Kieran Chapman (whose site is so well-designed that my eyes relax upon seeing it) points us to the “Top 10 Secrets They Don’t Want You to Know About the Debates” (NPR). I include it below the fold.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about whether I’ll move out of the country if President Bush is re-elected. Quite often I fear that Americans right now are living in Germany, circa 1932. Now I read a story describing the Bush administration’s support for a bill that would allow the U.S. to deport suspected terrorists to countries where they’re likely to be tortured (my cache). Here’s the lead:
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is supporting a provision in the House leadership’s intelligence reform bill that would allow U.S. authorities to deport certain foreigners to countries where they are likely to be tortured or abused, an action prohibited by the international laws against torture that the United States signed 20 years ago.
This government condones torture. This government’s lawyers have written reports in which they tried very hard to “prove” that the president has the authority to permit torture — that the sole military authority vests in him, and that the war on terror has rendered parts of the Geneva Conventions “quaint.” This government has tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib, with the explicit backing of Don Rumsfeld. This government proudly arrested 5,000 people in the wake of September 11, and kept many of them in jail. It has turned out since then that none of those people — some of whom, like Yaser Esam Hamdi, were held without access to an attorney for years — have been convicted of a crime. We’re holding innocent people for no good reason.
I don’t know that I can continue living in a country whose government — I separate the government from its people — does this. If Bush is re-elected, despite his atrocious failings as a president and as a human being, I don’t know whether I will still be able to hold the president and the people apart in my mind. They knew the bloodshed that Bush has caused. They know the depths to which Iraq has sunk on Bush’s watch. They know the torture — has any word throughout human history evoked greater horror? — that Bush has condoned. And yet — if my nightmares come true — he will be re-elected. Is this the sort of country I want to keep living in? Can a country with so little humanity long endure as a democracy?
Pedro is suckin’ lately. Lowe has not had a good year. Wakefield, I think in virtue of the knuckleball, is inconsistent. The only two Sox pitchers about whom I’m really confident are Schilling and Arroyo. Middle relief is weak, with maybe Mendoza (“Mendozer” if you’re a lifelong Bostonian) staying steady. Foulke, recent lapses notwithstanding, is a great closer.
Is anyone other than me mildly freaking out about Sox pitching in the playoffs?
Tampa Bay pitcher Scott Kazmir appears to have the Red Sox’ number. He’s the only pitcher for their team who has that honor. And yet, in retaliation for Bronson Arroyo’s two presumably accidental hit batsmen last night, Kazmir hit two Red Sox batters. Kazmir was thereby thrown out of the game in the fourth inning, having held the Sox scoreless until the ejection. In the fifth, the Sox promptly scored five runs.
So my question is: I know that retaliation for hitting batters is commonplace, but in this case isn’t it rankly stupid? It got one of Tampa’s only good pitchers thrown out of the game, and the Sox clinched a playoff spot one game earlier than they probably would have had he stayed in. Where’s the logic in this?
It’s also fascinating, because why should pre-reading the second syllable of “mismeasure” cause us to mispronounce it? We’re taking the “zh” sound in the second syllable and carrying it back to the first syllable — just like in “she sells seashells . . . ,” whose last word it’s very easy to pronounce “sheshells.” Why does that happen? I’ve been trying to think of some evolution-to-a-simple-mental-rule that would explain this — e.g., “it happens very often that syllables repeat, so the brain makes repeating syllables easy and makes similar-but-not-identical syllables hard to pronounce” — but that doesn’t make any sense. Do any linguists out there know of a good explanation for this phenomenon?
I would like to link two great articles on Cosma Shalizi’s blog, because linking great articles on Cosma’s blog is what I do:
I’ve been meaning to make the point for a while that while it may be detrimental to some individual programmers to give away software — a proposition of which I am not convinced — it is probably better for society as a whole. Imagine if every aspiring graphic designer could get a free copy of QuarkXPress to learn his craft on. (This may already be the case in the nation’s design schools; those of you who are designers are welcome to tell me what the world is actually like.) Imagine if every aspiring mathematician, statistician or physicist could play on a copy of MathWorks or somesuch to, for instance, run simulations or visualize complicated processes evolving in time. Imagine if every taxpaying American could keep track of his or her finances with a free copy of gnucash. What would be the results of such costless software? Would we get more mathematicians? More designers? More hobbyists, rather than professions-as-priesthoods? Would schools be able to teach math with more intriguing graphics? Would Americans spend less on professional tax preparers?
So I simply put into the doubters’ minds the question: even though you doubt the scalability of distributing software for free, don’t you at least admit the possibility that it may have offsetting benefits?
A great example comes today via Slashdot: an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. The Web is built on standards (HTML, HTTP, RSS, etc.) that people spent loads of time developing and then gave away for free. The web server which delivered this page to you is entirely free, even though it’s a rock-solid piece of software. Because it’s free, people like me can put up a website, write Perl scripts to develop our own rinky-dink weblog packages, and learn all about administering a secure server for absolutely no money. I’ve since used that knowledge to help multiple clients put up web presences. I would not have been able to learn any of this nearly as well if I had had to pay for it. A few software developers may make less money, but the rest of us benefit enormously.
Then think about the offsetting disadvantages of selling a product like Microsoft Windows. At the very least, there’s the enormous cost to society of enforcing Microsoft’s property rights in the product: every time someone sues someone else for patent infringement, the legal costs are a dead-weight loss to society. Every minute that a Microsoft programmer spends building copy protection into their software is a dead-weight loss to society. Every minute that every lawyer spends drawing up “click-wrap” license agreements that we click through and don’t read on the way to using some new software is a minute of time that society has just wasted. The U.S. government’s efforts to prevent software piracy in Asia are all dollars that would be better spent elsewhere. The enormous legal apparatus necessary to support proprietary software is one giant wasted pool of money. We would spend none of it — or at least much less — if all that software were open-sourced.
(I don’t deny, of course, that open-sourcing all software would create its own set of issues, not least among them being a marked increase in lawsuits defending the GPL.)
This reminds me of the debate over outsourcing. My dad pointed out a little while ago that outsourcing is a great idea “until you’re one of the people who loses his job.” I think this points out the often divergent interests of individuals and societies. Listen to most economists, and I think they’ll tell you that outsourcing is a net positive: if nation A can do something more efficiently than nation B, then nation A will tend to thrive at that task more than B will. More to the point, capitalism kills industries and companies all the time. Lots of good cash-register companies had to die because of the computer revolution; Hayes went out of business as other modem manufacturers found cheaper ways to do what Hayes did; the infrastructure around horses and buggies fell away when cars came along; and so on. People lament the death of the once-mighty American steel industry, but the world is probably better off for its having died: we now get cheaper steel, which allows cheaper cars, which means more money in consumers’ pockets to spend on other things that they value more. We can argue about the validity of that end goal (higher consumer consumption), but let’s focus on goals and what various policies do to get us there. If we were to ban outsourcing, or give tax credits to companies that hire American workers, would we effectively be transferring money from taxpayers to less-efficient companies? Would we be propping up the steel industry at the expense of more-efficient industries?
Likewise, the death of proprietary software may upset a lot of software companies, but it’s not clear that society as a whole is worse off from its death. People spend less on software, so they have more money to spend on things they care about. And they get the software for free; software is an input into other processes, so maybe some companies find more-efficient ways to produce new products. It is by no means clear that selling software at no cost is a net negative.
The Sox are right now clobbering the Yankees 9-2, after clobbering them yesterday and giving up the previous day’s game under Pedro’s tutelage. So I feel I can take a moment to step downstairs and write a few thoughts about baseball and statistics.
Like Pokey, however, Mientkiewicz is a weak hitter. Millar’s quite solid, batting around .300 this year. So I wonder: if you total Millar’s and Mientkiewicz’s RBIs (say) plus “Runs Prevented,” who comes out ahead? Runs Prevented would be really hard to quantify, but certainly those watching the games know that Mientkiewicz makes plays that no one else could make. So how do we quantify his defensive contribution?
That approach is wasteful, because you may be able to pick items off the line one at a time, then pass a point — say, 900 items with not a single failure — where you can stop the measurement and say with high probability that the failure rate is below the acceptable threshold. When you’re testing something expensive — automobiles, say — the cost savings can be enormous.
It occurs to me that maybe we ought to have a similar procedure in baseball. Treat games between teams as a sequential decision procedure, where after every game you stop and ask, “Can we decide, based on the teams’ won/lost records this year, which one is better?” If you come to a point where playing more games would add little more information about which team is better, you can stop playing. For instance, it’s virtually certain that the Sox are a better team than Tampa Bay; so far this year, the Sox are 12-4 versus Tampa. If the point of the season is to figure out which teams are the best, we probably could have stopped playing against Tampa a while ago. Contrariwise, after this game the Sox are probably going to be 11-8 against the Yankees; we could probably make a good case that Sox should be playing more games against the Yankees.
Obviously it doesn’t make sense to model baseball games along the lines of undifferentiated widgets on an assembly line. Players get traded, teams call up their minor leaguers, other players get injured, and so forth. Games are not random samples where each item carries the same probability of success. Moreover, the matchings between teams are chosen for the drama that historic rivalries cause; this is not a pure statistical problem. However, it seems to me that some procedure like Wald’s could help rationalize the pairings between teams.
I didn’t even check the byline before I read a blisteringly sarcastic piece about Ayad Allawi (my cache), the puppet prime minister of Iraq. (I found the link after Josh Marshall noted that the U.S. State Department sets Allawi’s travel schedule.) The article also includes some ominous thoughts about the disappearance of democracy in Russia. I was pleasantly surprised to find that George Will wrote it.
This is a Republican administration that (sing it with me now) is not conservative and never has been, except possibly along a social-conservative axis that Will has never focused on. He’s always been part of the economic- and foreign-policy-conservative school of the Republican party, when he wasn’t writing about baseball. I’m glad to see he’s finally realizing that “his” president actually works against everything that he holds dear.
Or not: looks like I spoke too soon (my cache).
Having just finished Brave New World (I’m slowly working my way through Books That I Should Have Read Long Ago — I’ve still not read Lord of the Flies, and I wonder whether I want to), I’m thinking about dystopias. Specifically, did literary dystopias only start to emerge with the arrival of powerful, centralized nations and industrialization? All the dystopias that we think of today (1984, Brazil, Brave New World, Metropolis, etc.) involve humans being used as cogs in a giant machine, or a central organization (corporation, government) that is far beyond human control.
Were there dystopias in literature before the 18th century?
My friend Stevie pointed me to a really interesting debate on NPR’s Justice Talking between Ralph Nader and Howard Dean.
Nader doesn’t really seem to get the debate format. To my eye, anyway, he lost to Dean in the debate because Dean can stay focused on a talking point. It may also be because Nader cannot — by the rules of campaigning — admit that he stands no chance of winning.
If Nader could admit that he will not win the election, then he would admit that his role in this election is as a spoiler. The best that he can do for himself and for third parties is to extract promises from the Democrats that they’ll throw more meat to progressives. The most plausible argument for Nader’s campaign, it seems to me, is this: if we ask third parties to stand aside precisely at those moments when they have the most leverage, then what is the point in having them in the first place? If Nader could be honest at this stage in the campaign, he would say, “I can’t win. But if I’m the spoiler in two close elections in a row, then maybe the Democrats will start noticing and start trying to appease this wing of liberalism.” That’s a plausible argument.
The trouble is that Dean is arguing that we should be thinking about the short term now — about the possibility of another four years of the Bush administration. Nader’s arguing the long term — about the viability of third parties over the next 20 years or more. Nader may ultimately be right. In the historical calculus, it may be better for us to vote for Nader and give third parties a chance. But that’s a very tough argument to make when Bush is in office. And Dean retorts plausibly: you think you’re going to get a lot for progressives, but you won’t get any of that if George Bush is re-elected. Since you will not be elected, and since the election may very well be close, your only role is to harm progressives in the long run.
Dean’s argument convinces me. I think both candidates would agree that the next four years under Bush would be intolerable; Dean’s trying to seal the deal by showing that even after four years from now, it would still be intolerable. There is no Nader-shaped light at the end of the tunnel.
I’m still uneasy. Kerry is a highly undesirable candidate, squirming out of controversial decisions (remember his interview with Tim Russert, in which he tried to deny what he said about his Vietnam War atrocities?) to appeal to a broader audience. But the argument that we simply can’t afford Nader right now is awfully convincing.
P.S.: Nader seems passionate about instant-runoff voting. The book Chaotic Elections! A Mathematician Looks at Voting convincingly argues that the instant runoff is possibly even worse than the majority-rules system we have now. It argues for the Borda count instead, in which voters give one point to their favorite candidate, two points to their second-favorite, and so on. The candidate with the lowest total wins. Read the book for lots of good, mathematically strong arguments in favor of Borda.
Via Kevin Drum: Juan Cole notes that Cat Stevens supported the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence against Salman Rushdie, and for this reason we shouldn’t care especially much about whether he was unjustly taken off the aircraft.
But that still doesn’t answer the question: why do the man’s disgraceful utterances have anything to do with whether we take him off a plane? Is he a security threat to the United States? Yes? Then why don’t we arrest him? No, he’s not a security threat? Then why are we pulling him off a plane? And do we intend to commit to this narrow principle wholeheartedly? Namely, will we pull anyone off a plane if he supported the fatwa?
I don’t understand much of what passes for “security” in U.S. airline travel today. I’ve said it many, many times: if I’ve already gone through a metal detector, and ostensibly highly-trained security guards (cough) have patted me down, and I’ve removed my shoes, and I can’t bring anything sharper than a ballpoint pen on the flight with me, then what security risk could I possibly pose?
The aircraft’s security is the only reason to divert it from its planned flight path. If you accept this premise, then I don’t see how you could argue for Stevens’s removal.
Headline and lead from the BBC News page:
Allawi insists Iraq is succeeding
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi says Iraq is succeeding in establishing democracy, in a speech to US Congress.
Why even bother reporting this? Shouldn’t there be some boilerplate that news organizations publish when someone gives an official speech whose content is dictated by his position? “Bush Says Exactly What You Would Expect During His State Of The Union,” “Puppet Foreign Leader Defends Failed Experiment,” etc. I mean, consider the opposite: what if Bush stood up and said, “The economy is doing badly, and we’ve really badly screwed Iraq.” It wouldn’t happen. If it did, it would be worth reporting on. But it’s exactly what you would expect. I doubt I’ll be seeing an article tomorrow morning on the sun’s surprising habit of rising in the east.
Why bother reporting on what a Famous Person says about an event or a policy? Is that even news? What’s important is not whether Bush or Allawi thinks that the Iraq experiment is succeeding — what’s important is whether that experiment is actually succeeding. Newspapers should be reporting on what’s actually happening in Iraq, and helping us to decide whether we support the policies in place there. Do we expect Bush to say, “Iraq is a real cock-up”? Of course not.
For that matter, it’s not even important what John Kerry says in response to Bush. Yesterday’s Times reported that Kerry’s and Bush’s contrasting views of the situation in Iraq were mere campaign posturing. Without even bothering to take a stand on the war, I think it’s reasonable to ask: isn’t it true that at least one of the candidates is wrong? Is Iraq a quagmire, America’s new Vietnam? Is Iraq on its way to anarchy? Or is it really on the path to stable democracy? It seems to me that either Bush or Kerry is wrong. If they had chosen positions that were nearer to one another — more amenable to compromise — it might not be possible to label one correct and the other incorrect. As it is, their views are incompatible. Shouldn’t the Times be trying to tell us which one is right?
Maybe that’s impossible — maybe the facts on the ground are such that deciding which one is right is impossible. If that’s so, again: shouldn’t the Times tell us that?
I’ve seen distressingly few articles about what’s actually happening in Iraq, short of the occasional car-bombing story. Bombings are a dime a dozen, though: they happen in Israel all the time, and Israel is (so I hear) quite stable. So car bombings alone don’t tell me much about the state of Iraq.
All of this perfectly follows the Swift Boat story arc: the story should be about a set of demonstrable facts (did John Kerry win his Purple Hearts for legitimate reasons? Is Iraq on its way to anarchy?), but it quickly turns into the story about the story (Swift Boaters say Kerry’s no hero; candidates have differing perspectives on Iraq). This is implicitly a victory for whichever side has the stronger propaganda machine.
Read Manufacturing Consent, and this actually falls into a much older, uglier, and deeper storyline: if you want to know what’s happening in Iraq, says Chomsky, you’re likely to ask the Department of Defense. They’ve got a multimillion-dollar public-relations office and frequent press conferences. You — as a reporter — have tight deadlines. It’s the rare journalist who will take the time to visit Iraq, say, or dig through decades-old war records. Whoever has the bigger propaganda machine wins.
Where are the Woodward and Bernstein d’antan? And when are we actually going to get some facts?
I’m rapidly coming to the end of my civil-liberties rope in this country. Via the Bookslut, I see that Tariq Ramadan — a Muslim reformer and prestigious author — has had his visa revoked by the U.S. State Department without explanation.
Then, of course, Cat Stevens was recently forbidden to enter the U.S., and the plane on which he was traveling was diverted to Maine. Adam Kessel makes the obvious point, which I’ve nonetheless heard no one else say: if Stevens is dangerous enough to be on a terrorist watchlist, why hasn’t he been arrested? If he’s not that dangerous (as his non-arrest would indicate), then why did they divert the flight?
I feel so much outrage and sadness and fear that I don’t know what to do with it all. Ranting doesn’t help — doesn’t help me, and doesn’t help anyone else. What do we do?
I’ve now come to the point in my fledgling web-design career where I really ought to learn Javascript. I’m trying to design a collapsible menu for a client, and as far as I can tell I can only get 90% of the way there with CSS — even if I forego browser compatibility. I’ll need some kind of event handling, like an onClick event — click on a button next to the top level of a collapsible list, and you’ll get the next level. I can’t think of any way to do this in CSS. I can get CSS to display a submenu when you hover your mouse over the higher-level menu, but that’s not quite what I want.
That said, I am discovering all sorts of obscure bits of CSS that are really pretty handy. For instance, the visibility property will generate the box surrounding an element but won’t render it. If you want a submenu to display only when you mouse over its containing menu, you could do something like
li ul { visibility: hidden; } li:hover ul { visibility: visible; }
The nuance here is that the visibility property will paginate the page appropriately — the menu may be hidden, but space will be set aside for it. I had been using the display property for this. It creates its own cool kind of effect by not generating the box that contains the list element. The corresponding code looks like
li ul { display: none; } li:hover ul { display: block; }
Now if you mouse over a list that contains a sublist, the rest of the page will move out of the way to accommodate the new list. This is kind of a cool effect, but it’s also jarring. Visibility is more appropriate here.
Anyway, I was going to make two points before I went off on that CSS tangent. First is that I’m really tired, but that I really wish I could sit down and write some Javascript; I just found a very neat page explaining how to generate just about exactly the menu that I was thinking of (with handy graphics!). Second is that I now need to sit down and figure out the Document Object Model for HTML. I’m not clear on how all the pieces fit together — whether the document “object” also contains methods like onClick and onMouseOver. A full C++ object would contain all the methods that make sense for that object, as well as the data structure itself.
That’s tomorrow’s task. That, and teaching a cool little nonprofit about Apache. Yay me.
I’m listening right now to Van Morrison’s album Moondance as I design a website (I’ll need to think for a while about what I need for good website-design music — booty-shakability is certainly a minimal demand), and I’m reminded: Morrison’s songs are quite often sad with a thin veneer of happiness atop. I just listened to Into The Mystic, which sounds like it should be totally joyous: here’s a guy who can now face his fears and head off into the great unknown. And yet . . . there’s something in Morrison’s voice that suggests all is not well — that underneath the joy, he’s really hurting. Like maybe he’s just lost a girlfriend and he’s trying to convince himself to get up out of bed. It’s hard to say what’s on Morrison’s mind, but he does this all the time. It’s his genius to hide emotional complexity beneath facially simple lyrics.
I really dislike the pitching won/loss statistics. The Sox have won some games this year in spite of their pitchers, winning only because the pitchers got good run support; they’ve lost others even though their starting pitchers gave outstanding performances. Tonight Curt Schilling pitched 14 strikeouts; the game would have been an almost guaranteed loss without him (going into tonight, I believe the Sox were 1-6 against the Orioles at Fenway, including some wanton destruction against Tim Wakefield last night). Yet Schilling ends up with the no-decision.
I suspect the logic is that the MLB wants the sum of a team’s pitchers’ wins to equal the team’s total wins, and likewise for its losses. Someone has to get the win and the loss, if you’re bothering with the statistic at all. But it seems to say literally less than nothing: viewed on its own, it tells a story about a pitcher that might bear no resemblance to what actually happened.
Obviously, then, we ought to be looking at defense- and offense-independent statistics: strikeouts, walks, home runs, the ratio of strikes to balls, and so forth. Not all of these statistics will work for all pitchers: Derek Lowe — when he’s not getting destroyed — is a groundball pitcher, who thereby relies on strong fielding behind him. So it’s not even clear that defense-independent statistics work for all pitchers. But we can certainly do better than wins and losses.
From Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head, after the narrator has discovered that his former mistress is now sleeping with his brother:
[T]here were times when I wondered whether my love for Georgie was strong enough to support the sheer weight of mess and muddle under which I felt it now laboured. All the same, when I had found her with Alexander my sense of possessiveness had been immediate and violent: a possessiveness which lingered on now as a sort of aching resentment. It was odd that I felt no urgency about seeing her. What I really wanted most just then was to put Georgie in cold storage. It is unfortunate that other human beings cannot be conveniently immobilized. Do what I might, Georgie would go on thinking, would go on acting, during my absence and my silence.
That’s one of the better descriptions of post-breakup emotions that I’ve ever read. You don’t want the other person to die, or even to disappear. You just wish they would stop doing anything that had any effect on your life, that you would never have to think of them being with another lover, and that you could freeze their lives in your memory at precisely that moment when you broke up.
Wow: I had no idea, but Brad DeLong points us to a description of John Kerry’s plan for health insurance. It’s really quite smart. Rather innovative, too. Worth the read.
A few days ago I mentioned that the government was trying to keep a law secret, and also keep secret the reasons why the law needs to remain secret. Well, via the canonical Larry Lessig and Bill Scannell, the 9th Circuit said no. So that’s a sliver of good news in the fight against a wannabe-tinpot-dictatorial Republican administration.
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