Transcendental Bloviation

Baby's Talking

2007-06-24T19:06:00.000-07:00

Recently, to the surprise of both my Japanese family here and myself, I've started speaking in Japanese a lot. Perhaps that's somewhat of a surprise to readers here as well. You've seen me write about the travails of technical translation. How is it possible, you must be wondering, that I can read complex engineering documents in Japanese but haven't really been able to speak the language? I've encountered this kind of bemusement among Japanese who have found out that I can translate Japanese patents that thoroughly baffle them, but am otherwise laughably inarticulate in Japanese. Well, how I became literate (selectively, narrowly) is a story for another time. The conundrum du jour is: why am I suddenly blabbing away now in Japanese, almost 12 years after I came to Japan to live?

I was puzzled over this question myself, even as I blithely entered into long conversations with strangers, and spoke to members of my family at lengths that surprised them, over the past few weeks. I had time to think about this question while hiking Takao-zan yesterday -- though not as much time as those hikes used to give me for mulling and theorizing. As it turned out, I spent half my ascent breathlessly chatting with a Japanese mountaineer who (I suppose) took an interest in me because I was the only person in his age range who could keep up with him on the trail. (And that wasn't the only extended conversation with a stranger yesterday. I fell into two more before I got home.)

One answer that occurred to me: I'm speaking Japanese out of sheer force of necessity. A brother-in-law who had been shepherding the finances of my extended family and its businesses died about a month ago, and the heir to those responsibilities has not been apparent. Things were left a bit of a mess, financially. Who is qualified to take up family money issues and straighten them out, with or without the help of a professional? This man's bereaved widow? No. Not right now, anyway. How about my wife? No. She is very literate, far more so than most Japanese, but she once called me up at work years ago to ask me what 6 times 7 is, because she couldn't find her calculator. Being literate and pleasantly fluent might have to take a back seat to being numerate, and these people are not very numerate. It looks like I've got to take up the money problems, and that's going to require speaking Japanese.

Force of necessity might be only part of the explanation, however, the spark on the kindling. The problem with necessity as a full explanation is that there have been more than a few sparks of crisis in the past decade or so, with no blaze resulting. If anything, the failure of those events to bring me out of the shell only dampened any ambition to speak Japanese fluently, an ambition that seemed unrealistic anyway given that I'm no longer young. I didn't start serious study of Japanese until I was 40. This year I turned 51. What could my future chances possibly be?

Well, here's an odd theory: it took me a long time to gain some fluency in Japanese because it takes me a long time to gain fluency in any language, with my native language being an excellent case in point. I could hardly stutter out my name when asked, at age 9. I was still very tongue-tied at age 12. I was reading like crazy, of course, but I was not a terribly good listener -- my thoughts tended to drift while being spoken to at any length. (Early warning sign on a first grade report card: "Does not always follow instructions.") In puberty, however, something began to click. I became outspoken in class (even though the prospect initially made my heart poiund), I learned to distract teachers with questions that interested them and I got them talking -- to me, and only to me, even with 30 other students in the class. In fact, I often got so much credit for "classroom participation" that my incredible laziness about doing homework was usually given a pass. By age 25, I'd go to parties in Berkeley, gab a mile a minute with any interesting person I could find, and was often handed a conversational plum at the end: "So ... where did you get your PhD?" (Dirty little secret about me: I never even got a bachelor's degree. A long story, don't ask.) A creative writing teacher at College of Marin once said to me, "You're 20, you look 17, but you talk like a 35-year-old man."

I'm a developmental oddity, that's all. Some part of my brain with whom I'm not on speaking terms (whose existence I didn't even suspect) seems to want circle all around a new language, keeping a watchful distance, then, after ten years, suddenly clobber the problem of speaking it.

So now that it seems I can speak Japanese, with whom should I speak it? Not just with tax accountants and my family. I sure hope not, anyway. That could get seriously dull. In my intensive Japanese school here, we were told, "If you want to learn to speak Japanese, you must make Japanese friends." I despaired of being able to do this (in Japanese anyway), partly blaming myself for starting to learn Japanese too late, partly blaming the culture for being so stand-offish. There may be a grain of truth to these excuses, but now I believe they are mainly just excuses. If I have a challenge now in the language, I don't think it's making friends. That just seems to be happening all by itself, if anything it's happening too fast to be sustainably manageable. Rather, I have to start improving my conversational Japanese fast enough to keep new friends. I know from experience here with trying to be friends with Japanese people speaking English that a person who seems initially interesting can become massively irritating if they keep making the same basic conversational mistakes over and over. I don't want to be like that, in any language.

Well, that's it. Baby's talking. (Baby's yelling, too -- the sparks of crisis have been sending sparks ricocheting off me. I've been spraying my own sparks, too. Now I often have to put out fires started by my anger, in Japanese, as best I can.) Baby's talking, yelling, burning. Baby's having to grow up fast, too. Taking on more responsibility can be like a second puberty, I suppose. Watch this space.

Personals ad: You, in burkha. Me, panting. Let's meet!

2007-05-10T07:09:00.000-07:00

Over at Rationally Speaking, they are arguing (in comments on "Between the Scylla of moral absolutism and the Charybdis of moral relativism") about what makes a culture "superior". Dr. Pigliucci's most recent clarification of his metric:

"...the "scale" proposed here is the same that Aristotle had in mind: whatever furthers human flourishing."

Somehow, though, "flourishing" doesn't put us any closer to an answer than "superior". How do you measure "flourish"?

You might find a woman in Saudi Arabia (even one with a PhD?) saying that the burkha promoted "human flourishing" by suppressing the more trivial aspects of being female -- that a society that permits women to be ranked in public by their looks simply devalues women, by forcing them to compete for attention on superficial aspects entirely independent of their worth as individuals. (I should emphasize "public". I once read an account from a westerner invited into the home of a muslim in India. The way his host's wife dressed at home, at least for guests, left him sorely tempted to convert to Islam.) In short: let's hypothesize that public suppression of women's sexuality results in more power for women, all other things being equal.

"Sure," you might reply. "And maybe we'll find an old diary entry of Andrea Dworkin's, conveying some such sentiment, penned at 4am after waking up dyspeptic from eating too much anchovy-pepperoni pizza."

Still, it's not an entirely whacky view even from the point of view of some normal western women. I read an article recently from a woman (an academic, IIRC) who toured some Arab countries, and adopted various modes of coverup as the social situations demanded. When she returned to her native country (Britain IIRC), she was re-exposed to consensus demands about women's appearance that suddenly seemed very uncomfortable.

Now, this isn't to say that one should favor laws requiring women to cover themselves Saudi-style. Still, I look at the French reaction to headscarves on girls in schools, and vaguely recollect a recent proposed law (?) in Britain banning the burkha, and am forced to wonder whether we should adopt any such prohibitionistic approach to whatever problems these dress styles supposedly represent to a secular, liberal, democratic, humanist society.

An anecdote, if you will. Maybe you can make something of it.

My first experience of seeing a woman in the flesh wearing a burkha or anything like it occurred in Berkeley, California, where you'll more likely run into people wearing absolutely nothing. The garb didn't reach all the way down -- she was wearing pants, and I could see that. But from mid-thigh upward, all I could see was her eyes and the skin on her hands. I spotted her half a block away. What to do? Duck into a store? Cross the street? It was distinctly creepy.

"Well," I remember thinking, "Lemme just be cool about this. Yeah, it's weird, but my hometown is weird, that's practically its raison d'etre. She's probably doing this for a term paper in Post-Colonial Comparative Gender Studies or something." So I made only the briefest eye contact with her, from perhaps 10 paces away, then feigned a relaxed stroll, staring off into the middle distance as we passed each other on the sidewalk.

And as we passed each other, she turned to me for just a split second and said, "Hello." Without breaking stride.

And I remember continuing down the street in a slight daze, thinking, "Wow. That was really sexy."

Now: what made it sexy? Whatever your answer -- unless your answer is "Michael Turner clearly needs some professional help" -- I think it goes hand-in-hand with the answer to the question, Why is public nudity (as opposed to glossy pictorials with professional lighting) so NOT sexy?

We tend to think of these dress styles as necessarily sexist. But perhaps that view is simply too (dys-)informed by xenophobia? What makes us prefer to believe that such customs prevail only though reinforcement by women motivated only out of blind allegiance to ideologies of male domination, or simple fear of male retribution (a likely strong component, I'll admit). What about a general recognition that covering up feels like "the great equalizer" of otherwise rather large individual differences in sexual power among women? What if it does favor equality of sexual power for women, and moreover, greater sexual power for women? (In the aggregate, mind you, and on average, if not for the exceptional hot babe, sweating underneath all that cloth.) Might we not consider that more egalitarian, more liberating in some sense, and more likely to promote this Aristotelian ideal of "human flourishing"?

No. Of course not. How stupid of me to even suggest such a thing. I don't know what came over me. Sorry. I'll leave you all alone now. Whatever you do, don't think about this. Especially, don't think about websites full of GIFs of women's eyes, framed in black cloth, staring out at you. With delicate eye-shadow and lush lashes. And audio icons that, when clicked, purr soft and friendly greetings. (Websites which I am NOT now googling desperately for, than you for asking.)

Presidential tag clouds: parsing the word salad

2007-05-07T22:30:00.000-07:00

You have to pan the stream of blogging about blogging with an eye peeled for the real nuggets -- most of what glitters in the silt turns out to be fool's gold. Marc Cooper blogs about blogging rarely, but does it exceptionally well. In a recent entry, he turned up TechPresident.com, immediately hooking me. I was most drawn to its discussion of tag cloud analysis on the speeches of presidential candidates. Brute-force broad-brush text analysis holds little technological fascination for me, since it's as much a source of unintended comedy as illumination. I say: do text analysis either with simple tools, or -- until the day when true Natural Language Understanding arrives -- not at all. Tag clouds (and text clouds) may fit the bill.

In the tag clouds found for Dem candidates at Pollster.com, Obama has the highest total wordcount for statistical purposes, and one of the least issue-specific clouds. Cf. Biden, all over the map on sometimes-obscure issues. Floating around in Obama's mix, you struggle for specificity -- hardly a “frame” in sight. Does “around” connote some political charge these days? Am I missing the dog-whistle note in “going”? Can we be sure that when he says “sure” (as he apparently does quite often) he’s really sure? He uses the word “families” quite frequently, as Bill Clinton did, and as Dubya did until 9/11. (Guess what the big word is *after* 9/11. Hint: it starts with a “t”.) Apart from that -- an apparent nullity from a not-insubstantial speaker. What gives?

Yes, Obama says real things. Obama wonks a lot, a whole lot, but on a lot of different topics, thus cancelling out any particular topic in his tag clouds. Of course, if you go his site, you can see videos of him winning the popularity contest handily. These clips won’t strain your powers of attention, and will only vaguely direct you to one issue focus or another. But you can also find long speeches in which topics like putting the world’s nuclear enrichment programs under an umbrella organization is just one of three parts. He can talk for 20 minutes about nuclear terrorism prevention, seriously wonky stuff, rather than about going mano-a-mano with terrorists, the stuff of sound bites. "Uranium" won’t pop out in his tag clouds because he goes at the problem from an “ounce of prevention” angle, while talking about a lot of other ounces, all over the political map.

In a way almost blatantly at odds with his ostensible strategy of direct popular conversation, Obama’s real audience for all this verbiage looks like the specialized political classes — evangelical leaders on the Dem side of the spectrum, high-level federal bureaucrats, business leaders, opinion-makers on specific policy issues. In these speeches, he greets initial applause with a slightly dour machine-gun spray of “thank you, thank you, thank you”, and almost winces when scattered clapping erupts in mid-sentence. The message in that, clearly: “Shut the fuck up, because what I’m going to say here is about stuff that matters to YOU, the serious student of policy, regardless of how you feel about ME. I’ve got a lot of material to cover. So don’t waste my time.” He subdues his audience every time: Yes, Professor Obama: we're listening. He gives these special audiences a heads-up on what an Obama presidency is going to mean to them in career terms.

Under the apparent vagueness suggested by Obama's tag cloud, you can see what I regard as truly brilliant strategy: for now, let the other candidates hammer away on getting the votes that he can get almost effortlessly with a smile and a wave, with his faintly Lincolnesque persona in formal speeches to open crowds, with his faintly (Bill) Clintonesque persona in the more informal settings. For now -- it's still early -- he concentrates on building up expectations among the people whose work he'll directly affect, day-to-day, if he reaches the Oval Office. The audience is not even particularly partisan. These two terms of Dubya will leave quite a few GOP political appointees in office after 2008, and they will greatly appreciate knowing where Obama is coming from, in various policy arenas.

Cf. Hillary. Hillary has gotten really big on saying “president”. President, president, president — she just loves to say “president”. She doesn’t need to provide detailed career-navigation clues to the political classes, because they already know that her administration will be Billary: The Sequel. The likely collocations: "This president" (note the subtle hiss), and "As president" (softly pointing "Me, me, me: the first woman president. Start believing now, so that by the time you get to the polls, you'll feel like you're re-electing me.")

Edwards is #2 in the upstart-popularity sweepstakes with Obama. When you're #2, you try harder. For him, for now, it's all about votes from the gut, and he knows it. He even has helpful Lakovian Framing happening by accident in his tag cloud, in alphabetical order, stuff you’d have to pay cubic dollars to political consultants to figure out, after they got that nattering George Lakoff guy out of the room:

America - believe

health - important

president - question

states - united

Of course, those happy accidents are almost certainly helped along by cubic money paid to political consultants.

For you history buffs out there, Chirag Mehta's US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud page is great fun. The biggest word in the presidential terms leading up to the Civil War? “Constitution”. If that one starts popping out again in future presidential-speech tag clouds, you might consider gradually liquidating your assets and moving the cash to off-shore accounts.

Debunking the value of debunking?

2007-05-06T23:29:00.000-07:00

Entirely by accident (well, sort of), I recently joined the Tokyo chapter of The Brights. Possibly in response to what might be called my "friendly collision" with this group, its organizer just sent a message about a change of group emphasis. The gist was: was "less debunking, more fun".

It somehow reminded me of an International Herald Tribune Teaching the Controversy". Adding to the brew, in private e-mail to me, the Tokyo Brights organizer pointed out the Tony Kehoe being the person to talk to if you're interested.) Both gave me yet more food for thought.

Debunking might not be such a useful activity for Brights and Skeptics and their ilk. Not to imply that arguments against a silly proposition are simply wrong, of course. Or even that those who wield those arguments are wrong. Rather, debunking for fun (and for the pros, profit) seems to me a case of too little, too late. If we don't treat the source of silly ideas at the root, silly ideas will continue to flower. Hack at the roots? Many mentalities root themselves in the wrong soil, so perhaps even roots don't make for such good targets. Transplantation? Probably a non-starter: Earth has a whole lot of this "soil", and there's no nicely furnished other planet to move to. We should perhaps think "strategic deployment of micro-nutrients" here, if only because of the scale of the problem. And what better "micro-nutrient" than good schooling, early and often, in critical thinking?

Read the above Michael Balter op-ed before you try to absorb the next item here: in public junior high school and high school, I hated science classes almost as much as I hated Catholic school religion classes in primary school. Perhaps things have changed, but at least one evidently intelligent high school student weighs in suggesting otherwise. Make no mistake, I fancy myself a scientific rationalist, and thought so even when young. Nevertheless, after the transition from parochial to public schools, I saw something about the way science was taught that irritated me. We were told some facts, certain ways of computing things, and given some experiments to do. We were treated to a few sidebar glances at great scientists in our textbooks. Basically, though, the treatment seem to consist of, simply, WE Tell YOU How It IS. I'd gotten enough of that in Catholic school to develop an allergy to it in any form.

Think about the real and potential value of teaching science to young people at all. Why do it? Reductively, one might defend the practice by saying that science yields technology which improves quality of life. So even if you start with tens of millions of junior high school kids forced to take science courses (and many, if not most, hating it), and get only a relative handful of productive scientists out the far end of the process (after high school, bachelor's degree programs, graduate programs and post-docs), the investment tends to pay dividends.

But look at that ratio -- tens of millions of students not-so-willingly science-educated, and perhaps only a few thousand top scientists produced in the end. What a vast expense of resources for such a small yield! And perhaps a vaste waste, too.

In one study I read years ago, about what makes for a productive scientist, it was found that about 1/3rd of all scientists deemed most productive by their peers had originally entered a small liberal arts college with no particular ambition of becoming a scientist. Small liberal arts colleges can't represent more than perhaps 3% of the total student body in college education, and yet they apparently outproduce other colleges by a factor of ten, starting with what seems like unlikely material in an unlikely context. It seems the most economical system for producing the scientists would concentrate almost evangelistic science teaching resources on the rare post-secondary student who embodies a nice balance of open-mindedness and critical thinking, and also happens to be possessed of an above-average esthetic sense.

One could argue that what scientists produce, and the technological value those results often have, forms only a small (though undeniably significant) part of the economic story. Pre-college science courses help cultivate the cadres of technologists, and even of "paratechnologists", from nurses to electronics technicians, required to deliver the products and services that science and the resulting technologies make possible. Again, I wonder if the economic argument fails. The best job training takes place ON the job. Secondary education inevitably lags the state of the art in any field.

Let's call in the reinforcements, move to the high ground: what about knowledge for its own sake? Of course knowledge has its own rewards. But you'll seldom find anyone more boring than the the guy (and isn't almost always a guy?) who seems to know everything, yet somehow disgorges that knowledge without much understanding of why things are the way they are. Chocking people's brains with facts isn't really very productive or valuable in itself.

Still, that last suggests convergence on a possible answer: perhaps science teaching should concern itself with Stories of the Pleasure (OK, maybe the agony, too) of Finding Things Out, imparting thinking skills that you can apply to almost any question in life. (While studying the lives of great physicists, I was amused to discover that memorizing formulae was far less prized as a skill than being able to rapidly re-derive formulae.) Newton approached the problem of gravity by Finding Out, incidentally co-inventing calculus (though the underpinnings of his math stretch back to the ancient Greeks.) We don't celebrate what he "knew" about theology and alchemy, those grab-bags of "facts" with little basis in reality and little coherent theory from which to derive anything new. We celebrate what he figured out.

More concretely, I suggest studying science as history, along with history. Teach it as the history of some conversations, with ever-better ways to argue about the natural world emerging slowly, not just as a series of "debunking" experiments. Teach biographies of great minds who still had their faults and foibles and fixed ideas, as we all do. But avoid hagiography - rather, focus on how few of them were lone wolves, on the value of a scientific community, even with all its squabbles and jagged personalities. Don't give the human sciences short shrift in this, but perhaps even emphasize them -- after all, if we want teaching the scientific way of thinking to almost everyone has any possible meaning for almost everyone, it should be in making people better participants in democracies. And that amounts to making them better thinkers about how people behave. All the hard-science reasoning skills in the world won't help you in the world unless you can transfer those reasoning skills to other, more humanistic, domains.

In this view of the matter, Teach the Controversy looks like precisely the right approach, even if the results are likely to backfire on its original ID organizers. (Perhaps, if the study Balter points to turns out to be indicative, ID will be force to repackage and "rebrand"?) Students should not absorb the theory of evolution as a regurgitable dogma, but as the result of many good -- even great -- minds (all initially Creationist) being changed not just by Darwin's individual process of trying to discern the truth of the origin of species, but also by Darwin's social process of putting that truth across convincingly to his peers.

In the controversy we've seen so far about Creationism, Evolution and ID, much has been made of the point that evolution can be a fact even if it's not a complete theory (which it isn't, even now), and that there's nothing wrong with students being told that it's not complete. Let's extend that to how we teach the human sciences. It's in the nature of reasoning about very complex phenomena that completion often remains elusive. Among the complex phenomena students could be taught to reason about (through the examples of successes and failures of reasoning in history) is political processes, especially if they are understood through what's now known in sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics and even the branch of linguistiscs called "sociolinguistics."

So how does all this tie into my subject line? To repeat, debunking is usually too little, too late. The weeds are already too deep and thick by the time debunking seems called for, and you'll never find a weedwhacker for neurons. Inculcating a cultural pattern that favors reason has been, to steal from Richard Dawkins' title, a process of Climbing Mount Improbable, and the rigors of the routes still leave too few clustered at the peaks. Perhaps, as Daniel Dennett claims, Freedom Evolves. However, if history teaches us anything, it teaches us that dramatic reversals happen; better to guard against them proactively. Chance favors the prepared mind, but we see too few prepared minds -- or rather, too many minds prepared to accept various chance, silly ideas without question. To what extent does accepting ideas without much question -- whether simply because they are novel, or simply because they are established -- still primarily stem from how our educational system prepares young minds, no matter how true (in some narrow, purely factual, sense) its teachings may be?

Teaching science -- all sciences, including the human sciences -- as flexible processes of questioning and narrowing down possibilities, rather than as fixed systems of answer-generators, should help everyone meet the challenges of citizenship in a democracy better prepared. Good democracies depend on good citizens, and good government makes life better for almost everyone. Nobody loses, really. Debunking doesn't really reach far enough, soon enough, to have much to offer in reaching this desirable outcome. At best, it's reactive, it provides ammunition for rear-guard defense. But a defensive posture alone seldom suffices to survive and thrive. Providing educational resources for a few ardent defenders won't get us very far up this particular peak of Mount Improbable.

Any realistic solution may require a change (even if only a subtle change) in the very nature of institutionalized education. To shift the metaphor from "soil micro-nutrients" to something more like "genetic engineering of soil bacteria", one can see a kind of meme-design challenge : how to implant self-propagating thoughts about education that favor a culture of critical discourse, even for the average citizen. If teaching science as the history of fallible human beings, seeking truth in fallible (but ever-better) ways, is a key strategy, perhaps an EQ ("Emotional Intelligence") strategic element must trump pure IQ tactics: it's very much about how you leave your opponent feeling, and less about wether you "won -- on points." That's something we might learn from Darwin himself.

Space: The Final Window of Opportunity?

2007-04-24T22:08:00.000-07:00

Bad meme. Bad, bad meme. We have only a few more decades. Then Earth becomes a stinking, overpopulated, overpolluted hell-hole from which humanity cannot escape, within which humanity may even extinguish itself. The narrative is usually softened with vaulting rhetoric about how the vast resources of space will save Earth.

The Window of Opportunity meme, though perhaps most strongly associated with Jerry Pournelle, traces goes back to Heinlein at least, and probably much earlier. Lots of SF has been predicated on global Malthusian crises; mix space access into that, and the hybrid scenario may sound apocalyptically compelling. However, it hardly comes across as a brilliant invention as memes go.

spacequotes.com quotes Pournelle:

This generation is crucial; we have the resources to get mankind off this planet. If we don't do it, we may soon be facing a world of 15 billion people and more, a world in which it's all we can do to stay alive; a world without the resources to go into space and get rich... I don't think it will come to that because the vision of the future is so clear to me. We need realize only one thing: we do not inhabit 'Only One Earth.' Mankind doesn't live on Earth. Man lives in a solar system... Given [a] basic space civilization ... we'll have accomplished one goal: no single accident, no war, no one insane action will finish us off." [from A Step Farther Out, 1979]

At spacequotes.com, you will also find Rick Tumlinson construing "sustainable growth" as an oxymoron, where I understand the term to mean "economic growth that catches up to and paces population growth, under the assumption that populations will stabilize." And they probably will. More than a generation has passed since Pournelle declared the Last Chance Generation, and one of the big economic questions of our time, ironically, is "Will China get rich before it gets old?" I.e., will it hit population shrinkage, as we did here in Japan, at a high enough developmental plateau? At its current growth rates, one can safely answer: yes.

Japan offers some interesting earlier precedents for sustainability. Japan appeared to hit a resource-constrained plateau in the Tokugawa period [Jared Diamond's Collapse, for details], and responded intelligently and sustainably:

"The first national census, conducted around 1720, indicates a population of approximately 30 million people, which remained relatively constant throughout the entire two and a half centuries of the EdoPeriod." [See http://www.energybulletin.net/5140.html

Were those Japanese all living hand-to-mouth in subsistence farming? No. In the year 1800 Japan enjoyed the status of most urbanized nation in the world. And they achieved this level of social surplus largely without the benefit of technological advances from the West -- advances which, by way of Dutch traders at Dejima, they knew of, but generally didn't adopt out of concerns for destabilizing effects and unsustainable resource consumption. I wouldn't want to live under feudalism, but I doubt the necessity anyway.

So maybe all this blather about how it's inevitable that the Earth will become a stinking hell hole is just that: blather. If the population of Japan, stretched out over an archipelago and speaking many mutually unintelligible dialects, with a long history of bitter internal conflict, could persevere, could overcome resource crunches and reach a higher level of civilization than much of Europe at the time, why not all of Earth in our time?

You can see a lot of manifest-destiny propheteering at spacequotes.com. Oddly, the only quote that touched me at all now (where in my youth I'd have been thrilled by most of them) came from Konrad Lorenz:

"I am convinced that of all the people on the two sides of the great curtain, the space pilots are the least likely to hate each other. Like the late Erich von Holst, I believe that the tremendous and otherwise not quite explicable public interest in space flight arises from the subconscious realization that it helps to preserve peace. May it continue to do so!" [On Aggression, 1963]

Perhaps one could hear some echo of Lorenz from a speaker from one of the Big Bad Bloated Aerospace companies at ISDC '06. He commented on the value of Russians and Americans working together on ISS, and said something like "real love comes not when you're looking at each other, but when you're looking together toward a shared goal." A Hallmark Moment? Perhaps. However, he seemed to offer this sentiment in all sincerity, and I must admit that some of my antipathy toward the whole undeniably-flawed endeavor melted a little just then.

Pournelle seems to come from Heinlein -- that we achieve the most profound and thrilling human unity only when faced with a common enemy. War as a unifier exacts unsustainable costs, however, and only for a unity too artificial to survive long except through perpetual renewal of hostility. In war, even people who hate each other passionately will work hand-in-hand.

Oddly, perhaps we find can greater spiritual achievement in solving a hard (even somewhat arbitrary) problem together. Or perhaps I am very little like most people in this respect. Team sports held little appeal for me, in my youth and even now, though I have great respect for athletes; my parents both taught figure skating. Back in the 80s, I had roommates who were slightly aghast to see me pleased that Katerina Witt (from darkest East Germany) won the women's gold in figure skating at the Olympics, with the favored American taking only bronze. But I merely wanted what I thought best for skating, not for America's image of itself. And fair judging of innovative skating could only improve skating. Does it matter? Do the lessons travel? What does that figure skting do but collect together some rather silly and somewhat arbitrary athletic and esthetic problems, when you look at it coldly? Never mind: people love how those problems get solved, and the better skating gets, the more they love it. Sure, it's all still framed within competition, just a slightly unfortunate means to a good end, in my view. Perhaps attitudes towards space development could benefit more by seeing it as sport and art, with the emphasis on art, rather than as dominance display, or as species escape hatch for the lucky few, who, having escaped, might or might not be motivated to save the rest of us.

Uberman On-Ramp Day ... uh ....

2007-04-21T06:53:00.000-07:00

What happened? Good question. I don't quite understand it myself.

The end of a long stretch of smooth sailing at the ryokan, with a large party leaving after 9 days, forcing errands and interruptions as we went into guest turn-over tasks, certainly contributed to losing momentum. Lesson: when you see turbulence coming up, brace yourself.

Outages on my PC and finally some kind of service changeover at blogger.com soured me on blogging for a while. Lesson: learn to handle frustration better.

A sharp reduction in caffeine withdrawal symptoms, and taking up swimming and meditation, seemed to release a torrent of energy, one that got blown on renewal of bad habits -- arguing on mailing lists (a very bad, very old habit) not least among them. Worse: I stopped swimming and mediating, even drank a full-caf cappucino on one day, with new withdrawal symptoms the next day. Lesson: the coming of good things can have unintended negative consequences. You won't become a better person overnight. Two steps forward, one step back. Smaller, tentative steps work better.

And these bad habits interfered with continuing adopted habits, and with the adoption of new habits. Lesson: guard areas of progress like a hawk, don't add too many life innovations at once.

Finally, all this happened during a rough spot on my Not-So-Secret Software Project. (Specifically, trying to bolt bakari ["just", "only", "approximately/about"] into the grammar of the Japanese parser. As with English "just/only", where you can have "Only John is going to the party," "John is only going to the party", and they mean two different things, bakari forms very freely, requiring augmenting a lot of grammar rules.) My response was to stop working on this project, even though at any given time, plenty of tasks sit on my project to-do list, most of them easy. Today I made progress, by simply noting that many of the test examples for bakari already involved forward references to grammar that I hadn't coded yet; and decided to put the examples and related vocabulary in the regression-testing database, solve the easier problems, and defer the harder ones. Lesson: be gentle on yourself as you're going through an adjustment, keep going where you can.

Why I hate Blogger, Reason #341

2007-04-20T00:13:00.000-07:00

I had no idea that making a "legacy claim" on my own blog would be such a hassle. My blog is "legacy"? What's with that? Why? Why now?

Could it have something to do with the Registry corruption I noticed on a reboot yesterday? With my Blogger password no longer being stored?

I, E-Primus

2007-04-16T06:19:00.000-07:00

Blogging about blogging. What could be duller? Admittedly, some do it well – bloggers who focus on how the blog technology is proceeding, where the medium is going, what it’s good for, and who also write well. But that last is key: a good writer not only grabs you about things you’re interested in, but can also make a subject interesting even if you’ve never heard of it before, or never thought of it as interesting.

Maintaining my blog has entered into my categories of Uberman On-Ramp progress. But what could be more redundant than to mention it? “Oh, and I blogged today.” Yeah, we see that; we also see that you slacked off for three days prior. Thanks for the update, guy.

To be a true category of progress, blogging must be something I’m doing ever better. But blogging is just writing. Sure, the medium features some of its own peculiarities, idioms and conventions, and it has a few usability issues as with anything involving computers. In the end, though, blogging better means writing better.

Hereby resolved:
(1) You won’t see me use the word “I” more than once per paragraph, and never in the first sentence of any paragraph.
(2) I [don’t jump down my throat – the above was a paragraph and the “I” was in quotes!] will try to use E-prime to the extent reasonable.

(No confusion about the first rule, but ... E-prime? What’s that? I’ll get to it in a minute.)

These resolutions were inspired by a recent column by William Safire. He wrote about the politicized uses of the word “existential”, as in“existential threat”. He divined that writers and speechmakers resort to such usage only to pump up the volume and puff up their authority. What does “existential threat” mean, after all, except “a threat to the very existence (of a people or a nation or a way of life), which I must underscore by using a big philosophical word commonly associated with a bleak world-view, nameless dread, and chain-smoking in dingy Left Bank cafes”? Perhaps we should blame Norman Mailer, who (in Armies of the Night, IIRC) tottered drunkenly on stage before a crowd of Vietnam War protesters and proclaimed, “This is an existential moment!”. (But why, Norman? Because, with so many eyes on you, you were that much more convinced of your own existence?)

I digress. [“Gotcha!” cries the reader.]

In this column, Safire made two excellent tangential points:

(1) Frequent use of “I” often sounds egocentric.
(2) “Existential sentences” (for example, ones starting with “There is”), when used sparingly, might have their place, but repeated use makes for dull and pompous reading.

Who would second-guess Safire on writing, even when he’s dispensing pearls of stylistic wisdom only parenthetically? I was brought up short. After all, precious reader time spent on William Safire is, at least potentially, reader time not spent on me, myself and my blog. Millions of blogs compete for many reddened eyeballs. My blog ranks very low in the Great Chain of e-Being. Had it become yet another denizen of the swamp of blogospheric self-absorption? Were my entries full of egotistical I’s, and dreaded existential forms? Could it be time for a writing tune-up?

Cue E-prime. E-prime consists of English shorn of all forms of the verb“to be”. A student of Alfred Korzybski, arch-druid of the nutty semantic cult of General Semantics, invented it because he believed “to be” contributed too much to general vagueness, and, consistent with the teachings of General Semantics (which might be described as “Better living through more precise language”) doing without it would help people see things as they really ... um ... exist? It was an existential moment, and a moment of existential threat, a threat of great moment, to existential sentences everywhere.

Reality caught up with General Semantics. Language will always understate reality, and extreme precision is not only nerdy and dulling, it’s usually redundant in context. We know a lot before anything gets said or written, we fill in the blanks in our minds, and in speech we communicate a great deal non-verbally. Whatever the virtues of E-prime, it was buried when the General Semantics house of cards collapsed.

E-prime resurfaced in a mildly tongue-in-cheek essay published in the Atlantic Monthly, some years ago. The writer noted that nobody can speak pure E-prime, and that adopting it as a style during periods of sustained, intense writing tended to cause the writer to get a headache lasting about one week. (At the end of his piece, he pointed out that you had just read a whole essay written in E-prime without missing “to be”. But also that he had this incredible headache.)

The use of E-prime (within reason) does tend to spruce up prose. Some of its salutary effects might stem from a sort of placebo effect: E-prime forces you to read your own prose more carefully and rewrite it more carefully. As well, finding replacements for all forms of “to be” (and its sneaky variants – the colon for example) forces one to find verbs that usually ... um ... “are” more precise. “What do I really mean?” you ask yourself. You try one verb. Then another. If you’re lucky, you attain bon mot nirvana. If you’re not, at least you’ve done better than usual.

From now on: I, E-Primus. (Gotcha! cries the reader. And Gotcha!)

Stay tuned

2007-04-15T21:55:00.000-07:00

The blogger startup page hasn't been coming up on my laptop at home. Hence no blogging from recently, and I've got a killer backlog.

It works at Ben's Cafe, though. Why?

Uberman On-Ramp Day 9: Good Rester

2007-04-14T08:39:00.000-07:00

Really, Day 10 -- it's after midnight.

I did OK. 6.5 hours of core sleep, a bit long. Cheated a little on caffeine, with two decafs and two canned cocoas. Two nap periods, both solid (maybe too long, if anything). Not much dream material to record, but some.

I have two new categories of progress to track.

(1) Hand-written diary/notebook. I've been keeping a little clothbound notebook going. I write dream reports, record my caffeine intake, and my nap/sleep times, but also the moments when drowsiness hits. I hope get a statistical base of drowsiness "time-stamps" to figure out when I should take my naps when I get regular. Right now, I'm not regular, and I probably won't be until I get through my various addiction withdrawal symptons. But I want this habit anyway. The notebook is also good for the usual things -- to-do lists, general impressions, ideas that hit suddenly.

(2) Coding. Part of the rationale for Uberman: gain more hours in the day for projects. And having more projects helps maintain Uberman. I stopped working on my not-so-secret software project three or four days ago, stymied by a bug that, on closer inspection today, turned out to be relatively simple. I've got to get back to doing some coding every day.

I hope to add more project categories in the future -- I can't code all the time. Improving the ryokan business is obviously one of them. There will be others.

Tomorrow: go swimming. Go swimming every day this week, just to set the habit. Doing something aerobic will help, and I never crave a nap more than right after a good swim.

My grudge against Charles Simonyi

2007-04-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

Charles Simonyi is in orbit. It seems even supposed Microsoft arch-enemy Google is celebrating, if the decorations on their logo on their current homepage are any indication.

Unlike some commenters on sci.space.policy (and many others) I don't begrudge Simonyi the wealth that got him up there. I might begrudge him the part of his wealth that accrued from Microsoft's monopolistic position. But Microsoft would have made him rich even if it hadn't gone that route. He'd probably be in orbit now (or maybe sooner) even if Microsoft had somehow gone belly-up during the 90s.

No, my gripe against Simonyi is a hacker's gripe: I hate Hungarian Notation. It had a use at one time, I suppose, but why did he have to make it the Law of the Land at Microsoft? Writing code that way made sense if you were hacking BRAVO, the world's first personal computer WYSIWYG word processor, in a poorly-typed language like BCPL. But not if you're writing C, and definitely not if you're writing C++. At least, not if you're writing good code in those languages (or in other typed, ALGOL-family languages like Java.)

Almost every rationale offered for Hungarian Notation consists of offering a crutch for bad coding practices -- like, using lots of globals, writing procedures so long it's hard to scroll back to variable declarations, and tying variables to fixed types when more abstraction is almost invariably better.

Even Microsoft has apparently figured this out. For .NET, they actually advise against using Hungarian. Well, against the worst variant of it, anyway: so-called Systems Hungarian. Arguably, Simonyi's invention got out of control, and was used in ways that made people hate it. Still, he could have done something about that. But he didn't.

$20 million to go to space? He has probably cost the world economy more than that by simply not going public enough with his own objections to how Hungarian Notation got fetishized and perverted. But at least he went to orbit, which I applaud. I'm ambivalent about sending Gates up, though, unless he never comes back down. I'm not sure the Moon would be far enough for me. Why, it's a whole argument in itself for commercial space travel: if they can send one Microsoft billionaire to the Moon, why not all of them?

Uberman On-Ramp Day 8: Rollin' Rollin' Rollin' ....

2007-04-12T19:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was hectic. Lots of Polyphasic group admin hassles dragging me down. Some ryokan business to attend to. An enervating dispute with another Polyphasic moderator over issue not related to policy about minors on the lsit (since settled). Also (oh, yeah, blame computers), an uncooperative blogger.com -- their startup page would never load enough for me to log in. Have I told you I'm going to blog about Why I Hate Blogspot? I think I have. For now, you can read someone else's rant.

It's been over a week on the On-Ramp. It's time for a summary of progress toward Uberman and the lack of it. Overall, I'm encouraged. Some things haven't gone as planned, creating new problems and new opportunities. Some things haven't happened at all. But you can't break some old habits and set a bunch of new habits all at once, much less practice them well.

This blog entry is organized as follows:

DEFINITE PROGRESS -- where I'm forging ahead nicely
PREPARING FOR PROGRESS -- steps I'm still mulling or studying
DEAD IN THE WATER -- where I've been a Bad Boy
THE ROAD AHEAD -- what I must work on next
... AND WHERE IT GETS ME -- thoughts on success and on the right kind of failure

Comments encouraged, and any encouragement gratefully received.

DEFINITE PROGRESS

Caffeine Withdrawal-- I'm way down. Today was half a can of weakish tea, and one cup of Starbucks decaf. (Decaf is hard to get in Japanese cafes, by the way, and at Starbucks they ask you to wait an extra five minutes while they make it special.) I'm still having withdrawal symptoms -- a little more drowsiness than usual, headaches in the morning, sometimes stretching through the day. However, there's still cherry blossom pollen in the air in Tokyo, which aside from its respiratory effects, often gives me the same trouble. I might be farther along than I feel.

Dream Journal -- this has gone surprisingly well. My main block is fear of writer's cramp -- how much I'm going to have to write down every day, especially with naps adding to the number of remembered dreams. At some point, detailed records will become redundant, a waste of time -- to those who say they don't dream, or seldom remember their dreams, it may come as some surprise that you can fill pages and pages from just a single night, with practiced recall.

[Skippable Note: To those not caught up on what I'm trying to do here -- I hope to have more lucid dreams while on Uberman, including a type called WILD where you go almost straight from pre-sleep states to lucidity. I've read encouraging anecdotal reports that Uberman facilitates WILD. I also hope to become adept at dream interpretation using Eugene Gendlin's technique described in Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams. If that goes well, I want to try a Tibetan (?) dream yoga technique: interpreting a (previous? on-going) dream while lucid. I had a lucid dream last night, but I'm not counting it as major progress just yet, for two reasons. (1) It's very common to have a lucid dream shortly after becoming (re-)excited about LDs, only to face frustration for weeks afterward. (2) I was woken at about the 4-hour point last night when my wife got home, I got up, fiddled around briefly, and went back to bed thinking that what I'd just done was similar to the Wake-Back-to-Bed (WBTB) technique, which yields lucidity perhaps 40% of the time (cf. maybe 5% for other techniques) but which is incompatible with polyphasic unless it could be considered as part of a variant on Everyman somehow. I guess I'll find out soon enough.]

Start Everyman - I'm doing well here, I think, considering caffeine withdrawal and pollen allergies. Yesterday I thought I'd have trouble napping, but I got in several naps. Today I thought the same, but had a mid-morning nap (with vivid dream, on top of two vivd dreams, one lucid, during the early morning hours) only about 4 hours after waking. Not sure if 2pm or 6pm will work out.

Breakfast Every Morning - good and getting better. I've been skipping breakfast far more often than not, for several years now, and it's been dragging me down. Often I'm not hungry. Often maybe I am, but caffeine suppresses my appetite, as does smoking -- and I've been doing both for so long that my body is probably confused about what it's craving: food, caffeine, nicotine or sleep. Being up more hours, I'm getting hungrier more, and more often. Being down to a bare-bones dose of caffeine, I'm getting my appetite back. This good habit of getting breakfast isn't strictly Uberman-related except insofar as eating small but nourishing meals frequently is recommended. Breakfast is one of the more important ones, at least until I'm on Uberman, when the whole category becomes fuzzy. (Is it breakfast when you eat at 4am, or at 8am?)

Blogging Daily - this wasn't on the original list, but it should have been. It's more committing to go public with an intent, and to keep going public. This way, I at least have to try Uberman, or lose face. ("That flake Michael, always dispensing all kinds of advice and 'wisdom' on the Polyphasic group, but has he got any game himself? Nah.") It also helps me track my own progress, it might help provide a framework for preparation for other attempters, and maybe it will help others to help me more.

PREPARING FOR PROGRESS

Start Meditating - well ... I do something like this sometimes when I'm settling down to naps. I'm very out of practice, and I should be practicing when not settling down to naps. Meditation will be probably be critical to quitting smoking -- it seems to have helped me a lot when I've quit before. And maybe I would never have started again had I continued.

Focusing - I've been working through Gendlin's book of the same name, taking it slow, re-reading passages when my attention wanders. I had good experiences with this technique in the past, but at that time I had a partner, I wasn't trying to do it on my own. Now, I'm reminded of one of two kindergarten report-card remarks that my mother never let me forget: "Doesn't always follow instructions." [The other remark was "Good Rester." Yeah. I got a star for that.] Gendlin's instructions are quite detailed. Some are hard to understand until you've gotten a handle on what he's talking about, and there's some learning-by-doing in getting those handles. He speaks of experienced Focusers being able to move smoothly and quickly through the steps (or Movements as he calls them -- as if they were symphonic sections, and given the steps within the steps, maybe that metaphor isn't as pompous as it sounds.) I can't even remember all the steps. I don't own a copy of Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams anymore. I'm hoping other sources (such as the PDF linked above) suffice. I'm considering writing a longish blog entry about Focusing, the scientific underpinnings, and the problems I'm encountering with practice.

CRON-ish diet - The sausage-cheese English muffin sandwich I had this morning with my Starbucks decaf doesn't exactly count. More like the opposite, except that it was well aligned with Japanese (i.e., small) portion sizes; few calories, but way too many calories from (bad) fat. I've written recently to the Polyphasic group asking about fasting, which in animal studies appears to have much the same life-extending benefits as CRON. I've got to clean up my diet a little more toward the Optimal Nutrition part, but I'm not sure I'm up to the complications of CRON.

Wakeup Call Network - I'm still ambivalent about this one. Then again, I've never been good about asking for help with anything, and maybe it'll turn out to be one of my better ideas. I think by contributing to the Polyphasic group and moderating diligently (maybe a little too diligently, but still), I'm establishing the good will that will lead to some reliable helpers -- people who will call me at appointed times to make sure I'm up, and to help wake me up by talking a little, during the harder parts of the Uberman adjustment period.

DEAD IN THE WATER

Quitting Smoking - As noted earlier, I'm in some trouble here. I'm moving unexpectedly quickly toward Everyman, which gives me more hours of the day to smoke. I had hoped to be sleeping more by now because of caffeine withdrawal, and that sleeping more would buffer nicotine withdrawal effects, but I'm actually sleeping less. I'm not meditating yet. I still haven't set up any hands-occupying habits. I'll tell you how bad it is: this is a two-ciggie blog entry so far, and about to become a three-ciggie. (Go ahead -- hate me. Does it help to say that I always smoke outside? That I have a no-smoking rule at the ryokan? That I think all government taxes on tobacco should go toward public nicotine-addiction treatment programs, free to all?)

Exercising More - This is also helpful in quitting smoking. First, you can't smoke while you're exercising (though I like to imagine puffing away while doing backstroke in the pool.) Second, it releases endorphins (opioids), which nicotine also does -- you're substituting for one of the things you're addicted to, from a healthier source, not just getting rid of what you're addicted to. Not to mention that exercise is good for body and soul, which can't help but improve the Uberman experience? Right now, I'm an exemplar of the old joke: Whenever I get the urge to excercise, I lie down until it goes away.

THE ROAD AHEAD

In the next 7 days or so, I think the concentration has to be on getting into habits that will help me quit smoking. Maybe I could do Uberman without quitting, but ... jeez, it's such an unhealthy, disgusting habit. To think of it as a mere Uberman risk factor trivializes it. An old friend from college died of lung cancer last month. A friend collapsed in a series of strokes (not a smoker, but drinking while also being diabetic). A brother-in-law is dying of cancer that started in his throat (not a smoker, but his wife is). Health catastrophes happen, and with little warning. Then there's me: a little shorter of breath than ten years ago, and with what might be warning signs of macular degeneration in my left eye. It's time to retire Marlboro Man. (Actually, I smoke a Japanese brand called Hope. "Hope Man"? Before that, it was an even deadlier Japanese brand called Peace. It comes in a dark blue pack emblazoned with -- could I make this up? -- the Dove of Peace plunging downward.)

The habits that I beliee will help the most to quit smoking are, in order, meditation, some busywork hobby, exercise and Focusing. Meditation calms me--something I use cigarrettes to do currently. Some occupation for my hands substitutes for fiddling with fire and tobacco, and distracts me from cravings. Exercise -- see endorphins, another substitute. Where Focusing fits in here: quitting smoking is an emotional experience. You start figuring out what you're using nicotine to self-medicate for, and it's not pretty. Focusing while quitting might help me get to the bottom of those conflicts (which are ofen with other people, not just myself), and maybe help me root them out more effectively than in the past. There is the simple fact of physical habituation, of course -- that, being an addict, I now smoke just to get normal. But there is always more to an addiction than that.

... AND WHERE IT GETS ME

If I succeed at Uberman, with all this preparation, the benefits go beyond me. First, I will have helped make a case that you don't have to be anything special to do Uberman -- except perhaps in having near-total control over your own time. I'm not a great candidate, after all: I'm an Owl, I've always slept a lot, I've never been terribly self-disciplined (except when athletic), I'm 51 and am having many of the usual problems with achieving positive personal change in middle age. Maybe I have some points in my favor: I think I'm as open-minded as anyone with a scientific-rationalist outlook can be, and I think any doctor (one who didn't look down into my lungs, anyway) would say I'm physically closer to late 30s than early 50s. But for the most part, if I can do Uberman, it's more likely that almost any reasonably healthy person with enough self-discipline to clean up their lifestyle can do it, too.

OK, but what if I fail? What if I do everything right in preparation, and still can't get to Uberman from Everyman, nor from any other angle of attack? That could also be good: it would tell people not too different from me that it's going to be much harder for them. If, as a result my experience, they don't try, that might be all to the good, too. We don't need more Uberman failure stories out there. Failed attempts are hardly risk-free anyway. It's reported that a large contributing factor to injury accidents (for monophasics) is sleep deprivation. Why add yet another sleep-related factor to further boost that casualty rate? Maybe, in failure, I could save some other people more than just some frustration.

Finally, if I fail, the whole exercise of preparation still have cleaned up my life a lot, and laid a foundation of habits for keeping it clean. Now that's a keeper, you have to admit.

Uberman On-Ramp Day 6: Flat Tires

2007-04-10T03:42:00.000-07:00

Today I've been trundling along on rims at the shoulder, imagining dozens of young, sprightly Uberkids in the world flashing past me, 0-60 in 10 days, leaving their turn signals on as they head into the fast lane. Head-achey. And cherry blossom pollen is killing me. (Oh, listen to me, cringing and moaning as if I were already trying to DO uberman, rather than simply preparing myself.)

Got a good nap in at 4pm, though. Will lie down and try again soon at 8pm, just to observe the every-4-hours schedule. Relatively little caffeine -- 3/4ths of a can of vending machine coffee, a decaf, that's it.

Space Cadet Turner Reporting for Duty

2007-04-09T18:40:00.000-07:00

Henry asked me last night, "Why are you interested in space?" After all, clearly I am -- I talk about it, I write essays about it and get them published, I go to space conferences, I contribute to online forums devoted to it. I mumbled something about how I was the usual Space Cadet case -- reading lots of science fiction as a kid, then going into engineering for a lving.

Then I saw the subtext of Henry's question: "Why are you, a middle-aged man, interested in space?" An--leaving aside any Puer Aeternus self-diagnosis for the moment--I told the truth: 9/11 shook me up. As it did all of us, of course, but in particular it made me ask "Why wasn't the real 2001 more like the movie?" and "What did I used to be really interested in, and how does that former interest relate to what I might want to do with the rest of my life? "

Perhaps the horror of the events of that year aroused the escapist in me. At the same time, however, in 2001 and afterward, I couldn't suppress another automatic reaction I have to the world now, as an adult and as someone who likes to think about things: why is it that some things happen, and other things don't? I could see (sort of) why airliners piloted by fanatics plowed into the Twin Towers--geopolitically, sociologically, I could make some kind of sense of it in the end. But as for why the events were not also greeted with horror by thousands of lunar colonists--that was a mystery. And it was one I felt like solving.

You'll see these preoccupying questions ("Why this? Why not that?") and my attempts at answers in the essays I write. My most recent essay, "When semantics, politics and reality collide: the 'space tourism' debate", is in some sense a sociolinguistics discursion. There, I'm saying that it's in the very nature of language that the great mass of people who are less interested in the details and the advancement of some enterprise will inevitably want to call things by one name, while those who are more concerned with the endeavor will use other terms, reflecting technical distinctions or internal political sensitivities. And that it's in the nature of language that there's little that anyone can do about it.

Before that, in "'Permission to believe' in a Moore's Law for space?", I pointed out how space launch hardware development and integrated circuit development couldn't be more different, in every way that mattered for rates of technological progress -- and that's why we have almost absurd progress in computer hardware and networking, while rocketry inches forward, with slowly branching technological family trees of designs with that all-important "heritage".

I'm starting to think about another essay, about why open source software processes probably won't help very much in non-governmental space efforts. Again, you can see the implicit question: "Why not?" I think it's part of growing up -- or my growing up, anyway -- that these words go from being a rhetorical question, a protest against the status quo, a Kennedyesque oratorical posture, and become a part of true, unbiased inquiry. I don't want to give up those former uses of the question. But in the end, I want answers. Life is short, it keeps getting shorter as you get older, and being able to see all the way down a blind alley beats walking to the end of it and banging your head against the wall.

One of these days I'll tackle the ultimate "Why not?" question in space advocacy: Why are some people hardly interested in space at all? I'd love to come up with an unignorable answer for the space advocacy community. It's a question they dislike facing. At one point, last night while arguing with Henry, we finally arrived at the obvious reason for our differences over a space access issue: he's not as pro-space as I am. I asked him, "Would you care if somebody paid $20 million to go into orbit, and turned out to be a crook, causing a storm of public outrage about how government space infrastructure (much of which was justified in terms of 'speaking to the highest aspirations of mankind') got used by some rich thug, with the upshot being that this branch of commercial space travel was shut down for the indefinite future?" His answer was "No." To him, the principle that anyone should be able to buy anything that was legal and on the market was more important. I happen to think he was overapplying the principle -- many industries -- but particularly those catering to the rich or dependent on government facilities -- manage their image in part by qualifying the customer. But at least I knew the source of my differences with him.

Uberman On-Ramp Day 5: Wrap-up

2007-04-09T07:25:00.000-07:00

Several minor business-related crises since I last wrote, not least of which was that I promised my friend Henry some Euros for his trip to Europe tomorrow, but didn't collect even half the amount I thought I could from our French guests.

Caffeine: asked for decaf at Starbucks while doing the currency deal with Henry, but maybe they screwed it up. All I know is I blabbed with him at high speed for an hour at least. On the other hand, I often do that with Henry anyway. He's a walking encyclopedia, I'm a knee-jerk theorizer; he's a moderate conservative, I'm a moderate liberal; he's East Coast Ivy League humanities, I'm West Coast U.C. system tech-sector. And we're both here in Japan with not many of the same types to hang out with. It's a recipe for seething conversational catalysis. Which is why we're friends, I guess.

Not much else to report about progress, because of the above-mentioned crises. Stay tuned. (Daniel Yokomizo on the Polyphasic list asked me if I had an RSS or Atom feed. I looked at my configuration page. I guess I do, Atom anyway, but not RSS as far as I can tell. I'm not sure if I have it set up right, though. A future blog entry will be entitled: Why I Hate Blogspot. Google does many things right, but I don't think this site is one of them.)

Japan's Birth Dearth

2007-04-09T04:18:00.000-07:00

Today I noticed a news story about tele-obstetrics in Japan -- web-cam assisted pregnancy care. To those with a less jaundiced eye on the country, it dovetails with the standard view of Japan as a dizzyingly high-tech country. The real reason is different: the countryside (a source of voters for the Liberal Democratic Party, which is neither) is becoming one vast old folks home, and young couples especially would rather not have their children in a rural hospital system that's increasingly an archipelago of geriatric wards. Obstetric units are on the decline everywhere in Japan, but especially out in the sticks. The Powers That Be tend not to be very experimental (the country's medical association just recently considered the idea of endorsing surrogate motherhood, and voted it down), but they'll try anything just to keep the countryside populated.

I live in Takadanobaba. You won't see Aging Japan here. But Baba is different: it's home to a major university campus and countless little trade schools, where young people can learn everything from advanced animation techniques to flower arranging. Once, when I was coming back from a hike in Okutama, one of our party looking out the train window exclaimed "wakamono!" -- "young people!" We were back inside the Tokyo urban core, where social surface tension -- and a generally more interesting, if more expensive, existence -- causes young people to collect and cluster. These urban puddles of the young are drying up.

Birth rates have been below replacement rate for a long time. Last year, I read a story saying 2008 would be the first year of population shrinkage. It was followed almost the next day by a correction: the statistics had been recomputed, and 2007 would be the First Year of Shrink. Not long after, the truth came out: Japan was already shrinking. These consecutive revelations weren't too much of a contradication of my beloved Spectrum of Mendacity: Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, Government Statistics and Japanese Government Statistics.

Uberman On-Ramp Day 5: Mid-day

2007-04-09T00:30:00.000-07:00

Make that "Late mid-day" (jeez, it's already 5).

Got up at 8:30am. My wife didn't comment on this, which is unusual. Ordinarily, if I crawl out of bed before 11, she knits her brow, all concerned and asks, "Are you sick?" That's what a slug I am. But I got up. Second day in a row. Something is happening. Maybe I'm going almost directly to an Everyman sleep schedule. See notes below about how that's a departure from plan, and what it might mean.

HOW IT'S GOING

Caffeine withdrawal: one cup of decaf, one of regular. No cocoa so far. Attacks of drowsiness, but reasonable energy.

Everyman habits: one attempt that I assumed would fail, at noon. Some slight hypnogogia, though. Then struck by drowsiness after lunch, and had a nap around 2:15, only interrupted by cat (Luna) stepping up onto my chest for a nap of her own. (INTERRUPTIONS AND SOLUTIONS NOTE: it's not enough to make sure their food dishes are replenished -- gotta nap somewhere they can't reach me.)

Smoking -- don't ask.

Meditation -- some done lying down for first nap attempt. Main observation: I'm way out of practice.

Dream journal: made an entry just after getting up. Something about a kidnap of me and a Chinese-American math professor during his office hours.

Focusing: read more of Gendlin over lunch, and before nap attempts.

Breakfast: didn't. Bad.

CRON-ish diet: Soup Stock Tokyo for lunch, pretty light (their two-soups set.)

Exercise: I thought really hard about going swimming, in fact so hard that I was almost out of breath at the end. Aren't you proud of me? Took a walk around the block.

Establishing wake-up call network: nada, unless my efforts this morning to frame policy on the Polyphasic Google group count as brownie points with people who might volunteer to wake me by phone.

WHAT IT ALL MEANS

So how is the plan going? Well, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.

I had planned to

(1) taper off caffeine,
(2) use the resulting greater sleeping time to buffer nicotine withdrawal,
(3) reduce my sleep hours to an Everyman schedule,
(4) then try Uberman.

What seems to be happening is that I can't count on caffeine-withdrawal-induced sleep time increases to buffer nicotine withdrawal. Even the few naps resulting from merely practicing being on a nap schedule seem to be reducing my core sleep time. This is consistent with my past Everyman experience, when I hardly cut back on stimulant intake at all, just moderated it when a nap was approaching. It's also consistent with other anecdotal reports: once you've done polyphasic, it's easier to get back on it again.

My core sleep last night was from about 1:30 am to 8:30, several hours less than my usual -- and considerably fewer hours than when I've quit caffeine in the past. What may end up helping is something I've noticed in the past: I also sleep more when I quit smoking. Unlike caffeine withdrawal, which I can't do cold-turkey (I get migraines usually), nicotine is a "Just Do It" proposition. Maybe it's already time. This scares me: I get very irritable on the third day, and often relapse after some outburst (typically at my wife, which doesn't help matters at all.)

HOW I MIGHT COPE

One of the biggest helps in getting through nicotine withdrawal has been finding something to do with my hands. Usually it's something that doesn't require a lot of brainpower, but that I still find intellectually satisfying in some way, and that's a problem. The main thing I do with my hands these days is type, but I hate myself for writing dreck, whether it's prose or code. Worse, whether I'm hating writing dreck or exultant over some (usually imagined) brilliance, my first impulse is to smoke. I don't have any busywork hobbies.

The last time I quit smoking for any length of time, I spent almost two weeks obsessively messing around with Pykrete. (At one point, I was filling balloons, pasting soggy toilet paper over them, and freezing them, making these big weird icy eggs that were satisfyingly difficult to crush. My friends feigned great amazement.) The last time I quit for a short stretch, I was messing around making Very Rich Dirt: finely mincing food garbage, putting it out in plastic containers to ferment for week or so, grinding up charcoal and mixing it in. In this, I was inspired by ECOSS, a carbon-negative soil amendment with a Stone Age precursor in Tera Preta soils. I felt so Green, so much like some kind of soil alchemist.

But maybe it's time for something humbler, more mundane. Like growing potted plants on the roof. Yes, we have some storage places that are hideously cluttered, and organizing them would engage my mind and my fingers. And it would be to the point: it would help secure nap space. But if past is prelude, it would also engage the possessive owners of all that junk (mostly my wife and her daughter). This has proved to be a source of explosive issues in the past. Getting into explosive issues while I'm quitting tobacco lead to explosions, which lead to flustered visits to the convenience store to buy cigs and smoke a bunch of them. Can't have that. So maybe it's gardening after all.

My Not-So-Secret Software Project

2007-04-08T23:05:00.000-07:00

I've been cagey about what I've been working on. Maybe what I've felt is akin to that superstition of some writers: that talking about what you're going to write soaks up creative juices that should be oiling the machinery of production. But I've told too many friends now, and besides, I'm stuck for a blog entry between my twice-daily Uberman On-Ramp entries. I don't want my blog to become All About My Weirdo Sleep Schedule. It's not as if you can't work toward uberman and still be an interesting person. Consider PureDoxyK (the mother of the movement, such as it is), or self-made self-help guru-blogger Steve Pavlina.

My Project X? Here's what it is: a Japanese-to-English machine translation tool that even professional translators wouldn't scorn. [He waits for the laughter to die down, scowling, thinking "You laugh now, but when I'm rich ...."] I started work on it in September, let it lapse in December and January, but have since been working on it almost every day since early February.

Here's the problem: much of the job of being a translator is already fairly mechanical. Of course, if you're translating Japanese that's semantically nuanced and culture-bound (novels, poetry, ad copy, movie subtitles, manga, anime), you'd better be full-spectrum human, and quite fluent and literate in both languages. But for anything technical or legal, it might even be an advantage to have a touch of Aspberger's Syndrome.

I've mostly translated patents, which are both technical and legal. Japanese patents run very much against the grain of vernacular Japanese, which is, in daily use, a notoriously vague and allusive tongue. Patents are grindingly explicit. In fact, the only distinctly human thing I've found in patents is the phenomenon of invention itself. (And not as often as I'd like; see below.)

I know I've got a good patent when I'm confused while reading it, only to have the proverbial lightbulb light up in the foggy comic-book dialogue-cloud above my head: "I see! The reason I was having a hard time understanding it is that this is a real patent: an explanation of a new and counter-intuitive technological idea."

Then it's fun. Then I'm rooting for the patent filers, because I feel they deserve their claim and any royalties accruable, for Bringing Fire to Man. I'm grateful for my bit part in the relay race -- I get the torch, I carry it my little part of the way, I pass the torch, but before I pass it, I sit huddled in my dark cubby after midnight, before my glowing screen, and blow on it and watch it flare a little. At those moments I feel more a part of the great human story than I ever would have felt as an altar boy on his first day, or if I had joined the Cub Scouts. (Two things I never did and never wanted to do -- I'm not a Joiner.) If only all patents -- but especially software patents -- were actually for real inventions. But that technological Valhalla must be pulsing and throbbing away in some other part of the galaxy. Here, we chip flint, we grovel before those who claim a slightly new style of crafting arrowheads, we pick lice out of their hair, we polish their arrowheads and crow over the hypocritcally, and hope they toss us the leftovers of their mammoth marrow pudding.

At its worst, patent translation is a special circle of hell: the patent text and claims are so long, the language so convoluted, the idea so evanescent (or non-existent -- many Japanese patents go on at great length about the obvious and nothing more), and the translator (that would be me) so tired from translating so much nothing, that you just start obsessively reviewing, wondering if the idea is so brilliant but so counter-intuitive that you just can't get it. This is especially bad when you've already blown one of those soul-crushing deadlines. Which I never do. Ever. (Well, sometimes.)

OK, so that's the problem: coming up with machinery that helps get the soul-crushers out of the way, and also helps you with the good stuff. Maybe it reduces the amount you have to type -- some translators have resorted to dictation to avoid further tendinitis damage. Maybe it helps you break vocabulary blocks. Maybe it helps you juggle parts of long sentences without doing damage to the syntax. Maybe it helps you automate sweeping, complex revisions. Maybe it makes sure you don't miss anything. I'd eventually like something that can figure out things about the diagrams, but that might be far too ambitious ona project that's already very ambitious.

There are several problems that I hope this project solves for me. One is that I'm in a sabbatical from translation, hoping to improve my skills in Japanese before I take on work again. Another is that my dream life is to make my living while traveling. And any software that takes the edge off, and helps me meet my deadlines while I'm also contending with the stress and logistical complications of life on the road is all to the good. Also, software was about the only thing I ever got professionally very good at. (I just fake being a hotelier -- so far, it's working.) Software is still a career option. But only if I keep my skills sharp. Alas, they've gotten rusty.

Finally, there's just what I most loved about writing software as a craft: messing around with complex data structures and algorithms. I'm sure I'll get my fill of that with this project. I like translating patents, but mainly because I like invention. I want to contribute inventions of my own, even if it's in a field (software engineering) where invention seems to be slowly waning, where doing anything new is getting harder every year.

I think I'm two years away from a production tool that others could use. Maybe one year away from having something I can use in my translation work, while continuously improving it. I've considered making it open source, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Right now I'm bogged down in just getting the thing to parse basic Japanese. I'm giving myself three more months to finish that. Then what? Yes: parsing intermediate Japanese.

Uberman On-Ramp Day 4: Wrap-up

2007-04-08T05:40:00.000-07:00

One cappuccino at 9am, a couple canned cocoas. Sleepy much of the day.

Too many cigarettes. Then some breakfast, which I should have done earlier.

One early afternoon almost-nap, quite refreshing anyway (my breath suddenly slowed at one point, like an automatic transmission shifting into drive -- very relaxing; some brief hypnogogia), another nap from about 3:15 to 3:45pm.

Carrot-pumpkin soup for lunch, chicken-onion curry rice for dinner, plus some bread; healthy stuff at least, if not CRON-ish.

Read some of Gendlin's Focusing. No meditation -- but still time for that before bed.

No exercise -- almost went for a walk with a friend, but begged off, feeling drowsy from caffeine withdrawal.

Just couldn't write code today. I seem to need to get wound up in order to hack, but without caffeine ....

WAY too much Google Polyphasic group moderation activity -- ugh. Why this sudden attack of responsibility? Or am I just offsetting aggression generated by life-change stress? I sign off on those exchanges as "-michael turner, your increasingly fascist moderator", but I think the self-deprecation comes off as a little soggy to those who like me there, and is probably taken seriously by certain members with whom I must be increasingly unpopular.

What part of "somewhat" didn't you understand?

2007-04-08T05:26:00.000-07:00

The International Herald Tribune doesn't come out on Sundays here in Japan. I'm reduced to the The Daily Yomiuri (or, as I like to put it, the "Gomi-uri" [trash vendor]) Today's top headline 'Amity needed between U.S., Japan, China' -- in quotes because it's the result of a poll of university students in Japan and in China.

What I liked was the poll results pie-chart. Asked "Should Japan, China and the United States strengthen their respective ties?", 60.3% of Chinese students and 46.3% of Japanese students answered "Yes." HOWEVER, 30.4% of Chinese and 42.7% of Japanese answered "Somewhat."

"Somewhat"?

Now, I don't know how it works in China, but here in Japan, a good translation of "somewhat" into Japanese is chotto. And a good translation of chotto back into English is "no (but I'm too polite and refined to say so.)"

In addition, 6.2% of Chinese and 6.3% of Japanese answered "Not really." 2.1% of Chinese and 3.1% of Japanese just sprinted way the hell out on a limb and answered "No."

So how I add all this up: 38.7% of the Chinese students said "no", as opposed 52.1% of the Japanese students. Which rather belies the conclusions of the article. But what else do you expect from The Daily Gomi-uri?

Uberman On-Ramp Day 4: In Which Things Do Not Go As Planned

2007-04-07T19:11:00.000-07:00

It's odd writing a mid-day report on my uberman prep at an hour of the morning at which I'd ordinarily still be dead to the world. I had planned to sleep late after yesterday's rush of guests at the ryokan. Have my one coffee, and some breakfast, before deciding whether to continue smoking today or try going on the gum instead.

Instead, I get a call from friends of the French guests who arrived yesterday, at 8:30am. It ties up my mobile phone for 10 minutes. One of the guests asks me to fax something. Fear sets in: maybe these people will be the dreaded High-Maintenance Customers? Maybe my cheery projections about having a wealth of schedule slack for the next week or so are out the window?

I go down to the Starbucks on the corner, I tank up, I smoke a couple cigs, I brood under the sunny skies. I sniffle and curse the drifting cherry blossoms, the delight of the season -- when we will have a mode of interspecies communication that permits me to explain to cherry trees that my sinuses represent no worthwhile reproductive opportunities for them? How can I enjoy any of the immediate benefits of quitting smoking if I feel just about as crappy anyway?

Adding to the misery: yesterday I didn't hack on my software project at all. There's an annoying and very mysterious bug in something I assumed was working all along. I keep telling myself: "just work on other, simpler, things." It's set up that way, I can do that. And during uberman adjustment, I'll need that, for any sense of progress.

Adding further to the misery: I've decided the Polyphasic Google Group needs a stated policy about underage contributors. Sometime it sucks being an adult.

Had this been an actual debate ....

2007-04-07T18:37:00.000-07:00

Michael Huang argues persuasively that the job of arguing for robots in space instead of humans is too important to be left unautomated.

I'd respond, but I'm out of the office right now. Please leave a message after the main text of this blog entry, and I'll get back to you as soon as possible.

Uberman On-Ramp Day 3: Last Report

2007-04-07T04:12:00.000-07:00

Damn, that sounds official, doesn't it? You'd think I was planning a deep space probe launch or something.

A total of 45 minutes lying down today, earplugs in, sleep mask on. No naps. Kind of "hypertired" as an old girlfriend used to say, from business demands and getting up earlier than usual. Drowsy from lack of caffeine, but unable to sleep.

I must start keeping a catalogue of Potential Interruptions and Solutions. Take my cats. Please. Cats know exactly one word of felinese, and it translates roughly as "Why the frak haven't you fed me yet? I've been hungry for several minutes, now!" There are various intonation patterns implying an infinite spectrum of guilt-trips, some of them employing frequencies they must have picked up from hearing fingernails raking across blackboards.

Way to cope: make sure the cat food dishes always have enough to tide them over any 25-minute lapse of operation in the Feeding Machine AKA Me.

And my wife just interrupted this blog entry with another one: it's time to go to the laundromat. Again. Second time today. (11 guests from France -- 10, really, with one more arriving tomorrow. Running a 6-room bulging-at-the-seams ryokan means going through a lotta towels, sheets and pillowcase every week.) Solution: stay on top of it, so she doesn't even have to ask. She lets it pile up. I have to sneak it out under her nose sometimes, just to get it done.

Phone calls: I have to set up space away from the business phone (we're on cordless here, so mainly that's a matter of moving the handset to another room), and always remember to turn off my mobile. I'd say one out of every three nap attempts in recent months has been interrupted by the phone.

Less manageable: customer arrivals. Guests can be as much as three hours late. Maybe a prominent sign would work, when I can't have my wife fill in for me: "Back in 20 minutes -- your faithful concierge." It would only have to work once in a while.

I must say I have it easy, though, compared to many attempting polyphasic schedules. No school. No job with a boss (unless my wife counts, and she does, sort of.) No irritating social demands, except for that guy who moved to Okinawa but still calls me at all hours for help configuring his Linux boxes, oblivious to my protests that I actually don't know what the hell I'm talking about in that department.

JAL: Seamlessly Insolvent

2007-04-07T03:35:00.000-07:00

Air travel. Doesn't just thinking about it make you slightly nauseous these days? It's gotten so that when things go well on a flight, it's newsworthy. And in my case, it piques a certain suspicion.

The April 7-8 edition of the International Herald Tribune carries a story by Tyler Brule, who found himself "stunned" at "real customer service" from Japan Airlines, as he was embarking from that execrable excuse for an airport known as Heathrow. His flight left slightly ahead of schedule, provoking "looks of amazement" among the passengers. The flight itself met his highest expectations.

To what do we owe this miracle of latterday civil aviation? The article's callout quote extols "Japanese management" -- to my ears, a distrbing echo of the 80s, when Japan had the U.S. running scared, and management pundits everywhere were trying to unscrew the inscrutable of Japan's apparent success.

So what gives? With insolvent airlines all over the world, how is Japan Airlines able to finance such sterling service quality? I won't sugarcoat it for you: they are even more insolvent than most carriers. Specifically, they are $12 billion in debt -- more indebted than any other Asian carrier. A Japanese analyst at Fitch Ratings says that JAL's cash flow is "too weak to support its high debt and capital expenditure plans .... [however] the Japanese bankruptcy regime tends to prevent large-scale corporate failure because of continued bank support ...."

Yep, that good 'ol Japanese management. Failure is not an option. Why, it's almost illegal. Your punishment, if you're caught failing: government support in perpetuity -- a corporate life sentence. How cruel!

I had a friend here in Tokyo who worked for an English conversation school that was bankrupt, owing all its assets and more to a bank, and yet continuing in operation. Their bank was itself bankrupt, and being kept afloat by the Japanese government. And what about the Japanese government anyway? It has the highest ratio of government debt to GDP in the G-7, surpassing Italy in that league long ago.

Uberman On-Ramp Day 3: Interim Report

2007-04-06T21:11:00.000-07:00

As I reported in my "Building up to uberman" entry on the Google Group for Polyphasic sleep, I'm going to take 4-5 weeks for Michael Turner's Total Lifestyle Overhaul before attempting uberman.

We've got 11 French guests -- all of them here for a Japanese archery competition -- arriving at the ryokan, so it's busy-busy-busy, gotta go get some laundry out of the dryer in 20 minutes, then get my head amputated so that I can run around like a chicken with my head cut off. After tomorrow, things settle down a lot -- for 9 whole days, perfect for de-stressing and getting my life more in shape. Here's how things stand right now, early afternoon JST.

My to-do list for the transition prep:

Quit caffeine
Quit smoking
Start meditating
Start dream journal
Start self-Focusing
Start Everyman
Breakfast every morning
CRON-ish diet
Exercise
Establish wake-up call network

Caffeine -- I've been a bad boy. But it was an accident, I swear! I had the one can of vending machine coffee, then a little later, plunked in 120 yen for what I thought, in my muzzied state, would be a can of cocoa. The first sip disabused me of the notion that my Japanese vending machine button-pushing accuracy rivals that of Kyudo archers. It was that drecky, over-sweetened coffee crap, probably with that non-dairy creamer that lays down several more nanometers of porcelain on your coronary arteries with each dose. I drank half of it anyway, then threw out the rest.

Quit smoking? It is to laugh. Probably six ciggies this morning alone. But I was planning to put that off until caffeine withdrawal was helping me sleeping through a lot of the nicotine withdrawal.

Start meditating? Does thinking about it count?

Start dream journal: OK, here I score. I wrote a couple pages from memory. Something about some job I might or might not have gotten, meeting some young woman in the workplace who was a little like Chloe O'Brien on 24, only much nicer, with frizzy hair, and somehow even nerdier (if that's possible without requiring hospitalization). My goal is lucid dreams, which I used to be sorta good at. Beyond lucidity, see below.

Start self-Focusing? Um ... does thinking about it -- oh, never mind. I count it as progress that I thought about how to interpret the above dream. Eventually I want to try using Eugene Gendlin's dream-interpretation technique (from Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams) while actually in a lucid dream.

Start Everyman: today I woke up around 9:15. And about 3.5 hours later, I felt drowsy. I really want to start lying down every 4 hours, sleep mask on, earplugs in, alarm set, just to get into the habit. In this case -- well, not having had breakfast, I was too hungry to nap, and things are too busy here at the ryokan anyway. So I went to Soup Stock Tokyo for lunch.

Breakfast every morning -- oops, see above. Maybe a missed nap opportunity because of this.

CRON-ish diet. Lunch at Soup Stock Tokyo counts, sort of. They are big on nourishment (but not on portion sizes.) Going without breakfast is way too much calore restriction, though, and not exactly optimal nutrition either.

Exercise -- does carrying a lot of futons to the roof of the ryokan to air out count as exercise? I got a little out of breath. What I'd like to do is go swimming every day, just to set the habit, then start doing more other kinds of exercise. I used to be a rock-climber, a trail-runner. Geez, I was even a champion gymnast as a kid. In my late 30s, I thought nothing of popping out of bed as 6:30 AM so I could do laps in the pool for half an hour before work. How far I have fallen.

Establish wakeup call network -- hey, I got a couple offers, one from PD herself!

OK, from now on, I won't be quite so blow-by-blow.

The Wizard of .... WTF!?

2007-04-06T18:52:00.000-07:00

[Redpill Spoiler Warning: if you loved the Oz books the way I did, do NOT continue reading.]

Yesterday I discovered that the Wizard of Oz has been analyzed as political allegory. Weirder still: an allegory for the Free Silver controversy in the late 19th century.

Dorothy (Theodore [Roosevelt] spelled backwards, sort of) is Traditional American Values. Cyclones are politico-economic instability. The Wizard is President McKinley. The Cowardly Lion is William Jennings Bryan (hey, that rhymes!). The Silver Slippers (changed to ruby in the film) were Free Silver vs. rigid adherence to the Gold Standard. The Tin Man and the Scarecrow were the reformist Farmer-Labor coalition. And so on. Read all about it.

L. Frank Baum said that the story was written purely to please children -- a fairy tale without all the weird, horrific moralizing. And to think I believed him. I guess we'll soon find out that Ozma of Oz was really about transgender issues.

It doesn't totally spoil Oz for me. Not totally.

[*Sob*.]

Uberman Ho!

2007-04-06T05:20:00.000-07:00

Um ... OK, maybe that's not such a great blog title after all. On a second reading, it makes me think of a blinged-out inner-city hooker with a tattered Penguin edition of Thus Spake Zarathustra tucked into her purse.

What I mean is: I'm going to try transitioning to an Uberman sleep schedule (20-25 minute naps, 6 times in every 24-hour period) over the next 4-5 weeks. Yesterday I announced this intention on the Google group for Polyphasic sleep, where I'm a moderator, and where I also preach oh-so-sagely while practicing not at all.

My goals? I'm working on a big, long software project of my own, and I'd like more time. I'd like more time for a lot of things, but that's the biggie. On Uberman, if I can do it (think positive, Michael) I can get maybe 6 hours more waketime per day. Maybe more like 8, when you consider that I usually stumble around sleepily for a couple hours every day after waking. (If I told you how much I sleep these days, I'd blush so hard it would pop zits, if I had any zits.)

More time is the main goal, but I'd also like to get back to lucid dreaming, experimenting with how an uberman schedule might increase the frequency to one LD a day or more. I have some anecdotal evidence that uberman does help have lucid dreams more often, though the quality is reportedly low.

Yesterday I announced my intentions on the Polyphasic list. Today I had one cup of coffee (actually, one can of coffee -- from a vending machine), and several cups of cocoa. I napped about two hours this evening, after unusually intense ryokan chores -- we expect 11 guests to arrive tomorrow and we're less than half-prepared. After that, it's 9 days of slack, because our guests are usually pretty low-maintenance types. I can start seriously cutting the caffeine.

I had planned to quit smoking only after all the caffeine withdrawal symptons subsided, then start uberman after the nicotine withdrawal symptons were gone. But that could take up to five weeks. Tonight's crash made me think I could combine the two. Reasoning: When I go off caffeine, I sleep a lot, for about a week, with the first three days being the worst. When I quit smoking, I feel serious temptation for about a week, peaking on the third day. Well, when I'm sleeping, I'm not smoking. Nor will I feel the need, right? And being sleepy can be nicely calming -- I smoke a lot just because I'm one of those jittery types you'd rather didn't have a right to keep and bear arms. (Relax: I live in Japan, where I don't). AND I've got this longish slack period coming up with few demands on my time. If I do both at once, it could cut weeks off my start date for Uberman.

Tomorrow: one more cup (can) of coffee, plus cocoa, and my usual cigarette breaks, to get me through the last intense workday for a while. Then I'll start halving my caffeine intake every day, maybe chew some nicotine gum for a day just to remind me of what it's like to not smoke. After that, well -- I hope I can still manage to type on Wednesday.

Dude: In Space, Nobody Can Hear You Yawn

2006-12-31T06:21:00.000-08:00

Young Americans (18-25) are apathetic about space, according to a survey reported on space.com. Going to the Moon and Mars doesn't hike their pulse much.

I can think of some reasons. Here are some.

The Moon Race happened during the 60s, and that was a real decade, not like some we've had since. It was a time of change, ferment, revolution, and ... now I'm making you yawn if you weren't around then, because you've heard it all before, but you didn't get to live it.

The Moon Race was an excellent bit of theater, with a suspenseful build-up. Going to the Moon in a series of ever more ambitious test flights kept people's interest. There was episodic, conspicuous, even dramatic, progress. By contrast, watching ISS getting built was like watching paint dry. Grey paint.

Sure, the cancellation of Apollo flights was a let-down, but frankly, I thought watching Schweickart rapturously somersaulting the length of Skylab, in his shirtsleeves, and in slow-motion, was a lot more exciting than watching the Apollo astronauts, with their ungainly bounces on the Moon. And we had the Shuttle coming up, with promises of $200/lb to Earth orbit, a flight every two weeks. Space would open up fast, surely. L5 started in the mid-70s, based on what was proven (real enough) and what was promised (a pack of lies and wishful thinking, as it turned out.)

Somewhere along the way, space travel became routine enough to stop attracting much notice, but not routine enough to allow for dramatic progress. It's a bad space program that gets its maximum news exposure from disasters, not accomplishments. We expected accelerating technological progress, but if anything, things slowed down. The future isn't what it used to be.

The universe itself let us down. (Or rather, SF had raised our expectations too high.) When I was a kid, Venus seemed like it might have steamy oceans beneath its cloudy veil, and while Mars was a desert planet, there was still hope that it had seen better days and would reveal a long history of life, maybe civilization. Well, we now know the truth: if Mars had life, it didn't make much of a mark. Venus is certainly dead, and probably always has been.

Not only is there less grist for imagination now, but the spectacle value of space seems mostly confined to pictures from robotic missions. When I was following space programs in the 60s and 70s, they were the most thrillingly futuristic thing going. Now we have SF special effects in an arms race for greater photorealism. You can make excitingly futuristic things seem to happen far more easily than you can make any corresponding future happen. And in that medium, not even limited by what's physically possible.

Is space a yawn, now? I don't really blame the young for thinking so.

Notable, Misquotable, Whatever: I like it

2006-12-28T22:21:00.000-08:00

Wikipedia features sometimes-endless debates over whether a given person, place, thing, or figment of someone's fevered imagination is "notable". If it's not notable, it's out. If someone differs strongly enough with that verdict, it's in again. In. Out. In. Out.

I just discovered the delightfully unpolished-yet-stylish prose of James D. Nicoll. Who is he? He is an SF critic on a usenet group. He is a survivor of many strange attempts on his life by mercurial reality. And now he is facing an attempted assassination of his potential immortality in a medium only slightly less evanescent than the one in which he chose to make his mark: He is, by his own account, scheduled to be sent down the Wikipedia memory hole for not being enough of a somebody. However, his Wikipedia entry is still up there anyway, last I checked.

His claims to notability might be slim, but our sense of the word "notable" must become more mutable to take account of new digital media, with its proliferation of means for taking note. If he is not noteworthy, why did someone retrieve a particular slew of his reviews (of SF novels covering the turn of the century) from oblivion, and assemble them on a website? Perhaps that is a weak argument. But perhaps Nicoll should still be considered notable as someone who said something so quotable that it got misattributed, and not just once, but several times. If someone that quotable isn't notable, who is?

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle [sic] their pockets for new vocabulary.

I almost corrected "riffle [sic]" to "rifle", but it occurred to me: if the original quote was in a medium without proofreaders, isn't leaving the misspelling/typo more authentic, much as we might now quote Shakespeare as having "spaek" something or other? Not that Nicoll and Shakspere are peers or anything.... for one thing, Nicoll is a lot funnier.

Novels and novelty; whither libraries?

2006-12-26T01:17:00.000-08:00

I'm still having trouble getting used to the idea that entire, recent, good novels can be found on the Web. For example, Peter Watts' Blindsight. Available under the Creative Commons license. There is even an effort called Librivox with the mission of "acoustical liberation of books in the public domain" -- free audiobooks, read into the public domain by volunteers.

Earlier this year, we at Tama Ryokan had a guest who was in Japan to study the architecture of libraries -- a curious choice of country, given that there are fewer libraries per 100,000 people in Japan than in most developed nations. I suggested to him that the primary reason we had libraries was that we used paper books, an information technology that might not have another twenty years left it in it before it goes the way of the buggy whip. Public investment in a building for the sole purpose of storing and lending out books was not likely to be seen as a good use of public funds. He was not impressed with my argument. Then again, I didn't expect him to be.

My Metal Head Hertz

2006-12-25T04:33:00.000-08:00

Maybe because of what I ate for Metal Lunch.

It's Christmas Day (or December 25th in Japan, if that counts, and I'm not sure it does). I've been randomly browsing all day. The above seemed like a very good place to stop.

The Great Wealth Transfer

2006-12-14T01:44:00.000-08:00

How the richer are getting richer, as Paul Krugman explains it.

I remain sympathetic to the argument that what we've got here is a combination of trends, only one of which is governmental. (If only because singular events are usually the result of multiple, independent factors, where our bias is to seek out a single cause.)

Take jobs. (Just don't take mine!) Krugman is a free-trader, so he has to know that China, among other developing nations, was going to start soaking up manufacturing jobs. Indeed, he argued in an essay, "In Praise of Cheap Labor: Bad Jobs at Bad Wages are Better than No Jobs at All", that to try to protect against that phenomenon would be counterproductive and miserly. Boy, did he get a lot of hate mail for that one.

Then there's the argument by Brad DeLong et al. that IT, among other things, has given us more of a winner-take-all economy. Perhaps there are fewer rainbows, fewer pots of gold at their endpoints. But there is beaucoup booty for those who get to those pots of gold first -- whether by way of talent, luck or unsustainably intense effort (with the biggest pots going to those who manage a trifecta). Perhaps the employees of Goldman Sachs would agree -- salaries, bonuses and benefits will amount to an average of $622,00 per employee this year. Meanwhile, the 120 workers on contract to clean Goldman Sachs offices in London are mulling a strike, with their workloads having been increased recenty by staff cutbacks. Well, that shows up what Krugman is talking about rather starkly, doesn't it? (The cleaners in the new York offices probably don't even belong to a union.)

The income disparities at the highest end are probably best explained by a market failure in executive compensation. One of the better explanations I've heard for this blames the rise of CEO head-hunting, which arguably marketized executive recruiting far beyond any precedent. That's paradoxical. The question is: should it have been marketized? Time was, most top executives arrived at their positions through internal promotions -- so when you got up there at the top, you actually knew something about your company. As Robert Townsend put it, it's better to hire from within even if your best internal candidate only looks like half of what you need -- "He'll grow the other half." Someone coming in from outside might fumble around for a year and half, and still not know which end is up. "Vision" in the sense of "seeing how your company really works" is not the kind of expertise that can be easily commodified. By liquefying the market for CEO bodies, executive recruiting actually made in-house wisdom scarcer, and also made the game of winning as a CEO considerably more of a crap shoot. What happens when you make something scarcer? The price goes up. And what happens when you make a job more like gambling? Less blame on the gambler when things go wrong -- thus a failure of market signals.

Krugman argues from the government side, and lays the blame on Reagan and Bush. Well, that's probably part of the picture. But I don't think it's the whole story.

Why we're not leaving Iraq

2006-12-13T06:28:00.000-08:00

Because if we do, the Saudis will likely weigh in on the side of the Sunni insurgency. Juan Cole analyzes this, which he describes as "no surprise," except for the part about their saying it so openly now. I assume it's no surprise to the White House, either.

The Conspiracy to Keep Us Confused about Income Inequality

2006-12-11T05:39:00.000-08:00

Paul Krugman is stirring up a ruckus with a piece in Rolling Stone entitled "How the Super-rich are Screwing America". That article is not on-line, but perhaps the substance of the argument might be summed up well enough in a 2003 article in the Nation. When Krugman really wants to push a point, he'll keep writing the same piece to the point of exhaustion.

I don't really have a problem per se with the rich getting richer. What worries me is that they might use their added wealth to buy the democracy they think they deserve. They may well feel they deserve it -- after all, the well-off pay most of the taxes. Paul Krugman thinks this is already happening -- that it has been happening for over a generation. And that people need to be woken up about it. Krugman's arch-nemesis (and transgalactic-scale idiot) Donald Luskin of NRO, loves the tag-line, "The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid", but Krugman seems out to co-opt that thesis for progressive politics.

Paul Krugman has some intelligent critics on this point. Brad Delong wonders whether the wealth and income disparities that have emerged in America are perhaps far too large to be explained by anything the government has done or could do. Note, however, that he doesn't question that the changes are large. More to the point, he definitely does not accuse Krugman of lying, as Fox News' Cavuto did last week.

Amory Lovins, bananas at 7,000 feet

2006-12-09T01:20:00.000-08:00

A voice crying in the wilderness since 1970 or so, Amory Lovins and his energy policy entrepreneurialism now gets more attention at the Pentagon than at DOE, by his account. He's a techno-optimist, almost a libertarian, but more than anything else, an environmentalist. Witty, too -- even if turns of phrase like "global weirding" distract more than they illuminate. Watch him on Charlie Rose.

Why The Industrial Revolution?

2006-12-06T06:16:00.000-08:00

The National Bureau of Economic Research is a jewel-like minaret thrust above the ivory tower of academic economics. Where else would someone get paid to write a paper showing that famous painters produce their most noteworthy work either when they are quite young or toward the ends of their careers, but not so much in between? I like to peruse the abstracts of recent NBER publications just to get an idea of the sort of weird ideas economists are thinking about these days.

One not-so-new paper caught my eye recently, entitled "Was an Industrial Revolution Inevitable? Economic Growth Over the Very Long Run". I loved the typo at the NBER site that turned the last line of the abstract into a punchline:

the simulated economy indicates that the single most important factor in the transition to modern growth has been the increase in the fraction of output pain to compensate inventors for the fruits of their labor.

Yes, the output pain. I know it well. There should be a t-shirt that says, "I Subverted the Dominant Paradigm in Silicon Valley, but all I got was this lousy case of tendinitis." OK, I got pain, but I also got paid.

The paper itself is quite chockablock with mathematical modeling, quantifications of the seemingly unquantifiable. After satisfying himself that an Industrial Revolution was inevitable, the author Charls Jones asks, was The Industrial Revolution inevitable? His model gets it a little wrong in timing, and there seems to be an inevitable non sequitur in his attribution of root causes -- how could advances in property rights in the twentieth century explain the Industrial Revolution arising a century earlier? Well, he's looking at the 25,000 year perspective, maybe his model is a little cross-eyed when it gets down to the fine details of timing.

Maybe he basically has it right, but in my own theory of the genesis of the Industrial Revolution, at least one shock to the system didn't retard it but rather advanced it. Once conditions were right -- demographic, technological, economic, legal, and institutional -- there was still one more thing required: the idea that inventors were really worth something. And since those conditions had been achieved before (in China, for example) without industrial revolution take-off, it's clear that something else has to work on people's minds to get them to accept the idea that invention, for all its disruptive effects, is still a net public good. Charles Jones says that, aside from the network effects of a high enough (and I suppose, dense enough) population were established, the other major change required is to start investing a lot in invention. So we agree there. But I don't think his model explains why people started feeling that way about invention. People who didn't give a tinker's damn about invention for thousands of years suddenly started giving a damn about the tinker -- paying him real money, in fact.

My theory is that the Little Ice Age played a big role. Climate change in Europe, in Britain particularly, where conditions were ripest, reduced the quality of life for everyone, but most importantly the rich and powerful. The weather doesn't play favorites. The rich and powerful are endowed with many things, but they catch colds and sneeze in nasty weather, and get sick on bad food, and starve when there's no food, just like the rest of us. Invent something that keeps the poor warmer and well-fed, you won't get rewarded much. Invent something that keeps the rich warmer and well-fed, you've really got something. And if it trickles down the poor in the long run, so much the better, especially if it enables an industrial proletariat to keep the process feeding into itself.

The Horror, the Horror

2006-12-05T04:41:00.000-08:00

I'm sure everyone has seen some film version of Donovan's Brain, Curt Siodmak's classic about the disembodied brain of an evil genius, controlling people telepathically. (Orson Welles did it as a radio show in the 40s, and the story started life as a novel -- the idea has amazing cross-media vitality.) Here's something interesting Siodmak wrote once about cycles in the popularity of horror films:

The popularity of horror films and current historical trends are interrelated. Horror stories and horror movies are safety valves for human anxieties. During World War Two there was a renaissance of the Frankenstein, Wolf Man and The Invisible Man stories. That trend lasted until the war's end. Though the cloud of the horrors of war permeated our everyday lives, motion pictures of heroic soldiers mowing down hordes of enemies only increased anxieties, since everybody knew that one machine gun couldn't liquidate five thousand Nazis and that fathers and sons were in the battleline facing death. But abstract horror movies--the Monster kidnapping the fair lady, the Wolf Man anxiously watching the moon which could change him into a murderous beast--were highly successful thrillers. Their horrors were detached from reality. When the audience left the theatre they knew they had seen a fantasy.

The day the war ended, the bottom of the horror movie industry fell out. Even Germany, having shed the Nazi spirit, liked only "Schnuitzen," insipid love stories, all sugar and spice. Horror pictures couldn't even be given away. In the United States the musicals and comedies had their heydays. Then, with Truman's cold war policy, with Russian and American atom bombs and other apocalyptic weapons against which there was no defense, horror pictures returned in quantity. They peaked in the early 1950s with the election of Eisenhower and with the cold war abated for a time. Then, they again faded away. But with the Kennedy, Johnson and later administrations and renewed world tensions, the horror movie cycle returned. Again the world's accelerating insecurity tried to find release in horror films and horror novels. As the danger for humanity increased even more with sophisticated weaponry, so the theme of horror pictures grew in magnitude. Disaster pictures like The Towering Inferno and Earthquake tried to top each other; the mental horror films like Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen presented stories of devilish possession as though the world were ruled by Satan and humans had no power.

And here's something I found while trying to find out how many more horror films are being made now than before the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq:

Top grossers
More guts and more gore mean more money at the box office

By Bonnie Britton

March 19, 2006
Moviegoers -- especially the younger ones -- are flocking to horror flicks these days like gulls to Tippi Hedren in "The Birds."

But you won't find too many flicks like those tame Alfred Hitchcock classics or movies starring Dracula, Frankenstein and the Werewolf.

Many newer horror films, including "Saw II" and "Hostel," come splattered with blood and guts. Flicks that revel in dead teenagers, rollercoaster crashes, serial killers, creepy things in the woods/town/building and finger-lickin' cannibals are becoming common fare at multiplexes.

[....]

Lionsgate's bloody and brutal "Saw II" took in $87 million domestically in 2005 ($131.4 million worldwide), making it the top-grossing horror film of the year. That's more than the Academy Awards best-picture winner "Crash" took in, which ended its domestic run with $53.4 million.

The article quotes, um, authorities on the subject:

Purdue University Professor of Communication Glenn Sparks, who studies the effects of mass media, offers a reason why people enjoy scary movies: "The feeling of fear generates a lot of physiological response."

Sparks said studies have found that watching horror movies causes the skin to release moisture and increases a person's heart and respiration rates.

Well, duh.

"People come out of these films oftentimes feeling a sense of euphoria," he said.

Yes, but why? Could it be that sense of relief -- "It wasn't real, we're all OK?" There's not much more depth in the analysis of studio execs. Or maybe they know the truth, but don't want to bum people out?

Marc Weinstock, executive vice president of marketing for Screen Gems/TriStar, calls horror movies a "communal experience. When you have 300 people all being scared at the same time, there's a lot of energy in the room."

Yes, but that wouldn't explain why there's money to be made in direct-to-video horror flicks, typical viewings of which result in one, two, or maybe as many as three people all being scared at the same time in the same room. Maybe when Weinstock talks about "energy in the room", he's really thinking about all the cash in the till back at the box office.

For a sense of what all the splatter is about, maybe we have to go back to Curt Siodmak, who spent about 90 of his 98 years writing, a lot of it in the horror genre, most of it forgettable (or in some cases unforgettably bad) but some of it truly timeless:

Horror stories and movies of anxiety are here to stay until the world's tensions diminish. To a writer's mind, global catastrophe might accelerate the world's quest for a solution to its problems. All this sounds rather grim. It is. Many great minds work on plans of how to rearrange the world we live in without fright and fears. The blueprint of the continuation is being worked on. Does mankind have the will to carry it out? When the monsters die for good, the world might have died with them. Or we might have found a way to live together with a sense of social justice and ecological stability.

I'm all for that, so long as it doesn't result in a food chain where my neighbor has a right to eat my brain if I forget to compost my lawn trimmings. Film treatment coming next week.

Pond scum and our energy future

2006-11-29T03:41:00.000-08:00

In the late 90s, the DOE's Aquatic Species Program closed out with a report saying that, despite all the promise of biodiesel from algae farming, diesel prices would have to at least double to make it commercially appealing.

Diesel prices have almost tripled since that time.

Algae farming, I love it. You can make methane, ethanol, diesel, maybe even cattle feed. You can grow algae in brackish water, so it's a great use for all those fields gone dead from salination. You can pump CO2 into the water from coal-burning effluent and increase the yield. The photosynthesis yield per acre of land useless for farming, pasture or woodland would be high. But we're not using algae to make biodiesel, an in the meantime, the surging demand for biodiesel is causing more rainforest to be cleared for sugar cane, palm oil, soy. What sense does this make? Still, I think it's coming, and we'll thank Jimmy Carter for investing in pond scum.

Iraq's Descent

2006-11-18T01:36:00.000-08:00

Excellent piece by Nir Rosen in the Boston Review. Interestingly, the Iraqi Shi'ite fanatic's standard term for Sunni is now Wahhabi. The Saudis can't be too happy about that.

More impactfulness found

2006-11-16T23:57:00.000-08:00

It's possible that major asteroidal and cometary impacts are far more frequent--perhaps by two orders of magnitude--than supposed. According to a story in the International Herald Tribune, some large sediment formations called chevrons contain a lot of deep ocean microfossils and elements associated with impact events. They are hypothesized to be the result of 'megatsunamis' that would have dwarfed the recent one that hit the coast of Sumatra so hard.

If the evidence mounts in favor of this hypothesis, planetary defense might still sit on the back burner, but the pot would bubble a little more. The Tribune story claims that all "earth-grazing" asteroids are catalogued and monitored, and the likely frequency of impacts are estimated from that data. But maybe they haven't been adequately covered.

I happed to run into Piet Hut while I was in Berkeley earlier this year. He said that the B612 Foundation takes up maybe only 5% of his time. I don't suppose it's anybody's first priority right now.

More tornado alleys?

2006-11-08T00:37:00.000-08:00

The GOP is this election's tornado bait. Disgusted conservative Christians staying home on one side, enraged Democrats (and not a few independents) charging to the polls on the other--something was going to get ripped up and splintered in between those two continental-scale masses.

Here in relatively sedate Japan, the news is of a literal tornado that has killed at least 9 people. Now, in America, that kind of death toll is not big news. But since 1961 (and better housing) the most lethal tornados in Japan have killed only one or two. Tornados of intensity higher than F4 are simply not seen. (I just caught a clip on TV news of a what may have been just a very large dust-devil in a schoolyard here, with students unsure of whether it was safe to approach it. In Oklahoma, they'd be taking shelter, fast.) The Japanese word tatsumaki doesn't even distinguish between tornado and waterspout.

I hate it when somebody seizes on a weather news item and declares Global Warming the cause. You heard a lot of that when Katrina hit. Statistically, tornadoes don't seem to be on the increase in Japan. However, the main outcome of global warming may be seen in increases in intensity of extreme events, not frequency.

Democrats getting into a the House? Possibility that state capitols will become majority-Democrat? Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican governor, declaring a split with the Bush administration's Kyoto Protocol policy, and making carbon-trading deals with Eastern seaboard states? (And his Attorney General announcing a lawsuit against major automakers for the damage done by their vehicles' carbon emissions?) A British report recently that untrammelled Greenhouse Gas emissions will cause more economic damage than abatement measures? Maybe it's finally all coming together: the big American turnaround on climate change issues. Maybe we don't have to wait until Bush leaves office.

Truly startling desperation

2006-11-06T20:12:00.000-08:00

One day before an election, you get a phone call. It's a recorded message. It purports to be about a Democratic candidate. Then you get an attack ad. At the end, you're told the ad was sponsored by a Republican campaign.

You get this same phone call eight times that day.

Actually, though, if you're a GOP-leaning voter, you probably hang up in the first few seconds, the first time (not just every time thereafter) because you've already made up your mind. Damned Democrats won't leave you alone! It riles you. You're gonna vote against these turkeys, and especially so because of their harassing phone calls!

If you're a Dem-leaning voter--well, maybe your chance of getting this call is much lower. The GOP machine has the phone numbers of many GOP voters. They can figure out who you are just by what diet cola you drink and what car you drive.

It's happening. It's sneaky, desperate, and not too likely to work, I think. It might be illegal, but the fine in New Hampshire is only $5,000, not exactly a major deterrent when you think of the millions being sunk into campaigns.

As one pundit put it recently, the American electorate is waiting to vomit, but is still staring at the porcelain. Robocalls are just another finger down their throats.

Neocons: "You can't blame us!"

2006-11-04T21:00:00.000-08:00

Or not much, anyway.

My theory is that the neo-cons were just another Big Tent constituency who were seduced into collaboration with the Petrodollar Wing of the GOP because of their blend of Boy Scout attitudes about ends and Machiavellian acceptance of any means necessary. They are a brainy tribe who sneer at Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh, I'm sure, even as Condi and Dubya appear on those radio shows because a vote is a vote is a vote. Brainy types like to be right--to the point of irritating their debating partners. I think what the neo-cons don't understand is that, in the politics of a democracy, it's better to appear stupid, while getting what you want, than to be "right", but not get it. (Since none of them seem to have run for elective office, it's not surprising they never learned this lesson.) As a constituency, they were convenient for the Bush administration--for a while. Now they are gone, though tarred by the association with Iraq failure. Which, of course, they resent mightily. I'm so sad for them. SO sad.

Make no mistake, see no mistake, speak no mistake

2006-11-04T07:05:00.000-08:00

That noble experiment in open source intelligence analysis, the Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal, has been taken down for inspection and removal of any of those pesky nuclear bomb recipes that somehow keep floating around the Internet.

But ... how did could something like this have happened? The official story is that "something unfortunate occurred". Whew. I'm so ... relieved. Think how much worse it could have been. Imagine if ... mistakes had been made. You don't want that.

The right-wing blogosphere is, of course, cawing victory: "Saddam had a bomb program! We even got the NYT to admit it! He was only a year away from a bomb!" Yeah--back in 1991. When are these people going to learn the past perfect tense? "He'd had a WMD program" is not the same as "He had a WMD program". I guess those homies was too cool for school. Shee-yit.

He Changes the Results with His Noodly Appendages

2006-11-03T06:21:00.000-08:00

The news is a constant assault for the habitual blogger. What to choose? For over 48 hours, I've been dithering.

Do I talk about this conservative evangelical superchurch leader, Haggard, caught with his pants down, who has apparently now admitted to a pastor some of the charges against him, but not all? ("Yes I hired a rent boy, but the part about buying meth from him is a lie, a total lie!") What's next with that story? Will we soon hear from Haggard that he was fondled as a teenager by some Papist Spawn of Sodom?

Or do I write about how Tony Snow downplayed a leaked Pentagon report that used the term "ethnic cleansing" in describing many of the variables of what might be called the Iraq Chaos Index? That came hot on the heels of PM Maliki telling the U.S. to clear off, get out of the way, let us handle this sectarian violence (I assume so that Shi'ite militias can ethnically cleanse Baghdad unimpeded.) Tony says deaths are down since Ramadan. (How would we know? The Iraqi government has decided it's going to stop reporting mortality figures.) It's just an October 18th snapshot, Tony says. If we all pull together, the sun will shine tomorrow! All this defeatist carping! It's SO unfair!

Do I write about John Kerry, the Cookie Monster of American orators, and his dumb botching of a dumb joke about how dumb Dubya is? Pretty soon we'll be hearing dumb criticism of his dumb apology to the dumb people who didn't realize he dumbly botched a dumb joke about how dumb Dubya is. Man, am I tired of reading about this. Why doesn't the American political system feature an OFF button?

I'm not gonna write about any of that. Read this, instead: the impassioned plea from a beleagured minority religion in America that their version of creation be taught in schools, that it be given equal time. The faithful members of The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster need to have their say, and I say: it's about time.

Ubergirl Dusts Supermemo - Rematch not yet scheduled

2006-11-01T06:59:00.000-08:00

The coiner of the term "uberman sleep", and until recently, one of the most successful popularizers of the concept by way of her anonymous everything2 entry years ago, takes on some of the most hideously pin-headed criticisms of the practice.

The Impossible Takes a Little Longer

2006-10-31T19:38:00.000-08:00

Did you believe in Dow 36,000? Don't give up hope! By 2021, it should be true. Buy some of those remainder copies of Glassman and Hasset's book off Amazon (as low as 1 cent plus shipping) and have them sent to your friends. Let's light a real fire under this market, which just hit a new high!

These guys are pants-on-fire liars, of course. They specifically said Dow 36,000 would materialize in 3-5 years. Now they are saying they weren't wrong overall, they were just a leetle off in some very minor detail. They can't even get it right about the stock market today--the Dow Jones hit a new nominal high, but not if you adjust for inflation. The other indices (arguably more reflective of reality) are still down from their bubble-era highs.

As long as I'm here, I hope you will all buy my forthcoming book, "How to Make a Million Dollars Before You Graduate from College". It's really pretty easy. You just put off going to college, and take a regular job, save every penny, then go to college after you've made a million dollars. And the best part is: you can save money on college costs because, after you've got a million bucks, why even go to college? (Besides, you'll be sixty years old, easily.) There's more to it than that, of course, but buy my book for the step-by-step breakdown.

Richard Feynman, computer designer?!

2006-10-31T06:41:00.000-08:00

Who knew? Well, I didn't. Danny Hillis' eulogistic tribute to Feynman's contributions at the now-defunct Thinking Machines corporation has so many quotables that I won't even try to pick the best one. Read the whole thing. Here's a teaser:

We tried to take advantage of Richard's talent for clarity by getting him to critique the technical presentations that we made in our product introductions. Before the commercial announcement of the Connection Machine CM-1 and all of our future products, Richard would give a sentence-by-sentence critique of the planned presentation. "Don't say 'reflected acoustic wave.' Say 'echo'." Or, "Forget all that 'local minima' stuff. Just say there's a bubble caught in the crystal and you have to shake it out." Nothing made him angrier than making something simple sound complicated.

Getting Richard to give advice like that was sometimes tricky. He pretended not to like working on any problem that was outside his claimed area of expertise. Often, at Thinking Machines when he was asked for advice he would gruffly refuse with "That's not my department." I could never figure out just what his department was, but it did not matter anyway, since he spent most of his time working on those "not-my-department" problems. Sometimes he really would give up, but more often than not he would come back a few days after his refusal and remark, "I've been thinking about what you asked the other day and it seems to me..." This worked best if you were careful not to expect it.

Just arguing semantics again

2006-10-30T05:08:00.000-08:00

I have another essay out at The Space Review: When Politics, Semantics and Reality Collide: the "space tourism" debate.

I can give you a money-back guarantee that you'll greet it with delight, loathing, or total apathy.

Oh no ... "serial polygamy"

2006-10-29T01:17:00.000-08:00

A question crossed the SWET list today: what is "serial polygamy"? This term caused a major snyaptic traffic jam in parts of my brain that I prefer to use for weightier matters, like deciding whether to take a nap or waste time searching the Web for Neologisms from Hell.

Having never heard of serial polygamy before, I checked Wikipedia. (Yes, this was after my nap.) There I was told that some conservative Christians prefer this term to "serial monogamy". I think their reasoning, such as it is, might go something like this:

- Polygamy is bad.

- Serial anything is worse. ("Serial killer", "serial rapist", etc.)

- Monogamy is good. So using that word in "serial monogamy" can only
confuse people. It makes holy matrimony sound like it can be both good and very, very bad. (Gosh, nobody who's actually been married would ever think that, would they?)

- ERGO: be sure to call it "serial polygamy" so that people are in no doubt whatsoever that divorce and remarriage are bad.

- BONUS: "Serial polygamy" is kinda cool because it sounds worse than just "polygamy". We don't want to make plain ol' polygamy sound too bad, and adding "serial polygamy" provides a backstop. Plain Ol' Polygamy was, after all, practiced by some Old Testament prophets who channeled the Word of God. Yeah, Solomon had a lot of wives, but there's a critical distinction here: can you find in Scripture any indication that he divorced even one of these wives? Didn't think so. He was a polygamist, but at least he wasn't (*shudder*) a serial polygamist.

"Serial monogamy" -- avaunt, you demons of cognitive dissonance! Back to choral harmony!

Google turned up several supposed Children's Encyclopedia entries for "serial polygamy", all claiming heritage from Wikipedia, when in fact there is no current Wikipedia entry for the term. I gather that, for one brief, shining, highly moralistic moment, there was some such entry, before the Demons from Cognitive Dissonance descended upon it, shrieking "WTF?!", as is their wont, those profane minions of Satan.

UPDATE: Anthony Burgess, who cannot be accused of innocence with regard to the English language, used the term somewhat seriously, but still tongue in cheek. He said that the American pattern of divorce and remarriage would seem to Europeans a kind of "serial polygamy". From the context, however, I think his remarks would invite great scorn from conservative Christians.

Why We Read

2006-10-28T07:29:00.000-07:00

Why do we read anyway? As a communications technology, writing has pretty obvious utility. But that's not why we read Dave Barry, Robert Ludlum, Paul Krugman. Ever since audio tape, we've potentially had the option of listening. Of course, we do like to listen--the enduring popularity of radio (and TV when we're not directly watching it) are proof of that. But if recreational reading were about wanting to be told stories, why didn't electronic audio supplant text for most purposes long ago? Isn't it less effort to listen than to read? And what is it that makes audio books less appealing? I might love Meryl Streep's voice, or Anthony Hopkin's, in a voice-over. For some reason, though, listening to them read an entire book to me seems a lot less appealing.

I don't think I have all the answers here, but I think I do have a partial-explanation theory I can't remember committing to writing before. (If you've seen it elsewhere, earlier, please write me.)

We listen when we want to be told things. We read when we want to love the sound of our own voices--perhaps to love our voices more than we have any right to, but nevertheless to love our own voices all the same.

I can hear the objections already. "I read authors because I love the sound of their voices!" Well, yes, that's true as well. But it's after the fact, I will argue. "I hate my voice when I read something aloud and listen to a recording of it! Don't you?" No doubt. I know the feeling. But I'm not talking about your real voice. I'm talking about your own voice as it would be most loved by you.

Studies of the psychology of reading have shown that we all subvocalize when we read. Forget speed reading. (I love Woody Allen's old joke about that, about reading War and Peace in two hours in a bookstore: "It's about Russia.") Even if you don't move your lips when you read, slight subliminal vocal muscle movement is recorded, correlating with what you're taking in.

So here's my theory: all text you read is merely support for a kind of fiction, in which you take on the author's voice, and in that way, slip into the author's persona. Reality has nothing to do with it. As Mark Twain said, fiction must be believable, but reality is under no such constraint. We continue reading because of a willing suspension of disbelief, a temporary-delusion self-flattery that we are saying things as well as the writer, that we are capable of the writer's imagination. This doesn't preclude a certain sense of distance from the text, from which we can also admire the writer as a writer. But the main impetus for moving from one sentence to the next is to get this feeling: "I'm saying this. I'm telling the story." When we say we love a piece of writing, we're mainly reporting on the (admittedly false) experience of being the story teller ourselves.

Ah, I used to really read ....

2006-10-27T23:00:00.000-07:00

Toby Litt's Cult Choice -- almost as much fun as the books he reviews. Not to mention a great cheat-sheet if you ever aspired to minor cult classic yourself, and still have ambitions along those lines.

I'm SO confused ....

2006-10-25T08:54:00.000-07:00

We're not staying the course. "We've never been 'stay the course'". (No matter how many times we've said it was, and even slapped reporters for not writing it exactly that way.)

It's now "adapt to win". Except when it's not. Or something like that.

The White House has got to be hoping the Religious Right doesn't dimly perceive some Darwinian subtext in the New Newspeak. After all, "adapt to win" does sound like a pithier version of "natural selection of random mutations." Notwithstanding fundamentalist theological objections, maybe Rummy's pet Revolution in Military Affairs will get an injection of transgenic treatments for our GIs -- they'll grow their own armor, leap tall sniper-infested buildings in a single bound, jump out of range of IED explosions faster than a speeding RPG. They'll adapt to win!

Tell me how it's gonna be, George. Tell me again how it's gonna be.

The Green Tunnel of Rot

2006-10-25T06:48:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's something in the air--the accelerating decay of the situation in Iraq, the midterm elections, East Asian rumblings over North Korea, but I was reminded of a passage from The Soccer War, by indefatigable Polish correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski, a collection of stories about his Third World travels through coup-ridden, revolution-scorched nations in the 60s. Here's the passage, from a fragmented chapter entitled "Plan for a Book that Could Have Started Right Here", part of a section about his experiences in the Congo.

At daybreak we start towards Stanleyville: a thousand kilometres of muddy dirt road, driving the whole time through a sombre green tunnel, in a stench of decomposing leaves, entangled branches and roots, because we are travelling deeper and deeper into the greatest jungle in Africa, into an eerie world of rotting, proliferating, monstrously exaggerated botany. We are driving through a tropical wilderness that fills you with awe and delight, and every so often we have to pull the Ford out of the rust-coloured clay or out of a bog overgrown with brownish-grey duckweed. Along the road we are stopped by gendarmerie patrols, drunk or hungry, indifferent or aggressive--the rebellious, undisciplined army that, gone wild, has taken over the country, robbing and raping. When stopped, we push our driver Seraphim out of the car and watch what happens. If he falls into an embrace with the gendarmes we breathe easy, because that means Seraphim has come across his tribal kinsmen. But if they start punching his head and beating him with the butts of their rifles, our skin crawls, because the same thing--or worse, perhaps--awaits us. I do not know what made us want to keep going along that road (on which it was so easy to die)--was it stupidity and a lack of imagination, or passion and ambition, or mania and honour, or our folly and our belief that we were obliged now to do it even though we had imposed an obligation on ourselves?--and as we drive on I feel that each kilometre another barrier has come down behind us, another gate has been slammed shut, and turning back becomes more and more impossible. After two days we roll into Stanleyville.

All Your Space Are Belong to U.S.

2006-10-21T05:12:00.000-07:00

Go, USA! America claims the right to deny access to space to any nation it considers a threat to its national interests.

The United States considers space capabilities -- including the ground and space segments and supporting links -- vital to its national interests. Consistent with this policy, the United States will: [...] deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. national interests ...

One could argue that it's academic, that it's just a forthright clarification of a space hegemony established at least as long ago as the end of the Cold War. Not only has space been latently militarized by ICBMs for many decades, ICBMs may be the only reason why we have space programs at all. Basing missile launchers on the ground, on aircraft and on submarines is simply the most convenient and cost effective mode of deployment. If there were some reason why they would be better based in orbit, or on the Moon, we'd be doing that.

What's a little scary is that "if necessary" part. (Not to mention "national interest", which is much broader than "national security".) It was necessary, we were told, to go into Iraq to deny Saddam his WMD capability, to disrupt his cooperation with al Qaeda. Oops. Now we're told it's necessary to establish freedom and democracy in Iraq rather than have our oil supply in the hands of terrorist sympathizers.

Are you worried about North Korean nukes and missiles? Well, so am I. A little. Maybe I should be: I live in Tokyo, in a little firetrap ryokan. A nuclear tipped missile from the North would be a distinctly non-peaceful use of outer space. But I'm actually more worried about Condoleezza Rice, who asserts that North Korea is still acting "belligerent" because, when she was in Beijing being briefed about North Korea by the Chinese, they made no mention of Kim Jong Il apologizing for his nuke testing and saying he wouldn't do it again. Well, duh, Condi: maybe your Chinese hosts just assume you read the papers? It sort of reminds me of Dubya finally getting clear on why he should care about North Korea at all--Saudi Prince Bandar (of all people) had to explain to him that, if North invaded South, a lot of people would die quickly, including U.S. troops stationed there. Bush had been complaining that his people had been giving him these long, seemingly pointless, briefings about the history and significance of North Korea. Maybe his briefers just assumed, reasonably enough, that he knew what the Tripwire strategy was about already, and wanted more background.

"Deny, if proven necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. national security" -- that's language I might be able to live with. But that's not what it says. What it does say is troubling. To a lot of people. When a UN resolution called "Prevention of Outer Space Arms Race" came to a vote, only the U.S. voted in favor. There were only two abstentions: Israel, and the Federated States of Micronesia. If these two virtual dependencies of the U.S. couldn't even bring themselves to vote yes, you have to wonder what the rest of the world must be thinking.

Autism Causes Television

2006-10-21T00:33:00.000-07:00

Well, if people can say television causes autism only because there's some correlation, why not the other way around?

Ever notice how the talking heads on television use such exaggerated facial expressions? Sure, there are exceptions, but how many people actually watch McNeil-Lehrer? Usually it's some newscaster who looks like she's going to pull some muscles around her mouth. It's articulation as X-treme Sport. And that's just the news. What about popular fictional TV series? As Sigourney Weaver once said, dismissively, of most TV actors: "They're not acting. They're ... indicating." I love watching 24, but it almost works with the sound off, because they spend so much time overexplaining plot elements to the audience in lieu of actual lines. Daytime talk shows? Don't even get me started about Geraldo. Even Steve Colbert employs body language reminiscent of a cardboard-cutout conservative rationalizer in This Modern World. Johnny Carson had a little subtlety, but now we have Jay Leno, who looks like he was genetically engineered to have a face you could recognize from 100 yards off. It's almost as if, in addressing the television audience, they are talking to people with ... with .. with some kind of social-clue deficit disorder.

Genetic studies suggest that there may be 20 different genes involved in autism. If only some of them are active in people who are not quite clinically autistic, those people might watch more television, might have children with people who are similarly impaired, and have kids that sit in front of the tube a lot in infancy because their parents are. They aren't getting much exercise and they are eating crap, so that have lousy immune systems and digestive systems, common symptoms in the full-blown autistic. Which leaves them ever more couch-bound, and watching ever more television.

Autism Causes Television.

Battling Body Counts

2006-10-19T23:15:00.000-07:00

I've only skimmed Iraq Body Count's initial incredulous reaction to the recent Lancet study. What strikes me is the emphasis they put on politically-motivated violence, as if that were the only likely source of a dramatically higher male death rate in Iraq.

Iraq is awash in guns--perhaps one per household, probably higher than in Saddam's time. Iraq has very high unemployment rates--60% is what I read--a substantial indicator of the kind of male despair and rage that can lead to higher rates of suicide and interpersonal (nonpolitical) homicide. Iraq has a very high crime rate as well, as you'd expect in a nation that is having trouble organizing its police forces, and that troublingly high unemployment rate.

I have some reason to believe that Arab countries dramatically underreport their suicide rates. The statistics defy belief. Can Jordan's really be zero? Can Egypt's really be 0.3 per 100,000 of population? Russia's is 70, and that might be underreporting in itself. I haven't been able to find recent numbers for Iraq.

In the U.S., there are 1.6 times as many suicides as homicides. Homicide itself (obviously high in Iraq) can be a motivator for suicide. Grief over any kind of death often is.

Consider accidental gun deaths as well. Merely having a gun around the household increases the chances of death at home considerably. Add the fact that people in Iraq are understandably jittery over violence, including mere criminal violence, and you have a multiplier effect. The mere availability of guns (and the somewhat greater male attraction to them, and the glorification of them in militia hands) increases the chance that a young boy or young man is likely to kill himself with a gun only by accident.

Iraq Body Count is strongly focused on politically motivated killing in Iraq. There's a place for that. The Lancet Study looks at something more: excess deaths since the invasion. That's important, too. Perhaps more important. Why? Because when you go to war, you go with idea is that it's a temporary, necessary evil that will make things better in the end. If it hasn't, you've failed. And this might explain another mystery pointed out by Iraq Body Count: how the central government's statistics for death rates could be so much lower than the numbers implied by the Lancet study. If there's one shred of legitimacy that the current Iraq government wants to hold onto, it's the perception that they are better than Saddam ever was. And that sort of desperate grasping pose can pose moral hazards in government statistics collections. Could the collections process be corrupted by politics? Why would that be surprising? It's not as if purity in government is widespread in Iraq--Transparency International ranks Iraq somewhere near the bottom.

Beijing to stamp out bad English

2006-10-15T21:25:00.000-07:00

I knew communist dictatorship had to be good for something. My favorite on the list so far: a sign saying "Question Authority" indicating a help desk.

The Lancet Study controversy: an Iraq numbers game

2006-10-14T03:24:00.000-07:00

Among the better of many bad arguments against the new Lancet study on the lethal repercussions of the invasion of Iraq is one I found clicking around from Little Green Footballs (yeah, yeah, I know: what the hell was I doing at a hate-speech site anyway?) Here's the gist:

One strike against the Lancet study is that it bases “excess deaths” on what seems a rather low pre-invasion death rate. America's death rate (said this source) is about 10 per 1000, Hungary's about 13--nearly what the Johns Hopkins researchers claim now for Iraq. How could Saddam’s subjects have suffered only 5-6 per 1000? Whether you’re with Ramsey Clarke about the tragedy of the sanctions, or with the neo-cons about what a genocidal monster Saddam was, or both (they aren’t mutually exclusive), your picture of sanctions-period Iraq is one of continuous funeral processions.

But let’s do some math. Maybe Gulf War I killed 50,000 Iraqi soldiers outright, and maybe the Republican Guard's retaliation against the uprisings in the Shi’ite south and the Kurdish north added up to 350,000 on top of that. What if years of Ba’athist killings and sanctions-related public health failures carried off an extra 10,000 per year for a decade? That adds up to about half a million. Chilling. However, against a population of about 25 million, over 10 years, that’s maybe 0.2% per year, or an extra 2 deaths per 1000 added to Iraq’s ordinary death rate–whatever “ordinary” means in a country like that.

Well, what would “ordinary death rate” mean in a country like Iraq? Do we have comparison cases? Yes. Sort of. There’s The Other Ba’athist State, Syria, funding public health under more peaceful conditions but out of much lower oil earnings. They come in at 4.8 per 1000 according to the CIA factbook. Maybe Iran is a better point of comparison–second largest oil supplier in the world, but very large population too, and more poverty. They’re at 5.55 per 1000. Triangulating a little, take a look at Kuwait, a very rich petrostate indeed: 2.41 deaths per 1000.

How biased could Iraq’s figures be, if they were based on Ba’athist sources? Two propaganda agendas might have canceled each other out: the need to complain to the world about the inhumanity of the sanctions, versus a need to be touting the merits of Ba’ath socialism in providing for public welfare (which of course helped justify taking lives among Saddam’s state enemies in the name of lives saved by the Saddam’s benificent rule). Iraq certainly had the medical means for the latter, as well as the conditions for the former. It’s not well known, but for a while, Iraq was a mecca for those desiring cheap kidney transplants, not only because impoverished Iraqis were willing donors, but also because Iraq had, and still has, many skilled physicians. So I’d say it had war-and-sanctions-related public health disasters largely offset by good public health measures.

What explains odd discrepancies like a rich U.S. with 10 per 1000 death rates but a strapped, war-torn, dictator-saddled, sanctions-bound Iraq with something like half that rate? One is age structure. Almost 40% of Iraq’s population is under 15 years old, and only about 3% is older than 65. Amazing as it might seem to anyone with an energetic teenage boy in the household, the young aren’t likely to die as soon as the aged. Japan’s death rate is around 9 per 1000, even though this is a much safer country than Iraq in terms of public violence, and most people ride the train to work rather than driving. But Japan also aging fast, and the birth rate is well below replacement rate. I suspect another factor pushing up some death rates is automobile use combined with alcohol abuse — Iraq is very much a car country (gas was around 5 cents a gallon in Saddam’s time, a price that the Occupation decided to perpetuate) but alcohol-related traffic accidents were probably rare. I don’t know what traffic conditions were like, but one feature of police states is that they are very well policed. It’s said that Saddam used to don a fedora and take a junker out on the roads of Baghdad as camouflage, after he concluded that an escort of black bullet-proof limousines, even with decoy units, made him still too much of an assassination target. Would he have done that if he thought driving around in Baghdad was more dangerous than driving around in Rome, Athens, or (shudder) Bangkok? Hungary, with its 13 per 1000 death rate, is probably a case of age structure (almost the same number of people over 65 as under 15) and what might be called Post-Soviet Syndrome: chronic male alcoholism. (There are about half as many Hungarian men as women in the over-65 age cohort, a strong indicator.)

In short, I don’t find a sanctions-period Iraqi death rate of 5-6 per 1000 so incredible, even under the worst assumptions made about Iraq in the sanctions period. Nice try. But no cigar.

YouTube - eGroups Redux

2006-10-12T19:45:00.000-07:00

The buzz around Google's acquisition of YouTube will die down soon. For now, I invite you to consider a precedent: Yahoo's acquisition of eGroups.

How could eGroups have been worth $432 million to Yahoo? That was about $25 per eGroup member--it would take a long time for Yahoo to recoup based on ad impressions. Well, eGroups wasn't worth that much--but I think both sides knew that going in. Yahoo bought eGroups for $432 million in Yahoo stock, which was considerably overvalued in June 2000 ($50-$60/share, down from a bubbly peak over $100). Yahoo is still overvalued, if you ask me, at P/E's of 45-50.

When I heard figures like $1.6 billion for YouTube, I figured it would be a stock-swap deal of some kind. After all, Google is also overvalued. And again, I think both sides know it. It was just lottery ticket swapping among friends. Google will never monopolize search, and thus it will never monopolize the ad-related revenue streams from search. Yes it does dominate search, and maybe it always will. But Intel dominates CPUs, and think of what we'd have to pay for CPU chips if it weren't for AMD, and the occasional "fabless" upstart that briefly (but signally) threatens what would otherwise be an Intel/AMD duopoly. Think: anti-trust. Tech is hardly immune from that. Right now, quite a few firms are focused on SEO and SEM, and improving bang-for-buck on ad impressions, and a lot of them focus solely on Google Adwords optimization. But price competition will enter when hypergrowth ends, and Google doesn't have a lock on this market. Portals are still strong. And the DoJ will still be in business when all other businesses today have succumbed to creative destruction.

P/Es will eventually go below historical norms as the Baby Boom retires. Google earnings will eventually be cut by price competition as online advertising matures. YouTube might be a copyright litigation tarpit, or it might be the future of television. But even if YouTube is the future of television, that doesn't mean it will ever be as profitable as television was at its peak, nor does it mean that it will be the only television network.

And speaking of stupidity

2006-10-12T19:38:00.000-07:00

A lead story about NoKo Nukes in the Int'l Herald Trib says that the Nihon Keizei Shimbun (Japan's New York Times or Wall Street Journal, depending on how you look at it) compared the impact of North Korea's nuclear test on Japan to that of 9/11's impact on Americans.

Well, if they mean that bars and restaurants emptied out, all flights were cancelled, and the Japanese are now spending 10 hours a day glued to the tube, weeping, calling friends ... No. In fact, nobody here has even mentioned it to me. If Nihon Keizai Shimbun said anything like that (the IHT's reporting on Japan is often so-so), it's probably because somebody at that paper never quite got in touch with how 9/11 hit Americans.

The Aum nerve-gassing of Tokyo subways had a much more dramatic impact on Japanese.

Dumb and dumber

2006-10-11T01:04:00.000-07:00

Q: What could be stupider than a cockroach-eating competition?

A: Animal-rights groups complaining about it. Or maybe that that Yahoo puts it on its science news page.

Better Living through Neologism Googling

2006-10-07T00:58:00.000-07:00

Try it. It's fun. Though disappointing in a way. Nine times out of ten, other people, people more annoyingly clever than you could dream of being, have already snatched the ball. Worse, they've run with it some distance as well, in directions you'd never think of. Googling on homespun neologisms will disabuse you of the notion that inventing a new word is really so easy.

"Panglossolalia" - the Goddess of the Infomercial. ("I knew that!", I hear you snapping in irritation).

"Webopticon" - ubiquitous surveillance via the Internet ("Well, of course!", you say, "But nobody knows I got there first!")

"Ontocracy" - thirty hits already.

Ah, but "Ontopreneur". Don't even think about jumping my claim, pardner. At this point, it's perhaps only an Engish typo on a Russian web that's possibly just reporting an MS Word spellcheck error. But maybe it's coming soon to a management pundit's forebrain perilously near you, as the Semantic Web goes through another hype cycle. Maybe I should register it?

"Tea with the Queen ...."

2006-08-14T06:07:00.000-07:00

Bush, on Iraqi speaker of the Parliament, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani:

I was impressed by him. He's a fellow that had been put in prison by Saddam and, interestingly enough, put in prison by us. And he made a decision to participate in the government. And he was an articulate person. He talked about running the parliament. It was interesting to see a person that could have been really bitter talk about the skills he's going to need to bring people together to run the parliament. And I found him to be a hopeful person.

They tell me that he wouldn't have taken my phone call a year ago—I think I might have shared this with you at one point in time—and there I was, sitting next to the guy. And I think he enjoyed it as much as I did. It was a refreshing moment.

Peter Galbraith asks, reasonably, who is this guy?

The incurious White House press corps never asked the obvious question: Why had the United States jailed al-Mashhadani? According to Sunnis and Shiites at the top levels of government in Iraq, al-Mashhadani was a member of, or closely associated with, two al-Qaeda-linked terrorists groups, Ansar Islam and Ansar al-Sunna. The first operated until 2003 in a no man's land high in the mountains between Iraqi Kurdistan and Iran while the second has been responsible for some of the worse terrorist attacks on Iraq's Shiites and Kurds. The Iraqis say they gave the Americans specific intelligence on al-Mashhadani's affiliations with those groups and his actions in support of terrorists.

According to Wikipedia

Ansar al-Islam is alleged to be connected to the al-Qaeda, and provided an entry point for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other Afghan veterans to enter Iraq. According to the United States, they had established facilities for the production of poisons, including ricin. The US also claimed that Ansar al-Islam had links with Saddam Hussein, thus claiming a link between Hussein and al-Qaeda. Mullah Krekar denied this claim, and declared his hostility to Saddam.

Wow, WMD and the supposed Al Qaeda link, and this guy who was affiliated with them now sits in Parliament.

Ansar al-Sunna? It doesn't get better. Again, according to Wikipedia:

Jaish Ansar al-Sunna has taken credit for several suicide bombings in Iraq, including the devastating attacks on the offices of two Kurdish political parties in Irbil on February 1, 2004, that killed at least 109 people .... It also has a strong presence in Mosul and northern Iraq. It claimed responsibility for a major suicide bombing at the dining hall of a US base near Mosul on December 21, 2004 that killed 14 US soldiers, 4 US citizen Halliburton employees and 4 Iraqi soldiers.

We don't negotiate with terrorists. We kill them.

Yes, but ... someone once said that a failed revolutionary is a terrorist, and a successful one gets to have tea with the queen. And someday, someone will say that a successful one gets to go mountainbiking with the President.

"They're not missing, we just haven't found them"

2006-08-14T05:28:00.000-07:00

You never saw the best footage of the first steps on the moon. And maybe you never will.

Lieberman: vote for Ned and the terrorists win!

2006-08-11T20:55:00.000-07:00

It's all over the netroots blogosphere, and it's not funny. As quoted in the NYT:

If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England .... It will strengthen them and they will strike again.

Yeah, it's true. It will be taken that way. By those people. The real questions (1) are the alternatives any better? and (2) who got us into that corner anyway?

The GOP, limping into the midterm elections significantly hobbled by Iraq, must be overjoyed to see the Dems' left heel slamming down to break the instep of its right, and the right heel responding by breaking the instep of its left

It might be good in the end. In the sense that Dubya uses when he says that war can clarify things. A pretty ill-time strategic exchange in this case, though, if the Dems were hoping to go into the mid-term elections with an uneasy, unity-in-relative-silence stance on Iraq.

LEGO my brain, pointy-haired boss

2006-08-07T03:49:00.000-07:00

This is a public service message brought to you by Doctor Science of LEGO SERIOUS PLAY. Seriously. I'm not playin' with your head, here. "LEGO o' mah leg", you might cry, but hold still: I have Doctor's Degree in ... SCIENCE!

The methods of Challenging Imagination include deconstruction and sarcasm .... Sarcasm is the recognition that there is no sacred thing [with the exception of LEGO, of course] as the "Truth." [Um, I guess those couldn't be sneer quotes in this context ....] The most popular manifestation of this approach is the comic strip "Dilbert." Scott Adam's sarcasm and parody of the business world has become a vital force within conversations among strategy makers across industries throughout the world. [At least, it is among the strategy makers who are Inner Party members of Dogbert's New Ruling Class.]

Whoa. I'm out of breath. Aren't you? Hold on a sec.

OK, let's dive in again:

Of course, one can take this deconstruction too far and negate and reject everything, leaving oneself with nothing. The trap or pitfall of Challenging Imagination, then, is a kind of strategic nihilism, in which all choices are seen as flawed, all plans unfeasible, all positioning imprecise and deceptive.

I don't have a bad attitude, boss. I have strategic nihilism. But so do you. You know that we're in agreement that we're deceiving the customer about how uncertain our position is, and how infeasible the plan is that they've just signed off on. You know that I know that we had to hoodwink them into buying into that plan because all the choices are flawed anyway .... what you don't like is me saying so.

I'm taking my Lego and going home now.

A Wikipedia in Every Pot?

2006-08-07T00:17:00.000-07:00

I got too excited about this: Wikipedia to ship preloaded on $100 laptops. I clicked. And ... it's not what you would think (a speculative headline from five years in the future.) It's about what to shoehorn into the $100 PC of One Laptop Per Child, a machine that ""will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data" and hence can feature only a "selection" of Wikipedia articles.

I'm ambivalent about efforts like these to bridge the Global Digital Divide. I'm not even sure that the GDD is a big issue for solving the problems of the world's poorest. But if it is, maybe leapfrogging all the way to laptops is a bridge too far? I don't think the laptop really took off in the west until it got below $1500. It had to get to the point where, even if your livelihood didn't depend on mobile computing, you were willing to shell out maybe 10% of your annual disposable income to just have that in your life.

Something like podcasting of compressed speech from radio transmitters at regular radio stations would make more sense, I think. The screen (if any) could be much smaller. You also wouldn't need a full keyboard. You'd need only enough to buttons scroll through menus and make selections. It would be so much cheaper. And it wouldn't presume literacy, or not much literacy anyway (the menus could have voice prompts, for that matter). Where people earn a dollar a day on average and where only one person in three can read, what kind of unit could you design along those lines for, say, $10?

The Web is a Long, Strange Trip Sometimes

2006-08-01T07:17:00.000-07:00

Do you ever have one of those browsing sessions that seems ... well, surreal somehow? Remember when weblogs used to be about the random linkwalk? Don't pretend you can't remember. Brace yourself for one of those.

The Space Review is one of the better wastes of time on the Web. So good, in fact, that I once wasted some time writing an essay for it myself, only to see it blown out of Rand Simberg's right nostril. I probably check The Space Review once every two weeks, there's always something good. And at ISDC 06, I even got a chance to meet Jeff Foust, its editor (while we both towered over somebody's improvised toy demo on the floor, trying to suppress skeptical expressions.) And I thought: here's a solid guy in an community featuring an awful lot of vapor at times.

Tonight, I was reading a review by Jeff of Beyond Earth: The Future of Humans in Space. Jeff's not too crazy about this book. And who but the crazy would be, when it has a chapter about how NASA ignores Cydonia, you know, the Face on Mars? The stuff of a thousand cult web pages?

In this review, an intriguing chapter title caught my eye: "Harnessing Bacterial Intelligence: A Pre-Requisite for Human Habitation of Space". Well, I thought, that's a new one. I'm not going to buy this book just to read that chapter. Maybe I can find an extended abstract at least? I Googled on the title, and found the whole chapter.

You must read this.

Dr. Eshel Raphael Breslav Ben Jacob is unquestionably possessed of a ravening, quirky, sometimes downright eerie intelligence. What makes this chapter unsettling reading is the impression one gets that he believes bacteria are possessed of a ravening, quirky, sometimes downright eerie intelligence. After pawing through some of the many papers and presentations he has on-line, one of which features lovely photos of bacterial colonies and less pleasant photos of Franksteinian culture growths on chip surfaces (with insets from Winnie the Pooh), I finally summoned up the courage to take a poke at his "Quotes of Wisdom" link.

And I find that, at the end of a list of quotes from luminaries such as Einstein, Laplace, Thomas Mann, he ... quotes himself. Uh-oh. But it gets worse -- look at the quote:

"“Darwin, a free thinker who dared make far-reaching conclusions based on observations, would have been dismayed to see the petrified doctrine his brainchild has become. Must we admit that all organisms are nothing but watery Turing machines evolved merely by a sequence of accidents favored by nature? Or do we have the intellectual freedom to rethink this fundamental issue?”
Eshel Ben Jacob, Endorsement on the Book Uncommon Dissent By William Dembski

Dembski, Dembski ... wait a minute: he's that Intelligent Design guy! And what's going on with him these days? A quick search takes me to his Wikipedia entry, and an external link takes me to his blog, where I discover that he was one of Ann Coulter's pre-publication reviewers (a "sounding board" for chapters 8-10") for her recent blockbuster best-seller, Godless.

The Web is a long, strange trip sometimes. And so is this quixotic (and maybe somewhat diogenesian) quest for the answer to a question that's been troubling me all my life: is it crazy to think that human beings have a future in space? In being among those who do, who seek permission to believe, I find myself in very odd company sometimes.

ISTS 25 -- a whole day of opening ceremonies?!

2006-06-04T20:49:00.000-07:00

Recently, my itinerary page mumbled something about attending 25th International Symposium on Space Technology and Science. I was kinda sort goin'. Maybe. Rather suddenly, I committed, buying tickets for an overnight bus yesterday afternoon, packing in a feverish rush, and starting off at 11:40pm for a seven hour trip through the wee hours of the morning on my first sojourn ever to west coast of Japan, when I was not even recovered from SF-to-Tokyo jet lag.

And now I'm here, in beautiful Kanazawa, all registered at the last minute, and ... cravenly ducking out of the seemingly endless opening ceremony addresses.

Where exactly am I now? In the nearby 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art. (By some odd coincidence, I was seated next to a young woman who came to the museum to take an exam, perhaps for a curatorial internship. Gambatte, girl, whoever you are.)

Even more precisely, I'm sitting in museum's Internet Cafe (which doesn't offer coffee, strangely), and when I peer through the doorway out into the exhibit area, I see wall after wall of delightful space-themed pictures by Japanese school children. Imagine van Gogh's Starry Night with the stars arrayed to almost pointillist density. It's kitschy, it's too cute by half, it's too Japanese by at least 75%, but it's 99.9% pure, sweet loveliness anyway.

This museum is far cooler in both senses of the word than the overcrowded and inadequately air-conditioned ceremony meeting room, with its gusts of hot air and its highly redundant touting of Kanazawa as a great place to be. The museum offers space in the usual sense. And it's full of cool air. And cool art. (Unfortunately, desperate searching and shopping for the right USB cable for my camera came to naught, so I can't show you anything.)

And perhaps the museum is, in its own quirky way, more to the point of the ISTS than any platitudes and blandishments currently venting from the podium a block away. I was disappointed by Japanese astronaut/fusion researcher Mamoru Mohri's address on space development based on Japanese culture. It was little more than A Brief History of Almost Everything. Finally, after insisting on universal values, he identified the specific cultural virtue of the Japanese in their space effort as ... wait for it ... "attention to detail." Perhaps as a sop to local tourist industry sponsors, he also manage to make the whole speech absurdly Kanazawa-centric. (Oh please God, I hope those tourism official don't pick up the word "Kanazawa-centric" for its imagined promotional value.)

This morning, I was lucky enough to be steered to a government-run (but still surprisingly palatial) hotel for my first nights stay by a Gunma University researcher Dr. Yusaka Fujii, who is here to deliver a paper on a clever method for measuring human body mass using a spring connecting the human body and a weight. Over breakfast, I pitched my idea of a Japanese version of KatySat, ideally to take advantage of a free launch on the H-IIa in 2008, a sort of JAXA version of the "Getaway Special" program used so often by AMSAT. Dr. Fujii saw many obstacles, but also mentioned that he'd like to volunteer. He has some experience with running volunteer efforts: he is the Chairman of The Society for the e-JIKEI Network, which offers open-source software for using webcams to monitor public safety, with an emphasis on early detection of kidnapping attempts.

The most interesting conversation so far today was with William A. ("Andy") Evans, including his penetrating insight that the Lewis and Clark expedition was a triumph of logistical planning. Those who know me know that I did my time in the U.S. defense logistics complex, working at LLNL during Gulf War I. But I can't hold a candle to Evans -- I soon found myself regaled with "loggie" war stories, and learned far more than I knew before about how U.S. forces were poised to take Baghdad before that got called off as "mission creep." Arguably, we're in a much bigger mess now because of that decision. But enough about that -- this conference's theme is "Space Exploration for a Peaceful Planet Earth".

Through Evans, a new word entered my vocabulary of strategic misconceptions in space development: "backpacking." The Moon part of Moon-Mars, at least, is being planned in "backpack" style, it's Apollo Redux, when what would really move things faster over the long run is taking a more logistical approach. Especially considering that Moon-Mars involves bases on the Moon.

I pointed out to Evans that Mamoru Mohri commented on the difficulties he had putting the Frontier Metaphor across to Japanese audiences, which I think is understandable: at best, the only true frontier that Japan has had within living memory is Hokkaido. (The Electronic Frontier Foundation had to close its Japan offices at one point for lack of interest among the Japanese; the Frontier Metaphor just doesn't play well in a country that was the most urbanized country on the planet in the year 1800.)

Perhaps what's needed is to marry Japan's "attention to detail" with the Lewis and Clark mythos, but with an emphasis on logistics. America's frontier mythos is symbolized by the coonskin cap, the image of covered wagons crossing the whole continent (when in fact none even crossed the Mississipi.) Various technologies for Earth-to-orbit and orbit-to-orbit still languish in the space development ghetto, not least among them the various projectile launch approaches whose history I'm making the subject of a book. And why? For the most part, for lack of a more logistics-oriented view of space development on the part of the national space agencies. Of course, the reasons have less to do with stupidity than with politics, but I will defer discussion of that point, I think. For now, I've got to get back to this conference, which I'm starting to think might be one of the most rewarding space conferences I've ever attended.

"Coming Out" as "Straight" (don't everybody gasp at once, please)

2006-04-20T11:05:00.000-07:00

I used to tell people I was bisexual but now I'm straight. Straight. Got that? I'll take your questions now. Operators are waiting. Don't be shy.

Was that a shocked silence? (More likely the usual: I'm just talking to myself here.)

Historical background: for years now, I've been answering any direct inquiries about my sexual orientation by saying, "I'm bisexual." The responses were all over the map. Baffled, embarrassed silence. Clueless questions. Barely-concealed snears of disgust. Lips puckered into a muttered "oh", under lidded eyes. Wincing skepticism (mostly from gay men.) Wishful thinking from some, irrespective of batting preference: "Maybe you're just confused about your sexuality." ("Oh yeah? Or maybe you're confused about my sexuality.")

The reactions got old. Fast. Hanging out with identified bisexuals helped a little. Then I moved to Tokyo, where such questions were seldom asked. It became an issue only when a new relationship started, and there were few enough of those.

Now I'm in Seattle. Getting a life again. The gay life? No. Not sexually, anyway. But I like gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, the transgendered, as much as anyone else, and maybe more. And they are curious about me, naturally, so sexual identity is an issue again.

I've decided: from now on, whenever it comes up, I'll tell people "I used to say I was bisexual, now I just say I'm straight." If they want an explanation, they'll get something like the rest of this blog entry. If they don't, we can go on to talk about sports, cars, work, politics, men, women, music, art, computers, relationships -- all the usual topics about which I know next to nothing.

This announcement has nothing to do with my desires, except my desire to be honest. It has everything to do with other people's feelings. Is that codependent of me? Honestly, I don't care. I have my reasons. I'll get into them.

But first, my desires: Yes, I'm still attracted to some men. I still sometimes fantasize about men. More pragmatically, when it comes to what might make me happy: I haven't ruled out finding a nice guy (preferably already with kids) and settling down, though I think that's unlikely even if I were in hunting for such a man. Just statistically, I'm more likely to end up with a woman matching the description. For now, though, fantasizing about being a father is about as idle a mental activity as fantaszing about having a boyfriend again. It's not gonna happen, not soon at any rate.

So why am I doing this? Why "come out" as "straight"? For me, it's a question of ethics, not morals.

When I was "experimenting with" (really, manifesting) my sexual "orientation", meeting men who liked to have sex with men, having fun with them, sometimes have sex with them, delighting that it was possible, relieved that I had more options, there was still something that seemed not quite right. I was sexually attracted, but not that attracted. I liked the sex, but not that much. I had romantic feelings, but they seemed directed at what was feminine about these guys. I left them for boring old garden-variety reasons for any breakup, but also because they were men, and men didn't quite do it for me. I broke hearts in part because of that final reason. It wasn't fair, it wasn't right, they deserved better than me on several counts, but in particular they deserved a man who was really into men. Not necessarily a man who was solidly gay. Just a guy who was more into guys.

I don't regret having had sex with men, and sometimes I get a little nostalgic about it. I recommend it to any man who's simply curious. I recommend it especially if you're curious but also creeped out by the prospect of trying. I was. The closer I got, the creepier it seemed. Then I did it. My skin promptly stopped crawling. I won't pretend it was the most graceful of breakthroughs, but it was surprisingly nice from the start. And it got better. But only so much better.

Were there benefits besides getting laid a few more times in life? Yes, I think so.

Having sex with men helped me shed my last few vestiges of homophobia. I stoppped caring whether people thought I was gay (though I still bristle when people think I must be gay, rather than bi, or possibly a slightly effeminate straight who has sloppily let his paintbrush slip over the paint-by-the-numbers lines here and there.)

Another good thing: I can more easily take a come-on from a man as a compliment, if it's done in a nice way. To notice more people finding me attractive, to find myself welcoming much of that attraction ... the only thing wrong with it is having it go to your head, letting it delude you into thinking you're some demi-god of pansexuality. Of course, sometimes the overtures are persistent and unwelcome. But that only renews my still-developing understanding of what women have to go through when they are being sexually harassed. (Not to speak of sexually-harassed gay/bi men, but let's not get distracted.) In short, I lost nothing but a certain kind of virginity, and I gained a lot.

Still, if you're like I was -- a homosexually inexperienced man, somewhat attracted to men, but ultimately just not that into them, and basically monogamous, please please please: be totally honest about that, with whomever you're doing your little personal behavioral-science experiment. He may go head over heels for you. That's not something you can control. But if he is, always tell him, "Don't believe I'll be here for you tomorrow. The sexual part is interesting, I don't know where it's going, but never forget I'm doing this for me, not you. I like you, but maybe I can only love you as a friend, not as a lover or a partner. Keep your options open. Don't let me break your heart. Don't cling. Keep a grip on yourself. Then I'm more likely to help you find someone you should really be with."

It's only right. For me, anyway. That's all I'm saying. If you're basically not monogamous, and bisexual, and clear about that with all your partners, indulge yourself as much as you want, without hurting yourself or others. And definitely call yourself bisexual, whether you're monogamous or not, because there still aren't enough people who could, and who are actually saying so. But I can't anymore. Being straight is something I have a choice about, unlike those who are solidly gay or straight. And it's a choice I'm making.

Well, that's it. Anticlimactic? Sorry. I'm being straight with you. I'm straight, not heartbreak bait, get over it, Mary. But above all, let's be friends.

Kudryavka's Wake

2006-04-14T20:48:00.000-07:00

48 years ago, on April 14th, a satellite holding the lifeless body of the first sentient creature sent into orbit reentered the Earth's atmosphere.

We celebrate the courage of human astronauts, but those astronauts were and are braving calculated odds. Kudryavka ("Little Curly", which wasn't very easy to pronounce, so they went with the generic "Laika" for media promotion value) didn't even know where she was going, and it's likely she died in part from the stresses of being sent -- alone, hungry, bewildered, and trapped -- into a place no sane dog would go unless following a beloved master or mistress.

Kudryavka's sputnik was arguably the first real "biosatellite", but the craft was not a credit to that otherwise excellent and underappreciated concept. Sputnik 2 was thrown together almost overnight, to celebrate an anniversary of the October Revolution with a new space "first". It was felt that simply launching another electronic satellite would not be symbolic
enough. So what about a dog?

Adequate life support was effectively impossible, however, and there was no way to get Kudryavka back down alive anyway. Exactly when Kudryavka died is uncertain-- some time within the first 7 hours of flight seems to be the final coroner's report, after decades of silence or confusion. Perhaps a compassionate flight technician poisoned her before sealing her up, to reduce the number of hours of terror and misery she might otherwise have had to endure. Overheating was the likely cause of death. Relatively little biometric data was collected, most of it of no real use, except insofar as it proved that an animate creature of some size could survive at least a few hours of weightlessness.

As recounted in a documentary I saw at the Museum of Flight on Yuri's night here in Seattle, a thousand letters arrived in response to the announcement of Kudryavka's launch, letters in which people expressed a desire to be sent into orbit themselves, even if there was no safe way to come back -- or no way to come back at all. The one reason for people to go into space that makes any real sense (i.e., that they simply want to go, as the ultimate expression of the human desire for flight and release) was ironically affirmed by Kudryavka's forced adventure. It is a strange (and in a way, wonderful) statement about us as a species that there would probably have been no shortage of human volunteers to go knowingly to a certain death in orbit, instead of Kudryavka, had there been a spaceworthy capsule large enough for a human being at that point. Unlike Kudryavka, any selected volunteer would have gone down in history knowing that they would be in the history books, and would have appeared in those books under their own name. Poor Kudryavka, had she been reachable by radio from orbit, would probably not have responded to hearing "Laika" except as another human sound. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Kudryavka, a stray mutt, died lonelier, more frightened, hungrier, and ultimately, just as nameless, as the day she was picked up off the streets of Moscow.

As a rule, I don't drink much. Tonight, however, I think I'll buy some vodka, and drink a toast to Kudryavka. Maybe I'll go out to some place where people dance; maybe I'll dance a little myself; and while dancing, I may try to make myself believe that, in her terror and bewilderment and loneliness, Kurdryakva might nevertheless have experienced a brief moment of joy and wonder in feeling weightless. I have no doubt that dogs can feel joy and wonder. I also have no doubt -- a legacy of my climbing days, I suppose -- that both joy and wonder are possible even in very miserable and frightening personal circumstances.

If and when I go out this Friday night, I'll try to invite some people, and if they come along, I will tell them I'm doing it in memory of Kudryavka. If they come along, it will be a true space party -- a wake, but still a real party. Will the moon be out? Perhaps we'll bay drunkenly at the moon, half-hoping to hear an echo from space, the voice of the spirit of a small dog who committed no worse sin than that of simply trusting some human beings with her life, trusting them as any good dog has been bred to do, oblivious to nationalism, technological ambition, political pressure, ideology, careerism. Maybe, if Seattle's skies clear up enough tonight, we'll be lucky and catch a glimpse of a falling star, and see something that looks like Kudryavka's coffin self-cremating in the upper atmosphere. And if we are very lucky, we will wake in the morning with not only a new respect for human intelligence and the wonders it can create, but also with a more wolflike wariness of the ever-present potential for that intelligence to be bent to purposes that are cruel, selfish, and deceptive. Any such wariness may feel like a personal burden, but it will also be a blessing in disguise. It's a wariness we owe to all sentient beings who might follow us wherever we go. We owe it to ourselves as well.

Kudryavka. Learn how to pronounce it. It was her name.

Here in the New World

2006-01-27T22:39:00.000-08:00

My little melatonin experiment last night was a comedy of errors. I took a half milligram on an empty stomach, with the aim of getting 3 hours of sleep, but maybe I mistimed it. I couldn't sleep for a half hour or more afterward, despite thinking I felt some effect. So I got up, had a banana (helps you dream, I rationalized), some yogurt (helps you sleep, I rationalized) and another half milligram of melatonin (which better damn put me out like a light, that's no rationalization.)

Slept six hours, resetting my alarm somewhere in the middle (incorrectly), waking up around 8am. Oh well.

I went out, had some blueberry pancakes and a decaf, and took a nap around 10:30am. And that was my only nap of an not-too-well-planned day. It's 10:45pm, and I'd hoped to settle down for a nap around now, but despite feeling a little sleepy throughout the day, my nap attempts have either been unsuccessful or preempted by ill-timed errands, like my trip to the DMV in the late afternoon to get a new drivers license. I booked a hot tub, tried to nap beforehand, tried to nap while in the drying-off room afterward (which worked like a charm last time), but didn't succeed. I'll try again soon, but my hopes aren't high.

As long as I'm in the New World, I thought, I might as well go see the recent movie of that name. The reviews sounded good. Towards the end of this seemingly endless film, I seriously considered walking out. Some girls were laughing in the back, and I'd ordinarily consider that the height of rudeness, but in this case I could sympathize. I could have snuck out, and maybe snuck into see some of Capote. (I love Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Colin Farrell doesn't really push my buttons.) So why didn't I? It finally came to me, in the last 10 minutes: you don't walk out of a classical music concert. It's boorish. And that's the kind of flick it was. It might have made a great silent film, with an organist down in front telling you what to feel at every point, in case it wasn't obvious. Not that there was all that much to feel -- I doubt there was a wet eye in the house when the credits started rolling. It's lushly beautiful in a Barry Lyndonesque sort of way. But my reaction to it was somewhat like my reaction to Barry Lyndon. You want to grab the director by the shoulders and beg for mercy: "OK, OK, I admit it: you're a goddam certifiable genius! Now MOVE ON."

Another melatonin experiment

2006-01-27T01:52:00.000-08:00

I just ate another half milligram about 20 minutes ago, on the assumption that it should start putting me out soon. I set my alarm clock for two hours in advance, so I can't sleep longer than an hour and half. I think I feel it starting to hit -- and supposedly the stuff clears in one pass through the liver. I'm hoping that if 1.5 hours is enough, all of the dose-related melatonin will be gone, leaving only what my body naturally generates.

I saw Syriana tonight, a kind of damn-the-nap-schedule-torpedoes move. I felt a little woozy on the way to the theater. Did I blow a nap opportunity? Maybe so. It certainly didn't provide any nap opportunities. It's not the kind of movie I would doze off in, nor would I ordinarily be able to sleep easily after seeing it. With only five more minutes to go before putting on the sleep mask, there isn't a lot I can say about it just now, except this: even those who liked it say it's hard to follow. I agree. However, that may have been intentional. Among the possible strategic purposes of obscurity and throwaway clues: they want people to talk after the movie. Individuals in a group of friends might pick up on different details, filling in the blanks for each other. There may also be some calculated subtext: "This whole Middle East mess is complicated: if you want to understand it, you've got to start paying attention." Another possibility: people who feel they need to see it again might rent it as a DVD, giving them more control -- "What did he just say? Maybe it's important. Let's back up and try to make it out."

Polyphasic on the Road? 10 Lessons

2006-01-26T17:51:00.000-08:00

I've closely followed the topic of polyphasic sleep on the Yahoo Uberman mailing list for some time, and for a few months last year, was practicing a variant of it -- naps (or attempts thereof) throughout the day, with a four-hour "core" sleep period at night. I'm convinced I can do four-hour-core polyphasic, and have been intrigued about whether that schedule makes for much easier transition to uberman sleep. I've also been curious about how polyphasic sleep might help manage (or even, in the case of uberman sleep, even eliminate) bad jet lag, and about how to manage polyphasic sleep while on travel.

My interest in polyphasic sleep and long-distance travel is far from theoretical. I live in Tokyo, and I fly once or twice a year to California. This is a hell of a timezone difference, at least for me -- 7 or 8 hours, depending on daylight savings time, and in the wrong direction: eastward. I'm perhaps worse than most when it comes to recovering from jet lag. Also, I seldom get more than a few hours of sleep before I travel, and have trouble sleeping on long flights if I don't get a chance to lie down. I usually arrive in California with not only jet lag, but with about 12 hours of sleep-debt. Throw the stresses of travel on top of that, bad airline food, the air inside a 747 on a long flight (too dry, too warm for me) and change of diet upon arrival, and I often get sick -- I get a cold, or some GI tract disturbance, or both. I've been on some two-week "vacations" to California where I've only started enjoying myself a few days before having to return to Tokyo. What a waste! If there were, on these trips, some way to get less (and reasonably high-quality) sleep, and more waking time, and suffer less stress, and .... well, you get the picture. Maybe polyphasic, and particularly uberman, solves more of these problems than it creates.

On my current trip to California -- I've been in Berkeley now for about a day and a half -- I have more to report about errors and pitfalls in the experiment than about successes, though I still imagine I'll ultimately reap some benefits. This is the first of a series (?) of postings here about how things are going. Not many of the likely readers of this blog live in East Asia, but probably many have taken a trip or two to Europe from a western state in the U.S., or from Europe to East/Pacific Asia. Consider the following entry as a kind of bug list. You might laugh at the kinds of errors I make, but there may be others that didn't occur to you. It could prove useful to more than just me.

I had planned to return to four-hour-core polyphasic before I traveled, perhaps even attempting a transition to uberman if that went well. Ah, the best-laid plans of insomniac mice and ambitious men .... I felt I was enjoying some success with the transition to four-hour-core when I stupidly went out early Saturday evening into the first snow of the season in Tokyo, in search of a tri-band phone to use during my trip. That errand could have waited. It should have. I slipped on an icy sidewalk, causing minor trauma to my right wrist and shoulder. That night, I felt I deserved some serious sack-time. And took it. I slept monophasic on Sunday as well. But this was while I was on a schedule to fly out Wednesday evening. Not an auspicious start.

Lesson 1: if you know you'll be traveling weeks before you travel -- even if you don't have a precise travel date set -- and if you aren't polyphasic yet, get onto your polyphasic schedule and stick with it. If you're on four-hour core, try to go to uberman if you think it will be manageable on your trip.

Lesson 2: be careful about anything that might throw you off -- use the added time in your life to avoid doing anything that could derail you.

The injuries slowed me down in some of my travel preparations (yes, I seem to be healing quite nicely, thank you for your concern), but I must admit I wasn't very organized in those preparations anyway. I've never been Mr. Planning. There were a few items on my long to-do list that I crossed off simply because I didn't get around to them. There are others that I'll have to do in California because I didn't finish them in Tokyo. I get bad "travel fever" -- I can't settle my mind easily, and often run off to do the fun things instead of the top-priority tasks. Or (as with the injury) I'll set my mind to a high-priority task and inflexibly carry it out, without regard for risks.

Lesson 3: be very organized about how you approach travel preparations. Even with all that can be done over the phone 24x7, and on the Web, there will be added real-time constraints in your life -- such as when certain shops are open, etc., -- that can conflict with your ordinary nap schedule if you aren't careful. Get a daily planner (if you don't already have one -- this is still on my to-do list) and attend to it anal-retentively. Make entries in pencil, so that it's easy to reschedule the errand and do some other task instead if something comes up.

Lesson 4: if you're prone to "travel fever", schedule some time for meditation and relaxation.

The night before I traveled, I was headed out of the house, neglected to turn the hallway light on in the corridor leading to the front door, and in the darkness, slammed into a bathroom door that had been left ajar. It didn't hurt, not much anyway (though my wrist/shoulder injuries didn't either at first), but like that earlier incident (when I heard a snapping that seemed to come from my shoulder), there was an ominous sound. Something tinkled on the floor. When I got the lights on, I saw it: a lens had popped out of the frame of my glasses. The underwire holding the lens had snapped. Oh no. Time enough to get it repaired? Probably not. Luckily I found an old pair that was about as good, for the time being, and I could get a repair after my arrival. Even if repairs would have to wait, this incident was nothing compared to the disaster of a major laptop crash, for which I'm still not prepared.

Lesson 4: go through everything you really need, and ask yourself: do I have a backup, in case something goes wrong with this? This is a good travel-prep idea anyway, of course, but being polyphasic on the road makes it even more important. Everything that can go wrong can be a source of uncontrollable real-time conflicts with your nap schedule.

When I got to the airport -- well ahead of time, as is my one good travel habit -- I found a lounge area apparently suitable for napping. Big, comfortable chair, a table I could put my feet up on, seemingly away from the hubbub. In my first nap attempt, however, I put on my sleepmask, shoved in my earplugs, settled in, and made an unpleasant discovery: airports can be really noisy places. The ear is deceptively akin to the eye, in terms of adjusting for intensity of stimuli. In airports, there are frequent PA blasts, planes are taking off not far away, there are crowds, and if anybody is talking nearyby, they are (unconsciously?) raising their voices to compensate. The noise (on top of my travel fever -- my body temperature literally goes up), was a major impediment to napping. I don't think I succeeded on either of my attempts, though polyphasics know that your memory can play tricks on you. I don't have a car in Japan -- I would have been better off retreating to the parking garage and napping in the back seat, if I had a car.

Lesson 5: if you'll be spending an amount of time at the airport that spans one or more of your scheduled naps, make it a priority to check out the quietest place -- not necessarily the most comfortable place -- to nap. Even if that's on the floor in some weird utility corridor, and you have to bring one of those self-inflating foam mats, it's better than contending with the noise.

Lesson 6: earplugs that usually work in your choice home-base nap locations may not be up to the job in other places. It might be worth investing in a set of headphones that block noise well, an added layer over your earplugs. (These kinds of headphones are probably less likely to damage your hearing that the less bulky kind, hence probably a good investment anyway.)

When I got to the airport, all I had for purposes of either supplementing or substituting for airline food was some dried blueberries, some almonds, and a croissant. This was not nearly enough. Stupidly, I didn't buy anything else when I could have. Successful polyphasic sleepers end up saying it over and over: diet is important. Besides, your overall intake tends to be higher, but do airlines know that? And if your GI tract doesn't take well to travel, it's doubly important -- stomach pain and diarrhea are yet more "real-time constraints" on your nap schedule. Besides, they're a bummer. I have both, right now.

Lesson 6: figure out how you're going to maintain the diet that has worked for you -- on the day of the flight, on the flight, afterward. If you can see well in advance that you're likely to need substitutes, get adjusted to those substitutes well before you fly.

When I got out of SFO via BART, the SF Bay Area's miserable excuse for a commuter train network (sorry, I'm spoiled, living in Tokyo), I discovered that a seat on BART isn't a really great place to nap -- it's about like an airport lounge, really. Visitors to Tokyo ofen marvel at how so many seem to be fast asleep, then wake up and dash off the train at their appointed stop. I could never do that. I might have been better off looking around SFO for a good place to get my next nap. I cleared customs at SFO at about 11 AM. I didn't need to be at my hotel, a few hours away, any time soon.

Lesson 7: plan for your naps on arrival -- before you arrive. Make several contingency plans. Some airports have rental facilities suitable for (if not intended for) naps. SFO does, in the form of private, lockable "business center" cubicles, so the solution might be near at hand, if you can be a little creative. If your budget permits, and the lay of the land is hazy at your destination, book a room at a hotel near the airport, for your first day. Or rent a car and try to find some place nearby where you could nap in the backseat and not have to worry about noise or snooping cops.

I got into Berkeley around noon, checked into my hotel, then did some errands. Berkeley (besides being my original hometown) is very good in some respects: it's very pedestrian-friendly, has a fair number of healthy eating establishments closely concentrated, has a lot to do and see in a small area. If your hotel is downtown, you can get a lot done and have fun, without being very far from the best place to nap: your hotel room. As evening fell, however, I noticed I made one mistake: on my current nap schedule, I was in the position of King Tantalus with regard to seeing movies. There are four multi-screen theaters withing five minutes of each other, I was spoiled for choice, but all of the running times overlapped my scheduled naps!

Lesson 8: If you want to have fun at your destination, check typical schedules even before you fly, and adjust your nap schedule accordingly, if you can.

Damn: no movies tonight. I went back to my hotel room, and looked at the bottle of melatonin I'd bought earlier. (Unavailable in Japan, right on the shelves in the U.S.) Hm, maybe time for an experiment. I felt sleepy anyway. At this point, I wasn't sure whether I was even still synchronized with the remaining shreds of my poorly-established Tokyo sleep cycle. I split a 1 mg pill and swallowed the half. It put me out. Or I went out as I would have anyway. I woke after about 4 hours.

Lesson 9: save your melatonin experiments for later, or conduct them well before you fly. Figure out how this substance might fit into your plans.

When I went out after waking up, I discovered what I knew all along: Berkeley, a campus town, really doesn't have much going on very late at night. Even meals are a problem in this gourmet mecca. Restaurants aren't open all that late. I ended up getting a hot-dog, not a great choice, at almost 2AM, last call. I could have gone grocery shopping earlier, but from where I was at that point, it was a slightly scary bus ride to the nearest all-night grocery store I knew about, and the one place I could buy food nearby was an all-night service station, where the quality of the food was predictably low. Tokyo has spoiled me -- even outside the immediate core of Tokyo, there are places open all night.

Figuring (I hope rationally) that sleep-debt was an infirm platform for any further polyphasic progression, I ate another half-gram of melatonin around 4 AM. Luckily I didn't sleep all that long on it, maybe 4 hours.

Lesson 10: either choose a place to stay that has some all-night services, or plan for how you'll feed yourself and keep yourself busy at night.

I've napped twice today, more or less as I've felt like it. Both times I set alarms. Neither time was I still sleeping when the alarm went off. However, I haven't felt like it for over four hours, as of this writing. I haven't been keeping careful records, for purposes of establishing what my ultradian cycle might be here. I still have a chance, I think, at something like success. However, in this experiment in seeing whether polyphasic helps with jet lag, I made the mistake of not being -- much less staying -- polyphasic on the trip over. What's left is to see is whether frequent regular naps help, if my circadian rhythm is easily shifted by relying on frequent naps, and whether I can easily ditch four-hour-core and become fully uberman-adjusted fairly soon. In some sense, the timezone shift can help with that last -- it's daytime here when I would ordinarily be getting my four continuous hours in Tokyo.

Talk and Action

2005-09-29T23:08:00.000-07:00

On the Space Generation Talk mailing list, there's an interview with an SGAC member, Iole-Michela De Angelis, and the concluding Q&A echoes a persistent problem in space activism:

What question would you like to ask other SGAC people?

Why do we spend so much time talking instead of doing things?

This message came hot on the heels of calls for more information about internships ("Give us something to do!"), and a forwarded plea for work leads from Robert Goehlich, who would seem to be as employable as any young person in alt.space. Before that, there was a debate over space property rights and global equity for lunar resources that included Michael Mealing, who started RocketForge with the idea that open source processes might be applied to the problem of cheap access to space. An early conclusion of the discussion of the raison d'etre for that site was that doing open source for hardware was harder, because hardware is harder. (And rocket science involves some pretty hard hardware.) I note that RocketForge seems increasingly concerned with a futuristic horizon that many erstwhile space activists have drifted into discussion about: the Singularity, the coming of super-intelligent AI. Which at this point, like cheap access to space, is mainly just talk.

Why is there so little to do except talk? I'm reminded of a gritty reality: nothing happens until you make a sale. Before that, the best you can do is build something you hope you can sell.

SGAC is about youth input to UN space policy. Which is to say, all it has for sale to its "client" is talk -- and talk that's about what to talk about at the UN. The only forms of payment are (1) the satisfaction of being listened to, and (2) the satisfaction of seeing the UN adopt SGAC recommendations. The SGAC "sells" to members the promise of becoming influential. But if its influence only on how others talk, its ultimately not fruitful influence.

Within its limits (and while trying to push those limits), I think the SGAC should focus as much as possible on what benefits of space could be sold directly to the citizens of the UN member states. That's the UN's ultimate constituency, and thus SGAC's as well. Those benefits should be as visible and tangible as possible.

It's not an easy problem to address, I'll admit. As one wag had it, "If God had intended us to go into space, he would have given us more money." And a great many of the UN member states are poor, so the question of what to sell into a market with little purchasing power only makes the question more difficult. But there is hope.

We want space to be important. We want to be important in developing it. We want the benefits to be felt widely -- globally, in fact. The challenge is to make more of the people of this world feel like they can be an important part of developing space. Anything else will mean either losing people's attention, or never getting it in the first place.

It's nice to be listened to, but actions speak louder than words, and effective action commands more respect. Let me rephrase the problem in more concrete terms: what would you take into a developing-world town that would (1) make the benefits of space tangible and visible for the residents, and (2) offer them the opportunity to contribute actively themselves to bringing the benefits of space closer?

CMM SEI and how to organize discussion

2005-09-27T00:00:00.000-07:00

On the Space Generation Talk mailing list, Jose Aban and Jim Volp raise a perennial question:

When you have a whole lot of people who have a whole lot to talk about over periods of years, how do organize that?

Jose sounds more like a top-down design kind of guy on that thread, Jim a little more bottom-up. I actually sympathize with both positions. If you've got a good organizational template, why not reuse it? But as Jim Volp points out, imposing organizational templates can be like doing a skin graft -- there's the possibility of rejection.

I wish I had the answer. But maybe I have a clue.

Back in the days when people talked about the software crisis as if it might be solved someday, software methodologists saw the first glimmerings of the idea for an organization metric eventually called the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). As formulated by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) associated with Carnegie Mellon University, the CMM had 5 levels:

Initial
Repeatable
Defined
Managed
Optimizing

Some have proposed a Level 0: Incomplete/Negligent. And, not entirely tongue in cheek, three negative levels: Obstructive, Contemptuous, and worst of all, Undermining.

How do you get to a target level? Unfortunately for companies that would like to be graded at Level 4 or 5, despite little attention to process, it's like every other learning curve in this world. You have to crawl, then walk, then run and then fly before you can reach space, much less orbit. In short, what they learned was this:

You have to start at Level 1

You can't skip steps.

I'd like to make two observations about this.

(1) An organization that has reached a high organizational process level may not be very prepared to host new activities, because there's so often a focus on how to fit any new work into the process. (Correllary: the template from a highly organized process will likely result in skin-graft rejection when applied to a less-developed organization.)

(2) Even in high-process-level organizations, there is seldom a process applied organization-wide for estimating what level a new activity should start at, and making sure it doesn't sink after it's started. (Remember, even from Level 1, you can sink. Who hasn't seen it?) Some projects don't need to start at Level 1 because they are hived off smoothly from a Level 2 or higher project. Perhaps most do, however.

Some large aerospace companies have worked around the first problem, by inaugurating a skunkworks for new, risky, innovative projects. Often, they were able to justify departures from mainstream corporate practices because of the ultrasecret nature of the project -- the extra secrecy was itself an added process burden, they might have argued, so why add "business as usual" as a drag force? They didn't expose their fresh, young, energetic talent to the corporation's whole mature development process. To some extent, they actually shielded them from it.

As for the second problem, it's quite common to have "intrapreneurs" in large organizations, well-connected innovators (or at least, innovation-sniffers) near the top, marshalling resources informally when they see a good idea. However, when you lose them, you lose the process that's captive in the brains. That loss is especially damaging when the process is owned by two top executives and you lose them both in the same year, as happened to the instrument company Tektronix at one point.

The good news here: I think you can form renewable organs even within a Level 1 organization (which themselves have to start from Level 1 and hang there for a while) that perform two functions:

(1) Assessing the level at which a proposed new activity might best start
(2) Pushing activities to the highest maturity levels they need to reach in their project lifetimes in order to be effective.

These organs within the organization need not have any formal authority. It would probably be enough for them simply to operate, evaluate, and educate. I would make some suggestions about how they ought to be organized, but doing so would imply an arrogant assumption that I know what they should look like at Level 2 ("Repeatable"), when I don't even know what they should look like at Level 1 ("Initial").

The Wisconsin Project calls for interns

2005-09-26T22:48:00.000-07:00

I just ran across the Wisconsin Project while researching ITAR and launch technology export controls. It's in the U.S., and thus requires a right to work in the U.S. However, they don't require a security clearance, and they operate in conjunction with the University of Wisconsin, presumably in part for the academic freedom benefits.

This organization appears to be a balanced source of useful information. I was amused by how one Project report baldly uses "spy satellite" to describe an orbiting object that the launching country, in its UN registration, chose to characterize as little more an experiment in satellite technology. I found especially amusing the quote from a government official saying that the rocket that launched this satellite poses no threat to neighboring countries because .... it only goes straight up. Hm, where is there a stable orbit straight up? A spy satellite in geosynchronous orbit -- I guess that might be a first. Wait, no ... you still need a non-vertical kickstage delta-V for GEO .... Well, with the Earth's rotational delta-V at the launch zone, you can get an orbit established at ... Hey! That doesn't square with U.N.-registered orbital elements! And what would it do way out there anyway? Spy on the Moon?! Oh, I'm so confused now ....

Space can't yield significantly greater benefits without improvements in launch economics, and since all launch technologies are dual-use, regulation is a fait accompli. So, for the foreseeable future, getting more effective, lower-cost regulation won't be possible without more openness, and without more openness, relaxing ITAR to help globalize the launch industry for more competitiveness might be impossible. The Wisconsin Project appears to play a useful role in creating more openness. It's non-partisan, and doesn't play favorities among nations as far as I can tell, so it might be worth looking into for SGAC members in search of career-building internships.

-michael turner
leap@gol.com
Tokyo

Uberman sleep without blears

2005-06-25T15:34:00.000-07:00

The relatively low success rate for Uberman attempts has convinced me that somebody needs to crack the problem of making it easier to get into. This is a request for comments on a proposed gradual approach.

Summary

1. Analyze your life, and figure out a nap schedule that will work
2. Align your monophasic schedule with the planned polyphasic schedule
3. Start scheduled nap activities, even if they don't result in naps
4. Cut over to polyphasic with a 4-hour core sleep period
5. Try a one-night Uberman push
6. Get core sleep the next night
7. Repeat steps 5-6 for a while, and assess
8. Uberman "Double-push" if all else fails

In more detail:

1. Analyze your life, and figure out a nap schedule that will work

This includes looking at meals - no heavy ones any later than an hour before a nap - and exercise sessions - no heavy sessions any earlier than, say, a half-hour before a nap. If you're in school, this means looking at your class schedule, and maybe seeing if you can move to another hour for the same subject. If you're a parent, well, consider the Power of Prayer? (Ditto for jobs involving travel.)

For your work schedule, this means seeking both time and space for uninterrupted naps. That "space" might end up being the back seat of your car in a shaded part of the parking lot. The time has to be negotiated with your boss, using such arguments as "I'll get here an hour earlier every day, but leave around the same time", leavened with heavy doses of authoritative-sounding reports about the benefits of daytime napping for worker productivity. Bonus points if you literally catch your boss napping during this time.

2. Align your monophasic schedule with the planned polyphasic schedule

Getting polyphasic is hard enough without adding "same-time-zone jet lag" on top of it. If the polyphasic schedule that works for you means getting 4 hours of core sleep and getting up at 6 AM, and your monophasic schedule currently has you rising at 8 AM, start shifting your 7-8 hours of monophasic to that 6 AM wakeup time, maybe in 20-30 minute increments per day. Get there and let it stabilize for a few days.

3. Start scheduled nap activities, even if they don't result in naps

Take the time to lie down with an alarm, sleep mask, earplugs, etc., in your planned nap locations. You don't have to nap, and shouldn't feel "robbed" or ashamed if you don't. Use it as a meditation practice session or to mull some decision, if sleep won't come. Some of these attempts to nap will be successful even on your monophasic sleep schedule.

4. Cut over to polyphasic with a 4-hour core sleep period

When you're getting an average of 2 naps or more per day with some regularity, just stay up until the scheduled start of a 4-hour core period. You'll probably be a bit foggy when you get up at your regular time, but you'll probably increase your nap success rate on that day -- maybe 3-4 naps. Keep at it, and keep a log of your nap successes, fine-tuning your polyphasic schedule over a period of a week or so. If there are nap periods that just don't work, don't use that as an excuse to avoid nap attempts on the schedule you've devised. Be disciplined. If you have discovered that your scheduled 10 PM nap just won't come, and there's a TV program on at that hour that you like a lot, learn to program your VCR, and watch it later.

5. Try a one-night Uberman push

Perhaps around a brightening lunar phase, cut your core sleep period to a short nap. Don't knock yourself out for the remaining 3.5 hours until your next scheduled nap. Go out for a slow, pleasant stroll at night, with headphones on, playing your favorite music. It's summertime -- tell any cops cruising by that you just can't sleep, and it's a nice night, keep an eye out for muggers and walk only in brightly-lit areas if you live in an area with a crime problem, and otherwise enjoy it as much as possible.

6. Get core sleep the next night

Don't try to go to full Uberman from 4-hour-core polyphasic. Get some core sleep.

7. Repeat steps 5-6 for a while, and assess

See how alternating 4-hour polyphasic with nights without a core feels to you. If you start waking up after 4-hour-core attempts, maybe your body is telling you that you've crossed the Uberman threshold. Go to DONE.

8. Uberman "Double-push" if all else fails

However, if you feel loggy after each 4-hour core on the alternating schedule, try a TWO-day Uberman "double push" -- 48 hours with no core sleep, just Uberman naps, forcing yourself up when necessary -- and see if you start waking up spontaneously after that. If this still doesn't work, maybe you should just settle for polyphasic, if it's not too much schedule hassle, or maybe you should just go back to monophasic/biphasic and hope you haven't saddled yourself with a chronic sleep disorder.

This program is about as gradual as I can imagine without getting absurd. I'm going to try it. Gradualism may be the enemy of Uberman, I don't know. Maybe it's just necessarily a boot-camp gauntlet. But it sure seems worth figuring out a gentler path, if one can be found.

Like Having Sex with the Future

2005-03-28T22:51:00.000-08:00

John Carter McKnight points us to "Pocky - Scooby Snacks of the Illuminati", and asks "So ... what *else* is like having sex with the future?"

To which I responded:

Maybe it's only because I read too much news and don't get enough sex, but certain news stories are like having sex with the future, even when they are about antiquity.

Today I had a good roll-in-the-hay with a story about how Cleopatra was really no looker, but quite the Renaissance Woman. She wrote books about science, designed buildings .... oh, the list goes on, and it makes you a little suspicious, since Kim Il Sung was credited with a wide range of accomplishments, including levitation and clairvoyance. But let's say it's true, that they aren't just digging up and translating Egyptian state propaganda from the first century BC (or, in this case, Arabic translations of it).

It suddenly becomes easier to imagine Marc Antony tooling up the Nile to port, and this flushed geekette rushing out to meet him, pushing past all those diplomatic-protocol smoothies rolling their eyes at her lack of composure, and her yelling "Marc, Marc, you've got to come see this -- I just scored the coolest Greek astrolabe you've ever seen ...."

Think how refreshing Marc Antony might have found her, after years of parrying (or falling for) the wiles of perfumed aristocratic manipulative types playing hard-to-get. OK, maybe this may seem more like having sex with the past, to you. But for me, it works: I'm having sex with the future, even if it's the future of our picture of Cleopatra.

Make sense? No? All right, I won't try again ....

My Dad has Started Blogging

2005-03-14T07:45:00.000-08:00

... at age 84. Here it is.

Talk about your shock and awe. He's even kinda good at it ....

Rat-enabled language identification

2005-01-13T01:24:00.000-08:00

Well, sort of.

I don't think those horrible phone voice-response systems will be employing rodent wetware any time soon. It seems that rats can be trained to tell the difference between someone speaking Dutch and someone speaking Japanese - provided it's the same person.

Someone once said that Dutch isn't a language, it's a throat disease. From years of failing to master Japanese, I can tell you that Japanese isn't a language either - it's a kind of facial paralysis. So they are really just two readily distinguishable diseases. That's a possible application area, come to think of it. But do you think the FDA would approve the use of rats in a diagnostic technique, especially given that rats have been such a major disease vector through out history? Somehow, I don't think so.

Rats telling the difference between Spanish and Italian, regardless of who is speaking, now that would impress me. None of the rats around our neighborhood are anywher near that bright. Why, you know what one of them said to me the other day? Aw fergeddit.

[Yes, I did steal that joke from Woody Allen. From his early standup comic years. Does that date me? Hey, at least I can get a date! HAR!]

Earth to JAXA: did you go off your meds?

2005-01-02T04:05:00.000-08:00

As a sometime Japanese-English translator, I'm no stranger to meanings getting lost in translation. Sometimes they get lost in space, too, I guess. Or so I gather from this report, with its deceptively cheery headline, "HAYABUSA's ion engines achieve 20,000 hours of Space Operation".

... The telemetry bit rate is also gradually falling, so that the operation team feels helpless.

HAYABUSA spacecraft, which is executing the maneuver operation diligently and automatically in the lonely deep space, is sturdy and dependable rather than us.

Doesn't sound like the champage corks are a poppin'. C'mon, guys, it's the new year! Genki o dashite!

Us, Them, and the Others

2004-12-24T01:01:00.000-08:00

I haven't written anything here in a long while. Asked why not, I recently replied, "the world has me at a loss for words." It was while reading an op-ed by Thomas Friedman Worth a Thousand Words, that I felt I found my voice again. Actually, it wasn't so much what Friedman wrote as who he so approvingly quoted: Tony Blair.

"Whatever people's feelings or beliefs about the removal of Saddam Hussein and the wisdom of that, there surely is only one side to be on in what is now very clearly a battle between democracy and terror. On the one side you have people who desperately want to make the democratic process work, and want to have the same type of democratic freedoms other parts of the world enjoy, and on the other side people who are killing and intimidating and trying to destroy a better future for Iraq."

What are these "democratic freedoms"? That verbal coin is somewhat debased. Why, just before I hit the blogspot control to start this entry, I noticed some bit of self-congratulation on Blogger's startup page, quoting the New York Times about how blogging wouldn't be nearly so "democratic" were it not for how easy it is to set up a blog.

Democratic freedom. We know it when we see it, I suppose. But what about those in the world who have never seen it? Someone once had this to say about that:

"And one should bear in mind that there is nothing more difficult to execute, nor more dubious of success, nor more dangerous to administer than to introduce a new order to things; for he who introduces it has all those who profit from the old order as his enemies; and he has only lukewarm allies in all those who might profit from the new. This lukewarmness partly stems from fear of their adversaries, who have the law on their side, and partly from the skepticism of men, who do not truly believe in new things unless they have personal experience in them."

Elsewhere, Machiavelli writes that a city that is used to being free will strive to regain its freedom from an occupier - you can raze that city, or you can go live in it, but you cannot truly hold it. However, a city used to domination, upon being freed and left to its own devices, will fall under domination again. In Iraq, we are dealing with the latter case. In Iraq, we are dealing with a relic of Empire - the Ottoman Turk empire, then, more briefly, the British Empire. Iraq's boundaries are but lines drawn to mark where divide-and-rule politics have reigned for centuries. Saddam only took up the same game within the nation-state context. It is a country of subjects, not citizens, and we shouldn't be so sure that this can change overnight - or even in a generation.

So do you see it now? How Blair (and Friedman) oversimplify? We take it as a given that Iraqi want something they've never seen in their own country. What they do know is order (draconian, murderous order, but still order). And America hasn't been able to supply that. Beyond order, Iraqis also came to expect amenities - clean water, continuous electricity. American hasn't been able to supply those either.

It's not Us vs. Them. No, it's A Lot of Us vs. A Small But Persistent Them, with the vast majority being - at best - those "lukewarm allies" Machiavelli spoke of. Lukewarm allies like those Iraqi troops who desert in mid-campaign. Lukewarm allies like those Iraqi civilians who, despite an average of one gun per household, do not organize to evict the renegade militias controlling their towns. Lukewarm allies who might chill down to the freezing point, only to be warmed again by Them.

Facing How 'Death Cults' are Created - and Why

2004-09-08T05:11:00.000-07:00

I like David Brooks. Who wouldn't? If Brooks' talking-heads persona is any indication, he is engaging, articulate, very intelligent and not the least bit stuffy. If only we could transplant his personality into Kerry's brain - the Democrats would win a landslide victory in November.

David Brooks is wrong, though. In today's International Herald Tribune, a handwringing piece, the cult of death, beyond reason or negotiation, reiterates the old canards of Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism. We're dealing with people beyond reason, he says, beyond negotiation. The Ossetia school massacre is only the latest confirmation. Those who deny this "have become experts at averting their eyes."

... the death cult is not really about the cause it purports to serve. It's about the sheer pleasure of killing and dying.

The "sheer pleasure of ... dying"? Whoa. Let me get back to that one in a second.

It's about massacring people while in a state of spiritual loftiness. It's about experiencing the total freedom of barbarism - freedom even from human nature, which says, love children, and love life. It's about the joy of sadism and suicide.

In a curious non sequitur, however, having attributed a kind of 'liberation' from human nature among these murderous suicide bombers, Brooks' invokes human nature immediately afterward as the explanation, but without ... well, explanation:

Yet when you look at the Western reaction to the Beslan massacres, you see people quick to divert their attention away from the core horror of this act, as if to say: We don't want to stare into this abyss. We don't want to acknowledge those parts of human nature that were on display in Beslan. Something here, if thought about too deeply, undermines the categories we use to live our lives, undermines our faith in the essential goodness of human beings.

Let me try to explain what Brooks couldn't about this "sheer pleasure of dying." The "sheer pleasure of killing" is perhaps more understandable, and hints at some context for tragedy. After all, the gratifications of revenge have been demonstrated using brain imaging. Revenge is sweet, scientists say. Well, duh: we knew that already. Revenge is the attempt to take the law into your own hands, and exact justice as you personally see it. Revenge motivates many murders. And revenge is common where the law is weak, or seen as irretrievably corrupt.

But ... the "sheer pleasure of dying"?

For this you may need to read the following: 'Black Widows' behind Beslan tragedy. The article leads off describing the Black Widows as an "unknown" group. Further into the article, however, you see that it's been known about for a while.

The name Black Widows surfaced in July 2003 when a Chechen woman, Zarema, was arrested in Moscow with a bomb in her bag. An explosives expert was brought in to defuse the bomb, but it went off and killed him. A Moscow court found Zarema guilty of terrorism and attempted murder and sentenced her to 20 years in prison.

The woman told investigators that she belonged to the Black Widows of Chechnya, a group whose aim is to wreak vengeance on Russians for killing their husbands and children.

Another source said the name of the woman leading the Beslan operation was Khaula Nazirov, a 45-year-old widow from Grozny, the Chechen capital. Her 18-year-old son, 16-year-old daughter, and some other relatives were also part of the operation. They attacked the school because Nazirov's husband was tortured to death in a Russian military camp five years ago, while some of her children's cousins were killed when Russian troops bombed a school in Chechnya some years ago.

David Brooks can't seem to make up his mind whether suicide-bomber massacres are human nature, or liberation from human nature, though he's absolutely sure it's utter unreason either way. Let's be clear: it's all human nature. Even women will kill the children of what they perceive as an enemy people, taking their own miserable lives in the process, if they've endured similar suffering themselves. Why wouldn't they? And as deracinated as this experience might have made them, that doesn't mean the political elements pulling the strings aren't behaving rationally. While we in the West might only see insanity, the Islamic world's first question might be, What have these women suffered, what crimes have been committed against them, to commit such crimes themselves, to inflict such suffering themselves? And islamofascists know it.

Events like Beslan ring like a gong - but in different tones in different parts of the world. For us, it resonates with utter unreason, the atonality of madness. For others, however, to hear of giving up the ghost in an expanding wave of detonated plastic explosive is news that would toll like a bell at a funeral, echoing through mountain valleys and shantytown alleyways: the harmonious and simultaneous gong-stroke of achieving both revenge and blessed relief from horror, suffering, grief. If such an act delays Chechen independence, it still galvanizes Jihad. Chechen is just a battle. It can be lost, and yet be a moral victory. Global Jihad is a world war in the making. Terror can work. It often has.

And don't islamofascists know it. I only wish David Brooks did.

Post-nuke Detective Work

2004-09-07T01:35:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of the The Reg, I learn that fallout from a nuclear blast can be IDed even decades later: read their Nevada nuke test fallout turns up in Hertfordshire

You might recall The Sum of All Fears. I haven't read the Tom Clancy novel, and wasn't too impressed with Ben Affleck in the movie version, but it did make me think: Can one determine the provenance of A-bomb fuel after the fact? The movie has Affleck racing against time to prevent the wrong retaliation. Does the physics and chemistry permit such rapid determination? Well, perhaps it does, if you know enough about the material itself.

Hence at least one unsummed fear in nuclear fuels processing when practiced outside the NPT regime: if Iranians or Koreans are refining bomb-grade uranium or plutonium, we won't know its composition unless they open up for full inspections. So if it gets passed to terrorists, we have a problem: with two or more nations refining the stuff, even a full accounting of known materials doesn't permit one to deduce the source by a process of elimination.

For a while, I've been strongly of the opinion - an unpopular one, perhaps, but what else is new with me? - that we should junk the Nonproliferation Treaty. After all, the terms require that cosignatories that already are nuclear-armed reduce their arsenals, yet during much of the term of the NPT, most superpowers only increased those arsenals.

The NPT is a treaty to gradually ban nuclear weapons, not just to establish an oligopoly for the U.N. Security Council. And it hasn't worked, has it? Israel, India and Pakistan haven't signed. States that didn't have nuclear weapons programs of any significance are tarred as violators:

There have been challenges to the NPT. Iraq was found to be in violation of the NPT in 1991. Its nuclear program was neutralized through action by coalition military forces in the spring of 2003 following 12 years of Iraqi noncompliance.

Remember that bit about how Iraq's noncompliance with inpections "proved" that Iraq had a program? Somehow, an alternative hypothesis never bubbled up very high - that Iraq was in such disarray as to make it possible for some people high to think it did have a program, while the ostensible program funding was being diverted to other purposes.

We're facing a very weird danger, here: states near the edge of collapse might have elements with motivations to pretend they have nuclear programs when they don't. And for all we know, Blix and ElBaradei knew of this state of affairs in Iraq not long after renewing inspections, and decided that playing for time was the most humane approach - a drawn-out inspection process might give Iraqi weapons scientists and their families a way to exit the situation other than through Saddam's torture chambers. For, certainly, Saddam would have been very angry indeed to discover that they weren't really working on nuclear weapons.

And how do we know that we aren't facing a very similar situation in North Korea? An unofficial delegation visited North Korea during the time when it was practically boasting of having capability, and were shown what was described to them as an ingot of plutonium. However, nobody was allowed to hold the sample. (Yes, this is safe to do.) A heftable but noncritical sample would have felt warm to the touch. It could have been bluffing to this delegation, but also a show of credibility for a non-existent program for the sake of saving their own skins from their own leadership. Perhaps Kim Jong Il only thinks he has a nuclear program. Or perhaps, under the circumstances, he likes the ambiguity that the Iraq situation created for him: policymakers now have to contend with even more possibilities.

(1) North Korean has bombs
(2) North Korean leadership thinks it has bombs, but doesn't
(3) North Korea is trying to fool everybody into thinking (1)

And you have to make that those propositions rows in a table with columns labeled as follows: The North Korean leadership is

(1) crazy, but wants to be seen as sane
(2) sane, and just doesn't communicate very well
(3) sane, and wants to be seen as crazy
(4) crazy, but also has sane reasons to be seen as even crazier

And at that point, you still haven't summed up the complexities and ambiguities inherent in the current picture. After all, "North Korean leadership" may be an oversimplification - perhaps we just see the iceberg tip of deeper intrigue and a mix of motivations.

How about a treaty that permits proliferation but with monitoring? How about finally ditching the notion that nuclear weapons are somehow inherently immoral? (Or become immoral when in the hands of nations that nobody should like?) What would a likely North Korea response be under those conditions? The answers may still be too ambiguous for comfort.

I just want someone to hate

2004-09-02T09:07:00.000-07:00

I've been following the reaction to Marc Cooper's reaction to Naomi Klein's Bring Najaf to New York. Cooper is indignant, and accuses Klein of being an "apologist" for islamo-fascists.

Well, let's hate Naomi Klein. Or, hey, let's hate George W. Bush. Or let's hate Moqtada al Sadr. For heaven's sake, hate somebody.

"You don't understand how the Fuhrer made us feel!" insisted Eichmann, in his own defense - according to one screenwriter, anyway. And isn't that the important thing? Dispassion can reinforce depression - to be able to feel again provides a basis for action. Rational action? Well, perhaps not, but to move is to live.

Someone posting in Cooper's comment section quoted an interesting bit from one of Moqtada al Sadr's firebrand lieutenants, and in searching for the source, I found it in this interesting New Yorker article, Caught in the Crossfire. Pay special attention to what one of the author's informants calls "the middle level of mind."

The doctor said that he belonged to “the middle level of mind” in Iraqi society, somewhere between the strictly religious masses and the secular élite. “There are many Iraqis like me,” he said. In Iraq, there is nothing unusual about a doctor who loves Marilyn Monroe and Cary Grant, desires the public whipping of prostitutes, and believes that executed homosexuals got what they deserved. Yet Shaker’s mix of traditional and modern views causes him considerable inner conflict. “I hate Iraq,” he said. “And I love it.” He longs to live abroad, but fears the moral climate outside the country. He is wary of the Western images that appear on his television screen, though he installed a satellite dish on his roof when it was illegal, and dangerous, to own one. He adores his new wife, an independent-minded woman who wears low-cut shirts, but he wants her to start covering her hair and acting like a traditional Muslim woman when she moves to Baghdad. His work fascinates him, but he is concerned that his daily immersion in death will make him less spiritual. “The doctor of forensic medicine deals only with bodies,” he said. “So maybe in the end I will become like you—an existentialist.”

The quote that inspired the search invokes a muslim-world urban legend: that jews had been warned away from the Twin Towers before 9/11, so that none died. Of course, plenty of jews died in that attack - for that matter, the percentage of muslim casualties exceeded their proportion in the U.S. population as a whole. Well, never mind - that just muddies one's thinking, does it not? How can one know what to feel? Strength through hatred, strength through joy - strength wherever you can find it. Your average Iraqi might disparage the relative balance of a channel like Al Jazeera, compared to the more usual conspiracy-theory-ridden fair of other news sources, because they aren't used to news that isn't telling them how to feel, but rather just telling them the facts.

Facts must be of service, after all, and if those you serve aren't interested, or are actually hostile to the facts ... well, someone once said, "unused knowledge is a burden." In Iraq today, disenfranchised Ba'athists - even some who worked for a while with the Occupation - are signing up as functionaries for islamists, both in the Sunni-dominant regions and the Shia-dominant regions. This move is all of a piece in the all-important matter of knowing what to feel, even when that means abandoning the truth. It's a sort of Stockholm Syndrome writ large - society-wide, in fact.

War is captivity. Long in captivity, one can stop feeling, can succumb to depression. Hatred expressed against captors is only expression of impotence, and can at best only earn you blows. But sympathizing with one's captors opens you up to feel again. And from your captors, you can receive a predigested set of feelings to refill your dessicated soul - hatred of your captors' enemies not least among them. Nuance, ambiguity, reason, the withholding of judgment - what attraction or satisfaction can any of those adult cognitive responsibilities hold for a social captive, reduced to a state of child-like dependency and incomprehension in a chaotic world? No, what you want is a conspiracy theory, no matter that it is an improbable one. A conspiracy theory orders your world-view immediately. And it tells you clearly who you should hate. And as for love, how can you not love the theory's messenger in that event, whether your captor-messenger is a George W. Bush, or a Moqtada al-Sadr?

War and economic depression makes hostages of us all. And hostages will side with captors. As a species, we're wired to make the best of bad situations. And that wiring just guarantees that the bad situations will repeat.

Amateur Spy Unearths Amateur Terrorist

2004-09-01T07:27:00.000-07:00

Were I not drunk right now, and trying to sober up at Ben's Cafe over a cappuccino, I wouldn't be bottom-feeding on the story of Ryan Anderson AKA Amir Abdul Rashid, national guardsman, tank loader, convert to Islam, convicted of carrying dangerous weapons near a school (boy, the Guard will take anybody these days, not just Lynddie England), and now to be tried for treason. What did he do? He passed information about U.S. tank vulnerabilities, much if not all of it available on the Web, to undercover agents posing as Al Qaeda.

It's worth bearing in mind that George W. Bush has just told us that the War on Terror is essentially unwinnable for reasons that should have some of us yelling "Whoa! Whoa! Nuance! Nuance! That's a French word, ain't it Bubba?" Are we reduced to tail-chasing? Are we reduced to nailing our own utterly ineffectual wingnuts of no particular relevance or risk, because we can't catch the real thing?

The amateur spy has her cheerleaders: Daniel Pipes, for one, lauds Shannon Rossmiller as an "American Hero." Um, that would be "heroine", would it not? Or does that have too much of an opiate echo these days, not to mention being slightly sexist? Well, whatever: she had nothing better to do with her time except bait a wingnut or two into the open, and not even in Arabic. I mean, it would take serious time to learn Arabic, right? Go for the low-hanging fruit - or nut, as the case may be. Rossmiller's a city judge and a mother of three in a town of about 2,700 people, and was recovering from having broken her pelvis. Can you say "bored"? Can you say "I went to law school for a trillion years, and all I got was this lousy backwater job?" I knew you could.

Now, am I out of my tree to think that a guy who posts openly, in English, confessing jihadi sympathies - nay, enthusiasms - has got to be too much of a nutter to be a threat? If you were an Al Qaeda operative, wouldn't you keep a very great distance from such a loudmouth, figuring that he was either an operative or was having his strings pulled unwittingly by operatives? Especially when it's so easy to just pop "M-1 tank" into Google?

I hereby propose some Compassionate Conservatism: find some poor schizoid on the street, get him enrolled in the National Guard (sounds like their standards are way low these days, and probably dropping daily, what with imperial overstretch), post a bunch of Jihadi rhetoric on Islamic nutter websites so that it can be traced back to this poor guy, and let the likes of Shannon Rossmiller, American Hero, pick him up on her insomniac radar. Pretty soon, he'll have have a warm place to sleep and four squares a day without the burden of having to maintain anything like military discipline; he'll have state-appointed counsel for his insanity defense; and, upon being sentenced, will be set up for life: housed, well-fed, medical care, all the reasonable entitlements that much of the civilized world outside America figures is the birthright of even sane citizens. If you're on the streets anyway, why not? I think this proposition would interest quite a few of the gibbering wretches who spare-change you on the way to the office, and maybe even some sane nine-to-fivers earning minimum wage.

OK, I'm way past my italics quota for the day. I'm also feeling sober enough to face my wife. Time to head home. Ta ta.

One Space Program, Under God, Indivisible ....

2004-08-31T23:53:00.000-07:00

Somehow I missed this: President Nixon wanted that plaque on the moon left by Apollo 11 to read as follows:

We came in peace, under God, for all mankind

Well, I'm not sure about the commas. I supplied those. It's a reasonable guess, though. You have to admit, without commas it would have come across as breathless, as if moonsuits only had enough oxygen for Neil to scramble out there, fling a plaque onto the lunar regolith, and crawl back into the LEM to gasp. Likewise, if you attribute the words directly to Nixon, doing without the commas would have lacked gravitas, rather as if he'd said

We-came-in-peace-under-God-for-all-mankind-but-now-we-gotta-get-back-to-fighting-communist-atheist-gooks

So whom should we thank for averting this cosmic faux pas? According to Julian Scheer, Assistant Administrator of NASA for Public Affairs from 1962 to 1971, the only reason we didn't get that wording is because of his canny sense of bureaucratic chaos. Here is his 1999 memory of a 1969 exchange with Nixon loyalist Peter Flanigan:

"Dammit, Julian, the President wants that change. The president is big on God."

"What?"

"Julian, Billy Graham is here nearly every Sunday. The President wants 'God' on the plaque!"

There was nothing left to do but say "yes."

It occurred to me that in the rush of events, no one would remember. That worked out. The plaque that has been resting on the Sea of Tranquility for 30 years is the original, without the benefit of President Nixon's editing.

Flanigan joined Bechtel - which then as now is a GOP-linked petrodollar laundromat - after serving in the Nixon administration. According to an obit from his alma mater, Scheer went into management and communications consulting, then went on to work in corporate public relations for LTV, an aerospace/defense contractor. His role in the Apollow program was clearly the peak of his career:

Apollo astronaut Frank Borman told The Washington Post, “The (space) program was really a battle in the Cold War, and Julian Scheer was one of its generals.”

A general with a brain, apparently. One wonders what Billy Graham had to say about it all.

The Business of Government

2004-08-30T08:15:00.000-07:00

Let's run the government more like a business. Yeah. Right. Last time I heard this one, it was from Bill O'Reilly while debating Paul Krugman. It's unforgiveably ad hominem to tar that idea by association with a guy whose debating tactics amount to petulant name-calling and seeing how many times he can interrupt his debating partner even when it's not on his show. Government as business - there are lots of ways in which it makes sense, actually. Just don't listen to Bill O'Reilly when he's spouting off about it.

I heard a lot of this "government as business" rhetoric when I was working for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory back in the early 90s, in their Electronic Commerce/EDI project. They wanted to trailblaze e-commerce in the defense sector. With electronic transactions, specifically. K-Mart does it, they said. General Motors does it. Why can't we? It was tilting at windmills at the time, but seemingly of the most noble sort. "Cut the fat, keep the muscle" was our Fearless Leader's refrain. We were ahead of our time.

One problem with this government-as-business notion is that, tragically often, the conservatives who shout it most often pull back from the brink when they figure out what it means. Robert Cringely penned an excellent column recently, one of his scattered departures from commenting on the IT scene, with Fred Nold's Legacy: Why We Send So Many Americans to Prison and Probably Shouldn't. If the economists he cites are to be believed (or if they even said what he thinks they said - he's talking about a buried paper), prison sentencing as we do it now, with longer terms, is simply uneconomical. It only grows the prison system and makes the social problems that contribute to crime even worse. And this conclusion was reached by some researchers who were looking at sentencing policy from a business point of view.

Here's my other problem with government-as-business: what about the problem of making business more like liberal democracy? Shouldn't that take precedence? Capitalism, from my frog's-eye employee view, hasn't seemed like the triumph of the freest and most competent. It seems more like the survival of the least incompetent socialist dictatorship. Every company I've worked for has fit this mold: is has been organized economically as a command economy, and politically as a top-down bureaucracy. At best. More often it looks like a collection of feuding fiefdoms, utterly lacking any rigorous judiciary.

Warming to Global Warming, or Just More Blazing Straddles?

2004-08-28T06:34:00.000-07:00

Hmph, the first half of that headline has already been taken by the New York Times. My quibble is expressed by adding a question mark.

George Bush's energy secretary and science advisor have both signed reports essentially admitting that industrial-society emissions are behind the warming trend in recent decades. But ... Bush himself seemed unaware of this, when asked about it an interview. "Ah, did we? ... I don't think so." (Well, I hope he is at least aware that the invasion of Iraq was undermanned, and the potential for resistance was, um, "misunderestimated," since he said as much recently.)

The USGCRP report describing is pretty unequivocal.

Multiple ensemble simulations of the 20 th century climate have been conducted using climate models that include new and improved estimates of natural and anthropogenic forcing. The simulations show that observed globally averaged surface air temperatures can be replicated only when both anthropogenic forcings, e.g., greenhouse gases, as well as natural forcings such as solar variability and volcanic eruptions are included in the model. These simulations improve on the robustness of earlier work.

Figs 8a and 8b - arctic sea ice shrinking - are compelling. Fig 9 is interesting, too: it illustrates some differences between simulations with and without anthropogenic forcing gases. And that graphic is followed by this:

A recent study shows that the average global results reported above also pertain over the North American region. Several indices of large-scale patterns of surface temperature variation were used to investigate climate change in North America over the 20 th century. The observed variability of these indices was simulated well by several climate models. Comparison of index trends in observations and model simulations shows that North American temperature changes from 1950 to 1999 were unlikely to be due only to natural climate variations. Observed trends over this period are consistent with simulations that include anthropogenic forcing from increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols.

Is it climbdown to admit the obvious? Good question. Dick Cheney has openly softened on gay marriage - as well he might, considering he has a lesbian daughter, and a wife who wrote a novel in which a lesbian relationship was portrayed in non-judgmental terms. Some months back, we even had Colin Powell more or less admitting that the choice of Iraq was partly driven by the need for "stable, democratic nation that will provide oil to the world market," causing scarcely a ripple in the news.

Well, one thing is for sure, it's not a climbdown when you seem not to know that your own administration has started feeling with one foot for a lower rung. Could Bush have been feigning ignorance? Could this be campaign posturing? The current straddle works both ways, after all. Republicans convinced of anthropogenic global warming (what few there may be) can point to Bush cabinet members' positions. And the faithful who think that climate change warning signs are all Chicken Little screeching can point to Bush's apparent obliviousness as a sign that he hasn't endorsed this position. People will remember what they want to remember. What Bush Knew and When He Knew It about global warming could be a forgotten issue in a week's time, especially if some SBVT die-hard shoots (or gets shot by) someone who hates SBVT, in some bar in Wyoming. What people will remember is whatever feels right to them.

We've got wide straddle on the gay marriage thing, too. Those Traditional Values people can point to Bush's continued support for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as being between a man and a woman, when you point out Cheney's clarified position on this issue. And for all we know, Cheney's admission was the opening note of a Cheney swan song, a clearing of the path to some less disastrous choice of Vice-President in what promises to be a real squeaker of an election.

Are we warming the atmosphere? Did we go into Iraq in part for its oil? Will Dick Cheney support a constitutional amendment defining marriage as sacrosanct union between a woman and something recognizably human? All I know is: straddle rules.

Najaf in the headlines - not

2004-08-26T02:40:00.000-07:00

Najaf was not on the front page of today's International Herald Tribune. How can this be? As I write, American forces are still pounding the surrounding areas of the shrine, and Ayatollah Sistani and his entourage crawl under British armed guard through traffic jams on the road from Basra to Najaf, traffic jams he himself created when he called upon followers to descend on the city.

I really did inspect the IHT's front page, but ... no Najaf. Even in that under-the-fold capsule summary Update section of the IHT, all they felt like reporting was President Arroyo of the Phillipines pronouncing her government "already in the midst of a fiscal crisis." She said it only sometime this week, not yesterday, and the article cites analysts as saying she was only "stating the obvious." Non-news is news, and Najaf is not?

The Tokyo edition of the IHT contains the Asahi Shinbun, and there is no Najaf on that sub-front page either. The latest Iraq news from that journalistic quarter is about the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) encampment in Iraq and its supposed lack of security. Hot news flash: on August 23nd (three days ago, guys!) "[s]everal explosions [were] heard near the GSDF camp." I guess the Dutch troops protecting the Japanese troops are falling down on the job. And I guess any Iraqi soldier who might shoot at another Iraqi to protect Dutch troops who are protecting Japanese troops is ... blasting away in the vicinity of the Imam Ali shrine.

There is news on Najaf, however. Go to Google News and you'll find it. Google's lead story might be 22 hours old - during which the Allawi government has probably announced twice that rooting Mahdi fighters out of the mosque compound was only "hours away" - but click on that link that says "umpteen thousand related" and you'll get your Najaf news bits hot off the e-presses, sorted latest-first. I've been clicking on that link almost every hour.

And that's how I ran across Georgie Anne Geyer's interesting thinkpiece. Half update, half media analysis, she urges her readers to check inside the paper, if they don't see Najaf on the front page. "It is almost as if no one notices anymore," she sighs, leading off the article. Americans are mainly tuning into the churning wake of campaign spin stirred up by those pesky Swift Boat Veterans, rehashing Vietnam during Iraq's fateful moment.

Geyer may not like my brand of politics, but she outdoes me (somehow) in her (admittedly clever) use of (mostly parenthetical) equivocations.

It seems that about every other hour, the Iraqi government (if it really is one) issues another warning to the Mahdi militias (if they do not really constitute some kind of army) inside the great Imam Ali Mosque to leave the shrine, or else ... We Americans, who are doing most of the fighting around the most holy shrine in Shiite Islam (which has destroyed virtually all of the blocks around it), continue to insist that this battle is under the Iraqi government (if there really is one).

My kinda gal, that Georgie.

She could be right about Kerry vs. Swifties being such a big distraction. Then you had the greywashing of Rummy on Abu Ghraib by a panel headed by James Schlesinger. Big news of a sort, but still just news about old news. Today's not exactly a slow news day. Najaf could be getting lost in the mix. But I have another theory.

Allawi kicked out Al-Jazeera out of Iraq not so long ago, and ordered ALL press out of Najaf. There were even reports of journalists getting shot at by the police in Najaf, though I don't know how whether to credit them. The point is this: reporting news from Najaf became a crime. As I check hourly, I've noticed a funny thing: Reuters and other wire services dribble out only two or three paragraphs on this subject, with only one or two actual new facts to report.

So maybe one of the reasons we're not getting much about Najaf, much less front page stories, is that much that's newsworthy is not getting written down, and what little is getting inked isn't currently getting out. As well, what does get out usually sounds old even if it's new, because the situation has spiraled through several almost-indistinguishable states reported at some remove from actual events.

"Fierce fighting reported."
"Ceasefire being negotiated."
"Agreement almost at hand."
"Negotiations fall through."
"Fierce fighting reported."

Maybe Americans would rather rehash Vietnam right now than check in on a story that sounds like Vietnam. And maybe 40 years from now, we'll be having presidential elections about some issue that's almost indistinguishable. About who took what kind of enemy fire (if any) in support of an Iraqi government (if Iraq really had one). About how deep and serious the wounds were (if they weren't in fact self-inflicted rather than from some Mahdi Army teenager's IED). About what kinds of medals they got for those wounds (and whether they threw those medals away in protest of the Iraq War or not). About why some commanding officers wrote glowing official reports of an American GI in his twenties, fighting in Najaf even as I write this, only to reverse themselves two generations later when that GI is running for president, on the basis of memories that couldn't have become any sharper in the meantime.

If, two generations from now, some such sorry repetition comes to pass, remember: you heard it hear first. Me, I hope I'll be pushing up daisies. Who'd want to live through this again?

The (Vietnam) War Comes Home - Again?

2004-08-25T06:19:00.000-07:00

The Pink Bunny of Battle, in an entry entitled "They Have Sown the Wind; They Shall Reap the Whirlwind", opines that the whole Swift Boat Veterans for Mudslinging issue might come to blows - and even shots. People on both sides of the issue are reacting with "rage". Well, I'm in Tokyo, mostly hanging out with Canadians, so what do I know? Pink Bunny sees it in living color and real time:

As I've tried to talk to people about this in the last few days -- people in my family, colleagues, strangers that I've struck up a conversation with in gas stations -- I hear shouting, threats, denunciations, filthy language that seems out of character, and -- most frightening of all -- a deep, pent-up, insatiable rage (anger isn't strong enough)... and they're Democrats as well as Republicans. Just browse the chat rooms -- left as well as right -- and you'll see what I mean.

Michael Totten shrugs it all off. He was three when the Vietnam war ended. I don't have that advantage - I wasn't quite old enough to be eligible for the draft when the Vietnam War was still raging, but my mother was constantly warning me about my grades in high school, saying if I didn't clean up my act, I might get shipped off to fight the Viet Cong. As well, my hometown of Berkeley periodically erupted in demonstrations - some of them pretty violent - over Vietnam. It left indelible memories.

But when it comes right down to it, I didn't go. And many American men did. It was perhaps only a matter of time before we'd have a presidential election in which the Vietnam generation would face itself.

Clinton gave us sort of a reprieve. McCain bowed out in the 2000 primaries. Bob Kerrey never went the distance in years past.

But John Kerry vs. George W. Bush - that makes it as clear as it's ever likely to be, and in a contest with resonant context: Iraq is not likely to leave the front pages before November. With Najaf burning down like a fuse, Iraqi oil flowing only sporadically, the Abu Ghraib story's branching tentacles reaching ever further up the chain of command, and oil prices fluttering around unprecedented highs on war fears, threatening an oil-shock economy, the stink has become uncontainable. If it all starts to smell like southeast asian jungle rot to some people who would know, it could bring out the worst in veterans on both sides.

Chavez and all that oil (and gas)

2004-08-24T08:11:00.000-07:00

A comment here about oil, and Hugo Chavez, but first ....

In the blog comment forums to which I contribute, my expressed opinions (only the tip of undoubtedly calamitous iceberg) are often aligned with those of leftist contributors. I sometimes feel I should do a monthly posting of my real ideological coordinates. Well, here they are.

The fact is, I almost never disagree with Paul Krugman except when I find some equally reputable economist pointing out that he's strayed off the reservation of economic received wisdom (and that's rare enough.) I think I'm as pro-market and pro-private property as it's possible to be, and still have some room for reason and compassion. And I think that if I'm wrong in those areas (I'm always willing to reconsider), I'm only wrong in the good company of some people who are a lot smarter than I am.

With that out of the way: Hugo Chavez is definitely using oil as both carrot (domestically) and stick (in foreign affairs.) Yes, he's effectively buying votes with oil money, and the only questions this behavior poses are whether he's buying them in the right way, for the right purposes. Is he an Allende? A Peron? A Castro in the making? Oh, I'm sure some of you see an embryonic Pol Pot if you squint at him sideways. Well, forget all that: he's a product of circumstances and systems, first and foremost, and oil is a big component of both. A focus on his personality or particulars of rhetoric is really beside the point. If not Chavez, it would probably be someone else not terribly different at this point in Venezuela's development.

Will the Venezuela oil windfall go away with dropping oil prices, leaving Chavez to hang? Don't bet on it. It's echoing around the business pages these days: we'll probably never see oil below $40/bbl again in our lifetimes. Even experts who feel certain that the recent runup is speculative frenzy are describing relief in terms of a return to around $43/bbl, not $23/bbl (where it was early this year - oh, how long ago that seems.) So Chavez is going to have his carrot-stick for a long time, a tuber-truncheon that any successor will inherit as well.

Oil is politically slippery stuff. It seldom brings out the best in a developing nation, and more often only makes things worse - see Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, and earlier, Indonesia's kleptocratic snakepit of oil corruption, yielding the OPEC's first BANKRUPT national oil industry. If you're Norwegian, of course, not to worry. You were already in mixed-economy democratic welfare-state paradise. North Sea oil just meant you could finance your kid's PhD, not just his M.A. But if you're Chadian, you do worry - Chadians looked around in dismay at their immediate Middle East neighbors, and decided to put their new-found oil earnings into an internationally monitored trust, to be spent on legitimate development priorities. In this, Chad may have only formalized and legitimized a program of social stability and improvement whose more socially-entrepreneurial Arab state precedent was ... well ... you won't like this. Chad was answering the question: "How can we become 1970s Libya without the Qadaffi?"

As well, oil is globally problematic for the environment. Guess which country has the highest CO2 emissions per capita? Yep: Kuwait, which probably has the most oil per capita, and no other source of energy anywhere near as cheap. It's adding up now. If you haven't felt some change in the air in recent years, you must be living in a freezer. It'll only get worse before it gets better, even under a ratified Kyoto Protocol.

Maybe it's time to recognize that humanity's petro windfall is not just everybody's problem, but also everybody's asset. The SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson - a Marxist in his view of capitalism's problems, if not in his mullings over solutions - said in a panel discussion recently that he'd like to see the Antarctica Treaty amended to creep toward us all at the rate of one degree of latitude per year. And it was a good point, because among the many ridiculous global inequities introduced by strictures of citizenship in a complex of nation states, geology has endowed some citizens with an equality much greater than others. Property rights in the sense of demarcations of land area is something I have no issue with. Mineral rights within national boundaries, however, have set global civilization some real issues. It's possible we'll see something like Robinson's scenario no matter what - the next major hydrocarbon fuel source might be ocean hydrates, most of which are outside the 200-mile EEZ areas, in a global commons.

Chavez is smart about this - he realizes that his 'revolution' is oil-financed, that the recent price run-up is just a small market windfall within a much bigger geological one, and so he talks up his South America energy independence plans. He aims to internationalize Venezuela's advantages to some extent, to spread wealth effects, at least through continental pipeline networks. In a United States of South America, with free flow of labor across borders, the oil wealth would in fact flow more freely, benefiting more than just Venezuelans, in the way that an oil strike in Texas or offshore Alaska benefits people in Boston through rippling economic effects. South America isn't there yet, and it may never be, but for all the anti-U.S.-imperialism rhetoric, this program of his sounds as truly Bolivarian as it's practical to be right now.

South America is a huge continent, a whole world unto itself. It could be world with its own energy security, with some degree of common ownership of all natural resources. It could be a world where Venezuela's (and Brazil's) oil and gas belongs to everybody in it, but also a world in which everyone sees that the problems that oil and gas create are equally distributed. Or rather, UNequally distributed: global climate change will, after all, hurt the poor the most, and South America is bursting at the seams with poverty.

Problems are solved with models first. Africa needs a model. Central Asia needs a model. So do the Asia Pacific nations, with their wealth of oil and gas. This is one thing Chavez talks about that I'd like to see succeed. And it's about issues on which I think any fully rational pro-market liberal democrat might ultimately agree with a Marxist. After all, it's not getting any cooler out there.

What About the Hedge Fund Mistress?

2004-08-23T04:34:00.000-07:00

Whatever you do today, don't look at www.hedgefundmistress.com.

Oh, you peeked, did you? (And if she finally figured out how to take it down, here's Daily Kos on the subject.)

Lee Roystone is the pen name of one Lee Whitnum, who was somehow a Harvard graduate student long ago, despite her evident lack of mastery of punctuation as basic as the question mark. Somehow, she is also a "former computer science teacher," according to The Washington Post's Reliable Source, even though she has trouble with web interfaces designed for 12-and-up. She was John Kerry's girlfriend for a wonderful, whirlwind 20 months of her life, way back when. Until he dumped her for someone with a brain, I guess: Teresa.

Could Whitnum have been what Bush was referring to when he announced his opposition to Ivy League 'legacies'?

Now she's putting out a novel, Hedge Fund Mistress, using her erstwhile romance with Kerry as an initial plot point. What's next? Pork Belly Futures Gigolo? Or maybe she'll get a million dollar advance to write Martha Stewart into a plotline lifted from Chained Heat? Stay tuned for Whitnum's talk show appearances. This could be weirder than anything in this election season so far.

Before embarking on HFM, Lee Whitnum wrote an SF novel called What About the Dead? Well, what about the dead, anyway? Her answer is complex. And lost in space. Somewhere in the inky void between her ears.

Maybe the problem is that she didn't use a Montblanc Limited Edition Franz Kafka fountain pen, which is presumably different from the inscription device used in his short story, In the Penal Colony. I'm sure that, coming from her, the agony would be roughly equivalent, however.

Franz Kafka pens in a Montblanc limited edition. I know you think this is a joke. It isn't. Not to go Dave Barry on you or anything, but I am not making this up. I got it from a press release excerpt at the end of The Reliable Source column cited above.

Headlines have been plagued with celebrity trials this summer -- Michael Jackson, Martha Stewart, Cameron Diaz and Courtney Love, to name just a few. With pleas of 'not guilty' before the courtroom, their appeals are reminiscent of Joseph K. in Franz Kafka's 'The Trial.' Above the law, breaking the law, whatever the law, it's clear that establishing one's innocence is the celebrity trend of the summer. . . . Montblanc's verdict is in: The Limited Edition Franz Kafka fountain pen is the ultimate accessory for summer trials. Dressed in bordeaux transparent resin, The Kafka writing instrument transitions from square to round. Available in fountain pen ($725) and ballpoint pen ($395) at Montblanc boutiques nationwide, including Washington DC Boutique.

Looks like Montblanc has no website - course not, they are Elegant Luddites! The Web is The Competition. Death before dishonor! However, a little googling reveals that the product, at least, is for real. As for the press release, so Onionesque ... well, maybe Lee Whitnum does PR for Montblanc?

Time to buy alternative energy stocks?

2004-08-21T04:50:00.000-07:00

Oil prices are much in the news these days, but one headline struck me as suggesting a real fin de siecle: High crude here to stay. Subtitle: "Experts say oil may never dip below $40."

There is a more-than-faint redolence of bias here, I must admit. The story is from the Calgary Sun, the energy experts cited are local boys, and Canada has recently been ranked as having the world's second largest supplies of oil (knocking the problematic Iraq off that rung) by virtue of its tar sands deposits. These deposits are considered worth exploiting when oil prices exceed $20/bbl, and they are being exploited. A friend of mine here in Japan sometimes goes back to Canada to work crane-operator jobs, and recently spoke of the exhilarating vista of cranes receding as if to the horizon at one tar sands site.

The stuff is right here on the surface - it's just not easily processed after you've scooped it up, and quality varies. Until we go to war with Canada, however, there will be no war premium for oil extracted from Canadian tar sands. Oil prices currently jitter on an hourly basis over abstruse economic questions like:

(2) Will Moqtada al-Sadr will bring the key to Imam Ali Shrine to the supreme Shi'ite clerics?

(2) Or they will come to him for the key?

(3) Or, hey, maybe al-Sadr will just leave the key under the Imam Ali Shrine doormat after locking up on his last night in Najaf?

Compare Canada. The most you have to worry about is our president shaking hands with their ex-prime minister in a photo-op, only to stir a fuss in crossing back over the border when the DEA's canines snarl at the Commander in Chief for the faint cannabinoid traces smeared onto his hands by the handshake, the trace THC molecules having originally been transferred from the Canadian's nightly hash-pipe. That sort of incident might take a little smoothing over, but it's mothing like finding out that a kidnapped Halliburton truck-driver is being held in Basra by Iranians who were trained in camps run rather openly in Pakistan, our "ally."

I'd write more, but I have to go check the price of oil again.

Ubiquitous Qubits, Virtual Economics

2004-08-19T22:18:00.000-07:00

I can't get over quantum cryptography. It's now been demonstrated across the Vienna sewer system of all places. The systems at the endpoints are still heavy - they don't fit into 19" racks. But they might shrink, since almost everything involving electronics and lasers seems to get miniaturized eventually, if my Sony Discman is any indication. The distances are still limited, though they've grown from centrimeters to over a kilometer. The data rates for key transfer started slow, but are expected to become respectable soon enough. And the impetus may be real: quantum supercomputing could eventually render standard public-key cryptosystems obsolete. That would mean all current e-commerce gone in a puff.

Quantum cryptosystems are being targeted for large electronic funds transfers right now, where it makes the most economic sense. Military apps are being considered, even key exchange for satellite communication - though how they'd get the optical fiber up to a satellite escapes me.

Move over Namibia: virtual world economies have just surpassed your GDP, according to Edward Castronova. Invisible market hands and increasingly visible court-tested virtual-world property rights are now moving virtual world economies toward the next hurdle: overtaking the GDP of Haiti. Well, you gotta start somewhere. Virtual world labor productivity ranks up there with Bulgaria. Bulgaria! It boggles the minds of even the experts in this area.

"When you realise the immense cultural impact that a place like Jamaica has had," Castronova says, "you also realize the potential impact that virtual worlds might have." I think he's talking about reggae music here. Pass me that e-spliff, mon. Ja love.

Googe's Initial Public Ogling

2004-08-18T21:26:00.000-07:00

Despite a Bloomberg report a few days ago about Google futures, suggesting that the stock price would tend to increase - maybe settling more in the neighborhood of $115 - Google has sold about 20 million shares at around $85, way toward the low end of projections. But still much higher than my estimate of Google's eventual price: $7-$9 per share.

My friend John Levine points out that imaginary numbers in stock prices might be useful for valuing acquisitions, which are so often justified in terms of "synergies" that seldom pan out. Multiply an imaginary stock price by another imaginary stock price, and you get a real number - a real negative number. Google will probably make quite a few acquisitions, even if its winnings in this IPO turn out very modest compared to hyped expectations. So here's my investment advice: listen for the S-word in Google acquisition PR, and take up short positions when you're sure the buyout will go through on stock-swap terms. You might start a Google News Alert for yourself, with "Google", "synergy", "acquisition" and "stock-swap" as the search terms. You can't lose with this one. Really. Remember, you heard it hear first.

My friend Michael Harris mentions something I didn't know: Physics Today runs full-page ads by Google, listing obscure math problems and asking people to e-mail their solutions if they want a job at Google. Weird. Interesting. What are they up to, anyway?

Well, I think I've got a clue. I've read that Google aims not just to be able to search the Web more comprehensively and efficiently, but to actually automate understanding of what's out there on the Web. (Good luck with my blog entries, Google!)

Now, think about this for a minute. Understanding the Web that its reading will put Google's supercomputer complexes in a position to take over the world. Taking over the world: what a brilliant business strategy, eh? (Or maybe not - I wonder how much aliens would pay for Earth right now if you put it on the transgalactic market? Maybe we're just a penny stock.)

In any case, Google's plan for global domination is going to require some very smart people indeed, and the world is awash in underemployed physicists. So this Google Physics Today ad campaign sounds pretty smart to me. Then again ... what do I know? Only what Google tells me, these days.

Google's IPO: $e billion vs. pi in the sky

2004-08-17T03:06:00.000-07:00

I haven't closely followed the Google IPO news, and much of my neglect owes to simple aversion. My dread is only increased when I dip into the tech biz news feeds, only to discover Google founders overestimating their site-hits by three orders of magnitude, and this in a Playboy interview, during an SEC-mandated quiet period. I guess that hasn't been the only slip in this comedy of errors. The SEC's solution? To mandate the inclusion of a Playboy story for the first time ever in a stock prospectus. Oh goody, does it come with a fold-out?

OK, here's a really weird one: Google's plan isn't for a $3 billion dollar offering, but for a $2,718,281,828 offering. That absurdly precise figure is 1 billion times the mathematical constant 'e', minus the trailing sub-dollar digits, which would otherwise go on forever. You might write it as "e billion dollars". If you want to check that value, just type

e

into the Google search box and hit enter. You'll get the value of e (and a link to 'More about calculator', a Google feature I didn't know about until just now), and maybe 23 million links after that.

OK, but why 'e'? Here I speculate. FIrst, e is irrational, and that makes sense in the case of Google's IPO, especially for its estimated stock price. However, pi is also irrational, and it's closer to the value 3. If the founders of Google are hoping to inspire some irrational exuberance, any of several irrational number constants would do. So perhaps 'e' was chosen for its association with exponentiation, with "e to the power of x" (written "exp") being supplied as a function in many, if not most, programming languages. Maybe Google's founders hope to reignite exponentially irrational exuberance, of the kind we saw up until early 2000. As well, 'e' is a universal prefix that got attached to almost every new idea during the Bubble. So I must admit: e has got some real resonance value over other constants. ("Theta"? Sounds like Scientology going public. "Gamma"? I don't know if investors would be interested in such a "hot" stock.)

Me, I would considered including i. i, you might remember from high school algebra, is the square root of -1, the problem being that there is no ordinary number yielding -1 when you multiply it by itself. Still, this didn't stop mathematicians, who grudgingly accepted 'imaginary numbers' when it turned out they could do some pretty useful interesting math with them. Just as they grudgingly accepted 'irrational numbers' well before that.

As long as we're being hermetically geeky with our IPOS, let's recall a famous equation in mathematics, "e to the power of i times pi equals -1", beloved of math geeks for so mystically and pithily combining so many interesting and weird constants. I think Google's formula might be leaving something out, and this equation inspires the erstwhile math geek in me.

My choice of a number for a Google IPO offering would be $1 billion times i times pi, where i is the imaginary value of free information. Or shall we say "pi billion i-dollars"? As a figure, its magnitude is pretty close to 'e billion dollars', but it fits in two terms of the Geek Equation and it expresses something else about the value of Google that an ordinary number - even an ordinary
irrational number - does not.

Mahdi Mines

2004-08-15T02:00:00.000-07:00

You have to wonder about the strength of a government that apparently has no control over 2 million residents of its own capital city. A Newsweek story offers some details of urban insurgency defense tactics, including how gunmen in Sadr City lay mines in a street without hardly trying:

Traps had been laid. A NEWSWEEK correspondent watched as other fighters brazenly planted more than a dozen hidden bombs, or improvised explosive devices (IEDs). First they set fires inside tires lying in the street, which melted the macadam underneath. Then they sank the IEDs into the molten asphalt and let them cool. Within hours, there was no sign of the devices, which could be detonated with the remote control of a car alarm whenever Coalition vehicles passed by.

It probably helps that the asphalt starts out pretty gooey in the first place, under direct sunlight and 125 degree F heat.

Can they keep this up? Sure they can. First of all, consider expertise - at globalsecurity.org you will learn that Iraq is one of the most heavily mined nations in the world. There are plenty of Iraqis who know their way around explosives.

How about materials? Car alarm electronics won't be hard to find in a country with a high rate of car ownership and (recently) a very high crime rate. And it doesn't stop with car alarms. As GlobalSecurity.org points out:

Some of the IEDs have been remotely detonated using relatively simple, readily available low-technology devices, such as garage door openers, car alarms, key fobs, door bells, toy car remotes, FRS and GMRS two-way radios, cellular telephones and pagers – which enable radio frequency command detonation. Therefore, this implies that observation of the target area probably requires line-of-sight observation points in many cases. However, the adaptation of using radios, cell phones and other remote control devices has given the enemy the standoff ability to watch forces from a distance and not be compromised.

How about timing? Triggering of IEDs pretty much has to be done manually, by someone in the line of sight of the target. However, in the close quarters of a slum district like Sadr City, having "standoff ability" might amount to peering out a window a few floors up, peering around a corner a half a block away, or crouching in weeds in a vacant lot. GlobalSecurity.org says that 40-60% of attacks in Iraq start with IED detonations (and increasingly constitute the entire attack). It's "the poor man's mortar fire," in tactical terms.

Burying mines invisibly in street asphalt hardly exhausts the range of mine-siting possibilities.

Many IEDs have been placed in these median strips, some placed under girders. Meals, ready-to-eat (MRE) boxes, soda cans, manholes, tunnels burrowed under roads, cement-encased bomb projectiles, and even dead animal carcasses have been used by the insurgents to conceal IEDs.

A pile of rocks or garbage will do, and a war-torn slum will offer plenty of such camouflage. It's probably only a matter of time before the insurgents can collect (or fake) enough U.S./Iraqi GI combat apparel to clothe dummies to be dragged over IED emplacements in the heat of battle - assuming they haven't put together such collections already.

Beyond a certain level of popular support for an insurgency that has urban warfare tactics like this at its disposal - a level which may have already been reached in certain places in Iraq - there is only one way to uproot it without massive casualties. You prepare a very large refugee camp, and then you start leveling the area with bombs, block by block, herding people out of the city and into that camp. Pentagon war planners know this. The militias they are trying to defeat also know this. Military victory is always near at hand if you have planes and bombs. It can be grasped. Easily, in fact. But it is grasping the nettle of political defeat. War is the continuation of politics by violent means, after all.