Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

My understanding of the archconservative position on unions — as stated periodically in the Wall Street Journal editorial section, for instance — is that they should be illegal because they constitute collusion among employees. Just as employers should be punished when they collude, so should employees.

Is that a fair synopsis? Because it’s absurd on its face. The assumption implicit within it is that a single corporation possesses power equal to that of a single employee. This is obviously false. It may have been true in a nation of shopkeepers, but it is manifestly not true in a world of multinational corporations.

Is there a better economic reason to oppose unions?

I assume there’s some good reason why C doesn’t allow you to do things like this, right?

int someFunc(void) { int someInt = 4; int someOtherFunc(void) { printf( "I know about %1d", someInt ); } } 

Seems like allowing functions inside functions lets you avoid globals more often, and lets you only keep a function in memory as long as it’s needed by its enclosing function. I’m not sure how broadly useful this is, but in any case: I’d have to imagine that its absence from C is intentional. Does anyone know if this is true?

After you’ve read a few essays by Bruce Schneier, you know how he’s going to tackle basically any problem that comes before him. But because his analytical toolkit is to well-tuned, the two or three devices he uses always work well. And because his writing is that of an articulate hacker, you know you’ll love to read everything he writes.

In that spirit, go check out his essay on our new national ID and how badly it will fail  . . .  and for that matter, how low the likelihood is that states will actually adopt it.

(Included below the fold.)

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So an intercoursing horse died. Why the intercourse is that front-page news?

I’m trying to decide if I want to go. $70 for a one-day ticket. It might be worth it. Though it wouldn’t be fun to go alone. Do any of my Boston peeps wanna come along?

P.S.: Holy wow, those are some expensive wine glasses.

If you’re doing a ton of Lisp programming, it’s probably worth your while to use a keymapping in which parentheses are not shifted. I wonder if that’s what Lisp people do. I’ll have to ask around the office, which uses a lot of Lisp.

Incidentally, I was unpacking some geeky t-shirts yesterday, among which were Google, Firefox (which my man Chris bought for me), and Perl Monger t-shirts. The last one is especially obscure, unless you know that Programming Perl is known as The Camel Book. But what I realized is that 90% of the people where I work — which is a Linux shop, top to bottom — would get the reference, and a nontrivial number of them would think me cool for wearing it. (Even though, to be clear, I am not cool for wearing it.)

Life is certainly good.

More as a convenient place for me to look later when I have time to read it than as a recommendation of my own, I’m including The Atlantic’s article “Prophetic Justice” below. Via Schneier, who gave it a very favorable link.

(Can we use something like “he digged it” as a shorthand for “he gave it a favorable link”?)

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Having driven along Route 9 last night to visit Jordan’s Furniture, I can say that the battle between Framingham and Natick has as much dignity, and relevance to the outside world, as watching quadriplegics wrestle in Jell-o. Do we really want to declare a winner?

(Route 9 is, sadly, the standard American road. It’s no better and no worse than northern New Jersey. It’s mini-mall upon mini-mall. It looks just like Route 1, running from Boston up to the North Shore. Every time I drive on one of those roads, I feel a lot of disgust — not least at myself, for being there. Last night I was marveling at the fact that people apparently live there. As the years go by, I understand less and less why people live in suburbs. I understand wanting to live in the country, and I very much understand wanting to live in the city. But what does living in the suburbs buy you? Why would you want to drive to do anything? Really, the farther I get from my Vermont roots, the more I realize that northern Vermont’s structure — ostensibly fighting suburbanization while ardently defending everything that goes along with it — is just not the way the world should be. Any place that has those attributes is on its way to looking like New Jersey or Northern Virginia, sooner or later.)

Great little story. Via Chris. Go! Help the world! Let’s get this into the hands of some journalists.

I spent a really ludicrous amount of money today on a couch, two chairs and an ottoman. They  . . .  they match. I mean, they’re gorgeous and they’ll look great in my place, but  . . .  am I an adult, officially? Do Adulthood Merit Badges come pre-stamped by La-Z-Boy?

There’s also something disheartening about spending multiple thousands of dollars on something to amplify my leisure, while many other people around the world would literally kill for that much money, just to stay alive.

The shamefulness of the whole thing is amplified by where I bought it: Jordan’s Furniture, off Route 9 in Natick. The sales experience, and the shopping experience when confined to the furniture showroom, were exceptional. My salesman was John O’Connell, whom I’d recommend to anyone. But calling Jordan’s “garish” is the height (depth?) of understatement. Somewhere within the Jordan’s edifice is, I believe, a working submarine piloted by a chorus line of tigers, each wearing tophats and monocles. The tigers are probably on fire, just because.

But now a couch is on its way to me, and will arrive here in five to eight weeks. That’s a long time, but they need to get it in the specific color I wanted (red wine, basically). And then I will have entered middle-classdom. Don’t I get some kind of party for this?

I am shoehorning twee parenting stories into hip cultural reference points! Don’t you see? This makes me also hip! I am writing for a journalistic vehicle that is itself so very hip because it is like a major media institution only it is online!

My next piece will be entitled “Kids Make The Darnedest Faces  . . .  On Flickr!” Which will be funny because flickr.com is a website with photos. I will tag all of them “cute”! And then people will find them when they search for “cute”!

(I love Dahlia Lithwick. Really I do. Her piece that mentions Clarence Thomas’s first foray into public speaking is just great. She has wonderful turns of phrase like

Out of nowhere booms the great, surprising “Luke-I-am-your-father” voice of He Who Never Speaks. Justice Clarence Thomas suddenly asks a question and everyone’s head pops up and starts looking madly around, like the Muppets on Veterinarian Hospital.

But come on. Let’s leave the “essays for 50-year-olds who want to feel connected to the electronic world” to other, less-talented people.)

Do you want to be able to shorten a URL using TinyURL within a text editor like vim? I’ve written a screen-scraping hack to do this. It’s super-simple. Like all screen-scraping hacks, it is sensitive to specific details of the TinyURL website UI. TinyURL needs an API. Until they get one, this hack isn’t bad.

To use it inside of vim, you could select a long URL using visual-select (press Esc to get out of insert mode, then press ‘v’, then select the URL), then run

:!~/bin/make_tiny.pl 

or better yet make a keybinding that does this for you.

Via Rugen, a pretty insane diagnosis of all the media crippling in MS Vista. (Included below the fold.)

Some questions:

1. Why is Microsoft doing so much for the content industries? They have billions of dollars; why don’t they fight? Google bought YouTube, knowing full well that YouTube is a platform for massive copyright violation; that’s what YouTube is for. (Well, and community and stuff.) And here Microsoft is, crippling their own platform to play someone else’s game. What’s that about? Has Microsoft struck some kind of agreement with the content industries, whereby it will get preferential treatment if it plays by their rules? Or does it have something to do with open-source? Certainly the “DRM CONSPIRACY-MONSTERS WILL EAT OUR LINUCKS” meme has gone around the block a few times.

2. Why would anyone want to upgrade to Vista?

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Having spent 20-odd minutes in line, and upwards of 45 minutes walking to and from the Cambridge city offices building to get a parking permit [*], and having spent a good many hours in similar offices all across this great land, I think one conclusion is eminently clear: these things don’t need to be done by humans. Here are the steps I had to take today, and here’s how an office updated as of 1995 (at the latest) could have handled it:

1. Give them two proofs of residence, which just means “pieces of mail addressed to me at the address for which I want the parking pass, within the last 30 days.” Seems to me that they could just call over to the post office, and that the USPS should have long since automated the process of verifying addresses for people. Better than using the phone, there could even be some technology — I’d call it “the Internet,” say, or even “the WEB,” for “the Wicked Easy Bureaucracy navigator” — whereby Cambridge could send a specially-formatted message (in a language I’ll call “XML,” for “eXtant Mail-recipient Locator”) to the USPS to ask, and the USPS could respond over “the WEB” in their own “XML” message. This could be done without any people, except for programmers. In metro Boston, it is difficult to find computer programmers, so this particular step may be impractical. It is the tragic flaw — the hamartia, if you will — of this entire enterprise.

2. Stand in line. I posit that this step is unnecessary, given “XML” and “the WEB” and commerce conducted “over the Internet” — which, as a shorthand, we’ll label “online commerce.”

3. Hand $8 to a septuagenarian. Apart from the septuagenarian, this is also unnecessary. It could be done using “online commerce.”

The modified sequence of steps would look like so:

1. I go on a “WEB site” and tell them the address for which I want the parking permit. I give them my name and address.
2. They check that name and address via “XML” with the post office. The post office confirms that I live there, and have done so within the last 30 days.
3. I pay a nominal fee (a lower fee, since they don’t need to hire as many septuagenarians — except possibly septuagenarian programmers whom they find in Montana or somewhere; or maybe the fee stays the same and they make more money! Everyone wins!)
4. They mail the permit to the address I submitted.
5. I buy beer for a septuagenarian.

This is the way in which I make the world better. FIN.

(Of course, this all assumes that Boston works, in some sense. Since it doesn’t, and since that’s why we love it, I’ll just smile and turn salty. I will never have the Boston accent, but I will develop salt. This I promise.)

[*] — not only is my sense of direction legendarily atrocious, but Broadway near Kendall Square is really badly labelled. None of the buildings within half a mile of where I work have street addresses on their sides; they’re only labeled “N Cambridge Center” for some value of N. So I stumbled around, cursing this city’s road signs, until a kind security guard within an Akamai building took pity on me and pointed me in the right direction.

The Babe is watching a bunch of MIT lectures through OpenCourseWare, so I’m helping her out by downloading the RealMedia files to my hard drive. How would one bulk-download lots of movies under Windows? Here’s how I had to do it under Linux:

1. Download the video-lectures index page:

   wget -O - 2>/dev/null 

2. Find all the ‘.rm’ (RealMedia) links within that page:

   !! |grep -o '"http://[^"]+.rm”‘ 

3. Find only those links that contain the string ‘220k’ (or on some index pages, 300k — in either case indicating the quality of the video):

   !! |grep -i 220k 

4. Strip out any double-quote marks, leaving behind just the URL and none of the HTML markup:

   !! |sed -e 's/"//g' 

5. Replace the Akamai link with an ocw.mit.edu link, per the helpful download link above:

   !! | sed -e 's#[long Akamai URL]#[MIT URL]#g’ 

6. Having now munged the text of the document into a downloadable form, download each RealMedia link in turn:

   !! |xargs -i wget -c '{}' 

   (The ‘-c’ argument tells wget not to retrieve the file if we’ve already retrieved it, and to download partial files for full download later. This way you can rerun this command whenever you want, and it’ll pick up where it left off.)

I’m sure this is possible under Windows, but how would one do it? Thus far I’ve downloaded 104 movies, totalling almost nine gigs. Surely you wouldn’t want to do this manually inside of a web browser. If you use the RealMedia player itself (cursèd be its name), you won’t be able to save files to disk (last I knew). You could use wget inside of cygwin, but that’s basically cheating. My question is whether Windows has support for this sort of thing, or even whether any set of costless, non-open-source tools will do it for you. I’m inclined to say no.

Having now completed all the stages of the PODS pickup and delivery — namely their delivering it to my place in D.C., my filling it up, their picking it up in D.C., their delivering it to Cambridge, my unpacking it in Cambridge and their picking it up again from Cambridge — I can give them a wholehearted endorsement. All my belongings arrived in one piece; they were courteous; I was almost never on hold for more than 30 seconds; and they accommodated all my schedule changes. I would certainly use them again. It cost $1,300 in total for the cross-country move, which compares favorably with professional movers. Granted, I need to put more labor into it than I might have had I used professionals, but then none of my stuff is broken and I didn’t have to worry about anyone stealing any of it. Five stars. Better than Cats. I’d use them again and again.

The fact that the golden ratio equals

1 + 1/(1 + 1/(1 + 1/(1 + 1/ . . . )))

gives me a remarkably peaceful feeling, and a sense that mathematicians must be looking at the right things.

(A clearer, recursive way of writing that continued fraction is

a₀ = 1
a_n = 1 + 1/a_n-1 for n greater than 0.

The golden ratio is then the limit of a_n as n grows large.)

My favorite appearance of the golden ratio is from A Guide to Simulation. I believe the setup of the problem goes like this: imagine you have a square field of length r on all sides. A fox sits at the bottom-left corner of the field, and a rabbit sits at the top left. A rabbit hole, where the rabbit will be safe, is at the top right. At time 0, the rabbit starts running straight for the rabbit hole and the fox starts running straight for the rabbit. At all times, both animals are pointing directly at their destinations. The rabbit runs at a constant speed v_r, and the fox at a constant speed v_f. The question in A Guide To Simulation is: under what conditions will the fox catch the rabbit? The answer they give, which I’ve not yet been able to prove (they claim it’s easy), is that the fox catches the rabbit when the ratio of the fox’s velocity to the rabbit’s is greater than the golden ratio. Which is kind of great.

I’m sometimes in awe of my friends. They’re awfully talented people. Once again Chris Rugen gets it done. And by “it” I mean “a hilarious and scathing review of the sins of DVD design.”

Watching Lieberman urge his colleagues in the Senate to give General Petraeus a chance to succeed, I can’t help but wonder: what is the standard for success in Iraq? Everyone knows that the “war on terror” has no well-defined standard of success; from the U.S. government’s perspective, this is surely a virtue. But in Iraq, it seems like there ought to be lots of concrete ways to define success: number of civilian deaths below a certain number, GDP growth above a certain percentage, electricity up some large fraction of the time, etc.

What I find funny is that — unless I’m reading the news wrong — few of the people railing against withdrawal from Iraq seem to be proposing any concrete standard for success. These are the same people, it seems to me, who are always insisting that government ought to be subject to the same standards as corporations, and ought to be governed accordingly. (I guess that strain of Republicanism — the strain that tells us, “Companies would never be allowed to run unchecked deficits” — has been muted since Bush and the Republican Congress started running unchecked deficits.) Would any corporation be allowed to run for long with no accountability and no concrete guidelines for how it should be run?  . . .  Actually, maybe I should rephrase that: would any of the idealized corporations that Americans seem to talk about — the ones run perfectly efficiently, subject to the harsh discipline of the market, and totally free of political games or cronyism — be able to survive if they were run like we’re running the Iraq war?

PODS dropped off the container yesterday, and my super-thoughtful and considerate friend Matt Flynn helped me unload it today. Boxes, a bed, bookshelves and a recliner are all sitting inside my apartment now, waiting to be unpacked and set up. I’m psyched. PODS comes to retrieve the container on Thursday. It’ll be nice to sleep on a real bed tonight, rather than an AeroBed (despite how comfortable the latter is).

Life here in Cambridge is shaping up. I’m really happy about that.