Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

• The Complete Works of Michel de Montaigne
• Anything by Jules Michelet
• Machiavelli’s The Prince and Discourses.
• In general, the books that established the foundations for classical liberal democracies in the 1700’s. (Though Bernard Bailyn’s book Ideological Origins of the American Revolution makes it pretty clear that American pamphleteers had much more to do with the spread of revolutionary ideas than did the classical British philosophers.)

Also, a very nice email conversation with the author of Ethics for Adversaries suggests that not only should John Rawls’ A Theory Of Justice be my next read, but that I should move from there to Rawls’ Collected Essays, Political Liberalism, and Law of Peoples.

Cosma Shalizi is always good for recommendations; in response to my question about the status of the word “species”, he suggested that I read

• Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusion
• Kitcher, Science, Truth and Democracy
• Ronald Giere, Explaining Science
• Larry Laudan, Beyond Positivism and Relativism
• Christopher Norris generally
• David Hull, Science as Process
• Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts

I think it’s time to learn to speed-read.

Also I want to learn Latin and Ancient Greek, but I suspect that’s a longer-term project.

My friend Chris pointed me to an article about digging through Stanley Kubrick’s estate, containing juicy bits like the following:

Tony takes me into a large room painted blue and filled with books. “This used to be the cinema,” he says.

“Is it the library now?” I ask.

“Look closer at the books,” says Tony.

I do. “Bloody hell,” I say. “Every book in this room is about Napoleon!”

“Look in the drawers,” says Tony.

I do.

“It’s all about Napoleon, too!” I say. “Everything in here is about Napoleon!”

I feel a little like Shelley Duvall in The Shining, chancing upon her husband’s novel and finding it is comprised entirely of the line “All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy” typed over and over again. John Baxter wrote, in his unauthorised biography of Kubrick, “Most people attributed the purchase of Childwick to Kubrick’s passion for privacy, and drew parallels with Jack Torrance in The Shining.”

This room full of Napoleon stuff seems to bear out that comparison. “Somewhere else in this house,” Tony says, “is a cabinet full of 25,000 library cards, three inches by five inches. If you want to know what Napoleon, or Josephine, or anyone within Napoleon’s inner circle was doing on the afternoon of July 23 17-whatever, you go to that card and it’ll tell you.”

“Who made up the cards?” I ask.

“Stanley,” says Tony. “With some assistants.”

“How long did it take?” I ask.

“Years,” says Tony. “The late 1960s.”

Kubrick never made his film about Napoleon. During the years it took him to compile this research, a Rod Steiger movie called Waterloo was written, produced and released. It was a box-office failure, so MGM abandoned Napoleon and Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange instead.

“Did you do this kind of massive research for all the movies?” I ask Tony.

“More or less,” he says.

“OK,” I say. “I understand how you might do this for Napoleon, but what about, say, The Shining?”

“Somewhere here,” says Tony, “is just about every ghost book ever written, and there’ll be a box containing photographs of the exteriors of maybe every mountain hotel in the world.”

It’s all worth reading  . . .  if you’re into Kubrick, that is — or if, like me, you find the man’s films largely cold and dead. (Dr. Strangelove being perhaps the only exception.)

Kubrick apparently was a fan of the Futura typeface, as well as Bembo. This is the sort of information that you can use to get girls at cocktail parties. Believe me, I know.

Actually that’s a complete lie.

Does it just disgust anyone else that the Bush Administration has stonewalled on releasing any information about any of its policies?

Why did Bush and Cheney have to impose the condition that they wouldn’t testify under oath? What do they have to hide? And why do they have to testify together? The above-linked article suggests that it’s so Bush and Cheney will “be able to correct each other’s memories.” But when the police are interrogating two suspects, don’t they ordinarily interview them separately so that holes in their stories can come out?

Does it occur to anyone else that Bush and Cheney are being interviewed together because Bush has always been awful when he tries to respond extemporaneously to the press? Might Cheney be there to make sure he doesn’t mess up?

The whole thing smells fishy. If there really is nothing suspicious going on, then why go through all this stonewalling? The Administration will only create more suspicion and conspiracy theories.

There’s been a lot of excitement over Larry Lessig’s new book, Free Culture. Lessig released it under a Creative Commons license, specifically the Attribution-NonCommercial 1.0 license: you are free “to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work,” and “to make derivative works,” under the conditions that “You must give the original author credit” and “You may not use for commercial purposes.” Consequently, Aaron Swartz has put a copy of it up on a Wiki (and written a great preface to the Wiki containing some inside jokes that may only be funny if you’re a geek), someone else has created a web-based version of the book that Lessig calls “extremely beautiful,” law professor Larry Solum is doing a chapter-per-day web class on the book, and others have created a collaborative audiobook out of it.

This is an example — a really stellar one — of what distributing information for free can do. It inspires people to consume the artistic work who might not otherwise have done so. It creates a whole set of cottage industries around the work. It can be used to spread education, which is the prime guarantor of a democratic society. Free information creates excitement as communities form around the work. Free information is everything we want, where “we” includes publishers, readers, and authors.

Granted, Lessig is probably already a wealthy man: a former law clerk for Judge Posner and Justice Scalia, author of three books that immediately become sacred texts of the hacker-activist movement, and a widely-traveled speaker. He may be able to afford to give this book away, where other authors might not. But who knows? Cory Doctorow has released both of his first two novels (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe) for free on the web, though of course you can still buy copies in stores. And Doctorow is not — as far as I know — a wealthy man.

Is it possible that enough examples of free publication — in the spirit of Lessig, Doctorow, and DJ Danger Mouse — will convince people that free works?

I am going to cry if Gephardt is Kerry’s running mate.

Elizabeth Rader has a quick little blurb today about how we’ll need to rethink what “privacy” means when everything we’ve ever written is available on the web. (A quick check shows that there are something like 1,144 posts within this here blog, and that excludes some that disappeared when I made the switch to Blosxom.)

There’s a lot to say here, but perhaps it suffices to point people to Richard Posner’s eye-opening comments on the idea of privacy; I believe I read them within either The Economics of Justice or Frontiers of Legal Theory. Part of Posner’s point is that there’s really no good reason — from a society’s perspective — for people to withhold damaging facts about themselves. The argument is subtle, challenging, and not entirely convincing, but I’d encourage you to read Posner’s books. They’re a fantastic contrarian look at common sense.

Adam’s comments on a recent script that I wrote lead me to ask: does anyone know of a way to compile a Perl script so that one doesn’t need to ship it with an interpreter or a set of libraries? You’d need to compile out every function call to the Perl interpreter, and every call to the libraries. Is this difficult? I’d be surprised if this problem hadn’t already been solved in full generality for any interpreted language, but maybe that’s taking it too far. I’d certainly be surprised if the problem hadn’t been solved in the special case of Perl. Does anyone know how to do something like this?

My friend Seth and I were discussing evolution today, and Seth mentioned that the standard definition of “species” that we learn in high school — “two animals come from the same species if they can mate and produce viable offspring” — is deeply flawed and wouldn’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny. I responded that there’s probably a continuum — that one could measure the probability that two different organisms could reproduce, where probability 1 would be the standard “same species” indicator and probability 0 would be “different species.”

My question is: is a species a thing in nature, or is it a conceptual simplification tacked on by humans? The concept of “viable offspring” seems to me to be a fact in nature, whereas the concept of “species” might be something that nature doesn’t care about.

To head off one objection at the pass: I’m not reproducing the Lockean debate over primary versus secondary characteristics; that’s a question about whether the things humans perceive are things in the object or things in the person observing the object, and my introductory college philosophy course convinced me that Berkeley followed this to its logical conclusion and demonstrated that both primary and secondary characteristics stand on the same subjective ground. My question lies a layer or two above that: setting aside the metaphysical reality of the world, does the term “species” define something that is more like the hair on an animal, or more like the picture of the earth as a point mass? That is, is “species” a type of data, or a type of model?

Any scientists out there are welcome to chime in.

A non-rhetorical question to which I’ve not arrived at a really satisfactory answer: is there a certain amount of money that an artist can make, beyond which we’re entitled to say “This work ought to be free”?

I’m thinking about this as I read a decent article on the BBC’s website covering Larry Lessig’s new book, DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, and the DVD of Peter Jackson’s Return of the King. The author of the article writes,

Both Prof Lessig and I can appreciate the difference between listening to the Grey Album and watching Return of the King.

Danger Mouse wants his music to be heard and is being stopped by a large corporation and its lawyers: his only route to an audience is through the web.

Peter Jackson wants to control the circulation of his films in order to recover the costs of making them and pay for more, and it is reasonable for him to do this.

Nowadays we tend to view copyright as a balance struck between the public’s right to have a rich public domain from which it can build other work, and artists’ rights to get paid for their work. This is why we tend to view EMI’s attacks on The Grey Album as offensive: the public loses an artistic work if EMI wins, and we’re not likely to get any more art out of The Beatles or Jay-Z.

The public also doesn’t seem terribly upset about denying The Beatles a few more million dollars. Paul McCartney is a billionaire, after all; denying him a bit more money wouldn’t hurt him all that much.

I think it’s safe to say that the public very strongly supports funding “starving artists,” but less so funding wealthy artists. Put another way: downloading the MP3s of wealthy artists, and not paying for those MP3s, doesn’t upset people all that much.

Is this ethically defensible? One good justification for the claim that an artist has “made enough money” once he’s passed some amount is just an extension of the traditional defense of copyright: past a certain amount of money, artists are unlikely to produce much more work. Put in economic terms, the artist’s marginal output is decreasing in the amount of money that he brings in.

Relatedly, the amount of money that an artist brings in is just as much of a legal construct as copyright is, and is in fact coextensive with copyright: if all work went immediately into the public domain, artists would make no money. (Assuming that people don’t pay for works in the public domain, which is a false assumption. But that’s a separate topic.) If copyrights were eternal, artists would make lots of money. It seems to me that the argument for copyright ultimately reduces to the argument that “you’ve made enough money; now give the work to the public.”

Or should the artist be able to make as much money as the public is willing to give him? Is that question even coherent? What “the public is willing to give him” is certainly bounded by what the law says the artist deserves; the public is willing to pay what it pays for Mickey Mouse merchandise because Disney still owns the copyright on it. There’s artificial scarcity in Disney products, backed up ultimately by the state’s use of violence. The public would presumably pay less for Mickey Mouse products if other companies could compete with Disney to produce such products. Hence the law decides for us what the price of Disney goods should be; it doesn’t even make sense, it seems to me, to ask what the public would be willing to pay for such goods if there were a totally free market. There isn’t such a market, and asking a counterfactual is kind of pointless.

If the price of a good subject to government regulation is viewed as a pure fiction — even more of a fiction than a free-market price — then it seems that there’s nothing wrong with saying “This artist has made enough money; now let the public have his work.” The government already does this in the form of copyrights. If you want to move to a pure free-market system in which the government doesn’t maintain artificial scarcity on goods, then fine. It seems likely, though, that the price the artist receives would actually drop; such is the traditional justification for copyrights and patents.

If the best approach for artists, then, is some copyright, it becomes a question of how best to strike the balance between the rights of the artist and the rights of the public. Returning, then, to the topic of Peter Jackson: is the BBC author’s claim that

Peter Jackson wants to control the circulation of his films in order to recover the costs of making them and pay for more, and it is reasonable for him to do this.

really true? If Peter Jackson’s legal right to protect his DVDs from “piracy” is viewed as a compromise meant to keep him producing films, then he should have a right to earn money from DVDs precisely up to the point that the money stops buying the public any more of Jackson’s art. It is not a priori true that Jackson deserves to control the distribution of his DVDs, any more than it’s a priori true that the public deserves the right to copy those DVDs without paying Jackson. The right to distribute DVDs for money is a legal fiction, which we can change whenever we want.

Jack Valenti is retiring as head of the MPAA, and via Copyfight we learn that Dan Gillmor thinks he’s worthy of respect. Gillmor seems to contradict himself, at least by my definition of “intelligent debate.” First Gillmor says that “despite my best efforts, he used his well-honed ability to weave around the questions he either couldn’t or didn’t want to answer.” Then he says that Valenti “is testament to the fact that it’s much more pleasant to have an intelligent debate with people like Valenti than with verbal bomb throwers. It’s easier to listen, for one thing.”

First, why is it any easier to listen to Valenti than it is to listen to any other evasive bureaucrat? Isn’t it just as infuriating to hear Valenti as to watch, say, the presidential debates? And second, how is intelligent debate possible with a man who doesn’t want to answer your questions? That’s not debate; that’s a sequence of monologues.

Valenti is a charlatan. Anyone who watched his debates with Larry Lessig can see this right away. Valenti’s sole debating skill, it appeared, was an ability to turn serious issues into pithy soundbites — which makes sense, given the man’s history as a PR hack for American presidents. The evidence flatly contradicts Gillmor’s assertion that a debate with Valenti is any more intelligent than a debate with a “verbal bomb thrower”: Valenti is himself a verbal bomb thrower. Good riddance. (Not that we can expect the MPAA to appoint anyone more subtle.)

Lisa Rein is quite right: you don’t want to miss a second of 60 Minutes’ coverage of American corporations doing business with terrorist states. American corporations are officially forbidden from doing business with Libya, Iran, and others. But there’s a loophole: a wholly-owned foreign subsidiary of an American company can do business with a terrorist state if the subsidiary is entirely run by foreign nationals. So what do companies like Halliburton and GE do? They set up a subsidiary in a place like the Cayman Islands that is officially run by foreigners but really gets all its direction from the American head office (Halliburton’s Cayman subsidiary forwards any incoming mail to the corporate office in Texas), then let the Cayman subsidiary do all the work with terrorist states.

It’s a disgrace, but people are doing something about it. Check out the video clip — containing the full 60 Minutes story — for all the details. It’s stirring, heartbreaking, and quite infuriating.

P.S.: This all leaves aside the issue of defining what “terrorist state” means. If Iran receives nuclear-weapons technology from Pakistan, isn’t Pakistan a supporter of a terrorist state? And if the Bush administration ostensibly holds accountable not only terrorists, but the states that fund them, shouldn’t this principle extend to targeting the sponsors of terrorist states? So shouldn’t it be illegal to do business with Pakistan?

Similarly, has the Bush administration said anything to contradict the widely-held belief that Saudi Arabia is among the worst sponsors of terrorism? Clearly it would be difficult to cut off all American business with Saudi Arabia (though it’s an interesting thought experiment: do they need our oil dollars more than we need their oil?). So of course there are tradeoffs involved in any dealings with terrorist states; maybe doing business with Pakistan, for instance, is necessary in other parts of the “war on terror.” Maybe the increased radicalism that could come from ostracizing Saudi Arabia offsets the gains that boycotting them would bring. But these are all questions of “proper balance” and “tradeoffs,” which are policy questions that never enter into the administration’s “with us or against us” public rhetoric on terrorism.

That is, without thinking very deeply on what real policies actually must be, we arrive at a set of policies that simply must be different than what the administration tells us. Which means the administration has denied us the information basis for a discussion that we really ought to have. That’s no way to run a democracy.

As of a few days ago, no transcript of Clarke’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission was available on the web. But Google comes through again, bringing me (among the transcripts which didn’t require website registration) CNN’s transcript. I generally trust text transcripts better than videos, because we can divorce image from substance. The canonical example here is the Nixon-Kennedy debates before the 1960 election, in which Nixon looked pasty and un-makeuped but apparently said more intelligent things, and in which pretty-boy JFK won on TV. A more recent example is our current president, whose speeches are wholly contentless but sometimes contain stirring rhetorical fluorishes. Best to strip out the fluorishes and read the content.

Lisa Rein has done us all a huge favor. In recent days she’s linked a large number of video clips from The Daily Show, 60 Minutes, and elsewhere. I’m just working through the clips now. The Daily Show’s longish coverage of Clarke’s testimony is, of course, funny, and actually a lot more insightful than you’d get from network news. The Daily Show is a lot like the Shakespearean fool: it’s funny and spends a lot of time acting ridiculous, but it’s subtly telling us the truth. My friend Josh this weekend wondered whether this is how The Daily Show manages to attack the Bush administration so routinely without drawing any fire from the administration. Maybe satire is the only effective — or at least most effective — political commentary nowadays. I don’t know that I have the skill to carry off effective satire, but I’m glad that there are people who do. And I hope it works.

On to 60 Minutes’ report on a fake Halliburton subsidiary in the Caymans, which Lisa tells us we cannot miss.

Axiom: electronic voting systems must be open-sourced; anything else invites black-box tampering, which is absolutely impermissible in a democracy.

Possible implementation of the axiom: the Open Voting Consortium. Let’s hope this goes somewhere, in the wake of the Diebold mess.

Brad DeLong’s post about the first-ever south Atlantic hurricane reminds me to mention: meteorology absolutely fascinates me, as someone with just enough differential equations under his belt to realize just how little of the subject he knows. So: can anyone out there tell me what the state of the art in meteorology is? How much of meteorology is well-calibrated subjective probabilities and how much is differential equations on a huge grid with huge computers?

On the subject of chaos theory, I’ve only read Gleick’s book (of which Cosma doesn’t think highly, and he’s a specialist in such things). Thinking of the book years later, it occurred to me that (my memory of) its central observation isn’t all that important: the solutions of PDEs may be highly sensitive to their initial conditions, so that perfect accuracy in modeling complicated phenomena may be beyond our powers as humans. But how about good-enough accuracy? Do we have any reason to believe that it is, for instance, impossible to predict a hurricane more than a month in advance? We may not know its precise contours, but we may be able to warn people up and down the Brazilian coastline that they’re in danger. As long as the rate of false positives isn’t high enough that people ignore forecasts, we’re doing all right.

So: is there any good introduction to the science of meteorology, aimed at people with a few college classes in differential equations?

I’ve not read Richard Clarke’s book, though I intend to when it comes out in paperback or gets remaindered. Hence I won’t say so much about it here, except to comment on something that David Brooks wrote. He writes, “Conservatives, including myself, believe that Clarke has turned himself into a mendacious glory-hound whose claims are contradictory. Liberals see him as the Erin Brockovich of the Bush years.”

Now, Clarke has just testified before Congress under oath. I believe that lying during that testimony could win Clarke a charge of perjury. Lying would be a very bad idea, indeed.

As Mark Kleiman points out, Bill Frist did, in fact, accuse Clarke of lying under oath:

“Mr. Clarke has told two entirely different stories under oath,’ Frist said in a speech from the Senate floor, alleging that Clarke said in 2002 that the Bush administration actively sought to address the threat posed by al-Qaida before the attacks.”

But then outside the Senate  . . . 

Frist later retreated from directly accusing Clarke of perjury, telling reporters that he personally had no knowledge. that there were any discrepancies between Clarke’s two appearances. But he said, “Until you have him under oath both times, you don’t know.”

So the most official attack on Clarke thus far has retreated from the charge of perjury. Yet that seems to be what Brooks is implying. What does Brooks know that Frist and the rest of the world don’t?

I mentioned the other day that Fafblog! doesn’t have an RSS feed. Well, now I’ve written a script to turn it into an RSS feed. If you have any difficulty running it, let me know; it relies on the XML::RSS Perl library.

I’m a real stickler for good book design, under the influence of my designer friend Chris. After I pointed out to him that New York Review Books had done a stellar job with their reissue of Edmund Wilson’s To The Finland Station (Amazon has a large photo of the cover which reveals part of its beauty), Chris suggested that I talk a bit here about book design generally. Great idea, I say.

It’s something I didn’t notice until a couple years ago: the way that books are designed matters. If you’re going to keep your eyes locked on something for a number of hours, it had better do its job well. If its font is heavy and dead-feeling, you’ll unconsciously be less likely to return to it and finish the slog. If the book fits nicely in your hand, you’ll be more inclined to take it out on the subway and read it standing up. If the paper is creamy and feels nice to the touch, you’ll unconsciously want to touch the book and turn those nice pages. If the binding is solid and flexible, the book will last longer and won’t fall apart no matter how badly you treat it. I’ve found that even the cover and spine design matter a great deal: if the book is packaged well, I sometimes find myself putting it down for a moment and just admiring its packaging.

Few books do this very well. The new Penguin redesigns of some great books master all parts of this process, including a spine that’s textured in such a way as to make holding the book a joy on its own. John Aloysius Farrell’s masterful biography of Tip O’Neill was the first book where all these elements really came together for me: the font is graceful, the paper slightly glossy and delicious to the touch, and the jacket elegant. This is a book that I didn’t want to put down, because from a purely aesthetic level I found it beautiful. (It doesn’t hurt that the contents were fascinating; Farrell is a great political storyteller.) While I wasn’t a fan of Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March, it did have at least one thing going for it: an indestructible binding, at least in the beautiful Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century reissue. It resembles the binding to Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions. (Lest you think this obsession with binding goes overboard, think of it in purely financial terms: if you ever sell the book back, you’ll likely get more money for an unbroken spine.)

One thing I find interesting about the packaging for To The Finland Station is that it very closely hews to the Golden Ratio: the book is 8” tall by 5” wide, for a ratio of 1.6:1; the Golden Ratio is 1.6180339887 . . . :1 . This is no accident, and I spotted it even without measuring it: the book is pleasing to the eye and to the hand, and after reading Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style, I figured that it had to be the Golden Ratio. I don’t think this is always the case with books; they don’t always appear so pleasing to me. And I wonder why, given that every little bit of aesthetic improvement can’t hurt sales. Maybe for some books, an extra dollar of aesthetic investment doesn’t buy an extra dollar of sales; people will buy Tom Clancy’s books no matter how poorly they’re designed. (And have you ever looked at a Bantam paperback? From the font, to the paper on which it’s printed, to the binding, it’s crap. I’ll grant you that it’s better for the world to have cheap, badly-designed books that everyone can afford than well-designed books that few can afford, but I would hope there’s some compromise available.)

So yes, this is my obsession (one of a few, including wind-up Victorian-era action figures). It adds an extra little bit of fun to the act of reading, which I already found quite enjoyable.

Wednesday: spent the afternoon having coffee and talking with my amazing friend Sharon. The hours flew by.

Thursday: got lunch with my friend Liz. The hour (and a half) flew by. Met up with Sharon for an anti-Bush protest, then headed to Davis Square to get drinks with friends. Took photos throughout.

Today: headed downtown to the law firm where Adam works, got a tour around, saw an amazing view from 23 floors up (encompassing the airport, the ocean, and South Boston), got lunch with him in the Common, took the T back, ambled through the sunny 60-degree weather. Smiled.

It’s been a good few days. Now one of my best friends is rolling into town. Plans for the weekend include, at least in part, a trip to New Hampshire where there will be partying and goodness. Life kicks ass.

Boston is incredibly beautiful during the spring and summer. At least in part I think that’s because the winters are so awful; you appreciate what you have when you don’t have it often. But it’s also just a great city during the summer: lots of stuff going on, lots of people outside, and unbelievably gorgeous women who just come out of nowhere. They emerged from their subterranean lairs today fully tanned.

Large quantities of props to Jeff Chausse (another former coworker with a terrific website) for this post:

Oh, That Wacky Bush!

At a black tie media event held at the White House, Bush put on a slideshow, including a shot of him looking under a couch, adding the comment: “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere!”

THAT’S SO FUNNY!!! ROFLOLOLOLOL!!!11!!!11

I know 589 dead soldiers and 10,000 dead Iraqi civilians who aren’t laughing, you jackass.