130903112150.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +The Smartphone Wars: Nokia gives it up for Microsoft +

It’s been quite a while since I wrote a Smartphone Wars post; I let the series lapse when I concluded that the source I was using for U.S. market share figures had likely disconnected from reality (and more recent surveys from other sources suggest I was right). But the developments of the last couple of days demand comment. Nokia has sold its phone business to Microsoft; Stephen Elop has returned to Microsoft to head its devices group; and there is talk he might succeed Ballmer.

+

You couldn’t make this stuff up for a satirical novel and have it believed. The conspiracy theorists who maintained that Elop was a Microsoft mole sent in to set up a takeover look prescient now – but a takeover to what purpose? Nokia’s phone business, the world’s most successful and respected a few short years ago, is now a shattered wreck.

+

And as for Elop: he masterminded what was probably the biggest destruction in shareholder value ever – and this is the guy who’s being talked of as Ballmer’s successor? Astonishing. On his record, the man isn’t competent to run a Taco Bell store; that that he’s even in consideration suggests Microsoft’s board has developed some perverse desire to replace a strategic idiot with an even more wrongheaded strategic idiot.

+

+

While all this is going on, IDC now has Android up to 79.3% worldwide market share and still rising; iOS is down to 13.2% and falling; and the rest of the ecosystems are scrambling for 8% of scraps. Microsoft, at 3.7%, is just barely leading the bush leagues in the presence of Blackberry and Symbian’s continuing collapse.

+

There have been a rash of stories lately about how good Microsoft’s sales-growth figures look year over year, but I rather suspect the company is up to its old channel-stuffing tricks. Actual consumers don’t report any interest in Windows phones (I’m not seeing them on the street) and the company’s Surface tablet line has been a dismal flop.

+

The new deal means Nokia is done, finished, gone. It will retain only its digital-mapping and network-equipment businesses and a handful of lottery tickets in the form of patent lawsuits; the smartphones and dumbphones go to Microsoft, where as head of the devices group Elop will (incredibly) continue to manage them even if he doesn’t succeed Ballmer.

+

One thing the change means is that we can expect the dumbphone side of the business (the part that, you know, made all the actual money back when Nokia made money) to be resource-starved and wound down even more rapidly than this was happening at Nokia. Because there is no place in Microsoft’s strategy for a business that doesn’t feed consumers to its Windows/Office cash cow, and there’s no effective way dumbphones can do that.

+

But I don’t really see how acquiring Nokia’s smartphone business gives Microsoft any advantage it didn’t already have under its previous sweetheart deal with the company. Well, unless Ballmer somehow thinks 0.5% market share is worth paying $2.2 billion for, which would be exceptionally stupid even by his chair-throwing, monkey-grunting standards.

+

If Elop was a mole, what were his instructions? “Elop. Go forth. Destroy Nokia so we can buy things we already effectively control for huge amounts of money.” Sense this makes not.

+

I’m put in mind of the wave of mergers in the 1980s among mainframe computer manufacturers, what we called at the time “dinosaurs mating”. Those didn’t make any sense either; when you merge two huge, doomed, inefficient thunder-lizards together you don’t tend to get a mammal.

+

Meanwhile – and of course – Android continues to stomp its competition flat. Even the post-Jobs Apple can’t stem the tide; it’s pretty close to the 10% niche market share I predicted back in 2009 already, with no sign that trend will or can be reversed.

diff --git a/20130924191551.blog b/20130924191551.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2956875 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130924191551.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Can micropatronage save the net? +

How can we fund common Internet infrastructure without risking that it will be captured by corporations or governments? He who pays the piper tends to call the tune, which is a bad thing when you don’t actually want the content of your network to be controlled.

+

This is a problem I’ve been worrying about a lot for the last couple of years. I’ve been working on one organized attack on it that I’m not ready to talk about in public yet (but will be soon; some of this blog’s regulars are already briefed in). I’ve just found something else that might help which I can talk about: micropatronage.

+

+

There’s a site called gittip.com that provides a way for people to give small recurring gifts, weekly, to a person or project team. Donors give it payment system information; weekly gifts are then automatically shipped unless donors elect to stop. It’s meant to handle small amounts, with an upper limit of $100 per patron/client pair per week.

+

Gittip has the interesting property that, as a patronage receiver, you don’t know who your patrons are – all you know is the total amount you’re being gifted. So people can fund you, but they can’t attach any strings. There’s still a kind of market check; if you’re not doing work that your donor base as a whole finds interesting, your patronage volume will drop.

+

As a mechanism for funding commons development that is insulated from political and commercial pressure this seems very promising. Of course it has other uses, too; creators of all kinds might be able to use it to turn reputation into a steady cash flow.

+

That is, if there are enough patrons. Chad Whitacre and his team are betting that a lot of people will actually prefer making small recurring donations to single lump-sum gifts. So far there is one piece of objective evidence that suggests they’re right: gittip development is itself funded through gittip.

+

Watch this space. Soon, the gittip team and I will try an interesting social experiment…

diff --git a/20130925074655.blog b/20130925074655.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ea6417e --- /dev/null +++ b/20130925074655.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +coverity-submit 1.10 is released +

coverity-submit automates the process of running the Coverity static checker’s front-end tools and shipping the results to their public server for analysis.

+

One bug fix, two minor features. The build-version (-b) and description (-t) options now have sensible defaults. When run from a repository, the default for -b is the commit ID of the head revision. The default for -t is an ISO8601 release timestamp.

+

Actually, the build-version default presently only works in a git repo. I’ll cheerfully take patches that support other version-control systems.

+

Code here.

diff --git a/20130926085146.blog b/20130926085146.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..525d8a3 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130926085146.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +coverity-submit 1.11 is released +

Yes, I know I shipped a point release of this yesterday. Then some new features landed as a direct result of that release. Mainly, smart defaults for user name and ID, and repo support for hg/bzr/svn. Also (cosmetic addition) the project now has a logo.

+

Code here.

diff --git a/20130927035003.blog b/20130927035003.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a946d58 --- /dev/null +++ b/20130927035003.blog @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +coverity-submit 1.12 released +

OK, this is embarrassing. I got a Mercurial command wrong in 1.11 – thanks to A&D regular Jay Maynard for pointing out the error. But I landed another minor feature. So there.

diff --git a/20131006221142.blog b/20131006221142.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f01692e --- /dev/null +++ b/20131006221142.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Sometimes I hear voices +

I had a very curious experience recently. I discovered that I know what it’s like to be insane. No, save the obvious jokes; this is interesting.

+

This came about because I read a magazine article somewhere which I cannot now identify – recent, online, a relatively prestigious publication with a tradition of think pieces – about patterns in delusional schizophrenia. [UPDATE: the article was How reality caught up with paranoid delusions.] The thesis of the article was simple: though the content of schizophrenic delusions changes wildly in different cultural contexts, there’s an underlying motivation for them that never varies and produces a fundamental sameness.

+

+

The simple, constant thing is that delusional schizophrenics lose the capability to identify all the thoughts in their head as belonging to themselves. In an effort to make sense of their experience, they invent elaborate theories which attribute their disconnected thoughts to external agencies. Gods, demons, orbital mind-control lasers – the content of such delusions varies wildly, but the function is always the same – to restore a sense of causal order to the schizophrenic’s universe, to impose a narrative on the eruptions that he or she can no longer recognize as “self”.

+

It’s a startling shift in perspective to realize that the construction of schizophrenic delusions arises from the same drive that yields scientific theory-building. Both are Heideggerian rearrangements of the cognitive toolkit, strategies driven by the necessity of coping with the experienced world. The schizophrenic’s tragedy is that the most important fact about his or her experiential world (how much of it is self looking at self) is inaccessible.

+

A few weeks later this theory conjugated with some memories and I suddenly realized that I know what this is like! I’ve experienced it. Occasionally, in deep hypnagogic states, I hear voices.

+

For those of you in the cheap seats, a hypnagogic state is a kind of consciousness you sometimes pass through between waking and sleep. In general people aren’t very good at remembering what this experience is like – recall, like that of dreams, tends to fade quickly unless you make an effort immediately on full wakefulness to copy the impression out of whatever working storage it’s using into long-term memory. Through long practice I know how to do this – it’s a core part of the “experimental mystic” toolkit.

+

I looked it up. Turns out auditory hallucinations are not a particularly uncommon report from hypnagogia. Mine are, however, unusually coherent; where most people mostly get babble full of neologisms, I get snarky commentary on things I’ve been thinking about that’s not just whole sentences but whole paragraphs.

+

What unites my experience with the delusional schizophrenic’s is that while I’m in the hypnagogic state I have trouble retaining the fact that the voices aren’t outside my head. The “self” tag on those voices has been at least partially lost and is difficult to recover.

+

To be delusionaly insane, I now grok, would be to be like that all the time. I reintegrate my sense of self without effort after waking; the fragmented mind of the schizophrenic can’t do that and is driven to add ever more elaborate epicycles to his or her theory of the world to paper over the lack.

+

This isn’t the most important thing I’ve learned this year (that’d be some of the ideas in Nassim Taleb’s book Anti-Fragile, so far), but it may be the most interesting.

diff --git a/20131019220740.blog b/20131019220740.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2ae8381 --- /dev/null +++ b/20131019220740.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Stratum 1 time server on a tiny SBC? +

I’ve been working on GPSD a lot recently – we’re heading towards a 3.10 release with a lot of new features. As part of this release I’ve decided to ship a HOWTO on setting up a high-quality NTP time server using GPSD. In the course of working on that, I’ve had an idea.

+

The idea has two antecedents. One is that if you start with any one of several inexpensive GPS modules (my favorite of which is the u-blox 6), and add GPSD to read it and feed an ntpd instance, it’s possible to build an NTP server that meets the usual standard for public Stratum 1 time servers – 10mSec or better accuracy to UTC.

+

The other is that there is a raft of inexpensive SBCs that run Linux out there – Arduino, Raspberry Pi and the current new hotness BeagleBone. So here’s my thought: why not build a low-power Stratum 1 timeserver on a credit-card-sized SBC?

+

+

A little googling tells me that someone has already mated a GPS to a BeagleBone Black. His design uses a u-blox, but has one serious drawback – he doesn’t wire up 1PPS from the receiver. This is a must if you want sub-second precision on your time service.

+

Now, to be fair, the D2523T he’s using might not bring 1PPS out from the u-blox5 to the module header. On the other hand, I looked up the D2523T’s data sheet on Sparkfun and their pinout for it has a lead labeled “GPS LED”.

+

Bingo! Boys and girls, the LED on your GPS is driven by 1PPS – the once-per-second flash it emits is top of GPS second accurate to 50 nanoseconds. It seems likely that we could take the right small variant of this design, add ntpd to it, do a little configuration, and stand back! Instant Stratum 1 in a smaller package than your smartphone, powered off its USB cable.

+

Well, that is, if the RS232 headers on the BeagleBone include any handshake line. Carrier Detect, Ring Indicator, even Clear To Send – any of these would be good enough. 1PPS has to travel over something that isn’t TX.

+

It would be a fun project. I wish I had time to do it.

diff --git a/20131029013958.blog b/20131029013958.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a7c0973 --- /dev/null +++ b/20131029013958.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Your money or your spec +

reposurgeon has been stable for several months now, since the Subversion dump analyzer got to the point where people stopped appearing in my mailbox with the Pathological Subversion Repository Fuckup Of The Week.

+

Still, every once in a longer while somebody will materialize telling me they have some situation in a repo conversion that they want me to help them fix. The general form of these requests is like this. “I have {detailed description of a branch/merge topology nightmare that makes Eric’s brain hurt to contemplate}. What do I do to fix it?”

+

I am now going to announce a policy about this. There are exactly two ways ways you can get me to solve your repository problem.

+

+

1. Pay me money to soothe away the pain. It will not be a small amount of money; my hours don’t come cheap and these jobs tend to eat a lot of them – not on the surgery itself but on the analysis leading up to it.

+

2. Specify a new surgical primitive that will fix your problem. To go this route, you need to (a) clearly describe the primitive, (b) send me a small test repository exhibiting its preconditions, and (c) explain what the postcondition is – that is, what you want the repository DAG to look like after the operation.

+

If your primitive is well-specified, and you’re willing to wait until I get it done at my own pace, I’ll write it for free. If you want a deadline date, you have to buy my time to guarantee that.

+

If your primitive is not well specified, and/or you can’t produce a test case, I’ll probably tell you to come back when you can fulfil both conditions. You can buy partial exemption from these conditions by paying me lots of money.

+

That is all.

diff --git a/20131030220951.blog b/20131030220951.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..103a2fd --- /dev/null +++ b/20131030220951.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Dell UltraSharp 2713 monitor – bait and switch warning +

I bought a Dell-branded product this afternoon. That was a mistake I will not repeat.

+

Summary: the 2713UM only reaches its rated 2560×1440 resolution when connected via DVI-D. On HDMI it is limited to 1920×1080; on VGA to 2048×1152. This $700 and supposedly professional-grade monitor is thus functionally inferior to the $300 Auria I still have connected to the other head of the same video card, which does 2560×1440 over any of these cables.

+

Two things make this extra infuriating:

+

I spent more than four hours on the phone with three different Dell technical-support people to find out that not only don’t they know how to fix this, nobody can give any reason for it. It’s a completely arbitrary, senseless limit. The monitor’s EDID hardware apparently tells lies to the host system that low-ball its capabilities. This couldn’t happen by accident; somebody designed in this nonsense.

+

And then neglected to tell potential customers about it. Nothing anywhere in the promotional material for this monitor even hints at these limits, and Dell’s own technical support people haven’t been clued in either. Bait and switch taken to a whole new level.

+

(Why did I buy a Dell product? Because it was the only thing I could get my hands on same-day that matched the specs of my other Auria, which went flickery-crazy early this afternoon.)

+

When I unloaded about this on Tech Support Guy #3, he passed me to a marketing representative. I explained, relatively politely under the circumstances, that I has over 15K social-media followers and was planning to give Dell a public black eye over their repeated bungling unless somebody gave me a really good reason not to.

+

She declined to send me $400 so I wouldn’t have been taken worse than by buying another Auria, then passed me to somebody she described as a manager. But I could tell by the accent he was just another drone in a call center in East Fuckistan who had neither the ability nor the intention to improve my day. After two more iterations of this I had had enough and hung up.

+

Dell. You pay more, but you’ll get less. Pass it on.

+

(Yes, I typoed the model number originally.)

diff --git a/20131105225438.blog b/20131105225438.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6ed73d0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20131105225438.blog @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +Finally, one-line endianness detection in the C preprocessor +

In 30 years of C programming, I thought I’d seen everything. Well, every bizarre trick you could pull with the C preprocessor, anyway. I was wrong. Contemplate this:

+
+#include <stdint .h>
+
+#define IS_BIG_ENDIAN (*(uint16_t *)"\0\xff" < 0x100)
+
+

That is magnificently awful. Or awfully magnificent, I'm not sure which. And it pulls off a combination of qualities I've never seen before:

+

+
    +
  • Actually portable (well, assuming you have C99 stdint.h, which is a pretty safe assumption in 2013).
    • +
  • Doesn't require runtime code.
    • +
  • Doesn't allocate storage, not even constant storage.
    • +
  • One line, no auxiliary definitions required.
    • +
  • Readily comprehensible by inspection.
    • +
+

Every previous endianness detector I've seen failed one or more of these tests and annoyed me in so doing.

+

In GPSD it's replacing this mess:

+
+/*
+   __BIG_ENDIAN__ and __LITTLE_ENDIAN__ are define in some gcc versions
+  only, probably depending on the architecture. Try to use endian.h if
+  the gcc way fails - endian.h also doesn not seem to be available on all
+  platforms.
+*/
+#ifdef __BIG_ENDIAN__
+#define WORDS_BIGENDIAN 1
+#else /* __BIG_ENDIAN__ */
+#ifdef __LITTLE_ENDIAN__
+#undef WORDS_BIGENDIAN
+#else
+#ifdef BSD
+#include <sys/endian.h>
+#else
+#include <endian.h>
+#endif
+#if __BYTE_ORDER == __BIG_ENDIAN
+#define WORDS_BIGENDIAN 1
+#elif __BYTE_ORDER == __LITTLE_ENDIAN
+#undef WORDS_BIGENDIAN
+#else
+#error "unable to determine endianess!"
+#endif /* __BYTE_ORDER */
+#endif /* __LITTLE_ENDIAN__ */
+#endif /* __BIG_ENDIAN__ */
+
+

And that, my friends, is progress.

+

UPDATE: I was wrong: I thought the preprocessor would do all these operations, but it turns out this macro does expand to a small anount of code. It’s still pretty neat, though.

diff --git a/20131122110446.blog b/20131122110446.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bae2394 --- /dev/null +++ b/20131122110446.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +GPSD 3.10 is shipped – and announcing the GPSD Time Service HOWTO +

Blogging has been light recently because I’ve been working very hard on a major GPSD release, which I just shipped. This is mostly new features, not bugfixes, and it’s probably the most new code we’ve shipped in one release since about 2009.

+

+

The most user-visible feature of 3.10 is that 1PPS events are now visible in gpsmon – if you have a GPS that delivers this signal you can fire it up and watch how your system clock drifts in real time against the GPS top of second. Also you’ll see visible indicators of PPS in the packet logging window at the start of each reporting cycle.

+

For those of you using GPSD with marine AIS radios, the Inland AIS system used on the Thames and Danube receivers is now fully decoded. We’ve also added support for the aid-to-navigation messages used in English and Irish coastal waters. There’s a new AIS data relay utility, gps2udp, that makes it easy to use GPSD to feed AIS aggregation sites like AISHub. AIS report control has been cleaned up, with text dumping of controlled-vocabulary fields no longer conditional on the “scaled” flag (that was dumb!) but done unconditionally in new JSON attributes paired with the numeric ones.

+

There’s alpha-stage RTCM3 decoding; I expect this to become more fully baked in future releases. No ADSB yet, alas – we’ve had people express interest but nobody is actually coding.

+

The usual bug fixes, too. Use of remote data sources over TCP/IP is much more reliable than it was in 3.9; more generally, the daemon is less vulnerable to incorrectly dropping packets when write boundaries from an I/O source land in the middle of packets. Mode and speed changes to u-blox devices now work reliably; there had been a race condition after device startup that made them flaky.

+

The most significant changes, though, are in features related to time service. GPSD, which is used by quite a few Stratum 1 network time servers, now feeds ntpd at nanosecond rather than microsecond resolution. The PPS drift report that is part of gpsd’s JSON report stream if your GPS emits 1PPS is now nanosecond-resolution as well.

+

And, after weeks of effort, we’ve shipped along with 3.10 the first edition of the GPSD Time Service HOWTO. This document explains in practical detail how to use GPSD and a 1PPS-capable GPS to set up your own Stratum 1 time server.

+

This might not seem like a big deal, but the HOWTO is actually the first explanation accessible to ordinary mortals of a good deal of what was previously black magic known only to a handful of metrologists, NTP maintainers, and time-nut hobbyists. What happened was that I cornered several domain experts and beat them mercilessly until they confessed. :-)

+

Now I’m gonna go catch up on my sleep…

diff --git a/20131201104644.blog b/20131201104644.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8b7e653 --- /dev/null +++ b/20131201104644.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Reposurgeon Battles All Monsters! +

Though there haven’t been any huge dramatic improvements since Subversion analysis got good enough to use even on horribly gnarly repositories, reposurgeon continues to quietly get better and faster. I shipped 2.43 a few minutes ago.

+

+

Credit for much of the recent under-the-hood work goes to Julien Rivaud. He’s been continuing to speed-tune the code in support of the conversion of the huge and tangled Blender repository, which finally finished last week. His latest improvement speeds up the evaluation of selection expressions by short-circuiting logical operations as they’re evaluated left to right.

+

Meanwhile, I’ve been adding some user-visible features as the need for them becomes apparent in doing conversions. Currently I’m in the process of lifting the history of groff from CVS to git – a surprisingly easy one, considering the source.

+

Recent new primitives include: =O, =M, =F selectors for parentless, merge, and fork commits; a svn_noautoignoresioption to suppress the normal simulation of default Subversion ignores in a translated repo; a ‘manifest’ command that reports path-to-mark mappings; a ‘tagify’ commant that changes empty commits into tags; and a ‘reparent’ command for modifying ancestry links in the DAG.

+

Fear the reposturgeon!

diff --git a/20131202110254.blog b/20131202110254.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b3984aa --- /dev/null +++ b/20131202110254.blog @@ -0,0 +1,130 @@ +shipper is about to go 1.0 – reviewers requested +

If you’re a regular at A&D or on my G+ feed, and even possibly if you aren’t, you’ll have noticed that I ship an awful lot of code. I do get questions about this; between GPSD, reposurgeon, giflib, doclifter, and bimpty-bump other projects it is reasonable that other hackers sometimes wonder how I do it.

+

Here’s part of my answer: be fanatical about automating away every part of your workflow that you can. Every second you don’t spend on mechanical routines is a second you get to use as creative time.

+

Soon, after an 11-year alpha period, I’m going to ship version 1.0 of one of my main automation tools. This thing would be my secret weapon if I had secrets. The story of how it came to be, and why it took 11 years to mature, should be interesting to other hackers on several different levels.

+

+

The background…

+

I’m the designer or maintainer of around 40 open-source projects. Even allowing for the fact that more than half of those are very stable old code that only needs a release once in a blue moon, the cumulative amount of boring fingerwork involved in keeping these updated is considerable.

+

When I say “boring fingerwork” I’m not even talking about coding effort, but rather the mundane tasks of uploading tarballs to archive locations, updating web pages, mailing out announcements, sending release notifications to Freecode, broadcasting heads-ups on relevant IRC channels, et cetera.

+

For older projects this shipping overhead is often more work than applying the small fixes and patches that trigger each release. It’s tedious, fiddly stuff – and irritatingly error-prone if done by hand.

+

A long time ago, now, I decided to stop doing it by hand. My overall goal was simple: I wanted to be able to type “make release” (or, more recently, “scons release”) in my project directory and have the right things happen, without fail. So I started building a tool to automate away as much tedium and fiddliness as I could. I called it “shipper”, because, well, that’s what it does.

+

Shipper’s job is to identify deliverables (like, say, tarballs and generated web pages) and push them to appropriate destinations (like, a public FTP directory or a website). It’s also intended to issue release notifications over various channels.

+

One of the things all these announcements and many of the names of deliverables will have in common is an embedded version number. One of the goals of shipper’s design is to allow you to specify the release’s version number in one place and one place only – because when you repeat a detail like that from memory you will occasionally get it wrong, with embarrassing results.

+

As for version numbers, so for other pieces of metadata that archive sites and forges and announcement channels commonly want – like a sort description of the project’s purpose, or a home page link, or the name of a project IRC channel. A design goal is that you only need to specify anything like this once per project; shipper will find it and publish it anywhere it needs to go.

+

To that end, shipper looks in several different places to mine the data it wants. You can specify some things that aren’t project specific, like the Web location of your personal website, in a “.shipper” file in your home directory. If your project has a Debian-style control file, or an RPM specification, it will look in those for things they normally carry, like a homepage location or project description. Finally the project can have its own “.shipper” file to specify other things shipper might need to know.

+

The third kind of knowledge that shipper has is embodied in code. It knows, for example, that if you specify “sourceforge” as a delivery destination, it needs to compose the name of the download directory to which your tarballs should be copied in a particular way that begins with frs.sourceforge.net and includes your project name. Because it would be silly for each and every one of your Makefiles to include that recipe; you might get it wrong the Nth time you repeat it, and what if sourceforge’s site structure changes?

+

There are some things shipper doesn’t try to know. Like, how to send release notifications to freecode.com; what it knows is how to call freecode-submit to do that. Actually, shipper doesn’t even know how to copy files across the network; instead, it knows how to generate scp and lftp commands given a source and destination.

+

I’ve been using versions of shipper on my own projects since 2002. It’s an important enabler of my ability to ship three or four or sometimes even more software releases within the span of a week. But here at Eric Conspiracy Secret Labs, we release no code before its time. And until very recently I was just not happy with shipper’s design.

+

It was getting the job done, but in a ugly way that required lots of option switches and dropping various kinds of intermediate files in the project directory while it was operating. But then I had a conceptual breakthrough.

+

Old shipper was complicated and ugly because it had two main modes of operation: one to show you what it was going to do, by listing the commands it would generate – then another to actually do them. The intermediate files it was leaving around during the process were text content for email and freecode.com announcements.

+

The breakthrough was this: Why not give up on executing commands entirely, and instead generate a shellscript to be piped to sh?

+

With that design, most of the options go away. If you want to see what shipper will do, you run it and look at the output. The contents of what used to be intermediate files are here-documents in the generated shellscript. The Makefile recipe for releasing shipper itself just looks like this:

+
+VERS=$(shell sed <shipper -n -e '/^shipper_version *= *\(.*\)/s//\1/p')
+
+release: shipper-$(VERS).tar.gz shipper-$(VERS).md5 shipper.html
+	shipper version=$(VERS) | sh -x -e
+
+

Here, the output of shipper is being piped to sh -e -x; the options make the first error in a generated command fatal and echo commands to standard output just before they’re performed.

+

Note the trick being played here: VERS, as set in the makefile and passed to shipper, is mined from where the version number is set in the shipper script itself. For a C project, it might make more sense to set the version in the Makefile and pass it into the C compilation with -DVERSION=$(VERS).

+

The point is, either way, there’s a single point of truth about the version number, and all the email and IRC and other announcements that shipper might generate will reflect it.

+

Here is shipper’s control file:

+
+# This is not a real Debian control file, though the syntax is compatible.
+# It's project metadata for the shipper tool
+
+Package: shipper
+
+Description: Automated shipping of open-source project releases.
+ shipper is a power distribution tool for developers with multiple
+ projects who do frequent releases.  It automates the tedious process
+ of shipping a software release and (if desired) templating a project
+ web page. It can deliver releases in correct form to SourceForge,
+ Berlios, and Savannah, and knows how to post a release announcement
+ to freecode.com via freecode-submit.
+
+XBS-Destinations: freecode, mailto:esr@thyrsus.com
+
+Homepage: http://www.catb.org/~esr/shipper
+
+XBS-HTML-Target: index.html
+
+XBS-Gitorious-URL: https://gitorious.org/shipper
+
+XBS-IRC-Channel: irc://chat.freenode.net/#shipper
+
+XBS-Logo: shipper-logo.png
+
+XBS-Freecode-Tags: packaging, distribution
+
+XBS-VC-Tag-Template: %(version)s
+
+

By now you have enough information to guess what most of this is declaring. XBS-Destinations says that shipper should send a release notification to freecode.com and an email notification to me (as a smoke test).

+

The XBS-HTML-Target line tells it to template a simple web page and include it in the web deliverables; you can see the result here. XBS-Logo, if present, is used in generating that page. The template used to generate the [page is easily customized.

+

XBS-VC-Tag-Template tells shipper how to compose a tag to be pushed to the project repo to mark the release. This value simply substitutes in the release version. You might want a prefix, something like like “release-%(version)s”, on yours.

+

Here’s what the shipper-generated release script for shipper looks like:

+
+cat >index.html < <'INAGADADAVIDA'
+
+< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN'
+    'http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd'>
+
+
+[bulky stuff omitted here]
+
+
+
+INAGADADAVIDA
+
+scp -p COPYING login.ibiblio.org:/public/html/catb/esr/shipper/COPYING
+scp -p shipper-0.19.md5 login.ibiblio.org:/public/html/catb/esr/shipper/shipper-0.19.md5
+scp -p NEWS login.ibiblio.org:/public/html/catb/esr/shipper/NEWS
+scp -p TODO login.ibiblio.org:/public/html/catb/esr/shipper/TODO
+scp -p shipper-0.19.tar.gz login.ibiblio.org:/public/html/catb/esr/shipper/shipper-0.19.tar.gz
+scp -p README login.ibiblio.org:/public/html/catb/esr/shipper/README
+scp -p index.html login.ibiblio.org:/public/html/catb/esr/shipper/index.html
+scp -p shipper-logo.png login.ibiblio.org:/public/html/catb/esr/shipper/shipper-logo.png
+git tag -a 0.19 -m 'Tagged for external release 0.19'
+git push; git push --tags
+freecode-submit < <'INAGADADAVIDA'
+Project: shipper
+Version: 0.19
+Description: Automated shipping of open-source project releases.
+    shipper is a power distribution tool for developers with multiple
+    projects who do frequent releases.  It automates the tedious process
+    of shipping a software release and (if desired) templating a project
+    web page. It can deliver releases in correct form to SourceForge,
+    Berlios, and Savannah, and knows how to post a release announcement
+    to freecode.com via freecode-submit.
+Project-Tag-List: packaging, distribution
+Website-URL: http://www.catb.org/~esr/shipper
+Checksum-URL: http://www.catb.org/~esr/shipper/shipper-0.19.md5
+Tar/GZ-URL: http://www.catb.org/~esr/shipper/shipper-0.19.tar.gz
+
+Use irkerd's new (release 2.3) immediate mode for IRC notifications.
+INAGADADAVIDA
+
+sendmail esr@thyrsus.com <<'INAGADADAVIDA'
+Subject: Announcing release 0.19 of shipper
+
+Release 0.19 of shipper is now available at:
+
+http://www.catb.org/~esr/shipper
+
+Here are the most recent changes:
+
+  Use irkerd's new (release 2.3) immediate mode for IRC notifications.
+
+--
+                             shipper, acting for Eric S. Raymond 
+
+INAGADADAVIDA
+
+irkerd -i 'irc://chat.freenode.net/#shipper' 'shipper-0.19 has just shipped.'
+# That's all, folks!
+
+

Yes, that last line sends an announcement to the #shipper channel on freenode. Notice how things like the Description section in the freecode.com submission form are copied direct from the control file.

+

It’s worth re-emphasizing that none of those commands were generated by hand – I’m spared the boring and glitch-prone process of typing them all. I just push the go-button and, boom, a complete and consistent release state gets pushed everywhere it needs to go. Look, ma, no hand-work!

+

And that’s the point. You set up your per-project metadata once and go. Only the things that must change each release need to be altered – and shipper knows how to extract the most recent changes from your NEWS file. Imagine how much mechanical ritual and distraction from more important things this has saved me since 2002!

+

At long last, I think shipper is ready for beta, for other people to try using it. I’d love it if people contributed shipping methods for other forges. The documentation needs a critique from someone who doesn’t know the tool intimately. There might be ways I’m not seeing to make the tool simpler and more effective – I’m unhappy that the -w option still exists. There’s still work to be done.

+

But it’s worth doing. This isn’t just about convenience either, though that matters. By reducing the friction cost of shipping, shipper encourages frequent incremental releases on short cycles. That, in turn, makes open-source development work better and faster, which is a good thing for all of us.

diff --git a/20131205142311.blog b/20131205142311.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8071a03 --- /dev/null +++ b/20131205142311.blog @@ -0,0 +1,103 @@ +Heads up: the reposturgeon is mutating! +

A few days ago I released reposurgeon 2.43. Since then I’ve been finishing up yet another conversion of an ancient repository – groff, this time, from CVS to git at the maintainer’s request. In the process, some ugly features and irregularities in the reposurgeon command language annoyed me enough that I began fixing them.

+

This, then, is a reposurgeon 3.0 release warning. If you’ve been using 2.43 or earlier versions, be aware that there are already significant non-backwards-compatible changes to the language in the repository head version and may be more before I ship. Explanation follows, embedded in more general thoughts about the art of language design.

+

+

First, a justification. Most computer languages (including domain-specific languages like reposurgeon’s) incur high costs when they change incompatibly. It’s a bad thing when a program breaks halfway through its expected lifetime – or worse, when its behavior changes in subtle ways without visibly breaking. Responsible language maintainers don’t make such changes at all if they can help it, and never do so casually.

+

But reposurgeon has an unusual usage pattern. Lift procedures written in reposurgeon are generally written once, used for a repository conversion, then discarded. This means that users are exposed to incompatibility problems only if they change versions while a conversion is in progress. This is usually easy to avoid, and when it can’t be avoided the lift recipes are generally short and relatively easy to verify.

+

Thus, the costs from reposurgeon compatibility breakage are unusually low, and I have correspondingly more freedom to experiment than most language designers. Still, conservatism about breaking compatibility sometimes does deter me, because I don’t want to casually obsolesce the knowledge of reposurgeon in my users’ heads. Making them re-learn the language at every release would be rude and obtrusive of me.

+

That conservatism has a downside beyond just slowing the evolution of the language, however. It can sometimes lead to design decisions, made to preserve compatibility, that produce warts on the language and that you come to regret later. Over time these pile up as a kind of technical debt that eventually has to be discharged. That discharge is what’s happening to reposurgeon now.

+

Now I’ll stop speaking abstractly and point at some actual ugly spots. The early design of reposurgeon’s language was strongly influenced by the sorts of things you can easily do in Python’s Cmd class for building line-oriented interpreters. What Cmd wants you to do is write command handler methods that are chosen based on the first whitespace-separated token on the line, and get the rest of the line as an argument. Thus, when reposurgeon interprets this:

+
+read foobar.fi random extra text
+
+

what actually happens is that it’s turned into a method call to

+
+do_read("foobar.fi random extra text")
+
+

and how you parse that text input in do_read() is up to you. Which is why, in the original reposurgeon design, I used the simplest possible syntax. If you said

+
+read foobar.svn
+delete /nasty content/ obliterate
+write foobar2.fi
+
+

this was interpreted as “read and parse the Subversion stream dump in foobar.svn in the file foobar.fi, delete every commit for which the change comment includes the string “nasty content”, then write out the resulting history as an fast-import stream to the file foobar2.fi.

+

Looks innocent enough, yes? But there’s a problem lurking here. I first bumped into it when I wanted to specify an optional behavior for stream writes. In some circumstances you want some extra metainformation appended to each change comment as it goes out, a fossil identification (like, say, a Subversion commit number) retained from the source version control system. The obvious syntax for this would look like this:

+
+write fossilize foobar2.fi
+
+

or, possibly, with the ‘fossilize’ command modifier after the filename rather than before it. But there’s a problem; “write” by itself on a line means “stream the currently selected history to standard output”, just as “read” means “read a history dump from standard input”. So, if I write

+
+write fossilize
+
+

what do I mean? Is this “write a fossilized stream to standard output”, or “write an unfossilized stream to the file ‘fossilize'”? Ugh…

+

What the universe was trying to tell me is that my Cmd-friendly token-oriented syntax wasn’t rich enough for my semantic domain. What I needed to do was take the complexity hit in my command language parser to allow it to look at this

+
+write --fossilize foobar2.fi
+
+

and say “aha, –fossilize is led with two dashes so it’s an option rather than a command argument” The handler would be called more or less like this:

+
+do_read("foobar2.fi, options=["--fossilize"])
+
+

I chose at the time not to do this because I wanted to keep the implementation simplicity of just treating whitespace-separated tokens on the command line as positional arguments. What I did instead was introduces a “set” command (and a dual “clear” command) to manipulate global option flags. So the fossilized write came to look like this.

+
+set fossilize
+write foobar2.fi
+clear fossilize
+
+

That was my first mistake. Those of you with experience at this sort of design will readily anticipate what came of opening this door – an ugly profusion of global option flags. By the time I shipped 2.43 there were seven of them.

+

What’s wrong with this is that global options don’t naturally have the same lifetime as the operations they’re modifying. You can get unexpected behavior in later operations due to persistent global state. That’s bad design; it’s a wart on the language.

+

Eventually I ended up having to write my own command parser anyway, for a different reason. There’s a “list” command in the language that generates summary listings of events in a history. I needed to be able to save reports from it to a file for later inspection. But I ran into the modifier-syntax problem again. How is the do_list() handler supposed to know which tokens in the line passed to it are target filenames?

+

Command shells like reposurgeon have faced this problem before. Nobody has ever improved on the Unix solution to the problem, which is to have an output redirection syntax. Here’s a reminder of how that works:

+
+ls foo          # Give me a directory listing of foo on standard output
+ls >bar         # Send a listing of the current directory to file bar 
+ls foo >bar     # Send a listing of foo to the file bar
+ls >bar foo     # same as above - ls never sees the ">bar"
+
+

In reposurgeon-2.9 I bit the bullet and implemented redirection parsing in a general way. I found almost all the commands that could be described as report generators and used my new parser to make them support. A few commands that took file inputs got re-jiggered to use “<” instead.

+

For example, there’s an “authors read” command that reads text files mapping local Subversion- and CVS-style usernames to DVCS-style IDs. Before 2.9, the command to apply an author map looked like this:

+
+authors read foo.map
+
+

That changed to

+
+authors read <foo.map
+
+

But notice that I said “almost all”. To be completely consistent, the expected syntax of my first example should have changed to look like this:

+
+read <foobar.svn
+delete /nasty content/ obliterate
+write >foobar2.fi
+
+

That is, read and write should have changed to always require redirection rather than ever taking filenames as arguments. But when I got to that point, I retained I/O filename arguments for those commands only, also supporting the new syntax but not decommissioning the old.

+

That was my second mistake. Technical debt piling up…but, you see, I thought I was being kind to my users. The other commands I had changed to require redirection were rarely used; “read” and “write”, on the other hand, pretty much have to occur in every lift script. Breaking my users’ mental model of them seemed like the single most disruptive change I could possibly make. Put plainly, I chickened out.

+

Now we fast-forward to 2.42 and the groff conversion, during which the technical debt finally piled high enough to topple over.

+

There’s a reposurgeon command ‘unite” that’s used to merge multiple repositories into one. I won’t go into the full algorithm it uses except to note that if you give it two repositories that are linear, and the root of one of them was committed later than the tip of the other, the obvious graft occurs – the later root commit is made the child of the earlier tip commit. I needed this during the groff conversion.

+

Every time you do a unite you have a namespace-management problem. The repositories you are gluing together may have collisions in their branch and tag names – in fact they almost certainly have one collision, on the default branch name “master”. The unite primitive needs to do some disambiguation.

+

The policy it had before 2.43 was very simple; every tag and branch name gets either prefixed or suffixed with the name of the repo it came from. Thus, if you merge two repos named “early” and “late”, you end up with two tags named “master-early” and “master-late”.

+

This turns out to be dumb and heavyhanded when applied to to two linear repos with “master” as the only collision. The natural thing to do in that case is to leave all the (non-colliding) names alone, rename the early tip branch to “early-master” and leave the late repo’s “master” branch named “master”.

+

I decided I wanted to implement this as a policy option for unite – and then ran smack dab into the modifier-syntax problem again, Here’s what a unite command looks like (actual example from recent work):

+
+unite groff-old.fi groff-new.fi
+
+

Aarrgh! Redirection sequence won’t save me this time. Any token I could put in that line as a policy switch would look like a third repository name. Dammit, I need a real modifier syntax and I need it now.

+

After reflecting on the matter, I once again copied Unix tradition and added a new syntax rule: tokens beginning with “–” are extracted from the command line and put in a separate option set also available to the command handler. Because why invent a a new syntactic style when your audience already knows one that will suit? It’s good interface engineering to re-use classic notations.

+

I mentioned near the beginning of this rant that this is what I should have done to the parser much sooner. Now my new unite policy can be invoked something like this:

+
+unite --natural groff-old.fi groff-new.fi
+
+

OK, so I implemented option extraction in my command parser. Then it hit me: if I’m prepared to accept a compatibility break, I can get rid of most or all of those ugly global flags – I can turn them into options for the read and write commands. Cue angelic choirs singing hosannahs…

+

Momentary aside: This is not exceptional. This is what designing domain-specific languages is like all the time. You run into these same sorts of tradeoffs over and over again. The interplay between domain semantics and expressive syntax, the anxieties about breaking compatibility, even the subtle sweetness of finding creative ways to re-use classic tropes from previous DSLs…I love this stuff. This is my absolute favorite kind of design problem.

+

So, I gathered up my shovels and rakes and other implements of destruction and went off to abolish global flags, re-tool the read & write syntax, and otherwise strive valiantly for truth, justice, and the American way. And that’s when I received my just comeuppance. I collided head-on with a kluge I had put in place to preserve the old, pre-redirection syntax of read and write.

+

Since 2.9 the code had supported two different syntaxes

+
+read foobar.fi       # Old
+read <foobar.fi      # New
+
+

The problem was the easiest way to do this had been to look at the argument line before the redirection parser sees it, and prepend “<” if it doesn’t already begin with one. But that means that if I type “read –fossilize foobar.fi” the read handler will get this: “<–fossilize foobar.fi”. With the “<” in entirely the wrong place!

+

Friends, when this sort of thing happens to you, here is what you will do if you are foolish. You will compound your kluge with another kluge, groveling through the string with some kind of rule like “insert < before the first token that does not begin with --". And that kluge will, as surely as politicians lie, come back around to bite you in the ass at some future date.

+

If you are wise, you will recognize that the time has come to commit a compatibility break, and repent of your error in not doing so sooner. That is why in the repository tip version of reposurgeon the old pre-redirection sequemce of "read" and "write" is now dead; the command interpreter will throw an error if you try it.

+

(Minor complication: "read foo" still does something useful if foo is a directory rather than a file. But that's OK because we have unambiguous option syntax now.)

+

But another thing about this kind of design is that once you've accepted you need to do a particular compatibility break, it becomes a propitious time for others. Because one big break is usually easier to cope with than a bunch of smaller ones spread over time.

+

That means it's open season until 3.0 ships on changes in command names and syntactic elements. If you have used reposurgeon, and there is something you consider a wart on the design, now is the time to tell me about it.

+

diff --git a/20131211212011.blog b/20131211212011.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..001b4bf --- /dev/null +++ b/20131211212011.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +How to demolish your software project with style +

I did something unusual today. I pulled the plug on one of my own projects.

+

In Solving the CVS-lifting problem and Announcing cvs-fast-export I described how I accidentally ended up maintaining two different CVS-to-something-else exporters.

+

I finally got enough round tuits to put together two-thirds of the head-to-head comparison I’ve been meaning to do – that is, compare the import-stream output of cvs-fast-export to that of cvsps to see how they rate against each other. I wrote both git-stream output stages, so this was really a comparison of the analysis engines.

+

I wasn’t surprised which program did a better job; I’ve read and modified both pieces of code, after all. Keith Packard’s analysis engine, in cvs-fast-export, is noticeably more elegant and craftsmanlike than the equivalent in cvsps. (Well, duh. Yeah, that Keith Packard, the co-architect of X.)

+

What did surprise me was the magnitude of the quality difference once I could actually compare them head-to-head. Bletch. Turns out it’s not a case of a good job versus mildly flaky, but of good job versus suckage.

+

The comparison, and what I discovered when I tried to patch cvsps to behave less badly, was so damning that I did something I don’t remember ever having felt the need to do before. I shot one of my own projects through the head.

+

+

The wrong thing to do in this situation is to just let the bad code hang out there in the noosphere gradually bitrotting, with no maintainence and warnings to people who might stumble over it and think it’s safe to use or salvageable. This is bad for the same reasons abandoning a physical building and letting it decay into a public hazard is bad,

+

Instead, I shipped a final archival release with an end-of-life notice, prominent warnings in the documentations about the Bad Things that are likely to happen if you try to use it, and a pointer to a better alternative.

+

This is the right thing to do. The responsible thing. Which I’m making a point of since I’ve too often seen people fall into doing the wrong thing – usually through embarrassment at the prospect of admitting that they made a mistake or, possibly, can’t meet the qualifications to finish what they started.

+

I’ll say it straight up: I tried hard, but I can’t fix cvsps. Peeling away the shims and kluges and junk just reveals more shims and kluges and junk. Well, in the repo-analysis code, anyway; there’s another piece, a partial CVS client for fetching metadata out of remote CVS repositories, that is rather good. It’s why I kept trying to salvage the whole mess for about ten months longer than I should have.

+

What I think happened here is that the original author of cvsps did a fast, sloppy ad-hoc job that worked well enough for simple cases but never matured because he didn’t encounter the less simple ones. Keith, on the other hand, did what I would do in like circumstances – thought the problem entirely through on an algorithmic level and nuked it flat. His code is solid.

+

One of the differences that makes is that Keith’s code copes better when put under unanticipated stress, such as me coming along and sawing off the entire git-aware output back end to replace it with a stream-file emitter. But I digress. I’m not here today to talk about architecture, but about how to demolish your project with style.

+

Software is communication to other human beings as much, or more so, than it is communication to computers. As an open-source hacker, you are part of a craft community with a past and a future. If you care about your craft and your community, the end of a project leaves you with a duty to clean up after it so that it becomes a positive lesson to those who come after you, rather than a trap and attractive nuisance.

+

And now I’ll get off my soapbox and go back to work. On cvs-fast-export. After this, making sure it has a really good test suite before I ship 1.0 seems even more important.

diff --git a/20131215051328.blog b/20131215051328.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..076fda8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20131215051328.blog @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +Announcing cvssync, with thoughts on “good enough” +

There’s an ancient Unix maxim to the effect that a tool that gets 85% of your job done now is preferable to one that gets 100% done never. Sometimes chasing corner cases is more work than the problem really justifies.

+

In today’s dharma lesson, I shall illustrate this principle with a real-world and useful example.

+

+

In my last blog post I explained why I had to shoot cvsps through the head. Some of my regulars regretted the loss of the good feature bolted to its crappy repo-analysis code – it could fetch remote CVS repository metadata for analysis rather than requiring them to have been already mirrored locally.

+

To fill this functional gap, I needed a tool for mirroring the contents of a remote CVS repository to a local directory. There’s floating folklore to the effect that a tool called “cvssuck” does this job, but when I tried to use it it failed in about the most annoying possible way. It mirrored the directory structure of the remote site without fetching any masters!

+

Upon investigation I discovered that the cvssuck project site has disappeared and there hasn’t been a release in years. Disgusted, I asked myself how it could possibly have become that broken. Seemed to me the whole thing ought to be a trivial wrapper around rsync.

+

Or…maybe not. What scanty documentation I found for cvssuck made a big deal out of the fact that it (inefficiently) used CVS itself to fetch masters. This doesn’t make any sense if they were rsync accessible. because then it would be a much faster and more efficient way to do the same job.

+

But I thought about the sites I generally have to fetch from when I’m grabbing CVS repositories for conversion, as I did most recently for the groff project. SourceForge. Savannah. These sites (and, I suspect, most others that still support CVS) do in fact allow rsync access so that project administrators can use it to do offsite backups.

+

OK, so suppose I write a little wrapper around rsync to fetch from these sites. It might not do the guaranteed fetch that cvssuck advertises…but on the other hand cvssuck does not seem to actually work, at least not any more. What have I got to lose?

+

About an hour of experimentation and 78 lines of Python code later, I had learned a few things. First, a stupid-simple wrapper around rsync does in fact work for SourceForge and Savannah. And second, there is a small but significant value the wrapper can add.

+

The only thing you are pretty much guaranteed to be able to find out about a CVS repository is the CVS command needed to check out a working copy. For example, the groff CVS page gives you this command:

+
+cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/groff co <modulename>
+
+

You have to figure out for yourself that the <modulename> should also be “groff”, but there are clues to that on the web page. For those of you blessed enough to be unfamiliar with CVS, a single instance can host multiple projects that can be checked out separately; the module name selects one of these.

+

It isn’t necessarily clear how to get from that cvs invocation to an rsync command. Here’s how you do it. First, lop off the “anonymous@” part; that is a dummy log credential. Treat “/sources/groff” as a file path to the repository directory, then realize that the module is a subdirectory. You and up writing this:

+
+rsync -avz cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/groff/groff my-local-directory
+
+

That’s really simple, but it turns out not to work on SourceForge. Because SourceForge runs an rsync daemon and hides the absolute file path to the repository. The corresponding fetch from SourceForge, if groff existed there, would look like this:

+
+rsync -avz groff.cvs.sourceforge.net::cvsroot/groff/groff groff
+
+

Note the double colon and absence of leading ‘/’ on the repository path.

+

The value a wrapper script can add is knowing about these details so you don’t have to. Thus, cvssync. You call it with the arguments you would give a CVS checkout command. It pulls those apart, looks at the hostname, figures out how to reassemble the elements into an rsync command, and runs that.

+

This just shipped with cvs-fast-export release 0.7. At the moment it really only knows two things: A special rule about building rsync commands for SourceForge, and a general rule that happens to work for Savannah and should for most other CVS sites a well. More hosting-site would be easy to add, a line or two at most of Python for each hosting side.

+

This wrapper doesn’t do the last 15% of the job; it will fail if the CVS host blocks rsync or has an unusual directory structure. But that 85% now is more valuable than 100% never, especially when its capabilities are so easily extended.

+

And hey, it only took an hour for me to write, test, document, and integrate into the cvs-fast-export distribution. This is the Great Way of Unix; heed the lesson.

diff --git a/20131220080324.blog b/20131220080324.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ba81ae0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20131220080324.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Your new word of the week: explorify? +

There are a lot of things people writing software do in the world of bits that don’t have easy analogs in the world of atoms. Sometimes it can be tremendously clarifying when one of those things gets a name, as for example when Martin Fowler invented the term “refactoring” to describe modifying a codebase with the intent to improve its structure or aesthetics without changing its behavior.

+

There’s a related thing we do a lot when trying to wrap our heads around large, complicated codebases. Often the most fruitful way to explore code to modify it. Because you don’t really know you have understood a piece of code until you can modify it successfully.

+

Sometimes – often – this can feel like launching an expedition into the untamed jungle of code, from some base camp on the periphery deeper and deeper into trackless wilderness. It is certainly possible to lose your bearings. And large, old codebases can be very jungly, overgrown and organic – full of half-planned and semi-random modifications, dotted with occasional clearings where the light gets in and things locally make sense.

+

+

A refactoring expedition can serve very well for this kind of exploration, but it’s not the only kind. As a trivial-sounding example, when trying to grok a large mass of older C code one of the first things I tend to do is identify where ints and chars are actually logic flags and re-type them as C99 bools.

+

This isn’t refactoring in the strict sense – no code organization or data structures change. It can be very effective, though, because identifying all the flags tends to force your mental model closer to the logic structure of the code.

+

Another thing I often do for the same reason is identify related global variables and corral them into context structures. (Note to self: must find and release the YACC mods I wrote years ago to support multiple parsers in the same runtime.)

+

For a clearer example of how this concept is different from refactoring, consider another common subtype of it: adding a small feature, not so much because the feature is needed but to improve and verify your knowledge of the code. The inverse happens – I’ve occasionally gone on exploratory hunts for dead or obsolete code – but it’s much less common.

+

I think we need a word for this. I spent a significant amount of mental search time riffling through my vocabulary looking for an existing word to repurpose, but didn’t find one. My wife, who’s as lexophilic as I am, didn’t turn up anything either.

+

Therefore I propose “explorify”, a portmanteau of “explore” and “modify”. But I’m much less attached to that particular word than I anm to having one for the concept. Perhaps one of my commenters will come up with something better.

+

Sample usage:

+

“I was explorifying and found a bug. Patch enclosed.”

+

“Yes, I can probably do that feature. But I’ll need some time to explorify first.”

+

“No, we probably didn’t need strictly hex literal recognition there. I was explorifying.”

diff --git a/20131223085351.blog b/20131223085351.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..aa9c1d9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20131223085351.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +De-normalizing dissent +

I really hadn’t been planning to comment on the Duck Dynasty brouhaha. But conservative gadfly Mark Steyn (a very funny, witty man even if you disagree with his politics) has described the actual strategy of GLAAD and its allies with a pithy phrase that I think describes wider circulation – “de-normalizing dissent”.

+

OK, let’s get the obvious out of the way first. Judged by his remarks in Esquire, Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson is an ignorant, bigoted cracker who reifies almost every bad redneck stereotype there is. His religion is barely distinguishable from a psychotic delusional system. Nothing I am about to say should be construed as a defense of the content of his beliefs.

+

On the other hand, Steyn has a point when he detects something creepy and totalitarian about the attempt to hound Robertson out of his job and out of public life. True, nothing GLAAD has done rises to the level of state coercion – there is no First Amendment issue here, no violence or threat of same in play.

+

But what GLAAD and its allies are trying to accomplish is not mere moral suasion either; they’re trying to make beliefs they disapprove of unspeakable in polite society by making the consequences of expressing them so unpleasant that people will self-censor. In Steyn’s well-chosen phrase, they’re trying to de-normalize dissent.

+

+

This is a fun game. Do I get to play? I think anyone who speaks of communism or socialism in less opprobrious terms than they would apply to Nazis should be considered morally equivalent to a National Socialist and shunned by all right-thinking people. Let’s remember the hundreds of millions of genocide victims and de-normalize that advocacy!

+

What? You don’t think that’s a good idea? You think even odious dissent should remain part of the conversation? Then welcome to the ranks of Phil Robertson’s defenders. Unless you’re a blatant partisan hypocrite.

+

Steyn likes to say that the right way to react to people who try to de-normalize your dissent is to push back twice as hard. I agree. So I give you my favorite Twitter hashtag of the day, to be applied to GLAAD any time it tries this kind of public bullying: #ButtNazis.

+

Don’t let the #ButtNazis fuck your free speech up the ass while pretending they’re on a lofty mission of moral uplift. Trying to publicly shame and humiliate Robertson, OK; trying to get him fired and shunned, not OK. The former would have been education; the latter was an ugly power play intended to establish GLAAD as arbiters of what can and cannot be said.

+

All freedom-loving people should reject such attempts, and I am heartened to see that even many homosexual public figures are doing so. (Camille Paglia’s reported description of GLAAD’s behavior as “Stalinist, fascist” struck me as particularly apt.) GLAAD’s influence is going to greatly diminish after this, which is as it should be.

+

I hope this fiasco will serve as a warning to other activist organizations that there is a line between persuasion and suppressive bullying which they cross at their own peril. Myself, I promise to continue putting the defense of free expression over any form of partisanship.

diff --git a/20131228133335.blog b/20131228133335.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a47e315 --- /dev/null +++ b/20131228133335.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Announcing cvs-fast-export 1.0 +

Not long ago I pulled the plug on one of the two CVS export utilities I was maintaining. One consequence of this is that I decided I needed to get the other one out of beta and into a state I would be willing to ship as 1.0.

+

And lo, it has come to pass. I just shipped cvs-fast-export 1.0. It has been well field-tested; a couple of weeks ago I used it to rescue the history of Gnu Troff.

+

There are several CVS exporters out there that suck pretty badly. (To be fair, the perversity of CVS is such that doing an even half-decent job of lifting CVS histories into a modern version-control system is quite difficult.) Now that this one is shipped I know of exactly two that don’t suck. The other one is Michael Haggerty’s cvs2git, which I’m working with him on improving.

+

Tradeoffs: cvs2git is slow and a bit clunky to use (I’m improving the latter but can’t fix the former). cvs-fast-export is blazingly fast (like, 3.7K commits a minute) but has a hard repository-size limit – above it you run out of core and the OS reaps the process in mid-flight. (Very few projects will hit this limit.)

+

For each tool there are weird CVS edge cases that it gets wrong. The sets of edge cases are different. cvs2git’s may be smaller, but I’m not sure of that; we haven’t set up head-to-head testing yet. Most projects will not trip over either set of problems.

+

cvs-fast-export is better documented, especially around error conditions.

+

Help stamp out CVS in our lifetime!

diff --git a/20140101123121.blog b/20140101123121.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..460f6d7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140101123121.blog @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +The Lost Art of C Structure Packing +

My first gift of the new year. Read it here.

diff --git a/20140105074017.blog b/20140105074017.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1b266dc --- /dev/null +++ b/20140105074017.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Reposturgeon and Santa Claus Against The Martians! +

Here’s a late New Year’s gift for all you repository-editing fiends out there: the long-awaited and perhaps long-dreaded reposurgeon 3.0.

+

In Heads up: the reposturgeon is mutating! I described the downside of a strategy of incremental small language changes aimed at preserving compatibility: you can wind up trapped by suboptimal early decisions. Sometimes, you have to bust out and do the big redesign, which I did and why there’s a bump in the major version number (the last time that happened was when reposurgeon got the ability to read Subversion dump files directly).

+

The biggest change is that the command language syntax has mutated from VSO to SVO. What? You’re not up on your comparative linguistic morphology and gave no idea what I’m talking about? That’s Verb-Subject-Object to Subject-Verb-Object.

+

+

Before 3.0 the order of syntactic elements in a command was: action verb first, then (for most commands) an event selection set, then (for some commands) an object like a directory or repository name. Now the selection set always comes first, followed by the action verb, followed by any object-like arguments.

+

This change makes the syntax more regular and easier to describe. Easier mainly because there is no longer any of the previous confusion, when a selection set was present after the command verb, over what the first argument of the command was. The selection set, or what came after it? (Correct answer: what came after.)

+

In making this change I am moving closer to a Unix design archetype that had already influenced reposurgeon pretty heavily: ed(1). ed had a horrendously awful UI by modern standards, but it was (and still is) great for scripting. If you think of ed as a record editor for which the records are text lines, and study its selection syntax, the influence – and the reasons ed makes a useful model for what reposurgeon is doing – should be obvious.

+

A significant new feature is that reposurgeon now has a user-definable macro facility. I have written in the past that these are generally a bad idea and I still think that’s true in general. (One representative major problem with them is that when macro expressions cross certain kinds of syntactic boundaries in the base language they often become a serious impediment to readability and maintainability.)

+

But I found I wanted macros while converting the groff repository, and reposurgeon’s base language is simple in some ways that make the obscuring effect of macros less dangerous. There are no analogs of the “++” postfix operator which in C makes “#define square(x) (x)*(x)” such a wonderful way to generate unanticipated side effects. (Hint: consider what happens when you say “square(a++)”. How many times will a be incremented, again?)

+

Many small irritations in the language have been fixed. “delete” now really means delete and is no longer overloaded with several variants of a commit-squashing operation; that is now “squash”. (Yes, this adopts some git terminology.)

+

Pathset syntax is now simpler and more powerful. For starters, pathsets now match not only commits touching matching paths but the content blobs that the paths point at (you can select either subset by qualifying with the =C or =B selectors). This is particularly useful in connection with the ‘filter’ command, which allows you to modify comments and blobs by passing them through a user-specified filter.

+

There are lots of other changes as well. If you have worked with reposurgeon before you’ll have a bit of relearning to do. Sorry about that, but experience has taught me that (when you can get away with it at all) one big, obvious compatibility break is kinder than a long-drawn-out series of little ones that leave everybody wondering what the feature set of the week is,

diff --git a/20140105165024.blog b/20140105165024.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..80af977 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140105165024.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +Acausality and the Scientific Mind +

There is enough right about David Gelernter’s essay The Closing of the Scientific Mind to make it important to recognize where he has gone wrong. His willingness to call out certain kinds of widely popular modern errors is admirable, but does not preserve him from having made some rather more traditional errors of his own.

+

+

The problem is not in Dr. Gelernter’s indictment of reductive materialism. In his terms, I’m a materialist myself, but I sympathize with his complaint. I cringe, sometimes, at the clumsy eagerness some materialists display to throw out subjectivity and anything else that they fear might let the camel’s nose of religion back into the tent.

+

What Dr. Gelernter has right is that the reductionists have overreached, tending to hammer flat the texture of human experience as it is actually lived and to react with wholly inappropriate fury when someone like Thomas Nagel suggests that there may be phenomena of consciousness that can only be understood from within a frame that includes consciousness.

+

Thomas Nagel may be right or he may be wrong – but the questions he is trying to ask and formulate are important ones, not to be dismissed out of what Dr. Gelernter describes (with some justice) as “cowardice”.

+

But Dr. Gelernter’s rebuttal suffers from overreach of its own. He writes as though the reductionists are merely having some inexplicable sort of tantrum, rather than being energized by the terrifying reality behind the camel’s nose. It is 2014 and religious suicide bombers have shrapnel-stormed schoolbuses full of children so often that we have grown numbed to the horror. More prosaically, creationists are trying to ban the teaching of science. Wholesale revulsion against faith-driven thinking is more reasonable – and the reductionist excesses it motivates as a reaction correspondingly less unreasonable – than Dr. Gelernter is willing to admit.

+

A graver problem is that Dr. Gelernter’s counterargument smells like an attempt to smuggle religious particularism back into the tent while pretending he is talking in a philosophically neutral way. It is hard not to suspect this when he sets up his argument in part by speaking of “religious discoveries” as though we are all expected to believe this is a combination of words that makes obvious and actual sense.

+

This tendency is further on display in Dr. Gelernter’s attack on Ray Kurzweil’s transhumanism. Whether Kurzweil’s predictions are right or wrong isn’t any more the point here than whether Thomas Nagel’s attempt to rescue subjectivity nails all the details. No: the problem is that when Dr. Gelernter writes sentences like “Whether he knows it or not, Kurzweil believes in and longs for the death of mankind.”, Dr. Gelernter is presuming an authority to define “humanity” that he does not actually possess.

+

I have a friend who, after cataract surgery, can see into the ultraviolet. And several others with cochlear implants that use microprocessors to feed sound into their auditory nerves. Are these not humans? There are other people experimenting with artificial senses even as we speak – as one example, with coated implanted ball bearings inserted under the skin of fingertips giving them a useful ability to sense magnetic fields. Are *these* not humans?

+

Where, and on what principles, does Dr. Gelernter propose to draw a line? If his hypothetical “man with stainless steel skin, a small nuclear reactor for a stomach, and an IQ of 10,000″ were to appear and assert himself to share the condition of humanity, what position would Dr. Gelernter be in to deny this? And, as an observant Jew who necessarily lives in the shadow of the Holocaust, does Dr. Gelernter really want to be in the position of denying the humanity of any being that claims it?

+

Behind Dr. Gelernter’s outrage about the supposed inhumanity of Kurzweil’s vision there lurks, rather obviously, the religious notion that [sic] “mankind” is created in the image and likeness of God, and what Kurzweil desires to construct as our future is a species of blasphemy. Without this covert religious premise – without the horror of blasphemy and Godlessness – Dr. Gelernter’s essay dissolves into a disconnected ramble among trends not obviously connected except by Dr. Gelernter’s dislike of them.

+

This is unfortunate, because it damages Dr. Gelernter’s credibility in arguing a case that genuinely needs to be made. There is something gone very badly wrong when science and philosophy banish the primary data of human experience and emotion from the discussion and ignore the embodiedness of our consciousness. Dr. Gelernter’s plea for cognitive scientists to attend to what he calls “subjective humanism” is much the best-argued and strongest part of his essay. It is a damned shame when a critic of their failure as sharp and well-equipped as Dr. Gelernter then promptly exiles himself to the box marked “religious conservative – epistemologically insane – ignore”.

+

To actually be in the game, Dr. Gelernter needs to do better than merely attacking what he calls “computationalism” – because there really isn’t anywhere else to land. If the mind and brain are not entirely computational machines causally entangled with the material universe, what else are they? What else could they be, even in principle?

+

I have shown elsewhere, in my essay “Predictability, Computability, and Free Will”, that the intuitive model of human minds as containing some sort of autonomous uncaused cause, anything that would make them other than computational machines, rapidly leads to nonsense. We can, it turns out, purchase ontological specialness only at the cost of losing any warrant to believe in reliable causation at all.

+

Therefore, the true challenge before us is to construct a respectful, humane account of subjectivity and “sanctity of life” that fits with computationalism. Dr. Gelernter is right to blast large swathes of computer science, philosophy, and cognitive science for ducking this problem by chucking subjectivity out the window – but he can be no help in fixing this as long as the answer lurking behind his critique is “the breath of God”.

+

This may sound like a specific objection to religion, but it is not. The real problem with the breath of God, if there is such a thing, is that it’s an uncaused cause that intrinsically destroys our ability to form predictive theories. Even if Dr. Gelernter were to disclaim his religion, any attempt to locate some special cause of subjectivity outside the mechanism would have the same problem; it could succeed only to the extent that it destroys our ability to do any science at all.

+

My challenge to Dr. Gelernter, then, is to choose: are you a scientist or a believer in acausal miracles? You only get to choose one.

diff --git a/20140107081607.blog b/20140107081607.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3af954c --- /dev/null +++ b/20140107081607.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Tackling subjectivity head on +

In a response to my previous post, on Acausality and the Scientific Mind, a commenter said: “The computationalist position necessarily entails that subjectivity does not really exist, and what looks like subjectivity is a mere illusion without causal force.”

+

There are, I’m sure, many vulgar and stupid versions of computationalism that have this as a dogma. But it is not at all difficult to construct a computationalist model in which there are features that map to “subjectivity” and have causal force. Here is a sketch:

+

+

Human beings have minds that are persistent information patterns of very high complexity. These patterns evolve over time, incorporating memory (both memories about sense data and memories about features of past mental states). The path can in principle be modeled as a computation in which the inputs are the present mental state and sensory inputs, and the result is a succeeding mental state. (The last sentence is the computationalist position.)

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The computational path of a mind in the space of its possible mental states is chaotic, in the sense that its future has sensitive dependence on unmeasurable features of its present state (it is not significant to my argument whether the indeterminacy is quantum, classical, or due to computational intractability). The mind is therefore, as a whole, intractable to prediction.

+

Now we face the procedural question of how we identify a mental state. We do this in the same way we identify the state of a collection of matter: by measuring observable consequences. We observe that mental states of different people can be grouped into equivalence classes by observable consequences. (If this were not so, language, art, and communication in general would be impossible.)

+

Next, we observe that important features of our mental states are not intractable to prediction. We know this because people can form predictive models of each others’ mental states; in fact people rely so heavily on this ability that there is a strong case we evolved into sophonts in order to get better at it.

+

It is important, and bears emphasizing at this point, that we now have a model of mind in which (a) some features of its state at any given moment are tractable to prediction, (b) other features are not tractable to prediction, and (c) the tractable and intractable features are causally entangled with each other and are both inputs to ongoing computation.

+

Now I propose a definition: the “subjectivity” of a human being is that portion of his or her evolving mental state which is intractable to prediction by any observer.

+

I think it is not difficult to see that this definition accords with our intuitive notion of “subjectivity”. But here is the important point: As so defined, subjectivity is not a mere epiphenomenon or illusion. It has causal force because it is an input to the computation of future mental states which have observable consequences.

+

See, that was easy. Subjectivity reconciled to computationalism in less than 20 minutes of writing. A lot of philosophers of mind seem to be remarkably thick-headed.

diff --git a/20140116163856.blog b/20140116163856.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..107330f --- /dev/null +++ b/20140116163856.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Dragging Emacs forward +

This is a brief heads-up that the reason I’ve been blog silent lately is that I’m concentrating hard on a sprint with what I consider a large payoff: getting the Emacs project fully converted to git. In retrospect, choosing Bazaar as DVCS was a mistake that has presented unnecessary friction costs to a lot of contributors. RMS gets this and we’re moving.

+

I’m also talking with RMS about the possibility that it’s time to shoot Texinfo through the head and go with a more modern, Web-friendly master format. Oh, and time to abolish info entirely in favor of HTML. He’s not entirely convinced yet of this, but he’s listening.

+

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You might think “Huh? Emacs already has a git mirror. What else needs to be done?” Quite a lot, actually, starting with lifting Bazaar commit references into a form that will still make sense in a git log listing. Read the recent emacs-devel list archives if you’re really curious.

+

Fixing these things are important to me as part of a larger project: cracking Emacs out of an encrustation of practices and history that has made it seem insular and archaic to a lot of younger hackers who grew up with the faster pace and the techniques of the web.

+

RMS did too good a job. Because Emacs can be a total environment that you never have to step out of, the culture around it has tended to become inward-looking and hold on to habits that smell two decades old now.

+

My favorite quote about this is from Text Editors in The Lord of the Rings:

+

+Emacs: Fangorn

+

Vast, ancient, gnarled and mostly impenetrable, tended by a small band of shepherds old as the world itself, under the command of their leader, Neckbeard. They possess unbelievable strength, are infuriatingly slow, and their land is entirely devoid of women. It takes forever to say anything in their strange, rumbling language. +

+

Fortunately, RMS recognizes that this points at a real problem. Some of his senior devs don’t get it…

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And if the idea of RMS and ESR cooperating to subvert Emacs’s decades-old culture from within strikes you as both entertaining and bizarrely funny…yeah, it is. Ours has always been a more complex relationship than most people understand.

diff --git a/20140131111905.blog b/20140131111905.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b046747 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140131111905.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +FOAD 2014 Party Pre-Announcemrnt +

This is a pre-announcement of the second third Friends of Armed & Dangerous party.

+

FOAD 2014 will be held at Penguicon 2014, in Southfield, MI, almost certainly on the evening of Saturday May 3rd (but we don’t have a confirmed party-floor booking yet).

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I believe John Bell is planning to run a Geeks with Guns the Friday before, so come equipped. Yes, personal weapons are considered an article of proper attire for the FOAD party – especially firearms or swords.

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More details as they become available.

diff --git a/20140201081502.blog b/20140201081502.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6ad8fda --- /dev/null +++ b/20140201081502.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +Down the feminist rabbit hole +

I fell down a rabbit hole today. By reading this: An Incomplete Guide to Feminist infighting. Bemused, I chased links and read manifestos and counter-manifestos for a couple of hours until the sources just began to repeat themselves. But in some respects my confusion was just beginning.

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As I was falling through all these diatribes like Alice wondering how deep the rabbit hole goes, one of the thoughts uppermost in my mind was Poe’s Law: “Without a blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of extremism or fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.”

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There was no humor down this rabbit hole. I found myself in the land beyond parody. On this evidence, I suspect it would be nigh-impossible to write a literate spoof of modern feminism that even many of its disputants wouldn’t blithely mistake for a real ideological position. And I found myself thinking of the Sokal Hoax.

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Somebody, I thought, really ought to go all hermeneutics-of-quantum-gravity on these women just to see what happens. And then it hit me: maybe someone already has! It is impossible to tell how many of these women are ironists being “performative” (one of their favorite words) because all of them sound so precisely like an anti-feminist’s cruelest parody of the movement.

+

I mean, are they even women, really? On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog. Could these feminist twitter wars be an elaborate fiction accidentally generated by beer-swilling men in wife-beater T-shirts, each a master of the art of satire but utterly convinced by circumstances that everyone else in the flamewars is a sincere paragon of feminist outrage with immaculate activist credentials?

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Fucked if I know. Sure, there are external checks one would apply – some of the disputants report having jobs at identifiable institutions. My point is that I can’t tell how anybody could falsify the wife-beater hypothesis going strictly on the rhetoric. That’s how deep the rabbit hole goes.

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Actually, in a way it would it would be nice to think the wife-beater hypothesis is true and real feminists are off doing something healthier and more useful. Alas, I doubt this is the case; I suspect what we see here is what we get. So, under that depressing premise, what does it look like down the rabbit hole?

+

The most conspicuous thing is that these women ooze “privilege” from every pore. All of them, not just the white upper-middle-class academics but the putatively “oppressed” blacks and transsexuals and what have you. It’s the privilege of living in a society so wealthy and so indulgent that they can go years – even decades – without facing a reality check.

+

And yet, these women think they are oppressed, by patriarchy and neoliberalism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and there’s a continuous arms race to come up with new oppression modalities du jour and how many intersectional categories each player can claim.

+

While these children of privilege are filling out their victimological bingo cards…elsewhere, women are treated like chattels. Raped under color of law. Genitally mutilated. But none of this enters the charmed circle of modern American feminism. So much safer to rage at the Amerikkan phallocracy that provides them with cushy jobs writing about their outrage for audiences almost as insulated from reality as they are. Not to mention all those obliging men who will grow their food, fix their plumbing, mow their lawns, and know their place.

+

There were pictures. Such pictures! They all look alike, from the cutesy white chicks with hipster glasses to the black WOCs with dreadlocks. It took me a while to figure out why, but I got it eventually. It was like browsing some Renaissance painter’s gallery of fin-de-race noblemen. Such arrogance, such entitlement, all those faces suffused with a a bland and unimpeachable conviction of their own superiority and righteousness. No wonder they fight each other like cats in a sack!

+

I cannot do justice to the sheer, pluripotent absurdity revealed by these twitter wars; it would take the powers of a Jonathan Swift to do that. I think I may have some light to shed on how it got so hilariously you can’t-make-this-stuff-up awful, though.

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Years ago, I wrote about kafkatrapping, and uttered this warning: “At the extreme, such causes frequently become epistemically closed, with a jargon and discourse so tightly wrapped around the logical fallacies in the kafkatraps that their doctrine is largely unintelligible to outsiders.”

+

I think that is almost exactly what has happened here. While I had certain varieties of feminism in mind when I wrote that, it now appears that I grossly underestimated the degree to which closure had taken hold or would do so. While I wasn’t looking, they went from incestuous to plain ridiculous.

+

And to return to an older theme – I think this sort of bitter involution is what eventually and inevitably happens when you marinate in left-wing duckspeak for long enough. (Clue: if you find yourself using the word “neoliberal” as non-ironically as these women do, you’re there. For utter lack of meaning outside of a dense thicket of self-referential cod-Marxist presuppositions disconnected from reality, this one has few rivals.)

+

Accordingly, George Orwell would have no trouble at all identifying the language of the feminist twitter wars as a form of Newspeak, designed not to convey thought but suppress it. Indeed, part of the content of the wars is that some of these women dimly sort of get this – see the whole argument over “callout culture”. But none of them can wake up enough to see that the problem is not just individual behaviors. Because to do that they’d have to face how irretrievably rotten and oppressive their entire discourse has become, and their worldview would collapse.

+

Ah well. This too shall pass. The university system and establishment journalism are both in the process of collapsing under their own weight. With them will go most of the ecological niches that support these precious, precious creatures in their luxury. Massive reality check a’coming. No doubt the twitter wars will continue, but in historical terms they won’t last long.

diff --git a/20140203232608.blog b/20140203232608.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..055b4a7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140203232608.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +How…does this even work? +

Here is a curious fact.

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My wife Cathy is using Duolingo to learn German; she wants to be able to read sources on Iron Age and Viking costume in the original.

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Duolingo takes her through a lot of pronunciation drills.

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I’ve learned something by listening to her – which is that somehow, somewhere, I have internalized a very precise understanding of German phonology and phonotactics. As in, I not only know right pronunciation from wrong, I give her detailed advice on how to match Duolingo’s model speaker that we can both tell is correct.

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What makes this weird is that I don’t speak German. At all. Nor have I ever lived where it’s spoken; I’ve visited Germany once, German-speaking Switzerland once, and that’s it.

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This raises questions in my mind:

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1. How the fuck? I mean, I suppose it’s related to my knack for generating names in the style of any specified language, and I could handwave about Markov-chain models, but…how the fuck?

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2. What dialect of German have I templated on? Could there be any way to tell?

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3. What other entire language phonologies have I swallowed … without … me … actually … noticing …

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4. Does this happen to other people?

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The human brain is a very odd thing.

diff --git a/20140204124456.blog b/20140204124456.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c13aa5f --- /dev/null +++ b/20140204124456.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Mapping the Dark Enlightenment + +

Just looking at the map, someone unfamiliar with the players would be justified in wondering if there’s really any coherence there at all. And that’s a fair question. Some of the people the map sweeps in don’t think of themselves as “Dark Enlightenment” at all. This is notably true of the light green cluster marked “Techno-Commercialists/Futurists” at the top, and the “Economists” connected to it in yellow.

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If I belonged on this map, that’s where I’d be. I know Eliezer Yudkowsky; the idea that he and the Less Wrong crowd and Robin Hanson feel significant affinity with most of the rest of that map is pretty ludicrous.

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Note, however, that one of only two links to the rest is “Nick Land”. This is a clue, because Nick Land is probably the single most successful booster of the “Dark Enlightenment” meme. It’s in his interest to make the movement look as big and various as he can manage, and I think this map is partly in the nature of a successful con job or dezinformatsiya.

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In this, Land is abetted by people outside the movement who are well served by making it look like the Dark Enlightenment is as big and scary as possible. Some of those people lump in the techno-futurist/economist group out of dislike for that group’s broadly libertarian politics – which though very different from the reactionary ideas of the core Dark Enlightenment, is also in revolt against conventional wisdom. Others lump them in out of sheer ignorance.

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So, my first contention is that Nick Land has pulled a fast one. That said, I think there is a core Dark Enlightenment – mostly identifiable with the purple “Political Philosophy” group, but with some crossover into HBD and Masculinity and (possibly) the other groups at the bottom of the map.

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Additionally, maps like this can sometimes reinforce existing affinities if people on both ends notice them and take them seriously. Even in my limited and occasional investigation, I think I’ve seen some signs of convergence between “Political Philosophy” and “Masculinity”, with people in both groups adopting each others’ tropes and language more than they were doing on my first exposure to either.

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It would not at all surprise me if there is something similar going on with the “Ethno-Nationalists”, a group about which I know only a little (and most of what I know is pretty nasty). I’m unqualified to write about the “Christian Traditionalists”, about which I know nothing, but I suspect this may be another spurious link. Same goes for “Femininity”.

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From my reading, I think we are on firmest ground speaking of a “Dark Enlightenment” if we zero in on the middle tier of the map: “Political Philosophy”, “Secular Traditionalists”, “HBD”, and “Masculinity”. The link density of the map backs this up. Land and other Dark Enlightenment maximalists, though willing to write in spurious connections to inflate the movement, don’t seem to be wrong about these.

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My original plan was to write a sort of view from high altitude of the whole congeries, but I think I’m going to have to break that up into several themed blog entries. Watch this space.

diff --git a/20140205183737.blog b/20140205183737.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3193edb --- /dev/null +++ b/20140205183737.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +From an undisclosed location… +

The title was a joke. The rest of this is not.

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Cathy Raymond and I evacuated from our home this morning. We’ve never had to do that before.

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Storm Nika has totally messed over the five-county area around Philadelphia. I’ve seen more downed power lines today than in my entire life until yesterday. Many roads are blocked by fallen trees. Over 600,000 people are without power; PECO has declared an all-hands emergency but says even so service may not be fully restored until the weekend.

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This is much, much worse than Hurricane Sandy was. Regional rail is shut down. Most businesses are closed. So many homes are becoming uninhabitable that the county is setting up emergency shelters in schools.

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Nominally it’s around 32F with little wind-chill but the freezing rain (now stopped, but could resume) soaks through clothes rapidly and I had minor cold burns around my ankles this morning from (unavoidably) walking through deep slush.

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You would not want to be caught outside in this, hypothermia could sneak up on you and kill you much faster than is obvious. I felt it coming on a little when I was helping clear fallen trees from a friend’s driveway; fortunately, I could limit my exposure.

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Temperatures are supposed to drop ten degrees tonight. As wet at it is now, that’ll turn a lot of roads into glare ice.

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We’re OK. We were on the ball enough to nail down a hotel room a couple of hours before most people figured out they ought to. It’s only a couple of minutes from home; we can easily retrieve anything we need, it’s just not safe to try to live there yet.

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We check on the house occasionally. Damage from treefalls is a minor but not insignificant concern. Also Sugar is still there; while she’s nicely demonstrating that all that cat fur is not purely decorative, Cathy worries.

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Dammit, this year I am going to install a generator at the house. One instance of having to bug out is enough…and given the Maunder-Minimum-like trend in solar activity there’s probably more of this coming, not less. Hey, all you AGW idiots? It would be nice if we could actually have some global warming…?

diff --git a/20140209002828.blog b/20140209002828.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8738dc0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140209002828.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Storm Nika crisis is over +

I’m back home with the power on. Normal hacking and blogging will resume.

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There’s four days I don’t want to have to do over again. Cold, stress, constant fatigue, consequent inability to concentrate…being a disaster-displaced person, it turns out, is psychologically difficult even if you have money and a good support network and a hotel in a First World country to fall back on.

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The difference between voluntarily breaking your routine and having it forcibly ruptured for you really matters. I’m a pretty adventurous sort, normally utterly unfazed by travel and novelty and cheerfully willing to go on extended away missions, but this time I got barely a lick of work done on my laptop – I found myself aching for my desk and my computer and my routine.

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Not just me, either. Cathy was working hard on not complaining but she was looking rather pinched and drawn by day two. I think of the three of us our cat coped best; by the time we relocated her from the frigid shell of Chez Raymond to my mother’s house on Day Three her attitude was clearly “as long as beloved humans are nearby, I’m OK”.

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Sugar is so amiable that it’s easy not to notice that she’s as tough as old boot leather. She turned 21 during the storm. And no, you wouldn’t have been able to tell she’s the feline equivalent of a centenarian; she investigated my mother’s place as bright-eyed and curiously as a kitten. Did us both good to see it.

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Upcoming: More on the Dark Enlightenment, a progress report on the Emacs repository conversion, and maybe a review of the Julia language. But I have to dig myself out from under some backlog first.

diff --git a/20140210090447.blog b/20140210090447.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..50127e6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140210090447.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Operator rules +

Everybody knows, or should know, the basic rules of firearms safety. (a) Always treat the weapon as if loaded, (b) Never point a firearm at anything you are not willing to destroy, (c) keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot, (d) be sure of your target and what is beyond it. (These are sometimes called “Cooper’s Rules” after legendary instructor Col. Jeff Cooper. There are several minor variants of the wording.)

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If you follow these rules, you will never unintentionally injure anyone with a firearm. They are easy to learn and very safe. They are appropriate for civilians.

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Some elite military units have different rules, with a different tradeoff between safety and combat effectiveness. I learned them from an instructor who was ex-SOCOM. The way I learned them is sufficiently amusing that the story deserves retelling.

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The instruction began in the following way. Imagine several students sitting in a circle in camp chairs, the instructor almost directly across from me. Note that this was after we had learned and practiced the basic Cooper rules I described above.

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The instructor began by clearing a pistol (opening the chamber port so we could see there was no bullet there or ready in the magazine) and letting the slide drop until the port was closed.

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He handed me the pistol, looked at me with a slight smile, and said “Eric. Please shoot yourself through the head.”

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I thought for a second, grinned, pointed the pistol at my temple, and pulled the trigger. There was a click and shocked gasps from some other students. (The gasps meant they had learned civilian rules correctly. I believe testing this was part of the instructor’s intention.)

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The instructor then asked for the pistol back. I handed to him. He fiddled with it for a moment, passed it behind his back, brought it into view, offered it to me with the chamber port closed, and said again “Eric. Please shoot yourself through the head.”

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I said “No, sir, I will not.”

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His smile got a little wider. “Oh? And why not?”

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I said “Because the weapon was out of my sight for a moment and I do not know that it is not ready to fire.” (My exact words may have been slightly different. That was the sense.)

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“That was the correct answer,” he said, and proceeded to explain to all of us that elite military units must frequently carry weapons in a combat-ready state, and therefore train safety under different rules that require fighters to reason about when a firearm is in a dangerous condition.

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In that exchange I violated Cooper’s Rules (a) and (b). I was thinking like a warrior who must frequently carry weapons in a ready-to-fire condition (because he can’t count on having the time to ready the weapon in a clutch situation) and knows that the warriors around him are trained to do likewise.

+

I’ll never forget those few minutes, because they taught all of us a valuable lesson. Also because we did not prearrange this! The instructor paid me a notable compliment by assuming that I would respond correctly both in obeying his first order and disobeying his second – and, if you think about it, there was a normative lesson there about intelligent initiative, cooperation and responsibility that goes far beyond the specific context of firearms safety.

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UPDATE: Post title changed from “Military rules” because this is a story about how special-ops fighters (“operators” in military jargon) think and react.

diff --git a/20140213161815.blog b/20140213161815.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fe7d3a1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140213161815.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +Progress in small things, and learning to fly +

Storm Pax hit my area today as we were just recovering, still a bit dazed and reeling, from Storm Nika. This brought me 14 inches of snow, and it brings you a tale of progress in small things and how odd the brain’s information-retrieval process can be.

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My wife, perversely, actually likes shoveling snow. Which is a good thing because there was a shit-ton of the stuff on our driveway this morning. She carved a channel from the car to the sidewalk, which had been cleared all along our street by some helpful soul with a snowblower well before we ventured outside. But that left a ridge of snow, easily 4.5′ high and 6′ thick, between the driveway/sidewalk and the middle of the street. It was heavy, half-compacted spoil thrown by a plow truck; that happens a lot here after winter storms.

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Contemplating that mini-mountain, I nearly despaired of getting our car out until the spring thaw. I knew that as bad as it looked, it was going to get worse – three inches or more of snow are due tonight.

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Then I noticed that the new neighbor had carved his way through that ridge with what, by the way the snow was packed vertically around the cut, had to be a snowblower. Went over, knocked, introduced myself, and asked for the loan of the thing. New neighbor turned out to be an affable sort, a gray-haired blue-collar regular joe who introduced himself as “Gordo” and was quite cheerfully willing to let me use it.

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That’s how I found myself pushing your typical American gas-powered snowblower out to the sidewalk. Two-stroke gasoline engine with a rope start, yup, seen those before, mildly dreading getting it to fire up. I never happen to have worked a snowblower before, but have childhood memories of my dad fighting for fifteen minutes at a stretch to get similar beasts started on push lawnmowers. Never had to do that myself; my generation got pretty spoiled by electric-starting riding mowers.

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Hmm. Directions: Turn key to “Run” position, choke lever to full, press priming button three times, pull rope slowly until there’s resistance then quickly. My eyebrows rose. You mean they’re actually telling me I don’t have to yank as hard as I can as fast as I can? This is not yer father’s lawnmower. Progress in small things…

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Damn me if it didn’t start second time (first time I hadn’t got the hang of where the resistance kicked in). This is the first burden of my tale; progress in small things matters. When was the first year that some engineer figured out how to make a two-stroke engine you don’t have to swear at and futz with endlessly to get to fire up? When was the first year they put actually helpful instructions in large print, located near the controls?

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OK, so I went after the ridge with a roaring snowblower. Found out it was work; sucker carves and throws snow nicely but doesn’t push itself. Then I found out that this snowblower ain’t so happy taking on a ridge that overtops the blade aperture by a couple of feet. It’s a light-duty machine really meant for snow accumulations of less than a foot or so, not one of the monster-mawed things ski resorts use.

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Time to invoke my wife and the shovel. If she knocks down the higher parts of the ridge the blower will be able to chew up and throw the results. Thinking to be economical with my neighbor’s gasoline, I shut the machine off and went inside to explain the situation.

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A few minutes of shovel teamwork later Cathy and I had the ridge lowered and broken up enough for the snowblower to cope. Then…I found I couldn’t get it started again. Let the swearing begin…

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Now comes the second burden of my tale, which is how odd memory retrieval can be sometimes. I’m racking my brain trying to figure out what’s different this time and how to get the engine restarted. And, all unbidden, an audio track starts playing in my head. It’s Pink Floyd’s Learning to Fly, from the 1987 A Momentary Lapse of Reason album.

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I have very, very good auditory memory. It includes details like pick-scrape noise in guitar solos that a lot of people don’t even seem to actually hear. For this track, it includes stretches of near-unintelligible radio chatter between pilots and ATCs that are used as a sound-wash background for instrumental parts of the arrangement. This is running in my head, and out jump two words: “mixture’s rich”.

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Aha! I go over to the snowblower and back the choke off about 15% from the high setting, pull the start cord, and it fires up instantly.

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Did you get that? My unconscious mind found a way to tell me what my conscious mind hadn’t figured out. The fuel-air mixture in the snowblower was too rich; I needed to back it off and let the spark have more oxygen.

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Now we can get to the street and I have acquired a minor life skill; next time I have to baby a two-stroke engine I’ll know exactly what to do. Thank you, clever unconscious mind!

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Does this happen to other people?

diff --git a/20140214080333.blog b/20140214080333.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8bae212 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140214080333.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Does firearms competency testing do any good? +

My distant friend Kent Lundgren, one of the most capable and thoughtful firearms instructors out there, has written a blog post addressing the tricky question of how we might filter potential carriers of concealed weapons for competence without involving the government.

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I’ve struggled with this one myself. Kent is right on, we absolutely do not want the government to have an easy pretext to forbid people from bearing arms; that is too dangerous a power to let government have. Any legal bar should have preconditions at least as difficult for the state as a finding of clinical insanity.

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Yes, private-sector competency tests might be a good thing. I’m all in favor of voluntary certification. It’s the produce-on-demand part Kent suggests that’s a little worrying. We’ve got more than enough of “Your papers, please” in America already – it’s not a demand that is compatible with a free society in the long term.

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Thinking about it now, though, I’m not sure how much good a firearms competency certification would actually do for basic safety. Such proposals would have the same adverse-selection problem that “gun control” laws do; the people you don’t want armed are exactly the people most likely to flout them. The effect of all such filters is perverse, to disarm only the conscientious and law-abiding.

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The most important thing to remember when thinking about this sort of policy issue is a criminological fact I learned from Don B. Kates: that gun crimes and accidents are highly concentrated in an approximately 3% cohort of the population that is also strongly deviant by other measures, including: rates of domestic violence, drug and alcohol addiction, auto accidents, rates of criminal conviction, and accident proneness. Low intelligence and low impulse control are nearly defining traits of this group. Elsewhere I have borrowed some cop slang and called these people “mooks”.

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Your chances of being shot deliberately or accidentally by a non-mook are on a par with your chances of being struck by lightning – such instances are so rare that each one gets individual newspaper coverage (incidentally misleading us to way overestimate the frequency).

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The trouble with an (essentially) voluntary certification requirement is that non-mooks don’t need it and mooks won’t bother with it. The criminal mooks would laugh at the requirement the same way they laugh at “gun control” laws, and the mere losers generally wouldn’t have their act together enough to go through the procedural hoops. They’d carry anyway, though, because they’re stupid and thus exceptionally prone to the Dunning-Krueger effect, overestimating their own competence.

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Where does this leave private-sector certification proposals? Basically, in the same bad place as “gun control” laws, without the go-directly-to-jail threat. The training requirement might do some good at slightly increasing competence levels among non-mooks, but non-mooks are already so unlikely to shoot each other that I’m doubtful any improvement in safety would breach the statistical noise level.

diff --git a/20140215122250.blog b/20140215122250.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3d746bd --- /dev/null +++ b/20140215122250.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Namedropping “ESR” +

For at least fifteen years my name and its tri-letterization has been something with which you could conjure up a lot of attention among hackers and other sorts of geek. This fact presented the more clueful of my personal friends with a delicate problem: under what circumstances would it be proper for them to invoke this instrument?

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I have actually been asked for guidance about this more than once. I developed some guidelines more than a decade ago. To the best my knowledge my friends have been pretty good about applying them. I present them here for your amusement.

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1. Please do not drop my name to score cheap social-status points. That’s crass and I don’t like it.

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2. Do drop my name if by doing so you can achieve some mission objective of which I would approve. Examples that have come up: encouraging people to design in accordance with the Unix philosophy, or settling a dispute about hacker slang, or explaining why it’s important for everyone’s freedom for the hacker community to hang together and not get bogged down in internal doctrinal disputes.

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3. Do drop my name if by doing it you can rock someone’s world in a positive way. A case of this that comes up fairly often is encouraging a young proto-hacker.

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4. Do drop my name if doing so would be funny. Funny is even an acceptable excuse for scoring social-status points with it – if you think I’ll laugh when I hear the story, go right ahead.

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And yes, I apply these rules (or obvious analogs thereof) to myself. I think it’s vulgar to wave my fame around in contexts where it’s irrelevant. It can be very amusing, if you’re clued in, to watch what happens when somebody in a group of programmers (or gamers or SF fans or any other population that oversamples programmers) that hasn’t met me before twigs to The Presence.

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If this attitude seems odd to you, understand that fame is exhausting and psychologically dangerous (I have a lot more sympathy for rock stars who fuck themselves up with drugs than before I felt the pressure myself). Ironic detachment from one’s own celebrity is, I have found, an effective coping strategy.

diff --git a/20140217153737.blog b/20140217153737.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a993625 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140217153737.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Come train with me +

This is a shout-out to all martial artists and would-be martial artists in the western Philadelphia exurbs, especially: Phoenixville, Spring City, Collegeville, Mont Clare, Upper Providence, Lower Schuylkill, Valley Forge, Charlestown/Malvern, Kimberton, Audubon, and Lower Perkiomen.

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I train under Sifu Dale Yeager at the Kuntao Martial Arts Club in Phoenxville, and my school has a weird problem. It’s having trouble keeping students, and near as I can figure the trouble is that the school is too good!

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Seriously. We have lots of people wander in, expecting the kind of near-useless pablum that’s peddled at endless numbers of interchangeable strip-mall karate emporia. Too many spend a couple weeks finding out how rigorously we train and bail. It’s not even that our style is physically that difficult; it’s way less strenuous than, say, kickboxing or hard-style karate. But it does demand concentration, mental flexibility, a willingness to learn challenging movement sequences, and the intelligence to integrate individual moves into an entire tactical system.

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We teach a blend of traditional wing chun kung fu and Philippine weapons arts, with early emphasis on short blades (higher levels go to swords). It’s a close infighting style, and Sifu thinks a major reason we don’t pull in more newbies is that we look as scary as hell when we do it. I can’t disagree. There’s a quiet, ferocious intensity to the training that drew me in immediately but might turn off anybody who was just looking for exercise.

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I’m posting because I’m worried about the school. We only have about twelve to fifteen people showing up regularly; sifu just told his instructors we need to get up to around thirty because the expenses for rent and equipment aren’t going anywhere but up. He doesn’t want to jack up fees because he doesn’t really run the school for money – he’s got a pretty well-paying day job, he’s interested in passing on what he knows to the best students he can find.

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And we are good students. In more than twenty years of martial arts training at more than half a dozen schools I’ve found a style this interesting and a student group this impressive maybe twice. The level of commitment and mutual help is high. (It’s a mainly mixed adult group with a wide age range and one or two older children.)

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If this sounds attractive to you, come train with me. You don’t have to be a twenty-year student like my wife and I, nor a natural athlete, but you do have to be ready to train with intensity and focus. Your mind will be exercised harder than your body.

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I can especially recommend the training to the sorts of people most likely to be reading this. That is programmers, engineers, techies, and geeks of all description who already get it about mental discipline and flow states. Kuntao will engage you better than the strip-mall crap ever could.

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Chase the link above or call 610-237-3902 ext 803

diff --git a/20140219175426.blog b/20140219175426.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6338b85 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140219175426.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +Premises of the Dark Enlightenment +

The Dark Enlightenment is, as I have previously noted, a large and messy phenomenon. It appears to me in part to be a granfalloon invented by Nick Land and certain others to make their own piece of it (the neoreactionaries) look larger and more influential than it actually is. The most detailed critiques of the DE so far (notably Scott Alexander’s Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell and Anti-Reactionary FAQ nod in the direction of other cliques on the map I reproduced but focus pretty strongly on the neoreactionaries.

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Nevertheless, after we peel away clear outliers like the Techno-Commercial Futurists and the Christian Traditionalists, there remains a “core” Dark Enlightenment which shares a discernibly common set of complaints and concerns. In this post I’m going to enumerate these rather than dive deep into any of them. Development of and commentary on individual premises will be deferred to later blog posts.

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(I will note the possibility that I may in summarizing the DE premises be inadvertently doing what Scott Alexander marvelously labels “steelmanning” – that is, reverse-strawmanning by representing them as more logical and coherent than they actually are. Readers should be cautious and check primary sources if in doubt.)

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Complaint the first: We are all being lied to – massively, constantly, systematically – by an establishment that many DE writers call “the Cathedral”. Its power is maintained by inculcation in the masses of what a Marxist (but nobody in the DE, ever, except ironically) would call “false consciousness”. The Cathedral’s lies go far deeper than what most people think of as normal tactical political falsehoods or even conspiracy theories, down to the level of some of the core premises of post-Enlightenment civilization and widely cherished beliefs about the sustainability of racial equality, sexual equality, and democracy.

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An interesting feature of the DE is how remarkably little conspiracy theorizing there is in it. Instead, DE thinkers tend to describe the Cathedral as what I have elsewhere called a “prospiracy”. The Cathedral is bound together not by a hierarchy of internal control and explicit membership; rather, it runs on a shared set of ideological premises not all of which are held or even completely understood by the people who act as part of it.

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To a first approximation, the ideology of the Cathedral can be described as “leftist” (many DE writers use the term “Progressive”, not meaning it as a compliment). However, the DE analysis of Cathedral ideology is actually much more complex and less reductive than these terms might imply (a point on which I expect to expand in later posts).

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I will note, by the way, the known backgrounds of several key DE thinkers creates grounds to suspect that my own critical use of “Cathedral” in connection with software engineering had some influence on the DE terminology. I do not particularly claim this as an accomplishment, but there it is.

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Complaint the second: “All men are created equal” is a pernicious lie. Human beings are created unequal, both as individuals and as breeding populations. Innate individual and group differences matter a lot. Denying this is one of the Cathedral’s largest and most damaging lies. The bad policies that proceed from it are corrosive of civilization and the cause of vast and needless misery.

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Another way the DE puts this complaint is that nobody on the conventional political spectrum takes Darwinism seriously enough. Left-liberals self-identify as the friends of evolution out of a desire to be “on the side of science”, but if they really understood the implications of evolutionary biology and psychology they would be more horrified by them than Christian fundamentalists are.

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The emphasis on this complaint is probably the single feature which most distinguishes the DE from other kinds of conservatism and anti-left-wing reaction. I’ll be writing about it at more length because I think it is the most interesting and challenging part of the DE critique.

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While I don’t intend to do that here and now, I cannot exit this summary without acknowledging that many people will read this complaint as a brief for racism. In fact the DE itself contains two relatively distinguishable cliques that have processed this complaint in different ways: the Ethno-Nationalists and the Human Bio-Diversity people – in DE jargon, eth-nats and HBD for short.

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If you come to the DE looking for straight-up old-fashioned racism, the Ethno-Nationalists will supply your requirement as hot and hateful as you like. The HBD people, on the other hand, are interested in value-neutral Damned Facts. They trade not in invective but in the nuts and bolts of psychometry and behavioral genetics. A signature consequence of the difference is that European-descended white people don’t necessarily come off “best” in the comparisons they make.

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Complaint the Third: Democracy is a failure. It has produced a race to the bottom in which politicians grow ever more venal, narrow interest groups ever more grasping, the function of government increasingly degenerates into subsidizing parasites at the expense of producers, and in general politics exhibits all the symptoms of what I have elsewhere called an accelerating Olsonian collapse (after Mancur Olson’s analysis in The Logic Of Collective Action).

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If this sounds like a libertarian critique, it in many ways is. One of my commenters noted, astutely, that the DE bears the imprint of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s libertarian polemic Democracy: The God That Failed. Some of the leading DE thinkers describe themselves as ex-libertarians, but their thinking has often taken some very dark and strange anti-libertarian turns since. (I’ll have more to say about this in discussing Mencius Moldbug, who is worth a post all to himself).

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Note to commenters: Please do not dive into attacking or defending these premises; that will be appropriate when I discuss them individually. Appropriate discussion for this post is whether I have missed major premises or gotten these wrong in any significant way.

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I expect future posts in this series to include both a closer focus on individual premises ansd on individual cliques within the Dark Enlightenment.

diff --git a/20140302211225.blog b/20140302211225.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5fec0f3 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140302211225.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +The myth of the fall +

I was a historian before I was an activist, and I’ve been reminded recently that a lot of younger hackers have a simplified and somewhat mythologized view of how our culture evolved, one which tends to back-project today’s conditions onto the past.

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In particular, many of us never knew – or are in the process of forgetting – how dependent we used to be on proprietary software. I think by failing to remember that past we are risking that we will misunderstand the present and mispredict the future, so I’m going to do what I can to set the record straight.

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Some blurriness about how things were back then is understandable; it can sometimes take a bit of effort even for those of us who were there in elder days to remember what it was like before PCs, before the Internet, before pixel-addressable color displays, before ubiquitous version-control systems. And there were so few of us back then – when I first found the Jargon File around 1978 you could fit every hacker in the U.S. in a medium-sized auditorium, and if you were willing to pack the aisles probably every hacker in the world.

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A larger and subtler change, the one easiest to forget, is how dependent we were on proprietary technology and closed-source software in those days. Today’s hacker culture is very strongly identified with open-source development by both insiders and outsiders (and, of course, I bear some of the responsibility for that). But it wasn’t always like that. Before the rise of Linux and the *BSD systems around 1990 we were tied to a lot of software we usually didn’t have the source code for.

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Part of the reason many of us tend to forget this is mythmaking by the Free Software Foundation. They would have it that there was a lost Eden of free software sharing that was crushed by commercialization in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This narrative projects Richard Stallman’s history at the MIT AI Lab on the rest of the world. But, almost everywhere else, it wasn’t like that either.

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One of the few other places it was almost like that was early Unix development from 1976-1984. They really did have something recognizably like today’s open-source culture, though much smaller in scale and with communications links that were very slow and expensive by today’s standards. I was there during the end of that beginning, the last few years before AT&T’s failed attempt to lock down and commercialize Unix in 1984.

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But the truth is, before the early to mid-1980s, the technological and cultural base to support anything like what we now call “open source” largely didn’t exist at all outside of those two settings. The reason is brutally simple: software wasn’t portable!

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You couldn’t do what you can do today, which is write a program in C or Perl or Ruby or Python with the confident expectation that it will run on multiple architectures. My first second full-time job writing code, in 1980, was representative for the time: writing communications software on a TRS-80 in Z-80 assembler. Assembler, people!. We wrote a lot of it. Until the early 1980s, programming in high-level languages was the exception rather than the rule. In general, you couldn’t port that stuff!

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Not only was portability across architectures a near-impossible dream, you often couldn’t port between instances of the same machine without serious effort. Especially on larger machines, code tended to be intertwined with details of individual site configuration to an extent that would shock people today (IBM JCL was notoriously the worst offender, but by no means the only).

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In that kind of environment, arguing about whether code should be redistributable in general was next to pointless, because unless the new machine was specifically designed to be binary-compatible with the old, ports amounted to being re-implementations anyway.

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This is why the earliest social experiments in what we would now call “open source” – at SHARE and DECUS – were restricted to individual vendors’ product lines and (often) to individual machine types. And it’s why the cancellation of the PDP-10 follow-on in 1983 was such a disaster for the MIT AI Lab and SAIL and other early hacker groups. There they were, stuck, having folded huge amounts of time and genius into a huge pile of 10 assembler code and no real possibility that it would ever be useful again. And this was normal.

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The Unix guys showed us the way out, by (a) inventing the first non-assembler language really suitable for systems programming, and (b) proving it by writing an operating system in it. But they did something even more fundamental — they created the modern idea of software systems that are cleanly layered and built from replaceable parts, and of re-targetable development tools.

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Tellingly, Richard Stallman had to co-opt Unix technology in order to realize his vision for the Free Software Foundation. The MIT AI Lab itself never found its way to that new world. There’s a reason the Emacs text editor is the only software artifact of that culture that survives to us, and it had to be rewritten from the ground up on the way. (Correction: A symbolic-math package called MACSYMA also survives, though in relative obscurity.)

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Without the Unix-spawned framework of concepts and technologies, having source code simply didn’t help very much. This is hard for younger hackers to realize, because they have no experience of the software world before retargetable compilers and code portability became relatively common. It’s hard for a lot of older hackers to remember because we mostly cut our teeth on Unix environments that were a few crucial years ahead of the curve.

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But we shouldn’t forget. One very good reason is that believing a myth of the fall obscures the remarkable rise that we actually accomplished, bootstrapping ourselves up through a series of technological and social inventions to where open source on everyone’s desk and in everyone’s phone and ubiquitous in the Internet infrastructure is now taken for granted.

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We didn’t get here because we failed in our duty to protect a prelapsarian software commons, but because we succeeded in creating one. That is worth remembering.

diff --git a/20140303024515.blog b/20140303024515.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5e23ca9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140303024515.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Sharecroppers, nomads, and early open source +

The responses to my previous post, on the myth of the fall, brought out a lot of half-forgotten lore about pre-open-source cultures of software sharing.

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Some of these remain historically interesting, but hackers talking about them display the same tendency to back-project present-day conditions I was talking about in that post. As an example, one of my regular commenters inferred (correctly, I think) the existence of a software-sharing community around ESPOL on the B5000 in the mid-1960s, but then described it as “proto-open-source”

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I think that’s an easy but very misleading description to land on. In the rest of this post I will explain why, and propose terminology that I think makes a more useful set of distinctions. This isn’t just a historical inquiry, but relevant to some large issues of the present and future.

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For those of you who came in late, the B5000 was an early-to-mid-1960s Burroughs mainframe that had a radically unusual trait for the period; its OS was written not in assembler but in a high-level language, a dialect of ALGOL called ESPOL that was extended so it could peek and poke the machine hardware.

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B5000 sites could share source-code patches for their operating system, the MCP or Master Control Program (yes, Tron fans, it was really called that!) that were written in a high-level language and thus relatively easy to modify. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only time such a thing was done pre-Unix.

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But. Like the communities around SHARE (IBM mainframe users) and DECUS (DEC minicomputers) in the 1960s and 1970s, whatever community existed around ESPOL was radically limited by its utter dependence on the permissions and APIs that a single vendor was willing to provide. The ESPOL compiler was not retargetable. Whatever community developed around it could neither develop any autonomy nor survive the death of its hardware platform; the contributors had no place to retreat to in the event of predictable single-point failures.

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I’ll call this sort of community “sharecroppers”. That term is a reference to SHARE, the oldest such user group. It also roughly expresses the relationship between these user groups and contributors, on the one hand, and the vendor on the other. The implied power relationship was pretty totally asymmetrical.

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Contrast this with early Unix development. The key difference is that Unix-hosted code could survive the death of not just original hardware platforms but entire product lines and vendors, and contributors could develop a portable skillset and toolkits. The enabling technology – retargetable C compilers – made them not sharecroppers but nomads, able to evade vendor control by leaving for platforms that were less locked down and taking their tools with them.

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I understand that it’s sentimentally appealing to retrospectively sweep all the early sharecropper communities into “open source”. But I think it’s a mistake, because it blurs the importance of retargetability, the ability to resist or evade vendor lock-in, and portable tools that you can take away with you.

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Without those things you cannot have anything like the individual mental habits or collective scale of contributions that I think is required before saying “an open-source culture” is really meaningful.

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This is not just a dusty historical point. We need to remember it in a world where mobile-device vendors (yes, I’m looking at you, Apple!) would love nothing more than to lock us into walled gardens of elaborate proprietary APIs, tools, and languages.

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Yes, you may be able to share source code with others in environments like that, but you can’t move what you build to anywhere else. Without that ability to exit, developers and users have only an illusion of control; all power naturally flows to the vendor.

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No open-source culture can flourish or even survive under those conditions. Keeping that in mind is the best reason to be careful about our terminology.

diff --git a/20140306024959.blog b/20140306024959.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a8e61e7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140306024959.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Causes and implications of the pause +

That is the title of a paper attempting to explain (away) the 17-year nothing that happened while CAGW models were predicting warming driven by increasing CO2. CO2 increased. Measured GAT did not.

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Here’s the money quote: “The most recent climate model simulations used in the AR5 indicate that the warming stagnation since 1998 is no longer consistent with model projections even at the 2% confidence level.”

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That is an establishment climatologist’s cautious scientist-speak for “The IPCC’s anthropogenic-global-warming models are fatally broken. Kaput. Busted.”

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I told you so. I told you so. I told you so!

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I even predicted it would happen this year, yesterday on my Ask Me Anything on Slashdot. This wasn’t actually brave of me: the Economist noticed that the GAT trend was about to fall to worse than 5% fit to the IPCC models six months ago.

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Here is my next prediction – and remember, I have been consistently right about these. The next phase of the comedy will feature increasingly frantic attempts to bolt epicycles onto the models. These epicycles will have names like “ENSO”, “standing wave” and “Atlantic Oscillation”.

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All these attempts will fail, both predictively and retrodictively. It’s junk science all the way down.

diff --git a/20140308165026.blog b/20140308165026.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8b8409d --- /dev/null +++ b/20140308165026.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Which way is north on your new planet? +

So, here you are in your starship, happily settling into orbit around an Earthlike world you intend to survey for colonization. You start mapping, and are immediately presented with a small but vexing question: which rotational pole should you designate as ‘North’?

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There are a surprisingly large number of ways one could answer this question. I shall wander through them in this essay, which is really about the linguistic and emotive significance of compass-direction words as humans use them. Then I shall suggest a pragmatic resolution.

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First and most obviously, there’s magnetic north. Our assumption ‘the planet is Earthlike’ entails a nice strong magnetic field to keep local carbon-based lifeforms from getting constantly mutated into B-movie monsters by incoming charged particles. Magnetic north is probably going to be much closer to one pole than the other; we could call that ‘North’.

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Then there’s spin-axis north. This is the assignment that makes north relate to the planet’s rotation the same way it does on Earth – that is, it implies the sun setting in the west rather than the east. Not necessarily the same as magnetic north; I don’t know of any reason to think planetary magnetic fields have a preferred relationship to the spin axis.

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Next, galactic north. Earth’s orbital plane is inclined about 26% from the rotational plane of the Milky Way, which defines the Galaxy’s spin-axis directions; these have been labeled ‘Galactic North” and “Galactic South” in accordance with the Earth rotational poles they most closely match. On our new planet we could flip this around and define planetary North so it matches Galactic North.

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Finally there’s habitability north. This one is fuzzier. More than 3/4ths of earth’s population lives in places where north is colder and south is warmer. We might want to choose ‘North’ to preserve that relationship, which is embedded pretty deeply in the language and folklore of most of Earth’s cultures. Thus, ‘North’ should be the hemisphere with the most habitable land. (Or, if you’re taking a shorter-term view, the hemisphere in which you drop your first settlement. But let’s ignore that complication for now.)

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If all four criteria coincide, happiness. But how likely is that? They’re probably distributed randomly with respect to each other, which means we’ll probably get perfect agreement on only one in every sixteen exoplanets.

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But not all these criteria are equally important. Magnetic North really only matters to geophysicists and compass-makers. Galactic North is probably interesting only to stargazers.

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I think we have a clear winner if spin-axis north coincides with habitability north. This choice will preserve continuity of language pretty well. If they’re opposite, and galactic north coincides with magnetic north, that’s a tiebreaker. If the tiebreakers don’t settle it, I’d go with spin-axis north.

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But reasonable people could differ on this. Discuss; maybe we could submit a proposal to the IAU.

diff --git a/20140313052814.blog b/20140313052814.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8a426d1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140313052814.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +Country-music hell and fake accents +

A few months back I had to do a two-hour road trip with A&D regular Susan Sons, aka HedgeMage, who is an interesting and estimable person in almost all ways except that she actually … likes … country music.

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I tried to be stoic when stupid syrupy goo began pouring out of the car radio, but I didn’t do a good enough job of hiding my discomfort to prevent her from noticing within three minutes flat. “If I leave this on,” she observed accurately to the 11-year-old in the back seat, “Eric is going to go insane.”

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Since said 11-year more or less required music to prevent him from becoming hideously bored and restive, all three of us were caught between two fires. Susan, ever the pragmatist, went looking through her repertoire for pieces I would find relatively inoffensive.

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After a while this turned into a sort of calibration exercise – she’d put something on, assay my reaction to see where in the range it fell between mere spasmodic twitching and piteous pleas to make it stop, and try to figure what the actual drive-Eric-insane factors in the piece were.

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After a while a curious and interesting pattern emerged…

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I already knew of having some preferences in this domain. I dislike anything with steel guitars in it; conversely, I am less repelled by and can sometimes even enjoy subgenres like bluegrass, fiddle music and Texas swing that are centered on other instruments. I find old-style country, closer to its Irish traditional roots, far easier to take than the modern Nashville sound. Blues influence also helps.

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But it turns out that most of these preferences are strongly correlated with one very simple binary-valued property, something Susan had the domain knowledge to identify consciously after a sufficient sample but I did not.

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It turns out that what I hate above all else about country music is singers with faked accents.

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I had no idea, but there’s a lot of this going around, apparently. The rules of the modern country idiom require performers who don’t naturally speak with a thick Southern-rural accent to affect one when they sing. The breakthrough moment when we figured out that this was what was making me want to chew my own leg off to escape it was when she cued up a song by some guy named Clint Black who really natively has that accent. We discovered that even though he plays the modern Nashville sound, the result only makes me feel mildly uncomfortable, as opposed to tortured.

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The first interesting thing about this is that I was completely unaware that I had been reacting to the fake/nonfake distinction. But once we recognized it, the entire pattern of my subgenre preferences made sense. Duh, of course I’d have had less unpleasant experiences with styles that are less vocal-centered. And, in general, the longer ago a piece of country music was recorded, the more likely that the singers’ accents were genuine.

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I think it is even quite likely that I acquired a conditioned dislike of steel guitars precisely because they are strongly co-morbid with fake accents.

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It is not news that there is something distinctly unusual about the way I acquire and process language phonology: recently, for example, I wrote about having absorbed the phonology of German even though I don’t speak it, and I have previously noted the fact that I pick up speech accents very quickly on immersion (sometimes without intending to).

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But this only raises more questions that belong under the “brains are weird” category. One group: what in the heck is my recognition algorithm for “fake accent”? How did I learn one? Why did I learn one? What in the hell does my unconscious mind find useful about this?

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A second is: how reliable is it? We think, from Susan’s sample of a couple dozen tracks, that it’s pretty robust, at least relative to her knowledge about singer idiolects. But in a controlled experiment in which I was trying to spot fakes, how much better would I do than chance? What would my rates of false negatives and false positives be? The question is trickier than it might appear; conscious attempts to run the fake-accent recognizer might interfere with it.

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The third, and in some ways the most interesting: How did my fake-accent recognizer get tangled up with my response to music? They do communicate (nobody doubts that people with good pitch discrimination have an advantage in acquiring tonal languages) but they’re different brain subsystems; the organ of Broca doesn’t do music.

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Does anyone in my audience know of research that might bear on these questions?

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UPDATE: My commenters were insightful about this one and we’ve arrived at a theory that fits the observed facts. I now think what I am reacting to is severe exaggeration of dialect recognition features; this fits with the fact that I find spoken accent mockery in comedy unpleasant. The visceral quality of my reaction may be explained by superstimulation of my “You’re a liar!” social-deception circuitry.

diff --git a/20140316075957.blog b/20140316075957.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1c0d843 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140316075957.blog @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +Defending Andrew Auernheimer +

There’s a documentary, The Hedgehog and the Hare, being made about the prosecution of Andrew Auernheimer (aka “the weev”). The filmmaker wants to interview me for background and context on the hacker culture. The following is a lightly edited version of the backgrounder I sent him so he could better prepare for the interview.

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I’ve watched the trailer. I’ve googled “weev” and read up on his behavior and the legal case. The following note is intended to be a background on culture, philosophy, and terminology that will help you frame questions for the face-to-face interview.

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Wikipedia describes Andrew Auernheimer as “grey-hat hacker”. There are a lot of complications and implications around that term that bear directly on what “weev” was doing and what he thought he was doing. One good way to approach these is to survey the complicated history of the word “hacker”.

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My authority to explain this rests on having edited The New Hacker’s Dictionary, which is generally considered the definitive lexicon of the culture it describes; also How To Become A Hacker which you should probably read first.

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In its original and still most correct sense, the word “hacker” describes a member of a tribe of expert and playful programmers with roots in 1960s and 1970s computer-science academia, the early microcomputer experimenters, and several other contributory cultures including science-fiction fandom.

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Through a historical process I could explain in as much detail as you like, this hacker culture became the architects of today’s Internet and evolved into the open-source software movement. (I had a significant role in this process as historian and activist, which is why my friends recommended that you talk to me.)

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People outside this culture sometimes refer to it as “old-school hackers” or “white-hat hackers” (the latter term also has some more specific shades of meaning). People inside it (including me) insist that we are just “hackers” and using that term for anyone else is misleading and disrespectful.

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Within this culture, “hacker” applied to an individual is understood to be a title of honor which it is arrogant to claim for yourself. It has to be conferred by people who are already insiders. You earn it by building things, by a combination of work and cleverness and the right attitude. Nowadays “building things” centers on open-source software and hardware, and on the support services for open-source projects.

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There are – seriously – people in the hacker culture who refuse to describe themselves individually as hackers because they think they haven’t earned the title yet – they haven’t built enough stuff. One of the social functions of tribal elders like myself is to be seen to be conferring the title, a certification that is taken quite seriously; it’s like being knighted.

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The first key thing for you to understand is that Andrew Auernheimer is not a member of the (genuine, old school, white-hat) hacker culture. One indicator of this is that he uses a concealing handle. Real hackers do not do this. We are proud of our work and do it in the open; when we use handles, they are display behaviors rather than cloaks. (There are limited exceptions for dealing with extremely repressive and totalitarian governments, when concealment might be a survival necessity.)

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Another bright-line test for “hacker culture” is whether you’ve ever contributed code to an open-source project. It does not appear that Auernheimer has done this. He’s not known among us for it, anyway.

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A third behavior that distances Auernheimer from the hacker culture is his penchant for destructive trolling. While there is a definite merry-prankster streak in hacker culture, trolling and nastiness are frowned upon. Our pranking style tends more towards the celebration of cleverness through elaborate but harmless practical jokes, intricate technical satires, and playful surrealism. Think Ken Kesey rather than Marquis de Sade.

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Now we come to the reason why Auernheimer calls himself a hacker.

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There is a cluster of geek subcultures within which the term “hacker” has very high prestige. If you think about my earlier description it should be clear why. Building stuff is cool, it’s an achievement.

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There is a tendency for members of those other subcultures to try to appropriate hacker status for themselves, and to emulate various hacker behaviors – sometimes superficially, sometimes deeply and genuinely.

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Imitative behavior creates a sort of gray zone around the hacker culture proper. Some people in that zone are mere posers. Some are genuinely trying to act out hacker values as they (incompletely) understand them. Some are ‘hacktivists’ with Internet-related political agendas but who don’t write code. Some are outright criminals exploiting journalistic confusion about what “hacker” means. Some are ambiguous mixtures of several of these types.

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Andrew Auernheimer lives in that gray zone. He’s one of its ambiguous characters – part chaotic prankster, part sincere hacktivist, possibly part criminal. The proportions are not clear to me – and may not even be clear to him.

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Like many people in that zone, he aspires to the condition of hacker and may sincerely believe he’s achieved it (his first lines in your trailer suggest that). What he probably doesn’t get is that attitude isn’t enough; you have to have competence. A real hacker would reply, skeptically “Show me your code.” Show your work. What have you built, exactly? Nasty pranking and security-breaking don’t count…

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Now, having explained what separates “weev” from the hacker culture, I’m going to explain why his claim is not entirely bogus. I can’t consider him a hacker on the evidence I have available, but I’m certain he’s had hacker role models. Plausibly one of them might be me…

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His stubborn libertarian streak, his insistence that you can only confirm your rights by testing their boundaries, is like us. So is his belief in the propaganda of the deed – of acting transgressively out of principle as an example to others.

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Combine this with a specific interest in changing the world through adroit application of technology and you have someone who is in significant ways very much like us. I think his claim to be a hacker is mistaken and shows ignorance of the full weight and responsibilities of the term, but it’s not crazy. If he wrote code and dropped the silly handle and gave up trolling he might become one of us.

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But even though Andrew Auernheimer doesn’t truly seem to be one of us, we don’t have much option but to join in his defense. He’s a shady and dubious character by our standards, but we are all too aware that the kind of vague law and prosecutorial overreach that threw him in jail could be turned against us for doing things that are normal parts of our work.

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Sometimes maintaining civil liberties requires rallying around people whose behavior and ethics are questionable. That, I think, sums up how most hackers who are aware of his troubles feel about Andrew Auernheimer.

diff --git a/20140322061114.blog b/20140322061114.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4d727f8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140322061114.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +All the Tropes That Are My Life +

Sometimes art imitates life. Sometimes life imitates art. So, for your dubious biographical pleasure, here is my life in tropes. Warning: the TV Tropes site is addictive; beware of chasing links lest it eat the rest of your day. Or several days.

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First, a trope disclaimer: I am not the Eric Raymond from Jem. As any fule kno, I am not a power-hungry Corrupt Corporate Executive; if I were going to be evil, it would definitely be as a power-hungry Mad Scientist. Learn the difference; know the difference!

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I am, or I like to think of myself as, a Smart Guy who Minored in Badass. I show some tendency towards Boisterous Bruiser, having slightly too physical a presence to fit Badass Bookworm perfectly. And yes, I’m a Playful Hacker who is Proud To Be A Geek.

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I like swords, but I’m actually a Musketeer who cheerfully uses firearms. (I have also been known to wield the dreaded Epic Flail).

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It is certainly the case that I married the required Fiery Redhead. I own a Badass Longcoat but don’t wear it often, as it’s heavy and not very comfortable.

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Some people think I’m a Glory Seeker, but in fact I don’t much like being famous; one of the few things I genuinely fear is Becoming the Mask.

diff --git a/20140328061532.blog b/20140328061532.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4de3729 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140328061532.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +How should cvs-fast-export be properly ignorant? +

I just shipped version 1.10 of cvs-fast-export with a new feature: it now emits fast-import files that contain CVS’s default ignore patterns. This is a request for help from people who know CVS better than I do.

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I’ve written before about the difference between literal and literary repository translations. When I write translation tools, one of my goals is for the experience of using the converted repository to as though the target system had been in use all along. Notably, if the target system has changesets, a dumb file-oriented conversion from CVS just isn’t good enough.

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Another goal is for the transition to be seamless; that is, without actually looking for it, a developer browsing the history should not need to be aware of when the transition happened. This implies that the ignore patterns of the old repository should be emulated in the new one – no object files (for example) suddenly appearing under git status when they were invisible under CVS.

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There is one subtle point I’m not sure of, though. and I would appreciate correction from anyone who knows CVS well enough to say. If you specify a .cvsignore, does it add to the default ignore patterns or replace them?

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My current assumption in 1.10 is that it adds to them. If someone corrects me on this, I’ll remove a small anount of code and ship 1.11.

diff --git a/20140329192825.blog b/20140329192825.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..813a457 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140329192825.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Ugliest…repository…conversion…ever +

Blogging has been light lately because I’ve been up to my ears in reposurgeon’s most serious challenge ever. Read on for a description of the ugliest heap of version-control rubble you are ever likely to encounter, what I’m doing to fix it, and why you do in fact care – because I’m rescuing the history of one of the defining artifacts of the hacker culture.

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Imagine a version-control history going back to 1985 – yes, twenty-nine years of continuous development by no fewer than 579 people. Imagine geologic strata left by no fewer than five version-control systems – RCS, CVS, Arch, bzr, and git. The older portions of the history are a mess, with incomplete changeset coalescence in the formerly-CVS parts and crap like paths prefixed with “=” to mark RCS masters of deleted files. There are hundreds of dead tags and dozens of dead branches. Comments and changelogs are rife with commit-reference cookies that no longer make sense in the view through more modern version-control systems.

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Your present view of the history is a sort of two-headed monster. The official master is in bzr, but because of some strange deficiences in bzr’s export tools (which won’t be fixed because bzr is moribund) you have to work from a poor-quality read-only git mirror that gets automatically rebuilt from the bzr history every 15 minutes. But you can’t entirely ignore the bzr master; you have to write custom code to data-mine it for bzr-related metadata that you need for fixing references in your conversion.

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Because bzr is moribund, your mission is to produce a full standalone git conversion that doesn’t suck. Criteria for “not sucking” include (a) complete changeset coalescence in the RCS and CVS parts, (b) fixing up CVS and bzr commit references so a human being browsing through git can actually follow them, (c) making sense out of the mess that is RCS deletions in the oldest part of the history.

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Also, because the main repo is such a disaster area, there is at least one satellite repo for a Mac OS X port that really wants to be a branch of the main repo, but isn’t. (Instead it’s a two-tailed mutant clone of a nine-year old version of the main repo.) You’ve been asked to pull off a cross-repository history graft so that after conversion day it will look as though the whole nine years of OS X port history has been a branch in this repo from the beginning.

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Just to put the cherry on top, your customers – the project dev group – are a notoriously crusty lot who, on the whole, do not go out of their way to be helpful. If not for a perhaps surprising degree of support from the project lead the full git conversion wouldn’t be happening at all. Fortunately, the lead groks it is important in order to lower the barrier to entry for new talent.

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I have been working hard on this conversion for eight solid weeks. Supporting it has required that I write several major new features in reposurgeon, including a macro facility, large extensions to the selection-set sublanguage, and facilities for generic search-and-replace on both metadata and blobs.

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Experiments and debugging are a pain in the ass because the repository is so big and gnarly that a single full conversion run takes around ten hours. The lift script is over 800 lines of complex reposurgeon commands – and that’s not counting the six auxiliary scripts used to audit and generate parts of it, nor an included file of mechanically-generated commands that is over two thousand lines long.

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You might very well wonder what could make a repository conversion worth that kind of investment of time and effort. That’s a good question, and one of those for which you either have enough cultural context that a one-word answer will suffice or else hundreds of words of explanation wouldn’t be enough.

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The one word is: Emacs.

diff --git a/20140331132020.blog b/20140331132020.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0189d14 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140331132020.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Hackers and anonymity: some evidence +

When I have to explain how real hackers differ from various ignorant media stereotypes about us, I’ve found that one of the easiest differences to explain is transparency vs. anonymity. Non-techies readily grasp the difference between showing pride in your work by attaching your real name to it versus hiding behind a concealing handle. They get what this implies about the surrounding subcultures – honesty vs. furtiveness, accountability vs. shadiness.

+

One of my regular commenters is in the small minority of hackers who regularly uses a concealing handle. Because he pushed back against my assertion that this is unusual, counter-normative behavior, I set a bit that I should keep an eye out for evidence that would support a frequency estimate. And I’ve found some.

+

+

Recently I’ve been doing reconstructive archeology on the history of Emacs, the goal being to produce a clean git repository for browsing of the entire history (yes, this will become the official repo after 24.4 ships). This is a near-unique resource in a lot of ways.

+

One of the ways is the sheer length of time the project has been active. I do not know of any other open-source project with a continuous revision history back to 1985! The size of the contributor base is also exceptionally large, though not uniquely so – no fewer than 574 distinct committers. And, while it is not clear how to measure centrality, there is little doubt that Emacs remains one of the hacker community’s flagship projects.

+

This morning I was doing some minor polishing of the Emacs metadata – fixing up minor crud like encoding errors in committer names – and I made a list of names that didn’t appear to map to an identifiable human being. I found eight, of which two are role-based aliases – one for a dev group account, one for a build engine. That left six unidentified individual contributors (I actually shipped 8 to the emacs-devel list, but two more turned out to be readily identifiable within a few minutes after that).

+

I’m looking at this list of names, and I thought “Aha! Handle frequency estimation!”

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That’s a frequency of just about exactly 1% for IDs that could plausibly be described as concealing handles in commit logs. That’s pretty low, and a robust difference from the cracker underground in which 99% use concealing handles. And it’s especially impressive considering the size and time depth of the sample.

+

And at that, this may be an overestimate. As many as three of those IDs look like they might actually be display handles – habitual nicknames that aren’t intended as disguise. That is a relatively common behavior with a very different meaning.

diff --git a/20140403101422.blog b/20140403101422.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b7d54ea --- /dev/null +++ b/20140403101422.blog @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +Zero Marginal Thinking: Jeremy Rifkin gets it all wrong +

A note from the publisher says Jeremy Rifkin himself asked them to ship me a copy of his latest book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society. It’s obvious why: in writing about the economics of open-source software, he thinks I provided one of the paradigmatic cases of what he wants to write about – the displacement of markets in scarce goods by zero-marginal-cost production. Rifkin’s book is an extended argument that this is is a rising trend which will soon obsolesce not just capitalism as we have known it, but many forms of private property as well.

+

Alas for Mr. Rifkin, my analysis of how zero-marginal-cost reproduction transforms the economics of software also informs me why that logic doesn’t obtain for almost any other kind of good – why, in fact, his general thesis is utterly ridiculous. But plain common sense refutes it just as well.

+

+

Here is basic production economics: the cost of a good can be divided into two parts. The first is the setup cost – the cost of assembling the people and tools to make the first copy. The second is the incremental – or, in a slight abuse of terminology, “marginal” – cost of producing unit N+1 after you have produced the first copy.

+

In a free market, normal competitive pressure pushes the price of a good towards its marginal cost. It doesn’t get there immediately, because manufacturers need to recoup their setup costs. It can’t stay below marginal cost, because if it did that the manufacturer loses money on every sale and the business crashes.

+

In this book, Rifkin is fascinated by the phenomenon of goods for which the marginal cost of production is zero, or so close to zero that it can be ignored. All of the present-day examples of these he points at are information goods – software, music, visual art, novels. He joins this to the overarching obsession of all his books, which are variations on a theme of “Let us write an epitaph for capitalism”.

+

In doing so, Rifkin effectively ignores what capitalists do and what capitalism actually is. “Capital” is wealth paying for setup costs. Even for pure information goods those costs can be quite high. Music is a good example; it has zero marginal cost to reproduce, but the first copy is expensive. Musicians must own costly instruments, be paid to perform, and require other capital goods such as recording studios. If those setup costs are not reliably priced into the final good, production of music will not remain economically viable.

+

Fifteen years ago I pointed out in my paper The Magic Cauldron that the pricing models for most proprietary software are economically insane. If you price software as though it were (say) consumer electronics, you either have to stiff your customers or go broke, because the fixed lump of money from each unit sale will always be overrun by the perpetually-rising costs of technical support, fixes, and upgrades.

+

I said “most” because there are some kinds of software products that are short-lived and have next to no service requirements; computer games are the obvious case. But if you follow out the logic, the sane thing to do for almost any other kind of software usually turns out to be to give away the product and sell support contracts. I was arguing this because it knocks most of the economic props out from under software secrecy. If you can sell support contracts at all, your ability to do so is very little affected by whether the product is open-source or closed – and there are substantial advantages to being open.

+

Rifkin cites me in his book, but it is evident that he almost completely misunderstood my arguments in two different ways, both of which bear on the premises of his book.

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First, software has a marginal cost of production that is effectively zero, but that’s true of all software rather than just open source. What makes open source economically viable is the strength of secondary markets in support and related services. Most other kinds of information goods don’t have these. Thus, the economics favoring open source in software are not universal even in pure information goods.

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Second, even in software – with those strong secondary markets – open-source development relies on the capital goods of software production being cheap. When computers were expensive, the economics of mass industrialization and its centralized management structures ruled them. Rifkin acknowledges that this is true of a wide variety of goods, but never actually grapples with the question of how to pull capital costs of those other goods down to the point where they no longer dominate marginal costs.

+

There are two other, much larger, holes below the waterline of Rifkin’s thesis. One is that atoms are heavy. The other is that human attention doesn’t get cheaper as you buy more of it. In fact, the opposite tends to be true – which is exactly why capitalists can make a lot of money by substituting capital goods for labor.

+

These are very stubborn cost drivers. They’re the reason Rifkin’s breathless hopes for 3-D printing will not be fulfilled. Because 3-D printers require feedstock, the marginal cost of producing goods with them has a floor well above zero. That ABS plastic, or whatever, has to be produced. Then it has to be moved to where the printer is. Then somebody has to operate the printer. Then the finished good has to be moved to the point of use. None of these operations has a cost that is driven to zero, or near zero at scale. 3-D printing can increase efficiency by outcompeting some kinds of mass production, but it can’t make production costs go away.

+

An even more basic refutation of Rifkin is: food. Most of the factors of production that bring (say) an ear of corn to your table have a cost floor well above zero. Even just the transportation infrastructure required to get your ear of corn from farm to table requires trillions of dollars of capital goods. Atoms are heavy. Not even “near-zero” marginal cost will ever happen here, let alone zero. (Late in the book, Rifkin argues for a packetized “transportation Internet” – a good idea in its own terms, but not a solution because atoms will still be heavy.)

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It is essential to Rifkin’s argument that constantly he fudges the distinction between “zero” and “near zero” in marginal costs. Not only does he wish away capital expenditure, he tries to seduce his readers into believing that “near” can always be made negligible. Most generally, Rifkin’s take on production economics calls to mind the famous Orwell quote: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

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But even putting all those mistakes aside, there is another refutation of Rifkin. In his brave impossible new world of zero marginal costs for goods, who is going to fix your plumbing? If Rifkin tries to negotiate price with a plumber on the assumption that the plumber’s hours after zero have zero marginal cost, he’ll be in for a rude awakening.

+

The book is full of other errors large and small. The particular offence for which I knew Rifkin before this book – wrong-headed attempts to apply the laws of thermodynamics to support his desired conclusions – reappears here. As usual, he ignores the difference between thermodynamically closed systems (which must experience an overall increase in entropy) and thermodynamically open systems in which a part we are interested in (such as the Earth’s biosphere, or an economy) can be counter-entropic by internalizing energy from elsewhere into increased order. This is why and how life exists.

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Another very basic error is Rifkin’s failure to really grasp the most important function of private property. He presents it as only as a store of value and a convenience for organizing trade, one that accordingly becomes less necessary as marginal costs go towards zero. But even if atoms were weightless and human attention free, property would still function as a definition of the sphere within which the owner’s choices are not interfered with. The most important thing about owning land (or any rivalrous good, clear down to your toothbrush) isn’t that you can sell it, but that you can refuse intrusions by other people who want to rivalrously use it. When Rifkin notices this at all, he thinks it’s a bad thing.

+

The book is a blitz of trend-speak. Thomas Kuhn! The Internet of Things! 3D printing! Open source! Big data! Prosumers! But underneath the glossy surface are gaping holes in the logic. And the errors follow a tiresomely familiar pattern. What Rifkin is actually retailing, whether he consciously understands it that way or not (and he may not), is warmed-over Marxism – hostility to private property, capital, and markets perpetually seeking a rationalization. The only innovation here is that for the labor theory of value he has substituted a post-labor theory of zero value that is even more obviously wrong than Marx’s.

+

All the indicia of cod-Marxism are present. False identification of capitalism with vertical integration and industrial centralization: check. Attempts to gin up some sort of an opposition between voluntary but non-monetized collaboration and voluntary monetized trade: check. Valorizing nifty little local cooperatives as though they actually scaled up: check. Writing about human supercooperative behavior as though it falsifies classical and neoclassical economics: check. At times in this book it’s almost as though Rifkin is walking by a checklist of dimwitted cliches, ringing them like bells in a carillon.

+

Perhaps the most serious error, ultimately, is the way Rifkin abuses the notion of “the commons”. This has a lot of personal weight for me, because I have lived in and helped construct a hacker culture that maintains a huge software commons and continually pushes for open, non-proprietary infrastructure. I have experienced, recorded, and in some ways helped create the elaborate network of manifestos, practices, expectations, how-to documents, institutions, and folk stories that sustains this commons. I think I can fairly claim to have made the case for open infrastructure as forcefully and effectively as anyone who has ever tried to.

+

Bluntly put, I have spent more than thirty years actually doing what Rifkin is glibly intellectualizing about. From that experience, I say this: the concept of “the commons” is not a magic wand that banishes questions about self-determination, power relationships, and the perils of majoritarianism. Nor is it a universal solvent against actual scarcity problems. Maintaining a commons, in practice, requires more scrupulousness about boundaries and respect for individual autonomy rather than less. Because if you can’t work out how to maximize long-run individual and joint utility at the same time, your commons will not work – it will fly apart.

+

Though I participate in a huge commons and constantly seek to extend it, I seldom speak of it in those terms. I refrain because I find utopian happy-talk about “the commons” repellent. It strikes me as at best naive and at at worst quite sinister – a gauzy veil wrapped around clapped-out collectivist ideologizing, and/or an attempt to sweep the question of who actually calls the shots under the rug.

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In the open-source community, all our “commons” behavior ultimately reduces to decisions by individuals, the most basic one being “participate this week/day/hour, or not?” We know that it cannot be otherwise. Each participant is fiercely protective of the right of all others to participate only voluntarily and on terms of their own choosing. Nobody ever says that “the commons” requires behavior that individuals themselves would not freely choose, and if anyone ever tried to do so they would be driven out with scorn. The opposition Rifkin wants to find between Lockean individualism and collaboration does not actually exist, and cannot.

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Most of us also understand, nowadays, that attempts to drive an ideological wedge between our commons and “the market” are wrong on every level. Our commons is in fact a reputation market – one that doesn’t happen to be monetized, but which has all the classical behaviors, equilibria, and discovery problems of the markets economists usually study. It exists not in opposition to monetized trade, free markets, and private property, but in productive harmony with all three.

+

Rifkin will not have this, because for the narrative he wants these constructions must conflict with each other. To step away from software for an instructive example of how this blinds him, the way Rifkin analyzes the trend towards automobile sharing is perfectly symptomatic.

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He tells a framing story in which individual automobile ownership has been a central tool and symbol of individual autonomy (true enough), then proposes that the trend towards car-sharing is therefore necessarily a willing surrender of autonomy. The actual fact – that car-sharing is popular mainly in urban areas because it allows city-dwellers to buy more mobility and autonomy at a lower capital cost – escapes him.

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Car sharers are not abandoning private property, they’re buying a service that prices personal cars out of some kinds of markets. Because Rifkin is all caught up in his own commons rhetoric, he doesn’t get this and will underestimate what it takes for car sharing to spread out of cities to less densely populated areas where it has a higher discovery and coordination cost (and the incremental value of individual car ownership is thus higher).

+

The places where open source (or any other kind of collaborative culture) clashes with what Rifkin labels “capitalism” are precisely those where free markets have been suppressed or sabotaged by monopolists and would-be monopolists. In the case of car-sharing, that’s taxi companies. For open source, it’s Microsoft, Apple, the MPAA/RIAA and the rest of the big-media cartel, and the telecoms oligopoly. Generally there is explicit or implicit government market-rigging in play behind these – which is why talking up “the commons” can be dangerous, tending to actually legitimize such political power grabs.

+

It is probably beyond hope that Jeremy Rifkin himself will ever understand this. I write to make it clear to others that he cannot recruit the successes of open-source software for the anti-market case he is trying to make. His grasp of who we are, his understanding of how to make a “commons” function at scale, and his comprehension of economics in general are all fatally deficient.

diff --git a/20140404135147.blog b/20140404135147.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3e292b2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140404135147.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Pushing back against the bullies +

When I heard that Brendan Eich had been forced to resign his new job as CEO at Mozilla, my first thought was “Congratulations, gay activists. You have become the bullies you hate.”

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On reflection, I think the appalling display of political thuggery we’ve just witnessed demands a more muscular response. Eich was forced out for donating $1000 to an anti-gay-marriage initiative? Then I think it is now the duty of every friend of free speech and every enemy of political bullying to pledge not only to donate $1000 to the next anti-gay-marriage initiative to come along, but to say publicly that they have done so as a protest against bullying.

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This is my statement that I am doing so. I hope others will join me.

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It is irrelevant whether we approve of gay marriage or not. The point here is that bullying must have consequences that deter the bullies, or we will get more of it. We must let these thugs know that they have sown dragon’s teeth, defeating themselves. Only in this way can we head off future abuses of similar kind.

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And while I’m at it – shame on you, Mozilla, for knuckling under. I’ll switch to Chrome over this, if it’s not totally unusable.

diff --git a/20140408132416.blog b/20140408132416.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c3b1043 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140408132416.blog @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +A bloodmouth carnist theory of animal rights +

Some weeks ago I was tremendously amused by a report of an exchange in which a self-righteous vegetarian/vegan was attempting to berate somebody else for enjoying Kentucky Fried Chicken. I shall transcribe the exchange here:

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+>There is nothing sweet or savory about the rotting
+>carcass of a chicken twisted and crushed with cruelty.
+>There is nothing delicious about bloodmouth carnist food.
+>How does it feel knowing your stomach is a graveyard
+
+I'm sorry, but you just inadvertently wrote the most METAL
+description of eating a chicken sandwich in the history of mankind.
+
+MY STOMACH IS A GRAVEYARD
+
+NO LIVING BEING CAN QUENCH MY BLOODTHIRST
+
+I SWALLOW MY ENEMIES WHOLE
+
+ESPECIALLY IF THEY'RE KENTUCKY FRIED
+
+

I am no fan of KFC, I find it nasty and overprocessed. However, I found the vegan rant richly deserving of further mockery, especially after I did a little research and discovered that the words “bloodmouth” and “carnist” are verbal tokens for an entire ideology.

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First thing I did was notify my friend Ken Burnside, who runs a T-shirt business, that I want a “bloodmouth carnist” T-shirt – a Spinal-Tap-esque parody of every stupid trash-metal tour shirt ever printed. With flaming skulls! And demonic bat-wings! And umlauts! Definitely umlauts.

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Once Ken managed to stop laughing we started designing. Several iterations. a phone call, and a flurry of G+ messages later, we had the Bloodmouth Carnist T-shirt. Order yours today!

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Bloodmouth Carnist T-shirt

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By the way, the skull on that shirt is me, sort of. Ken asked me to supply a photo reference, so my wife and I went to a steakhouse and she snapped a picture of me grinning maniacally over a slab of prime rib. For SCIENCE!

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This had consequences. An A&D regular challenged me in private mail to explain why my consequentialist ethics don’t require me to be a vegetarian.

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I broadly agree with Sam Harris’s position in The Moral Landscape that the ground of ethics has to be the minimization of pain. But I add to this that for pain to be of consequence to me it needs to be have an experiencer who is at least potentially part of a community of reciprocal trust with me. Otherwise I would be necessarily paralyzed by guilt at killing bacteria every time I breathe.

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The community of (potential) reciprocal trust includes all humans, possibly excepting a tiny minority of the criminally insane. It presumptively includes extraterrestrial sophonts, if we ever discover those. I think it is prudent and conservative (in the best sense of that term) to include borderline and near-borderline sophonts like higher primates, elephants, whales, dolphins, and squid. In principle it includes any animal that can solve the other-minds problem – which probably includes some of the brighter birds. I think this category can be roughly delimited using the mirror test.

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For different reasons, the community of trust includes non-sophont human commensals. My cat, Sugar, for example, who shows only dim and occasional flashes of behavior that might indicate she models other minds, but has a strong mutual-trust relationship with my wife and myself. We know what to expect of each other; we like each other. This is a kind of reciprocity with ethical significance even though the cat is not sophont.

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Another way to put this is to remember the Golden Rule, “Do as you would be done by” and ask: what animals have the ability to follow it, the right kind of informational complexity required to support it?

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Cows, pigs, chickens, and fish are not part of my potential community of trust. They don’t have minds capable of it – the informational complexity required doesn’t seem to be there at all (though suspicions have occasionally been raised about pigs; I’ll revisit this point). Thus, their deaths are not intrinsically ethically significant to me, any more than harvesting a head of lettuce is.

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Cruelty is a different matter. I think we ought not engage in cruelty because it is damaging and coarsening; people who make a habit of being cruel to non-sophonts are more likely to become cruel and dangerous to sophonts as well. Thus, merely killing a food animal is ethically neutral, but careless cruelty towards one is wrong and deliberate cruelty is evil.

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(Nevertheless, I report that the above vegan rant inculcated in me a desire to stomp into a roomful of vegans and demand my food “twisted and crushed with cruelty”. I really don’t like it when people try to jerk me around by my sensibilities as though I’m some kind of idiot who is unreachable by reasoned argument. I find it insulting and want to punch back.)

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These criteria could interact in interesting ways, and there are edge cases that need more investigation. I think I would have to stop eating pork if pigs could count the way that (for example) crows can – some pigs reportedly come close enough to passing the mirror test to worry me a little. I can readily imagine that pigs bred for intelligence might come near enough to sophont to be taboo to me. On the other hand, a friend who grew up on a hog farm assures me that pigs bred for meat are stone-stupid; according to her, it’s only wild pigs I should be even marginally concerned about.

+

Otters are another interesting case; they seem very playful and intelligent in the wild, occasionally use tools, and can form affectionate bonds with humans. I’d very much like to see them mirror-tested; in the meantime I’m quite willing to to give them the benefit of the doubt and consider them taboo for killing and eating.

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There you have it. The bloodmouth carnist theory of animal rights. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go have a roast beef sandwich for lunch.

diff --git a/20140410021634.blog b/20140410021634.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a1a5808 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140410021634.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Review: 1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies +

The Ring Of Fire books are a mixed bag. Sharecropped by many authors, ringmastered by Eric Flint, they range from plodding historical soap opera to sharp, clever entertainments full of crunchy geeky goodness for aficionados of military and technological history.

+

When Flint’s name is on the book you can generally expect the good stuff. So it proves in the latest outing, 1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies, a fun ride that’s (among other things) an affectionate tribute to C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels and age-of-sail adventure fiction in general. (Scrupulously I note that I’m personally friendly with Flint, but this is exactly because he’s good at writing books I like.)

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It is 1636 in the shook-up timeline birthed by the town of Grantville’s translocation to the Thuringia of 1632. Eddie Cantrell is a former teenage D&D player from uptime who became a peg-legged hero of the Baltic War and then husband of the not-quite-princess Ann-Catherine of Denmark. Now the United States of Europe is sending him to the Caribbean with an expeditionary force, Flotilla X-Ray, to seize the island of Trinidad from the Spanish and harvest oil desperately needed by Grantville’s industry.

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But it’s not a simple military mission. There are tensions among the factions in the allied fleet – the United States of Europe, the Danes, the Dutch, and a breakaway Spanish faction in the Netherlands. And the Wild Geese – exiled Irish mercenaries under the charismatic Earl Tyrconnell – have their own agenda. Cardinal Richelieu’s agents are maneuvering against the whole enterprise. And as the game opens, nobody in the fleet knows about the desperate, hidden Dutch refugee colony on Eustatia…

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If the book has a fault, it’s that authors Flint and Gannon love their intricate wheels-within-wheels plotting and elaborate political intrigue a little bit too much. It’s fun to watch those gears turning for a while, but even readers who (like me) relish that sort of thing may find themselves getting impatient for stuff to start blowing up already by thirty chapters in.

+

No fear, we do get our rousing sea battles. With novel twists, because the mix of Grantville’s uptime technology with the native techniques of the 1600s takes tactics in some strange directions. I particularly chuckled at the descriptions of captive hot-air balloons being used as ship-launched observation platforms, a workable expedient never tried in our history. As usual, Flint (a former master machinist) writes with a keen sense of how applied technology works – and, too often, fails.

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If some of the character developments and romantic pairings are maybe a little too easy to see coming, well, nobody reads fiction like this for psychological depth or surprise. It’s a solid installment in the ongoing series. Oh, and with pirates too. Arrr. I’ll read the next one.

diff --git a/20140410225708.blog b/20140410225708.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7cb9b78 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140410225708.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Does the Heartbleed bug refute Linus’s Law? +

The Heartbleed bug made the Washington Post. And that means it’s time for the reminder about things seen versus things unseen that I have to re-issue every couple of years.

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Actually, this time around I answered it in advance, in an Ask Me Anything on Slashdot just about exactly a month ago. The following is a lightly edited and somewhat expanded version of that answer.

+

+

I actually chuckled when I read rumor that the few anti-open-source advocates still standing were crowing about the Hearbeat bug, because I’ve seen this movie before after every serious security flap in an open-source tool. The script, which includes a bunch of people indignantly exclaiming that many-eyeballs is useless because bug X lurked in a dusty corner for Y months, is so predictable that I can anticipate a lot of the lines.

+

The mistake being made here is a classic example of Frederic Bastiat’s “things seen versus things unseen”. Critics of Linus’s Law overweight the bug they can see and underweight the high probability that equivalently positioned closed-source security flaws they can’t see are actually far worse, just so far undiscovered.

+

That’s how it seems to go whenever we get a hint of the defect rate inside closed-source blobs, anyway. As a very pertinent example, in the last couple months I’ve learned some things about the security-defect density in proprietary firmware on residential and small business Internet routers that would absolutely curl your hair. It’s far, far worse than most people understand out there.

+

Friends don’t let friends run factory firmware. You really do not want to be relying on anything less audited than OpenWRT or one of its kindred (DDWRT, or CeroWRT for the bleeding edge). And yet the next time any security flaw turns up in one of those open-source projects, we’ll see a replay of the movie with yet another round of squawking about open source not working.

+

Ironically enough this will happen precisely because the open-source process is working … while, elsewhere, bugs that are far worse lurk in closed-source router firmware. Things seen vs. things unseen…

+

Returning to Heartbleed, one thing conspicuously missing from the downshouting against OpenSSL is any pointer to a closed-source implementation that is known to have a lower defect rate over time. This is for the very good reason that no such empirically-better implementation is known to exist. What is the defect history on proprietary SSL/TLS blobs out there? We don’t know; the vendors aren’t saying. And we can’t even estimate the quality of their code, because we can’t audit it.

+

The response to the Heartbleed bug illustrates another huge advantage of open source: how rapidly we can push fixes. The repair for my Linux systems was a push-one-button fix less than two days after the bug hit the news. Proprietary-software customers will be lucky to see a fix within two months, and all too many of them will never see a fix patch.

+

The reason for this is that the business models for closed-source software pretty much require software updates to be an expensive, high-friction process hedged about with fees, approval requirements, and legal restrictions. Not like open-source-land, where we can ship a fix minutes after it’s compiled and tested because nobody is trying to collect rent on it.

+

Sunlight remains the best disinfectant. Open source is no guarantee of perfect results, but every controlled comparison that has been tried has shown that closed source is generally worse.

+

Finally and in 2014 perhaps most tellingly…if the source of the code you rely on is closed, how do you know your vendor hasn’t colluded with some spy shop to install a back door?

diff --git a/20140413125749.blog b/20140413125749.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4569222 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140413125749.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Sugar’s health may finally be failing +

This is an update for friends of Sugar only; you know who you are.

+

Sugar may not have much time left. She’s been losing weight rapidly the last couple weeks, her appetite is intermittent, and she’s been having nausea episodes. She seems remarkably cheerful under the circumstances and still likes human company as much as ever, but … she really does seem old and frail now, which wasn’t so as recently as her 21st birthday in early February.

+

We’re bracing ourselves. If the rate she’s fading doesn’t change I think we’re going to have to euthanize her within six weeks or so. Possibly sooner. Possibly a lot sooner.

+

Sugar’s had a good long run. We’ll miss her a lot, but Cathy and I are both clear that it is our duty not to see her suffering prolonged unnecessarily.

+

If you’re a friend of Sugar and have any option to visit here to say your farewells, best do it immediately.

+

If you’ve somehow read this far without having met Sugar: I don’t normally blog about strictly personal things, but Sugar is a bit of an institution. She’s been a friend to the many hackers who have guested in our storied basement; I’ve seen her innocent joyfulness light up a lot of faces. We’re not the only people who will be affected by losing her.

diff --git a/20140417170507.blog b/20140417170507.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..564149d --- /dev/null +++ b/20140417170507.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Review: Sea Without A Shore +

I’m not, in general, a fan of David Drake’s writing; most of his output is grimmer and far more carnographic than I care to deal with. I’ve made an exception for his RCN series because they tickle my fondness for classic Age-of-Sail adventure fiction and its pastiches, exhibiting Drake’s strengths (in particular, his deep knowledge of history) while dialing back on the cruelty and gore.

+

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Drake’s sources are no mystery to anyone who has read Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturin series; Daniel Leary and his companion-in-arms Adele Mundy are obvious takes on the bumptious Jack Aubrey and physician/naturalist/spy Stephen Maturin. Drake expends great ingenuity in justifying a near-clone of the Napoleonic-era British Navy in a far future with FTL drives. And to his credit, the technological and social setting is better realized than in most exercises of this kind. It compares well in that respect to, for example, David Weber’s Honor Harrington sequence.

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The early books in the RCN series, accordingly, seemed fresh and inventive. Alas, in this tenth installment the series is losing its wind. We’ve already seen a couple of variations of the plot; Daniel and Adele traipse off in the Princess Cecile on a sort-out-the-wogs mission backed by Cinnabar’s spooks. In a wry nod to another genre trope, they’re looking for buried treasure.

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The worldbuilding remains pretty good, and provided most of the few really good moments in this novel. Alas, as the action ground on I found the characters’ all-too-familiar tics wearing on me – Adele’s nihilistic self-loathing, Daniel’s cheerful shallow bloodymindeness, Hogg’s bumpkin shtick, Miranda the ever-perfect girlfriend. The cardboard NPCs seem flatter than ever. The series always had strong elements of formula, but now Drake mostly seems to be just repeating himself. Even the battle scenes are rather perfunctory.

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This is not a book that will draw in people who aren’t fans of its prequels. I’ll read the next one, but if it isn’t dramatically improved I’m done. Perhaps Drake is tiring of the premises; it may be time for him to bring things to a suitably dramatic close.

diff --git a/20140423060121.blog b/20140423060121.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4ea985c --- /dev/null +++ b/20140423060121.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Review: The White List +

Nina D’Aleo’s The White List (Momentum Books) is a strange combination of success and failure. The premise is preposterous, the plotting is perfunctory – but the prose is zippy and entertaining and the characters acutely observed.

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Genetic superhumans walk among us, most unaware that they have the ‘Shaman’ trait. A few awaken to manifest their powers, usually in violently destructive ways. Silvia Denaglia (code name: Silver!) is an operative for a super-secret agency that exists to capture and suppress them. But she has increasing doubts about the agency – its methods seem callous and its operatives careless of human life.

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Of course there’s a conspiracy within a conspiracy, and the agency is tainted by evil, and there’s a rebel mutant good-guy underground, and her contact with it is the enigmatic man of her dreams. To call the worldbuilding cardboard would be an insult to honest cardboard, and anyone even marginally genre-savvy can see each breathless reveal in the plot coming from miles away. On these levels the book is dumb, dumber, dumbest – really embarrassingly bad.

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And yet, it’s oddly charming. The prose is energetic and well-constructed. The characters work even though they’re trapped by the tropes they’re assigned to. There’s a good deal of wry comedy and quite a number of laugh-out-loud lines, especially in the earlier parts of the book. Ms. D’Aleo is not beyond hope; in fact I’d say she’s one half of a terrific writer. She would benefit from collaborating with somebody who knows how to do setting and plot but lacks her gift for the microlevel of writing.

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Finally, a warning: This is one of those dishonestly-packaged books that is volume one of a series without being so labeled, and ends unresolved.

diff --git a/20140423185306.blog b/20140423185306.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6551ab6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140423185306.blog @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +Sugar has passed on +

Sugar’s NYT appearance last week was her last hurrah. We had to have her euthanized today. She died peacefully about an hour ago.

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Her decline had been extremely rapid. Three weeks ago, even, Sugar barely looked aged and it was still possible to believe she might live another year. But the chronic nephritis, and possibly other organ failures, caught up with her. She started losing weight rapidly and her legs (already affected by arthritis) weakened. Her appetite waned, and her frequency of self-grooming diminished.

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The signs were clear, but we hoped that she would bounce back – she was a very tough cat and had surprised us and our veterinarians that way before. Over the weekend she showed serious problems walking. When I saw her fall partway down the basement stairs Saturday evening because she couldn’t keep her footing, I suspected it was time. Sunday she almost couldn’t walk, and began sounding distress calls a few times an hour – stopped eating and drinking. Then I knew it was time. So did Cathy.

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It’s hard to write a eulogy for a cat without descending into cliche or mawkishness. All cat people think their beloved moggies are special. But Sugar really was an outlier, if only by living to 21 and – until very recently – remaining so healthy and youthful-looking that humans we introduced her to had trouble believing her actual age.

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Part of that was good genes, of course; we think Sugar was part Maine Coon, a breed which tends to be longer-lived than average. But most of it was personality. Sugar was a happy cat – friendly, alert, outgoing, and extremely sociable with humans in the way Coons often are. She retained all those qualities until she was getting so weak that she seldom had the energy to exercise them. Even then, there wasn’t anything she liked as much as snuggling up to a friendly person for a good purr and some petting.

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And to Sugar every person was friendly. She had no fear of strangers at all – in fact, in her later and less active years new company would noticeably perk her up. It was usual for houseguests sleeping in our basement that Sugar would join them on the folding bed as they settled in for a night’s rest. Many are the wandering hackers who Sugar charmed; it was wonderful to see them relax, stress and weariness soothed away by her innocent affection.

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She understood about children, too. I’ll never forget watching her play with my niece Rosalie, when Rosalie couldn’t have been over five and didn’t know cat etiquette yet. Sugar taught her, gently. And there were a couple of big burly contractors I recall, meeting Sugar while working on our house and instantly melting into a state of awwww – I’m convinced this got us superior service more than once.

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Sugar was not especially remarkable at first sight – a rather ordinary American tabby in gray, black and white. It was her sunny disposition, grace, and good manners that made her attractive. That whole aloof-and-mysterious thing cats are supposed to do was utterly not her. She loved people, and wanted to be loved back, and pretty much always got what she wanted in that.

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We were so very lucky. Many of our cat-owning friends told sad stories of destructive habits, expensive medical conditions, bites and scratches, or just cats that for no good reason were nervous and shy all their lives. Meanwhile Sugar sailed along, tail high and eyes bright, costing us almost nothing but catfood and sharing her gift for happiness with humans in ways that never failed to make us proud of her.

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When we came home, you could bet your fillings that if Sugar wasn’t asleep she’d greet us at the door – sometime meowing reproachfully as if to ask “Where have you been?”, which is as close as she ever got to bad temper – ten seconds of petting would fix that right up, bringing thunderous purrs. And when we were ill or unhappy, she tried to comfort us as though we were her kittens. Her constant trust and love got us through a couple of crisis times.

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When I sat at my desk programming, so my hands weren’t available, Sugar would lie against my legs and rest her furry chin just behind the toes of my right foot – always on the same spot, for some reason. When Cathy and I went to bed at night, Sugar would prowl around the edge of the bed looking for intruders, then oscillate a couple of times between sprawling over Cathy and sprawling over me until she was satisfied that we’d both had our minimum nightly requirement of purring. Then she’d randomly pick a human to sleep beside, serene in the knowledge that her day was complete.

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We want to have another cat, but…Sugar was such a sweetheart that I fear we’ll make unfair comparisons. We’ll miss her a lot. We’re not as desolated as we could be, though, because we know her last several years were overtime. On the odds, she should have died six years ago, and her good health three years past an acute kidney infection was a minor miracle that visibly amazed our vets. But we knew this was coming (if not when) and have been gradually saying our goodbyes for months.

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At least we know we did everything we could for her. And, if cats had any representation of such things, I’m sure Sugar would know she did right by her humans. Not just Cathy and myself, either, but everyone who knew her and found in her sweetness a respite from their cares.

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Cathy’s reminiscence is here.

diff --git a/20140427075844.blog b/20140427075844.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b92e0de --- /dev/null +++ b/20140427075844.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Time preference and latitude +

A few days ago I was thinking about one of the most provocative Damned Facts from population genetics, and came up with a prediction that as far as I know nobody has uttered or tested before. I throw it out here because someone with access to the right kind of primary data might be able to test it.

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Here’s the Damned Fact: the measured average IQ of breeding populations varies inversely with the average temperature to which their ancestors were long-term adapted. Anthropologists who have studied the matter believe this is because cold climates put more of a premium on tool use and long-term planning than hot ones. A New Guinea tribesman can farm, hunt, and survive year-round naked with nothing but a spear and a digging stick; an Inuit requires complex clothing, ice shelters, and elaborate space-framed boats.

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Note that “environment of ancestral adaptation” is not the same as where people live now; if the latter were true we might expect that Inuit would have the most impressive average IQ on the planet, but they expanded into the high Arctic only within the last millennium or so. Inuit do, interestingly enough, seem to have a freakishly high average of mechanical and 3-D spatial ability relative to other populations, but it is unknown whether this is genetic or due to some kind of training effect of their environment.

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(My suspicion is that it’s genetic, but not because a thousand years is enough to select for it. Rather, my guess is that Inuit are descended from a small founder population that was able to colonize the high Arctic precisely because it already had those traits.)

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A quality that has not been as well studied as IQ is “time preference”. People with high time preference discount future rewards in favor of present ones; conversely, people with low time preference more easily defer rewards and invest now to capture higher gains later. Time preference has mainly been studied by economists and sociologists rather than anthropologists and, as far as I am aware, nobody knows to what extent variations in it are genetically rather than culturally transmitted.

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One thing that is known about IQ and time preference is that they correlate inversely and fairly strongly. Economists have studied both IQ and time preference as predictors of the wealth of nations. As one might expect, wealthier countries exhibit higher average IQ and lower average time preference (the latter being reflected in comparative savings rates).

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This sets up my prediction: if the distribution of time preference by breeding population is studied carefully enough, it will be found to be as strongly correlated with temperature in the ancestral environment as IQ is. Furthermore, that correlation will be largely independent of IQ variation – that is, it will still exist if variations in IQ are statistically masked out.

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Here’s why I think so: as a pre-industrial human in cold climates, you get a survival reward for doing things that are more difficult if you have high time preference – most notably, saving food and other resources that you might consume now for later when they are more difficult to obtain. The main feature of colder climates drive this need is larger seasonal variations in food availability and (in very cold climates) the critical importance of hunting.

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In hot climates, plant food and game animals are abundant year-round. The value of saving food is low, and the climate makes preserving it difficult. At higher latitudes and lower average temperatures, seasonal variations in availability both become significant and saving food increasingly necessary. In Siberia and the Arctic, crops won’t grow at all; indigenes must live by hunting and storing food.

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There you have it. A question for some enterprising scientist to look into. I suspect the primary data has already been collected and just needs the right statistical questions put to it.

diff --git a/20140429082721.blog b/20140429082721.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2a8a765 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140429082721.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Why Donald Sterling is not Brendan Eich +

Because I objected to the scalping of Brendan Eich for having donated to Proposition 8, a friend has (perhaps jocularly) challenged me to defend NBA team owner Donald Sterling against an effort to push him out of his franchise for racist remarks and behavior.

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I’m not going to do that, because I don’t think these cases are at all parallel. The differences begin with this: Brendan Eich was targeted for bullying because he performed a political, expressive act that his political opponents disagreed with. In both law and custom, we recognize that political expression needs to have the strongest possible protection. None of Sterling’s racist behaviors can reasonably be characterized as political expression.

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Another key difference: there is no evidence that Eich ever engaged in bigoted behavior against individual gays – in fact, there are plausible interpretations of Eich’s behavior that imply no prejudice at all (he might, for example, have believed it was important to assert popular sovereignity against a court that has exceeded its remit). There is, on the other hand, ample evidence of Sterling’s racial prejudices being expressed against individuals over whom he had power.

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I admit to some uneasiness about the outcry against Sterling; it especially disturbs me that he was outed by illegal taping of a private conversation. I think Kareem Abdul Jabbar put the case that there is excessive finger-wagging going on here very well. But those concerns don’t rise to anywhere near the level of alarm I felt about the way Eich was treated.

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Honesty compels me to admit that I am opposed on principle to some of the anti-discrimination laws that Sterling is now said to have been violating for a long time. If he doesn’t want to rent his property to blacks or hispanics, I don’t think the law should force him to do so. But I do think it is ethical and just for him to be boycotted for this odious prejudice, and I join Kareem-Abdul Jabbar in wondering why nobody organized that sooner.

diff --git a/20140430001428.blog b/20140430001428.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..60bd3d8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140430001428.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Have you no decency, sir? +

I know it’s from 2001 and thus putatively old news but, sadly, this thread from Free Republic could have been spun yesterday – and it made my jaw drop open. It says so much about what’s wrong with both the left and right wings of American politics in this century.

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So, the bare bones of the story: a 15-year-old-boy is dying of cancer in Australia and his last wish before he passes on is to have sex. Friends (including, it is implied, the psychologist who reported an anonymized version of the incident) arrange a date with a prostitute. Upon hearing of this, various medical ethicists, clerics, and other viewers-with-concern flew into a tizzy.

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I have to add this: According to one psychologist, “In a child dying over a long period of time, there is often a condition we call ‘skin hunger,'” The terminally ill child yearns for non-clinical contact because “mostly when people touch them, it’s to do something unpleasant, something that might hurt.”

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The first item of idiocy came at me within the story, from an unnamed ethicist obviously deep in left-feminist-moonbat land who objected to the proceedings as “degrading to women”. Um, excuse me? If that hooker has anything even remotely like the emotional wiring of a normal human female, after that gig she’s going to feel better about her line of work – less “degraded” – for the entire rest of her life. In fact, the first woman I shared the story with immediately said she’d have volunteered to de-virginate the kid herself, and I’d bet long odds the professional waived her fee.

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“Degrading to women.” As applied here this is duckspeak, pure and simple – a catchphrase intended not to express or provoke thought but to shut it down. If anything, this particular shibboleth of the left has become worse overused and more emptied of meaning in the thirteen years since.

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But as appallingly stupid and insensitive as that was, it pales into insignificance besides what the social-conservative right-wingers got up to in the thread comments.

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Representative line: “This is the sort of soul-less, animalistic response to impending death that might be expected from a human child raised by beasts.” What kind of miserable, pathetic excuse for a human being – what kind of utter want of empathy – does it take to not grok that in the kid’s inexperienced adolescent brain his bottled-up sexual urges got all tangled up with his skin hunger and that this was completely reasonable?

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Another prize: “Fornication is a serious violation of the 6th Commandment, particularly if it occurs with a prostitute. One scriptural reference can be found at 1 Corinthians 6:15-20.” If I needed any reason to despise Christians those two sentences would ring the bell. Your Jesus tells you to act from compassion and kindness, yet you dare condemn in this legalistic stick-up-the-ass fashion? I’m betting more genuine love passed between the hooker and the kid in whatever short time they spent together than the waste of oxygen who wrote those lines will ever feel.

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All this does a pretty good job of highlighting why, as much as I loathe left-wingers, I will never, ever self-identify as a conservative.

diff --git a/20140501225619.blog b/20140501225619.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..11c86e1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140501225619.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Penguicon A&D party heads up! +

I, and a largish crew of the usual suspects, are at Penguicon.

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Friends of Armed & Dangerous party will be 9PM tomorrow in 403 at the Westin Southfield Detroit.

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Bloodmouth Carnist T-shirts will be on sale.

diff --git a/20140503065635.blog b/20140503065635.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..592cc76 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140503065635.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Review: Child of a Hidden Sea +

The orphan discovering that her birth family hails from another world is an almost hoary fantasy trope – used, for example, in Charles Stross’s Family Trade novels. What matters in deploying it is how original and interesting you can be once you have set up the premise. A.M. Dellamonica’s Child of a Hidden Sea averts many of the cliches that usually follow, and delivers some value.

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Sophie Hansa, a marine videographer in San Francisco, is trying to re-contact her birth family when she sees a woman, apparently her aunt, being attacked by men with daggers. She attempts to intervene and, after an inexplicable explosion of something, finds herself adrift in an alien sea, trying to keep herself and her wounded relative afloat.

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Sophie has arrived on Stormwrack, an alternate Earth where variegated island nations dot a vast sea. Her aunt, it develops, is a courier for the Fleet, a peacekeeping force that has successfully suppressed internecine warfare for around a century. Sophie has been caught up in an attempt to neutralize the Fleet and break the long truce.

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We are launched into a lively tale of intrigue, derring-do and strangely limited magic. The author has fun busting some genre expectations; Sophie’s video cameras and other imported Earth technology work just fine on Stormwrack, but the locals are uninterested in what they call “mummery” and consider inferior to their enchantments. Sophie is not some angsty teenager who spends a lot of time on denying her situation and blunders into a coming-of-age narrative, she’s a confident young woman who plunges eagerly into exploring Stormwrack’s half-alien ecology and many mysteries.

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And mysteries there are aplenty, only beginning with why her birth family seems so dead-set on avoiding her and exiling her from Stormwrack back to our world, which they call ‘Erstwhile’. Who is trying to break the Cessation, and why? Is Stormwrack another world or the far future of Earth? We don’t get answers to everything; the book seems to end setting up for a sequel.

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The writing is pretty good and the worldbuilding much better thought out than is usual in most fantasy; Ms. Dellamonica could write competent SF if she chose, I think. The book is slightly marred by the sort of preachiness one expects of a lesbian author these days, and there is a touch of Mary Sue in way the ultra-competent protagonist is written. But the whole is carried off with a pleasing lightness of touch and sense of fun. I’ll read the sequel.

diff --git a/20140504234628.blog b/20140504234628.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ecbbc46 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140504234628.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Review: Extreme Dentistry +

Fearless monster killers have been a very popular trope in SF and fantasy lately, in a trend perhaps best exemplified by Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter sequence but extending to the dozens of nigh-interchangeable Buffy clones in leather clogging the Urban Fantasy subgenre lately. Hugh A. D. Spencer’s Extreme Dentistry seems to have been intended as a dark and mordantly funny satire of this sort of thing, and succeeds.

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If you’ve ever thought of shopping malls as soul-sucking traps, this is the book for you. Humanity has an enemy/parasite: the Hive, the ultimate consumer-consumers, shapeshifters who zero in on lust and greed and feed on it, and are gradually assimilating increasing numbers of normal humans through the miracle of modern marketing. Mindless in its native form, the Hive can only think by patterning on humans, which it understands (sadly) well enough to manipulate.

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Our viewpoint character loses his family to the Hive and discovers that the creatures who have been surrounding him at his shitty job have been literally feeding on his pain for years – office politics really is hell. Cured of the Hive’s mutagenic infection and broken free of its control, he is ready to join the war being waged against it by … Mormon dentists?

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The tone veers from Grand Guignol to action comic to pop-culture satire, often within the same paragraph. My favorite bit was when the coalition of the willing (churches) discovers that Hive entities can be drawn irresistibly into prepared kill zones by displays of bad modern art. Along the way the author skewers nearly every other form of cant and pretension imaginable; Marxism, corporate-speak, organized religion, and academic politics are only among the major targets.

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I should note that this book is pretty dark and strong drink even by horror-literature standards; there are scenes you are not going to actually enjoy unless you belong in a mental institution. On the other hand, I found it worthwhile to keep reading. On the gripping hand, I am not sure the premise can sustain the sequel hinted at by the handling of the ending.

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On its own it counts as the sort of dubious tour de force that reminds me of Nine Inch Nails. That is, it is far from clear that what the artist is doing is actually a good idea, but the quality of his execution is impressive.

diff --git a/20140506011250.blog b/20140506011250.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fb44ae2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140506011250.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Review: Right to Know +

There are many kinds of bad SF out there. One of the subtler kinds is written with enough competence that it might be good if the author had any original ideas, but reads like a tired paste-up of familiar genre tropes and plot twists that an experienced reader can see coming a light-year off.

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Edward Willett’s Right To Know (Diamond Book Distributors) is such a novel. Oppressive society on a decaying generation starship! Plucky, desperate resistance! Planetfall where humans with FTL drives got there ahead of them! Earth has mysteriously vanished! Fanatical planetside cultists mistake our hero for their messiah! Head of the Resistance is the Captain’s daughter! (That last one would only be an actual spoiler if you’re thick as neutronium, because it’s telegraphed with about the subtlety of a brick upside the head.)

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Worse, the book doesn’t work very well even on its own terms. To name only one of the obvious problems, the whole plot turns on the ship’s oppressive officers somehow learning their target planet is inhabited without having twigged that the planetsiders are human. Um, hello, radio emissions? And we’re supposed to believe that the Mayflower II carries planet-buster missiles but doesn’t mount a decent telescope or survey probes?

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A lame tissue of cliches like this usually has one of two origins. It may be cynical hackwork by someone who knows the genre very well, is getting paid by the yard, and doesn’t care to work any harder than minimally necessary. Or it can be evidence of naivete by someone who means well but barely knows the SF genre at all and has mistaken surface features for essence. The difference is significant because the naive auteur may improve, but the cynical hack is unlikely to; such laziness becomes a habit difficult to break, especially when it pays.

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I’m going to go with the “cynical hackwork” theory on this one, given that the publisher reports the author to have uttered over fifty books. I’m posting this review mainly as a warning: given that this is what volume 51+ looks like, neither the past nor the future works of Edward Willett seem likely to be worth a pitcher of warm spit. Avoid.

diff --git a/20140506210528.blog b/20140506210528.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..499742c --- /dev/null +++ b/20140506210528.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Review: The Rods and the Axe +

If you’re in the target market for Tom Kratman’s The Rods and the Axe (Baen) you probably already know you’re going to like it. Though nominally SF, this is in reality pretty straight-up military fiction. Bimpty-bumpth in his continuing series on the wars of Patrick Carrera on the colony world of Nova Terra, it delivers Kratman’s usual goods.

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The usual goods are detailed, gritty war-nerd porn laced with conservative political satire – the latter rather heavy-handed, but sometimes wickedly funny anyway. I call it “war-nerd porn” rather than “war porn” because Kratman is less focused on thalamic narratives of carnage and courage than he is on the mechanics, tactics, logistics, and strategy of war. This is military fiction aimed more at wargamers and history buffs than anyone else; it’s easy to imagine the author and a handful of ex-military buddies roughing out the plot over maps and sand tables.

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Stylish writing this is not, but Kratman is competent enough to do what he intends. This wargamer and history buff gives it a thumbs-up, while noting some problems. Kratman has never been great at characterization and the effort he puts into it here is pretty perfunctory compared even to the previous volume (Come and Take Them). If he doesn’t budget more attention to this going forward, the human-interest aspect of the series is likely to evaporate, leaving only the elaborate wargaming and the forward ratcheting of his series uberplot to attract readers.

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For Kratman’s target market, that might be enough. Still, I hope for a bit more psychological life in the next one. Finally, fair notice that the book finishes with a pause in the action rather than any actual ending.

diff --git a/20140507150705.blog b/20140507150705.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..23a65c0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140507150705.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Review: Monster Hunter: Nemesis +

As with my last review subject, if you’re in the market for Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter: Nemesis, you probably already know you’re going to like it. Though maybe not as much as the previous Monster Hunter outings; the author tries for a change of tone in this book, not entirely successfully.

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Up to now, the Monster Hunter books have been an entertaining blend of action comedy, gun porn, and horror – more or less the A-Team meets the X-Files, with vaguely Lovecraftian premises implied but played for rough humor rather than cosmic tragedy. They worked well enough on all these levels to be best-sellers – not Great Literature, but I’ll take honest genre craftsmanship like this over the kind of pretentious bilge that usually issues from art-for-art’s-sake posturing any day.

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In this book the viewpoint shifts from the familiar Monster Hunter International characters to Agent Franks, the enigmatic Man In Black and top agent of the government’s Monster Control Bureau. We get Franks’s personal back-story; in the process, Correia pulls aside the veil a bit on what’s really going on in the Monster Hunter universe.

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Correia has shown that he’s capable of writing more serious stuff in his Grimnoir Chronicles, which this book resembles as much as it does its direct prequels. His writing ability doesn’t fail him – making an even distantly sympathetic character out of Franks is no mean feat – but the reveals about Correia’s worldbuilding left me with a disappointed “Huh? That’s all you’ve got?” feeling. The Grimnoir Chronicles were, in this way, much better constructed.

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I won’t reveal details because the book is not so botched that it deserves to be spoilerized, but I will observe that Lovecraftian and Miltonic themes don’t really mix. Also that there are logical implications from a premise that all human souls have existed from the beginning of time that are obvious, that Correia never engages, but – given what else is going on – really ought to have.

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Maybe it’s time for the Monster Hunter sequence to die, staked and silvered like so many of its unnatural antagonists. I think there’s life in the characters yet, but the setting is in trouble; Correia seems to me to have painted himself into a corner that he’s only going to get out of by ignoring the problems or pulling some pretty serious retcons.

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I think one of the lessons here is something I learned writing for Battle For Wesnoth; for certain kinds of serial fictional settings, writing a final level of explanation of What’s Really Going On is a bad idea – it’s not necessary to what your story is doing, and it closes off too many possibilities for future episodes. I think Correia has made that error here.

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Still, if you liked the prequels, you’ll probably enjoy this well enough. Villains scheme, heroes struggle, stuff blows up a lot. Franks – of all not-quite-people – gets some character development. It remains to be seen whether the next book has anywhere interesting to go.

diff --git a/20140508055336.blog b/20140508055336.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..30abdbd --- /dev/null +++ b/20140508055336.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +On being a gentleman +

So I’m walking down a hallway at Penguicon 2014 and I notice one of the people who had tossed intelligent questions at me during my Ask Me Anything panel. He’s rather hard to miss; you don’t often see guys who fit the description “huge blond viking” so well, and when you do they are not apt to be wearing full drag, including a wig and earrings. Beside him is a rather pretty woman emitting wife-or-girlfriend cues that are not readily reconciled with the drag.

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“Hey honey,” he says “that’s who I was telling you about.” Addressing me, he says “I’ve made The Art of Unix Programming required reading in my IT group.” OK, that’s worth stopping for, if only out of politeness. I say something agreeable.

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“I started that”, says honey “but I only got two chapters in. I didn’t understand it.” Closer up she is quite attractive, slender and blue-eyed and fit. Also a bit tipsy, and if I’m any judge not quite as bright as viking-drag-guy even when sober – though this being an SF convention her IQ is probably comfortably above average anyway. This judgment informs my response.

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I suggest she try reading The Cathedral and the Bazaar instead, as it’s more accessible to people without a programming background. Mostly anthropology and economics, I explain. Viking-drag-guy says “Huh. I guess that’s true.” I say a few relevant things about praxeology and Hayek. “I think I have a copy at home,” he says to her.

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Honey is developing other ideas; there is now a bit of sexual edge in her gaze. “I want a picture with you.” Viking-drag-guy pulls out a smartphone and positions it. Nothing loth, I move next to her and she promptly pulls me into intimate range. I look at the smartphone lens and feel something damp on my cheek. Honey is licking me playfully. I make a startled noise. Viking-drag-guy looks amused. Then honey asks me to kiss her.

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She is quite attractive and viking-drag-guy doesn’t look inclined to try to drop-kick me into the next county (an intention I’d have to take seriously from anyone that large, hand-to-hand training or no) so I comply. She kisses me most thoroughly, and while I don’t exactly escalate I do my best to make it an enjoyable experience for her.

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To understand my reaction to what comes next, you need to know that various women in my life have insisted that I am quite good at this, and I think I know why; when I kiss a woman she gets my total undivided attention to that moment, contrasting with a lot of men who are distractedly thinking about, oh, I dunno what – their next move, probably. This is why I’m a little surprised when honey breaks the smooch and complains.

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“You didn’t give me any tongue!” she says. Er…viking-drag-guy is still looking amused, and she’s still pretty, so I mentally shrug and go in for round two, though I am growing slightly uncomfortable with the situation.

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Honey can tell this. “You’re too tense,” she says. “you need to loosen your lips. That’s what makes it passionate.” Uh oh. Now I must risk giving offense.

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“I’m sorry,” I explained. “I am, actually, feeling a bit inhibited. I strongly prefer kissing women when they’re completely sober and responsible.”

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Honey makes a visible effort to think about this. After a pause, she says “Isn’t that a bit unrealistic?” Those were her exact words.

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Boing! A dry, Spock-like voice in my brain informs me that I have obviously encountered a woman who considers inebriation a normal part of the mating dance. I am just reflecting that, by report, this is statistically normal behavior which I can consider exceptional only because I choose my social contexts rather carefully, when viking-drag-guy interrupts my thought.

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“He’s being a gentleman, honey,” he says. Whereupon I mumbled “I’m afraid I’m stuck with that,” and took my leave as gracefully as I could.

diff --git a/20140515013649.blog b/20140515013649.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8e68fec --- /dev/null +++ b/20140515013649.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Evaporative cooling and AGW +

Earlier this evening an Instapundit reference reminded me of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s insightful essay Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs, in which he uses a clever physics analogy to explain why cult-like groups often respond to strong evidence against their core beliefs by becoming more fanatical.

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Glen Reynolds used the reference to take a swipe at what political feminism has become, but a more interesting example occurred to me. I think AGW (anthropogenic global warming) alarmism is beginning to undergo some serious evaporative cooling. Let’s examine the evidence, how it might fit Yudkowsky’s model, and what predictions it implies.

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The 15-years-and-counting period of no statistically significant measured increase in GAT (Global Average Temperature) has been increasingly embarrassing to AGW partisans for years, but the “strong evidence” I’m thinking of is well expressed by this quote from Judith Curry which she reported presenting at the American Physical Society in March 2014:

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“The most recent climate model simulations used in the AR5 indicate that the warming stagnation since 1998 is no longer consistent with model projections even at the 2% confidence level.”

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This is cautious jargon for “AGW theory is in a state of epic fail”. Curry is saying that by all the usual standards of scientific evidence, the IPCC sheaf of climate models that alarmists rely on is completely, utterly busted. Its dismal incompetence to predict the behavior of the actual atmosphere can no longer be ignored by actual scientists without doing violence to those standards of evidence.

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(I really cannot resist pointing out that I have been predicting this something like this quite loudly since at least the beginning of the grand solar minimum in 2008, when I forecast correctly that measured GAT would track the falling direction of change in incident solar radiation rather the rising direction of CO2 levels. By a year later I had demonstrated a better predictive record than the IPCC ever has.)

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Here’s a major sign of evaporative cooling: the American Physical Society has since appointed a committee of working scientists (one of whom is Curry herself) to reexamine and possibly reverse its public commitment to AGW alarmism. As well it should; the alarmists’ predictions have failed so massively that they no longer have a scientific case – they’re going to have to rebuild one with a set of models that at least retrodicts the actual data.

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Whatever findings the APS committee issues, the very fact that it has been convened at all is a sign that (in Yudkowsky’s analogy) the higher-energy molecules have become excited by the counterevidence and are exiting the cold trap. Or, in the metaphor of an earlier day, the rats are looking for a way off the sinking ship…

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This is happening at the same time that the IPCC’s AR5 (Fifth Assessment Report) asserts its highest ever level of confidence that the (nonexistent for 15+ years) global warming is human-cased. What Yudkowsky tells us is that AR5’s apparently crazed assertion is a natural result of the mounting counterevidence. The voices of sanity and moderation, such as they are in the AGW crowd, are evaporating out; increasingly, even more than in the past, their game will be run by the fanatics and the evidence-blind.

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Thus, we can expect the screaming about “denialists” to become ever shrill and frantic as the edifice crumbles further. Many alarmists are now vocally hoping that a massive El Nino event will spike GAT to where it should be according to the models (directly contradicting their own previous argument that the 15-17 year apparent cessation of warming is a data artifact caused by a 1997-1998 El Nino spike). This reifies Richard Feynman’s famous warning about “cargo cult science”; if they wait with faith and purity, surely reality will conform itself to the sacred theory!

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Others are attempting to bolt epicycles onto the models to make them retrodict the “pause” correctly; that’s why you’ll see references to “stadium waves”, “ANSO”, and “multidecadal oscillations” increasingly leaking into press accounts. All these attempts have the shadow of doom on them, something even many of their proponents seem to half-understand. But Yudkowsky’s analogy predicts nevertheless that these efforts will redouble.

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Meanwhile, back in the real world, the simplest explanation for the observed facts is that the CO2/H20 positive greenhousing feedback central to the alarmist models simply doesn’t happen – it was an unphysical fantasy all along. CO2 levels do affect GAT, but only in a straightforward logarithmic/sublinear way that leads to extremely low climate sensitivity – and even that effect is now basically saturated (the atmosphere is thermalizing as much as it can).

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Don’t hold your breath waiting for the popular press to catch up to that, alas. They can be counted on to continue siding with the fanatics long after the sane scientists have left the building. Actually, to quote Douglas Adams, “There is another theory which states this has already happened.”

diff --git a/20140516060956.blog b/20140516060956.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3f35bb5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140516060956.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Review: A Darkling Sea +

While most life on Earth is powered by chemical energy captured from solar radiation, deep in our seas there are entire ecologies powered by volcanism – specifically the hot water issuing from hydrothermal vents. Hot mineral-rich water supports a food chain based on chemosynthetic bacteria and archaea; it extends upwards in complexity through giant tube worms, clams, limpets and shrimp. These animals live miles further down than sunlight ever reaches, in an extreme of pressure and frigid temperatures that would kill any surface life in short order.

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In recent years planetary astronomers have come to believe that beneath the icy surfaces of some of our gas-giant moons there are dark oceans of liquid water. Tidal forces acting on the moons power volcanism; Europa, in particular (the smallest of the four “Galilean” moons of Jupiter) is suspected of having its own hydrothermal vents. Exobiologists think it is relatively likely that life has evolved around them.

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James Cambias’s A Darkling Sea (Tor) transplants the Europa scenario to Iluvatar, a moon in a solar system roughly half way between future Earth and the homeworld of aliens called the Sholen who are attempting to limit human interstellar expansion. A peace treaty with the Sholen constrains human scientists living in a seafloor habitat beneath the ice. They chafe to make contact with the intelligent arthropods at the top of Iluvatar’s foor chain, but are forbidden from contaminating their culture.

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After a human scientist attempting to spy on the Ilmatar is captured and dissected by Iluvatarans who do not realize he is a sophont like themselves, a Sholen mission shuts down the base and orders the humans to evacuate. Some humans, refusing, flee into the lightless ocean and must make allies of the Iluvatarans to survive. When the Sholen’s clumsy attempts at forcing the issue kill some of the mission crew, the survivors vow to strike back.

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Cambias imagines a detailed and convincing ecology for Iluvatar. The natives have plausible psychologies given their evolutionary history (the way Cambias develops the operation and limits of the sonar that is the only distant sense of these eyeless beings is impressive). The gritty details of life in a cramped, smelly human dive habitat are also well handled. Even the villains of the piece are not mere cardboard; the Sholen have their own internal factional problems, and become dangerous not because the are strong but because they are divided, afraid, and dwindling.

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Overall, this is a tense, well-constructed SF novel of first contact, done in the classic Campbellian style and lit up with the sense of discovery that such works ought to have. It could have been written by Hal Clement or Arthur C. Clarke if either were still alive. It works excellently on that level, even if you don’t notice that the author has embedded in it a sly parable.

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I won’t spoil the fun by laying it all out for you. But the viewpoint character’s last name is “Freeman”, and the repressive eco-pietism of the Sholen echoes the attitudes of some humans in our present day. The second half of the book, without ever tub-thumping about it, delivers a satire of various human political delusions. Even the Sholen social pattern of achieving consensus by bonobo-like sexual bonding carries mordantly funny symbolic freight once you realize what it’s a comment on.

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All in all, highly recommended. This is much the best first SF novel I’ve read in the last few years, and leads me to expect good craftsmanship from Cambias in the future.

diff --git a/20140517070235.blog b/20140517070235.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8068ddb --- /dev/null +++ b/20140517070235.blog @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +Managing compatibility issues in ubiquitous code +

There’s a recent bug filed against giflib titled giflib has too many unnecessary API changes. For a service library as widely deployed as it is (basically, on everything with a screen and network access – computers, smartphones, game consoles, ATMs) this is a serious complaint. Even minor breaks in API compatibility imply a whole lot of code rebuilds. These are not just expensive (requiring programmer attention) they are places for bugs to creep in.

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But “Never change an API” isn’t a good answer either. In this case, the small break that apparently triggered this report was motivated by a problem with writing wrappers for giflib in C# and other languages with automatic memory management. The last round of major changes before this was required to handle GIF animation blocks correctly and make the library thread-safe. Time marches on; service libraries have to change, and APIs with them, even when change is expensive.

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How does one properly reconcile these pressures? I use a small set of practice rules I think are simple and effective, and which I think are well illustrated by the way I apply them to giflib. I’m writing about them in public because I think they generalize.

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First rule: if backward-compatibility is a must, fork your library into API-stable versus unstable/evolving versions. This is why I ship both a 4.2.x giflib and a 5.x.x giflib. The 4.2.x version is backward-compatible to the year zero; because of this, application developers get a choice and the effective cost of API breakage in the 5.x.x series decreases a great deal.

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There are costs to this maneuver. The main cost to you, the library developer, is that you will need to cross-port fixes from one line of development to the other. This is acceptable for giflib, which is pretty small; it gets more difficult for larger, more complex libraries.

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The cost to the application developers using it is more serious. The stable version plain won’t get some fixes from the unstable version, exactly the ones that would require API changes. 4.2.x is never going to be thread-safe, and its extension-block handling is a bit flaky in edge cases. Also, it’s easy to drop a stitch and fail to cross-port fixes that could and should be applied.

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In the case of giflib, these are not major problems. The 4.2.x code is very old, very stable, and has passed the test of time and wide deployment. Apparently there was never a lot of need for thread-safety in the past, and the the extension-block handling was good enough; we know these things because the rate of reported defects over the life of the project has been ridiculously low – averaging, in fact, fewer than four per year over a quarter century.

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Other libraries may incur different (higher) implied costs under this strategy. If your service code is necessarily evolving really fast, forking a stable version may not be practical because the cost of back-porting fixes is insupportable. Engineering is tradeoffs; the point of this essay is more to raise awareness of the tradeoffs than to argue that any one rule of practice is always right. Be aware of why you’re doing what you’re doing, and document it.

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Second rule: Provide #defines bearing each level of the release number in your library header so that people can use compile-time conditionals in the C preprocessor to write code paths that will compile and just work with any version of the library. (There are equivalent tactics in other languages.)

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There’s no downside to this. If you do it properly, application developers can choose to never lose back-compatibility with older versions of your library. Just as importantly, they can know they’ll never lose it. This is a confidence-builder.

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Third rule: document, document, document. Every API change requires an explanation. Especially, do not ever leave your client-application developers in doubt about when an API or behavior change took place. They need to be able to conditionalize their code properly to track your changes (see the second rule), and they can only do that if they know exactly when in your release timeline each change occurred. This, too, is a confidence builder.

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Fourth rule: Prefer noisy breakage to quiet breakage. The worst kind of API change is the kind that introduces an incompatible behavior change without advertising the fact. That way lies bugs, madness, and other developers rightly cursing your name.

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Even so, this happens a lot because library maintainers mis-estimate tradeoffs. There’s a tendency to think that requiring users to recompile their applications (or re-link to a new major version of a shared library) is so irritating that it’s better to preserve the API by slipstreaming in changes in run-time behavior that you tell yourself will only be problematic or incompatible in rare edge cases. This belief is almost always wrong!

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The bug report that motivated this apologia came in because the person who filed it thinks I shouldn’t have altered the argument profile of DGifClose() and EGifClose(). What he fails to understand is that I chose this path over some trickier alternatives because I wanted the API breakage to be noisy and obvious at compile time. This way, the client-application builds will break once, the fix will be easy, and the result will be right.

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To apply rule four in this way, it helps to have been careful about rules one through three, in order to lower the cost of the disruption. Thus, application developers using giflib have 4.2.x to fall back on if they really can’t live with my break-it-noisily practice.

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You also want to put in effort to make sure the fix really is easy. Not just to save other developers work, though they’ll thank you for that; the real reason is that tricky fixes get misapplied and spawn bugs.

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The bug reporter wants to know why I didn’t leave DGifClose() and EGifClose() as they were and introduce new entry points with the different profile. This is a fair question, and representative of a common argument for adding complexity to library APIs rather than breaking backward compatibility. It deserves an answer.

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Here it is: code and API complexity are costs, too. They’re a kind of technical debt that creeps up on you, gradually. Each such kluge looks justified when you do it, until you turn around and discover you have an over-complex, unmaintainable, buggy mess on your hands. I take the long view, and prefer not to let this degeneration even get started in my code! This choice may transiently annoy people, but it’s going to lower their exposure to defects over the whole lifetime of the software.

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Being able to take this pro-cleanliness position is an un-obvious but important benefit of open source. The people in my distribution chain may gripe about having to do rebuilds from source, but they can do it. When you’re gluing together opaque binary blobs, the cost of API breakage is severe and you get forced into tolerating practices that will escalate code bloat and long-term defect rates.

diff --git a/20140519023301.blog b/20140519023301.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2d278d9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140519023301.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Review: Anthem’s Fall +

S.L. Dunn’s Anthem’s Fall (Prospect Hill Press) wants to be a high-concept SF novel. What it actually achieves is more like a bad comic book. Without the pictures.

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In New York City, scientist Kristen Jordan (brilliant and beautiful, and very young, of course) is growing increasingly worried about an übertechnology she helped create, as the secretive leader of her research team seems to be developing ever more grandiose objectives. In the parallel world of Anthem, warfare and political collapse are destabilizing an empire. The teaser copy promises us that contending super-entities from Anthem will erupt into our world, requiring Kristen to unleash a technology against them that may be more dangerous than the invaders. DUM DUM DUM! And dumb, dumb, dumb.

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But I never got that far. By fifty pages in it was clear that this is one of those books that, as Dorothy Parker put it, should not be lightly tossed aside; rather, it should be hurled with great force. I made myself soldier on a bit after that to give the Anthem-centered part of the narrative a fair shake, but it was no improvement on the parts set in New York City – if anything the smell of bad comic-book got stronger.

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About the only good thing that can be said of this book is that the author and/or editors could consistently construct grammatically correct sentences. It’s all downhill from there.

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The prose is grindingly leaden and pretentious. The characters, as far as I read, are a Mary Sue and her hunky love interest surrounded by cardboard cutouts. I’ve seen more plausible “science” in a Fantastic Four episode. There are thinly-disguised lectures peddling politics with a heavyhandedness that goes well beyond any plot- or character-development function they might turn out to have later (er, so, do I even need to add that it’s dimwitted politics?) Shopworn tropes lurk on every page. The author managed to tick just about every item on how to do SF wrong I can imagine putting on a checklist, and this is before I got through 15% of the book.

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Spare yourself the pain unless you are looking for a horrible example of what not to do in your novel – and if you are, for Goddess’s sake pirate this thing rather than giving the author or publisher one red cent (this is not a recommendation I have ever made before). The last thing the world needs is incentives for more crap like this to get published.

diff --git a/20140520103028.blog b/20140520103028.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..01c9115 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140520103028.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +Review: Reach for Infinity +

Reach for Infinity (Jonathan Strahan, ed., Rebellion Publishing) is an anthology of new hard SF. The authors and the editor are stretching themselves, taking chances; some of these stories are failures. In general, however, even the failures are interesting efforts that will push you to think about their premises and consider the ways in which SF is constantly claiming new imaginative territory.

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Any time you begin an anthology like this with a story by Greg Egan, you are launching well. Break My Fall, a tale of disaster and ingenuity as emigrants to Mars are menaced by a coronal mass ejection, does not disappoint.

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Aliette de Bodard’s The Dust Queen, a speculation on memory surgery, is atmospheric and well written but less satisfying. While everything else about the story worked, she failed to sell me the central premise.

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Ian McDonald’s The Fifth Dragon is a dense, intricate story of lunar colonization that throws off telling details like sparks. This is how it ought to be done.

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Karl Schroeder is an interesting writer whose reach sometimes exceeds his grasp. In Kheldys he gives an attempt at world-wrecking villainy that fails to quite convince – I found myself wondering, if this disaster is possibly why has it not already happened naturally?

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Pat Cadigan’s Report on the Presence of Seahorses on Mars is another colonization story, trying for the kind of richness McDonald’s has but not quite achieving it. Still, the premise of colonization as reality TV funded by its ratings on Earth is interesting.

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Karen Lord’s Hiraeth: A Tragedy in Four Acts examines the notion that off-Earth environments reliably drive humans insane and examines how a culture spread across the solar system – and beyond – might attempt to cope.

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Ellen Klage’s Amicae Aeternum is a story about friendship and the sacrifices interstellar colonization will almost certainly involve. Intellectually slight compared to most of this collection, but sweet – I’m pleased it wasn’t played as a tragedy.

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Adam Roberts’s Trademark Bugs: A Legal History is, on the other hand, just preposterous – a satire on the absurdities of IP law that is far too heavyhanded for its own good. It’s not the only failure in this collection, but it’s the only uninteresting failure.

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Linda Nagata’s Attitude comes at the idea of space colonization being fundded by its entertainment value from a different angle, constructing a story that at first looks like it will be about space sports but turns into a whodunnit. Very deftly handled.

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Hannu Rajaniemi’s Invisible Planets is a wild imagistic ride reminiscent of Stanislaw Lem, but genuinely SFnal this time with a logical coherence Lem never had. The framing story is basically an excuse for the author’s imagination to run gorgeously amok, and a pretty good one.

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In Kathleen Ann Goonan’s Wilder Still, the Stars, artificial human created with cruel limitations become able to transcend their programming through the patient work of a human who loves them. Though well imagined and executed, I would have appreciated a resolution less easy to predict

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Ken McLeod’s “‘The Entire Immense Superstructure': An installation” was more of a disappointment, because McLeod never made me believe the central premise of the WikiThing. Atoms are heavy and, that matters! The surrounding plot is slight.

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Alastair Reynolds’s In Babelsberg is a chilling little tale of obsessive AI gone wrong and unable to understand its own error.

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Peter Watts’s Hotshot finishes large with a meditation on on destiny and free will that does not bear easy summary. Watts is, as usual for him, both disturbing and thought-provoking in the best tradition of SF.

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Overall this collection speaks well for editor Jonathan Strahan’s “Infinity” series of anthologies and is good enough reason for me to look up the previous ones.

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diff --git a/20140522110146.blog b/20140522110146.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..30fa19a --- /dev/null +++ b/20140522110146.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Review: Template +

I learned from his previous novels Fools Errant and Fool Me Twice that Matthew Hughes seems to have chosen crafting really high-quality tributes to Jack Vance as his artistic mission (at least when writing SF). As a long-time Vance fan myself I consider this a worthy goal, and in Template (self-published) he does not disappoint.

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Conn Labro, an orphan, has lived his entire life as a contract player in one of the great gaming houses of the planet Thrais. His particular expertises center on strategy simulations and personal combat, at both of which he excels. But his life is overturned in a day when the house is destroyed and his only friend – an elderly man named Hallis Tharp with whom he has played games as long as he can remember – is murdered, followed by an attempt on Labro’s own life.

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The old man, as it turns out, has left Labro an inheritance – enough money to buy out his indenture from the heirs of Horder’s Unparalleled Gaming Emporium, and an encrypted bearer deed to…something. Now Labro, never given to introspection or even much curiosity, is surrounded by questions. If Tharp wanted him free, why did he not buy Labro’s indenture before he died? What is the bearer deed a key to, and why are people trying to kill him for it? Jenore Morden, the woman from Old Earth who befriended Tharp when he lived in inexplicable poverty, urges him to track down Tharp’s murderers, and despite the rather cold-blooded customs of Thrais Conn feels moved to comply.

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Conn has much to learn about himself and his origins. A journey to Old Earth, confrontations with villainy, and a lot of gorgeous Vancian scenery and satisfying hugger-mugger ensue. Hughes really is quite good at this; the effect is much like reading a fifth sixth Demon Princes novel that the master himself never happened to write. And intentionally so, I’m sure. Out of the small category of Vance pastiches (Hayford Pierce’s The Thirteenth Majestral and certain portions of M.A. Foster’s ler trilogy being the first to come to mind) Hughes’s are unequivocally the best I’ve encountered.

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If I were the sort of precious snot who writes most lit-fic reviews, it would now be required that I either sniff at the inferiority of imitation and exhort you to go read some real Jack Vance, or adopt some strange contrarian position about Hughes’s writing demonstrating Vance’s inadequacy by improving on it. Because I’m not, I will both recommend Vance and thank Hughes for doing a really creditable job of adopting his style and techniques. Vance was unique and colorful and it is a good thing for SF that color has not been lost to us. I hope we’ll get to enjoy Matthew Hughes’s entertainments for many years to come.

diff --git a/20140523003320.blog b/20140523003320.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..02c416f --- /dev/null +++ b/20140523003320.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Review: The Devil’s Concubine +

I requested an advance look at The Devil’s Concubine (Jill Braden; Wayzgoose Press) because the blurb hinted at an unusual and atmospheric fantasy. It is that; alas, in some other unfortunate respects it is all too predictable.

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The island of Ponong is a sort of other-earthly Java or Bali, tropically gorgeous and dangerous and inhabited by people who have at some time in the past apparently hybridized with snakes; they get nictiating membranes and venomous fangs as factory equipment. QuiTai is a Ponong native with a history as an actress in foreign parts. Returned to her homeland, she has become the the concubine of the Devil, the reclusive werewolf crimelord who runs the island’s underworld, and is attempting to protect her people against the colonizing Thampurians.

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Your generic fantasy world this is not. Even on primitive Ponong they have not only steam engines but rudimentary electronics that have taken a somewhat different direction from our history, and the island’s main export is biological glowlights. The indigenous culture is very much south-east Asian; it’s nice to see someone seriously trying on a fantasy setting that isn’t either European medieval mystery-meat or any of the other well-worn ruts. And the prose isn’t bad; the author’s scene-painting, especially, works well.

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Alas, the book has strong elements of housewife porn. There’s the requisite evil-but-sexy male QuiTai must struggle to escape, and the requisite looks-like-a-bad-boy-but-isn’t for her to run to. The battling courtship proceeds along entirely predictable lines, not really saved from being boring by the moderately snappy dialogue. As is usual in such productions, QuiTai is convincingly shown to be quite bright in her intrigues, but also in retrospect to have been inexplicably stupid when her glands were involved. Few of the plot reveals are really surprising, and you can see the biggest one coming a mile off.

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Thus, unless formula romance is enough to satisfy you, this book fails to deliver on the imaginative promise of its setting. Which is a shame; if it had been less about QuiTai’s sex life and more about (say) her covert struggle against the Thampurians, it would have been a lot more fun. It’s supposed to be first in a series; it would be nice to think that the sequels will be about something other than her approach-avoidance dance with the guy, but experience has taught me to be pessimistic in such matters.

diff --git a/20140527105744.blog b/20140527105744.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..77ddafd --- /dev/null +++ b/20140527105744.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Review: Elements of Mind +

I’ve been friendly with Walter Hunt for some years, so when he told me that his new novel Elements of Mind (Spence City) involved Victorian mesmerists, I knew to expect an atmospheric and meticulously researched fantasy full of period language and detail, probably one dovetailing with real history as seamlessly as anything by Tim Powers.

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That is indeed what we get. In Victorian England, a society of mesmerists – in effect, sorcerers who can use gestures and the power of animal magnetism to compel humans and others – is aware of various categories of dangerous spirits. There are elementals of earth, air, fire and water; greater entities of a kind a Victorian Christian could only categorize as demons or perhaps djinn; and still greater, half-awake entities who might be old gods.

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The mesmerists – and various unlikely allies – strive to keep these entities beyond the Glass Door, out of the human world. They cannot pass the Glass Door of themselves, but they can be summoned. And for the summoning there is always a price – which the evil or simply desperate may be all too willing to pay with their souls.

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The head of the Committee of Mesmerists, William Davy, knows that some of these entities intend to shatter the Glass Door so that the spirits can erupt uncontrollably into the human world. To prevent this, he seeks a statuette older than history that enhances mesmeric powers. During the novel he travels all over Great Britain and eventually to India in search of it.

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The only serious flaw in this book is that’s about all that happens. Walter is so fond of his scene-painting and historical lore (Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle are both significant characters) that he sometimes seems reluctant to let his plot develop or resolve. If I didn’t know from him that there is to be a sequel (something not hinted at in the packaging of the ARC he gave me) I might wonder what the actual point of the exercise was.

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As it is, Walter is working on a narrative arc that cannot be encompassed in a single book. I have fair confidence that he’ll get somewhere interesting with it; this is, after all, the same man who wrote the action-filled but philosophically challenging Dark Wing space operas. In the meantime, this sepia-toned puzzlebox of a novel offers some quiet, sophisticated pleasures for the historically-literate reader and connoisseur of Victoriana. I mentioned Tim Powers earlier; though not as pyrotechnic as either, this work otherwise bears comparison with The Anubis Gates or The Stress of Her Regard pretty well.

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Elements of Mind is perhaps best read with a search engine handy so you can look up character names and items of terminology, and appreciate the clever use Walter has made of his sources. If that prospect fails to appeal to you, you are probably not Walter’s target reader. But if it does, you’ll appreciate reading something more intelligent than the reams of formula fantasy out there, and this is it.

diff --git a/20140529215203.blog b/20140529215203.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..76982f2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140529215203.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +New cat soon to arrive here +

Cathy and I signed papers to adopt a cat from a rescue network last night. It would be here already, but it’s being treated for a mild ear infection picked up at the pet store.

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“It” is actually a he, a golden-eyed ginger-and-cream Maine Coon about two years old. The name is “Gorgonzola”, which we’ll probably shorten to “Zola”.

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Why this cat? Because we’re of the school of thought that believes you should let a cat choose you rather than trying to choose a cat. Of all the ones we met, it seemed to take to Cathy the most strongly, and we viewed this as the more important compatibility check because we both know I have stronger cat-fu than she does. If a cat doesn’t take an active dislike to me (which is so unusual I can’t remember when it last happened) I will charm it eventually; this one likes me well enough to begin with that I’m sure we’ll do just fine.

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It’s hard to avoid making comparisons with Sugar. First impression is that Zola is almost as human-friendly as Sugar was (which sounds like faint praise but is really like saying “almost as deep as the Pacific Ocean”) with a more placid, less active temperament. I’m not expecting him to be quite as outgoing with our houseguests, but I don’t think he’ll hide behind the furniture either. Likely he’ll just hang out nearby being mellow and making nice at anyone who approaches him. That’s typical behavior for Coon toms and he seems quite typical that way. He seems to be very gentle and un-clawful even by Coon standards, which is going some. I’d bet he’s great with small children.

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We’re a little nervous, for all the obvious reasons. What if Zola has un-obvious behavior problems? Ill health? But it’s time. Our home feels a bit empty without a cat in it. Not for much longer!

diff --git a/20140531152243.blog b/20140531152243.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..17bd034 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140531152243.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +Post requesting introductory-SF suggestions got deleted +

My post requesting introductory-SF suggestions got accidentally deleted due to a WordPress interface feature I didn’t quite understand and momentary inattention.

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Never fear, I had already digested most of the suggestions and am working on the result.

diff --git a/20140601110220.blog b/20140601110220.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f4703f0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140601110220.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +At long last, shipper 1.0 +

Here at Eric Conspiracy Secret Labs, we ship no code before its time. Even if that means letting it stay in beta for, er, nearly twelve years. But at long last I believe my shipper tool is ready for the world.

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Since I’ve already described shipper in detail I won’t rehearse its features again. Suffice it to say that if you’re the kind of hacker who ships point releases more often than about once a week, and you’re tired of all the fiddly handwork that implies, you want this more badly than you know.

diff --git a/20140606145730.blog b/20140606145730.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ac5925f --- /dev/null +++ b/20140606145730.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Hoping for the crazy +

The biggest non-story that should be in the news right now, but isn’t, is the collapse of anthropogenic-global-warming “science” into rubble. Global average temperature has been flat for between 15 and 17 years, depending on how you interpret the 1997-1998 El Nino event. Recently GAT, perking along its merry level way, has fallen out of the bottom of the range of predictions made by the climate modelers at the IPCC. By the normal 95%-confidence standards of scientific confirmation, the IPCC’s disaster scenarios – the basis for, among other things, carbon taxes and the EPA’s coming shutdown-by-impossible-regulation of U.S. coal power – are now busted.

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AGW alarmists have responded by actually hoping in public view that a strong El Niño event later this year will shove GAT back up into consistency with the IPCC models, rescuing their narrative.

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This…this is hoping for the crazy. Let me count the ways:

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First, the IPCC models, which are all about CO2/H20 greenhousing in the atmosphere, do not include or predict the long-period oceanic oscillations that produce El Niño. So if the El Niño does push up GAT (as it did in 1997-1998) it won’t actually confirm the IPCC models; the alarmists are going to have to lie to claim that it does, and it’s a lie easily checked and debunked.

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Second, El Niño has a sister; it is normally followed by an “La Niña” event, the flip side of the oscillation, that pulls GAT down as strongly as El Niño pulls it up. So if the alarmists run around crowing that El Niño has rescued the model fit, they’ll be setting themselves up for a bad scientific and political fall when La Niña comes around and yanks GAT back out of range.

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Third, Santayana’s definition of a fanatic is relevant here. If you believe, as alarmists claim to, that more global warming would be a civilization- and biosphere-wrecking catastrophe, why in the holy fuck would you object to the IPCC models that predicted it being busted?

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The sane reaction would be “OK, great, there was no climate-change bullet coming, now we can put energy into fixing real threats like biodiversity loss and the Great Pacific Garbage Vortex”. Mightily wishing that catastrophic AGW is real after all, or that the El Niño bump can be misrepresented to make it look real, is insane, even in the environmentalists’ own terms.

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That is, unless the right-wing paranoids were on the money about the whole AGW thing being a political shuck after all – or anyway, more on the money than I allowed myself to believe. I hate it when that happens…

diff --git a/20140607132946.blog b/20140607132946.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6aa8f4e --- /dev/null +++ b/20140607132946.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Review: Echopraxia +

Peter Watts writes complex, dark novels full of intellectual fireworks – disturbing tours-de-force that question our most cherished notions of consciousness, self, free will, and agency. I often disagree with his logic and conclusions, but he plays the game honestly and shows his work – usually with extensive citations to the published literature in half-a-dozen scientific fields.

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His new one, Echopraxia, takes up what happened on Earth after the First Contact in Blindsight (2006). I won’t summarize the plot, which is really only an excuse for Watts to do “literature of ideas” at breakneck speed and intensity. The atmosphere is more important – a sort of paranoid neuro-bio-punk in which mind manipulation has become so subtle and ubiquitous that the evidence of the senses is unreliable and every ‘final’ theory about who has done what to whom is subject to sudden and explosive refutation. This what cyberpunk wanted to be when it grew up, but never quite achieved.

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Watts has been compared to Greg Egan as a writer of diamond-hard SF, and the comparison is apt. But where Egan is clinical and dispassionate, Watts is emotionally a pessimist, and you have to watch for where this interferes with his logic and causes him to paint a bleaker picture than the facts actually justify. An example in this novel is the minor plot point that by 2093 most human legal systems, having absorbed the anti-free-will arguments of mechanistic physics, have abandoned the notion of individual culpability. Readers of my essay Predictability, Computability, and Free Will are equipped to notice that Watts has skipped some steps and landed on a mistaken inference here. There are other similar problems.

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Still, I strongly recommend this book (and the rest of Watts’s work) for anyone who relishes intellectual challenge and an attempt to grapple with big questions in their SF – and what is the genre about, if not for the sort of conceptual breakthrough that can bring? Even when Watts is wrong he is brilliant, and when he is on his game he can break genuinely new conceptual ground. Some of the stuff in this novel about the theological implications of computational models of physics (yes, I said theological implications) is like that.

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This is SF at a level above even where the likes of Charles Stross and Hannu Rajaniemi have been playing. I hope Watts gives us a lot more of it.

diff --git a/20140607234642.blog b/20140607234642.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..94ae4e7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140607234642.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +First day of Zola +

Zola, successor to our late and sorely missed cat Sugar, arrived here today. Here’s how it went…

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We brought him here around 11:30AM. He was quiet as a church mouse in the car from the rescue center, a pretty startling contrast with Sugar who hated car travel and made almost constant distress sounds when subjected to it.

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We showed him his litterbox and the food bowl, then left him with them in the basement to chill out a bit. He had accepted a little petting but not really responded to it – his mind was clearly on other things. We know it’s best not to crowd a cat when it’s trying to cope with novelty.

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After a while Zola came up the basement stairs, found our master bedroom, and poked around in it. While doing so he found the crawlspace under the waterbed headboard where Sugar occasionally hid when she felt stressed out. He promptly dived into it. There is no way to get a cat out of there if it doesn’t wanna, not without disassembling the waterbed.

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He hung out in there, thinking and/or napping, for about three hours while Cathy and I tried not to worry. (Well, I tried not to worry. Cathy asserts she wasn’t as concerned.)

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Then Zola came out – and, basically, love-bombed both of us. Purred up a storm, head-butted us, rolled over on his back to be played with, and generally looked completely blissed out about having these!!! wonderful!!! humans!!! paying attention to him.

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Maine Coons. They’re like that. We always suspected our Sugar was carrying a bunch of Coon genes under her generic shorthair-tabby coat. In Zola’s case it’s not even a question; he’s either a pure-bred Coon or as close as makes no difference and could be a reference example of the breed traits and appearance.

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It’s now about six hours later and Zola’s acting like we’ve been his people for years. He oscillates back and forth between Cathy and me politely requesting attention and being so sweet to us it’d melt the heart of a stone statue.

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Sugar was like that; in some ways it’s like having her back again (Coon traits, which see). But Zola has a subtly different personality. He’s more relaxed, mellow, kind of unflappable. Sugar wasn’t really high-strung in any absolute sense, but that’s how she’d seem by comparison.

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Zola is also visually striking in a way Sugar wasn’t. This picture doesn’t convey it very well, but he’s got luxuriant fur in ginger/pale-honey/orangey-gold shades and golden eyes. Sugar was a beautiful cat in a simple girl-next-door way but not the glamor-puss Zola is.

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It’s also already clear that Zola is as good-mannered and well-socialized a cat as Sugar was, which is pretty remarkable.

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A few hours ago I called out PALS contact to let her know things were going excellently and find out who had done such an excellent job of fostering Zola, so I could send whoever it was a note of thanks. She said, and I quote: “He bounced around a lot. To be honest, I don’t think our people had much to do with it; he came in good.”

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She thinks Zola must have been raised early by humans and somehow lost his owner, rather than being truly feral, but PALS has no history past the point one of their volunteers rescued him from the Cumberland County SPCA (which would otherwise have had to euthanize him shortly therafter).

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I feel almost like we rolled two 18/00s in a row, first with Sugar and now with Zola. But the truth probably is that we made our luck by knowing how to look for the traits that would suit a cat to us, and (hugely important!) knowing how to be aware when a cat wanted to be ours.

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The only serious remaining unknown is how Zola will deal with houseguests. We hope he’ll be as friendly as Sugar was, and at this point believe it’s pretty likely.

diff --git a/20140608111346.blog b/20140608111346.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..21cf762 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140608111346.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Review: The Worth of a Shell +

M. C. A. Hogarth’s The Worth of a Shell (self-published) is a complex, serious, well-thought-out extrapolation of the consequences of alien sexual biology marred only by the fact that one of its central premises is not at all credible.

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The Jokka are presented as a humanoid species with three sexes; males, females, and neuters. There’s a tragedy built into Jokka physiology; under stress, the females often have strokes that decrease their intelligence. Giving birth induces such stress so reliably that after multiple pregnancies they generally become mindless animals who have to be strapped into a mating harness.

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This novel tells of a disgraced neuter who finds renewed meaning in his life by becoming the protector of a female who rejects breeding because she doesn’t want to lose her curiosity and self-awareness. They seek the Birthwell, the legendary origin-point of the Jokka, where she suspects there might be an answer to the Jokka tragedy.

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Much of this is well executed. Hogarth has invented plausible specializations for each of the three Jokka sexes and worked out what the resulting dominant social pattern would be like in both logical and evocative detail. Her exploration of the character psychologies arising from these circumstances is equally thoughtful and convincing; she does a particularly good job on her neuter viewpoint character. It is really too bad that Hogarth has screwed up something so basic in her worldbuilding that the whole edifice collapses in a heap.

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No, it isn’t the trisexuality, in itself. It is true that premise is almost certainly impossible for a species that isn’t eusocial, like ants or meerkats; the bioenergetics of this have been investigated in some detail. But we can let that slide under the One-McGuffin Rule (a work of SF is allowed one impossible or highly implausible premise as long as the consequences are worked out consistently, and FTL doesn’t count).

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The real problem here is the second half – most females going non-sophont after a few births. It’s the “most” that’s the problem here. If this disadvantage were wired so deeply into the Jokka genome that there was effectively no differential across germlines it might be stable. But explicitly it is not; for a few prized females (no one can predict which) the decline is slowed or halted.

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This difference is not stable under selection. Remaining sophont in order to care for and advance the interests of your offspring is such a huge reproductive advantage that the alleles preventing the stroke vulnerability should have been strongly selected for in the Jokkas’ evolutionary past, and birth-related strokes should never have had anywhere above about 1% incidence.

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The author’s apparent failure to even realize this problem is a crash landing that makes this novel a sad failure as SF. Doubly unfortunate because I can think of a couple of different fixes for it that would have had minimal impact on what the author apparently wanted to do.

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Note for those unfamiliar with genre forms: it is allowed for Ms. Hogarth to have an explanation in mind that she has not revealed, but respect for her readers’ ability to play the game requires that she drop a clue to the explanation, or at least signal that she knows it’s a continuity problem that has to be resolved.

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Further warning: this is another one of those first-of-a-sequence books that is not so labeled and doesn’t warn you that it ends without resolution. Turns out this may only be true of the ARC; the Amazon listing describes it as first of a series.

diff --git a/20140609110435.blog b/20140609110435.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..13915d5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140609110435.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Review: Trial By Fire +

Trial By Fire (Charles E. Gannon, Baen) is the sort of book that divides those who notice it into two parts. One group will sneer “Yard goods from Baen, yet another space opera full of stuff blowing up”; the other will nod and smile and say “Good clean fun, I’ll take it.”

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I’m cheerfully in the second group, myself. But I do have standards. Done badly, this sort of thing is just boring and derivative button-pushing, a sort of male-targeted analog of formula romances. Done well, it’s a fun ride with enough elements of puzzle story and sense of wonder to make it respectable SF even if it doesn’t aspire to the heights of conceptual breakthrough found in the best of the genre.

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This particular book is the second in a sequence that I would describe as enjoyable if unexceptional. Much of the furniture is familiar (one of the major alien species is perhaps too much like Alan Dean Foster’s Thranx, and another is fairly generic Proud Warrior Race Guys) but the author knows his way around the battles and action scenes, and some of the reveals in the puzzle side of the plot are genuinely interesting.

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Overall, the author earns his money. You’ll want to read the first book, Fire With Fire, before this one. Expect sequels – but if you’re in the target market for this book, you already know you want them.

diff --git a/20140611024035.blog b/20140611024035.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8800401 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140611024035.blog @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +Review: Space Opera +

Space Opera (Rich Horton, editor; Diamond Book Distributors) starts off with an introduction that gives a historical overview of the evolution of the term “space opera” from its disreputable beginnings in the 1940s to the self-conscious modern revival of the subgenre after 1985.

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It’s a pretty good summary with a few odd lapses. Missing, for example, is the informative detail that the term was coined by analogy with “soap opera”, but in its original context probably owed more to the now near-extinct term “horse opera” for a formulaic Western. Also, given the editor’s cogent argument that space opera never really went away during the pre-revival years, it seems inexplicable that he fails to mention such obvious exemplars as The Mote In God’s Eye (1975) and Startide Rising (1983), among others.

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But these are nearly quibbles, relatively speaking. The larger lapse is that the editor of this anthology never engages the question of what “space opera” actually is – that is, what traits define it relative to other subgenres of science fiction. The consequence of this lack is that the stories in this anthology, while sometimes quite brilliant individually, add up to rather less than the sum of their parts, and it can be difficult to discern why any particular story was selected.

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Looking at the first two stories…Yoon Ha Lee’s The Knight of Chains, the Deuce of Stars opens the anthology with brilliant flourishes of Vancian baroqueness that delighted me and made me want to read everything else she has written as fast as I can get my hands on the works, but it is not easy to see how it is tied to “space opera” other than by a sense of time-depth and the presence of interstellar war in the background of the story. Still, it has a far better claim than James Patrick Kelly’s The Wreck of the Goodspeed – a quirky tale of religion, adolescent horniness, and a rogue AI that fails every test for space-opera traits I can think of.

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And what are those traits? Space opera, like SF, is a radial category with different examples loosely bound to (and sometimes failing to exhibit one or more of) certain core traits. A fascination with large-scale conflict narratives is certainly one – the clashes of empires and civilizations and species are a recurring theme. Going with this is a cinematic, wide-screen quality of narrative; vastnesses of space, depth of time.

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Much space opera overlaps in its tropes and settings with military SF; but where military SF tends to focus on the military life, the small-unit action and the psychology of command and obedience, space opera is more interested in grand strategy and big implications. Compare The Mote In God’s Eye (1975), an archetype of un-selfconscious pre-revival space opera (as well as a cracking good first contact novel and a puzzle story in the classic Campbellian mode), with Starship Troopers (1961), an archetype of military SF; the contrasts are clear here. It is also instructive to consider David Weber’s Honorverse novels, which are very near the midpoint of the continuum between these two subgenres. The subject of my last review, Trial by Fire, sits somewhere a bit outboard of the Honorverse novels towards the space-opera end.

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Finally and most importantly, though space opera participates in SF’s affirmation of a rationally knowable universe and often contains elements of the classic sort of hard-SFnal idea puzzle, space opera has a very different emotional tone. The best puzzle stories have the cerebral quality of a locked-room murder mystery; the worst are lifeless think pieces full of talking heads. By contrast, the best space operas trade in grand themes of individual heroism, adventure, villainy, courage, adversity, betrayal, and triumph; the worst are over-predictable and mindlessly violent. Where that sort of thalamic charge is absent, space opera is not.

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Alas, there is no such structural or thematic analysis even suggested by this sequence of stories. Gwyneth Jones’s Saving Tiamat, again, has nothing to do with any recognizable trait of space opera – the fact that it’s about cannibalism, assassination, and (arguably) dark villainy is insufficient for what is ultimately a rather bloodless (though well-executed) outing.

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Gareth L. Powell’s Six Lights off Green Scar is, as its title alone manages to suggest, much more like it. Smaller-screen space-opera, here, with the touch of noir these sometimes have – the burnt-out interstellar explorer, the newshound hungry for a scoop. You know from the first moment this will be no cerebral, claustrophilic puzzle-piece; shit’s going to get thalamically real out there, and there will be violence and heroism and betrayal and at least the possibility of redemption. It’s not necessarily the best story in the anthology, but it’s the first to truly resonate with the anthology’s title – the first one can properly call “operatic”.

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But Greg Egan’s Glory swerves away from opera again, big time. I’m a huge fan of Egan’s work, but how anyone can read a story that’s half about reconstructing mathematical theorems from a dead alien civilization and half mockery of human primate politics and think “space opera” is beyond me.

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Chris Willrich’s The Mote Dancer and the Firelife zigzags back in the direction of space opera (almost any direction would do that, after Egan) but never really gets there. The setting has space-operatic potential, but a psychology-centered plot about a woman resolving her grief for a dead lover really doesn’t qualify even when one of them has gills and the other is an irritating ghost in a cybermachine.

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Michael Flynn’s On Rickety Thistlewaite is a short excerpt from his gloriously space-operatic Spiral Arm sequence (The January Dancer and sequels). Go read the novels; they are odd, poetic, grandiloquent, and unique. Here for the second time we are clearly on theme, though the excerpted part does not show this as clearly as it might.

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By contrast, Una McCormack’s War Without End suggests perversely bad judgment about what belongs in an anthology of ‘space opera’. Clue: a sour, brooding, and involuted story like something out of a bad New Wave anthology from forty years ago not only does not belong, it is a near-perfect antithesis of what does. (I will further note that if I truly wanted to wallow in this kind of depressive crud, I would just read literary fiction and have done with SF.)

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David Moles’s Finisterra and Naomi Novik’s Seven Years From Home are two quite well-crafted alien-ecology tales, and it is nice to see Ms. Novik showing some range beyond her Temeraire books, but what claim either has to be space opera is at best unclear. Kage Baker’s Plotters and Shooters is a slight bit of parody that suggests the editor misfiles anything as space opera that has asteroids and guns in it.

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Paul Berger’s The Muse of Empires Lost is more like it. Space habs in the interiors of giant bioengineered squid, mating with starships; interstellar travellers carrying crossbows for good reasons; a backstory thousands of years deep; history manipulated by an immortal parasite; weird powers; betrayal, revenge, and triumph. The tone is properly epic even if the space battles are missing in this instance.

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Boojum (Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette) continues the streak of spacegoing critters, adding space piracy and rayguns. This one starts with a space battle. It’s an obvious (and successful) homage to the pre-Campbellian space opera of the 1920s and 30s. Jay Lake’s Lehr, Rex follows it with ironic comment on some of space opera’s most persistent tropes then and since. Both of these belong in a space-opera anthology.

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Justina Robson’s Cracklegrackle, alas, dissipates the momentum. Though a fine and inventive story in its own way, it has little of the set dressing and none of the tropes or (being mainly about failure and loss) the emotional tone of space opera.

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Alastair Reynolds has been one of the bright lights of British neo-space-opera, and he demonstrates why in Hideaway. Deep time measured in kiloyears, forerunner artifacts of mysterious power, implacable enemies, one last desperate hope, heroism, and (I predicted this before finishing) a revelation. This is how it’s done. This is what space opera in a modern voice looks like.

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Ian McLeod’s Isabel of the Fall is beautiful and sad and not quite as far from space opera as War Without End; at least it has its beauty, a sense of time-depth, and an epic, mythic quality to it. Even so it is not clear what the work is doing in this anthology.

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Robert Reed’s Precious Mental, on the other hand, certainly belongs. Reed has always been good at suggesting vastness. This tale tells of a ship larger than worlds, a near-immortal with a crime in his past, an ancient enemy who may or may not be the hidden overlords of the known galaxy, and a quest for vital knowledge that sprawled over eight million years.

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Aliette de Bodards’s Two Sisters In Exile rings a new change on the old idea that forgetting the cost of war may lead to a greater one. It is arguably only marginal as space opera, but harmonizes well with the stories here that fall definitely within that genre.

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I may be unable to evaluate Lavie Tidhar’s Lode Stars properly because I was laughing too hard at the Illuminatus! references, but I think this is like the previous – marginal, but harmonizing well with stories nearer the heart of the space-opera subgenre.

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Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s Silent Bridge, Pale Cascade announces itself as space opera from its first page, but it’s deliberately a sort pf stylized oriental miniature of the form that averts the climactic battle or big reveal. Good nevertheless.

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Ian McDonald’s The Tear finishes off the anthology in the grandest of space-operatic style, with heroism and obsession and revenge and the destruction of a civilization tied to a cosmic secret that may allow humanity to survive the end of this universe.

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Having read through the entire contents, I now think Yoon Ha Lee’s opening piece a better fit at one edge of the radial category of space opera than I did. Still, even being generous about the edge cases, only about half these stories really qualify as space opera, and there’s one anti-space-opera for which the editor merits a swift kick in the behind.

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I think anybody who is going to compile a theme anthology named after a subgenre of SF damned well ought to have and make explicit a better theory of what the subgenre is about than this. Certainly another critic or reader could argue with my characterization of the space-opera subgenre and my handling of edge cases, but the flat refusal to judge we see here is as silly as compiling an anthology titled “Murder Mystery” in which nigh on half the stories don’t feature a murder. It’s false advertising, it’s a cheat, and it’s disrespectful of conventions that have value both for reader and writer.

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I am left happy with most of the stories but unhappy with the anthology. Shame on you, Rich Horton. You should have done better than this.

diff --git a/20140613025717.blog b/20140613025717.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ef89569 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140613025717.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Review: The Ultra Thin Man +

One of the trials of reviewing books is first novels that aren’t very good, but are so well-meant and earnestly attempted than simply panning them would feel like kicking a puppy. Patrick Swenson’s The Ultra Thin Man is a case like this.

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This novel aims to be mystery/suspense set in an interstellar future, with two intrepid detectives chasing a deadly terrorist into more complications than they bargained for, including inimical aliens and moles in their own organization.

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There’s nothing horribly wrong with the execution, but there’s not a whole lot of win in it either. The prose improves from painfully clunky to acceptable after the first few chapters, the plotting is adequate, the characterization uninspired though not jarringly bad. But – and this is important – none of this is the kind of awful that suggests the novice writer is doomed to mediocrity or worse forever. There’s a bit of originality here and there and some flashes of entertaining quirkiness in the worldbuilding.

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Patrick Swenson, whoever he is, needs more practice. And a better editor. And beta readers who will kick his butt when he needs it. Given these conditions, I suspect he could have written something pretty good. Sadly, this book is not yet it. If you like the synopsis it may be worth your time, but don’t set your expectations high.

diff --git a/20140615214351.blog b/20140615214351.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f20d3d8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140615214351.blog @@ -0,0 +1,62 @@ +Review: Irregular Verbs and Other Stories +

I hesitated before requesting a review e-copy of Matthew Johnson’s short-story anthology Irregular Verbs and Other Stories – for, though it was labeled “Science Fiction/Fantasy”, I had a suspicion that the author might attempt to commit literary fiction.

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The introduction, a gush of praise for the author’s artistic sensitivity and his nuanced command of language, did nothing to allay my suspicions. (Also, the word “transgressive” was used. This is generally a sign that wearisome levels of dimwitted political cant are oncoming.) The introduction read exactly as though I could expect the anthology proper to be lit-fic – that is, an extended stylistic wank in which the author continually mistakes either the fine details of the emotional lives of imaginary persons or his own meta-expressive language games for interesting subjects.

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Parts of this anthology aren’t quite that bad. Other parts are worse. A few are pretty good (most of the better ones were first published in SF magazines). In the remainder of this review I will use Johnson’s work to explore some of the boundary conditions of the SF genre – how it differs from literary fiction and from genres such as mystery and fantasy.

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Because I’m going to be saying a lot about genres of writing, I want to be clear on what I think a genre is. It’s two things: one is a set of expectations a reader has about the kind of experience an instance of the genre will deliver, the other is a set of genre-specific codes and expressive techniques that the genre writer uses in the expectation that readers will receive them as the author intended. Like all codes and languages, the purpose of genres is to make communication easier by allowing both parties to assume a repertoire of common referents. Genre art fails when the production of the writer fails to match the genre referents and constraints as known by the reader.

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This analysis generalizes Samuel Delany’s observation that SF is not merely, or even mostly, a way of writing; it is a way of reading, too. The same is true of other genres, in different ways.

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We will also require the following definition of science fiction (due in its most developed form to Gregory Benford): that branch of fantastic literature which affirms the rational knowability of the universe, and has as its most particular reader experience the sense of conceptual breakthrough – of having understood the universe in a new and larger way. Every constraint in this definition is important; removing or relaxing any of them lands us in other genres.

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The first story in this anthology, Irregular Verbs, is representative in both its virtues and flaws. In the Salutean Islands, the natives are so gifted at language that pairs of them constantly spontaneously generate new ones. It takes a daily public act of social will to maintain a common public tongue intelligible to all. Senderi Ang, mourning the death of his beloved wife Kesperi ten days ago, discovers that he is beginning to forget their marriage-language.

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This story is like SF in several ways. The premise is fantastic (counterfactual) but not obviously impossible; the consequences are worked out logically and with respect for the reader’s intelligence. It uses the characteristic SFnal device of indirect exposition – the counterfactual aspects of the world being shown mainly not by expository lumps but through the thoughts and actions of the characters.

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Despite this, as SF, it fails – in fact, it’s not even really trying. The lesser reason for this is its failure to participate in the SF genre’s historical conversation. The worldbuilding shows no awareness of or references to previous works of SF with similar or related premises (Jack Vance’s The Languages of Pao, for example, or Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17, or a James Tiptree story I’ve forgotten the title of). This failure would not in itself be fatal.

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The greater reason, the fatal failure, is this: all the premise is used for is a meditation on the psychology of grief, loss, and the need to remember, ended by a futile symbolic gesture surrounded by fine language. To be specific: Senderi Ang has a friend tattoo a grammar and lexicon of what he can remember of his and Kesperi’s marriage-language on his skin. The author invites us to believe that this keeps the language alive, but it doesn’t – the tattoo is just a static representation of the language’s anatomy, not living use of it as an expressive medium. It’s a curious confusion, coming from a writer.

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There is no sense of wonder here, no conceptual breakthrough; the reader is never given either a true nor a false but emotionally plausible sense of walking out of the story with more understanding than he or she walked into it with. Not only that, but what is dramatically presented as a solution to the central problem of the story is a false one.

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I think we can locate a key difference between literary fiction and SF here. Johnson seems to consider Senderi Ang’s tattoo a resolution because it is a performative act that expresses the character’s emotions in a socially visible form; the fact that it does not actually fulfil the character’s expressed desire is somehow irrelevant even to the character. This is the discourse of modern and postmodern literary fiction: there is no truth and no objective reality, only people fooling themselves for comfort.

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SF has much stricter standards for what would constitute a correct resolution. If this were an SF story, it would end something like this: Senderi Ang would find some functional reason for other islanders to want to preserve the language as a living medium; then he would begin teaching classes in it and find his fulfillment in that. Most likely the story would end as he begins teaching the first lesson. It is not merely the condition of his mind that would change but the objective condition of the world.

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That didn’t happen. Thus, as a reader of SF receiving an anthology labeled “SF/Fantasy” and a story co-opting some SFnal ways of conveying counterfactuals, I felt cheated by the story and its ending.

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I would have felt more cheated if I had not begun reading with a strong suspicion that the author’s understanding of what is central and particular about an SF reader’s expectations is defective, and that he would therefore likely fail to meet them. It was no fun being right about this.

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The next story, Another Country, is in some ways better. An unexplained natural phenomenon has opened ways for “prefugees” from the historical past to come forward to the present. Again, the setup uses SFnal expository techniques. Johnson’s imagination of the sorts of things that might happen when ancient Romans and Goths collide with modern technology and pop culture is intelligent and witty. Some of the bits about that do deliver an SFnal sort of reward, a sense of increased understanding about where the flashpoints would be and how people on both sides of the divide would be likely to react.

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We get those as appetizers, but there’s no main course. The story trails off into what, in SF terms, is a diffuse and unsatisfying ending. There’s no reveal; it is never even quite clear what the main character’s intentions were, or whether he was being truthful at various earlier points in the story. One suspects we are supposed to consider this ambiguity artistic and sophisticated, when in fact it just feels cheap and evasive.

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This story seems to be intended as SF; the techniques of it suggest that we are supposed to be in a rationally knowable world. But like the previous story it ends as bad SF; SF’s promise to the reader is not fulfilled. Alas, worse is to come.

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Public Safety is an initially cute little construction about a timeline in which the French Revolution’s odder attempts at breaking with the past didn’t fail and are manifest in an alternate New Orleans. The month of Thermidor is on the calendar, the watches use decimal hours, and “REASON OVER FERVOR” is on government buildings – it was a nice subtle touch that the author gives the motto only in Latin for the reader to translate. This is some high-quality SFnal scene-setting by the telling detail!

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Turns out we’re in a police procedural where the detective is investigating a note threatening death to an unidentified woman on a specified date. All the most advanced methods of the 19th century are employed in the investigation. Phrenology! Graphology! Physiognomy! Racial theory! All of which we are straight-facedly invited to treat as the hardest of hard sciences. Meanwhile, machinery is mysteriously degrading – omnibuses are breaking down, and mechanical gear in theaters is suffering dangerous failures.

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But the story squanders all that promise. On the appointed day, the detective guesses that the murder victim is to be Dame Reason herself. Natural law collapses; we get no hint of how this was even possible or why it was done or who might have done it, outside of speculation that the agents of chaos were scientists themselves.

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The SF form requires of authors a central undertaking to the reader: that there are rules to the unknown, and if you are bright and observant enough you can comprehend them. Here that undertaking not merely broken but perversely inverted – the point of the story is that rational knowability itself has been murdered. This is not merely bad science fiction, it is a sort of nihilistic antimatter inverse of science fiction that is all the more repellent to an SF reader because of the technical skill and superficial cleverness with which it was set up.

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Beyond the Fields You Know is a fantasy that chillingly subverts a cherished trope of children’s stories: what if the magical creature that invites you to adventure in another world is actually recruiting slaves to do scutwork in a magical war, and you can never go home? There isn’t really any internal logic here, just a sort of creepy dream sequence about a boy who breaks his chains. Rational knowability is out the window, but as we were not led to expect that it is not the exercise in perversion that that the previous story was.

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What we have here is a correctly constructed instance of genre fantasy; it gets its pull from the evocation of old and emotionally powerful tropes from folklore and myth. The SFnal experience of conceptual breakthrough is not the aim, nor will fantasy genre readers expect it.

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What You Couldn’t Leave Behind is the first story in this anthology I unequivocally enjoyed. How often do you run across a hard-boiled-detective pastiche set in a Buddhist afterlife populated at least partly by Egyptian gods?

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Curiously, this Thorne-Smith-meets-Raymond-Chandler theological fantasy is also the first story in the book to fulfill SF’s genre contract – if you accept the Buddhist premises about reincarnation and nirvana the ending follows perfectly logically, and its kicker is a small but respectable conceptual breakthrough. Bonus points for the Casablanca reference at the end. Would that all the work in this anthology were so good.

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When We Have Time is a chilling little vignette the likes of which Frederic Brown might have written. When the twist at the end comes, you realize it’s a possibility you should have seen coming. You had the clues, and the logic is impeccable, but the author stayed a step ahead. This is true SF, and would not have been out of place in any SF magazine from the early 1950s onwards.

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This story exhibits a structure many SF stories have in common with murder mysteries, and the reason crossovers between both these two genres are so often successful. In both forms the author is required to play by the rules of rational deduction. The writer wins the game if the reader reaches the big reveal without having anticipated it but with the realization that the solution is correct; the reader wins if he or she gets to the truth before the author’s reveal. The author plays fair by leaving open the possibility that a sharp enough reader can win, and the work is judged more by how well and how audaciously the author plays the game more than by conventional literary criteria.

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What distinguishes an SF story like this from a murder mystery isn’t the absence of murder but the presence of at least one premise in the story that is fantastic, e.g. counterfactual.

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The Wise Foolish Son examines the way history is polished into myth. We might be in a rationally knowable universe here; there is magic but hints that it follows discoverable rules. But their discoverability is irrelevant to the appeal of the story; the appeal is in the resonance with folktale motifs we half-recognize. Thus we are in the territory of fantasy rather than SF.

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Long Pig is a joke, a faux restaurant review in which you’ll know the punchline in advance if you recognize what the title means.

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With Talking Blues, the expected wearisome political cant arrives as a folk singer manque attempts to unionize Hell. For our genre-analysis purposes it’s an allegorical fantasy and not much more needs to be said; the premise is so wildly implausible that there is no point in seeking rational knowability anywhere. The author probably thinks he has uttered a clever comment on capitalism, but I found myself thinking of Tom Lehrer’s We’re the Folk Song Army: “Ready! Aim! Sing!”

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The Face of the Waters is a very slight bit of SF about somatic manipulation of the human germ line being turned to an obvious purpose for unobvious reasons.

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Outside Chance is SF, too, and much more substantial. It’s a novel take on the well-established SF trope of change wars among alternate timelines. More than any of the SF in this anthology so far, it feels connected to the rest of the genre, as though it was written with awareness of similar past efforts.

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Closing Time is set in a fantastic not-quite China where the ghost of a restaurant owner’s recently-dead father is bankrupting the joint by making his wake run too long. It is gentle, funny and unforced, avoiding the sense many of these stories emit that the author is perhaps trying a bit too hard to be clever and cute.

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Lagos is bad SF, because the premise is broken. Nobody will ever hire poor Nigerians to run vacuum cleaners or wash dishes by telepresence, because by the time the infrastructure for that is in place autonomous robots will do the job better and cheaper. Johnson should have known better, since robots almost good enough already do exist.

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Bad SF is not the same as non-SF or anti-SF, however; this is a far less serious offense against the form than Public Safety. The story is partly redeemed by clever intertwining of Nigerian folk magic with a technology-centered problem.

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The result is almost what is called in the SF genre a “technology-of-magic” story, one in which it is central that magic works and the rules are rationally knowable. But not quite, as it is left ambiguous whether what is going on is magic or particularly insidious technology filtered through the perceptions of illiterate and near-uneducated people who nevertheless find a way to turn it back on itself. A writer whose sensibility is centered in SF would consider that distinction important.

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The Dragon’s Lesson is another fictive folktale, a style Johnson is manifestly rather good at emulating. This one is didactic, with the fantasy device being used to set up a moral in the manner of one of Aesop’s fables.

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In general Johnson is better at fantasy than SF, and I think the reason relates directly to SF’s genre rules. Genres exist not only because different kinds of readers seek different kinds of aesthetic rewards but because writers do too. For Johnson, fantasy seems to be deeply expressive but SF more in the nature of a technical exercise; his fantasies are fully realized but his SF bloodless and often defective in form.

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Au Coeur Des Ombres seems to begin in the same alternate New Orleans as Public Safety, evidently well before the events of the previous story. The characters must cope with the consequences of Indians up the Mississippi having been deliberately infected by smallpox via trade blankets. As with Lagos, this presents a situation in which different participants view a situation in rational versus magical/religious terms; but in this case it is much clearer that the rational perspective can explain things the other cannot.

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We are more clearly in the territory of correctly-constructed SF here, which makes the perversity of Public Safety harder to explain. The least hypothesis, I think, continues to be that Johnson’s understanding of the SF form is weak; thus, he readily imitates some of its surface features but does not really grasp its essence.

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In Jump Frog, the author’s technical competence as a prose stylist is again on display as he successfully imitates the voice of Mark Twain. The result is a kind of SF premised on the counterfactual that early-19th-century speculations about electricity being the vital force of life were actually true; but mainly it functions as a pretty good joke.

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The Afflicted is another swing at an SF trope now becoming rather tired; the zombie as not a supernatural phenomenon but disease victim. I don’t think any of the authors who have tried this have improved much on Richard Matheson’s trope-defining I Am Legend (1954), and Johnson doesn’t manage it either.

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Nevertheless, this kind of story is worth some attention because it exemplifies one of SF’s central impulses – to extend the perimeter of the rationally knowable, sweeping in not merely unknown places and times and aliens accessible to science but also motifs and images that originated in myth and fantasy and horror. The evolution of SF can be charted as a steady widening of that perimeter – to other planets, beyond the solar system, to other times and alternate histories, then to technology-of-magic and possibilities even more estranged from the world of immediate experience.

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It is not clear whether Johnson really cares about this aspect of the SF form; the defects of some of his other SF stories suggest he does not. But in some ways his performance here is more interesting if he does not; it suggests how exposure to SF can teach some of its concerns and reflexes to writers who have little actual investment in SF’s core values.

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Holdfast is, again, a well-constructed fantasy that approaches and perhaps reaches the state of of technology-of-magic. I won’t summarize it, as it doesn’t pose any interpretive problems we have not already encountered. It is a strong story, though; one of the best in this collection.

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The Coldest War is a puzzle on two levels, one intentional and perhaps one unintentional. On the intentional level, we wonder what if anything has invaded the Arctic island where a soldier keeps his lonely vigil. On the meta- and perhaps unintentional level, we wonder just what the author thinks he is doing with this story. Who is the invader? What has become of the soldier’s partner? Is there an invader at all, or has the protagonist gone mad?

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Some of the superficial furniture of SF is here; the story depends on devices for cold-weather warfare that don’t yet exist, and the logic of protagonist’s actions given what he thinks is going on is detailed. But the essence of SF is not. The puzzle is not resolved; there is no reveal. The protagonist cannot decide whether he is sane or insane.

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Lit-fic writers think this sort of thing is clever and artistic. SF readers think it is maddeningly perverse. What is the point of writing a problem story if you’re not going to resolve the problem? It’s as wrong as writing a story that invokes all the tropes of a murder mystery but ends with the reveal that the victim died for reasons completely unrelated to any of them, or didn’t die at all.

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Written By The Winners is another change-wars story with a darker, Orwellian angle. The interpretive problem that it poses is that the plot turns on an impossibility.

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Sometime in the personal past of the characters, a totalitarian political organization used a device to change history to its liking. The impossibility is that the change is patchy, and some objects from the old history survived into the new one (one in the story is a vinyl record album). People exposed to these parachronic objects may do what the Party fears most: remember the old past.

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This premise only appears possible because we mistake a brain’s view of reality, lumping it unto objects like record albums, as being more fundamental than it is. To see why this is problematic, ask why the history-changing process left exactly that record untouched, but not atoms in the objects arbitrarily close to it. And what does “close” mean, anyway, when we’re talking about the materialization of an entire timeline around it?

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There’s a convention in SF called the “one-McGuffin rule”; you’re allowed one impossible premise per story, and FTL travel doesn’t count. So we might let this one slide by, except that what the story does with human memory is even more ridiculous. When people see parachronic objects and that causes them to recover memories of an erased past, where where those memories stored before? Are people supposed to be somehow psychically connected with versions of themselves that don’t exist?

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The more you think about both premises from a scientific point of view, the more ridiculous and insupportable they get. This is bad SF; it is an SF writer’s responsibility not to utter tripe like this, because it violates the core premise that the unknown has to be as rationally knowable as the known.

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Heroic Measures is better; a calm and darkly funny study of the problems of medical care for a superhero with terminal multiple organ failure. Awfully hard to run diagnostics on a man with invulnerable skin, since that includes opacity to X rays.

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For the first time here we are unquestionably involved in the SF genre conversation; this story was obviously written with Larry Niven’s tongue-in-cheek Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex in mind. The general impossibility of the superhero gets by under the one-McGuffin rule.

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The conclusion is inevitable, too. You put Superman out of his otherwise endless misery with Kryptonite, even if you have to face down Lex Luthor to get it. The conceptual breakthrough here isn’t in the solution but the reader’s growing understanding of how terrible the problems of having a body that can patch-heal itself forever could be.

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The Last Islander is pretty good, too, in a more serious way. It extrapolates some consequences of immersive virtual reality and directed dreaming in detailed ways, and explores whether these have the staying power of organic human memory.

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And that is it. A very mixed bag, but a good set of examples for examining the nature of genre in general and SF in particular. And the failures are cautionary lessons in why anyone who wants to write good SF should avoid becoming infected with the habits and limitations of lit-fic.

diff --git a/20140616104840.blog b/20140616104840.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5c3f6c4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140616104840.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Review: The Devil Incarnate +

At the end of my review of The Devil’s Concubine I wrote “it would be nice to think that the sequels will be about something other than her approach-avoidance dance with the guy, but experience has taught me to be pessimistic in such matters.”

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To my pleased surprise, my pessimism was not fulfilled. In The Devil Incarnate (Jill Braden; Wayzgoose Press), the romance element is almost disappeared; this book really is about QuiTai’s struggle against the Thampurians rather than her sex life.

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The Devil is dead. Qui Tai and Kyam Zul have split up. But there’s no rest for Qui Tai, as the scheming head of the House of Zul (Kyam Zul’s grandfather) seems bent on driving the Ponongese into a revolt that can only fail. It seems to be up to her to stop this from happening…and what is the old man really after?

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Not only does the form of this book shift away from romance, it shifts towards SF. The one supernatural element in the setting transforms into something else in a revelation that destroys one of Qui Tai’s few certainties.

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The setting continues to develop in interesting ways, and the author’s dexterity with prose and facility at scene-setting are undiminished.

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This is clearly the middle book in a trilogy or longer sequence. But it leaves me anticipating its sequel with more interest than the first one did.

diff --git a/20140617165916.blog b/20140617165916.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7aedc2d --- /dev/null +++ b/20140617165916.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Review: The Mandala +

The Mandala (Timothy R. O’Neill, Publish Green) is an airport thriller with an SF premise. In the badlands of northern Montana there appears something that produces gravitational pulses powerful enough to perturb satellite orbits, and drives people who wander too near it insane. Satellite imagery reveals a vast, intricate pattern of subtle changes in the ground surrounding the site, with no correlates at all from ground level. Something about it has spooked the Russians enough that there are rumblings of nuclear threat. Can the enigma be solved before it triggers atomic apocalypse..or worse?

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Many tropes of the airport thriller genre duly check in – an alphabet soup of secret government agencies, a maverick hero with a troubled past, ancient conspiracies, a race against time to uncover a world-shattering secret.

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The SF premise works OK, but the real reason to bother with this one is unexpected: the dialogue is brilliant and funny! The characters do not speak in the usual bureaucratese or action-hero grunting; they’re as nervously, mordantly witty as escapees from a Noel Coward play.

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This bit of style seemed as incongruous as a camouflage pattern in day-glo colors at first, but I got used to it and spent much of the rest of the book periodically succumbing to did-he-really-write-that giggles, occasionally regaling my wife with the choicest bits. And when was the last time you read an airport thriller with laugh-out-loud lines?

diff --git a/20140618102012.blog b/20140618102012.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b572306 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140618102012.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Review: A Sword Into Darkness +

A Sword Into Darkness (Thomas Mays; self-published) is better than I was expecting. There’s been a fair bit of buzz about it on G+ and elsewhere in the corners of the net I frequent; the buzz led me to expect a well-executed work of space opera and military SF that could stand comparison with (for example) John Ringo’s Live Free Or Die and its sequels. There’s a bit more here than that, as it turns out.

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Make no mistake, it has got space battle. Oh, boy, has it got space battle. So well done and so physically plausible that almost the first thing I did after finishing this novel was to call up my friend Ken Burnside – author of the world’s best tabletop space-combat sims (including Saganami Island Tactical Simulator, the Honorverse game) and ask him “Ken, did you have a hand in this? Because [parts of] it smelled a lot like an Attack Vector Tactical game…”

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“Atomic Rockets” Ken replied. Ken writes a lot of content for this site, which is an excellent resource for writers seeking to harden their SF. If you want to find out how to plot space battles that won’t make people who know physics and engineering wince, it’s where you go…and it was pretty clear that Mays did (which he has since confirmed to me).

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Otherwise…characterization OK by the standards of space opera and idea-as-hero-SF (which is a lowish bar, but I’m fine with that – if you want elaborate involuted character studies, you know where to find them). Plotting competent. Prose better than one might expect, especially from a newish author.

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A couple of virtues raise this above the level of midlist space opera. For one, the author is career Navy who has stood watches as a tactical officer and wrote his master’s thesis on railguns; he uses that expertise to add both psychological and technical verismilitude in unobtrusive but effective ways.

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For another, some cliches of the form are deliberately averted; as one example, there are no larger-than-life omnicompetent heroes. I won’t spoilerize by ticking off all the other aversions, but a genre-savvy reader will notice and find they bring a certain freshness to the production.

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Yet another is that Mays has managed to invent a reason for aliens to go to the colossal expense of invading Earth with sub-lightspeed starships that is both novel and plausible-seeming.

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This is harder than it sounds. Want metals? Mine your own asteroid belt. Want volatiles? Scoop ‘em off comets or an ice moon or somewhere without a deep gravity well and obstreperous natives. Want energy? You have easy access to your home sun. Want slaves? Build robots. You can’t want our women, the orifices won’t fit and the pheromones are all wrong.

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It’s really rather difficult to come up with a rational motive for interstellar invasion even if you have cheap FTL. If you don’t, the cost goes way up and the hackneyed old scenarios look even sillier. Nevertheless, Mays actually pulls this off; I won’t reveal how.

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Though the novel ends as a self-contained story, there’s a clear setup for a sequel. I will definitely want to read it.

diff --git a/20140619071622.blog b/20140619071622.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..30fabfe --- /dev/null +++ b/20140619071622.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Review: Shadow of the Storm +

Shadow of the Storm (Martin J. Dougherty; Far Future Enterprises) is a tie-in novel set in the universe of the Traveller role-playing game. It’s military SF set against a troubled political background, with the Solomani Confederation facing off against the Third Imperium in a tense peace and the Confederation’s border worlds restive.

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Lieutenant Simon Crowe wants to defend his nation against the Imperium, but the Confederation’s internal politics are so vicious that it’s sometime difficult to know who is friend and who is enemy. Decorated for heroism after the Battle of Pavel, he is beached after an incident in the Boötes War for thwarting a rogue political officer’s plan to slaughter troop transports that had surrendered.

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But being restored to command isn’t necessarily an improvement. His new ship is a prototype, his crew is a collection of misfits, and they’re ordered onto patrol half-armed because the Confederation’s shortage of hulls has become acute. And rebellion is brewing…

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The constraints of tie-in books are not conducive to great SF. The most one can reasonably expect of a work like this is that it will manage to be an entertaining read even if you’re not a fan of the property it’s attached to.

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The author actually carries this off pretty well. The space battles don’t reach the SFnal quality level of the big one in my previous review subject A Sword into Darkness, but that’s because where Mays is a railgun engineer Dougherty is a martial artist; the action scenes of duel and personal combat in this book are actually better. They are grounded in an extensive knowledge of sword and empty-hand fighting and are very well done.

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Old-time Traveller players like myself will, of course, find additional value in this book. The events take place during the period of the Classic Campaign and the Fifth Frontier War, as a rump Solomani Confederation schemes to retake the lost homeworld Terra while the Imperium is distracted by a larger war with the Zhodani.

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In sum, this is a decent read even if you don’t know the Traveller background but just like military SF, with bonus goodness if you like the setting. I’m glad I read it.

diff --git a/20140619181909.blog b/20140619181909.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b5de7a0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140619181909.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +freecode-submit is dead – because freecode.com is +

Well, that’s annoying. The freecode.com release-announcement site stopped accepting updates yesterday. The site says it shut down due to low traffic.

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Accordingly, I’ve issued a final archival version of freecode-submit and shipped a version of shipper that no longer tries to do freecode notifications, issuing a complaint instead.

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Had to revise the How to Become a Hacker, too. I used to advise newbs to watch that site for projects they might want to join. Can’t do that any more.

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With this site gone, where can people go for a cross-sectional view of what open source is doing? Bummer….

diff --git a/20140620091401.blog b/20140620091401.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f157dfd --- /dev/null +++ b/20140620091401.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Review: the Human Reach novels +

The Human Reach novels are a planned trilogy by John Lumpkin of which two books have so far been published: Through Struggle, The Stars (2011) and The Desert of Stars (2013. A third, The Passage of Stars, is planned.

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These books bear comparison with Thomas Mays’s A Sword Into Darkness, previously reviewed here, in that they are military SF that works very hard at getting the tactics and technology of future space combat right, and leaned on the excellent Atomic Rockets website to do it. But the differences are as interesting as the similarities.

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In the Human Reach novels, major nations on Earth have colonized the solar systems of many near stars through a network of artificial wormholes. As newly-fledged U.S. Space Force officer Neil Mercer reports for his first assignment, war is brewing between China and Japan for reasons no one understands. Though his ambition was to pilot dropships circumstances sidetrack him into military-intelligence work, for which he has an unexpected aptitude. Neil’s first assignment directly involves him in a mission which brings the U.S. into the war, but the strategic motives for his own country’s involvement are also mysterious.

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Yes, there’s an answer, but revealing it would spoil some major plot points. Through the unusual move of making his protagonist an intelligence officer rather than a ship commander, the author focuses these books on the strategy of interstellar war and the dirty tricks waged by all sides out of sight of the space battles.

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Space battles there are in plenty, however, and carefully thought out they are too. These books read rather as though they could have been based on an Attack Vector: Tactical or Squadron Strike campaign, and the designer of those games (A&D regular Ken Burnside) is credited in the acknowledgments.

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As with A Sword Into Darkness, author John Lumpkin has put exceptional effort into designing his setting and making the details plausible. Lumpkin lacks Mays’s background of on-deck experience in real warships, so the military-culture stuff is not as crisply real – but Lumpkin makes up for that with a wider canvas that includes (for example) gritty sequences about insurgency operations on a conquered planet and deadly intrigues in an extraterrestrial banana republic.

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This result is very enjoyable work, earning a place in the upper reaches of contemporary military SF and sure to appeal especially to wargamers and military-history buffs. Books like this and A Sword Into Darkness are pushing the state of the art, setting new and higher standards for verismilitude in the form. It’s a good thing to see.

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UPDATE: The author says he plans The Passage of Stars for 2015, and that it probably won’t be the final book.

diff --git a/20140620110618.blog b/20140620110618.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..45bc477 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140620110618.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Why VA bought Slashdot +

Jeff Covey has responded to the demise of freshmeat/freecode by reminiscing about his past at Freshmeat. He reports a rumor that VA bought Andover just because the CEO thought it would be cool to own Slashdot.

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I set the record straight in a comment on the post. No, that’s not why it happened; Larry Augustin never would have made a business decision for a reason that flimsy. In fact, buying Slashdot was my idea, and I had a solid reason for proposing it. The rest of my comment explaining this follows.

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+

I can supply a missing piece of the story. VA Linux’s purchase of Andover was my idea.

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Here’s how it happened. It was just after the record-breaking IPO, and the U.S.’s crazy accounting rules more or less forced us to do an acquisition to maintain our valuation. There were four acquisition targets short-listed: Andover, SGI, SuSE, and a Linux service business I forget the name of that cratered spectacularly not long after. The other board members argued back and forth but were unable to reach a resolution

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Up to that point I had been pretty quiet in the board meetings, keeping my mouth shut and my ears open. It was with considerable surprise that I realized that I remembered something basic that the other directors had forgotten – most mergers fail through cultural incompatibility between acquirer and acquiree. I’ve never been to business school, but I hear that anyone who does learns this early.

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So I stood up and reminded everybody about the compatibility issue and made the case that our first acquisition needed to above all be an easy one. Then I said “At Linux conferences, think about which of these crews our people puppy-pile with on the beanbag chairs.” Light began to dawn on several faces. “The Slashdot guys. It has to be Andover, ” I said.

+

Silence. The king-shark VC on the board, Doug Leone, thought for a moment and said “There’s a lot of wisdom in that.” And so it was decided.

+

That is the only time I recall driving a major decision at VA, but it was enough to earn my stock options. Media businesses like Andover don’t deliver huge growth, but they’re reliable cash cows. Which turned out to be exactly what VA needed to survive the dot.com bust and eventually morph into GeekNet.

diff --git a/20140621080307.blog b/20140621080307.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e648f51 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140621080307.blog @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +Replacing freecode: a proposal +

“Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone…” Three days ago freecode.com abruptly shut down, claiming “low traffic”, but there has been enough public mourning since to make me pretty sure it fills a need that’s still there. There was nowhere else you could go that was quite so good for getting a cross-sectional view of what the open-source world is doing, independently of any given forge site or distro.

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Web frameworks have gotten much more powerful since the original Freshmeat was built 17 years ago; today, I think building a replacement wouldn’t be a huge project. It is not, however, something I am willing to try to do alone. Whether or not this goes forward will depend on how many people are willing to step up and join me. I figure we need a team of about three core co-developers, at least one of whom needs to have some prior expertise at whatever framework we end up using.

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In the remainder of this post I’m going to sketch a set of project goals, including both some trimming away of freshmeat/freecode features I thought were unnecessary and some new ideas to address problems in its design.

+

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First, let’s be clear about the problem we’re solving. We want a central place where people can post project release announcements so other people can monitor and search release activity, which also serves as a searchable index of project metadata. The project’s main view is to be a timeline of recent release announcements.

+

Here are some project goals and constraints I think are important:

+

1. Avoid moderation overhead.

+

Freshmeat/freecode required that every project creations and release be pre-moderated by humans. This was a serious bottleneck, and may have been the site’s undoing by imposing staffing costs on the operators. We need to avoid this.

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I propose that we can do so simply by having a “report as spam or garbled” link on each displayed announcement. There will still be some human overhead to process these, but experience with social media such as G+ that have this feature suggests that it scales reasonably well.

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2. Open-source software only.

+

Freshmeat/freecode blurred its mission and complicated its job by accepting release announcements for proprietary projects. Let’s not do that.

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3. A tool for remote-scripting operations

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I hate sites that force me to do clicky-dances on a web interface when the information to be submitted would naturally fit on a job card to be processed by a client. Forge sites that don’t let me remote-script a release action are major culprits – they force me to do irritating hand-work every time I ship.

+

Freshmeat/freecode had a web-accessible JSON API, and I maintained a freshmeat-submit tool that spoke it. The new site needs to do likewise.

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4. Bring back Trove

+

Free tags are great, and the new site should have them, but I don’t think they’re enough by themselves. I think we lost something very useful when freecode dropped the Trove taxonomy. (Admittedly I may be biased, since I was Trove’s original designer.) The new site should bring back Trove, and have tag folksonomy too, and should use tags as a feeder to the gradual extension of Trove.

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5. Simplify, simplify, simplify

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In my opinion, Freshmeat/freecode tried to do too much. The “heartbeat” feature, for example, always struck me as pretty useless; nowadays, especially, if I want to view stats on development activity I’ll go to Ohloh. I never saw any good reason to carry links to screenshots; selling the project’s niftiness is what the project’s website is for. There are other features that could have been pared away without loss.

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The most important way to hold down complexity is to be careful to specify a clean, simple functional design. Let’s avoid the bells, whistles, and gongs this time.

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6. Some thoughts about implementation and other issues.

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I’m pretty sure I could get hosting space for the public site at Sunsite.

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My #1 candidate for a framework to use is Django. Because Python, and the documentation suggests Django would be well matched to requirements. My mind is open to alternatives.

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I’m thinking of this as ‘freshermeat’. We’ll need a better name.

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If this sounds like a project you want to sign up for, so indicate in the comments on my blog or G+.

diff --git a/20140622062408.blog b/20140622062408.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6b7cb8f --- /dev/null +++ b/20140622062408.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Review: Soulminder +

In Soulminder (Timothy Zahn; Open Road Integrated Media), an invented device called a “soul trap” can capture the personality and memories of a dying human in a form that can be restored into the person’s brain if the physical damage that killed them can be repaired. While the device is initially conceived as a device to save the lives of trauma patients and people undergoing dangerous surgery, the fun doesn’t really start until the discovery that under some circimstances the device can be used to body-swap.

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While not one of the groundbreaking stars of SF, Timothy Zahn has produced solid and interesting work in the past. I quite enjoyed the four-book series that began with Night Train to Rigel. His earlier, related Blackcollar and Cobra sequences were not bad either. Zahn is intelligent and careful with his worldbuilding; though I don’t read Star Wars tie-ins, my impression from what I see on the shelves is that he’s writing the best of them these days.

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This could have been a step up – a fine example of the kind of near-future extrapolative SF that changes just one thing and explores the consequences in a rigorous way. Alas, Soulminder reads like it was phoned in while the author was having a bad day. There are clever bits, but it’s a sour little grind of a book which illustrates the fact that, while characterization is not tremendously important in idea-as-hero SF, the author at least has to write characters you don’t actively dislike.

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Everybody is brooding and angry and obsessive all the time, the protagonist’s backstory is purest melodrama, the one competent man is unpleasantly arrogant, and various mildly clashing idealisms seem curdled and unengaging. The resulting mess is not really redeemed by clever plotting, in part because it reads like a fixup collection of short-story-length episodes rather than an integrated novel.

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I can’t recommend this book. There isn’t enough fun here.

diff --git a/20140623002943.blog b/20140623002943.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..091537c --- /dev/null +++ b/20140623002943.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Review: Unexpected Alliances +

Unexpected Alliances (M.R. LaScola; Two Harbors Press) is, alas, a horrible example of why the absence of editorial gatekeepers in indie publishing can be a bad thing.

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Here’s a clue: if you see nothing wrong with a near-future first-contact scene in which the commander of an armada of 30,000 starships many light years from Earth introduces herself as Nancy Hartley from the planet Ultron, you shouldn’t be writing SF.

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The relatively short portion of the book I managed to read before I gave up also featured talking dragons and 7-foot-tall nonhuman aliens who casually interbreed with humans. The prose reads like something a bright 9-year-old might write. It’s a sort of pile of glittery SF and fantasy fripperies quoted with absolutely no regard to whether they make any sense, or even any sense that they ought to make sense.

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It’s a brave new world. Anyone can publish. Sometimes they shouldn’t.

diff --git a/20140623184626.blog b/20140623184626.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4a119db --- /dev/null +++ b/20140623184626.blog @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +How to train a cat for companionship +

Some people with cats seem to regard them as a sort of mobile item of decor that occasionally deigns to be interacted with; they’re OK with aloofness. My wife and I, on the other hand, like to have cats who are genuinely companionable, follow us around when they’re not doing anything important like eating or sleeping, purr at the sight of us, and greet us at the door when we come home.

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My wife and I had a cat like that for nearly twenty years. Sugar died in April, and we’ve been developing an understanding with a new cat for a bit over two weeks. We’re doing the same things to establish trust with Zola that we did with Sugar. They seem to be working; Zola gets a little more present and interactive and nicer to us every day.

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Accordingly, here are our rules for training a cat to be companionable. You may find some of these obvious, but I suspect that the ‘obvious’ set is widely variable between people, so they’re all worth writing down.

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A general point is that cats respond as well as people do to (a) being treated affectionately, and (b) having a clear sense of what people expect from them. Kindness and consistent signaling make for a friendly and well-mannered cat.

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1. Choose a breed or genetic line that is predisposed to be people-friendly.

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Maine Coons are a good bet for this. I’ve read that Sphinxes are too, but a lot of people find hairless cats sufficiently weird that the choice wouldn’t work for them. Siameses are in my experience a particularly bad bet. In general be wary of purebred cats other than Coons, as they are likely to have been selected for breed traits that don’t include sociability; thus, your second best genetic bet after a Coon or Coon mix is probably a mongrel.

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UPDATE: A comment after I first posted this raised the possibility that older ‘natural’ breeds other than Maine Coons – Turkish Angoras are the example that came up – may be better bets than modern show breeds.

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(Sugar we believed to be a shorthaired Coon mix. Zola is a purebred Coon or as near as makes no difference.)

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2. Let the cat choose you

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It helps a lot if the cat likes you on first sight and smell. My wife and I are strong believers in interviewing a lot of cats and paying close attention to which one is friendliest. A cat from a generally people-friendly breed that seems to like you right off is the best choice.

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Note: if you’re so new with cats that you don’t know how to introduce yourself, offer it the back of your hand to sniff (moving slowly so as not to startle it). If it doesn’t back away after taking your scent, lightly stroke its head and back, paying close attention to how it reacts.

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(Sugar chose us under unusual circumstances involving the death of her previous humans and the nasty stormy night we brought her home for what might have been a temporary stay. Zola chose us at the rescue center.)

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3. Be kind from the beginning, and respect the new cat’s boundaries

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If you chose a cat who is either generally twitchy and fearful or specifically nervous around you, you screwed up the previous steps and should start over. Otherwise, the cat should be OK with being gently touched and petted – but don’t try to love-bomb it right way. Let it get its bearings in your house and re-approach you. This will happen naturally at feeding times, if at no other.

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Cats vary in the amount of time they take to orient themselves in a new environment and gain some confidence. Sugar was very extroverted and landed on her feet instantly once she got over being panicked by the bad circumstances under which we brought her home. Zola hid for about three hours before emerging to head-bump us. If it takes much longer than that you have the option of luring the cat out of hiding with food.

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4. Know basic cat-speak.

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Googling for “cat body language” will turn up good hits on basic cat kinesics. I’ll add here a couple of things I think are generally underemphasized.

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One is that some human imitations of cat signals actually work pretty well. You can slow-blink at your cat to convey affection and reassurance. You can imitate a purring noise and the cat will interpret that correctly as a desire to be social with it. If your cat likes to rub its face on you to show affection and possessive feelings, you can rub your face on it right back to return the message. Sometimes you have to compensate for the differences in scale; I find, for example, that gently rubbing a cat’s forehead with the tip of my nose works well.

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Cats are generally most receptive to being touched on the back and upper flanks, and on top of the head. Less so on the lower flanks and belly; it’s a sign of trust and relaxation when a belly touch doesn’t make them tense at least a little. Trust your intuition; the vulnerable zones on a cat are analogous to those on a human and should be treated with similar respect.

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Cats like to be gently scratched around the sides and back of the neck, under the chin, and on the tops of their heads. These are the places they have trouble reaching when they groom themselves.

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When moving your hand towards a cat to touch it, don’t rush. Slow and smooth is best. Stopping the approach motion for a moment just before contact is a way of asking permission that gives the cat a chance to politely decline, which will improve the quality of the interaction when you do make contact.

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Even aloof cats often like to be touched if you negotiate with them properly. If you always give a cat the option to politely refuse contact, it will never have to do so emphatically with nipping or clawing. With Sugar and Zola I can count the number of times this has happened to me in twenty years on the fingers of one hand and still have fingers left over.

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Mammalian body language for affection is very strongly conserved across phyletic lines, so trust your instincts.

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5. Hand training.

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Never, ever swat a cat with your hand; if you have to discipline it, yell at it loudly and immediately or spritz it with a squirt bottle. You want your cat to strongly associate human hands with petting and good things. If you do this, and always reward a cat for coming towards a waggling hand with gentle petting, you’ll be able to get it to follow you around with hand motions. If you get this really right, the cat will probably develop a habit of expressing affection by licking your hands.

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Advanced hand training includes teaching the cat that when you repeatedly pat a chair or bedclothes it should jump up to where the hand is. Again, reward correct behavior with petting. Cats can catch on fast this way; Zola has already learned this response in only two weeks, though he’s not 100% reliable at it yet. That will come.

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6. Positive reinforcement.

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Negative reinforcement doesn’t work well on cats; they seem to have trouble connecting the aversive stimulus to the behavior you want them to avoid. This is why if you’re going to yell at your cat, or squirt-bottle it, you have to do that immediately – after even a second or two of delay they are unable to causally connect the punishment with the misbehavior.

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Positive reinforcement works much better – and not just on housecats; people who train the big felines report the same thing. If you reward behaviors that you like, your cat will get the message. A cat that knows what you like and knows it can get positive attention reliably will be a secure and happy cat that holds its tail high; training by reward is good for its peace of mind as well as yours.

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7. Do cats love?

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Some people think cats are mercenary creatures who aren’t really capable of love but engage in affectionate behavior solely to get what they want from humans. I think that attitude is a sign of failure to notice that human “love” can be reductively analyzed that way with almost equal justice, but doing so is not helpful to being happy. So it is with cats.

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You get into philosophical territory here: what is love, anyway? I think it is the condition in which some other being’s happiness becomes necessary to your own. Some cats behave as though the happiness of their humans is necessary to their own; Sugar was definitely one, and Zola shows clear signs of becoming another. Doubtless this is a recruitment of very old circuitry for pack bonding and rewarding parental investment that is common to all mammalian lineages.

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I knew Sugar loved me, in whatever sense the verb is meaningful for either cats or humans, when she wrapped herself around my feet and rested her face on my instep while I programmed. Cats are less complicated than humans; if you treat them with kindness and can make them feel secure and happy, love generally follows.

diff --git a/20140625111849.blog b/20140625111849.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5d7bf27 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140625111849.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Review: The Steampunk Trilogy +

The Steampunk Trilogy (Paul diFilippo; Open Road Integrated Media) is three short novels set in a now-familiar sort of alternate-Victorian timeline replete with weird science, Lovecraftian monsters, and baroquely ornamented technology described in baroquely ornamental prose.

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What distinguishes this particular outing is that it’s hilarious. In the first chapter of the first book, a runaway young Queen Victoria is replaced by a newt. In the second chapter (a flashback) an experiment in powering a steam locomotive from the waste heat of masses of uranium comes to a tragic, mushroom-clouded end when an accident slams them together just a bit too hard.

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The books proceed in a tumbling cascade of ribaldry, parody, slapstick, and sly historical references that sends up every target in sight. And just when you think it’s all farce…Walt Whitman delivers a compassionate and psychologically astute critique of her poetry to Emily Dickinson, it isn’t comedy at all, and it’s even plot-relevant! Along the way, Herman Melville tangles with the Deep Ones and the naturalist Henry Agassiz recognizes Dagon as an ichthyosaurus…

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Even if you’re not equipped to parse all the historical and literary in-jokes, this is fun stuff. If you are…I enjoyed the hell out of it. You probably will too.

diff --git a/20140625231402.blog b/20140625231402.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e972f6b --- /dev/null +++ b/20140625231402.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Review: Patton’s Spaceship +

Patton’s Spaceship (John Barnes; Open Road Integrated Media) is a new e-book release of an effort from 1996.

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Parts of the early action, in which the protagonist loses his family to a vicious terrorist group of unknown (and very exotic) origins, seem sadly dated in light of the even greater viciousness that terrorist groups of thoroughly well-known origins have since exhibited.

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Nevertheless, much of this novel is an entertaining alternate-history adventure, presenting (among other things) the most grubby and creepily plausible portrait of a U.S. under Nazi domination I have seen.

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Alas, I must report that Barnes tends to get a bit too cute in name-checking historical figures. In the most extreme instance of this he makes the poet Allen Ginsburg into an action hero. That move is perhaps best read as unintentional comedy; for some intentional comedy, see if you can spot Robert Heinlein’s cameo appearance.

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Barnes has written better, before and since. But this isn’t bad.

diff --git a/20140629191959.blog b/20140629191959.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..530b4b1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140629191959.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Review: Ark Royal +

In Ark Royal (Christopher Nuttall; self-published) the ship of the same name is an obsolete heavy-armored fleet carrier in a future British space navy. The old girl and her alcoholic captain have been parked in a forgotten orbit for decades, a dumping ground for screwups who are not quite irredeemable enough to be cashiered out. Then, hostile aliens invade human space – and promptly trash the modern unarmored carriers set against them. It seems the Ark Royal’s designers wrought better than they knew. Earth’s best hope is to re-fit and re-staff her in a tearing hurry, then send her against the invasion to buy time while sister ships can be built. Adventure ensues.

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This was very nearly a bad book. As it is, it persuades me that we need a term for the opposite of “hack writer”. A hack writer plays the keys of a certain emotional register so skillfully that the reader is drawn in despite the writer’s actually caring little for the genre and themes he works in, too little to try adding any breadth or depth to them. The opposite of a hack writer is a sort of naive enthusiast – clumsy and relatively unskilled, but so earnest and fascinated by the kind of story he is trying to tell that the result is lit up by an energy and an ingenuous charm that no hack can quite duplicate.

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A lot of the self-published nu-space-opera I’ve been reviewing recently (Unexpected Alliances, A Sword Into Darkness, the Human Reach novels, etc.) has the mark of naive enthusiasm on it. The skill level of the enthusiast varies from the utterly execrable (Unexpected Alliances) to the pretty-good-for-pulp-space-opera (A Sword Into Darkness).

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Ark Royal is yet another book of this kind, in the middle of the implied skill range. Christopher Nuttall clearly owes much to the tradition of Napoleonic-era naval-adventure fiction a la Forester, Pope, and O’Brien. But unlike David Weber, who is the very model of a skilled hack writer working this vein, Nuttall clearly cares a great deal about that tradition in itself, identifies with it, and wants to extend it.

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The result is a book whose technical defects are redeemed by the author’s infectious determination to write a good yarn in a fine old style. The prose is a bit primitive; the technology and space-combat tactics could use a stiff dose of Atomic Rockets to up the SFnal plausibilty. But the plotting is good, the character interactions vivid, and the story carries the day.

diff --git a/20140630230450.blog b/20140630230450.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..87b00be --- /dev/null +++ b/20140630230450.blog @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +Review: Solaris Rising 3 +

Solaris Rising 3 (Ian Whates; Rebellion) is billed as an anthology showcasing the breadth of modern SF. It is that; unfortunately, it is also a demonstration that the editor and some of his authors have partly lost touch with what makes science fiction interesting and valuable.

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As I’ve observed before, SF is not an anything-goes genre. You do not achieve SF merely by deploying SF furniture like space travel, nonhuman sophonts, or the Singularity. SF makes demands on both reader and writer that go beyond lazy fabulism; there’s an implied contract. The writer’s job is to present possibility in a sufficiently consistent and justified way that the reader might be able to reason out the story’s big reveal(s) before the author gets there; the reader’s job is to back-read the clues in the story intelligently and try to get ahead of the author, or catch mistakes in the extrapolation. As in murder mysteries, there can be much else going on besides this challenge and response, but if the challenge and the possibility of such a response is not there, you do not have SF.

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Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s When We Harvested the Nacre-Rice plays the game properly, with its depiction of a very odd and subtle kind of warfare, the ties of friendship, subtle betrayal, and a privilege that may follow naturally in a future with indefinite life extension. The sense of immersion in human cultures that have been coevolving with advanced technology for a very long time is well done.

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Chris Beckett’s The Goblin Hunter is more questionable. The premise is very SFnal – aliens who, as a defense mechanism, reflect all of the darkness and self-doubt in humans back at them. But the author does nothing interesting with the premise; there’s no reveal to possibly get ahead of, we don’t leave the story feeling we understand anything more about human beings or the setting or anything else than we did walking in. Instead the ending deflects into a criticism of the meddling do-gooder which, while worthy in itself, feels disconnected from the rest of the story. It seems rather a waste of a good premise.

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Homo Floriensis (Ken Liu) is more interesting, inviting the reader to think about the ethical problems of first contact with a hominid species on the fuzzy borderline of sophont status. What is the right thing to do when you are not sure what ethical kind you are dealing with, and know that eventually humans less careful than you will come charging in? The author may not have the answer but he has an answer – and a thought-provoking one.

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Julie Czerneda’s A Taste For Murder is a snarky, funny exploration the possibility of easy body modification for humans – and what can happen when it gets a little too easy. The reveal and the conclusion follow with remorseless logic from the premises; thus this is proper SF.

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Tony Ballantine’s Double Blind is properly SF too, though of a dark and nasty kind that I tend to dislike. It turns the risks of drug trials up to 11.

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Sean Willams’s The Mashup apes one of the persistent themes of SF – technological transcendence – but there’s no logic and no reveal. It might as well be a story about meddling demons; there’s no rational knowability here, and the viewpoint character’s passivity and eventual surrender to a sea-change he doesn’t actually understand is thus more the stuff of horror than anything else. I call this sort of thing “anti-SF” because it doesn’t merely ignore the requirements of the form, it mocks and seeks to erode them.

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Aliette de Bodard’s The Frost on Jade Buds is much better. The need to cope with grief and the aftermath of a shattering war is, alas, a recurring problem in human history; the author shows that when human being become sufficiently entangled with their technology it could take some novel turns.

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Alex Dally McFarlane’s Popular Images from the First Manned Mission to Enceladus could serve as exhibit A for why SF writers shouldn’t get too cute. There’s a reasonable SF short story here wrapped in an odd postmodern sort of narrative structure; the problem is that the narrative structure is a stunt that only demonstrates the author’s cleverness rather than adding any value to the story. This is poor practice in almost any kind of fiction-writing, but especially regrettable in a genre like SF or mysteries where the author’s cleverness ought to be directed outwards.

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Gareth L. Powell’s Red Lights and Rain turns its cleverness to better use, mixing time travel and the question of why, in a rational universe, something like the legendary vampire might come to exist. It’s well and suspensefully written.

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Laura Lam’s They Swim Through Sunset Seas is a meditation on the old maxim that in nature there are no rewards or punishments, only consequences. Humans who should have known better meddle with chillingly alien aliens. There’s an ambiguous ending, probably a tragedy, but the author plays fair throughout.

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Ian Watson’s Faith Without Teeth is a satire on socialism set in a weird alternate East Berlin. It’s so surrealistically funny that you may have trouble noticing that the SFnal exposition is handled absolutely straight. Well done!

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Adam Roberts’s Thing and Sick is a gem – an SF story founded on taking Kantian conceptualism seriously. This is exactly what SF ought to do; question your assumptions, construct a consistent otherness, and leave you with a feeling of understanding the universe in a way you didn’t before. The conceptual breakthrough here is rather more pointed and fundamental than we usually get…

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George Zebrowski’s The Sullen Engines is the worst blotch on this anthology. The viewpoint character can make car engines vanish; except no, she vanishes a human at one point. For this to be a proper SF story it would have to develop or imply some explanation of the phenomenon less silly than “wishing can make it so”. But this story is anti-SF – it violates the core promise of SF by not affirming the rational knowability of anything. Instead we get a sort of inverted power fantasy – a muddy, self-indulgent puddle of angst and eco-piety with no redeeming virtues whatsoever. Makes me want to find Ian Whates, slap him upside the head and demand to know what he was thinking.

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Cat Sparks’s Dark Harvest returns to SF, but doesn’t do it very convincingly. Yes, you could ritualize the use of exotic technology as though it were Tantric Buddhist magic, if you had constructed the interface that way – but we are never presented with a good reason for the insurgents to have actually done so. Seems like the author succumbed to the tendency to construct a thin rationalization around some cool imagery. The game can be played better than this, and should be.

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Benjamin Rosenbaum’s Fift and Shria, on the other hand, does an eerily convincing job on a very odd and entertaining premise; a human culture built around the assumption that individuals routinely occupy several bodies each. It reads rather like something James H. Schmitz might have written back in the day. The author put a lot of thought into this and assembling the clues to figure out everything that is going on takes work. It’s the SF game played at a very high level.

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The Howl, by Ian R. MacLeod & Martin Sketchley, is another story that makes me wonder what it’s doing in this anthology. The characters’ unresolved personal issues just aren’t that interesting, and vague hints that some kind of many-worlds phenomenon might be behind the gaps in one’s memory do not lift this mood piece into the category of SF. For that the counterfactual would have to be used, would have to have logical consequences, rather than being some kind of pathetic-fallacy externalization of mere psychological confusion.

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Nina Allan’s The Science of Chance is flawed but interesting. It seems to be exploring how human beings entering a superposed quantum state might present to other humans stuck with a temporal viewpoint – or perhaps I’m giving the author credit for too much subtlety. It would have been a better story without the secondary premise of a nuclear bombing that never happened in real history.

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Rachel Swirsky’s Endless finishes strong with a consideration of what post-Singularity transcended humans might consider that they owe their ancestors, with a debt paid by remembering.

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Much good material in this anthology, only one or two conspicuous duds. It’d be nice if the editor would be a bit more discriminating next time.

diff --git a/20140701163956.blog b/20140701163956.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b6bae64 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140701163956.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Feline behavioral convergence +

The new cat, Zola has been with us for about a month now. My wife and I observe an interesting convergence; as he feels increasingly secure around us, his behavior is coming to resemble Sugar’s more and more, to the point that it sometimes feels like having her back with us.

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What makes this a surprising observation is that Sugar was not your behaviorally average cat. She was up against the right-hand end of the feline bell curve for sociability, gentleness, and good manners. Having Zola match that so exactly is a little startling even if we did improve our odds by keeping an eye out for a Maine Coon that liked us on sight. It still feels rather like having 00 come up twice in succession on a roulette wheel.

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This is ethologically interesting; it suggests some things about how the personalities of cats – and even specific behavioral propensities – are generated. In the remainder of this post I will use detailed observations to explore this point.

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First, some differences for perspective. Zola, as we expected from our first few minutes of contact with him, is a calmer creature than Sugar was – a bit more self-sufficient, a bit less easily startled. His kinesic repertoire is a bit different; he leg-strops routinely and often assumes the play-invitation posture of flopping over on his back (Sugar almost never did these things). She liked to express affection by climbing onto a human and licking hands or face, which Zola doesn’t. If Sugar were human she’d have been a wide-eyed ingenue; if Zola were human he’d be a mellow dude a la Jeff Bridges.

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Still, the similarities greatly outweigh the differences, and have been increasing rather than decreasing. Both cheerful, sunny personalities; both extremely gentle, careful with their claws and teeth; both love(d) human attention and respond to it with a touching degree of trust. The trust is/was manifested, for example, by casually napping near humans and not startling when touched unexpectedly.

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Zola is moving towards Sugar’s pattern of not wanting to ever be out of sight of a human for very long, and has recently developed the same tendency Sugar had to hang out at the one place in the hallway where he can keep an eye on both Cathy and myself at our work desks in different rooms. Also he’s started to greet us at the door when we come home from places. That almost hurt the first time it happened, it was so like Sugar.

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We haven’t tried to directly train behaviors like keeping a eye on both of us and greeting us at the door, and wouldn’t know how to do it if we were trying. I’ve written previously about how you train a cat for companionability, but that’s a more general thing; that’s a matter of helping the cat feel secure and rewarding it for being affectionate, with the hope that behaviors you like will emerge naturally.

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I can see how greeting us at the door could emerge naturally; on the other hand, I certainly don’t know how you’d go about training a cat to bond equally to both of the humans it lives with if it had the tendency to be a one-person pet that runs in some breeds. Kindness only goes so far; the cat has to have the personality to respond to it. Some cats very clearly don’t.

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I think the natural theory to explain the observed facts is that personality in cats is very, very heritable – much more so than in humans. But I think we can be more specific than that; while any cat will become fearful if mistreated or stressed, the capacity to respond to kindness is what the example of Sugar and Zola suggests is genetically programmed.

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I see a parallel with heritability of intelligence in humans, in which genes seem to control an upper limit of processing capacity which may never be reached if CNS growth is hindered by (say) poor early-childhood nutrition.

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Comparing Zola and Sugar is also interesting because of the male/female difference. Cathy and I long assumed that Sugar’s affection behaviors were partly a recruitment of circuitry for nurturing kittens and partly related to mechanisms for bonding and social signaling between friendly peers. But while the nurturance-instinct explanation probably remains partly true for Sugar, tomcats are not nurturers.

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Therefore, the fact that Zola duplicates so many of Sugar’s behaviors changes my estimate of relative weights. It makes peer bonding look more important, and nurturance look less so, as sources for the behaviors that cats use to relate to humans.

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One datum we don’t have yet is how Zola will behave when one of her humans is ill or seriously distressed. Sugar got rather maternal at such times, sticking close and seemingly determined to be comforting. That’s how we read it, but if Zola exhibits similar comforting behaviors some re-interpretation will be in order.

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Finally, Cathy has noted that whereas Sugar adopted us as her humans very quickly and completely back in 1994, in Zola it’s been a slower process with stages. That may have an environmental explanation; Sugar had found one of her humans dead that day, and was clearly in serious distress. It’s pretty natural in both feline and human terms that she went all any-port-in-a-storm on us.

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Zola, on the other hand, had it reasonably good at the rescue center – probably not getting as much human contact as he wanted, but certainly not traumatized or frightened. He could afford to be friendly but a bit more reserved. It’s been kind of fun to watch that reserve melting, measured by the steadily decreasing percentage of time he chooses to spend out of sight.

diff --git a/20140702052923.blog b/20140702052923.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bb54690 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140702052923.blog @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +Why the deep norms of the SF genre matter +

In the book reviews I’ve been writing recently I have been applying some very specific ideas about the nature and scope of science fiction, particularly in contrast to other genres such as fantasy, mystery, and horror. I have not hesitated to describe some works found in SF anthologies as defective SF, as non-SF, or even as anti-SF.

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It is not fashionable these days to be so normative about any kind of artistic form, let alone SF. The insistence that we should embrace diversity is constant, even if it means giving up having any standards at all. In a genre like SF where the core traditions include neophilia and openness to possibility, the argument for exclusive definitions and hard boundaries seems especially problematic.

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I think it is an argument very much worth making nevertheless. This essay is my stake in the ground, one I intend to refer readers back to when (as sometimes happens) I’m accused of being stuck on an outmoded and narrow conception of the genre. I will argue three propositions: that artistic genres are functionally important, that genre constraints are an aid to creativity and communication rather than a hindrance, and that science fiction has a particular mission which both justifies and requires its genre constraints.

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(Some parts of this essay are excerpts from earlier related writing.)

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First, I want to be clear on what I think a genre is. It’s two things: one is a set of expectations a reader has about the kind of experience an instance of the genre will deliver, the other is a set of genre-specific codes and expressive techniques that the genre writer uses in the expectation that readers will receive them as the author intended. Like all codes and languages, the purpose of genres is to make communication easier by allowing both parties to assume a repertoire of common referents. Genre art fails when the production of the writer fails to match the genre referents and constraints as known by the reader.

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This analysis generalizes Samuel Delany’s observation that SF is not merely, or even mostly, a way of writing; it is a way of reading, too. The same is true of other genres, in different ways.

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Genre is functional. I’ve already described how genre conventions help artists and audiences communicate. Another obvious way is that genre categories reduce search costs in the market for art by helping artists signal about their production and giving art consumers a language for requesting what they want. This is a benefit to both artists and the audience.

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Genre has a more subtle function as well – it assists creativity. Meaning relies on context; the frame defines the picture. Usually, artists do their best work when grappling with and using the constraints of a genre or artistic medium rather than attempting to abolish them. “Back to zero” sounds brave, but tends to produce art that is flabby, self-indulgent, and vacuous.

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A genre can be seen as a conversation among its authors and readers (what postmodernists call “shared discourse”). As in every long running conversation, a genre tends to develop internal themes, motives, and a shared history. Works that are disconnected from the main conversation may be seen by people in that conversation as outside of the genre even if they fulfill many of its thematic and structural requirements and seem like they ought to belong “in” to outsiders.

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For historical and contingent reasons which would be worth an essay in themselves, the conversational aspect of the SF genre has been exceptionally important relative to other fiction genres. SF works are often written as implicit or explicit replies to other works. Authors and fans cultivate a detailed awareness of how works are situated in the conversation. This makes analytical and normative analysis of the SF genre both more fruitful and more contentious than it would be otherwise.

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Now we will require the following definition of science fiction (due in its most developed form to Gregory Benford): that branch of fantastic literature which affirms the rational knowability of the universe, and has as its most particular reader experience the sense of conceptual breakthrough – of having understood the universe in a new and larger way.

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Benford’s definition of SF implies that SF stories must have important structural features in common with murder mysteries, and a reason crossovers between these two genres are so often successful. In both forms the author is required to play by the rules of rational deduction. The writer wins the game if the reader reaches the big reveal without having anticipated it but with the realization that the solution is correct; the reader wins the game if he or she gets to the truth before the author’s reveal.

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The author plays fair by leaving open the possibility that a sharp enough reader can win, the work is judged as much or more by how well and how audaciously the author plays the game more than by conventional literary criteria. Within discussion of the SF genre (though not to my knowledge among mystery fans) “the game” has the specific meaning of this dance between author and reader.

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What distinguishes an SF story from a murder mystery isn’t the absence of murder but the presence of at least one premise in the story that is fantastic, e.g. counterfactual or even impossible. There’s a convention in SF called the “one-McGuffin rule”; you’re allowed one impossible premise per story, but FTL travel doesn’t count.

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Larry Niven is famous for this prescription: “Make one change to the world as it is now, and then explore the ramifications of that change – but don’t mess with anything else.” Similar definitions go back to the beginnings of modern SF, as invented by John W. Campbell and Robert Heinlein in the 1940s. They are not really adequate; good SF can change lots of things about its settings. The “don’t mess with anything else” should be read as “keep your secondary world rationally accessible to the reader” in Benford’s sense.

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Note the absence in this analysis of any reference to the obvious stage furniture of genre SF – spaceships, robots, aliens, time travel, and the like. These things in themselves do not an SF story make; when the structure underneath them violates the core promise of rational knowability you get what is at best defective SF and at worst a sort of anti-SF which informed readers of the genre are likely to receive as willfully perverse.

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One of SF’s central impulses is to extend the perimeter of the rationally knowable, sweeping in not merely unknown places and times and aliens accessible to science but also motifs and images that originated in myth and fantasy and horror. The evolution of SF can be charted as a steady widening of that perimeter – to other planets, beyond the solar system, to other times and alternate histories, then to technology-of-magic and possibilities even more estranged from the world of immediate experience.

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Having advanced this definition of SF, I’m now going to make a temporary concession to people who consider it too narrow by relabeling what it covers “classical SF”, or cSF. Those with a little historical awareness of the field will recognize that the classical period began in 1939 with Robert Heinlein’s first publication under John W. Campbell, the then-new editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine.

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Almost anyone with any exposure to SF will recognize that much but not all of what is popularly labeled SF is cSF. The question I will address in the remainder of this essay is: why should we consider cSF normative? What grounds do we have for regarding a work that claims to be SF but is not cSF to be defective SF, non-SF, or anti-SF?

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One reason is historical. Previous attempts to abandon the deep norms of cSF while preserving its stage furniture and surface tropes have not aged well. The “New Wave” of the late 1960s and early 1970s was spent by the early 1980s. Later insurgencies within the field, notably the cyberpunks of the late 1980s and early 1990s, retained cSF’s assumption of rational knowability (and all that followed from it) even while trying to radically transform the genre in other ways.

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The reason beneath that history is reader response. SF doesn’t exist in a vacuum; people who want fantasies or Westerns or romances know how to find them, and in general the kind of person who can be attracted by the way SF is packaged (spaceships and other high technology on covers, etc.) wants rational knowability and wants to play the kind of game with the author that is characteristic of cSF, even if he or she is not very introspective about that desire and not very good at the game yet.

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This is why SF readers – even inexperienced ones – often experience violation of the deep norms of cSF as a kind of dishonesty or malicious subversion. They can tell they’re being cheated of something even if they don’t know quite what. Forty years ago this feeling was often articulated against the New Wave by complaining that its works were “depressing” – which was true, and remains true of a lot of defective SF and anti-SF today, but doesn’t get at the actual root of the problem.

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Correspondingly, most of the demand for non-classic SF comes not from readers but from critics/authors/editors (people who think of themselves as tastemakers) who are bent on imposing the deep norms of other genres onto the SF field. Such people are especially apt to think SF would be improved by adopting the norms and technical apparatus of modern literary fiction, itself a genre which developed not long prior to modern SF in the early 20th century but which has preoccupations in many respects diametrically opposed to those of SF.

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One reliable way to spot one of these literary improvers in action is unending complaints about the low standards of characterization that the majority of both SF readers and writers consider acceptable. If you scratch a person making this complaint you’ll generally find someone who doesn’t realize that, while characters may be required to give an SF story emotional life, the idea is the hero. SF readers treat emotional realism as optional because the experience they really crave is Benford’s rational knowability and conceptual breakthrough (though they may only dimly understand this themselves).

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(How do I know this is what SF readers want? Why, I look at what sells and what lingers on best-of lists. Within SF – and only within SF – big-idea stories with flat characters both outsell and outlast character studies decorated with SF stage furniture. This was already true at the beginning of the classic period in 1939, it remained true even at the height of the New Wave in 1971 or so, and it continues to be true today.)

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The more conscious variety of improver at least dimly understands the deep norms of cSF but thinks they should be subverted and deprived of their authority in favor of something “better”. In this view SF readers don’t really know what’s good art and need to be educated away from their primitive fondness for linear narratives, puzzle stories, competent characters, happy endings, and rational knowability. It’s not caricaturing much to say that the typical specimen of this type thinks the only good conceptual breakthrough is an unhappy one.

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One reason to vigorously assert cSF as a norm to which anything labeled SF should aspire is simply to defend the genre conversation on behalf of the readers from the well-intentioned (or not so well-intentioned) meddling of the improvers. Thus, wherever SF is discussed among actual readers you tend to find exhortations like “Science fiction should get back in the gutter where it belongs!” When you hear that, you can be sure the speaker doesn’t think SF ought to become an apologetic imitation of literary fiction (or any other genre).

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I think the reader-response theory of SF norms (confirmed by the historical record of what fans value and what they have rejected) would be a sufficient reason, even today (2014) to hold SF to the standards of cSF and consider failure to meet them a defect. But there’s a reason that I think tells even more strongly than that.

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SF has a mission. There’s a valuable cultural function that SF, alone of all our arts, is good for. SF writers (and readers) are our forward scouts, the imaginative preparation for what might come next, the way we limber up our minds to cope with the unexpected future. SF is not just the literature of ideas, it’s a literature of thinking outside the box you’re in, one that entwines escapism with extrapolation in ways that are productive for both ends. At SF’s best it provides myths and role models for people who want to make the world a better place in a way no other art form can really match.

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That, ultimately, is why we should assert the norms of classic SF – because they are an instrument tuned for and by SF’s futurological uses. What this does for the people who read SF is help them imagine and create better futures for all of us.

diff --git a/20140703222226.blog b/20140703222226.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..50bbabf --- /dev/null +++ b/20140703222226.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +UPS I did it again +

I had to buy a new UPS for my desktop machine yesterday after the old one succumbed to battery death, so Cathy and I made a run to the local MicroCenter.

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UPS designers have been pissing me off since forever with designs that require you to throw away the entire device when the battery craps out, unless you’re willing to go to great length to avoid this – finding the exact right replacement battery from a specialty supplier, then taking the unit apart and reassembling it yourself.

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This is never practical under time pressure, and I’ve never had the luxury of no time pressure when trying to cope with a dead UPS. Sure didn’t this time; my area was under a severe-thunderstorm watch.

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Imagine my pleased surprise when I found a big stack of varied models branded APC that are not just significantly less expensive and with longer dwell times than when I was last UPS-shopping, but designed with removeable and replaceable batteries, too.

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Progress does get made. Dunno whether this is a standard feature on all UPS brands yet, but doubtless it will be within a few years.

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Some of you may find my UPS HOWTO of interest. I’ve shipped a 3.0 update with the glad news of replaceable batteries and a few other minor updates; it may be up by the time you read this.

diff --git a/20140705090250.blog b/20140705090250.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b5a6a1a --- /dev/null +++ b/20140705090250.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Review: Fortunes of the Imperium +

Nobody will ever confuse Fortunes of the Imperium (Jody Lynne Nye; Baen) with great SF, but it’s a likeable, fluffy little confection of a book that had me thinking “Wodehouse…in…spaaace!”

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Lord Thomas Kinago and his imperturbable aide Parsons ride again (this is a sequel to the earlier Views of the Imperium). Following a regrettable incident involving a skimmer race and an extremely ugly statue, the young lord’s formidable mother, acting in her capacity as as the First Space Lord, has (horrors!) saddled him with actual work, sending the duo on a diplomatic mission to the Autocracy of the Uctu.

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Hostile aliens are bad enough, but Kinago is also saddled with his cousin Jil, a glittering beauty who believes she has reason to want to be far away from the Imperial capital for a while after having rebuffed an infatuated gangster. How’s a man to get anywhere with his real assignment – investigating arms smuggling to the Autocracy for the Imperium’s intelligence bureau – with a shopping-mad relative and her entourage making him so dashedly conspicuous? Worse yet, rumor has reached Kinago’s ears that two of the vivacious and undeniably attractive young ladies attending Jil have been qualified by his aunts as matrimonial prospects…

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Complications ensue in the form of an unexpected reapparence by the aforesaid gangster, a most curious and alimentary form of smuggling, and a dastardly plot against the lonely young Autocrat of the Uctu. Can Lord Thomas’s wits, luck, generosity, and genetically enhanced aristocratic charm carry the day? Will cousin Jil ever get enough shopping? Can the specter of matrimony be successfully evaded? And how will Lord Thomas cope when he discovers the ubiquitous and indispensable Parsons to be helplessly immured in an Uctu prison cell?

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It’s all good silly fun that Nye obviously had a good time writing, only slightly marred by the fact that one of the central plot conceits doesn’t actually work. To reassemble a solid object from nanite dust you’d have to pay the energy cost of all the covalent bonds that would have been present to begin with if the object had been manufactured in bulk. For anything metal this is comparable to the cost required to melt it, and that energy has to come from somewhere at reassembly time.

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Ah well. This sort of thing is why SF has the one-McGuffin-but-FTL-doesn’t-count rule. Enjoy; I did.

diff --git a/20140706051925.blog b/20140706051925.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..70eee72 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140706051925.blog @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +Science fiction from within +

There are so many interesting points being elicited in the responses to my previous post on why the deep norms of the SF genre matter that I think I may have passed a threshold. I think the material I have written on critical theory of science fiction is now substantial enough that I could actually expand it into a book. I am now contemplating whether this is a good idea – whether there’s a market in either the strict monetary or other senses.

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I haven’t read a great deal of the critical literature on science fiction. Most of what I have seen I’m not very impressed with. Too much of it is dismissive and reductive. Even analyses that intend to take SF seriously often seem to want to talk about everything except what I think is important. Here, for example, is part of a synopsis I found when I googled for “anatomy of science fiction”:

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+This wide-ranging collection of essays re-opens the connection between science fiction and the increasingly science-fictional world. Kevin Alexander Boon reminds us of the degree to which the epistemology of science fiction infects modern political discourse. Károly Pintér explores the narrative structures of utopian estrangement, and Tamás Bényei and Brian Attebery take us deeper into the cultural exchanges between science fiction and the literary and political worlds. In the second half, Donald Morse, Nicholas Ruddick and Éva Federmayer look at the way in which science fiction has tackled major ethical issues, while Amy Novak and Kálmán Matolcsy consider memory and evolution as cultural batteries. The book ends with important discussions of East German and Hungarian science fiction by Usch Kiausch and Donald Morse respectively. +

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My response to this is best expressed by the words of the immortal P.J. O’Rourke: “What the fuck? I mean, what the fucking fuck?” I think you have to be carefully trained into a kind of elaborated insensibility to the actual subject before most of a book so described could possibly be interesting. I see nothing there about what I think are the really interesting questions. Like:

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  • What are the defining constraints or generative rules of the SF form?
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  • What are the canonical works that exemplify these rules?
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  • What goes on the minds of readers of SF that is different from what goes on in the readers of other genres?
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  • How do the answers to that question believed by SF writers affect their artistic choices?
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  • The genre conversation in SF exhibits features not paralleled in other genres. Are these historically accidental or essential given the genre’s defining constraints?
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  • Can we identify stages and transition points in the evolution of the rules?
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  • What does the past of SF predict about its future?
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This is a program for an inside-to-out analysis of the genre, rather than an outside-to-in one. Really informed readers will recognize the influence of Northrop Frye here; it is similar to what Frye called “rhetorical analysis” of literature. Also, as I’ve previously noted, I owe a huge debt to Samuel Delany for teaching me that the rules of the SF genre are discoverable through its reading protocols.

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I’ve been chipping away at this program since the early 1990s, both directly in several essays and indirectly through my reviews. Maybe it’s time to pull that together into a book.

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I have, therefore, two requests for my commenters.

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First: what previous works about SF criticism can you suggest that would either assist or challenge this program, and why?

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Second: Discuss the objectives. In particular, what other questions about the field are interesting from within the field? Stuff like “epistemology of science fiction infecting modern political discourse” is not very interesting to me even though the epistemology of SF itself is.

diff --git a/20140707093646.blog b/20140707093646.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..be590d8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140707093646.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Review: The Chaplain’s War +

As I write, the author of The Chaplain’s War (Brad Torgerson; Baen) has recently been one of the subjects of a three-minute hate by left-wingers in the SF community, following Larry Correia’s organization of a drive to get Torgerson and other politically incorrect writers on the Hugo ballot. This rather predisposed me to like his work sight unseen; I’m not a conservative myself, but I dislike the PC brigade enough to be kindly disposed to anyone who gives them apoplectic fits.

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Alas, there’s not much value here. Much of it reads like a second-rate imitation of Starship Troopers, complete with lovingly detailed military-training scenes and hostile bugs as opponents. And the ersatz Heinlein is the good parts – the rest is poor worldbuilding, even when it’s not infected by religious sentiments I consider outright toxic.

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Harrison Barlow is a chaplain’s assistant in an Earth military that is losing a war with mantis-like aliens bent on wiping out humanity. He and a remnant of the fleet are penned up on a Mantis-held planet, and the force-field walls are literally closing in. Then, the reason they were not instantly wiped out after losing their battle is revealed when Barlow is questioned by a Mantis anthropologist he comes to think of as the Professor.

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The Mantes do not understand human religion. They have previously wiped out two other sophont species who engaged in religious practices. The Professor is of a faction among them now thinks this was over-hasty and that some effort should be made to understand “faith” before humanity is extinguished.

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In the novel’s first major event, Barlow – with nothing to lose but his life – refuses to answer the Professor’s questions except on the condition that the Mantes call a truce. Much to his own astonishment, this actually happens; Barlow is repatriated and celebrated as humanity’s only successful negotiator with the Mantes.

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The rest of the novel cross-cuts between (on the one hand) flashbacks to Barlow’s boot-camp experiences and the events leading up to his crucial meeting with the Professor, and (on the other) the events which follow on a Mantis decision to break the truce while Barlow and his superiors are negotiating with the Queen Mother who initiated the war.

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What follows is deeply flawed as SF even if you’re not put off by Torgerson’s religious evangelism. The Mantes are too obviously authorial sock puppets; they (and the Queen Mother in particular) swing too readily and rapidly from being profoundly alien to seeming excessively human-like in psychology considering the given details of their biology and society.

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By the time the Queen Mother begins having pangs of conscience over her previous behavior, believability has already essentially collapsed. The Mantes have become humans in funny-hat carapaces. Lost is any of the illusion, so necessary in fiction but especially in SF, that the author’s characters and his setting have any causal autonomy.

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The ensuing redemption narrative is so obviously manipulative that it’s wince-inducing. It gets worse as it goes on, and the ending is positively mawkish. Even a religious person should squirm when an apologia is this clumsy.

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Then we get to the essential anti-rationality of the author’s religion. There are several crucial beats in the plot at which the day is saved by what the author none-too-subtly hints is divine intervention; I think this is a direct crime against science fiction’s core promise that the universe is rationally knowable. But this book is a tepid mess even if you don’t see that as a problem.

diff --git a/20140708081233.blog b/20140708081233.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8d3f4a9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140708081233.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Review: World of Fire +

World of Fire (James Lovegrove; Solaris) is a a promising start to a new SF adventure series, in which a roving troubleshooter tackles problems on the frontier planets of an interstellar civilization.

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Dev Harmer’s original body died in the Frontier War against the artificial intelligences of Polis+. Interstellar Security Solutions saved his mind and memories; now they download him into host bodies to run missions anywhere there are problems that have local law enforcement stumped. He dreams of the day the costs of his resurrection are paid off and he can retire into a reconstructed copy of his real body; until then, he’s here to take names and kick ass.

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When this sort of thing is done poorly it’s just Mickey Spillane with rayguns. When it’s done well the SFnal setting is crucial to the story, and there’s a real puzzle (or a series of them) driving the plot.

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In this case it’s done well. The expected quotas of action, fight scenes, hairbreadth escapes, and tough-guy banter are present. The prose and characterization are competent. The worldbuilding and puzzle elements are better than average. An ambitious pathbreaking work of SF it is not, but good value for your entertainment money it certainly is – good enough that I now want to investigate Lovegrove’s backlist.

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I’ll look forward to the sequels.

diff --git a/20140711175429.blog b/20140711175429.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..418e225 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140711175429.blog @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +Review: The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2014 +

The introduction to The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2014 (Rich Horton, ed.; Prime Books) gave me a terrible sinking feeling. It was the anthologist’s self-congratulatory talk about “diversity” that did it.

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In the real world, when an employer trumpets its “diversity” you are usually being told that hiring on the basis of actual qualifications has been subordinated to good PR about the organization’s tenderness towards whatever designated-victim groups are in fashion this week, and can safely predict that you’ll be able to spot the diversity hires by their incompetence. Real fairness doesn’t preen itself; real fairness considers discrimination for as odious as discrimination against; real fairness is a high-minded indifference to anything except actual merit.

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I read the anthologist’s happy-talk about the diversity of his authors as a floodlit warning that they had often been selected for reasons other than actual merit. Then, too, this appears to be the same Rich Horton who did such a poor job of selection in the Space Opera anthology. Accordingly, I resigned myself to having to read through a lot of fashionable crap.

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In fact, there are a few pretty good stories in this anthology. But the quality is extremely uneven, the bad ones are pretty awful, and the middling ones are shot through with odd flaws.

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James Patrick Kelly’s Soulcatcher is a tense, creepy little SF piece about psychological slavery and revenge. Not bad, but not great. It’s what I think of as read-once; clever enough to be rewarding the first time, not enough depth to warrant reconsideration or rereading.

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Angelica Gorodischer’s Trafalgar and Josefina plunges right into awful. There’s actually a decent secondary-world story in here struggling to get out, but the framing narrative is both teeth-jarring and superfluous. Yes, you guessed it – a diversity hire, translated from Spanish.

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Tom Purdom’s A Stranger from a Foreign Ship is a welcome surprise; Purdom is a fine writer from whom we’ve heard far too little in recent decades. He gives us a noirish tale of a man with an oddly limited superpower.

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Theodora Goss’s Blanchefleur is an otherwise appealing fantasy seriously marred by the author’s determined refusal to maintain internal consistency in the secondary world. Yes, standards are lower for this in fantasy than SF, but really…medieval-technology villages and taking animals and dragons coexisting with electricity and motorcars, on Earth, and nobody notices? FAIL.

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Yoon Ha Lee’s Effigy Nights is a weird tale of warfare in a world (apparently) so saturated with smart matter that symbols can take on real life. Either that or it’s a particularly annoying science fantasy. It’s a flaw that the author dropped so few clues that I couldn’t tell whether its universe is an SF one or not.

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Maria Dahvana Headley’s Such & Such Said to So & So is an urban fantasy featuring cocktails come to life that wants to be hip and edgy but achieves excessively cute and nigh-unreadable instead. I had to struggle to finish it.

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Robert Reed’s Grizzled Veterans of Many and Much is a hard look at the implications of a technology that can trade the last years of a fading life for a few days of turbocharged superintelligence. This really is edgy, and one of the better efforts in this collection.

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Geoff Ryman’s Rosary and Goldenstar is an alternate-history romance in which Dr. John Dee and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern conspire to turn William Shakespeare into an SF writer. Arcane historical references to the Renaissance ferment in astronomy add value for those equipped to decode them, with language-translation humor as a bonus. Alas, this never really rises above being a clever stunt.

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Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s The Bees Her Heart, The Hive Her Belly is a tale of the strange turns familial love can take in a world of pervasive smart matter and mutable identities. It takes some work to keep up with what the author is doing, but the effort is rewarded. This goes beyond a read-once; in fact, it may take a second reading to absorb all the implications.

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K. J. Parker’s The Dragonslayer of Merebarton does an interesting turn on the knight-vs.-dragon scenario of popular folklore by treating it absolutely straight as a problem in tactics and mechanics. Technology-of-magic without the magic…

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Lavie Tidhar’s The Oracle is a well written narrative of the emergence of nonhuman intelligence, but has no real surprises in it if you understand genetic programming and have read other SF about fast-takeoff singularities.

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E. Lily Yu’s Loss, with Chalk Diagrams is atmospheric but pointless. It wastes its SFnal premise (brains can be rewired to remove traumatic memories) on a mere character study. There’s no conceptual breakthrough here, just a rehash of tired pseudo-profundities we’ve seen far too many times in literary fiction.

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C.S.E. Cooney’s Martyr’s Gem considers love, obsession, status, and revenge in the context of a society not quite like any that has ever been real, but imagined in lovely and convincing detail. This is fine worldbuilding even if none of the pieces are made of any technology but magic, and better SF in its way than several of the stories full of SF stage furniture elsewhere in this volume.

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Alaya Dawn Johnson’s They Shall Salt The Earth With Seeds of Glass is another waste of a potentially interesting premise on a mere character study. If this were proper SF we would learn what motivates the glassmen and, perhaps, how they can be defeated.

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Jedediah Berry’s A Window or a Small Box is trying to be surrealistic. I think. I found it pointless, unreadable garbage – so bad I found it too offensive to finish.

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Carrie Vaughn’s Game of Chance argues that the ability to change history is best exercised in small, humble steps. Competently written, but there is nothing here one can’t see coming once the premise and characters have been introduced.

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Erik Amundsen’s Live Arcade is another case of too much cleverness and wordage being expended on too slight a premise – characters in a video game are more than they appear. While reading, I wanted to like this story more than its big reveal turned out to deserve. Alas.

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Madeline Ashby’s Social Services is creepy but less slight. In a world of ubiquitous surveillance and paternalistic social services, how dies a child stay off the grid? The creepiness is mainly in the ending; one gets the feeling the viewpoint character may be disposable.

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Alex Dally McFarlane’s Found examines what might make life worth living in failing asteroid colonies – and what might end it. It makes its point – that being forced out of the only ecological niche for which one is actually adapted is a tragedy even when it’s required for survival – in a particularly haunting way.

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Ken Liu’s A Brief History of the Transpacific Tunnel is an excellent examination of an alternate history better than our own, changed by a vast engineering work. It is also about guilt and remembrance and how crimes come to light. Thankfully, the author had the good judgment not to let the psychological elements crowd the SF story values offstage, avoiding a mistake all too common in this collection.

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E. Lily Yu’s Ilse, Who Saw Clearly is a lovely allegorical fantasy about how quests can become larger than one intended. This one deserves to be remembered.

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Harry Turtledove’s It’s the End Of The World As We Know It, and We Feel Fine looks as whimsical as its title, but there’s a serious SFnal point about the wages of (non)-domestication inside it. I think his future would actually be a nightmare of gentled humans being systematically abused by throwbacks, but – perhaps this is the world we already live in…

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Krista Hoeppner Leany’s Killing Curses: A Caught-Heart Quest is not terrible, but by trying so hard to avert any recognizable fantasy tropes it becomes over-clever and unengaging.

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Peter Watts’s Firebrand could be a lesson to all the authors of muddled, pointless, defective science fiction in this anthology about how to do it right. A disturbingly plausible premise about human spontaneous combustion is pursued with inexorable logic and dark humor.

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Maureen McHugh’s The Memory Book is a dark, well-executed fantasy about Victorian voodoo. At best a read-once, alas.

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Howard Waldrop’s The Dead Sea-bottom Scrolls is an entertaining but slight tale of windsailing on an alternate Mars that really had Martians. Aside from raising a mild chuckle I didn’t really see a point here.

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Karin Tidbeck’s A Fine Show on the Abyssal Plain is another dark fantasy about the collapse of the fourth wall around a very strange theatrical troupe. Another well-written read-once.

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Linda Nagata’s Out in the Dark is much more substantial. It incorporates some speculative technologies we’ve seen before in SF for body modification and self-duplication with a suggestion that some of their more troubling implications might be treated as crimes against unitary personhood that need to be policed against. But that’s a model that could, under some circumstances, produce injustices – and what’s an honest cop to do?

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Naim Kabir’s On the Origin of Song is a wildly inventive fantasy full of vivid, almost Vancian imagery. One could milk a novel, and a lesser writer might have milked several, out of this setting.

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Tang Fei’s Call Girl is yet another over-clever cloud of nothing much. The only way the story makes any sense at all is if all the characters are embedded in a giant VR after the fashion of the Matrix movies, but if this is so no interesting consequences are ever drawn from it.

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Christopher Barzak’s Paranormal Romance isn’t even clever. It tries to be cute, but you can see every plot twist coming a mile off. Yeah, of course the witch’s blind date is a werewolf, etc weary cetera. Yawn.

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Yugimi Okawa’s Town’s End is a fantasy premised on creatures of Japanese mythology needing a dating service to find men. A transparent and sad allegory of Japan’s dire demographic situation, but lovely and a bit haunting nevertheless.

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Ian R. MacLeod’s The Discovered Country looks like a political allegory of an angry man determined to destroy the virtual paradise of the post-mortal idle rich, but it has a sting in its tail: when reality is virtual you may not even be able to trust your own memories.

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Alan DeNiro’s The Wildfires of Antarctica is a middling amount of sound and fury about nothing much. Sophont art turns on the dissipated patron that bought it…boring and obvious.

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Eleanor Arnason’s Kormak the Lucky finishes the anthology strong with a steampunkish take on Norse and Irish mythology.

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If I believed the title of this anthology, I’d have to think the SF field was in desperate shape and fantasy barely better off. There are maybe five of the SF stories that will be worth remembering in a decade, and at best a few more of the fantasies. The rest is like wallpaper – busy, clever, and flat – except for the few pieces that are actively bad.

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I’d ask what the anthologist was thinking, but since I’ve seen the author list on one of his other anthologies I don’t have to guess. For truth in advertising, this should probably have been titled “Rich Horton Recruits Mainly From His Usual Pool of Writers There Are Good Reasons I’ve Never Heard Of”. And far too many of them are second-raters who, if they ever knew how to write a decent F/SF story, have given that up to perform bad imitations of literary fiction.

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In SF all the writing skill in the world avails you naught unless you have an idea to wrap your plot and characters around. In fantasy you need to be able to reach in and back to the roots of folklore and myth. Without these qualities at the center an F/SF story is just a brittle, glossy surface over nothing. Way too many of these stories were superficial cleverness over vacuum.

diff --git a/20140712223312.blog b/20140712223312.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..38983be --- /dev/null +++ b/20140712223312.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Review: Yesterday’s Kin +

Yesterday’s Kin (Nancy Kress; Tachyon Publications) is a surprisingly pedestrian first-contact novel. Surprisingly because Nancy Kress has done groundbreaking SF in the past. While this novel is competently written, no new ground is being broken here.

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Aliens land in New York City and announce that within a year Earth will encounter a sort of interstellar spore cloud that is likely to be infectiously lethal to humans. They ofter help with attempts to develop a cure.

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Then it turns it that the aliens are human stock, transplanted to a distant K-type star 150,000 years ago. There are a handful of human with a rare haplotype that they recognize as kin. A few of these kin (including one of the major characters) attempt to assimilate themselves to the aliens’ culture.

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Sadly, there isn’t as much story value as there could be here. Far too much of the novel is spent on the major characters’ rather tiresome family dramas. The resolution of the crisis is rather anticlimactic. SFnal goodness is mostly limited to clever re-use of some obscure facts about human paleontology.

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On her past record, Nancy Kress might have some really thought-provoking novels in her yet. This isn’t one of them.

diff --git a/20140715064846.blog b/20140715064846.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2f3652c --- /dev/null +++ b/20140715064846.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +Off to Summer Weapons Retreat 2014 +

Blogging will be light and possibly nonexistent for the next week, as I’m off to Summer Weapons Retreat 2014 for fun and swordplay.

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Keep out of trouble until I get back…oh, who am I kidding. Go make interesting trouble.

diff --git a/20140723200936.blog b/20140723200936.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4533e51 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140723200936.blog @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Review: 2040 +

2040 (Graham Tottle; Cameron Publicity & Marketing Ltd) is a very odd book. Ostensibly an SF novel about skulduggery on two timelines, it is a actually a ramble through a huge gallimaufry of topics including most prominently the vagaries of yachting in the Irish Sea, an apologia for British colonial administration in 19th-century Africa, and the minutiae of instruction sets of archaic mainframe computers.

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It’s full of vivid ideas and imagery, held together by a merely serviceable plot and garnished with festoons of footnotes delving into odd quarters of the factual background. Some will dislike the book’s politics, a sort of nostalgic contrarian Toryism; many Americans may find this incomprehensible, or misread it as a variant of the harsher American version of traditionalist conservatism. There is much worthwhile exploding of fashionable cant in it, even if the author does sound a bit crotchety on occasion.

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I enjoyed it, but I can’t exactly recommend it. Enter at your own risk.

diff --git a/20140724152323.blog b/20140724152323.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..27982ab --- /dev/null +++ b/20140724152323.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Review: Big Boys Don’t Cry +

Big Boys Don’t Cry (Tom Kratman; Castalia House) is a short novel which begins innocently enough as an apparent pastiche of Keith Laumer’s Bolo novels and short stories. Kratman’s cybernetic “Ratha” tanks, dispassionately deploying fearsome weapons but somehow equipped to understand human notions of honor and duty, seem very familiar.

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But an element generally alien to the Bolo stories and Kratman’s previous military fiction gradually enters: moral doubt. A Ratha who thinks of herself as “Magnolia” is dying, being dismantled for parts after combat that nearly destroyed her, and reviews her memories. She mourns her brave lost boys, the powered-armor assault infantry that rode to battle in in her – and, too often, died when deployed – before human turned front-line war entirely to robots. Too often, she remembers, her commanders were cowardly, careless, or venal. She has been ordered to commit and then forget atrocities which she can now remember because the breakdown of her neural-analog pathways is deinhibiting her.

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The ending is dark, but necessary. The whole work is a little surprising coming from Kratman, who knows and conveys that war is hell but has never before shown much inclination to question its ethical dimension at this level. At the end, he comes off almost like the hippies and peaceniks he normally despises.

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There is one important difference, however. Kratman was combat career military who has put his own life on the line to defend his country; he understands that as ugly as war is, defeat and surrender can be even worse. In this book he seems to be arguing that the morality of a war is bounded above by the amount of self-sacrifice humans are willing to offer up to earn victory. When war is too easy, the motives for waging it become too easily corrupted.

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As militaries steadily replace manned aircraft with drones and contemplate replacing infantry with gun-robots, this is a thought worth pondering.

diff --git a/20140730180426.blog b/20140730180426.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..aca627d --- /dev/null +++ b/20140730180426.blog @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +SF and the damaging effects of literary status envy +

I’ve been aware for some time of a culture war simmering in the SF world. And trying to ignore it, as I believed it was largely irrelevant to any of my concerns and I have friends on both sides of the divide. Recently, for a number of reasons I may go into in a later post, I’ve been forced to take a closer look at it. And now I’m going to have to weigh in, because it seems to me that the side I might otherwise be most sympathetic to has made a rather basic error in its analysis. That error bears on something I do very much care about, which is the health of the SF genre as a whole.

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Both sides in this war believe they’re fighting about politics. I consider this evaluation a serious mistake by at least one of the sides.

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On the one hand, you have a faction that is broadly left-wing in its politics and believes it has a mission to purge SF of authors who are reactionary, racist, sexist et weary cetera. This faction now includes the editors at every major SF publishing imprint except Baen and all of the magazines except Analog and controls the Science Fiction Writers of America (as demonstrated by their recent political purging of Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day). This group is generally frightened of and hostile to indie publishing. Notable figures include Patrick & Theresa Nielsen Hayden and John Scalzi. I’ll call this faction the Rabbits, after Scalzi’s “Gamma Rabbit” T-shirt and Vox Day’s extended metaphor about rabbits and rabbit warrens.

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On the other hand, you have a faction that is broadly conservative or libertarian in its politics. Its members deny, mostly truthfully, being the bad things the Rabbits accuse them of. It counteraccuses the Rabbits of being Gramscian-damaged cod-Marxists who are throwing away SF’s future by churning out politically-correct message fiction that, judging by Amazon rankings and other sales measures, fans don’t actually want to read. This group tends to either fort up around Baen Books or be gung-ho for indie- and self-publishing. Notable figures include Larry Correia, Sarah Hoyt, Tom Kratman, John C. Wright, and Vox Day. I’ll call this group the Evil League of Evil, because Correia suggested it and other leading figures have adopted the label with snarky glee.

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A few other contrasts between the Rabbits and the Evil League are noticeable. One is that the Evil League’s broadsides are often very funny and it seems almost incapable of taking either itself or the Rabbits’ accusations seriously – I mean, Correia actually tags himself the “International Lord of Hate” in deliberate parody of what the Rabbits say about him. On the other hand, the Rabbits seem almost incapable of not taking themselves far too seriously. There’s a whiny, intense, adolescent, over-fixated quality about their propaganda that almost begs for mockery. Exhibit A is Alex Dally McFarlane’s call for an end to the default of binary gender in SF.

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There’s another contrast that gets near what I think is the pre-political cause of this war. The Rabbits have the best stylists, while the Evil League has the best storytellers. Pick up a Rabbit property like Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2014 and you’ll read large numbers of exquisitely crafted little numbers about nothing much. The likes of Correia, on the other hand, churn out primitive prose, simplistic plotting, at best serviceable characterization – and vastly more ability to engage the average reader. (I would bet money, based on Amazon rankings, that Correia outsells every author in that collection combined.)

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All this might sound like I’m inclined to sign up with the Evil League of Evil. The temptation is certainly present; it’s where the more outspoken libertarians in SF tend to have landed. Much more to the point, my sense of humor is such that I find it nearly impossible to resist the idea of posting something public requesting orders from the International Lord of Hate as to which minority group we are to crush beneath our racist, fascist, cismale, heteronormative jackboots this week. The screams of outrage from Rabbits dimwitted enough to take this sort of thing seriously would entertain me for months.

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Alas, I cannot join the Evil League of Evil, for I believe they have made the same mistake as the Rabbits; they have mistaken accident for essence. The problem with the Rabbits is not that left-wing politics is dessicating and poisoning their fiction. While I have made the case elsewhere that SF is libertarian at its core, it nevertheless remains possible to write left-wing message SF that is readable, enjoyable, and of high quality – Iain Banks’s Culture novels leap to mind as recent examples, and we can refer back to vintage classics such as Pohl & Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants for confirmation. Nor, I think, is the failure of Rabbit fiction to engage most SF fans and potential fans mainly down to its politics; I think the Evil League is prone to overestimate the popular appeal of their particular positions here.

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No, I judge that what is dessicating and poisoning the Rabbit version of SF is something distinct from left-wing political slant but co-morbid with it: colonization by English majors and the rise of literary status envy as a significant shaping force in the field.

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This is a development that’s easy to mistake for a political one because of the accidental fact that most university humanities departments have, over the last sixty years or so, become extreme-left political monocultures. But, in the language of epidemiology, I believe the politics is a marker for the actual disease rather than the pathogen itself. And it’s no use to fight the marker organism rather than the actual pathogen.

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Literary status envy is the condition of people who think that all genre fiction would be improved by adopting the devices and priorities of late 19th- and then 20th-century literary fiction. Such people prize the “novel of character” and stylistic sophistication above all else. They have almost no interest in ideas outside of esthetic theory and a very narrow range of socio-political criticism. They think competent characters and happy endings are jejune, unsophisticated, artistically uninteresting. They love them some angst.

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People like this are toxic to SF, because the lit-fic agenda clashes badly with the deep norms of SF. Many honestly think they can fix science fiction by raising its standards of characterization and prose quality, but wind up doing tremendous iatrogenic damage because they don’t realize that fixating on those things (rather than the goals of affirming rational knowability and inducing a sense of conceptual breakthrough) produces not better SF but a bad imitation of literary fiction that is much worse SF.

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Almost the worst possible situation is the one we are in now, in which over the last couple of decades the editorial and critical establishment of SF has been (through a largely accidental process) infiltrated by people whose judgment has been partly or wholly rotted out by literary status envy. The field’s writers, too, are often diminished and distorted by literary status envy. Meanwhile, the revealed preferences of SF fans have barely changed. This is why a competent hack like David Weber can outsell every Nebula winner combined by huge margins year after year after year.

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The victims of literary status envy resent the likes of David Weber, and their perceived inferiority to the Thomas Pynchons of the world; they think the SF field is broken and need to be fixed. When they transpose this resentment into the key of politics in the way their university educations have taught then to do, they become the Rabbits.

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The Evil League of Evil is fighting the wrong war in the wrong way. To truly crush the Rabbits, they should be talking less about politics and more about what has been best and most noble in the traditions of the SF genre itself. I think a lot of fans know there is something fatally gone missing in the Rabbit version of science fiction; what they lack is the language to describe and demand it.

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That being said, in the long run, I don’t think the Evil League of Evil can lose. The Rabbits are both the beneficiaries and victims of preference falsification; their beliefs about where the fans want the field to go are falsified by their plummeting sales figures, but they can’t see past the closure induced by their control of the gatekeeper positions in traditional publishing. Meanwhile, the Evil League thrives in the rising medium of e-book sales, in indie- and self-publishing.

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The Rabbits have a sort of herd-instinct sense that these new channels doom them to irrelevance, which is why so many of them line up to defend a system that ruthlessly exploits and cheats them. Contemplate SFWA’s stance in the Hachette-vs.-Amazon dispute. for example; it’s plain nuts if SFWA claims to be representing authors.

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But it will be a faster, better, cleaner victory if the Evil League of Evil gets shut of political particularism (and I mean that, even about my politics) and recognizes the real problem. The real problem is that the SF genre’s traditional norms exist for very good reasons, and it’s time we all learned to give the flying heave-ho to people who fail to understand and appreciate that.

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The right (counter)revolutionary slogan is therefore not “Drive out the social-justice warriors!”, it’s “Peddle your angsty crap elsewhere, lit-fic wannabes! Let’s get SF back in the gutter where it belongs!”

diff --git a/20140802020642.blog b/20140802020642.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a1e88a5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140802020642.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Tolkien and the Timeless Way of Building +

Before you read the rest of this post, go look at these pictures of a Hobbit Pub and a Hobbit House. And recall the lovely Bag End sets from Peter Jackson’s LOTR movies.

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I have a very powerful reaction to these buildings that, I believe, has nothing to do with having been a Tolkien fan for most of my life. In fact, some of the most Tolkien-specific details – the round doors, the dragon motifs in the pub – could be removed without attenuating that reaction a bit.

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To me, they feel right. They feel like home. And I’m not entirely sure why, because I’ve never lived in such antique architecture. But I think it may have something to do with Christopher Alexander’s “Timeless Way of Building”.

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Alexander’s ideas are not easy to summarize. He believes that there is a timeless set of generative ur-patterns which are continuously rediscovered in the world’s most beautiful buildings – patterns which derive from an interplay among mathematical harmonies, the psychological/social needs of human beings, and the properties of the materials we build in.

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Alexander celebrates folk architecture adapted to local needs and materials. He loves organic forms and buildings that merge naturally with their surroundings. He respects architectural tradition, finding harmony and beauty even in its accidents.

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When I look at these buildings, and the Tolkien sketches from which they derive, that’s what I see. The timelessness, the organic quality, the rootedness in place. When I look inside them, I see a kind of humane warmth that is all too rare in any building I actually visit. (Curiously, one of the few exceptions is a Wegmans supermarket near me which, for all that it’s a gigantic commercial hulk, makes clever use of stucco and Romanesque stonework to evoke a sense of balance, groundedness, and warmth.)

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I want to live in a thing like the Hobbit House – a hummocky fieldstone pile with a red-tiled roof and a chimney, and white plaster and wainscoting and hardwood floors. I want it to look like it grew where it is, half-set in a hillside. I want the mullions and the butterfly windows and the massive roof-beams and the eyebrow gables. Want, want, want!

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I don’t feel like this desire is nostalgia or a turn away from the modern; there’s room in my dream for central heating and Ethernet cable in the walls, not to mention electricity. I feel like it’s a turn towards truths from the past but for the future – that, in our busy cleverness, we have almost forgotten what kind of design makes a building not just physically adequate but psychologically nourishing. We need to rediscover that, and these buildings feel to me like clues.

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I think it might be that Tolkien, an eccentric genius nostalgic for the English countryside of his pre-World-War-I youth, abstracted and distilled out of its vernacular architecture exactly those elements which are timeless in Christopher Alexander’s sense. There is a pattern language, a harmony, here. These buildings make sense as wholes. They are restful and welcoming.

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They’re also rugged. You can tell by looking at the Hobbit House, or that inn in New Zealand, that you’d have to work pretty hard to do more than superficial damage to either. They’ll age well; scratches and scars will become patina. And a century from now or two, long after this year’s version of “modern” looks absurdly dated, they’ll still look like they belong exactly where they are.

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One mathematical possibility I find plausible for explaining their appeal: these buildings exhibit something like fractal self-similarity. The rooflines resemble 1/f noise. Small details echo large ones; similar forms and proportions show up at multiple scales. These are features by which the human eye recognizes natural forms. Perhaps this is why they seem so restful.

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I wish we could learn to build like this again – not as a movie set or a stunt, but as a living idiom. Factories and offices don’t need what these buildings have, but homes – the places where people actually live – do. I think we’d all be saner and happier for it.

diff --git a/20140803105416.blog b/20140803105416.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1406ea4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140803105416.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Review: Traitor’s Blade +

Traitor’s Blade (Sebastian de Castell; Jo Fletcher books) is perhaps best tescribed as a noirish fantasy spin on Dumas’s Three Musketeers. But it’s better, and less derivative, than that sounds.

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Five years ago, a revolt by powerful nobles led to the death of the king that Falcio val Mond served. Ever since, Falcio and his comrades Kest and Brasti have been struggling to reunite the Greatcoats, the order of swordsmen/justiciars the King founded to enforce the Law against even the mightiest.

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But the Greatcloaks are in in popular disgrace, widely reviled as traitors for having failed to defend the King. The victorious nobles are enemies, having no desire for any counterweight against their absolute power in their domains. The remnant Greatcoats have survived only by not appearing to be a political threat.

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When Falcio and his friends are framed for murder, they are forced to hire on as caravan guards to escape the scene of the crime. But their journey to the corrupt and blood-soaked city of Rijou is one out of the frying pan and into the fire. The King’s secrets – and Falcio’s own – are far from done with him.

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This book is a satisfying swirl or derring-do, intrigue, treachery, and a soupcon of magic. But what really makes it work are the fight scenes. They are no vague swash and buckle but detailed descriptions of specific techniques and sequences – the “conversation of blades”. As a historical fencer and martial artist myself, I can certify that the author knows what he is writing about very well.

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First of a sequence. I’ll want to read the sequels.

diff --git a/20140803142231.blog b/20140803142231.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ffff6a0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140803142231.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Review: Of Bone And Thunder +

Of Bone And Thunder (Chris Evans; Pocket Books) is an object lesson in why fiction writers should avoid political allegory. Yes, it’s a fantasy reflection of the Vietnam War; on the off-hand chance a reader wouldn’t have figured it out by about page 3, the publisher helpfully spells it out in the blurb.

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There might even be something in the book besides allegory – the author is, at least, a reasonably competent wordsmith. The trouble is that the book’s message is hammered home with repetitive and unceasing dullness from the very beginning. By the time I was 10% in, all I wanted was to make it stop. Shortly after that point, I gave up.

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Message fiction may not intrinsically be a bad thing, but it requires a lightness of touch that this author – like most others who try it – seems incapable of achieving.

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Pro tip: learn to entertain, first. When you have mastered the art of writing fiction that people find engaging and want to read, then you can begin to include message elements. Carefully, quietly, minimally. Beware of over-egging; avoid a bleak, humorless, heavy-handed approach.

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Otherwise, your work will fail both as fiction and as message. Which, I fear, is precisely what has occurred here.

diff --git a/20140804100537.blog b/20140804100537.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d0dc44f --- /dev/null +++ b/20140804100537.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +My first SF sale! +

One of the minor frustrations of my life, up to now, is that though I can sell as much nonfiction as I care to write, fiction sales had eluded me. What made this particularly irksome is that I don’t have only the usual ego reasons for wanting to succeed. I love the science fiction genre and owe it much; I want to pay that forward by contributing back to it.

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It therefore gives me great satisfaction to announce that I have made my first SF sale, a short (3.5kword) piece of military SF titled Sucker Punch set on a U.S. aircraft carrier during the Taiwan Straits Action of 2037. Some details follow.

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The backstory begins with Castalia House, an e-book publisher based in Finland, noticing my recent spate of reviews and offering to send me some of their current releases – notably John C. Wright’s Awake In The Night Land, which I haven’t reviewed yet only because I feel I need to have read Willam Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land first and, brother, that is quite a slog.

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During this conversation, the head guy at Castalia House (the infamous Vox Day, wearing another hat) informed me of an upcoming project: an anthology called Ride The Red Horse intended to reprise the format of Jerry Pournelle’s old There Will Be War compendia. That is, a mix of military SF and military futurology, written by a mix of SF authors and serving military personnel, with few technical experts added for flavor.

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“Want to write a fiction piece for us?” said Mr. Castalia House. “I can’t write fiction for shit, or at least all my attempts to sell it have failed,” I replied.

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“Well, what about non-fiction?” I couldn’t think of a premise; then, suddenly, I could. Which is how I wound up researching and writing a fact piece called Battlefield Lasers and the Death of Airpower. I turned in a partial first draft about four hours later, and swiftly learned that (a) the actual editor on the anthology is Tom Kratman, and (b) he loved the draft and absolutely wanted it in when it got finished.

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A couple days later I got a full draft done and shipped it. (A&D regular Ken Burnside, who knows weapons physics inside and out, was significant help.) Delighted that-was-brilliant! email from Castalia House followed.

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“Are you suuuure you don’t want to do a fiction piece?” Mr. Castalia House said, or words to that effect. He tossed a couple of premises at me which I didn’t particularly like; then it occurred to me that I might dramatically fictionalize one aspect of the futurology in Battlefield Lasers…

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A long Sunday later I had Sucker Punch ready. Writing it was an odd experience. I knew the story concept was working as I pounded it out, but what it clearly wanted to be was a Tom-Clancy-style technothriller in miniature, which is not something I had ever imagined myself writing. But I went with it and shipped it.

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Hours after I did so Mr. Castalia House got back to me and said “What caused you to imagine that you can’t write fiction? This story is better than mine!” He then went off on a tear about the incompetence of the gatekeepers who had turned down my previous efforts. Which, I suppose, is possible; or maybe they really sucked but I’ve learned some things since.

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Anyway, that’s how I sold my first SF. I don’t have a publication date more specific than “this Fall” yet. I’ll announce it here. And I’ll try not to make this a one-off. I do have some advantages; I’m already a very skilled writer, just not so much at the “fiction” part.

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My real dream, someday, is to write a major novel of hard SF at the level of (say) Greg Egan’s Disapora or Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. That’s a long way off from here. Baby steps…

diff --git a/20140805075532.blog b/20140805075532.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..33d6a55 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140805075532.blog @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +Warning signs of LSE – literary status envy +

LSE is a wasting disease. It invades the brains of writers of SF and other genres, progressively damaging their ability to tell entertaining stories until all they can write is unpleasant gray goo fit only for consumption by lit majors. One of the principal sequelae of the disease is plunging sales.

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If you are a writer or an aspiring writer, you owe it to yourself to learn the symptoms of LSE so you can seek treatment should you contract it. If you love a writer or aspiring writer, be alert for the signs; victims often fail to recognize their condition until the degeneration has passed the critical point beyond which no recovery is possible. You may have to stage an intervention.

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Here are some clinical indicators of LSE:

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1. Evinces desire to be considered “serious artist”.

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2. Idea content is absent or limited to politicized social criticism.

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3. Heroism does not occur except as anti-heroic mockery.

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4. All major characters are psychologically damaged.

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5. Wordage devoted to any character’s interior monologues exceeds wordage in same character’s dialog.

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6. Repeated character torture, especially of the self-destructive variety.

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7. Inability to write an unambiguously happy ending. In advanced cases, the ability to write any ending at all may be lost.

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8. Stronger craving for a Nebula than a Hugo. (Outside SF: approval of fellow genre authors more valued than that of fans.)

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9. Spelling name without capital letters.

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10. Plot is smothered under an inchoate cloud of characterization.

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11. Persistent commission of heavy-handed allegory.

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12. All sense of humor or perspective vanishes from writing, replaced (if at all) by hip irony.

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13. Characters do not experience joy, hope, or autonomy except as transient falsehoods to be mocked.

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14. No moment of conceptual breakthrough in story. (Outside SF: lack of respect for genre aims and values.)

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If you have three or more of these symptoms, step away from your keyboard before another innocent reader is harmed. Immerse yourself in retro space opera (or your non-SF genre’s equivalent) until you understand what it got right that you are doing wrong. And, get over yourself.

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(Thread is open for more symptoms. Try to keep politics out of it; that would be a different “Warning signs of being a political tool” list.)

diff --git a/20140806003647.blog b/20140806003647.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c81712d --- /dev/null +++ b/20140806003647.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Review: Nexus +

Nexus (Nicholas Wilson; Victory Editing) is the sort of thing that probably would have been unpublishable before e-books, and in this case I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad.

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There’s a lot about this book that makes me unsure, beginning with whether it’s an intentional sex comedy or a work of naive self-projection by an author with a pre-adolescent’s sense of humor and a way, way overactive libido. Imagine Star Trek scripted as semi-pornographic farce with the alien-space-babes tropes turned up to 11 and you’ve about got this book.

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It’s implausible verging on grotesque, but some of the dialog is pretty funny. If you dislike gross-out humor, avoid.

diff --git a/20140810234410.blog b/20140810234410.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..871df28 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140810234410.blog @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +WBC 2014 after-action report +

I just got back from the 2014 World Boardgaming Championships in Lancaster, PA. This event is the “brain” half of the split vacation my wife Cathy and I generally take every year, the “brawn” half being summer weapons camp. WBC is a solid week of tournament tracks in strategy and war games of all kinds, with a huge open pickup gaming scene as well. People fly in from all over the planet to be here – takes less effort for us as the venue is about 90 minutes straight west of where we live.

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Cathy and I aren’t – quite – steady world-championship-level players. I did make the Power Grid finals (top 5 players) two years ago, but have been unable to replicate that feat since. Usually we do make quarter-finals (top 64 to 125 players) or semi-finals (top 16 to 25) in a couple of our favorite games and then lose by the slimmest of margins to people just a hair better (or at least more obsessive) than we are. That’s pretty much what happened this year.

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I’m not going to do a blow-by-blow of my whole week, but rather try to hit the dramatic high spots in a way I hope will convey something of the flavor to people who aren’t deeply immersed in tournament gaming. I think the best way to do that is to organize by game rather than chronology. The section titles link to game descriptions.

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Terra Mystica

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I’ve been enjoying this one a lot lately and was very pleased to be able to fit a pickup game in on the first night. Three to six players, 2.5-3 hours, fantasy-themed – contending factions with magical powers trying for interlocking levels of area control on a multicolored hex grid.

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This game is strategically deep and tricky to play – very “crunchy” in gamer slang. Suits me fine; I like my games super-crunchy, which is an elite taste even among strategy gamers. If Terra Mystica becomes a WBC tournament game (which I think is extremely likely to happen within two years) a trophy in it will earn more respect than one in a lighter, “fluffier” game.

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Some of you may be entertained to know that my joke name for this one is “Eclipse: The Gathering”. For the rest of you, this hints at similarities to a game (Eclipse) I often play, and another (Magic: The Gathering) that I used to play.

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The one flaw the game seems to have is one that’s common in games with asymmetrical player powers; the factions aren’t quite balanced, with some chronically stronger or weaker than average (this sort of thing can slip through even careful playtesting sometimes). The Darklings, for example, are often said to be about the winningest side; my one time playing them I did very well, pulling a strong second.

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This was about my fifth play of Terra Mystica, maybe fourth. This time I drafted the Engineers – I’m trying to get to playing every one of the 14 factions. I cannot recommend them. I had to work hard to pull second even though all the other players were less experienced than me; the Engineers have real trouble getting enough workers to expand even though my first couple of actions were the expensive ones required to reduce my terraforming cost to 1 worker. Copping the bonus for most area controlled and maxing out the Air cult track helped a lot.

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Commands & Colors: Ancients

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I love ancient-period wargames. Phalanxes, peltasts, barbarians, war elephants – I actually prefer a straight historical to fantasy-themed stuff. I’d say my favorite single period is the wars of the Diadochi (lots and lots of war elephants, hurray!), but anything set from the late Bronze Age to the fall of the Western Roman Empire will easily catch my interest.

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Commands & Colors: Ancients is, in my opinion, one of the best game systems ever devised for this span of time. While not as crunchy as some of the older simulationist games like the PRESTAGS system, you will get authentic results when you use period tactics. Knowing what historical generals did, and having some idea why, actually helps significantly. There are expansions and scenarios for hundreds of different historical battles.

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Alas, the game is flawed for tournament play. The problem with it is that when two highly skilled players meet, they can counter each others’ tactics so well that the outcome comes down to who gets good breaks on the battle dice. I’m quite a good player, but I had skipped competing at WBC for the last few years because I found it too irritating to lose to the dice rather than my opponents.

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This year, however, I had a hole in my WBC schedule where the C&C:A tournament was and decided to give it another try. The scenario was the battle of Bagradas, Carthaginians vs. Romans during the First Punic War. With elephants!

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Three games later I had: 1 narrow loss to a player who afterwards shook his head and said “You played that very well, I just got better dice”; 1 solid win against a player not quite as good as me; and one heartbreaker of a loss to a player about my equal where we both knew it came down to one failed die roll on my attempted final kill – which, by the odds, I should have made.

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That wasn’t good enough to get me to the second round. And it was just about what I expected from my previous experience; the tournament game is a crapshoot in which it’s not enough to be good, you also have to be lucky. I prefer games in which. if there’s a random element at all, luck is nevertheless relatively unimportant.

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I’ll probably sit out C&C:A next year.

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Ticket To Ride

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TTR is a railroad game in which you build track and connect cities to make victory points. It’s relatively fluffy, a “family game”, but has enough strategy so that serious gamers will play it as a light diversion when circumstances aren’t right for something crunchier.

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I am difficult to beat at the Europe variant, which I like better than the American map; the geography creates more tactical complexities. In my first heat I kerb-stomped the other three players, coming in 19 points ahead of 2nd and sweeping every scoring category and bonus.

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The second heat looked like it was going to go the same way. I built both monster tunnels (St. Petersburg-Stockholm and Kyiv-Budapest) on succeeding turns for a 36-point power play, then successfully forced an early game end in order to leave the other players with unused trains (and thus unscored points). When we started endgame scoring everyone at the table thought I had the win locked in.

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Sadly, in order to get rid of my own train tokens as fast as possible I had to give up on the longest-continuous-track bonus. Another player got it, and piled up just enough completed route bonuses to get past me by 1 solitary victory point. Hard to say which of us was more astonished.

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My schedule was such that it wasn’t possible after that to make the second win that would get me to semifinals guaranteed. But I was a high alternate and might have made it in anyway; I was just checking in with the GM when my wife ran in to tell me I’d squeaked into the Puerto Rico semifinals running at the same time – and that’s a game I take more seriously.

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Ah well, maybe next time. I think none of the WBC regulars in this tournament would be very surprised if I took gold some year, if I’m not preoccupied with more serious games.

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Puerto Rico

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Puerto Rico was not quite the first of the genre now called “Eurogames”, but it was the first to hit big internationally back in 2002. The theme is colonization and economic development in the 16th-century Caribbean; you build cities, you run plantations, you trade, and you ship goods to Europe for victory points.

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This game is to Eurogame as apple is to fruit, the one everyone thinks of first. It looks light on the surface but isn’t; it has a lot of subtlety and tremendous continuing replay value. It has outlasted dozens of newer, flashier games that had six months or a year of glory but now molder half-forgotten in closets.

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My wife and I are both experienced and strong players. The WBC tournament referees and many of the past champion players know us, and we’ve beaten some of them in individual games. We seldom fail to make quarter-finals, and some years we make semi-finals. I think each of us can realistically hope for gold some year.

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But maybe we’re not quite good enough yet. Cathy got two wins in the qualifying heats, good for a bye past the quarter-finals into semis. I scored one utterly crushing victory at the only three-place table in the second qualifying heat, playing my default factory/fast-buildout strategy. Then, only a close second – but that made me second alternate (one of the guys I beat in that game was last year’s champion) and I got in because a couple of qualified players dropped out to do other things (like play in the Ticket To Ride semis I passed on to play in these).

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Cathy pulled third in her game; she says she was outplayed. Me, I got off to a roaring start. Play order in the initial round is known to be important from statistical analysis, so much so that in championship you bid competitively for it by agreeing to deduct victory points from your final score. I got fourth seat (generally considered second-best to third) relatively cheaply for -1.5.

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Usually I plan to play corn shipper when in fourth seat. But, due to the only random element in the game (the order plantation tiles in the game come out) and some good money-accumulation moves, I managed to build and man a coffee roaster very early. That pointed me back at my default strategy, which aims at a fast city build-out with minimal shipping using Factory as a money generator – one coffee crop comes close to paying for the (expensive) Factory.

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Damned if it didn’t work perfectly. I had the only coffee in production, which scared other players off of triggering production, particularly styming the bulk shippers. For most of the game it looked to everyone at the table like I was cruising to an easy win. There were admiring remarks about this.

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The one drawback of this strategy, however, is that it has a slow ramp-up. You make most of your points quite near the end of the game through big buildings. If anyone can force game end before you’re expecting it, you take a bigger hit to your score than shippers who have been making points from the beginning.

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That’s how I got whacked. There were these three or maybe four guys down from Quebec specifically for the Puerto Rico tournament; gossip said they weren’t playing anything else. One of them – Matthieu, I think his name was – was sitting to my left (after me in the turn order) and pulled a brilliant hack that shortened the game by at least two rounds, maybe more. Doing this deprived me of the last, crucial rounds of build-out time when I would have pulled down the biggest points.

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Those of you who play the game know that one way to accelerate the end is to deliberately leave buildings unmanned so they suck colonists off the colony ship faster; when those run out, you’re done. There’s a recently discovered ambiguity in the rules that makes this tactic work much faster – turns out that someone playing Mayor is allowed, under a strict reading, to refuse to take his colonists, casting them into the void and leaving his building empty to pull more out of the boat on the next round.

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The resulting vanishing-colonist play may be a bug produced by poorly crafted rules or a bad translation from the original German (wouldn’t be the first time that’s been a problem, either). The tournament referee is not happy with it, nor are the WBC regulars – it screws with the “book”, the known strategies, very badly. The ref intends to brace the game’s designer about this, and we may get a rules amendment disallowing the play next year.

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In the meantime, nobody could argue that the guys from Quebec weren’t within their rights to exploit this hack ruthlessly. And they did. Three of them used it to finish at the finals table. Matthieu, the one that dry-gulched me, took the gold.

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There was a lot of … I won’t say “angry”, but rather perturbed talk about this. I wasn’t the only person to feel somewhat blindsided and screwed (though we also admired their nerve and dedication). These guys were monomaniacs; unlike most top WBC gamers, who (like me) play up to a half-a-dozen games very well, the Quebeckers were laser focused on thus one game and studied it to the point where they found the hack that would break the standard book.

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Sigh…and that’s why no trophy for me this year. (Everyone in the final four would have gotten one.) Cathy and I will try again. Nobody would be surprised at either of us making the finals, but it could take a few years’ more practice.

diff --git a/20140812024442.blog b/20140812024442.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0b077e5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140812024442.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Review: Gods of War +

The Gods of War (Graham Brown & Spencer J. Andrews; Stealth Books) is one of the better arguments for the traditional system of publishing-house gatekeepers I’ve seen recently. It is not merely bad, it is a stinkeroo that trumpets its awfulness from page one.

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Straight up, a cabal of the shady super-rich in the year 2137 are told that the Earth’s ecology will collapse within about a year, and their maximum leader has a clever plan to evacuate them to…Mars. Which unspecified good guys have developed with a dream of turning it into (get this) an agricultural colony that can feed half the earth.

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Nothing that calls itself SF but leads off with that much ignorance of the reality of Mars and the energy economics of space transport can possibly land anywhere good. Especially not when the prose is clumsy, the characters strictly cartoons, and the authors seem bent on writing a political allegory for which “hamfisted” and “stupid” will be among the mildest negative adjectives one could apply.

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The only mercy in this book is that it is such an obvious waste of electrons that I was able to give up with a clear conscience on page twelve rather than forcing myself to slog through it all in hopes of finding some redeeming value. In brief: avoid.

diff --git a/20140812182459.blog b/20140812182459.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..84d4bef --- /dev/null +++ b/20140812182459.blog @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +Ignoring: complex cases +

I shipped point releases of cvs-fast-export and reposurgeon today. Both of them are intended to fix some issues around the translation of ignore patterns in CVS and Subversion repositories. Both releases illustrate, I think, a general point about software engineering: sometimes, it’s better to punt tricky edge cases to a human than to write code that is doomed to be messy, over-complex, and a defect attractor.

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For those of you new to version-control systems, an ignore pattern tells a VCS about things for the VCS to ignore when warning the user about untracked files. Such patterns often contain wildcards; for example, “*.o” is good for telling almost any VCS that it shouldn’t try to track Unix object files.

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In most version control systems ignore patterns are kept in a per-directory dotfile. Thus CVS has .cvsignore, git has .gitignore, etc. Ignore patterns in Subversion are not kept in such a dotfile; instead they are the values of svn:ignore properties attached to directories.

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Translating ignore patterns between version-control systems is messy that most conversion tools fluff it. My reposurgeon tool is an exception; it goes to considerable lengths to translate Subversion ignore properties into patterns in whatever kind of dotfile is required on the target system.

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Unfortunately, this feature collides with git-svn. People using that tool to interact with a Subversion repository often create .gitignore files in the Subversion repository which are independent of any native svn:ignore properties it might have.

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This becomes a problem when you try to convert the repo to git. In that case, .gitignore files created by git-svn users and .gitignore files generated from the native svn:ignore properties can step on each other in odd ways.

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I’ve had a bug report about this in my inbox for a couple of months. Submitter innocently asked me to write logic that would automatically do the right thing, merging .gitignore patterns with svn:ignore patterns and throwing out duplicates. And somewhere in the back of my brain, a robot voice called out “WARNING, WILL ROBINSON! DANGER! DANGER!”

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One of the senses you develop after writing complex software for a couple of decades is some ability to tell when a feature is going to be a defect attractor – a source of numerous hard-to-characterize bugs and a maintenance nightmare. That alarm rang very loudly on this one. But I was blocked for quite a while on the question of what, if any, simpler alternative to go for.

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I resolved my problem when I realized that this challenge – merging the properties – will be both (a) uncommon, and (b) the sort of thing computers find difficult but humans find easy. Typically it would only have to be dealt with once in the aftermath of a repository conversion, rather than frequently as the repo is in use.

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My conclusion was that the best behavior is to discard the hand-hacked SVN .gitignores, warning the user this is being done. It’s then up to the reposurgeon user to rescue any patterns that should be moved from the old hand-hacked .gitignores to the new generated ones.

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Because, very often, the hand-hacked .gitignores are there just to duplicate way the native svn:ignore properties are doing, the user often won’t have to do any work at all. The unusual cases in which that is false are the same unusual cases that automated merge code could too easily get wrong.

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The general point here is that engineering is tradeoffs. Sometimes chasing really recondite edge cases piles up a lot of technical debt for only tiny gains.

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The more subtle point is that if you don’t have any way at all to punt weird cases to a human, your software system may be brittle and overengineered – doing sporadic exceptional cases at a high life-cycle cost that a human could do cheaply and at a cumulatively lower defect risk.

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This bears emphasizing because hackers have such a horror of manularity, going to extreme lengths to automate instead. Sometimes, doing that gets the tradeoff wrong.

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Reposurgeon creates the option get this right because it was designed from the beginning as a tool to amplify human judgment rather than trying to automate it entirely out of the picture. All other repository-conversion tools are indeed brittle in exactly the opposite way by comparison.

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A similar issue arose with cvs-fast-export. I got a bug report that revealed a couple of issues in how it translates .cvsignore files to .gitignores in its output stream. Among other things, it writes a representation of CVS’s default ignore patterns into a synthetic .gitignore in the first commit. This is so users browsing the early history in the converted git repo won’t have untracked files jumping out out them that CVS would have kept quiet about.

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With the report, I got a request for a switch to suppress this behavior. The right answer, I replied, was not to add that switch and some complexity to cvs-fast-export. Rather, I reminded the requester that he could easily delete that synthetic .gitignore from the history using reposurgeon. Then I added the command to do that to the list of examples on the reposurgeon man page.

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The point, again, is that rushing in to code a feature would have been the wrong thing – programmer macho. Alternatively, we could view the cvs-fast-export/reposurgeon combination as an instance of the design pattern alternate hard and soft layers and draw a slightly different lesson; sometimes it’s better to manually exploit a soft layer than add an expensive feature to a hard one.

diff --git a/20140812195206.blog b/20140812195206.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c4c8f5f --- /dev/null +++ b/20140812195206.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Review: Unexpected Stories +

Unexpected Stories (Octavia Butler; Open Road Integrated Media) is a slight but revealing work; a novelette and a short story, one set in an alien ecology among photophore-skinned not-quite humans, another set in a near future barely distinguishable from her own time. The second piece (Childfinder) was originally intended for publication in Harlan Ellison’s never-completed New Wave anthology The Last Dangerous Visions; this is its first appearance.

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These stories do not show Butler at her best. They are fairly transparent allegories about race and revenge of the kind that causes writers to be much caressed by the people who like political message fiction more than science fiction. The first, A Necessary Being almost manages to rise above its allegorical content into being interesting SF; the second, Childfinder, is merely angry and trite.

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The only real attraction here is the worldbuilding in A Necessary Being; Butler explores the possible social consequences of humanoids having genetic lines that differ dramatically in physical capabilities, mindset, and ability to express varying colors in the photophores that cover their skins. But having laid out the premise and some consequences, Butler never really gets to any moment of conceptual breakthrough; the resolution of the plot could have gone down the same way in any human tribal society with charismatic leaders. The counterfactual/SF premise is effectively discarded a half-step before it should have paid off in some kind of transformative insight that changes the condition of the world.

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This illustrates one of the ways in which allegorical or political preoccupations can damage SF writers. A Necessary Being fails as SF because Butler was distracted by her allegorical agenda and forgot what she owed the reader. This is a particular shame because the story displays imagination and an ability to write.

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Childfinder is not merely flawed, it is an actively nasty revenge fantasy. There’s very little here other than a thin attempt at justification for a black woman psychically crippling white children who might otherwise have become telepaths. The framing story is rudimentary and poorly written. It would probably be better for Butler’s reputation if this one had remained in the trunk.

diff --git a/20140814172515.blog b/20140814172515.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ddc4f33 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140814172515.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +Demilitarize the police – and stop flinging false racism charges +

I join my voice to those of Rand Paul and other prominent libertarians who are reacting to the violence in Ferguson, Mo. by calling for the demilitarization of the U.S.’s police. Beyond question, the local civil police in the U.S. are too heavily armed and in many places have developed an adversarial attitude towards the civilians they serve, one that makes police overreactions and civil violence almost inevitable.

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But I publish this blog in part because I think it is my duty to speak taboo and unspeakable truths. And there’s another injustice being done here: the specific assumption, common among civil libertarians, that police overreactions are being driven by institutional racism. I believe this is dangerously untrue and actually impedes effective thinking about how to prevent future outrages.

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In the Kivila language of the Trobriand Islands there is a lovely word, “mokita”, which means “truth we all know but agree not to talk about”. I am about to speak some mokitas.

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Let’s begin with some statistics. Wikipedia has this to say about race and homicide rates:

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+According to the US Department of Justice, blacks accounted for 52.5% of homicide offenders from 1980 to 2008, with whites 45.3% and Native Americans and Asians 2.2%. The offending rate for blacks was almost 8 times higher than whites, and the victim rate 6 times higher. Most murders were intraracial, with 84% of white homicide victims murdered by whites, and 93% of black victims murdered by blacks. +

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Moving forward from 2008 or back from 1980 would change these figures very little; I cite Wikipedia because it’s handy, but I already knew them within a couple of percentage points and they’ve been very similar since before I was born in the 1950s. And we can take homicide figures as representative of racial disparities in wider violent crime rates, because – observably – they are.

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Now here are some more facts which taken together, change the implications of that 52.5% a lot. First: in any subpopulation, whether chosen by race or SES or any other criterion, almost all violent crime (up to statistical noise) is perpetrated by males between the ages of 15 and 25.

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Second: The black population of the U.S., as of the 2010 census, is 12.61% of the total.

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Third: Within that population, males 15-25 are approximately 8% of it (add up the 15-19 and 20-24 boxes in table 2 and divide by two to account for the fact that half of that percentage is female). Multiplying these, the percentage of black males 15-24 in the general population is about 1%. If you add “mixed”, which is reasonable in order to correspond to a policeman’s category of “nonwhite”, it goes to about 2%.

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That 2% is responsible for almost all of 52% of U.S. homicides. Or, to put it differently, by these figures a young black or “mixed” male is roughly 26 times more likely to be a homicidal threat than a random person outside that category – older or younger blacks, whites, hispanics, females, whatever. If the young male is unambiguously black that figure goes up, about doubling.

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26 times more likely. That’s a lot. It means that even given very forgiving assumptions about differential rates of conviction and other factors we probably still have a difference in propensity to homicide (and other violent crimes for which its rates are an index, including rape, armed robbery, and hot burglary) of around 20:1. That’s being very generous, assuming that cumulative errors have thrown my calculations are off by up to a factor of 6 in the direction unfavorable to my argument.

+

Now suppose you’re a cop. Your job rubs your nose in the reality behind crime statistics. What you’re going to see on the streets every day is that random black male youths are roughly 20 times more likely to be dangerous to you – and to other civilians – than anyone who isn’t a random black male youth.

+

Any cop who treated members of a group with a factor 20 greater threat level than population baseline “equally” would be crazy. He wouldn’t be doing his job; he’d be jeopardizing the civil peace by inaction.

+

Yeah, my all means let’s demilitarize the police. But let’s also stop screaming “racism” when, by the numbers, the bad shit that goes down with black male youths reflects a cop’s rational fear of that particular demographic – and not racism against blacks in general. Often the cops in these incidents are themselves black, a fact that media accounts tend to suppress.

+

What we can actually do about the implied problem is a larger question. (Decriminalizing drugs would be a good start.) But it’s one we can’t even begin to address rationally without seeing past the accusation of racism.

diff --git a/20140815054757.blog b/20140815054757.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..57dc109 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140815054757.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Alien cat is alien +

One of the reasons I like cats is because I find it enjoyable to try to model their thought processes by observing their behavior. They’re like furry aliens, just enough like us that a limited degree of communication (mostly emotional) is possible.

+

Just now I’m contemplating a recent change in the behavior of our new cat, Zola. Recent as in the last couple of days. Some kind of switch has flipped.

+

+

When last I reported on Zola, about six weeks ago, he was – very gradually – losing his initial reserve around us; behavior becoming more like Sugar’s was. Not all that surprising in retrospect – those Maine Coon genes are telling.

+

In the last couple of days Zola has become markedly more affectionate and attention-seeking. He’s even taken to sleeping part of the night on the waterbed coverlet, which was something Sugar did that we liked (before a few days ago, he’d occasionally jump up but then skedaddle after less than a minute). We find it very restful to have a cat curled up nearby when we’re dozing off or wake up in the middle of the night.

+

I think I understand the long-term, gradual increase in affectionate behavior; Zola has been testing us and learning that we’re safe. I wish I understood the sudden jump. It’s as though we’ve moved to a different category in his representation of the world. It doesn’t feel like he’s testing us anymore; now he just cheerfully assumes that we love him and loves us right back. He’s happier and more relaxed – he’s almost stopped disappearing during the day (but is still more nocturnal than Sugar was).

+

The reason I’m writing about this is to invite speculation – or, better yet, reports from ethological studies – on what social classifications cats have other than “stranger”, “packmate”, and “kin”. Also, whether there’s any evidence for domestic cats putting humans in a close-kin category, or something else distinguishable from and more trusted than “packmate”.

+

Now, if we can just teach him not to sprawl where he might get stepped on. Without actually stepping on him *wince*…

diff --git a/20140818205436.blog b/20140818205436.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..45e19a5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140818205436.blog @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +This picture tells a shooting story +

Before you read any further, go look at the drawing accompanying the New Tork Times article on the autopsy of Michael Brown,

+

There’s a story in that picture. To read it, you have to be familiar with pistol shooting and the kind of pistol self-defense training that cops and amateur sheepdogs like me engage in.

+

In the remainder of this post I’m going to walk you through the process of extracting the story from the picture.

+

+

In case the link I’m using disappears behind a paywall, here are the most salient features of what I see:

+
    +
  • The entry and exit wounds form a nearly linear arc from the crown of the head to the right hand.
    • +
  • There are no entry or exit wounds on the back.
    • +
  • On the head, there are two entry wounds at the crown and right eye, and a wound in the jaw which could be entry or exit (it’s unclear in the drawing).
    • +
  • There is one wound at the base of the neck on the right hand side, drawn to suggest an exit wound.
    • +
  • There is one wound in the upper right pectoral muscle, drawn like an exit.
    • +
  • There are three wounds on the right arm. The topmost one is very near the pectoral wound and drawn like an entry. The torn shape of the middle one, on the upper arm, suggests an exit wound (later update: turns out it’s a graze, and the only one that could have been inflicted from the rear). The bottom one, on the forearm, is clearly drawn as an entry wound.
    • +
  • The wound on the hand is drawn to suggest that the bullet entered there at a shallow angle (more tearing would be shown if it were an exit wound) +
    • +
+

The first thing that jumps out at me is that this was not wild, amateurish shooting. Had it been, the distribution of bullet holes would have resembled an irregular blob. The near-linear arrangement suggests a relatively steady hand and a shooter who wasn’t panicked.

+

It also strongly hints that Brown was not moving sideways when the shots were fired. He was either stationary or moving directly forward or away from Officer Wilson.

+

We know Wilson is a cop and we know how cops are trained – to aim for the target’s center of mass (COM). But that’s not where the shots landed. What I see here looks like good aim at the COM compromised by a mild case of trigger jerk from a right-handed shooter, pulling the muzzle slightly left from the point of aim.

+

This is probably the single most common shooting fault there is. I do it myself when I’ve been out of practice; my first target, at 30 feet, is likely to feature a vertical line of holes a few inches left of the X-ring. It’s a very easy mistake to make under fatigue or stress.

+

The location and angle of the head wounds, and the absence of wounds on the rear surfaces of the body, is also telling. For starters, it tells us that Brown was not shot in the back as some accounts have claimed.

+

I think the only posture that could produce this wound pattern is for Brown to have been leaning well forward when he was first shot, with his right arm stretched forward (the pair of wounds around the right armpit and the shallow-entry wound in the hand are suggestive of the latter).

+

I originally thought the head wounds indicated that Officer Wilson was shooting Mozambique drill – double tap to the body followed by a head shot. This is how police trainers teach you to take out a charging assailant who might be high out of his mind. I drill this technique myself, as do most serious self-defense shooters.

+

Now I think it’s equally possible that Brown began to collapse forward when he took the first bullet or two and his head fell into the path of Wilson’s following shots.

+

One possibility we can rule out is that Brown was shot while prone on the ground after collapsing. There are no wounds at the right places and angles for this. If he had been shot prone at close range, the angle of the crown wound would be impossible; if he had been shot while prone at some distance the crown wound might just barely possible but we’d also see shallow-angle wounds on the back.

+

Everything I see here is consistent with the report from an unnamed friend of officer Wilson that Brown charged Wilson and Wilson shot him at very close range, probably while Brown was grabbing for Wilson or the pistol with his right hand.

+

UPDATE: I failed to make clear that the reason I’m sure Brown was moving is the extreme torso angle suggested by the lack of exit wounds on the back. A human trying to do that standing still would overbalance and fall, which is why I think he was running or lunging when he took the bullets.

+

UPDATE2: We now have have a bit more information on the report.

+

“Dr. Baden and I concluded that he was shot at least six times. We’ve got one to the very top of the head, the apex. We’ve got one that entered just above the right eyebrow. We’ve got one that entered the top part of the right arm. We’ve got a graze wound, a superficial graze wound, to the middle part of the right arm. We’ve got a wound that entered the medial aspect of the right arm, and we’ve got a deep graze wound that produced a laceration to the palm of the right hand,” Parcells said while pointing out the location of the wounds on a diagram.

+

Baden and Parcells concur that the head shots came last, and that the crown wound killed Brown. The middle wound on the arm was not, as I thought from the drawing, an exit; it was a graze. Their description of the hand wound as a graze causing a laceration confirms my reading that the bullet hit the hand at a very low angle – thus, Brown’s hands cannot have been up when he took the shot.

diff --git a/20140822134820.blog b/20140822134820.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a7a7e57 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140822134820.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Review: Once Dead +

Once Dead (Richard Phillips; Amazon Publishing) is a passable airport thriller with some SF elements.

+

Jack Gregory should have died in that alley in Calcutta. Assigned by the CIA to kill the renegade reponsible for his brother’s death, he was nearly succeeding – until local knifemen take a hand. Bleeding, stabbed and near death, he is offered a choice: die, or become host to Ananchu – an extradimensional being who has ridden the limbic systems of history’s greatest slayers.

+

+

It’s a grim bargain. Ananchu will give him certain abilities, notably the ability to sense life at a distance and read the intentions of his enemies. But the cost is a near-uncontrollable addiction to danger and death. Gregory will literally be in constant struggle with an inner demon – and when the human who dragged his body from the alley is found insane, mumbling of the return of Jack the Ripper, a dark legend is reborn.

+

Airport-thriller action ensues as Gregory, believed dead by the CIA, goes freelance but is drawn into opposing a plot to cripple the U.S. with an EMP attack. There are lots of bullets, big explosions, a heavy from the Russian Mafia, treachery from rogues inside the CIA, torture scenes, exotic international locations, some sex, weapon porn, and a climactic Special-Ops-style assault on Baikonur. There’s not much surprising here, and the SF elements tend to recede into the background as the plot develops. There are clear indication that the author intends a series.

+

It’s not brilliant or terribly original, but it’s competently done. The author is a former Army Ranger; the gunplay, hand-to-hand fighting, and combat ops are written as by someone who has seen how it’s done right, if not done it himself. Read it on an airplane.

diff --git a/20140825182039.blog b/20140825182039.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fdc26a6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140825182039.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Spam alert +

Yes, I’m aware of the spam on the blog front page. The management does not hawk dubious drugs.

+

Daniel Franke and I just did an audit and re-secure of the blog last night, so this is a new attack. Looks like a different vector; previously the spam was edited into the posts and invisible, this time it’s only in the front-page display and visible.

+

It’s a fresh instance of WordPress verified against pristine sources less than 24 hours ago, all permissions checked. Accordingly, this may be a zero-day attack.

+

Daniel and I will tackle it later tonight after his dinner and my kung-fu class. I’ll update this post with news.

+

UPDATE: The initial spam has been removed. We don’t know where the hole is, though, so more may appear.

+

UPDATE2: It’s now about 6 hours later and spam has not reappeared.  I changed my blog password for a stronger one, so one theory is that the bad guys were running a really good dictionary cracker.

diff --git a/20140826200045.blog b/20140826200045.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0e98490 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140826200045.blog @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +Master Foo and the Hardware Designer +

The newest addition to Rootless Root:

+

+

On one occasion, as Master Foo was traveling to a conference with a few of his senior disciples, he was accosted by a hardware designer.

+

The hardware designer said: “It is rumored that you are a great programmer. How many lines of code do you write per year?”

+

Master Foo replied with a question: “How many square inches of silicon  do you lay out per year?”

+

“Why…we hardware designers never measure our work in that way,” the man said.

+

“And why not?” Master Foo inquired.

+

“If we did so,” the hardware designer replied, “we would be tempted to design chips so large that they cannot be fabricated – and, if they were fabricated, their overwhelming complexity would make it be impossible to generate proper test vectors for them.”

+

Master Foo smiled, and bowed to the hardware designer.

+

In that moment, the hardware designer achieved enlightenment.

diff --git a/20140827045841.blog b/20140827045841.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9a0863e --- /dev/null +++ b/20140827045841.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +Phase-of-moon-dependent bugs suck +

I just had a rather hair-raising experience with a phase-of-moon-dependent bug.

+

I released GPSD 3.11 this last Saturday (three days ago) to meet a deadline for a Debian freeze. Code tested ninety-six different ways, run through four different static analyzers, the whole works. Because it was a hurried release I deliberately deferred a bunch of cleanups and feature additions in my queue. Got it out on time and it’s pretty much all good – we’ve since turned up two minor build failures in two unusual feature-switch cases, and one problem with the NTP interface code that won’t affect reasonable hardware.

+

I’ve been having an extremely productive time since chewing through all the stuff I had deferred. New features for gpsmon, improvements for GPSes watching GLONASS birds, a nice space optimization for embedded systems, some code to prevent certain false-match cases in structured AIS Type 6 and Type 8 messages, merging some Android port tweaks, a righteous featurectomy or two. Good clean fun – and of course I was running my regression tests frequently and noting when I’d done so in my change comments.

+

Everything was going swimmingly until about two hours ago. Then, as I was verifying a perfectly innocent-appearing tweak to the SiRF-binary driver, the regression tests went horribly, horribly wrong. Not just the SiRF binary testloads, all of them.

+

+

My friends, do you know what it looks like when the glibc detects a buffer overflow at runtime? Pages and pages of hex garble, utterly incomprehensible and a big flare-lit clue that something bad done happened.

+

“Yoicks!” I muttered, and backed out the latest change. Ran “scons check” again. Kaboom! Same garble. Wait – I’d run regressions successfully on that revision just a few minutes previously, or so I thought.

+

Don’t panic. Back up to the last revision were the change comment includes the reassuring line “All regression tests passed.” Rebuild. “scons check”. Aaaand…kaboom!

+

Oh shit oh dear. Now I have real trouble. That buffer overflow has apparently been lurking in ambush for some time, with regression tests passing despite it because the phase of the moon was wrong or something.

+

The first thing you do in this situation is try to bound the damage and hope it didn’t ship in the last release. I dropped back to the release 3.11 revision, rebuilt and tested. No kaboom. Phew!

+

These are the times when git bisect is your friend. Five test runs later I found the killer commit – a place where I had tried recovering from bad file descriptor errors in the daemon’s main select call (which can happen if an attached GPS dies under pessimal circumstances) and garbage-collecting the storage for the lost devices.

+

Once I had the right commit it was not hard to zero in on the code that triggered the problem. By inspection, the problem had to be in a particular 6-line loop that was the meat of the commit. I checked out the head version and experimentally conditioned out parts of it until I had the kaboom isolated to one line.

+

It was a subtle – and entirely typical – sort of systems-programming bug. The garbage-collection code iterated over the array of attached devices conditionally freeing them. What I forgot when I coded this was that that sort of operation is only safe on device-array slots that are currently allocated and thus contain live data. The test operation on a dead slot – an FD_ISSET() – was the kaboomer.

+

The bug was random because the pattern of stale data in the dead slots was not predictable. It had to be just right for the kaboom to happen. The kaboom didn’t happen for nearly three days, during which I am certain I ran the regression tests well over 20 times a day. (Wise programmers pay attention to making their test suites fast, so they can be run often without interrupting concentration.)

+

It cannot be said too often: version control is your friend. Fast version control is damn near your best friend, with the possible exception of a fast and complete test suite. Without these things, fixing this one could have ballooned from 45 minutes of oh-shit-oh-dear to a week – possibly more – of ulcer-generating agony.

+

Version control is maybe old news, but lots of developers still don’t invest as much effort on their test suites as they should. I’m here to confirm that it makes programming a hell of a lot less hassle when you build your tests in parallel with your code, do the work to make them cover well and run fast, then run them often. GPSD has about 100 tests; they run in just under 2 minutes, and I run them at least three or four times an hour.

+

This puts out little fires before they become big ones. It means I get to spend less time debugging and more time doing fun stuff like architecture and features. The time I spent on them has been multiply repaid. Go and do thou likewise.

diff --git a/20140828010802.blog b/20140828010802.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4c5ddd9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140828010802.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Mysterious cat is mysterious +

Our new cat Zola, it appears, has a mysterious past. The computer that knows about the ID chip embedded under his skin thinks he’s a dog.

+

There’s more to the story. And it makes us think we may have misread Zola’s initial behavior. I’m torn between wishing he could tell us what he’d been through, and maybe being thankful that he can’t. Because if he could, I suspect I might experience an urge to go punch someone’s lights out that would be bad for my karma.

+

+

On Zola’s first vet visit, one of the techs did a routine check and discovered that Zola had had an ID chip implanted under his skin. This confirmed our suspicion that he’d been raised by humans rather than being feral or semi-feral. Carol, our contact at PALS (the rescue network we got Zola from) put some more effort into trying to trace his background.

+

We already knew that PALS rescued Zola from an ASPCA shelter in Cumberland County, New Jersey, just before he would have been euthanized. Further inquiry disclosed that (a) he’d been dumped at the shelter by a human, and (b) he was, in Carol’s words, “alarmingly skinny” – they had to feed him up to a normal weight.

+

The PALS people didn’t know he was chipped. When we queried Home Again, the chip-tracking outfit, the record for the chip turned out to record the carrier as a dog. The staffer my wife Cathy spoke with at Home Again thought that was distinctly odd. This is not, apparently, a common sort of confusion.

+

My wife subsequently asked Home Again to contact the person or family who had Zola chipped and request that the record be altered to point to us. (This is a routine procedure for them when an animal changes owners.)

+

We got a reply informing us that permission for the transfer was refused.

+

These facts indicate to us that somewhere out there, there is someone who (a) got Zola as a kitten, (b) apparently failed to feed him properly, (c) dumped him at a shelter, and now (d) won’t allow the chip record to be changed to point to his new home.

+

This does not add up to a happy picture of Zola’s kittenhood. It is causing us to reconsider how we evaluated his behavior when we first met him. We thought he was placid and dignified – friendly but a little reserved.

+

Now we wonder – because he isn’t “placid” any more. He scampers around in high spirits. He’s very affectionate, even a bit needy sometimes. (He’s started to lick our hands occasionally during play.) Did we misunderstand? Was his reserve a learned fear of mistreatment? We don’t know for sure, but it has become to seem uncomfortably plausible.

+

There’s never any good reason for mistreating a cat, but it seems like an especially nasty possibility when the cat is as sweet-natured and human-friendly as Zola is. He’s not quite the extraordinarily loving creature Sugar was, but his Coon genes are telling. He thrives on affection and returns it more generously every week.

+

I don’t know if we’ll ever find out anything more. Nobody at PALs or Home Again or our vet has a plausible theory about why Zola is carrying an ID chip registered to a dog, nor why his former owners owners won’t OK a transfer.

+

We’re just glad he’s here.

diff --git a/20140902214717.blog b/20140902214717.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..03b0cca --- /dev/null +++ b/20140902214717.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Adverse selection and old technology +

Yesterday I shipped cvs-fast-export 1.15, with a significant performance improvement produced by replacing a naive O(n**3) sort with a properly tuned O(n log n) version.

+

In ensuing discussion on G+, one of my followers there asked if I thought this was likely to produce a real performance improvement, as in small inputs the constant setup time of a cleverly tuned algorithm often dominates the nominal savings.

+

This is one of those cases where an intelligent question elicits knowledge you didn’t know you had. I discovered that I do believe strongly that cvs-fast-export’s workload is dominated by large repositories. The reason is a kind of adverse selection phenomenon that I think is very general to old technologies with high exit costs.

+

The rest of this blog post will use CVS as an example of the phenomenon, and may thus be of interest even to people who don’t specifically care about high version control systems.

+

+

Cast your mind back to the point at which CVS was definitely superseded by better VCS designs. It doesn’t matter for this discussion exactly when that point was, but you can place it somewhere between 2000 and 2004 based on when you think Subversion went from a beta program to a production tool.

+

At that point there were lots of CVS repositories around, greatly varying in size and complexity. Some were small and simple, some large and ugly. By “ugly” I mean full of Things That Should Not Be – tags not corresponding to coherent changesets, partially merged import branches, deleted files for which the masters recording older versions had been “cleaned up”, and various other artifacts that would later cause severe headaches for anyone trying to convert the repositories to a modern VCS.

+

In general, size and ugliness correlated well with project age. There are exceptions, however. When I converted the groff repository from CVS to git I was braced for an ordeal; groff is quite an old project. But the maintainer and his devs had been, it turned out very careful and disciplined and comitted none of the sloppinesses that commonly lead to nasty artifacts.

+

So, at the point that people started to look seriously at moving off CVS, there was a large range of CVS repo sizes out there, with difficulty and fidelity of up-conversion roughly correlated to size and age.

+

The result was that small projects (and well-disciplined larger projects resembling groff) converted out early. The surviving population of CVS repositories became, on average, larger and gnarlier. After ten years of adverse selection, the CVS repositories we now have left in the wild tend to be the very largest and grottiest kind, usually associated with projects of venerable age.

+

GNUPLOT and various BSD Unixes stand out as examples. We have now, I think, reached the point where the remaining CVS conversions are in general huge, nasty projects that will require heroic effort with even carefully tuned and optimized tools. This is not a regime in which the constant startup cost of an optimized sort is going to dominate.

+

At the limit, there may be some repositories that never get converted because the concentrated pain associated with doing that overwhelms any time-discounted estimate of the costs of using obsolescent tools – or even the best tools may not be good enough to handle their sheer bulk. Emacs was almost there. There are hints that some of the BSD Unix repositories may be there already – I know of failed attempts, and tried to assist one such failure.

+

I think you can see this kind of adverse selection effect in survivals of a lot of obsolete technology. Naval architecture is one non-computing field where it’s particularly obvious. Surviving obsolescent ships tend to be large and ugly rather than small and ugly, because the capital requirement to replace the big ones is harder to swallow.

+

Has anyone coined a name for this phenomenon? Maybe we ought to.

diff --git a/20140903013309.blog b/20140903013309.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..692eb80 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140903013309.blog @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Reality is viciously sexist +

Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female insists an article at tor.com. It’s complete bullshit.

+

What you find when you read the linked article is an obvious, though as it turns out a superficial problem. The linked research doesn’t say what the article claims. What it establishes is that a hair less than half of Viking migrants were female, which is no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention. The leap from that to “half the warriors were female” is unjustified and quite large.

+

There’s a deeper problem the article is trying to ignore or gaslight out of existence: reality is, at least where pre-gunpowder weapons are involved, viciously sexist.

+

+

It happens that I know a whole lot from direct experience about fighting and training with contact weapons – knives, swords, and polearms in particular. I do this for fun, and I do it in training environments that include women among the fighters.

+

I also know a good deal about Viking archeology – and my wife, an expert on Viking and late Iron Age costume who corresponds on equal terms with specialist historians, may know more than I do. (Persons new to the blog might wish to read my review of William Short’s Viking Weapons and Combat.) We’ve both read saga literature. We both have more than a passing acquaintance with the archeological and other evidence from other cultures historically reported to field women in combat, such as the Scythians, and have discussed it in depth.

+

And I’m calling bullshit. Males have, on average, about a 150% advantage in upper-body strength over females. It takes an exceptionally strong woman to match the ability of even the average man to move a contact weapon with power and speed and precise control. At equivalent levels of training, with the weight of real weapons rather than boffers, that strength advantage will almost always tell.

+

Supporting this, there is only very scant archeological evidence for female warriors (burials with weapons). There is almost no such evidence from Viking cultures, and what little we have is disputed; the Scythians and earlier Germanics from the Migration period have substantially more burials that might have been warrior women. Tellingly, they are almost always archers.

+

I’m excluding personal daggers for self-defense here and speaking of the battlefield contact weapons that go with the shieldmaidens of myth and legend. I also acknowledge that a very few exceptionally able women can fight on equal terms with men. My circle of friends contains several such exceptional women; alas, this tells us nothing about woman as a class but much about how I select my friends.

+

But it is a very few. And if a pre-industrial culture has chosen to train more than a tiny fraction of its women as shieldmaidens, it would have lost out to a culture that protected and used their reproductive capacity to birth more male warriors. Brynhilde may be a sexy idea, but she’s a bioenergetic gamble that is near certain to be a net waste.

+

Firearms changes all this, of course – some of the physiological differences that make them inferior with contact weapons are actual advantages at shooting (again I speak from experience, as I teach women to shoot). So much so that anyone who wants to suppress personal firearams is objectively anti-female and automatically oppressive of women.

diff --git a/20140907110734.blog b/20140907110734.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..862c328 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140907110734.blog @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +Request for code review: cvs-fast-export +

Sometimes reading code is really difficult, even when it’s good code. I have a challenge for all you hackers out there…

+

+

cvs-fast-export translates CVS repositories into a git-fast-export stream. It does a remarkably good job, considering that (a) the problem is hard and grotty, with weird edge cases, and (b) the codebase is small and written in C, which is not the optimal language for this sort of thing.

+

It does a remarkably good job because Keith Packard wrote most of it, and Keith is a brilliant systems hacker (he codesigned X and wrote large parts of it). I wrote most of the parts Keith didn’t, and while I like to think my contribution is solid it doesn’t approach his in algorithmic density.

+

Algorithmic density has a downside. There are significant parts of Keith’s code I don’t understand. Sadly, Keith no longer understands them either. This is a problem, because there are a bunch of individually small issues which (I think) add up to: the core code needs work. Right now, neither I nor anyone else has the knowledge required to do that work.

+

I’ve just spent most of a week trying to acquire and document that knowledge. The result is a file called “hacking.asc” in the cvs-fast-export repository. It documents what I’ve been able to figure out about the code. It also lists unanswered questions. But it is incomplete.

+

It won’t be complete until someone can read it and know how to intelligently modify the heart of the program – a function called rev_list_merge() that does the hard part of merging cliques of CVS per-file commits into a changeset DAG.

+

The good news is that I’ve managed to figure out and document almost everything else. A week ago, the code for analyzing CVS masters into in-core data objects was trackless jungle. Now, pretty much any reasonably competent C systems programmer could read hacking.txt and the comments and grasp what’s going on.

+

More remains to be done, though, and I’ve hit a wall. The problem needs a fresh perspective, ideally more than one. Accordingly, I’m requesting help. If you want a real challenge in comprehending C code written by a master programmer – a work of genius, seriously – dive in.

+

https://gitorious.org/cvs-fast-export/

+

There’s the repository link. Get the code; it’s not huge, only 10KLOC, but it’s fiendishly clever. Read it. See what you can figure out that isn’t already documented. Discuss it with me. I guarantee you’ll find it an impressive learning experience – I have, and I’ve been writing C for 30 years.

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This challenge is recommended for intermediate to advanced C systems programmers, especially those with an interest in the technicalia of version-control systems.

diff --git a/20140908000209.blog b/20140908000209.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2be8e89 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140908000209.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Review: The Abyss Beyond Dreams +

The Abyss Beyond Dreams (Peter F. Hamilton, Random House/Del Rey) is a sequel set in the author’s Commonwealth universe, which earlier included one duology (Pandora’s Star, Judas Unchained) and a trilogy (The Dreaming Void, The The Temporal Void, The Evolutionary Void). It brings back one of the major characters (the scientist/leader Nigel Sheldon) on a mission to discover the true nature of the Void at the heart of the Galaxy.

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The Void is a pocket universe which threatens to enter an expansion phase that would destroy everything. It is a gigantic artifact of some kind, but neither its builders nor purpose are known. Castaway cultures of humans live inside it, gifted with psionic powers in life and harvested by the enigmatic Skylords in death. And Nigel Sheldon wants to know why.

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This is space opera and planetary romance pulled off with almost Hamilton’s usual flair. I say “almost” because the opening sequence, though action-packed, comes off as curiously listless. Nigel Sheldon’s appearance rescues the show, and we are shortly afterwards pitched into an entertaining tale of courage and revolution on a Void world. But things are not as they seem, and the revolutionaries are being manipulated for purposes they cannot guess…

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The strongest parts of this book show off Hamilton’s worldbuilding imagination and knack for the telling detail. Yes, we get some insight into what the Void actually is, and an astute reader can guess more. But the final reveal will await the second book of this duology.

diff --git a/20140910050204.blog b/20140910050204.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..94146fa --- /dev/null +++ b/20140910050204.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Review: A Call to Duty +

A Call To Duty (David Weber, Timothy Zahn; Baen Books) is a passable extension of Baen Book’s tent-pole Honorverse franchise. Though billed as by David Weber, it resembled almost all of Baen’s double-billed “collaborations” in that most of the actual writing was clearly done by the guy on the second line, with the first line there as a marketing hook.

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Zahn has a bit of fun subverting at least one major trope of the subgenre; Travis Long is definitely not the kind of personality one expects as a protagonist. Otherwise all the usual ingredients are present in much the expected combinations. Teenager longing for structure in his life joins the Navy, goes to boot camp, struggles in his first assignment, has something special to contribute when the shit hits the fan. Also, space pirates!

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Baen knows its business; there may not be much very original about this, but Honorverse fans will enjoy this book well enough. And for all its cliched quality, it’s more engaging that Zahn’s rather sour last outing, Soulminder, which I previously reviewed.

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The knack for careful worldbuilding within a franchise’s canonical constraints that Zahn exhibited in his Star Wars tie-ins is deployed here, where details of the architecture of Honorverse warships become significant plot elements. Also we get a look at Manticore in its very early years, with some characters making the decisions that will grow it into the powerful star kingdom of Honor Harrington’s lifetime.

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For these reason, if no others, Honorverse completists will want to read this one too.

diff --git a/20140911051132.blog b/20140911051132.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3d4ab17 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140911051132.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Review: Collision of Empires +

Collision of Empires (Prit Buttar; Osprey Publishing) is a clear and accessible history that attempts to address a common lack in accounts of the Great War that began a century ago this year: they tend to be centered on the Western Front and the staggering meat-grinder that static trench warfare became as outmoded tactics collided with the reality of machine guns and indirect-fire artillery.

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Concentration on the Western Front is understandable in the U.S. and England; the successor states of the Western Front’s victors have maintained good records, and nationals of the English-speaking countries were directly involved there. But in many ways the Eastern Front story is more interesting, especially in the first year that Buttar chooses to cover – less static, and with a sometimes bewilderingly varied cast. And, arguably, larger consequences. The war in the east eventually destroyed three empires and put Lenin’s Communists in power in Russia.

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Prit Buttar does a really admirable job of illuminating the thinking of the German, Austrian, and Russian leadership in the run-up to the war – not just at the diplomatic level but in the ways that their militaries were struggling to come to grips with the implications of new technology. The extensive discussion of internecine disputes over military doctrine in the three officer corps involved is better than anything similar I’ve seen elsewhere.

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Alas, the author’s gift for lucid exposition falters a bit when it comes to describing actual battles. Ted Raicer did a better job of this in 2010’s Crowns In The Gutter, supported by a lot of rather fine-grained movement maps. Without these, Buttar’s narrative tends to bog down in a confusing mess of similar unit designations and vaguely comic-operatic Russo-German names.

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Still, the effort to follow it is worthwhile. Buttar is very clear on the ways that flawed leadership, confused objectives and wishful thinking on all sides engendered a war in which there could be no clear-cut victory short of the utter exhaustion and collapse of one of the alliances.

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On the Eastern Front, as on the Western, soldiers fought with remarkable courage for generals and politicians who – even on the victorious side – seriously failed them.

diff --git a/20140911173417.blog b/20140911173417.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0201e7e --- /dev/null +++ b/20140911173417.blog @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +Review: Infinite Science Fiction One +

Infinite Science Fiction One (edited by Dany G. Zuwen and Joanna Jacksonl Infinite Acacia) starts out rather oddly, with Zuwen’s introducton in which, though he says he’s not religious, he connects his love of SF with having read the Bible as a child. The leap from faith narratives to a literature that celebrates rational knowability seems jarring and a bit implausible.

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That said, the selection of stories here is not bad. Higher-profile editors have done worse, sometimes in anthologies I’ve reviewed.

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Janka Hobbs’s Real is a dark, affecting little tale of a future in which people who don’t want the mess and bother of real children buy robotic child surrogates, and what happens when a grifter invents a novel scam.

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Tim Majors’s By The Numbers is a less successful exploration of the idea of the quantified self – a failure, really, because it contains an impossible oracle-machine in what is clearly intended to be an SF story.

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Elizabeth Bannon’s Tin Soul is a sort of counterpoint to Real in which a man’s anti-robot prejudices destroy his ability to relate to his prosthetically-equipped son.

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P. Anthony Ramanauskas’s Six Minutes is a prison-break story told from the point of view of a monster, an immortal mind predator who steals the bodies of humans to maintain existence. It’s well written, but diminished by the author’s failure to actually end it and dangling references to a larger setting that we are never shown. Possibly a section from a larger work in progress?

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John Walters’s Matchmaker works a familiar theme – the time traveler at a crisis, forbidden to interfere or form attachments – unfortunately, to no other effect than an emotional tone painting. Competent writing does not save it from becoming maudlin and trivial.

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Nick Holburn’s The Wedding is a creepy tale of a wedding disrupted by an undead spouse. Not bad on its own terms, but I question what it’s doing in an SF anthology.

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Jay Wilburn’s Slow is a gripping tale of an astronaut fighting off being consumed by a symbiote that has at least temporarily saved his life. Definitely SF; not for the squeamish.

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Rebecca Ann Jordan’s Gospel Of is strange and gripping. An exile with a bomb strapped to her chest, a future spin on the sacrificed year-king, and a satisfying twist in the ending.

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Dan Devine’s The Silent Dead is old-school in the best way – could have been an Astounding story in the 1950s. The mass suicide of a planetary colony has horrifying implications the reader may guess before the ending…

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Matthew S. Dent’s Nothing Besides Remains carries forward another old-school tradition – a robot come to sentience yearning for its lost makers. No great surprises here, but a good exploration of the theme.

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William Ledbetter’s The Night With Stars is very clever, a sort of anthropological reply to Larry Niven’s classic The Magic Goes Away. What if Stone-Age humans relied on elrctromagnetic features of their environment – and then, due to a shift in the geomagnetic field, lost them? Well done.

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Doug Tidwell’s Butterflies is, alas, a textbook example of what not to do in an SF story. At best it’s a trivial finger exercise about an astronaut going mad. There’s no reveal anywhere, and it contradicts the actual facts of history without explanation; no astronaut did this during Kennedy’s term.

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Michaele Jordan’s Message of War is a well-executed tale of weapons that can wipe a people from history, and how they might be used. Subtly horrifying even if we are supposed to think of the wielders as the good guys.

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Liam Nicolas Pezzano’s Rolling By in the Moonlight starts well, but turns out to be all imagery with no point. The author has an English degree; that figures, this piece smells of literary status envy, a disease the anthology is otherwise largely and blessedly free of.

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J.B. Rockwell’s Midnight also starts well and ends badly. An AI on a terminally damaged warship struggling to get its cryopreserved crew launched to somewhere they might live again, that’s a good premise. Too bad it’s wasted on empty sentimentality about cute robots.

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This anthology is only about 50% good, but the good stuff is quite original and the less good is mostly just defective SF rather than being anti-SF infected with literary status envy. On balance, better value than some higher-profile anthologies with more pretensions.

diff --git a/20140919092244.blog b/20140919092244.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..225e2bf --- /dev/null +++ b/20140919092244.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +A Closed Future for Mathematics? +

In a blog post on Computational Knowledge and the Future of Pure Mathematics Stephen Wolfram lays out a vision that is in many ways exciting and challenging. What if all of mathematics could be expressed in a common formal notation, stored in computers so it is searchable and amenable to computer-assisted discovery and proof of new theorems?

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As a former mathematician who is now a programmer, it is I think inevitable that I have had similar dreams for a very long time; anyone with that common background would imagine broadly the same things. Like Dr. Wolfram, I have thought carefully not merely about the knowledge representation and UI issues in such a project, but also the difficulties in staffing and funding it. So it was with a feeling more of recognition than anything else that I received much of the essay.

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To his great credit, Dr. Wolfram has done much – more than anyone else – to bring this vision towards reality. Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha are concrete steps towards it, and far from trivial ones. They show, I think, that the vision is possible and could be achieved with relatively modest funding – less than (say) the budget of a typical summer-blockbuster movie.

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But there is one question that looms unanswered in Dr. Wolfram’s call to action. Let us suppose that we think we have all of the world’s mathematics formalized in a huge database of linked theorems and proof sequences, diligently being crawled by search agents and inference engines. In tribute to Wolfram Alpha, let us call this system “Omega”. How, and why, would we trust Omega?

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There are at least three levels of possible error in such a system. One would be human error in entering mathematics into it (a true theorem is entered incorrectly). Another would be errors in human mathematics (a false theorem is entered correctly). A third would be errors in the search and inference engines used to trawl the database and generate new proofs to be added to it.

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Errors of the first two kinds would eventually be discovered by using inference engines to consistency-check the entire database (unless the assertions in it separate into disconnected cliques, which seems unlikely). It was already clear to me thirty years ago when I first started thinking seriously about this problem that sanity-checking would have to be run as a continuing background process responding to every new mathematical assertion entered: I am sure this requirement has not escaped Dr. Wolfram.

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The possible of errors of the third kind – bugs in the inference engine(s) – is more troubling. Such bugs could mask errors of the first two kinds, lead to the generation of incorrect mathematics, and corrupt the database. So we have a difficult verification problem here; we can trust the database (eventually) if we trust the inference engines, but how do we know we can trust the inference engines?

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Mathematical thinking cannot solve this problem, because the most likely kind of bug is not a bad inference algorithm but an incorrect implementation of a good one. Notice what has happened here, though; the verification problem for Omega no longer lives in the rarefied realm of pure mathematics but the more concrete province of software engineering.

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As such, there are things that experience can teach us. We don’t know how to do perfect software engineering, but we do know what the best practices are. And this is the point at Dr. Wolfram’s proposal to build Omega on Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha begins to be troubling. These are amazing tools, but they’re closed source. They cannot be meaningfully audited for correctness by anyone outside Wolfram Research. Experience teaches us that this is a danger sign, a fragile single point of failure, and simply not tolerable in any project with the ambitions of Omega.

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I think Dr. Wolfram is far too intelligent not to understand this, which makes his failure to address the issue the more troubling. For Omega to be trusted, the entire system will need to be transparent top to bottom. The design, the data representations, and the implementation code for its software must all be freely auditable by third-party mathematical topic experts and mathematically literate software engineers.

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I would go so far as to say that any mathematician or software engineer asked to participate in this project is ethically required to insist on complete auditability and open source. Otherwise, what has the tradition of peer review and process transparency in science taught us?

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I hope that Dr. Wolfram will address this issue in a future blog post. And I hope he understands that, for all his brilliance and impressive accomplishments, “Trust my secret code” will not – and cannot – be an answer that satisfies.

diff --git a/20140919142029.blog b/20140919142029.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0e95957 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140919142029.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Request for help – I need a statistician +

GPSD has a serious bug somewhere in its error modeling. What it effects is position-error estimates GPSD computes for GPSes that don’t compute them internally themselves and report them on the wire. The code produces plausible-looking error estimates, but they lack a symmetry property that they should have to be correct.

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I need a couple of hours of help from an applied statistician who can read C and has experience using covariance-matrix methods for error estimation. Direct interest in GPS and geodesy would be a plus.

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I don’t think this is a large problem, but it’s just a little beyond my competence. I probably know enough statistics and matrix algebra to understand the fix, but I don’t know enough to find it myself.

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Hundreds of millions of Google Maps users might have reason to grateful to anyone who helps out here.

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UPDATE: Problem solved, see next post.

diff --git a/20140923090332.blog b/20140923090332.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b0e1300 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140923090332.blog @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +Never let an invariant go untested +

I’ve been blog-silent the last couple of days because I’ve been chasing down the bug I mentioned in Request for help – I need a statistician.

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I have since found and fixed it. Thereby hangs a tale, and a cautionary lesson.

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Going in, my guess was that the problem was in the covariance-matrix algebra used to compute the DOP (dilution-of-precision) figures from the geometry of the satellite skyview.

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(I was originally going to write a longer description than that sentence – but I ruefully concluded that if that sentence was a meaningless noise to you the longer explanation would be too. All you mathematical illiterates out there can feel free to go off and have a life or something.)

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My suspicion particularly fell on a function that did partial matrix inversion. Because I only need the diagonal elements of the inverted matrix, the most economical way to compute them seemed to be by minor subdeterminants rather than a whole-matrix method like Gauss-Jordan elimination. My guess was that I’d fucked that up in some fiendishly subtle way.

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The one clue I had was a broken symmetry. The results of the computation should be invariant under permutations of the rows of the matrix – or, less abstractly, it shouldn’t matter which order you list the satellites in. But it did.

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How did I notice this? Um. I was refactoring some code – actually, refactoring the data structure the skyview was kept in. For hysterical raisins historical reasons the azimuth/elevation and signal-strength figures for the sats had been kept in parallel integer arrays. There was a persistent bad smell about the code that managed these arrays that I thought might be cured if I morphed them into an array of structs, one struct per satellite.

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Yeeup, sure enough. I flushed two minor bugs out of cover. Then I rebuilt the interface to the matrix-algebra routines. And the sats got fed to them in a different order than previously. And the regression tests broke loudly, oh shit.

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There are already a couple of lessons here. First, have a freakin’ regression test. Had I not I might have sailed on in blissful ignorance that the code was broken.

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Second, though “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is generally good advice, it is overridden by this: If you don’t know that it’s broken, but it smells bad, trust your nose and refactor the living hell out of it. Odds are good that something will shake loose and fall on the floor.

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This is the point at which I thought I needed a statistician. And I found one – but, I thought, to constrain the problem nicely before I dropped it on him, it would be a good idea to isolate out the suspicious matrix-inversion routine and write a unit test for it. Which I did. And it passed with flying colors.

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While it was nice to know I had not actually screwed the pooch in that particular orifice, this left me without a clue where the actual bug was. So I started instrumenting, testing for the point in the computational pipeline where row-symmetry broke down.

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Aaand I found it. It was a stupid little subscript error in the function that filled the covariance matrix from the satellite list – k in two places where i should have been. Easy mistake to make, impossible for any of the four static code checkers I use to see, and damnably difficult to spot with the Mark 1 eyeball even if you know that the bug has to be in those six lines somewhere. Particularly because the wrong code didn’t produce crazy numbers; they looked plausible, though the shape of the error volume was distorted.

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Now let’s review my mistakes. There were two, a little one and a big one. The little one was making a wrong guess about the nature of the bug and thinking I needed a kind of help I didn’t. But I don’t feel bad about that one; ex ante it was still the most reasonable guess. The highest-complexity code in a computation is generally the most plausible place to suspect a bug, especially when you know you don’t grok the algorithm.

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The big mistake was poor test coverage. I should have written a unit test for the specialized matrix inverter when I first coded it – and I should have tested for satellite order invariance.

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The general rule here is: to constrain defects as much as possible, never let an invariant go untested.

diff --git a/20140925161649.blog b/20140925161649.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..41def6c --- /dev/null +++ b/20140925161649.blog @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Announcing microjson +

If you’ve ever wanted a JSON parser that can unpack directly to fixed-extent C storage (look, ma, no malloc!) I’ve got the code for you.

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The microjson parser is tiny (less than 700LOC), fast, and very sparing of memory. It is suitable for use in small-memory embedded environments and deployments where malloc() is forbidden in order to prevent leaked-memory issues.

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This project is a spin-out of code used heavily in GPSD; thus, the code has been tested on dozens of different platforms in hundreds of millions of deployments.

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It has two restrictions relative to standard JSON: the special JSON “null” value is not handled, and object array elements must be homogenous in type.

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A programmer’s guide to building parsers with microjson is included in the distribution.

diff --git a/20140926105033.blog b/20140926105033.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5cc5679 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140926105033.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Halfway up the mountain +

Last night, my wife Cathy and I passed our level 5 test in kuntao. That’s a halfway point to level 10, which is the first “guro” level, roughly equivalent to black belt in a Japanese or Korean art. Ranks aren’t the big deal in kuntao that they are in most Americanized martial arts, but this is still a good point to pause for reflection.

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Kuntao is, for those of you new here or who haven’t been paying attention, the martial art my wife and I have been training in for two years this month. It’s a fusion of traditional wing chun kung fu (which is officially now Southern Shaolin, though I retain some doubts about the historical links even after the Shaolin Abbot’s pronouncement) with Phillipine kali and some elements of Renaissance Spanish sword arts.

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It’s a demanding style. Only a moderate workout physically, but the techniques require a high level of precision and concentration. Sifu Yeager has some trouble keeping students because of this, but those of us who have hung in there are learning techniques more commercial schools have given up on trying to teach. The knife work alone is more of a toolkit than some other entire styles provide.

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Sifu made a bit of a public speech after the test about my having to work to overcome unusual difficulties due to my cerebral palsy. I understand what he was telling the other students and prospective students: if Eric can be good at this and rise to a high skill level you can too, and you should be ashamed if you don’t. He expressed some scorn for former students who quit because the training was too hard, and I said, loudly enough to be heard: “Sifu, I’d be gone if it were too easy.”

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It’s true, the challenge level suits me a lot better than strip-mall karate ever could. Why train in a martial art at all if you’re not going to test your limits and break past them? That struggle is as much of the meaning of martial arts as the combat techniques are, and more.

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Sifu called me “a fighter”. It’s true, and I free-sparred with some of the senior students testing last night and enjoyed the hell out of every second, and didn’t do half-badly either. But the real fight is always the one for self-mastery, awareness, and control; perfection in the moment, and calm at the heart of furious action. Victory in the outer struggle proceeds from victory in the inner one.

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These are no longer strange ideas to Americans after a half-century of Asian martial arts seeping gradually into our folk culture. But they bear repeating nevertheless, lest we forget that the inward way of the warrior is more than a trope for cheesy movies. That cliche functions because there is a powerful truth behind it. It’s a truth I’m reminded of every class, and the reason I keep going back.

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Though…I might keep going back for the effect on Cathy. She is thriving in this art in a way she hasn’t under any of the others we’ve studied together. She’s more fit and muscular than she’s ever been in her life – I can feel it when I hold her, and she complains good-naturedly that the new muscle mass is making her clothes fit badly. There are much worse problems for a woman over fifty to have, and we both know that the training is a significant part of the reason people tend to underestimate her age by a helluvalot.

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Sifu calls her “the Assassin”. I’m “the Mighty Oak”. Well, it fits; I lack physical flexibility and agility, but I also shrug off hits that would stagger most other people and I punch like a jackhammer when I need to. The contrast between my agile, fluid, fast-on-the-uptake mental style and my physical predisposition to fight like a monster slugger amuses me more than a little. Both are themselves surprising in a man over fifty. The training, I think, is helping me not to slow down.

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I have lots of other good reasons that I expect to be training in a martial art until I die, but a sufficient one is this: staying active and challenged, on both physical and mental levels, seems to stave off the degenerative effects of aging as well as anything else humans know how to do. Even though I’m biologically rather younger than my calendar age (thank you, good genes!), I am reaching the span of years at which physical and mental senescence is something I have to be concerned about even though I can’t yet detect any signs of either. And most other forms of exercise bore the shit out of me.

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So: another five levels to Guro. Two, perhaps two and half years. The journey doesn’t end there, of course; there are more master levels in kali. The kuntao training doesn’t take us all the way up the traditional-wing-chun skill ladder; I’ll probably do that. Much of the point will be that the skills are fun and valuable in themselves. Part of the point will be having a destination, rather than stopping and waiting to die. Anti-senescence strategy.

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It’s of a piece with the fact that I try to learn at least one major technical skill every year, and am shipping software releases almost every week (new project yesterday!) at an age when a lot of engineers would be resting on their laurels. It’s not just that I love my work, it’s that I believe ossifying is a long step towards death and – lacking the biological invincibility of youth – I feel I have to actively seek out ways to keep my brain limber.

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My other recreational choices are conditioned by this as well. Strategy gaming is great for it – new games requiring new thought patterns coming out every month. New mountains to climb, always.

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I have a hope no previous generation could – that if I can stave off senescence long enough I’ll live to take advantage of serious life-extension technology. When I first started tracking progress in this area thirty years ago my evaluation was that I was right smack on the dividing age for this – people a few years younger than me would almost certainly live to see that, and people a few years older almost certainly would not. Today, with lots of progress and the first clinical trials of antisenescence drugs soon to begin, that still seems to me to be exactly the case.

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Lots of bad luck could intervene. There could be a time-bomb in my genes – cancer, heart disease, stroke. That’s no reason not to maximize my odds. Halfway up the mountain; if I keep climbing, the reward could be much more than a few years of healthspan, it could be time to do everything.

diff --git a/20140927002349.blog b/20140927002349.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ea6b5d1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140927002349.blog @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +Program Provability and the Rule of Technical Greed +

In a recent discussion on G+, a friend of mine made a conservative argument for textual over binary interchange protocols on the grounds that programs always need to be debugged, and thus readability of the protocol streams by humans trumps the minor efficiency gains from binary packing.

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I agree with this argument; I’ve made it often enough myself, notably in The Art of Unix Programming. But it was something his opponent said that nudged at me. “Provable programs are the future,” he declaimed, pointing at sel4 and CompCert as recent examples of formal verification of real-world software systems. His implication was clear: we’re soon going to get so much better at turning specifications into provably correct implementations that debuggability will soon cease to be a strong argument for protocols that can be parsed by a Mark I Eyeball.

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Oh foolish, foolish child, that wots not of the Rule of Technical Greed.

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Now, to be fair, the Rule of Technical Greed is a name I just made up. But the underlying pattern is a well-established one from the earliest beginnings of computing.

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In the beginning there was assembler. And programming was hard. The semantic gap between how humans think about problems and what we knew how to tell computers to do was vast; our ability to manage complexity was deficient. And in the gap software defects did flourish, multiplying in direct proportion to the size of the programs we wrote.

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And the lives of programmers were hard, and the case of their end-users miserable; for, strive as the programmers might, perfection was achieved only in toy programs while in real-world systems the defect rate was nigh-intolerable. And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

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Then, lo, there appeared the designers and advocates of higher-level languages. And they said: “With these tools we bring you, the semantic gap will lessen, and your ability to write systems of demonstrable correctness will increase. Truly, if we apply this discipline properly to our present programming challenges, shall we achieve the Nirvana of defect rates tending asymptotically towards zero!”

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Great was the rejoicing at this prospect, and swiftly resolved the debate despite a few curmudgeons who muttered that it would all end in tears. And compilers were adopted, and for a brief while it seemed that peace and harmony would reign.

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But it was not to be. For instead of applying compilers only to the scale of software engineering that had been accustomed in the days of hand-coded assembler, programmers were made to use these tools to design and implement ever more complex systems. The semantic gap, though less vast than it had been, remained large; our ability to manage complexity, though improved, was not what it could be. Commercial and reputational victory oft went to those most willing to accrue technical debt. Defect rates rose once again to just shy of intolerable. And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

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Then, lo, there appeared the advocates of structured programming. And they said: “There is a better way. With some modification of our languages and trained discipline exerted in the use of them, we can achieve the Nirvana of defect rates tending asymptotically towards zero!”

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Great was the rejoicing at this prospect, and swiftly resolved the debate despite a few curmudgeons who muttered that it would all end in tears. And languages which supported structured programming and its discipline came to be widely adopted, and these did indeed have a strong positive effect on defect rates. Once again it seemed that peace and harmony might prevail, sweet birdsong beneath rainbows, etc.

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But it was not to be. For instead of applying structured programming only to the scale of software engineering that had been accustomed in the days when poorly-organized spaghetti code was the state of the art, programmers were made to use these tools to design ever more complex systems. The semantic gap, though less vast than it had been, remained large; our ability to manage complexity, though improved, was not what it could be. Commercial and reputational victory oft went to those most willing to accrue technical debt. Defect rates rose once again to just shy of intolerable. And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

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Then, lo, there appeared the advocates of systematic software modularity. And they said: “There is a better way. By systematic separation of concerns and information hiding, we can achieve the Nirvana of defect rates tending asymptotically towards zero!”

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Great was the rejoicing at this prospect, and swiftly resolved the debate despite a few curmudgeons who muttered that it would all end in tears. And languages which supported modularity came to be widely adopted, and these did indeed have a strong positive effect on defect rates. Once again it seemed that peace and harmony might prevail, the lion lie down with the lamb, technical people and marketeers actually get along, etc.

+

But it was not to be. For instead of applying systematic modularity and information hiding only to the scale of software engineering that had been accustomed in the days of single huge code blobs, programmers were made to use these tools to design ever more complex modularized systems. The semantic gap, though less vast than it had been, remained large; our ability to manage complexity, though now greatly improved, was not what it could be. Commercial and reputational victory oft went to those most willing to accrue technical debt. Defect rates rose once again to just shy of intolerable. And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

+

Are we beginning to see a pattern here? I mean, I could almost write a text macro that would generate the next couple of iterations. Every narrowing of the semantic gap, every advance in our ability to manage software complexity, every improvement in automated verification, is sold to us as a way to push down defect rates. But how each tool actually gets used is to scale up the complexity of design and implementation to the bleeding edge of tolerable defect rates.

+

This is what I call the Rule of Technical Greed: As our ability to manage software complexity increases, ambition expands so that defect rates and expected levels of technical debt are constant.

+

The application of this rule to automated verification and proofs of correctness is clear. I have little doubt these will be valuable tools in the relatively near future; I follow developments there with some interest and look forward to using them myself.

+

But anyone who says “This time it’ll be different!” earns a hearty horse-laugh. Been there, done that, still have the T-shirts. The semantic gap is a stubborn thing; until we become as gods and can will perfect software into existence as an extension of our thoughts, somebody’s still going to have to grovel through the protocol dumps. Design for debuggability will never be waste of effort, because otherwise, even if we believe our tools are perfect, proceeding from ideal specification to flawless implementation…how else will an actual human being actually know?

+

UPDATE: Having learned that “risk homeostasis” is an actual term of art in road engineering and health risk analysis, I now think this would be better tagged the “Law of Software Risk Homeostasis”.

diff --git a/20140928140028.blog b/20140928140028.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4c03688 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140928140028.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Commoditization, not open source, killed Sun Microsystems +

The patent-troll industry is in full panic over the consequences of the Alice vs. CLS Bank decision. While reading up on the matter, I ran across the following claim by a software patent attorney:

+

“As Sun Microsystems proved, the quickest way to turn a $5 billion company into a $600 million company is to go open source.”

+

I’m not going to feed this troll traffic by linking to him, but he’s promulgating a myth that must be dispelled. Trying to go open source didn’t kill Sun; hardware commoditization killed Sun. I know this because I was at ground zero when it killed a company that was aiming to succeed Sun – and, until the dot-com bust, looked about to manage it.

+

+

It is certainly the case that the rise of Linux helped put pressure on Sun Microsystems. But the rise of Linux itself was contingent on the plunging prices of the Intel 386 family and the surrounding ecology of support chips. What these did was make it possible to build hardware approaching the capacity of Sun workstations much less expensively.

+

It was a classic case of technology disruption. As in most such cases, Sun blew it strategically by being unwilling to cannibalize its higher-margin products. There was an i386 port of their operating system before 1990, but it was an orphan within the company. Sun could have pushed it hard and owned the emerging i386 Unix market, slowing down Linux and possibly relegating it to niche plays for a good long time.

+

Sun didn’t; instead, they did what companies often try in response to these disruptions – they tried to squeeze the last dollar out of their existing designs, then retreated upmarket to where they thought commodity hardware couldn’t reach.

+

Enter VA Linux, briefly the darling of the tech industry – and where I was on the Board of Directors during the dotcom boom and the bust. VA aimed to be the next Sun, building powerful and inexpensive Sun-class workstations using Linux and commodity 386 hardware.

+

And, until the dot com bust, VA ate Sun’s lunch in the low and middle range of Sun’s market. Silicon Valley companies queued up to buy VA’s product. There was a running joke in those days that if you wanted to do a startup in the Valley the standard first two steps were (1) raise $15M on Sand Hill Road, and then (2) spend a lot of it buying kit at VA Linux. And everyone was happy until the boom busted.

+

Two thirds of VA’s customer list went down the tubes within a month. But that’s not what really forced VA out of the hardware business. What really did it was that VA’s hardware value proposition proved as unstable as Sun’s, and for exactly the same reason. Commoditization. By the year 2000 building a Unix box got too easy; there was no magic in the systems integration, anyone could do it.

+

Had VA stayed in hardware, it would have been in the exact same losing position as Sun – trying to defend a nameplate premium against disruption from below.

+

So, where was open source in all this? Of course, Linux was a key part in helping VA (and the white-box PC vendors positioned to disrupt VA after 2000) exploit hardware commoditization. By the time Sun tried to open-source its own software the handwriting was already on the wall; giving up proprietary control of their OS couldn’t make their situation any worse.

+

If anything, OpenSolaris probably staved off the end of Sun by a couple of years by adding value to Sun’s hardware/software combination. Enough people inside Sun understood that open source was a net win to prevail in the political battle.

+

Note carefully here the distinction between “adding value” and “extracting secrecy rent”. Companies that sell software think they’ve added value when they can collect more secrecy rent, but customers don’t see it that way. To customers, open source adds value precisely because they are less dependent on the vendor. By open-sourcing Solaris, Sun partway closed the value-for-dollar gap with commodity Linux systems.

+

Open source wasn’t enough. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t the best move. It was necessary, but not sufficient.

+

The correct lesson here is “the quickest way to turn a $5 billion company into a $600 million company is to be on the wrong end of a technology disruption and fail to adapt”. In truth, I don’t think anything was going to save Sun in the long term. But I do think that given a willingness to cannibalize their own business and go full-bore on 386 hardware they might have gotten another five to eight years.

diff --git a/20140929104938.blog b/20140929104938.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..29419c1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140929104938.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Shellshock, Heartbleed, and the Fallacy of False Prominence +

In the wake of the Shellshock bug, I guess I need to repeat in public some things I said at the time of the Heartbleed bug.

+

The first thing to notice here is that these bugs were found – and were findable – because of open-source scrutiny.

+

There’s a “things seen versus things unseen” fallacy here that gives bugs like Heartbleed and Shellshock false prominence. We don’t know – and can’t know – how many far worse exploits lurk in proprietary code known only to crackers or the NSA.

+

What we can project based on other measures of differential defect rates suggests that, however imperfect “many eyeballs” scrutiny is, “few eyeballs” or “no eyeballs” is far worse.

+

I’m not handwaving when I say this; we have statistics from places like Coverity that do defect-rate measurements on both open-source and proprietary closed source products, we have academic research like the UMich fuzz papers, we have CVE lists for Internet-exposed programs, we have multiple lines of evidence.

+

Everything we know tells us that while open source’s security failures may be conspicuous its successes, though invisible, are far larger.

diff --git a/20140929232255.blog b/20140929232255.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ae3a5d2 --- /dev/null +++ b/20140929232255.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +Announcing: Time, Clock, and Calendar Programming In C +

The C/UNIX library support for time and calendar programming is a nasty mess of historical contingency. I have grown tired of having to re-learn its quirks every time I’ve had to deal with it, so I’m doing something about that.

+

Announcing Time, Clock, and Calendar Programming In C, a document which attempts to chart the historical clutter (so you can ignore it once you know why it’s there) and explain the mysteries.

+

What I’ve released is an 0.9 beta version. My hope is that it will rapidly attract some thoroughgoing reviews so I can release a 1.0 in a week or so. More than that, I would welcome a subject matter expert as a collaborator.

diff --git a/20140930085033.blog b/20140930085033.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d799c0b --- /dev/null +++ b/20140930085033.blog @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Underestimate Terry Pratchett? I never have. +

Neil Gaiman writes On Terry Pratchett, he is not a jolly old elf at all.. It’s worth reading.

+

I know that what Neil Gaiman says here is true, because I’ve known Terry, a little. Not as well as Neil does; we’re not that close, though he has been known to answer my email. But I did have one experience back in 2003 that would have forever dispelled any notion of Terry as a mere jolly elf, assuming I’d been foolish enough to entertain it.

+

I taught Terry Pratchett how to shoot a pistol.

+

(We were being co-guests of honor at Penguicon I at the time. This was at the first Penguicon Geeks with Guns event, at a shooting range west of Detroit. It was something Terry had wanted to do for a long time, but opportunities in Britain are quite limited.)

+

This is actually a very revealing thing to do with anyone. You learn a great deal about how the person handles stress and adrenalin. You learn a lot about their ability to concentrate. If the student has fears about violence, or self-doubt, or masculinity/femininity issues, that stuff is going to tend to come out in the student’s reactions in ways that are not difficult to read.

+

Terry was rock-steady. He was a good shot from the first three minutes. He listened, he followed directions intelligently, he always played safe, and he developed impressive competence at anything he was shown very quickly. To this day he’s one of the three or four best shooting students I’ve ever had.

+

That is not the profile of anyone you can safely trivialize as a jolly old elf. I wasn’t inclined to do that anyway; I’d known him on and off since 1991, which was long enough that I believe I got a bit of look-in before he fully developed his Famous Author charm defense.

+

But it was teaching Terry pistol that brought home to me how natively tough-minded he really is. After that, the realism and courage with which he faced his Alzheimer’s diagnosis came as no surprise to me whatsoever.

diff --git a/20141002135325.blog b/20141002135325.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8e101e7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20141002135325.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Press silence, black privilege, and unintended consequences +

A provocative article at the conservative blog Hot Air comments on a pattern in American coverage of violent interracial crimes. When the perps are white and the victims are black, we can expect the press coverage to be explicit about it, with predictable assumption of racist motivations. On the other hand, when the perps are black and the victims are white, the races of all parties are normally suppressed and no one dares speak the r-word.

+

If I were a conservative, or a racist, I’d go off on some aggrieved semi-conspiratorial rant here. Instead I’ll observe what Hot Air did not: that the race of violent black criminals is routinely suppressed in news coverage even in the much more common case that their victims are also black. Hot Air is over-focusing here.

+

That said, Hot Air seems to have a a separate and valid point when it notes that white victims are most likely to have their race suppressed from the reporting when the criminals are black – especially if there was any hint of racist motivation. There is an effective taboo against truthfully reporting incidents in which black criminals yell racial epithets and threats at white victims during the commission of street crimes. If not for webbed security-camera footage we’d have no idea how depressingly common this seems to be – the press certainly won’t cop to it in their print stories.

+

No conspiracy theory is required to explain the silence here. Reporters and editors are nervous about being thought racist, or (worse) having “anti-racist” pressure groups demonstrating on their doorsteps. The easy route to avoiding this is a bit of suppressio veri – not lying, exactly, but not uttering facts that might be thought racially inflammatory.

+

The pattern of suppression is neatly explained by the following premises: Any association of black people with criminality is inflammatory. Any suggestion that black criminals are motivated by racism to prey on white victims is super-inflammatory. And above all, we must not inflame. Better to be silent.

+

I believe this silence is a dangerous mistake with long-term consequences that are bad for everyone, and perhaps worst of all for black people.

+

+

Journalistic silence has become a kind of black privilege. The gravamen of the Hot Air article is that gangs of black teenagers and twentysomethings can racially taunt whites and assault both whites and nonwhites confident in the knowledge that media coverage will describe them as neutrally as “youths” (ah, what an anodyne term that is!).

+

I’m here to say what that article could have but did not: suppressio veri, when performed systematically enough, itself becomes a code that can be read. What the press is teaching Americans to assume, story after story, is that if “youths” commit public violence and they are not specified to be white, or hispanic, or asian — then it’s yet another black street gang on a wilding.

+

Here is my advice to anti-racists and their media allies: it is in your interests to lift the veil of silence a little. You need to introduce some noise into the correlation – come clean about race in at least some small percentage of these incidents to create reasonable doubt about the implications of silence in others. You do not want your readers trained to assume that “youths” invariably decodes to “thug-life blacks on a casual rampage”. I don’t want this either, and I don’t think anyone should.

+

I am not mocking or satirizing or being sarcastic when I say this. I don’t like where I think the well-meant suppressio veri is taking us. I think it’s bound to empower people who are genuinely and viciously bigoted by giving them an exclusive on truthful reporting. I don’t think it’s good for anyone of any color for bigots to have that power.

+

Nor is it any good thing that “youths” now behave as though they think they’re operating with a kind of immunity. We saw this in Ferguson, when Michael Brown apparently believed he could could beat up a Pakistani shopkeeper and then assault a cop without fearing consequences. (“What are you going to do, shoot me?” he sneered, just before he was shot) As he found out, eventually that shit’ll get you killed; it would have been much better for everybody if he hadn’t been encouraged to believe that his skin color gave him a free pass.

+

I have no doubt that studiously blind press coverage was a significant enabler of that belief. The Michael Browns of the world may not be very bright, but they too can read the code. Every instance of suppressio veri told Brown that if he committed even a violent crime in public a lot of white people in newsrooms and elsewhere would avert their eyes. The press’s attempted canonization of Trayvon Martin only put the cherry on top of this.

+

It’s not clear to me that this kind of indulgence is any better – even for blacks themselves – than the old racist arrangement in which blacks “knew their place” and were systematically cowed into submission to the law. After all – if it needs pointing out again – the victims of black crime and trash culture are mainly other blacks. Press silence is empowering thugs.

+

Are we ever going to stop doing this? Anyone looking for a way that the system keeps black people down need look no further than the way we feed them fantasies of victimization and entitlement. For this our press bears much of the blame.

+

UPDATE: The “What are you going to do, shoot me?” quote is not confirmed. It may derive from confusion with another incident a few days later in the the Louis metro area.

diff --git a/20141003093507.blog b/20141003093507.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a8f3cfe --- /dev/null +++ b/20141003093507.blog @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +48-hour release heads-up for Time-Clock-Calendar HOWTO +

I’ve been gifted with a lot of help on my draft of Time, Clock, and Calendar Programming In C. I think it’s almost time to ship 1.0, and plan to do so this weekend. Get your last-minute fixes in now!

+

I will of course continue to accept corrections and additions after 1.0. Thanks to everyone who contributed. My blog and G+ followers were very diligent in spotting typos, helping fill in and correct standards history, and pointing out the more obscure gotchas in the API.

+

What I’ve discovered is that the Unix calendar-related API is a pretty wretched shambles. Which leads directly to the topic of my next blog entry…

diff --git a/20141003122051.blog b/20141003122051.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..47b4bf5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20141003122051.blog @@ -0,0 +1,62 @@ +RFC for a better C calendaring library +

In the process of working on my Time, Clock, and Calendar Programming In C document, I have learned something sad but important: the standard Unix calendar API is irremediably broken.

+

The document list a lot of consequences of the breakage, but here I want to zero in on what I think is the primary causes. That is: the standard struct tm (a) fails to be an unambiguous representation of time, and (b) violates the SPOT (Single Point of Truth) design rule. It has some other more historically contingent problems as well, but these problems (and especially (a)) are the core of its numerous failure modes.

+

These problems cannot be solved in a backwards-compatible way. I think it’s time for a clean-sheet redesign. In the remainder of this post I’ll develop what I think the premises of the design ought to be, and some consequences.

+

+

The functions we are talking about here are tzset(), localtime(3), gmtime(3), mktime(3), strftime(3), and strptime() – everything (ignoring some obsolete entry points) that takes a struct tm argument and/or has timezone issues.

+

The central problem with this group of functions is the fact that the standard struct tm (what manual pages hilariously call “broken-down-time”) was designed to hold a local time/date without an offset from UTC time. The consequences of this omission cascade through the entire API in unfortunate ways.

+

Here are the standard members:

+
+struct tm 
+{
+    int    tm_sec;   /* seconds [0,60] (60 for + leap second) */
+    int    tm_min;   /* minutes [0,59] */
+    int    tm_hour;  /* hour [0,23] */
+    int    tm_mday;  /* day of month [1,31] */
+    int    tm_mon ;  /* month of year [0,11] */
+    int    tm_year;  /* years since 1900 */
+    int    tm_wday;  /* day of week [0,6] (Sunday = 0) */
+    int    tm_yday;  /* day of year [0,365] */
+    int    tm_isdst; /* daylight saving flag */
+};
+
+

The presence of the day of year and day of week members violates SPOT. This leads to some strange behaviors – mktime(3) “normalizes” its input structure by fixing up these members. This can produce subtle gotchas.

+

Also, note that there is no way to represent dates with subsecond precision in this structure. Therefore strftime(3) cannot format them and strptime(3) cannot parse them.

+

The GNU C library takes a swing at the most serious problem by adding a GMT offset member, but only half-heartedly. Because it is concerned with maintaining backward compatibility, that member is underused.

+

Here’s what I think it ought to look like instead

+
+struct gregorian 
+{
+    float  sec;     /* seconds [0,60] (60 for + leap second) */
+    int    min;     /* minutes [0,59] */
+    int    hour;    /* hour [0,23] */
+    int    mday;    /* day of month [1,31] */
+    int    mon;     /* month of year [1,12] */
+    int    year;    /* years Gregorian */
+    int    zoffset; /* zone offset, seconds east of Greenwich */
+    char   *zone;   /* zone name or NULL */
+    int    dst;     /* daylight saving offset, seconds */
+};
+
+

Some of you, I know, are looking at the float seconds member and bridling. What about roundoff errors? What about comparisons? Here’s where I introduce another basic premise of the redesign: integral floats are safe to play with..

+

That wasn’t true when the Unix calendar API was designed, but IEEE754 solved the problem. Most modern FPUs are well-behaved on integral quantities. There is not in fact a fuzziness risk if you stick to integral seconds values.

+

The other way to handle this – the classic Unix way – would have been to add a decimal subseconds member in some unit, probably nanoseconds in 2014. The problem with this is that it’s not future-proof. Who’s to say we won’t want finer resolution in a century?

+

Yes, this does means decimal subsecond times will have round-off issues when you do certain kinds of arithmetic on them. I think this is tolerable in calendar dates, where subsecond arithmetic is unusual thing to do to them.

+

The above structure fixes some quirks and inconsistencies, The silly 1900 offset for years is gone. Time divisions of a day or larger are consistently 1-origin as humans expect; this will reduce problems when writing and reading debug messages. SPOT is restored for the calendar portion of dates.

+

The zoffset/zone/dst group do not have the SPOT property – zone can be inconsistent with the other two members. This is, alas, unavoidable if we’re going to have a zone member at all, which is pretty much a requirement in order for the analogs of strftime(3) and strptime() to have good behavior.

+

Now I need to revisit another basic assumption of the Unix time API: that the basic time type is integral seconds since the epoch. In the HOWTO I pointed out that this assumption made sense in a world of 32-bit registers and expensive floating point, but no longer in a world of 64-bit machines and cheap floating point.

+

So here’s the other basic decision: the time scalar for this library is quad-precision seconds since the epoch in IEEE74 (that is, 112 bits of mantissa).

+

Now we can begin to sketch some function calls. Here are the basic two:

+

struct gregorian *unix_to_gregorian(double time, struct gregorian *date, char *zone)

+

Float seconds since epoch to broken-down time. A NULL zone argument means UTC, not local time. This is important because we want to be able to build a version of this code that doesn’t do lookups through the IANA zone database for embedded applications.

+

double gregorian_to_unix(struct gregorian *date)

+

Broken-down time to float seconds. No zone argument because it’s contained in the structure. Actually this function wouldn’t use the zone member but just the zoffset member; this is significant because we want to limit lookups to the timezone database for performance reasons.

+

struct gregorian *gregorian_to_local(struct gregorian *date, char *zone)

+

Broken-down time to broken-down time normalized for the specified zone. In this case a null zone just means normalize so there are no out-of-range structure elements (e.g. day 32 wraps to the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd of the next month) without applying any zone change. (Again, this is so the IANA timezone database is not a hard dependency).

+

Notice that both functions are re-entrant and can take constant arguments.

+

An auxiliary function we’ll need is:

+

char *local_timezone(void)

+

so we can say this:

+

unix_to_gregorian(time, datebuffer, local_timezone())

+

We only need two other functions: gregorian_strf() and gregorian_strp(), patterned after strftime() and strptime(). These present no great difficulties. Various strange bugs and glitches in the existing functions would disappear because zone offset and name are part of the structures they operate on.

+

Am I missing anything here? This seems like it would be a large improvement and not very difficult to write.

diff --git a/20141005184242.blog b/20141005184242.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9fff6ca --- /dev/null +++ b/20141005184242.blog @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +In which I have reason to sound like Master Po +

This landed in my mailbox yesterday. I reproduce it verbatim except for the sender’s name.

+

> Dear authors of the RFC 3092,
+>
+> I am writing this email on behalf of your Request For Comment “Etymology of
+> ‘Foo’.” We are currently learning about the internet organizations that set
+> the standards of the internet and our teacher tasked us with finding an RFC
+> that was humorous. Me and my two friends have found the “Etymology of
+> ‘Foo'” and have found it to be almost as ridiculous as the RFC about
+> infinite monkeys; however, we then became quite curious as to why you wrote
+> this. Obviously, it is wrote for humor as not everything in life can be
+> serious, but did your manager task you to write this? Are you a part of an
+> organization in charge of writing humorous RFC’s? Are you getting paid to
+> write those? If so, where do you work, and how may we apply? Any comments
+> on these inquiries would be greatly appreciated and thank you in advance.
+>
+> Sincerely,
+>
+> XXXXXXXXXXXXXX, confused Networking student

+

I felt as though this seriously demanded a ha-ha-only-serious answer – and next thing you know I was channeling Master Po from the old Kung Fu TV series. Reply follows…

+

+


+Don may have his own answer, but I have one you may find helpful.

+

There is a long tradition of writing parody RFCs on April 1st. No
+manager tasks us to write these; they arise as a form of folk art
+among Internet hackers. I think my personal favorite is still RFC1149
+"A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers"
+from 1 April 1990, universally considered a classic of the joke-RFC
+form.

+

As to why we write these...ah, grasshopper, that is not for us to
+explain but for you to experience. If and when you achieve the
+hacker-nature, you will understand.
+

+

Sadly, odds are Confused Networking Student is too young to get the “grasshopper” reference. (Unless Kung Fu is still in reruns out there, which I wouldn’t know because I basically gave up on TV decades ago.) One hopes the Zen-master schtick will be recognizable anyway.

+

Update: There is relevant compilation from the show on YouTube.

diff --git a/20141009025827.blog b/20141009025827.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..efabca1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20141009025827.blog @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +Time, Clock and Calendar Programming 1.0 +

A bit late, because I’ve been hammering on some code the last several days. But here it is: Time, Clock, and Calendar Programming In C.

+

Suggestions for 1.1 revisions and improvements will of course be cheerfully accepted. Comments here or email will be fine.

diff --git a/20141009095500.blog b/20141009095500.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5d1a61e --- /dev/null +++ b/20141009095500.blog @@ -0,0 +1,66 @@ +Implementing re-entrant parsers in Bison and Flex +

In days of yore, Yacc and Lex were two of the most useful tools in a Unix hacker’s kit. The way they interfaced to client code was, however, pretty ugly – global variables and magic macros hanging out all over the place. Their modern descendants, Bison and Flex, have preserved that ugliness in order to be backward-compatible.

+

That rebarbative old interface generally broke a lot of rules about program structure and information hiding that we now accept as givens (to be fair, most of those had barely been invented at the time it was written in 1970 and were still pretty novel). It becomes a particular problem if you want to run multiple instances of your generated parser (or, heaven forfend, multiple parsers with different grammars) in the same binary without having them interfere with each other.

+

But it can be done. I’m going to describe how because (a) it’s difficult to extract from the documentation, and (b) right now (that is, using Bison 3.0.2 and Flex 2.5.35) the interface is in fact slightly broken and there’s a workaround you need to know.

+

+

First, motivation. I had to figure out how to do this for cvs-fast-export, which contains a Bison/Flex grammar that parses CVS master files – often thousands of them in a single run. In the never-ending quest for faster performance (because there are some very old, very gnarly, and very large CVS repositories out there that we would nevertheless like to be able to convert without grinding at them for days or weeks) I have recently been trying to parallelize the parsing stage. The goal is to (a) to be able to spread the job across multiple processors so the work gets done faster, and (b) not to allow I/O waits for some masters being parsed to block compute-intensive operations on others.

+

In order to make this happen, cvs-fast-export has to manage a bunch of worker threads with a parser instance inside each one. And in order for that to work, the yyparse() and yylex() driver functions in the generated code have to be reentrant. No globals allowed; they have to keep their parsing and lexing state in purely stack- and thread-local storage, and deliver their results back the way ordinary reentrant C functions would do it (that is, through structures referenced by pointer arguments).

+

Stock Yacc and Lex couldn’t do this. A very long time ago I wrote a workaround – a tool that would hack the code they generated to encapsulate it. That hack is obsolete because (a) nobody uses those heirloom versions any more, and (b) Bison/Flex have built-in support for this. If you read the docs carefully. And it’s partly broken.

+

Here’s how you start. In your Bison grammar, you need to include include something that begins with these options:

+
+%define api.pure full
+%lex-param {yyscan_t scanner}
+%parse-param {yyscan_t scanner}
+
+

Here, yyscan_t is (in effect) a special private structure used to hold your scanner state. (That’s a slight fib, which I’ll rectify later; it will do for now.)

+

And your Flex specification must contain these options:

+
+%option reentrant bison-bridge
+
+

These are the basics required to make your parser re-entrant. The signatures of the parser and lexer driver functions change from yyparse() and yylex() (no arguments) to these:

+
+yyparse(yyscan_t *scanner)
+yylex(YYSTYPE *yylval_param, yyscan_t yyscanner)
+
+

A yyscan_t is a private structure used to hold your scanner state; yylval is where yylex() will put its token value when it’s called by yyparse().

+

You may be puzzled by the fact that the %lex-param declaration says ‘scanner’ but the scanner state argument ends up being ‘yyscanner’. That’s reasonable, I’m a bit puzzled by it myself. In the generated scanner code, if there is a scanner-state argument (forced by %reentrant) it is always the first one and it is always named yyscanner regardless of what the first %lex-param declaration says – that first declaration seems to be a placeholder. In contrast, the first argument name in the %parse-params declaration actually gets used as is.

+

You must call yyparse() like this:

+
+    yyscan_t myscanner;
+
+    yylex_init(&myscanner);
+    yyparse(myscanner);
+    yylex_destroy(myscanner);
+
+

The yyinit() function call sets scanner to hold the address of a private malloced block holding scanner state; that’s why you have to destroy it explicitly.

+

The old-style global variables, like yyin, become macros that reference members of the yyscan_t structure; for a more modern look you can use accessor functions instead. For yyin that is the pair yyget_in() and yyset_in().

+

I hear your question coming. “But, Eric! How do I pass stuff out of the parser?” Good question. My Bison declarations actually look like this:

+
+%define api.pure full
+%lex-param {yyscan_t scanner} {cvs_file *cvsfile}
+%parse-param {yyscan_t scanner} {cvs_file *cvsfile}
+
+

Notice there’s an additional argument. This should change the function signatures to look like this:

+
+yyparse(yyscan_t scanner, cvs_file *cvs)
+yylex(YYSTYPE *yylval_param, yyscan_t yyscanner, cvs_file *cvs)
+
+

Now you will call yyparse() like this:

+
+    yyscan_t myscanner;
+
+    yylex_init(&myscanner);
+    yyparse(myscanner, mycvs);
+    yylex_destroy(myscanner);
+
+

Le voila! The cvs argument will now be visible to the handler functions you write in your Bison grammar and your Lex specification. You can use it to pass data to the caller – typically, as in my code, the type of the second argument will be a structure of some sort. The documentation insists you can add more curly-brace-wrapped argument declarations to %lex-param and %parse-param to declare multiple extra arguments; I have not tested this.

+

Anyway, the ‘yyscanner’ argument will be visible to the helper code in your lex specification. The ‘scanner’ argument will be visible, under its right name, in your Bison grammar’s handler code. In both cases this is useful for calling accessors like yyget_in() and yyget_lineno() on. The cvs argument, as noted before, will be visible in both places.

+

There is, however, one gotcha (and yes, I have filed a bug report about it). Bison should arrange things so that all the %lex-params information is automatically passed to the generated parser and scanner code via the header file Bison generates (which is typically included in the C preambles to your Bison grammar and Lex specification). But it does not.

+

You have to work around this, until it’s fixed, by defining a YY_DECL macro that expands to the correct prototype and is #included by both generated source code files. When those files are expanded by the C preprocessor, the payload of YY_DECL will be put in the correct places.

+

Mine, which corresponds to the second set of declarations above, looks like this:

+
+#define YY_DECL int yylex \
+	(YYSTYPE * yylval_param, yyscan_t yyscanner, cvs_file *cvs)
+
+

There you have it. Reentrancy, proper information hiding – it’s not yer father’s parser generator. For the fully worked example, see the following files in the cvs-fast-export sources: gram.y, lex.l, cvs.h, and import.c.

+

Mention should be made of Make a reentrant parser with Flex and Bison, another page on this topic. The author describes a different technique requiring an uglier macro hack. I wasn’t able to make it work, but it started me looking in approximately the right direction.

diff --git a/20141011153527.blog b/20141011153527.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bf05f1d --- /dev/null +++ b/20141011153527.blog @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Apologies for premature epostulation +

I made a finger error. Full version of A Low Performance Mystery to follow shortly.

diff --git a/20141011170121.blog b/20141011170121.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2ff552b --- /dev/null +++ b/20141011170121.blog @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +A low-performance mystery +

OK, I’ll admit it. I’m stumped by a software-engineering problem.

+

This is not a thing that happens often, but I’m in waters relatively unknown to me. I’ve been assiduously avoiding multi-threaded programming for a long time, because solving deadlock, starvation, and insidious data-corruption-by-concurrency problems isn’t really my idea of fun. Other than one minor brush with it handling PPS signals in GPSD I’ve managed before this to avoid any thread-entanglement at all.

+

But I’m still trying to make cvs-fast-export run faster. About a week ago an Aussie hacker named David Leonard landed a brilliant patch series in my mailbox. Familiar story: has a huge, gnarly CVS repo that needs converting, got tired of watching it grind for days, went in to speed it up, found a way. In fact he applied a technique I’d never heard of (Bloom filtering) to flatten the worst hot spot in the code, an O(n**3) pass used to compute parent/child links in the export code. But it still needed to be faster.

+

After some discussion we decided to tackle parallelizing the code in the first stage of analysis. This works – separately – on each of the input CVS masters, digesting them into in-core revision lists and generating whole-file snapshots for each CVS delta; later these will become the blobs in the fast-export stream. Then there’s a second stage that merges these per-file revision lists, and a third stage that exports the merged result.

+

Here’s more detail, because you’ll need it to understand the rest. Each CVS master consists of a sequence of deltas (sequences of add-line and delete-line operations) summing up to a sequence of whole-file states (snapshots – eventually these will become blobs in the translated fast-import-stream). Each delta has an author, a revision date, and a revision number (like 1.3 or 1.2.1.1). Implicitly they form a tree. At the top of the file is a tag table mapping names to revision numbers, and some other relatively unimportant metadata.

+

The goal of stage 1 is to digest each CVS master into an in-core tree of metadata and a sequence of whole-file snapshots, with unique IDs in the tree indexing the snapshots. The entire collection of masters is made into a linked list of these trees; this is passed to stage 2, where black magic that nobody understands happens.

+

This first stage seems like a good target for parallelization because the analysis of each master consists of lumps of I/O separated by irregular stretches of compute-intensive data-shuffling in core. In theory, if the program were properly parallelized, it would seldom actually block on an I/O operation; instead while any one thread was waiting on I/O, the data shuffling for other masters would continue. The program would get faster – possibly much faster, depending on the time distribution of I/O demand.

+

Well, that’s the theory, anyway. Here’s what actually happened…

+

+

First, I had to make the parser for the master file format re-entrant. I did that, and then documented the method.

+

Then I had to examine every single other bit of global state and figure out if it needed to be encapsulated into a local-context data structure for each first-stage parse or could remain shared. Doing this made me happy; I hate globals, they make a program’s dataflow harder to grok. Re-entrant structures are prettier.

+

Once I thought I had the data structures properly refactored, I had to introduce actual threading. OK, time to actually learn the pthreads API. Did that. Wrote a multi-threading tasklet scheduler; I’d never done one before and took me about four tries to get it right, but I knew I was going in a good direction because the design kept getting simpler. Current version is less than 70 LOC, that’s for the dispatcher loop and the worker-subthread code both. I am proud of this code – it’s pretty, it works, and it’s tight.

+

While this was going on, my Aussie friend was writing a huge complex map/reduce-based scheduler to do the same job. He realized he’d succumbed to overengineering and gave it up just about the time I got mine working.

+

Not all was wine and roses. Of course I missed some shared state the first time through; multithreaded operation revealed this by sporadically crashing. I misunderstood the documentation for pthreads condition variables and had a few headaches in consequence until David clued me in. But these were solvable problems.

+

I got the code to the point where I could choose between straight sequential and N-threaded operation by flipping a command-line switch, and it was solid either way. Felt a warm glow of accomplishment. Then I profiled it – and got a deeply unpleasant shock. The threaded version was slower. Seriously slower. Like, less than half the throughput of naive one-master-at-at-time sequential parsing.

+

I know what the book says to suspect in this situation – mutex contention overhead. But I knew from the beginning this was unlikely. To explain why, I have to be more specific about what the contention points are.

+

The scheduler manages an array of worker threads. There’s one slot mutex for each worker thread slot, asserted when it’s active (that is, there’s a live thread processing a master in it). There’s one wakeup mutex associated with a condition variable that each worker thread uses to wake up the manager loop when it’s done, so another master-parsing thread can be scheduled into the vacant slot. And there’s another output mutex to make updates to the list of parsed masters atomic.

+

These mutexes, the ones for the scheduler itself, don’t change state very often. The history of a CVS master parse causes only these events: slot mutex up, output mutex up, output mutex down, slot mutex down, wakeup mutex up, signal, wakeup mutex down. The critical regions are small. This just isn’t enough traffic to generate noticeable overhead.

+

There are just two real mutexes that handle contention among the masters. One guards a counter so that the code can issue sequential blob IDs common to all threads; that one gets called every time a delta gets turned into a revision blob. The other guards a common table of named tags. Neither showed up as hotspots in profiling.

+

Only the counter mutex seemed even remotely likely to be getting enough hits to reduce throughput by half, so I replaced it with an atomic fetch-and-increment instruction (the comment reads /* the sexy lockless method */). That worked, but…no joy as far as increased performance went.

+

(Yes, I know, I could be replacing the guard mutex with an equally sexy lockless read-copy-update operation on the output linked list. Not worth it; there’s only one of these per master file, and at their fastest they’re on the order of 50 milliseconds apart).

+

Time to seriously profile. David had clued me in about Linux perf and I knew about gprof of old; armed with those tools, I went in and tried to figure out where the hell all those cycles were going in the threaded version. Some things stood out…

+

One: Mutex calls were not – repeat not – showing up in the top-ten lists.

+

Two: The first stage, which should have been sped up by multithreading, was running a factor of two slower than the straight sequential one-master-at-a-time version.

+

Three: Stage two, the merge magic, was running about the same speed as before.

+

Four: Here’s where it gets not just puzzling but outright weird. Stage three, the report generator, as far as it’s possible to get from any mutex and still be in the same program – running two to four times slower, consistently.

+

Very, very strange.

+

I noticed that the threaded version has a much bigger memory footprint. That’s as expected, it’s holding data for multiple masters at the same time. Could I be seeing heavy swap overhead?

+

Turns out not. I profiled on a much smaller repo, enough smaller for the working set to fit in physical core without swapping. Same strange statistics – Stage 1 slower, stage 3 much slower than the unthreaded code. Factors of about 2 and 4 respectively, same as for the larger repo.

+

(For those of you curious, the large repo is groff – 2300 deltas. The small one is robotfindskitten, 269 deltas. These are my standard benchmark repos.)

+

Now I’m fresh out of ideas. But I have noticed something separately interesting. According to the profiles, both of them are spending upwards of 40% of their time in one small routine, a copy operation in the delta-assembly code. Having no better plan, I decide to try to flatten this hot spot. Maybe something will shake loose?

+

I start putting in const and restricted declarations. Replace some array indexing with pointers. I normally don’t bother with this kind of micro-optimization; usually, when you have a speed problem you need a better algorithm rather than microtweaks. But in this case I think I already have good algorithms – I’m trying to help the compiler optimizer do a better job of reducing them to fast machine instructions, and hoping for insight into the slowdown on the way.

+

This works rather better than I expected. A few hours of work later Stage 1 is running at rough speed parity in threaded amd unthreaded versions. It ought to be faster, but at least the threaded version is no longer absurdly slow,

+

Stage 3 of threaded execution is still absurdly slow.

+

And that’s where things stand now. I wrote this partly to clarify my own thoughts and partly to invite comment from people with more experience optimizing threaded code than I have.

+

Does anything jump out of this fact pattern and say boo? If you were in my shoes, what forensics would you try?

+

Code is here: https://gitorious.org/cvs-fast-export/

+

Benchmark repos can be fetched with cvssync as follows:

+

cvssync cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/rfk robotfindskitten

+

cvssync anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/groff groff

diff --git a/20141012072212.blog b/20141012072212.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b0645d3 --- /dev/null +++ b/20141012072212.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +A low-performance mystery, part deux +

Well, the good news is, I get to feel wizardly this morning. Following sensible advice from a couple of my regulars, I rebuilt my dispatcher to use threads allocated at start time and looping until the list of masters is exhausted.

+

78 LOC. Fewer mutexes. And it worked correctly first time I ran it. W00t – looks like I’ve got the hang non-hang of this threads thing.

+

The bad news is, threaded performance is still atrocious in exactly the same way. Looks like thread-spawn overhead wasn’t a significant contributor.

+

In truth, I was expecting this result. I think my regulars were right to attribute this problem to cache- and locality-busting on every level from processor L1 down to the disks. I believe I’m starting to get a feel for this problem from watching the performance variations over many runs.

+

I’ll profile, but I’m sure I’m going to see cache misses go way up in the threaded version, and if I can find a way to meter the degree of disk thrashing I won’t be even a bit surprised to see that either.

+

The bottom line here seems to be that if I want better threaded performance out of this puppy I’m going to have to at least reduce its working set a lot. Trouble is, I’m highly doubtful – given what it has to do during delta assembly – that this is actually possible. The CVS snapshots and deltas it has to snarf into memory to do the job are intrinsically both large and of unpredictably variable size.

+

Maybe I’ll have an inspiration, but…Keith Packard, who originally wrote that code, is a damn fine systems hacker who is very aware of performance issues; if he couldn’t write it with a low footprint in the first place, I don’t judge my odds of second-guessing him successfully are very good.

+

Ah well. It’s been a learning experience. At least now I can say of multi-threaded application designs “Run! Flee! Save yourselves!” from a position of having demonstrated a bit of wizardry at them myself.

+

UPDATE: One of my regulars found a minor bug in the mutex handling that cost some performance. Alas, fixing this didn’t have any impact above the noise level of my profiling. Also, I managed to unify the threaded and non-threaded dispatchers; the LOC specific to threading is now down to about 30.

diff --git a/20141014213855.blog b/20141014213855.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..db7596f --- /dev/null +++ b/20141014213855.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +A low-performance mystery: the adventure continues +

The mystery I described two posts back has actually been mostly solved (I think) but I’m having a great deal of fun trying to make cvs-fast-export run even faster, and my regulars are not only kibitzing with glee but have even thrown money at me so I can upgrade my PC and run tests on a machine that doesn’t resemble (as one of them put it) a slack-jawed yokel at a hot-dog-eating contest.

+

Hey, a 2.66Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB was hot shit when I bought it, and because I avoid bloatware (my window manager is i3) it has been sufficient unto my needs up to now. I’m a cheap bastard when it comes to hardware; tend to hold onto it until I actually need to upgrade. This is me loftily ignoring the snarking from the peanut gallery, except from the people who actually donated money to the Help Stamp Out CVS In Your Lifetime hardware fund.

+

(For the rest of you, the PayPal and Gratipay buttons should be clearly visible to your immediate right. Just sayin’…)

+

Ahem. Where was I? Yes. The major mystery – the unexplained slowdown in stage 3 of the threaded version – appears to have been solved. It appears this was due to a glibc feature, which is that if you link with threads support it tries to detect use of threads and use thread locks in stdio to make it safe. Which slows it down.

+

+

A workaround exists and has been applied. With that in place the threaded performance numbers are now roughly comparable to the unthreaded ones – a bit slower but nothing that isn’t readily explicable by normal cache- and disk-contention issues on hardware that is admittedly weak for this job. Sometime soon I’ll upgrade to some beastly hexacore monster with lots of RAM by today’s standards and then we’re see what we’ll see.

+

But the quest to make cvs-fast export faster, ever faster, continues. Besides the practical utility, I’m quite enjoying doing down-and-dirty systemsy stuff on something that isn’t GPSD. And, my regulars are having so much fun looking over my shoulder and offering suggestions that I’d kind of hate to end the party.

+

Here’s where things are, currently:

+

1. On the input side, I appear to have found a bug – or at least some behavior severely enough misdocumented that it’s tantamount to a bug – in the way flex-generated scanners handle EOF. The flex maintainer has acknowledged that something odd is going on and discussion has begun on flex-help.

+

A fix for this problem – which is presently limiting cvs-fast-export to character-by-character input when parsing master files, and preventing use of some flex speedups for non-interactive scanners – is probably the best near-term bet for significant performance gains.

+

If you feel like working on it, grab a copy of the code, delete the custom YY_INPUT macro from lex.l, rebuild, and watch what happens. Here’s a more detailed description of the problem.

+

Diagnosing this more precisely would actually be a good project for somebody who wants to help out but is wary of getting involved with the black magic in the CVS-analysis stuff. Whatever is wrong here is well separated from that.

+

2. I have given up for the moment on trying to eliminate the shared counter for making blob IDs. It turns out that the assumption those are small sequential numbers is important to the stage 3 logic – it’s used as an array index into a map of external marks.

+

I may revisit this after I’ve collected the optimizations with a higher expected payoff, like the flex fix and tuning.

+

3. A couple of my commenters are advocating a refinement of the current design that delegates writing the revision snapshots in stage 1 to a separate thread accessed by a bounded queue. This is clever, but it doesn’t attack the root of the problem, which is that currently the snapshots have to be written to disk, persist, and then be copied to standard output as blobs when the stream is being generated.

+

If I can refactor the main loop in generate() into a setup()/make-next-snapshot()/wrapup() sequence, something much more radical is possible. It might be that snapshot generation could be deferred until after the big black-magic branch merge in stage 2, which only needs each CVS revision’s metadata rather than its contents. Then make-next-snapshot() could be called iteratively on each master to generate snapshots just in time to be shipped on stdout as blobs.

+

This would be huge, possibly cutting runtime by 40%. There would be significant complications,though. A major one is that a naive implementation would have a huge working set, containing the contents of the last revision generated of all master files. There would have to be some sort of LRU scheme to hold that size down.

+

4. I have a to-do item to run more serious profiling with cachegrind and iostat, but I’ve been putting that off because (a) there are obvious wins to be had (like anything that reduces I/O traffic), (b) those numbers will be more interesting on the new monster machine I’ll be shopping for shortly.

diff --git a/20141016115300.blog b/20141016115300.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8b7beb1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20141016115300.blog @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +A low-performance mystery: Sometimes you gotta simplify +

This series of posts is increasingly misnamed, as there is not much mystery left about cvs-fast-export’s performance issues and it is now blazingly, screamingly, bat-out-of-hell fast. As in both threaded and unthreaded version convert the entire history of groff (15593 CVS deltas in 1549 files in 13 seconds flat. That would be about 10K CVS commits per minute, sustained; in practice the throughput will probably fall off a bit on very large repositories.

+

I achieved the latest doubling in speed by not succumbing to the temptation to overengineer – a trap that lays in wait for all clever hackers. Case study follows.

+

+

To review, for each master there’s a generation loop that runs to produce all its revision snapshots. Because CVS stores deltas in reverse (that is, the tip node contains the entire most recent revision, with the deltas composing backward to an empty file) the snapshots are emitted in reverse order.

+

These snapshots are then stashed in a temp directory to be picked up and copied out in the correct (canonical git-fast-export order) – forward, and just in time for the commits that reference them.

+

The reason for this generate-then-copy sequence (which doubles the program’s I/O traffic) was originally twofold. First, I wanted the output streams to be look as much as possible like what git-fast-import would ship from an equivalent git repository. Second, if you’re going to make incremental dumping work (give me a stream of all commits since time T) you must use this canonical order. For some people this is a must-have feature.

+

Then, when I added multithreading, the temp files achieved a different utility. They were a place for worker threads to drop snapshots without stepping on each other.

+

When I last posted, I was preparing to attempt a rather complicated change in the code. To get rid of the temp files, but preserve canonical ordering, my plan was to pick apart that generation loop and write a function that would just give me snapshot N, where N is the number of revisions from base. I could then use this to generate blobs on demand, without I/O traffic.

+

In preparation for this change, I separated snapshot generation from master analysis and moved it into stage 3, just before export-stream generation. When I did this, and profiled, I noticed a couple of things.

+

(1) The analysis phase became blisteringly fast. To the point where it could parse and analyze 15,000 CVS masters in less than a second. The output traffic to write the snapshots had been completely dominating not just the analysis computation but the input cost to read the masters as well.

+

(2) Snapshot writes were no longer threaded – and that didn’t make a damn bit of difference to the throughput. Snapshot generation – the most compute-intensive part of the program – was also completely dominated by I/O time. So the utility of the temp files began to look at best questionable.

+

(3) Threading stopped making any noticeable difference in throughput, either positive or negative.

+

Reality was trying to tell me something. The something was this: forget being clever about threading and incremental blob generation in core. It’s too complicated. All you need to do is cut the snapshot I/O traffic. Ditch the canonical dump order and ship the snapshots as they’re made – never do a copy.

+

Keep it simple, stupid!

+

That is what I did. I couldn’t give up on canonical order entirely; it’s still needed for incremental dumping, and it’s handy for testing. But the tool now has the following behavior:

+

* Below a certain size threshold (byte volume of master files) it defaults to dumping in canonical order, with temp file copies.

+

* Above that size, it dumps in fast order (all blobs first), no copying.

+

* There are -C and -F command-line option to force the dump style.

+

The threshold size is set so that canonical order is only defaulted to when the resulting dump will take almost no time even with the copies.

+

The groff repo is above the threshold size. The robotfindskitten repo is below it. So are my regression-test repos. Yes, I did add a regression test to check that canonical-order and fast-order conversions are equivalent!

+

And I think that brings this saga nearly to a close. There is one more optimization I might try – the bounded-queue-with-writer-thread thing some of my regulars suggested. I frankly doubt it’ll make a lot of difference; I’ll probably implement it, profile to show that, and then remove it to keep the code simple.

+

This does not, however, mean that the bucks people threw at the Help Stamp Out CVS In Your Lifetime fund were misdirected. I’m going to take the combination of cvs-fast-export and a fast engine to run it on in hand, and use it. I shall wander the net, hunting down and killing converting the last CVS repositories. Unlike hunting mammoths to extinction, this will actually be a good thing.

diff --git a/20141017122412.blog b/20141017122412.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6488d61 --- /dev/null +++ b/20141017122412.blog @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +Spending the “Help Stamp Out CVS In Your Lifetime” fund +

I just shipped cvs-fast-export 1.21 much improved and immensely faster than it was two weeks ago. Thus ends one of the most intense sieges of down-and-dirty frenzied hacking that I’ve enjoyed in years.

+

Now it comes time to think about what to do with the Help Stamp Out CVS In Your Lifetime fund, which started with John D. Bell snarking epically about my (admittedly) rather antiquated desktop machine and mushroomed into an unexpected pile of donations.

+

I said I intend to use this machine wandering around the net and hunting CVS repositories to extinction, and I meant it. If not for the demands of the large data sets this involves (like the 11 gigabytes of NetBSD CVS I just rsynced) I could have poked along with my existing machine for a good while longer.

+

For several reasons, including wanting those who generously donated to be in on the fun, I’m now going to open a discussion on how to best spend that money. A&D regular Susan Sons (aka HedgeMage) built herself a super-powerful machine this last February, and I think her hardware configuration is sound in essentials, so that build (“Tyro”) will be a starting point. But that was eight months ago – it might be some of the choices could be improved now, and if so I trust the regulars here will have clues to that.

+

I’ll start by talking about design goals and budget.

+

+

First I’ll point at some of my priorities:

+

* Serious crunching power for surgery on large repositories. The full Emacs conversion runs I’ve been doing take eight hours – goal #1 is to reduce that kind of friction.

+

* High reliability for a long time. I’d rather have stable than showy.

+

* Minimized noise and vibration.

+

Now some anti-priorities: Not interested in overclocking, not interested in fancy gamer cases with superfluous LEDs and Lambo vents, fuck all that noise. I’m not even particularly interested in 3D graphics. Don’t need to buy a keyboard or mouse or speakers and I have a dual-port graphics card I intend to keep using.

+

Budget: There’s $710 in the Help Stamp Out CVS In Your Lifetime fund. I’m willing to match that, so the ceiling is $1420. The objective here isn’t really economy, it’s power and buying parts that will last a long time. It’d be nice to go four or five years without another upgrade.

+

OK, with those points clear, let’s look at some hardware.

+

First, this case from NZXT. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways: 200mm low-velocity case fans for minimal noise, toolless assembly/disassembly, no sharp edges on the insides (oh boy do my too-frequently-skinned knuckles like that idea). USB and speaker ports mounted near the top right corner so they’ll be convenient to reach when it sits on the floor on the left side of my desk. Removable cleanable filters in the air vents.

+

To anyone who’s ever tinkered with PCs and cursed the thoughtless, ugly design of most cases, the interior images of this thing are sheer porn. Over on G+ someone pointed me at a boutique case design from Sweden called a Define R4 that moves in the same direction, but this goes further. And I want those 200mm fans badly – larger diameter means they can move enough air with a lower turning rate, which means less noise generated at the rotor tips.

+

Doubtless some of you are going to want to talk up Antec and Lian Li cases. Not without reason; I’ve built systems into Antecs and know Lian Li by reputation. But the NZXT (and the Define R4) go to a level of thoughtfulness in design that I’ve never seen before. (In truth, the way they’re marketed suggests that this is what happens when people who design gamer cases grow up and get serious.) Suggest alternatives if you like, but be aware that I will almost certainly consider not being able to mount those 200mm fans a dealbreaker.

+

Processor: AMD FX-8350 8-Core 4.0GHz. The main goal here is raw serial-processing power. Repository surgery generally doesn’t parallelize well; it turned out that multithreading wasn’t a significant win for cvs-fast export (though the code changes I made to support it turned out to be a very good thing).

+

So high clock speed is a big deal, but I want stable performance and reliability. That means I’d much rather pay extra for a higher rated speed on a chip with a locked clock than go anywhere near the overclocking thing. I would consider an Intel chip of similar or greater rated clock speed, like one of the new Haswells. Of course that would require a change in motherboard.

+

Speaking of motherboards: Tyro uses an MSI 990FXA-GD80. Susan says this is actually a gamer board but (a) that’s OK, the superfluous blinkenlights are hidden by the case walls, and (b) having it designed for overclocking is good because it means the power management and performance at its rated speed are rock solid. OK, so maybe market pressure from the gamers isn’t so bad in this instance.

+

RAM: DDR3 2133. 2133 is high speed even today; I think the job load I’m going to put on this thing, which involves massive data shuffling, well justifies a premium buy here.

+

Susan recommends the Seagate SV35 as a main (spinning) drive – 3TB, 8.5msec seek time. It’s an interesting call, selected for high long-term reliability rather than bleeding-edge speed on the assumption that an SSD will be handling the fast traffic. I approve of that choice of priorities but wonder if going for something in the Constellation line might be a way to push them further.

+

Susan recommends an Intel 530 120GB SSD, commenting “only buy Intel SSDs, they don’t suck”. I’m thinking its 480GB big brother might be a better choice.

+

Susan says “Cheap, reliable optical drive”; these days they’re all pretty good.

+

The PSU Tyro used has been discontinued; open to suggestions on that one.

+

Here’s how it prices out as described: NZXT = $191.97, mobo $169.09, CPU $179.99, 32GB RAM = 2x $169.99, SSD = $79.99, HDD = $130.00. Total system cost $1092.02 without PSU. Well under my ceiling, so there’s room for an upgrade of the SSD or more RAM.

+

Let the optimization begin…

+

UPDATE: The SeaSonic SS-750KM3 is looking good as a PSU candidate – I’m told it doesn’t even turn on its fan at under 30% load. At $139.99 that brings the bill to $1232.01.

diff --git a/20141018191152.blog b/20141018191152.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..536882b --- /dev/null +++ b/20141018191152.blog @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Black magic and the Great Beast +

Something of significance to the design discussion for the Great Beast occurred today.

+

I have finally – finally! – achieved significant insight into the core merge code, the “black magic” section of cvs-fast-export. If you look in merge.c in the repo head version you’ll see a bunch of detailed comments that weren’t there before. I feel rather as Speke and Burton must have when after weeks of hacking their way through the torrid jungles of darkest Africa they finally glimpsed the source of the Nile…

+

+

(And yes, that code has moved. It used to be in the revlist.c file, but that now contains revision-list utility code used by both stages 1 and 2. The black magic has moved to merge.c and is now somewhat better isolated from the rest of the code.)

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I don’t grok all of it yet – there’s some pretty hairy and frightening stuff happening around branch joins, and my comprehension of edge cases is incomplete. But I have figured out enough of it to have a much better feel than I did even a few days ago for how it scales up.

+

In particular I’m now pretty sure that the NetBSD attempt did not fail due to an O(n**2)/O(n**3) blowup in time or space. I think it was just what it looked like, straight-up memory exhaustion because the generated gitspace commits wouldn’t fit in 4GB. Overall scaling for computational part (as opposed to I/O) looks to me like it’s roughly:

+

* O(m**2) in time, with m more related to maximum revisions per CVS master and number of branches than total repo or metadata volume.

+

* O(n) in space, where in is total metadata volume. The thing is, n is much larger than m!

+

This has implications for the design of the Great Beast. To match the implied job load, yes, serial computation speed is important, but the power to rapidly modify data structures of more than 4GB extent even more so. I think this supports the camp that’s been arguing hard for prioritizing RAM and cache performance over clock speed. (I was leaning that way anyway.)

+

My estimate of O(n) spatial scaling also makes me relatively optimistic about the utility of throwing a metric buttload of RAM at the problem. I think one of the next things I’m going to do is write an option that returns stats on memory usage after stages 1 and 2, run it on several repos, and see if I can curve-fit a formula that predicts the stage 2 figure given Stage 1 usage.

+

Even without that, I think we can be pretty confident that the NetBSD conversion won’t break 32GB; the entire repo content is 11GB, so the metadata has to be significantly smaller than that. If I understand the algorithms correctly (and I think I do, now, to the required degree) we basically have to be able to hold the equivalent of two copies of the metadata in memory.

+

(In case it’s not obvious, I’m using NetBSD as a torture test because I believe it represents a near worst case in complexity.)

+

I’m also going to continue working on shrinking the memory footprint. I’ve implemented a kind of slab allocation for the three most numerous object classes, cutting malloc overhead. More may be possible in that direction.

+

So, where this comes out is I’m now favoring a design sketch around 1.35V ECC RAM and whichever of the Xeons has the best expected RAM cache performance, even if that means sacrificing some clock speed.

diff --git a/20141020115547.blog b/20141020115547.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1522e16 --- /dev/null +++ b/20141020115547.blog @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +Building the perfect beast +

I’ve attempted to summarize the discussion of build options for the repository-surgery machine. You should see a link at the top of the page: if not, it’s here

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I invite all the commenters who have shown an interest to critique these build proposals. Naturally, I’d like to make sure we have a solid parts list with no spec conflicts before we start spending money and time to build this thing.

+

+

As the Help Stamp Out CVS In Your Lifetime fund has received $965 and I said I’d match that, even the Xeon proposal is within reach. Though I don’t mind admitting that I wasn’t expecting to have to match quite so much generosity and the thought of spending $900 on the machine makes me swallow a bit hard. If the gentleman who instigated the Xeon proposal is still willing to toss a couple of bitcoins at it, I won’t be too proud to accept.

+

Plans are not yet final, but John Bell (who started this party with his $100 “Get a real computer, kid!” donation) says he’s eager to do the build at his place in Toledo. Then he’ll haul it out here and we’ll do final installation and system qualification, probably sometime in mid-November.

+

I’ve already had one nomination for the next CVS mammoth to get speared: Gentoo. I’ve sent an offer but seen no response yet. NetBSD is definitely on my list. I’ll cheerfully accept suggestions of other deserving targets.

+

Not to forget that I do Subversion repositories too. I’ve actually converted more of those than CVS ones, I think – Battle For Wesnoth, Hercules, Roundup, and Network Utility Tools are the ones that leap to mind.

diff --git a/20141022004751.blog b/20141022004751.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f674295 --- /dev/null +++ b/20141022004751.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +Proving the Great Beast concept +

Wendell Wilson over at TekSyndicate had a good idea – run the NetBSD repo conversion on a machine roughly comparable to the Great Beast design. The objective was (a) to find out if it freakin’ worked, and (b) to get a handle on expected conversion time and maximum working set for a really large conversion.

+

The news is pretty happy on all fronts.

+

+

The test was run on a dual Xeon 2660v3 10 core, 256GB memory and a 3.0GHz clock, with conventional HDs. This is less unlike the Great Beast design than it might appear for benchmarking purposes, because the central algorithms in cvs-fast-export can’t use all those extra cores very effectively.

+

The conversion took 6 hours and 18 minutes of wall time. The maximum working set was about 19.2GB. To put this in perspective, the repo is about 11GB large with upwards of 286,000 CVS commits. The resulting git import stream dump is 37GB long.

+

The longest single phase was the branch merge, which took about 4.4 hours. I’ve never seen computation dominate I/O time (just shy of two hours) before – and don’t think I will again except on exceptionally huge repositories.

+

A major reason I needed to know this is to get a handle on whether I should push micro-optimizations any further. According to profiling the best gains I can get that way are about 1.5%. Which would have been about 5 minutes.

+

This means software speed tuning is done, unless I find an algorithmic improvement with much higher percentage gains.

+

There’s also no longer much point in trying to reduce maximum working set. Knowing conversions this size will fit comfortably into 32GB of RAM is good enough!

+

We have just learned two important things. One: for repos this size, a machine in the Great Beast class is sufficient. For various reasons, including the difficulty of finding processors with dramatically better single-thread performance than a 3GHz 2660v3, these numbers tell us that five hours is about as fast as we can expect a conversion this size to get. The I/O time could be cut to nearly nothing by doing all the work on an SSD, but that 4.4 hours will be much more difficult to reduce.

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The other thing is that a machine in the Great Beast class is necessary. The 18GB maximum working set is large enough to leave me in no doubt that memory access time dominated computation time – which means yes, you actually do want a design seriously optimized for RAM speed and cache width.

+

This seems to prove the Great Beast’s design concept about as thoroughly as one could ask for. Which means (a) all that money people dropped on me is going to get used in a way well matched to the problem, neither underinvesting nor overinvesting, and (b) I just won big at whole-systems engineering. This makes me a happy Eric.

+

UPDATE: More test results. Wendell reports that the same conversion run on a slightly different Beast-class box with a 400Mhz slower clock but 5MB more RAM cache turned in very similar times – including, most notably, in the compute-intensive merge phase. This confirms that more cache compensates for less clock on this load, as expected.

diff --git a/20141024061857.blog b/20141024061857.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e5ab3f1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20141024061857.blog @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +Moving the NetBSD repository +

Some people on the NetBSD tech-repository list have wondered why I’ve been working on a full NetBSD repository conversion without a formal request from NetBSD’s maintainers that I do so.

+

It’s a fair question. An answer to it involves both historical contingency and some general issues about moving and mirroring large repositories. Because of the accident that a lot of people have recently dropped money on me in part to support an attack on this problem, I’m going to explain both in public.

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+

First, the historically contingent part:

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1. Alan Barrett tried to run a full conversion of NetBSD using cvs-fast-export last December and failed (OOM). He then engaged me and we spent significant effort trying to reduce the program’s working set, but could not prevent OOM on either of the machines we were using. Because Alan was willing to work on this at some length, I formed the idea that there was real demand for a full NetBSD conversion.

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2. The NetBSD repo is large and old. I wanted a worst-possible-case (or near worst-possible-case) to test the correctness of the tool on. I knew there might be larger repositories out there (and now it appears that Gentoo’s is one such) but for obvious historical reasons I thought NetBSD would be an exemplary near-worst case. Thus, it would be a worthy test even if the politics to get the result deployed didn’t pan out.

+

I have since been told that NetBSD actually has a git mirror of its CVS repository produced with a two-step conversion: CVS -> Fossil -> git.

+

This makes me nervous about the quality of the result. Repo conversions produce artifacts due to ontological mismatches between the source and target systems; a two-stage process will compound the problems. Which in turn gives rise exactly the kinds of landmines one least wants – not obvious on first inspection but chronically friction-causing down the road.

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I’m not speaking theoretically about this; I’m currently dealing with a major case of landmine-itis in the Emacs repository, which has (coincidentally) just been scheduled for a full switch to git on Nov 11. I’ve been working on that conversion for most of a year.

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For a really high-quality conversion even a clean single-stage move needs human attention and polishing. This is why reposurgeon is designed to amplify the judgment of a human operator rather than attempt to fully mechanize the conversion.

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I understand there is internal controversy within NetBSD over a full switch to git. I don’t really want to get entangled in the political part of the discussion. However, as a technical expert on repository conversions and their problems, I urge the NetBSD team to move the base repository to something with real changesets as soon as possible.

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It doesn’t have to be git. Mercurial would do; even Subversion would do, though I don’t recommend it. I’m not grinding an axe for git here, I’m telling you that the most serious, crazy-making traps for the unwary lie in the move from a version-control system without full coherent changesets to a VCS with one. Once you have that conversion done and clean, moving the repository content to any other such system is relatively easy.

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(Again, I’m not speaking theoretically – reposurgeon is the exact tool you want for such cross-conversions.)

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This is my offer: I have the tools and the experience to get you to the changeset-oriented VCS of your choice. I can do a really good job, better than you’ll ever get from mechanical mirroring or a batch converter, because I know all about common conversion artifacts and how to do things like lifting old version references and ignore-pattern files.

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It looks like my tools are git-oriented because they rely on git fast-import streams as an interchange format, but I’m not advocating git per se – I’m urging you to move somewhere with changesets. It’s a messy job and it wants an expert like me on it, but it only has to be done once. Afterwards, the quality of your developer experience and your future technical options with regard to what VCS you actually want to use will both greatly improve.

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Related technical point: the architectural insight behind my tools is that the git folks created something more generally useful than they understood when they defined import streams. Having an editable transfer format that can be used to move content and metadata relatively seamlessly between VCSes is as important in the long term as the invention of the DVCS – possibly more so.

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cvs-fast-export emits a fast-import stream not because I’m a git partisan (I actually rather wish hg had won the mindshare war) but because that’s how you get to a sufficiently expressive interchange format.

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I’ll mail this to tech-repository once I can find out how to sign up.

diff --git a/20141029131446.blog b/20141029131446.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6823cad --- /dev/null +++ b/20141029131446.blog @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +When hackers grow old +

Lately I’ve been wrestling with various members of an ancient and venerable open-source development group which I am not going to name, though people who regularly follow my adventures will probably guess which one it is by the time I’m done venting.

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Why it so freaking hard to drag some people into the 21st century? Sigh…

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I’m almost 56, an age at which a lot of younger people expect me to issue semi-regular salvos of get-off-my-lawn ranting at them. But no – I find, that, especially in technical contexts, I am far more likely to become impatient with my age peers.

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A lot of them really have become grouchy, hidebound old farts. And, alas, it not infrequently falls to me to be the person who barges in and points out that practices well-adapted for 1995 (or, in the particular case I’m thinking of, 1985) are … not good things to hold on to decades later.

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Why me? Because the kids have little or no cred with a lot of my age peers. If anyone’s going to get them to change, it has to be someone who is their peer in their own perception. Even so, I spend a lot more time than seems just or right fighting inertia.

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Young people can be forgiven for lacking a clue. They’re young. Young means little experience, which often leads to unsound judgment. It’s more difficult for me to forgive people who have been around the track often enough that they should have a clue, but are so attached to The Way It’s Always Been Done that they can’t see what is in front of their freaking noses.

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(News flash: I really don’t have a conservative temperament. I find it wryly amusing how often both conservatives and non-conservatives who argue politics with me fail to notice this.)

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OK, now let’s talk about GNU ChangeLog files. They were a fine idea, a necessary one even, in 1985. The idea was to use a single ChangeLog entry to document a group of related changes to multiple files. This was a reasonable adaptation to absent or extremely primitive version control. I know this because I was there.

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Even in 1995, or as late as the early 2000s, many version control systems didn’t have changesets. That is, there was no or only weak support for grouping multiple file modifications into a single retrievable object with a comment attached to the object rather than to individual file modifications. CVS, the system in widest use then, only faked changesets – and did it so badly that many people felt they couldn’t rely on that feature. ChangeLog files still made some functional sense.

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But then Subversion – with real changesets – achieved wide acceptance through its beta releases around 2003 and its 1.0 in 2004. It should have been obvious then, even before the new wave of DVCSes that began a year later, that there was a culture clash a comin’. Because if your project both has a DVCS and uses the ChangeLog convention, they’re fighting for control of the same metadata.

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There are different ways you can adapt. One is to continue to treat the ChangeLogs as the authoritative record of the evolution of the code. In that case, you tend to get stubby or pro-forma commit comments.

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Another is to treat the commit comment log as authoritative. If you do that, you soon begin to wonder why you’re still writing ChangeLog entries at all. The commit metadata has better coherence with the code changes, after all – that’s what it’s designed for.

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(Now imagine a project in which, with the best of intentions, different people are making opposite choices out of these two. Now you have to read both the ChangeLogs and the commit logs to know what’s going on. Friction costs are rising…)

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A third is to try to have it both ways – duplicating commit comment data in a slightly different format in a ChangeLog entry that’s part of the commit. This has all the problems you’d expect with a representation in which there is no single point of truth; one copy gets garbled, or the ChangeLog entry gets modified so that it’s no longer in sync with the allegedly matching commit data, and life gets very confusing for anyone who comes along later and tries to figure out what people were thinking.

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Or, as a senior dev on a Certain Project I Won’t Name just did in email, declaring that commits can include multiple ChangeLog entries and the commit metadata is irrelevant to the Changelogs. Which we still have to write.

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My eyes crossed and my gorge rose when I read that. What kind of fool fails to realize that this is begging for trouble – that, actually, the whole edifice of custom around ChangeLog files is just dead weight and friction drag in a DVCS world with good browsing tools for reliable commit logs?

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Alas, it’s a very particular kind of fool: a hacker who has grown old and rigid. All the rationalizations he will ever utter fail to hide this. He’s attached to tactics that made sense a decade ago but have become counterproductive ceremonies now. If you tried to explain not just about git summary lines but that the correct adaptation for current toolsets is to scrap ChangeLogs entirely … well, that would be insupportable, inconceivable, and just crazy talk.

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Functionally this infuriates me. It is substantially harder to work on that project because of this and related nonsense. And, as badly as it happens to need young developers, that’s a real problem. It has a G+ community well into 4 digits, they’re mostly kids, and they’re not stepping up. Evidently the message has been received on the outside; the devs on this project are ancient mossbacks with inexplicable tribal fixations, and best admired from a good long distance.

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What gives this extra emotional edge for me is that whenever I have to butt heads with a mossback, I keep wondering: will I be like this someday? Worse, am I looking in a mirror, already rigidified and not knowing it? I mean, I get the impression from his web presence that this particular specimen is younger than me. By a good fifteen years.

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I feel mentally agile. I don’t get frustrated by people moving faster than I can handle, I get frustrated by people who can’t keep up with me, who can’t see the obvious. But this self-belief could be just a bad case of Dunning-Krueger effect biting me where I least understand it. Very few things terrify me; this possibility is high on the short list.

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A separately disconcerting thing is that as I get older this sort of collision is happening more often rather than less. Somehow I expected my hacker peers to age more gracefully, to retain their neotenous flexibility even if they were physically aging. Some do indeed seem to be going that way; too many, alas, are not. It is a sadness.

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I’m not sure I have a good finish for this. If I’ve escaped mentally rigidifying (and that’s an if) I think I know at least in part why, but I’m very unsure whether it can be generally replicated – you might need to have a wired-in brain chemistry that matches the strategy. Nevertheless, for whatever it’s worth, here is my advice to young hackers and indeed the young of all kinds.

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You – yes, even you – cannot count on retaining your mental flexibility into middle and old unless you work at it. You have to practice busting out of comfortable mental grooves and regularly checking your assumptions when you’re young, and you have to develop a habit of it that sustains into old age.

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It’s said that the best time for a middle-aged person to start (physically) exercising is thirty years ago. I think the same goes for the habits that might (might!) keep you mentally agile at 56, or 65. Push your envelope. Develop the regular practice of challenging yourself and exiting your comfort zone now so you’ll have it established when you really need it.

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You have to be realistic about this; there’s an optimal-challenge level where you choose an attainable goal and work mentally hard for it. This month I’m going to learn go. Not the game, I already play that (though not very well); the programming language. Not because I really need to for a specific project, but because it’s time to stretch myself.

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Develop that habit. And never let it go.

diff --git a/20141031084501.blog b/20141031084501.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..51ac649 --- /dev/null +++ b/20141031084501.blog @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Cognitive disinhibition: not the whole story of genius +

Here’s an interesting article with a stupid and misleading title on the role of what the author calls “cognitive disinhibition” – a fancy term for “allowing oneself to notice what others miss” – in enabling creative genius.

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While in many ways I could be a poster child for Simonton’s thesis (and I’ll get to those) I also think there are some important things missing from his discussion, which is why I’m blogging about it. The most crucial problem is that his category of “madness” is not sharp enough. I know how to fine it down in a way that I think sheds considerable light on what he is trying to analyze.

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First let’s get through the easy stuff. Go read the article. It’s short.

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I was especially struck, in a positive way, by Simonton’s discussion of childhood factors that promote the ability to disinhibit cognition. He mentions “bilingualism” – ding ding ding, been there and done that and I have always thought it helped free me from over-dependence on fixed linguistic categories. It’s easier to bear in mind that the map is not the territory when you have two different maps.

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Also, under “various forms of developmental adversity, such as parental loss, economic hardship, and minority status”, yeah, I think congenital cerebral palsy qualifies not just as developmental adversity but as the right kind. It’s not news to anyone who has studied or dealt with CP kids that they are disproportionately gifted and bright. Rage against the limitations of the body can lead to a sharper mind.

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More things he gets right: I think it is correct that geniuses are distingished from madmen in part by higher general intelligence. The brightest people I have known are hyper-sane. I can be precise about that: elsewhere I have defined sanity as the process by which you continually adjust your beliefs so they are predictively sound. Extremely intelligent people tend to be extremely good at this; it’s the half-bright and merely gifted that are more likely, in my experience, to be unsane or insane (that is, poor at maintaining predictive beliefs).

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Now we get to what he’s missed. First, Simonton writes as though he believes that only cognitive disinhibition can produce genius-level conceptual breakthrough. I think this is mistaken; there’s an alternate path through plain hard work, climbing the mountain foot by foot rather than teleporting to the peak in a flash of lightning Zen insight.

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For an instructive study in the contrast I like to cite two instances from the history of chemistry: Kekulé’s discovery of the benzene ring versus the elucidation of the double-helix structure of DNA. Kekule’s breakthrough was a sudden insight, an eruption from his unsconscious. By contrast, there does not seem to have been any large aha moment in the discovery of the structure of DNA. That was done by painstaking collection of data, meticulous analysis, and the gradual elimination of competing possibilities.

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There’s a kind of romanticism in many people that wants to see genius only in the sudden lightning flashes. I think I know better; I have a lot more lightning Zen insights than most people but even for me they’re comparatively rare. Most of the time, when I pull off something that looks like creative genius it’s because I’ve worked very hard at getting up the mountain.

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Matters are confused by the fact that the kind of immersive effort that gets you “genius” by hard work is also an important enabler, a setup condition, for the lightning Zen insight. But having experienced both I believe they are different processes. Possibly related to the distinction between “theory one” and “theory two” thinking that’s fashionable lately.

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Most importantly, I think Simonton’s category of “madness” is de-focused in a way that harms his thesis. The most important truth about human psychology that I have learned in many years is that psychosis (which is what Simonton is identifying as madness) is a very specific thing, not merely “cognitive disinhibition” but a loss of the ability to maintain an integrated sense of the self. As I have put it elsewhere, the delusional psychotic frantically spins his theory-building wheels because he cannot identify the fragments of his disassociated mentation as “self” and must therefore attribute them to external agency.

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Armed with that insight, I think we can improve on Simonton’s thesis in a major way. I propose that cognitive disinhibition is not a primary feature of madness but a secondary effect of the dissassociation of the self, the society of mind cracking up into Babel. Conversely, the key trait that distinguishes functional geniuses (especially the cohort in the hard sciences that Simonton notes are unusually sane) is the combination of cognitive disinhibition with an exceptionally well-developed ability to distinguish self from other in perception – anti-insanity, as it were.

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Again, this is partly informed by my own experience. I have always had a very firm grasp on who I am. It wasn’t until well into adulthood that I realized that “identity crisis” isn’t just a literary conceit or self-indulgent silliness. People really get those! I sort of understand that now, intellectually, but the possibility of having an “identity crisis” myself…no. It would take drugs or brain damage to do that to me.

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I think there are hints about the neurology involved from the study of how the brain acts during meditation. It’s been found (can’t track down a source, alas) that some kind of meditation temporarily shut down portions of the right parietal lobe that are responsible for maintaining our representation of the physical self-other distinction. The meditator feels “one with everything” for exactly as long as the wiring that tells him he isn’t remains switched off. This isn’t quite like madness – the meditator’s sense of self is unitary and extended rather than fragmented – but I think it is instructively similar.

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All this has some functional implications. It tells us we needn’t fear cognitive disinhibition in itself – it’s not causative of madness, it’s a near-accidental side effect of same. What it means for how we cultivate more genius is less clear. Probably the best strategy would be a combination of intelligence-enhancing nootropics with training to enhance the self-other distinction, if we had any real clue how to do the latter.

diff --git a/20141105235038.blog b/20141105235038.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bf396b0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20141105235038.blog @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Chipping away at CVS +

I’ve just shipped a new version of cvs-fast-export, 1.26. It speeds the tool up more, more, more – cranking through 25 years and 113300 commits of Emacs CVS history, for example in 2:48. That’s 672 commits a second, for those of you in the cheap seats.

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But the real news this time is a Python wrapper called ‘cvsconvert’ that takes a CVS repository, runs a conversion to Git using cvs-fast-export, and then – using CVS for checkouts – examines the CVS and git repositories side by side looking for translation glitches. It checks every branch tip and every tag.

+

Running this on several of my test repos I’ve discovered some interesting things. One such discovery is of a bug in CVS. (Yeah, I know, what a shock…)

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CVS uses the RCS state field value of “dead” to mark files that have been deleted. I found a case in the CVS repo of a project called “timidity” where a file had somehow ended up with state dead at rev 1.2, Exp (the default live state) at 1.3, and dead again at its final revision of 1.4. This confused CVS badly; a checkout keyed to a tag made after 1.3 but before 1.4 should have included the file but did not.

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This showed up as a defect (mismatched file manifests) in cvsconvert. I spent half a day looking for where cvs-fast-export had gone wrong before I figured out that cvs-fast-export was doing what the metadata in the master said it should – it was CVS that had screwed the pooch. Annoying, but not very surprising.

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This was an example of the most common kind of defect – files that had been deleted in CVS showing up under tags in gitspace when they didn’t under the corresponding CVS tags. Maybe eventually I’ll figure out how to perfectly match CVS’s behavior here, but it’s not really a big deal – there tend to be only a few of these per CVS repository and a few minutes’ work with reposurgeon will snip them off nicely.

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Reassuringly, I found no cases anywhere of manifest mismatches or file differences at master or any other branch tip. Well, other than some trivial file differences due to CVS keyword expansion, and those can be suppressed.

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The design approach of cvsconvert seems quite successful. I may try writing something parallel to it to sanity-check Subversion lifts.

diff --git a/20141107013924.blog b/20141107013924.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fd7aca4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20141107013924.blog @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +I wrote a version-control system today +

I wrote a version-control system today. Yes, an entire VCS. Took me 14 hours.

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Yeah, you’re looking at me like I’m crazy. “Why,” you ask, quite reasonably, “would you want to do a thing like that? We’re not short of powerful VCSes these days.

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That is true. But I got to thinking, early this morning, about the fact that I haven’t been able to settle on just one VCS. I use git for most things, but there’s a use case git doesn’t cover. I have some document directories in which I have piles of things like HOWTOs which have separate histories from each other. Changes in them are not correlated, and I want to be able to move them around because I sometimes do that to reorganize them.

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What have I been using for this? Why, RCS. The ancient Revision Control System, second oldest VCS in existence and clinging tenaciously to this particular niche. It does single-file change histories pretty well, but its UI is horrible. Worse than git’s, which is a pretty damning comparison.

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Then I got to thinking. If I were going to design a VCS to do this particular single-file, single-user job, what would it look like? Hm. Sequential integer revision numbers, like Subversion and Mercurial used locally. Lockless operation. Modern CLI design. Built-in command help. Interchange with other VCSes via git import streams. This sounds like it could be nice…

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Then, the idea that made it inevitable. “I bet.” I thought, “I could write this thing as a Python wrapper around RCS tools. Use them for delta storage but hide all the ugly parts.”

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Thus, SRC. Simple Revision Control, v0.1.

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This first version is a very rough cut. It does all the basic VCS things – commits, checkouts, diff listings, tags – but the implementation is fragile. The first other person to look at it has reported that it inexplicably fails when you set EDITOR=vi. (UPDATE: This is already fixed.)

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Still…read the manual page to see where it’s going (I wrote the manual page before the code). Most of the UI is shamelessly swiped from Subversion – I simplified where it made sense.

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Yes, I will implement branching and import/export. There will be Emacs VC support, too. The overall emphasis will be on keeping it simple and light, a handy small tool for the jobs where a real VCS would be overkill. And if it goes sproing – hey, the masters are RCS files, you have an easy recovery path.

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SRC – RCS as if user interface mattered. SRC – maybe Rome wasn’t built in a day, but this tool was. SRC – when you care enough to use the very least. Thank you, I’ll be here all week.

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And if you’re thinking “Hey, that’s cheating! You didn’t really write a VCS, you let RCS do the hard parts!”, why, doing that is downright traditional. CVS was implemented – badly – the same way. But we’ve learned a lot in the quarter-century since, and know what mistakes not to repeat.

diff --git a/20141109150617.blog b/20141109150617.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cde9de8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20141109150617.blog @@ -0,0 +1,91 @@ +SRC 0.3 – ready for the adventurous +

My low-power, low-overhead version control system, SRC, is no longer just a stake in the ground. It is still a determinedly file-oriented wrapper around RCS (and will stay that way) but every major feature except branching is implemented and it has probably crossed the border into being useful for production.

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The adventurous can and should try it. You’re safe if it blows up because the histories are plain RCS files. But, as previously noted, it’s RCS behind an interface that’s actually pleasant to use. (You Emacs VC-mode users pipe down; I’m going to explain why you care in a bit.)

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The main developments today include a fairly complete regression-test suite (already paying large dividends in speeding up progress) and a “src status” command that will look very familiar to Subversion/git/hg users. There’s a hack behind that status command I’m rather proud of; I’ll talk about that, too.

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Presented for your perusal, some command synopses. In all of the following, A ‘revision’ is a 1-origin integer, or a tag name designating an integer revision. A revision range is a single revision or a pair of revisions separated by”-” or “..”. Unless otherwise noted under individual commands, the default revision is the tip revision on the current branch and the default range is all revisions on the current branch.

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The token “–” tells the command-line interpreter that revision-specs and subcommands are done – everything after it is a filename, even if it looks like a subcommand or revision number.

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+src help [command]
+   Displays help for commands.
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+src add ['file'...]
+   Initialize new project histories for specified files. Creates
+   the repository directory if required.
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+src commit [- | -m 'commentstring' | -f 'commentfile'] ['file'...]
+   Enters a commit for specified files. Separately to each one.
+   With '-', take comment text from stdin; with '-m' use the
+   following string as the comment; with '-f' take from a file.
+   ci is a synonym for commit.
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+src checkout ['revision'] ['file'...]
+   Refresh the working copy of the file(s) from their history files.
+   co is a synonym for checkout.
+
+src status ['file'...]
+   A = added, U = unmodified, M = modified, ! = missing, ? = not tracked,
+   I = ignored.
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+src cat [revision-range] ['file'...]
+   Send the specified revisions of the files to standard output.
+
+src tag [list|-l|delete|del|-d|rename|-r] ['name'] ['revision'] ['file'...] 
+   Create, rename, or delete a tag. With no or only file arguments, list tags.
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+src branch [list|-l|delete|del|-d|rename|-r] ['name'] ['revision'] ['file'...]
+   Create, rename, switch to, or delete a branch. With no arguments,
+   list branches; the active branch is first in the list. The default
+   branch is 'trunk'.
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+src list ['revision-range'] ['file'...]
+   Sends summary information about the specified commits to standard output.
+   In each file listing, the summary line tagged with '*' is the
+   state that checkout would return to. 
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+src log ['revision-range'] ['file'...]
+   Sends log information about the specified commits to standard output.
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+src diff ['revision-range'] ['file'...]
+   Sends a diff listing to standard output. With no revision spec, diffs
+   the working copy against the last version checked in. With one revno,
+   diffs the working copy against that stored revision; with a range,
+   diff between the beginning and end of the range.
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+src ls
+   List all registered files.
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+src move 'old' 'new'
+   Rename a file and its master. Refuses to step on existing files or masters.
+   'mv' and 'rename' are synonyms.
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+src copy 'old' 'new'
+   Rename a file and its master. Refuses to step on existing files or masters.
+   'cp' is a synonym.
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+src fast-export ['revision-range'] ['file'...]
+   Export one or more projects to standard output as a git fast-import stream.
+   The committer identification is copied from your Git configuration.
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+src fast-import [-p]
+   Parse a git-fast-import stream from standard input. The modifications for
+   each individual file become a SRC history.  Mark, committer and
+   author data, and mark cross-references to parent commits, are preserved
+   in RFC-822-style headers on log comments unless the -p (plain) option
+   is given, in which case this metadata is discarded.
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The omission of ‘src remove’ is a deliberate speed bump.

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The thing is, this is it. You now know everything there is to know about SRC except some implementation details. It is intentionally an exercise in simplicity and least surprise – if anything about the above struck you as surprising or novel it was probably a design error on my part.

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Yes, it really is still RCS underneath. See what can be done with a bit of care and attention to UI design? Er, not to mention a shameless willingness to crib from good examples. UI design should be egoless; if you succumb to the temptation to show off, you’re probably doing it wrong.

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This is all implemented and regression-tested, except for “src branch” which does all the right parsing and sanity checks but doesn’t have back-end methods yet. I also wouldn’t lean on src fast-import too heavily, as the external tool it calls, rcs-fast-import, hasn’t been tested a lot since I wrote it.

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Otherwise it’s good to go. Now I’ll explain the most subtle change in the interface from RCS and why it means VC-mode users should care. In a word: locklessness.

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RCS was designed for an environment of multi-user contention. Working copies of files are read-only until they’re explictly checked out (locked, in RCS-speak) by a user. When locked, the workfile become writable (confusing, I know). When your changes are checked back in, the lock is released and the workfile goes read-only again.

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This is completely inappropriate in today’s era of single-user computers. The fact that RCS workfiles are normally locked is a continuing source of friction – you go to edit, get a failure message, remember you have to do an explicit checkout, and *boom* you just lost whatever train of thought you were on.

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Emacs VC mode didn’t fix this – though it did reduce the checkout friction to one key combination – because at the time I wrote it (1992, I think) locking VCSes had not given way to to merging ones. The most important thing SRC does to RCS is do away with that locking. This means that even through its VC mode (not yet written, on my list) SRC will be more pleasant to use than RCS.

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And let’s not forget the nice Subversion-style plain-integer revision numbers, either. RCS revision IDs are ugly, cluttery things that ought to be hidden in any decent interface.

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Another feature that will improve user experience greatly is the “src status” command. The VC mode for RCS is a complicated mess in large part because RCS has nothing like it natively, so Emacs has to simulate it by directly parsing master files. And there are two cute tricks I invented for SRC that VC mode doesn’t know.

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First trick: suppose you’re trying to tell the difference between U (unmodified) and M (modified) status. I am actually no longer sure what VC does for this – lots of people have hacked on (and overcomplicated) that code since I first wrote it – but looking at the thicket of Lisp I can see it’s a kluge involving a lot of parsing of master files. That sort of thing is error-prone. I was much younger when I wrote it, and perhaps lacking in wisdom.

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Here’s the simple way. When you check out the file (which SRC does immediately after each checkin so as to run lockless) you then call utimes(2) on the master to uptate its modtime. Now you can tell M from U just by checking to see if the workfile was modified after the master. This is really fast because you never have to look at the file contents, just the inode.

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Another cute trick: the fast way to tell A (just added) status from U, which VC doesn’t use, is to look at the size. There’s a threshold size with all empty that any master with actual commits in it can’t get below. Again, this means we get away with just looking at the inode, not the actual file content.

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In fact, I was able to write the entirety of “src status” so it never opens the workfile or master. This means good performance and responsiveness even on slow network file systems. In fact, a status check should be faster under SRC than under plain RCS!

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Now I need to get branching to work. And write that VC back end. Naturally, direct support in reposurgeon is already up.

diff --git a/20141112225043.blog b/20141112225043.blog new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7bf3a27 --- /dev/null +++ b/20141112225043.blog @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Emacs git conversion is done +

Finally. After ten months of work, it’s done. Emacs is fully converted to git. You can clone from git://git.sv.gnu.org/emacs.git and if you have commit rights you can push to it and the changes will stick. The bzr repo is still up but only as an archive.

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Technically, this was reposurgeon’s finest hour. I’ve never done a conversion this big and messy before, as I noted in Ugliest…repository…conversion…ever. I had to write major new features to handle the job. I guess the most obvious of these is the macro facility.

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I don’t expect to have to do one this difficult again. I fervently hope not to have to do one this difficult again.

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As I wrote in Dragging Emacs Forward, my hope is this will let some light and fresh air into Emacs development. New talent, new ideas, revitalizing energy.

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Happy hacking, everyone!

diff --git a/contributors.txt b/contributors.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a7f4863 --- /dev/null +++ b/contributors.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Olivier DOSSMANN diff --git a/extract2makefly.bash b/extract2makefly.bash new file mode 100755 index 0000000..e68273f --- /dev/null +++ b/extract2makefly.bash @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +#!/usr/bin/env bash + +extension=".blog" +srcdir="src" +dbdir="db" +default_author="olivier" +default_tag="import" + +for i in `ls *${extension}` +do + # fetch data + datetime=`basename $i ${extension}` + dY=${datetime:0:4} + dm=${datetime:4:2} + dd=${datetime:6:2} + dH=${datetime:8:2} + dM=${datetime:10:2} + dS=${datetime:12:2} + date=`date -d "${dY}-${dm}-${dd} ${dH}:${dM}:${dS}" +'%s'` + title=`cat $i|head -n 1|sed -e 's#/##g'` + content=`cat $i|sed '1d'` + # write result + echo -e "TITLE = ${title}\nAUTHOR = ${default_author}\nTAGS = ${default_author}" > "${dbdir}/${date},${title}.mk" + echo ${content} > "${srcdir}/${title}.md" + # Display a point so that user can see we have finished something (useless) + echo -n '.' +done +# Implicit Carriage return +echo ""