Text messages have irritated me more and more as the years have gone by. The thing that first struck me about them was that they aspire to be emails. First they’re limited to 160 characters. Then the providers discover that users want to send longer texts — so if you’re on Verizon, for instance, you can send something like seven texts concatenated into one (unless you’re using the aforementioned Treo 650, whose texts are limited to 160 characters). Then providers discover that people like sending multimedia attachments, so they invent MMS messages. We still want threading, and quoting …

What we want here is email. We want MIME attachments rather than MMS. It just happens that the phone industry is locked into a model that started developing with the landline industry many years earlier. If the phone industry had begun with the computer industry, a lot of things would be different: the iPhone’s novel way of treating voicemails like emails wouldn’t be so novel. Call waiting wouldn’t be something you do with a single phone call: you could receive many calls and put them all on hold. Likewise, “three-way calling” wouldn’t be a special feature; N-way conference calling for N greater than 3 would be trivial. (At an implementation level, I believe this would just be a multicast UDP application.)

I don’t think even Apple really gets it, actually, though they’re trying. On a real computer, I could install any application that I desire. My relatively uninformed guess is that Apple is constrained by its providers: AT&T doesn’t want you to install Skype on your iPhone or iPod Touch, so Apple is required to clamp down on installable apps. This one design constraint leads to a whole set of other limitations. On a real computer, you could install Skype or anything else.

And you’d be able to back up a real computer. I could do a bit-by-bit backup of the iPhone’s firmware using any number of command-line utilities like dd or rsync. If the iPhone had a fully functional USB port (I’m not sure: does it?), I could connect a USB thumb drive to it, boot to thumb-drive Ubuntu, back up my phone to that drive, and restart the phone. I wouldn’t need to go through contortions to back up “certain … information” from that phone; I could back up all of it, no questions asked.

My hope is that the Googlephone will cure all my woes here. Apple or Google will realize that a phone is just a computer with a user interface that’s specially tailored to voice calls and small boxes.

The network is also just a pipe for carrying bits. I should be able to walk into any convenience store, buy a phone off the shelf, put a simcard in it that maps this phone to this number, and be on my way. Maybe the routers are smart enough to figure out billing: the nearest Verizon WiFi (or whatever) router sees a simcard for 617-308-5571 and charges me some money to be on its network for however long I’m on it. I move down to the block to an AT&T router, and its billing software does the same thing.

Or maybe I don’t get charged at all, because my phone is smart enough to hand me off seamlessly from WiFi to cell. When I’m on WiFi — as I would be when I’m at home — my call is free. I configure my home WiFi router to allow my phone as much bandwidth as it desires (within my cable modem’s limitations), so voice calls from home are really high quality. When I switch back onto the cell network, the quality goes down.

So in short, we should be thinking about phones that are just small computers, running on top of Just Another IP Network. The fact that we’re not there yet owes a lot, I think, to the Ma Bell origins of the phone network. I want a phone network designed by computer companies and Internet service providers, not by old-line phone companies.

And for that matter, I want government-mandated network openness: if my AT&T phone wanders into a Verizon-only area, Verizon charges me for my time on their network. Now providers wouldn’t be able to compete on their networks; they’d compete on other things, like devices or customer service.

Incidentally, I had fun the other day calling Verizon to tell them that I was considering switching to AT&T and getting an iPhone. I’ve been off a Verizon contract for years. They told me that I’m eligible for a discount on a new phone, so long as I renew my contract for two years. I replied that this is a “non-starter”: if I’m going to get a new Verizon phone, I’ll go buy one on eBay and skip the contract renewal. I don’t think the sales guy on the other end was especially happy to hear this.

In two earlier, exceedingly hefty and fascinating books — Sunk Costs and Market Structure and Technology and Market Structure — Sutton has put forth a particular, humble vision of economic modeling. Most economic models involve specifying a set of parameters quite precisely, very carefully laying out how actors (that is, people or companies or whatnot) will behave, then solving for their behavior in “equilibrium.” That equilibrium can evolve over time, so another class of economic model — those based on evolutionary game theory maybe being the most famous — carefully lays out the rules by which people change over time. The models might include some process of learning, for instance.

Sometimes this precision works — matches up with the data — and sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t match up, quite often it’s because our models are missing important variables. Models need to be simple in order to be usable, though, so we can’t very well add in every conceivable variable that might affect an economic outcome. (Though here is the place to note that a realistic psychology would go a long way to building microfoundations that might eventually bubble up into accurate macroscopic models of, e.g., stock-market pricing.)

Sutton’s response is refreshing, and is unique at least among the bits of economics that I’ve read: abandon altogether the search for One True Model. Instead, pick a few axioms that any credible model must satisfy, then use those axioms to derive a class of models in which the truth is likely to lie. Specifically, his models of industrial organization rest on two principles:

• Viability: In equilibrium, every company in a particular industry will be making nonnegative profits.
• Stability: No new company could enter and make a certain profit.

The latter condition is essentially an arbitrage principle: don’t assume that all economic actors are rational; only assume that if there were an obvious opportunity, someone would eventually take it. An equilibrium industry configuration is then one in which both viability and stability are satisfied. (I found a paper of Sutton’s entitled “One Smart Agent” that bears on this subject and may be interesting to some of my readers.)

Sutton’s approach here is really elegant, really simple, and promises to be really productive. Being an eminently fair man, his next step is to ask under what conditions the classic economic approach — one model to rule them all — is likely to bear fruit, and under what conditions his class-of-models approach will work better. In the process of answering this, he sketches some really beautiful game theory on the design of auctions, specifically auctions of petroleum-bearing lands. I can’t do any better than Sutton in laying out the theory here, so I’ll just point you to page 47. The upshot is that in the case of an auction, we know very precisely how participants will behave, because we know exactly what the rules of the auction are. Sutton’s own field of industrial organization is much less well-formed, hence much more usefully treated with a class-of-models approach. (Full disclosure: I never finished Technology and Market Structure or Sunk Costs and Market Structure; that mostly had nothing to do with their mathematical content — which is substantial — and had more to do with my available time.)

His writing is dense but not difficult; one just needs to read a bit more slowly than usual. Without ever having met the man, I can only imagine that he’s a fun, amiable, brilliant sort. On the way to telling us what sort of workable models he thinks we have any right to expect in economics, he sketches the history of modeling tides in physics — fascinatingly enough to make me want to rush out and read the appropriate citations. This is where Marshall’s Tendencies gets started, in fact: it seeks to understand why modeling aggregated human behavior might be a much different task than modeling aggregated water waves.

Sutton traipses from waves to game theory to industrial organization, all with enough rigor to satisfy the most demanding reader but with enough of a light touch to never bore you. All this in just over 100 pages. Bravo to Professor Sutton.

(Thanks to Cosma Shalizi for the recommendation. Though I should note — purely to prove that I still do possess an independent will — that my earlier exposure to Sutton inclined me toward this book. That said, I wouldn’t have even looked at TAMS or SCAMS had I not seen them recommended on his blog. This quest for free will is more than likely illusory.)

This is just not the world we ought to be living in. There is a better way and a better world, of course. We know that we can’t get to this world on our own. On our own, we are isolated from the rest of those who are suffering. We are powerless so long as we are isolated.

It’s virtually an axiom, then, that some form of collective resistance to limitlessly powerful corporations is necessary. We simply cannot do it on our own. It does not follow, however, that labor unions are the ideal form of that resistance. It also doesn’t follow that government is the ideal form. But in their highly imperfect way, says Thomas Geoghegan, labor unions are far better than a world without them. He backs this up with story upon story about corporations absolutely crushing workers in the absence of any labor-union resistance.

Geoghegan himself is a labor lawyer who’s been fighting the fight alongside labor unions for a quarter century or more. He’s also often worked against them: he’s sued the Teamsters repeatedly, in essence fighting for more union democracy. He’s trying to get the unions that the employees deserve.

He’s not had much luck fighting against them. For a short time, Geoghegan’s heart leapt for joy when Ron Carey was at the Teamsters’ helm, but the Carey era ended quickly enough and James P. Hoffa (son of Jimmy Hoffa) took over.

As for fighting alongside them, that hasn’t worked very well either. Unions are down to 10% or so of the working population. Not coincidentally (as any reader of Paul Krugman knows well), the Democratic party is in a shambles and has been for at least thirty years. The Democrats need the unions.

What makes this book so agonizing is Geoghegan’s insistence that a few little changes would bring democracy to the unions, unions to the workers, and the Democratic party to power. One such change is a card-check system like the one Canada uses. Consequently, Canadian union membership has been consistently in the 30% range for at least a decade. When we dream of the better world that Canadians seem to inhabit, it’s well to consider how they got there.

The fact that just over the border is a country not much different than ours, but whose policies could hardly be more different, gives the lie to the notion that unions have disappeared in the U.S. because of changing workplaces. Yes, we’re now a service economy rather than an industrial economy. But so is Canada. Geoghegan dispenses with any number of commonplaces like this one.

In general, he spends the most time dismantling the idea that unions’ disappearance is in some sense “natural.” It’s not. It has a lot to do with Republicans and with conservative courts. It has to do with Taft-Hartley. It has to do with one law after another that smashed unions into the ground. There was nothing natural about it.

This book doesn’t give much in the way of solutions, but I’m not even sure that’s its point. Merely getting people — especially Democrats — to recognize a problem is plenty. Getting them to recognize a human-created problem is better still. Along the way, Geoghegan is impossibly funny, chatty, and self-deprecating. While I can’t quite call this book a “joy” — it’s too maddening for that — I do submit that it’s indispensible and should be on every American’s bookshelf.

(Thanks to Cosma Shalizi for the recommendation.)

The Wisdom of Whores is one of the few books I’ve read that actually lives up to the jacket blurbs. One author describes it as not only a work of science, but also a page-turner. And indeed it is. Pisani holds a Ph.D. in epidemiology, and you can tell from reading The Wisdom of Whores that she has the chops to do serious data analysis. It’s data analysis in the service of a practical end, namely figuring out the most efficient ways to stop AIDS. Pisani has been on the ground interviewing prostitutes and junkies for a couple decades now, so she’s learned a bit about how the disease actually spreads.

Part of the answer is just common sense: HIV spreads when an infected person’s blood comes in contact with an uninfected person’s blood. When heroin users share needles, the risk of HIV’s spreading rises. Unprotected sex is riskier than protected sex. Unlubricated sex is riskier than lubricated sex, because the risk of causing tears is higher. Uncircumcised men are at higher risk than circumcised men. Prostitutes and their johns are at higher risk than non-prostitutes, because they have more partners.

This much should be common sense; the fact that this common sense often doesn’t translate into policy is where the “bureaucrats” in the subtitle come in. The Bush administration and many other nations have changed the conversation: we don’t talk about the actual mechanics of sex and drug use, in part because prostitutes and drug users are considered wicked, and it helps no politicians to aid the wicked. From a public-health perspective, most of our effort ought to be focused on the populations that are most at risk: addicts, gay people, and prostitutes. But that doesn’t sell. What sells is to talk about “neutral” topics: pretend that consumers of prostitution come home to their innocent wives and unwittingly give them the disease, which then spreads to their kids. When you frame the issue as “AIDS hits everyone,” surely you can get votes. Likewise with international aid: if you tell your voters that “poverty and gender disparities” cause AIDS, you can sidestep the icky topics of sex and heroin injection.

Once the money flows, there’s a great risk of corruption and waste. Fortunately, Pisani tells us, there are a lot of people on the receiving end of that money who are really trying to do right by the world’s taxpayers. And there are organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that seem to disburse funds more efficiently and measure programs’ effectiveness better than a lot of governments do. And the governments are learning from their mistakes, in no small part because the epidemiologists on the ground are pushing back on them. Pisani never takes the step that a lot of libertarian fanatics do, namely jumping from the observation that foreign aid can be wasteful to the conclusion that all foreign aid should end. That’s because Pisani isn’t a libertarian fanatic. She’s a hardworking, nose-in-the-details scientist who, like a good disciple of Herb Simon, tries to assume as little as she can before she starts gathering data.

Indeed, the big takeaway from The Wisdom of Whores is that reality is complicated, and that the only way to actually help solve the AIDS epidemic is to dig into the details and be honest about how the disease actually spreads. Don’t let ideology, for instance, blind you to the virtues of free condom distribution. Don’t let ideology stop needle-exchange programs. At the same time, don’t let ideology convince you that needle-exchange programs always work: look at the data first. This book is what happens when a truly scientific worldview merges with the passion of an activist.

Thanks to Alex Tabarrok for recommending this book, and thanks to Chris Blattman for picking up Tabarrok’s recommendation. I heart the web.

What this means is that you just basically shouldn’t be taking the red line if you’re under any time pressure, or if you’re carrying any heavy bags with you: you’ll get on the red line, get off at Park, walk outside (up several flights of stairs), get on a bus, take it for 10-15 minutes, get off at Kendall, lug your bag down some more stairs, and take the red line to your destination.

See, for instance, directions from my house to the Clear Flour bakery in Brookline (where I’ll be meeting a friend shortly). It says that the trip takes 48 minutes. That is false. It may take 48 minutes regularly; that’s with a perfectly functioning red line. Without such a red line, it’ll take closer to an hour an a quarter or an hour and a half. The walking distance between those two points is 2.2 miles, which I can cover in about 40 minutes.

Moral: taxis or walking are your friends this weekend.

This has been a public-service announcement from me, Steve Laniel.

• Got a tooth removed and braces put on on May 31.

• Was supposed to go to a friend’s wedding in deepest Virginia on June 1. Ended up instead confined to bed for 24 hours after developing an infection during the aforementioned dental love.

• Stayed on penicillin for 10 days, more or less, after June 1.

• Ended the penicillin, developed an ear infection, went on ofloxacin for that. (Next step after penicillin. Normally I think cipro is that second step; for whatever reason, my doctor didn’t choose that.)

Well, wouldn’t you know it: 1% to 3% of ofloxacin patients develop nervousness and/or sleep disorders. Which is precisely what happened to me: I’ve been nervous and sleepless for a few days now. The anxiety has been so bad that it’s prevented me from running: I tried my now-standard three-mile loop, but couldn’t do it: my body felt rubbery, and I was shaking far too much. And also sweating way more than normal. As a generally non-anxious person, this was vexing to me.

So today I switched, on the doctor’s recommendation, to azithromycin. A bit of reading suggests that nervousness and so forth are unlikely. I hope to god so. I also just hope to be off meds Real Soon Now.

A coworker pointed out that in the 1972 presidential election, where Richard Nixon destroyed George McGovern … well, I need to let the Wikipedia image (cached) speak for itself.

Another coworker chimed in that California, New England and New York should secede and form their own awesome country. That sounds about right.

Sometimes, like in the case of The Satanic Verses — and to an extent in Midnight’s Children — Rushdie loses all discipline. He’s self-consciously creating a phantasmagoria, which is the danger of someone who writes in the magical-realist tradition of García Márquez: rather than injecting bits of magic into the daily lives of your characters, sometimes you dive off the deep end and create a work of fiction that really wants to be a fantasy work. This was the trouble in The Satanic Verses. Finally, Rushdie sometimes wants to paint the world as a carnival, and the brushstrokes lose all control. (Think here of the films of Federico Fellini.) Midnight’s Children almost suffered from this, but Rushdie reined it in.

All of which is prologue to The Moor’s Last Sigh and The Enchantress of Florence. These are Rushdie’s masterworks. They inject fantasy where it’s necessary, tell a captivating story, keep Rushdie’s frenetic intelligence in check, and never let a moral overpower the novel’s own momentum.

Structurally, the story is similar to the 1001 Arabian Nights, though it doesn’t recurse as deeply as the Arabian Nights does. The story begins at a beautiful oasis of a city, presided over by an emperor who — at least according to his PR — possesses all the virtues and none of the faults of ordinary mortals. He is the living Truth itself. He refers to himself as “We,” inasmuch as he embodies the people themselves.

Into this city, and directly to this grand emperor, comes our hero (sort of — remember that there are stories within stories, so there are several heroes) with a vast secret to tell. He’s a magician of sorts, wearing a strange coat in which endless objects can hide. Where has this strange man come from? What does he have to tell the emperor? How will he get through the many walls surrounding His Majesty?

This is the stuff of great fun. I don’t think I’m giving away much if I tell you that he does make it through to the emperor, through the use of magical potions of a special sort. Every time Rushdie could stop and tell a little story — say, about how the potions were made, or what they contain — he does, and each time he does I got tickled. These are terrific stories.

Our hero himself has a story to tell the emperor. That story constitutes more or less the entire book. Most of the time we forget that we’re inside the inner stories; Rushdie has wrapped us up completely within it. The inner story is where we hear about the character in the title: the Enchantress is the most beautiful woman in the world, the most beautiful woman anyone has ever seen or ever will see. Her mere presence causes otherwise stoic men to fall to their knees and either pray for her or pray for themselves (even the men themselves aren’t clear which it is).

And so forth. The storytelling here is without peer. Knights with skin as white as death, court intrigues, epic battles … this is a throwback to an earlier kind of storytelling, and what a skilled throwback it is.

At the same time, it’s a history piece. The grand emperor with whom we started is Akbar the Great (which, Rushdie reminds us, is redundant: “Akbar,” or some part of it, means “great”). Akbar’s ancestors, it turns out, were connected in various ways with Niccolò Machiavelli and Sandro Botticelli and Amerigo Vespucci. Did these connections actually happen? How about the court intrigues: were there any parallels to them in the real Ottoman Empire? There’s material enough in the historical bits alone to fuel research for years; Rushdie himself must have spent years just on that part. It’s great fun.

Then there’s the meta part of The Enchantress of Florence — the part that deals with the power of storytelling itself. We learn early on, for instance, that Akbar has brought a queen into existence using only his mind. His force of will is such that she becomes real, and the city eventually sees her as well. When Akbar leaves on a military campaign, he returns to hear his queen relate what has gone on in his absence. He makes love with his imaginary queen. (The creation of a real living human from sheer force of will is, I suspect, a hat tip to Calvino’s Nonexistent Knight. Rushdie does cite Calvino’s Italian Folktales collection in the bibliography, for what it’s worth.) This idea recurs throughout The Enchantress of Florence, but again: never enough to get in the way of the story itself, which is magical without being fantasy.

The Enchantress of Florence is a treasure.

I worry. Rushdie’s book Shalimar the Clown was a tremendous disappointment (from the beginning, actually, if memory serves). Roth’s Plot Against America started with his standard effortlessly brilliant character portrayal, then didn’t have the courage of its convictions and unraveled into a happy story that the rest of the book never justified. And don’t get me started on Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, the It book of 2002, which starts hilariously and just collapses by the time it’s done. (I may be one of only two people in the world who think this, along with my friend Liz. We comprise a majority of two.)

So my fingers are crossed that it will live up to its promise. If it does, it is a jewel.

Determining whether a number is the sum of two squares is straightforward. Suppose I want to figure out whether 111 is the sum of two squares. Start with the smallest square, namely 1. If 111 is the sum of two squares, one of which is 1, then the other must be 110. 110’s not a square, so continue: try 4+107. Then 9+102, 16+95, 25+86, 36+75, 49+62, 64+47,81+30, and 100+11. None of the second numbers in those added pairs are squares, so we conclude that 111 is not the sum of two squares.

Figuring out whether a number is the difference of two squares is harder. Let’s use the same example: is 111 the difference of two squares? You need to start with some number larger than 111. Pick the least square larger than 111, namely 121. 111=121-10, and 10 is not a square, so we move on to 144: 111=144-33, and 33 is not a square. So we move on to 225: 111=225-114, and 114 is not a square.

And so on. This process can continue forever, each time with a larger candidate for squaredom on the right side of the minus sign. It might never terminate.

Is there some clever way I’m not thinking of to detect whether a number is the difference of two squares?