February 2007 Archives

It was a short winter. Although snow still remains from a sleety squall last week, large stretches of lawn are now visible. We had little snow to melt, with only two snowfalls sufficient to accumulate. And now the robins are out.

If the sight of a robin is a sign of spring, we’re well into July. I walked directly through a cluster—“flock” is too generous—right on the sidewalk this morning, dense enough to count all eight without turning my head. It reminded me of a first-grade art exercise of drawing a robin.

We were taught to draw a semicircle and triangle depending from a long line angled about 30° from the bottom of the page, looking very much like a backwards “R.” These became the body and tail. Add a circle for the head, two small triangles for an open beak, and a couple claw feet. Color. Voila! A robin Ed Emberly would be proud of.

Although the drawings were readily recognizable, none of them looked very good, and not just because they were drawn by six-year-olds. Certainly, the drawings were almost identical, including the shortcomings: backs were too straight, the legs and feet spread out in an unnatural fashion, the heads flat and unconvincing. Every bird faced to the viewer’s left. We had not been given an art lesson, but a craft lesson: follow these steps, and you will generate a reliable, if uninteresting, product.

Even at six, I recognized that the robins didn’t look quite right, and tried to fix it in subsequent doodles, but only by altering the size and shape of the component parts, rather than conceiving of a more radical approach, like a change of perspective on the bird, or turning the feet to face the same direction, or even joining the two segments of the beak near the head. Unlike other art lessons, this one had positively hurt my creativity. And, while it doesn’t keep me up at night, when the sight of robins remind me of the drawings, I remain disappointed.

It seems Patton’s sentiments on military leadership apply to children’s art classes, as well: “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”

Today, the Chinese stock market, so active under the new capitalism, suffered a serious correction: down almost 9 points. 9% of the wealth evaporated in a single day, poof! The evening news and subsequent market news on the radio this evening made no predictions as to whether tomorrow will be a repeat performance, but it has all the earmarks of a classic market crash. Almost all the earmarks of a classic market crash. Prices had ballooned, doubling in the past few years. Much of this increase was fueled by “ordinary folks,” as opposed to professional investors, entering the speculative market. Many have gone so far as to take out bank loans to speculate, and they’re suddenly in deep doo-doo. A few savvy speculators will get fabulously rich for choosing the right moment to buck the trend, but the general populace loses, spending drops, industry feels a pinch, and the country suffers generally.

This is bad news for the U.S., too, and not just because our industries will feel some of that cooling consumption. China holds a lot of U.S. debt, and when their economy cools, the pressure is to call in those debts. But I’m drifting from my point.

The Chinese dip has all the earmarks but one of a bursting bubble. In a western market, a market slide causes the government to make reassuring cooing noises. A really serious drop causes the government to close the market for a day or two, along with aggressively reassuring cooing noises, just to let people stop and catch their breath and think about where they really expect things to go. But that’s as far as it goes. The market is reopened, and prices begin to move once again to equilibrium.

In China, however, the government is a paranoid military oligarchy with a demonstrated history of cracking down without reservation on anything that threatens their power base. Right now, that power base is strongly attached the urban proto-bourgeoisie, to whom the farmers’ interests have been sacrificed for a couple decades. Nobody but the inner circle of China knows what the inner circle of China is going to do—if indeed they know, themselves—when the penny investors start to holler.

In arguing religion, I more often renounce faith than any particular religious claim, although I suppose that’s more a product of my choice of friends, none of whom are literalists, than of my relationship with religion generally. Any system of belief which seeks to rope off certain ideas as not subject to question should be questioned, and aggressively, especially on those points it seeks to remove from questioning. In my experience, those are the points which have proven indefensible.

Some of my friends have defended a church as encouraging questions. This may well be. But, apart from the Unitarians, I have yet to find a church that encourages different answers.

Lest Jen feel I’m picking on her, I’ll draw instead on Eileene’s tale of her family minister when she was an impressionable young adolescent. She liked him, and with good reason. He recognized her intelligence, and encouraged her study of the Bible by engaging her arguments over particular passages. Naturally, being much more experienced and professionally trained, he had ready answers for objections she raised. I suspect, too, that the questions weren’t the really hard ones, since Eileene was then still a believer herself. The really tough questions come from outside belief, rooted in the denial of the authority of religious texts in the first place. Nonetheless, the minister deserves credit for going so far as dealing with easier questions, and probably for being willing to tackle harder ones as Eileene got older and more sophisticated.

He never got the chance. Higher-ups in INC decided that developing questioning minds was inappropriate, and replaced him with a more doctrinaire minister, one who turned the entire congregation back to rote recital of biblical passages and reinstated church authority as the sole source of religious understanding.

But even had the older, less authoritarian minister remained, I suspect there were lines of questioning he would not tolerate. Sometimes, people ask questions and find the answers leading them away from God. Never—never!—have I heard a friend describe an expression of doubt to a minister that caused the minister to say, “Ah! I’m glad to see you making so much progress. If you’ve decided that you no longer believe, then all our discussions have borne fruit.” For that matter, I’ve never read a stranger’s account of such an event, either. When the questions get too pointed, churches keep falling back on faith: “Your direct experience in contradiction to church doctrine doesn’t mean the doctrine is wrong; it just means you didn’t experience it right. Trust in the litany.”

This is my fundamental reason to refuse to consider science co-equal with religion, or reason co-equal with faith. (I’ll go back to picking on Jen a moment here.) Jen thinks the two are just different sets of beliefs, with no way to choose between them, except personal preference. Science and reason eagerly seek out challenges as a means of refining understanding. If sufficient evidence against gravity could be brought to bear, the theory of gravity would be tossed aside, reluctantly perhaps, in the face of accumulated evidence in its favor, but with excitement, too, with enthusiasm for what new ideas might be found. That willingness to change belief provides a form of error-correction that faith can never replicate.

It’s not sufficient to endure questions; a belief system must be prepared to concede if the questions are pointed enough, and be prepared to abandon its seat entirely in the face of hard answers.

My friend Jen and I argue religion a lot. She’s a believer, and was a believer even in that period when she didn’t know what she believed in, between leaving Catholicism and her recent conversion to Judaism. I am not a believer, the kind of atheist who goes beyond pointing out the absence of compelling evidence for God (or gods) right on to pointing out compelling evidence for the absence of God.

Recently, Jen has taken to shrugging her shoulders and saying, “There you go with that either/or stuff,” the way Reagan rolled his eyes at Carter and said, “There you go again,” without actually answering the point. She does this when I catch her in self-contradiction, and, like Reagan, seems to feel this absolves her of resolving the contradiction, as though an insistence on consistency is somehow a product of narrow-mindedness. I see this attitude elsewhere, too, and it drives me nuts. Some statements—opinions—can have no established truth value, but statements with a truth value are true or false. They can’t be both.

Either I have 87¢ in my pockets, or I do not have 87¢ in my pockets. I can’t kind of have 87¢ in my pockets; I can’t have 87¢ in my pockets for some people and not have 87¢ in my pockets for other people; I have only one set of pockets. Different people may hold different beliefs about the quantity of money in my pockets, but then some of those people, possibly all of them, are wrong. Anyone who simultaneously believes that I have 87¢ in my pockets and that I do not have 87¢ in my pockets is also wrong. He can’t possibly not be wrong.

Either Napoleon ate sausage at breakfast on his 20th birthday, or he did not eat sausage at breakfast on his 20th birthday. We may never know which is the case, but one and only one of these statements is true. He can’t have kind of eaten sausage at breakfast on his 20th birthday. He can’t have eaten sausage at breakfast on his 20th birthday for some people and not for others—how many Napoleons were there? And if one person believes Napoleon did eat sausage at breakfast on his 20th birthday, while another believes he did not, at least one of these people is wrong.

Either Jesus was born in Nazareth, or Jesus was born in Bethlehem, or he was born somewhere else entirely. He can’t have been born in Nazareth for some people and in Bethlehem for other people—how many Jesuses where there? If some people believe he was born in Nazareth and others believe he was born in Jerusalem (as different books of the Gospel claim), then some people must be wrong. We may not know which, but somebody is wrong. Knowing this, it is reasonable for us to question the authority of writers who claim one or the other. And anyone who believes Jesus was born in both Bethlehem and Nazareth has some serious explaining to do.

Either an immortal, omnipotent, omniscient god created the universe and continues to direct its affairs, or no immortal, omnipotent, omniscient god created the universe and continues to direct its affairs. He can’t have created your universe and not created mine; we share the same universe. And if we hold different beliefs on the matter, at least one of us is wrong. Two different beliefs on the matter cannot both be valid; we cannot tactfully agree that we are both right, and that all beliefs are equally true. We might both be wrong; perhaps an omnipotent, omniscient god created the universe but does not continue to direct its affairs, for example. But we are not both right.

And if one of us presents some compelling arguments for his belief, the other must answer those arguments. Simply stating, “Well, you have a world view that works for you, and I have one that works for me" is insufficient when we’re discussing the same world.

Sergeant Colon is a character from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, described as a natural-born sergeant, someone who would immediately gravitate to that rank in any organization. In a moment of satori, I became aware of just how many equivalents to sergeants there are, and the parallels between military and other hierarchies, and especially of the curious division between officer and soldier.

Rank hath its privileges, and responsibilities. Rising in rank at any level brings greater pay, oversight over more people, answerability to higher authorities. But the distinction between non-com and junior officer is sharp. Hierarchies have a line marking the boundary between those who make decisions and those who carry them out, with titles to match.

This doesn’t always make much practical sense. While officers are put through additional training, the distinctions between a lieutenant leading a platoon and a sergeant leading a squad, or between a lieutenant and a sergeant serving as adjutant can be invisible in practice. Yet the responsibilities and privileges cut sharply at that line. Officers are held to much higher legal standards, and stricter punishments for violations. They enjoy the privileges of status, such as entry to the officers’ bar and receiving salutes. Any officer, including doctors and paper-pushers, is presumed to be more fit than veteran non-coms to lead in combat, should something happen to the combat officers.

These practices make historical sense, however, being hold-overs from medieval days when the nobles and knights who led armies were professional soldiers, while the rank and file were just whoever else showed up, willingly or otherwise. This was later ensconced in class structure: officers were drawn from the aristocracy, soldiers and sailors from the commoners, and class distinctions were preserved for broader social purposes, rather than strictly for military effectiveness. The officer-enlistee divide survives in part from inertia; military traditions die hard, even in egalitarian countries. Sometimes traditions continue for a while even if they get people killed—exposure to hardship is often endorsed as a way of hardening the troops, or engendering esprit de corps through common suffering I can understand that, though I may question the principle.

Tradition is not an answer, however, to why factories mark a similarly sharp divide between management and labor, with the foreman playing the role of NCO. Companies very quickly jettison tradition if it’s costing money, or are quickly replaced by those who will. Education may play a part, as in the army, but how much, really? It can’t play any part in the qualitative divide between school administrators and teachers, including professors with advanced degrees, with department heads as NCOs. Nor does it explain why priests can deliver the mass while lay church officials who could repeat the litany without a hiccup can’t.

Something else must be at work to preserve that distinction, and I don’t know what it is.

I am overtired today. I stayed up too late last night, helping some online friends progress through an online game. The process takes a couple hours commitment, and leaving in the middle is awkward and frustrating for everyone, so if the exercise takes longer than expected, it can make for a late bedtime.

When I’m overtired, I’ve found there’s no point in doing any significant writing. The time spent is not merely less valuable then an equal time spent on a better day, it actually has negative value: I end up amending existing text so badly that I have to spend even more time the following day fixing up the mistakes created in the process. Better to leave existing text alone. Better to spend my work hours reading for useful quotes, or simply doing housework. Or write for the exercise itself, as I am now, developing good habits.

The final product is hardly worth the effort, though. Perhaps you noticed.

For Valentine’s Day, Eileene got me Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist, an economic primer. Unlike classical economics, which assumes a perfectly rational and perfectly liquid market, Harford prefers to focus on the imperfections of the market: the fluctuations occasioned by a sudden change, the response of price to the margin between more and less desirable commodities, markets distorted by corruption, and taxes seeking outcomes other than simple revenue. By doing this, he explains nonsensical behavior, or rather behavior that would be nonsensical behavior in a perfect market, and which therefore appears counterintuitive to the reader who knows nothing but Smith’s “invisible hand” and the tidy intersection of supply and demand curves at a common price.

I’m only about a fifth of the way through. So far, Harford has spent a lot of time on pricing schemes, especially those designed to squeeze more money out of those willing to pay more without losing customers who aren’t by overpricing minor variations on the basic product. I got a lot of amusement out of this section, because he frames the tactic in the environment of a grocery store, and it accurately reflects my grocery shopping experiences with Eileene, especially when we were first dating. I was a poor grad student (and had always been a cheapskate), and Eileene was an undergrad with a respectable allowance. I was sensitive to price; she was less so. So I was careful in my purchases, while she fell prey to any number of devices Harford describes groceries employing: significantly higher prices for a marginally better product, or for prominently displayed products, or products placed where price comparisons were inconvenient. The results were entirely predictable, yet she was always astounded at our receipts, and especially at the little note at the bottom announcing how much we’d saved by taking advantage of “special offers” (which weren’t all that special).

It gives me a smug delight to think I’m largely free from the seductive powers of advertising and marketing. It lets me think I’m that much smarter than anybody else, though of course intelligence deserves no more credit for protecting me from bad purchases than do my miserliness, skepticism, and general negativity.

Nevertheless, when I’m all alone with my thoughts, I have to question that independence of mind. I catch myself now and again in denial, rationalization, or wishful thinking, so it’s not like I’m immune to the irrational urges that drive us. A more likely explanation is that I’m simply not the target audience. Different tricks work on different people, and vendors can’t use all the tricks at once. Maybe I’m relatively free of marketing gimmicks because shoppers who think like me are just too uncommon to be worth the advertising budget. Voters who think like me may be too few to be worth alienating another voting block. People who are convinced of propositions the way I am may just not be the kind of parishioners churches really want.

Insignificance confers a great deal of intellectual freedom, but does intellectual freedom have any value when practiced in insignificant ways?

Because our search for a new restaurant to be “ours” for special occasions, ongoing since the change of management at Roberto’s, has only met with near success, Eileene wants to make dinner on Valentine’s Day. At my suggestion, she’ll try her hand at the rabbit she bought on impulse a week ago. I don’t even know where. We looked over a few recipes online last night, and I’m inclined to a simple roasting, though I’m fond of rabbit stew, too. More elaborate dishes don’t seem designed to do justice to the rabbit itself, seasoned so heavily that it may as well be the more familiar beef, pork, or chicken. One recipe, courtesy of Mario Batali, is even titled “rabbit cooked like a Tuscan pig.” We couldn’t resist checking out hasenpfeffer recipes, which didn’t seem to have anything in common beyond rabbit and an oven. No, not even pepper, though the name literally means “peppered hare.” Hasenpfeffer must be one of those dishes, like turkey stuffing and cheesecake, that are unique to each cook, and can spark long, pointless debates over which version is authentic.

(Technically, I should say I couldn’t resist checking out hasenpfeffer recipes. Eileene had never heard of hasenpfeffer, having no appreciation for the pinnacle of western culture that is Chuck Jones animated shorts.)

All this attention to rabbit recipes has forced my memory, unwilling, back to a book I read a few years ago on a lark. I don’t remember the title any longer, but it purported to be a compendium of weird and even repulsive dishes, though the author in fact endorsed them all. The book is a few decades old, and seems quite tame after the flowering of international cuisine. Tongue and brain don’t seem so terrifying next to some of the things offered daily in Manhattan, and even jellyfish is no longer an unthinkable entrée. Unpalatable, yes, but not unthinkable.

As the keen reader has surely realized, the most horrible dish described in the book was rabbit. Jellied rabbit. A whole rabbit or hare is cleaned and stewed in a roasting pan with a sizeable helping of lard and pectin. These elements cook down into a greasy soup. The bones are fished out, and the remainder chilled, causing it to set into a jelly, and served cold, doubtless spooned out with a soft schlup noise. The main seasoning is anise.

Why, of all things, anise?

I mailed off our tax returns today. We lost a little to the feds, lost a lot to New York, and got a lot back from New Jersey. Net result: about $300 back to us.

It’s the state taxes I want to discuss. We have to fill out two state tax returns because New York employs some kind of rule that people working in New York owe them money, even if they live out of state, even—as in Eileene’s case—they work at home for a business nominally headquartered in New York. Because New York withholds none of our income, we have to cut them a check every year. Because New Jersey does withhold income, but gives us a sizeable reduction for taxes paid to another state, they have to cut us a check every year, in return.

This really irks me, and not just the nuisance of filling out two returns, or the delay between mailing a check and waiting for the bureaucracy to send us one. Where does New York get off, taxing people from other jurisdictions? And why do neighboring states put up with it? As a matter of raw power politics, I can see why New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and others might knuckle under: if they didn’t cut their residents a break, they’d lose residents unwilling to pay two state taxes. It seems to my legally uneducated mind that serious grounds for a suit exist here. Perhaps the outlying states have already tried legal suit and failed. But if it goes that far, why bother retaining residents who are sending their taxes to another state, but draw on the services of their own? Let them move, and let them strain New York social services. If we’re lucky, the really bad drivers will be the first to move.

Upstate New Yorkers complain a lot about NYC’s dominance of state politics. They may have a point, if more money flows into the metropolis than out. Or maybe not. It depends on just what forms of money transfer you count. When they do, the root argument is always that NYC bullies its way around state politics, and state budgets, because it can. Yet the upstaters don’t seem to have any problem with New York state doing the same to other states equally in the orbit of New York City. Hypocrites.

When I have a block of time too small to be put to good use—say four or five minutes while waiting for water to boil, or for Eileene to find her keys—I keep myself occupied with a quick round of the internet checkers program that comes with Windows. It’s happened often enough that I took the trouble of leafing through a book on checkers at the MSU library. There wasn’t much to it; checkers is not nearly so deep a game as chess, nor even as deep as reversi. It did explain something that had been troubling me, however.

The book took a page to describe and deflate a checkers myth. The idea is that, if you never move your checkers off your back rank, you can never lose. Your opponent can never get a king, nor can he capture those last four checkers. This is, technically, true, but it’s as useful as pointing out that, if you never inhale, you’ll never drown. Sooner or later, you need to breathe. And, unless your opponent is actively helping you win, you’ll sooner or later need to move one of those checkers off the back rank, if only because he’s captured the rest of your pieces. In the meantime, you’re playing with two thirds of your strength, and thus with a terrible handicap.

Lingering on the back rank before committing to a new position can serve important purposes, but determining never to move off the back rank under any circumstances whatsoever is laughable. Yet the idea refuses to die out, smoldering among the patzer community like a California brush fire. So strongly do a few of the online players subscribe to the strategy that, left with the choice of moving off the back rank or losing two or three pieces immediately, will choose to lose the pieces. Typically, this doesn’t even buy time; the pieces are captured, and the patzers still have to move off the back rank on their next turn. The idea still boggles my mind, but at least now I know where the motive for throwing pieces away comes from.

Distrust simple, guaranteed-to-win strategies. If they really worked, nobody would play the game much longer, any more than people play tic-tac-toe past the age of 8 or so.

This morning, I came across Attractors, yet another web page employing Flash as an experimental toy. Tiny dots (I call them BBs) spill out of the upper left hand corner of the display at slightly different trajectories and fall in parabolic arcs, as though under the effect of gravity. As they fall, they trace a shadowy comet tail, the better to let you watch their motion. When the BBs fall to the bottom of the screen, they are immediately injected back into play from the starting point. You can affect their motion through the placement of four tools: two large, rotatable platforms, off of which you can carom the BBs, and two spots (I call them black holes) with a powerful attractive force.

After tinkering briefly with attempts to create attractive patterns, I settled down to a somewhat more concrete goal: creating a stable and dynamic flow of BBs. This is harder than it might seem at first. A stable, static pattern is easy: simply angle the platforms together to form a cup, move the black holes far enough away to make their effect negligible, and let the BBs collect in the cup. This is neither interesting to achieve nor interesting to look at.

To keep things moving, you need to get the BBs orbiting one or both of the black holes in some fashion. A single black hole is insufficient. If a BB approaches close enough to a black hole, and slowly enough not to whip past on an escape velocity, it can circle the black hole several times, but the background gravity soon takes its toll, and the BB dips lower and lower until it drops away entirely. Two black holes alone are probably insufficient, too, though it should work in theory. The problem is that this is a chaotic system: small, even microscopic changes in input (in this case, the positions of the black holes and the initial velocity of the BBs) produce dramatic changes in output (in this case, the extended trajectory of the BBs). Placing the elements precisely enough to keep the BBs circling forever is effectively impossible; the tiniest variation in a BB’s flight can send it swinging more and more wildly, until it is flung free.

I was reduced to combining the two ideas: collect the BBs in a cup formed by the two platforms, and place the black holes inside the cup, closely enough to pick up any BBs that drop out of orbit, even if they settle in the bottom of the cup. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the result—simply recovering fallen BBs by default seemed like cheating—but it does work. If anyone can do better, let me know. My best idea so far for a more efficient design hasn’t yet worked: a really tight configuration might allow one platform to do the work of two, if no BBs travel sideways too quickly to be recaptured by the black holes before they drop off one of the edges of the platform.

Many online games reward quick reflexes. This is natural enough, given that some are glorified video games, direct descendants of Pac-Man and Battle Zone, but quick reflexes can be an asset even in slower, nominally strategic games. Even massive turn-based spreadsheet games like Civilization have spawned incarnations wherein the units all move at once, and faster players can kill or protect weak units before opponents do likewise. Games that place a premium on reflexes, and the players who excel at them, are often called “twitchy.”

World of Warcraft is not an especially twitchy game; the pace of combat is evened considerably by pauses of a second or more between attacks. Still, timing is important, especially against other players (PvP), but also against the more passive computer-run foes (PvE). No player can be considered great until and unless he masters the art of finessing countermoves, such as launching a speedy kick to interrupt an enemy’s spell before it gets cast. Old and slow players like me, or those whose machines can’t quite keep up with the streaming data (also like me), can never be more than adequate at PvP play, or fairly good at the more forgiving PvE.

On the other hand, the degree of reflex conditioning that goes into good twitch play can be counterproductive. Not long ago, I was playing in a group of five, fighting our way through one of the many strongholds of evil known as instances. Also in the group was a hunter renowned (at least in my circles) as a great player. I’ve heard tales of how he used hit-and-run tactics to down a powerful “boss” monster by himself, and other tales of how he could simultaneously take on more monsters than is normally thought healthy.

And yet we, as a team, were having a difficult time of what should have been an easy run. It took me a while to realize that our problem was the hot-shot player, the one who could nearly handle the whole instance himself. And his problem was the way he continued using tactics that would be effective, even necessary, at fighting through the instance alone. For example, one of my jobs was to transform monsters temporarily into harmless sheep, allowing us to defeat the rest individually. Another player was the tank; his job was to hold the attention of hostiles, forcing them to attack his considerable defenses, rather than allowing them to run rough-shod over our more fragile party members. The hot-shot made these critical tasks extremely difficult by spreading his attacks around, disrupting the sheeping enchantment and distracting monsters from the tank.

Had he let us perform our roles, everything would have worked easily. Perhaps, had he done it all himself, the rest of us would have been perfectly safe, too. But by mixing it up, using same tactics that gave him his reputation for solo performance in a group setting, the hot-shot caused severe problems. Spreading his attacks around like this might have made him 20% more effective than he would have been with a more conservative strategy, at the expense of making three of his four teammates far less effective. We suffered needless deaths (thankfully only a temporary problem in the World of Warcraft) and even more tight squeezes because his methods disrupted the expected flow of play.

And he couldn’t stop! Because he had worked so hard to make play as reflexive as possible, all in the interest of speed, he couldn’t—or, possibly, wouldn’t, but I give him the benefit of the doubt—stop following attacks A and B with his usual attack C, even after he was asked not to.

That was an eye-opening experience for me. I’ll never perform well in PvP. Never, no matter how long I practice. But, despite my very ordinary reflexes and computer, I was still vastly better than the hot-shot in the group PvE environment. Some players excel in multiple situations, and I can still envy them. But I’ve stopped feeling like a second-rate player simply because I’m slow.