scripsit

Guilt-free Ideas

2010-01-08T23:02:00.000-08:00

I've started a new blog, Guilt-free Ideas, for recording some of my studies of Objectivism.

Unemployment outlook with generous assumptions

2009-11-15T14:43:00.000-08:00

Yet, in spite of all those generous assumptions, no double dip recession, no second recession, high rates of job growth and falling participation rates all the way through 2020, and unemployment peaking at 11.6% not 13%, the best I can do is suggest the unemployment rate will be over 10% all the way through 2015 and never dip below 8% all the way out through the end of 2020.

With a rosy outlook like that, who needs a worst case scenario? Such as Prechter's prediction that we will double from here to a U3 of 20% in a major global depression.

Electronics Project #1

2009-11-04T22:08:00.000-08:00

Since recently completing all 101 projects in the Snap Electronics Jr. kit, Elias has been learning real hobby electronics and loving it. It's almost an obsession, but healthy I think. We have fun and learn a lot together. What makes it natural for him is he is able to retain just about every fact ever explained to him, and he is very excited to learn how physical things work and above all to create his own contraptions. It surely helps that I'm interested in electronics too (cause like all geeks I want to eventually build super-cool robots), though I actually know very little about it.

We've been reading that Forest M. Mims, III book Getting Started in Electronics that Radio Shack has been selling for at least 20 years -- that's how old my copy is. We're up to Silicon Controlled Rectifiers. And to test out our little circuits we use a bread boarding box that I've been storing for 20 years, apparently just for this purpose. Last week, Elias got the hang of creating what he calls a "touch detector" circuit, which involves a transistor, a resistor, an LED, and some wires. I don't even know how (are people positively charged relative to residential ground?), but just by touching one wire attached to the gate of the transistor, the LED lights up. He was building this all by himself on the bread board for a few days.

I recommended that we get out my soldering iron, another relic, and actually burn his touch detector circuit into permanent form. We had a broken circuit board from an old phone handset that was just the right size for 2 AAA batteries to lay on it. Of course I did all the soldering, but only after I had him draw a schematic of what we had laid out on the bread board. He labeled the 10K Ohm resistor, the round and flat sides of the LED with little marks, and the 2N2222 transistor, which has E, C, and B by its legs. The three "fingers" on each of the two free ends of wires are, I think, a reflection of his love earlier this year for drawing diagrams of neurons, after seeing them in my college biology text. Here's the last version he made on the breadboard, touching the red and green wires lights the LED.

And this is the permanent version. Bending the white wire slightly so that it touches a leg of the transistor lights the LED. We found that once we went to battery power, the mysterious trick of just touching the transistor gate with your finger no longer worked.

What next? We are trying to build a circuit from the Mims book that is supposed to pulse a light or buzzer at about 1Hz. One capacitor, two transistors, and three resistors. He laid most of it out on the bread board looking at the schematic, then I stepped in to finish it. You'd think I could nail such a baby circuit, but we were working on it tonight and it just buzzes solidly. So I know the first thing Elias is going to ask me tomorrow morning is to work on it with him. Fun!

Book: Goddess of the Market

2009-10-20T11:54:00.000-07:00

Last week, Jon Stewart interviewed Jennifer Burns, author of a new biography of Ayn Rand, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Burns was reasonable, but made a few incorrect statements: Ayn Rand a "conservative"? [15:50] whose life mission was to defend the right? Actually, AR stressed that she was not a conservative, e.g. she couldn't stand Reagan, and The Fountainhead was not about political philosophy at all, but about the psychology and ethics of spiritual independence. Still, not a hint of the childish insulting tone from either Burns or Stewart that I was expecting (such as Colbert displayed about AR earlier this year). In fact, both of them seem genuinely impressed with AR. So thumbs up to Stewart for intellectual honesty here.

Today, Burns has an article on www.foreignpolicy.com, Howard Roark in New Delhi. This is an interesting description of the popularity of AR in India. But this time Burns labels AR with "libertarianism." Actually, AR stressed that she was not a libertarian, calling libertarianism "a mockery of philosophy and ideology" which often plagiarizes her without credit.

So, Burns seems to be generally intellectually honest from what I've seen so far, and may intend to be objective about AR's political thought -- but she doesn't or can't distinguish between the Objectivist political philosophy and two movements that are profoundly incompatible with Objectivism, as has been described many times by many people, including AR.

Movie: The White Rose

2009-10-09T12:31:00.000-07:00

Last night I watched the subtitled movie "Sophie Scholl: The Last Days" about the young and courageous members of the secret resistance group in 1942-3 Germany, The White Rose. The group members, mostly students at the university of Munich, distributed thousands of leaflets denouncing the Nazi programme of war and murder. A few days after they were caught, the leaders (including Sophie Scholl, who was 21) were guillotined; many others were imprisoned. As a movie I don't recommend it, it is very depressing, one is better off to just read about The White Rose on the Internet (the Wikipedia article seems to give a decent overview). But the story depicts, negatively, the grand power of intellectual activism: besides brute force, irrationality has no defense against voices of reason. It may be a fictitious line, but in the movie Hans defiantly tells the judge that he and Hitler must be afraid of -- and thus morally inferior to -- the members of The White Rose, otherwise there wouldn't even be a trial.

From The White Rose leaflet #3:

[W]hy do you allow these men who are in power to rob you step by step, openly and in secret, of one domain of your rights after another, until one day nothing, nothing at all will be left but a mechanised state system presided over by criminals and drunks? Is your spirit already so crushed by abuse that you forget it is your right - or rather, your moral duty - to eliminate this system?

Next leg down: Are we there yet?

2009-10-01T12:35:00.000-07:00

Daneric:

So the primary count is officially Minuette (iii) down of Minute [i] of Minor 1 of Intermediate (1) of Primary [3] of Cycle wave c of Supercycle wave (a) of Grand Supercycle wave IV.

Translation: last week we may have seen the highest stocks are going to be for years, with SPX hitting 1088.

UPDATE: The short-term call is already wrong, SPX has since hit 1099, but whether or not this rally ends, sooner than later, with a top in this neighborhood that will reign for years, remains to be seen.

Hazlitt on Profits

2009-09-22T12:47:00.000-07:00

Henry Hazlitt:

The indignation shown by many people today at the mention of the very word profits indicates how little understanding there is of the vital function that profits play in our economy. ...

The function of profits ... is to put constant and unremitting pressure on the head of every competitive business to introduce further economies and efficiencies, no matter to what stage these may already have been brought. In good times he does this to increase his profits further, in normal times he does it to keep ahead of his competitors, in bad times he may have to do it to survive at all. For profits may not only go to zero, they may quickly turn into losses; and a man will put forth greater efforts to save himself from ruin than he will merely to improve his position.

Contrary to a popular impression, profits are achieved not by raising prices, but by introducing economies and efficiencies that cut costs of production.

Ghate on political philosophy

2009-09-18T13:02:00.000-07:00

On Constitution Day 2009, Dr. Ghate of ARI/ARC clarifies the meaning of checks and balances in the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, their notions of man in a "state of nature", Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and the morality of selfishness as supporting the objectivity of liberty ... in 8 minutes.

Just saying "no"

2009-09-14T13:09:00.000-07:00

I have withdrawn Elias from Portland Public Schools. He attended one day of kindergarten.

The political philosophy question

2009-09-10T13:14:00.000-07:00

Commerce or coercion, price tags or guns -- which are compatible with morality, i.e., every individual's rational pursuit of his or her own happiness?

Book: Beyond the Mountain

2009-08-31T11:13:00.000-07:00

In Beyond the Mountain, Steve skillfully plots his career with a series of truly amazing stories. Mostly we are treated to gripping descriptions of climbing at the edge of human ability, in which his relentless drive risks his life for reasons he struggles to identify. But there are also understated love stories here -- not of romance, but of the partners and others who have meant the most to him personally in his vertical pursuits.

Steve seems to have put all of himself into this work, writing with a psychological honesty that is uncommon, reliving for us his victories and moments of clarity, but also his intense inner struggles with the desire to succeed and the fear of failure, the love of the sport and the crushing despair over fallen friends, the will to risk everything and the nagging question of why he does this given the intense personal costs. It is because of his brutal honesty, with others but mostly with himself, that what Steve gives us here is truly a gift, a glimpse into another man's soul, so that ironically this biography of the uber-athlete is the story of Everyman.

You will start to read it because it is the must-read of the year for everyone who has ever felt the thrill of going on belay, but you will blast through it and then dwell on it for days because Steve has not tried to oversimplify or falsely dramatize or glorify, but only to describe his lifelong quest to answer with his body the fundamental question of how one should find meaning and fulfillment.

Moral Health Care vs. "Universal Health Care"

2009-08-12T13:27:00.000-07:00

I finally read this long article, which gives the history of why there are now 47 million Americans with no health insurance. The popular myth is that a free market of profit-seeking big businesses is, for some malevolent reason, purposefully excluding these tens of millions of potentially-paying customers. This is absurd on its face. The truth is there hasn't been a free market in health care for decades.

Moral Health Care vs. "Universal Health Care"

Grampa Williams on Guam, 1944

2009-07-30T13:32:00.000-07:00

I think I just found the picture of my grandfather, Robert Williams, pulling the rope on the first "official" raising of the US flag on Guam in 1944.

Do we all work for Goldman Sachs?

2009-07-05T22:56:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to a conspiracy-type article about Goldman Sachs. Of course, I can't vouch for its accuracy, but in general I consider beyond dispute that there are corrupt "businessmen" pulling giant levers in Washington, defrauding the rest of us of enormous sums of the wealth we create, in just the kind of "crony capitalism" that statists use as an excuse for more government controls in the economy.

It is important to remember that some state oppression is direct, both politically and philosophically, i.e., taxes and regulations restrict your freedom and are meant to restrict your freedom; -- but a great deal of injustice is the indirect consequence of the non-capitalistic government's parceling out of favors to the "well-connected", i.e., to those who are willing and able to buy men of political power.

Atlas Shrugged gives timeless characterizations of both manifestations of statism.

Defenders of individual rights must communicate clearly the polar-opposite difference between those corrupt "businessmen" of today who are able to "do whatever they want" by trafficking in government favors -- versus the individuals in a system of true capitalism, who would be free to make any business arrangements, but would be unable to purchase economic favors from the government, since a capitalistic government would have none to sell.

Donahue with ITOE

2009-06-18T13:40:00.000-07:00

Donahue holding the little book which revolutionizes epistemology, from his first interview of Ayn Rand here.

Protest in Tehran

2009-06-16T13:46:00.000-07:00

Now that's a protest, and without a First Amendment. If only we had SOMETHING worth protesting in the US, we'd fill the streets too, right?

GMO's

2009-06-11T14:08:00.000-07:00

A WebMD doctor's review of the literature shows that the safety of GMO's is unknown and there are reasons to be apprehensive.

For the record: on this issue, as in many others, proof is unnecessary for action. The point of the article is that it is reasonable to doubt the safety of all GM food. I happen to know that WebMD is extremely careful to only make medically defensible claims in their articles, because this is crucial to the market value of the WebMD brand. So until I learn more and otherwise, I'd rather play it safe, within a margin of practicality (affordability), especially with the developing bodies of my children.

Le Guin on growing up

2009-06-10T14:11:00.000-07:00

You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do....

- A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula Le Guin

A couple of firsts

2009-03-28T14:49:00.000-07:00

Elias started taking violin lessons. At first, in the Suzuki method, they don't even get the violin out, but now he can play six notes, enough for part of a song:

Dahlia went to her first day of preschool! She was extremely excited about it the day before, and the first thing I heard in the morning was her yelling "Daddy I go to school today!" She was fully dressed and even had her shoes on 40 minutes before it was time to go, and had a great time. Elias was excited to have her go too.

The wonderful irony

2009-03-27T15:14:00.000-07:00

During a time of soaring injustice, here's some overdue justice:

The Austrian business cycle in one image

2009-03-09T10:29:00.000-07:00

[T]he only way 45% of the world's wealth could vanish in a year is if it was a mirage in the first place. - Mish Shedlock

Sacramento, California: Inflationary malinvestment in the background; deflationary bust in the foreground.

"As many as 50 people a week are turning up and the authorities estimate that the tent city is now home to more than 1,200 people." Daily Mail

A government-caused period of massive inflation of credit money has just ended. We are now sliding down the backside of that unsustainable mountain of credit and debt, in a deflationary reset, something not seen since the 1930's:

Peak credit has been reached. That final wave of consumer recklessness created the exact conditions required for its own destruction. The housing bubble orgy was the last hurrah. It is not coming back and there will be no bigger bubble to replace it. Consumers and banks have both been burnt, and attitudes have changed.

It took nearly 80 years for people to get as reckless as they did in 1929. 80 years! Few are still alive that went through the great depression. No one listened to them. That is the nature of the game. The odds of a significant bout of inflation now are about the same as they were in 1929. Next to none. - Mish

Incredibly, the government's solution is to try to inflate more, through "stimulus" spending and through printing. Are these actions about to stop the bust?

Based on what house prices and equity valuation have been doing this quarter, we are likely in for a total loss of household net worth approximating $7 trillion this quarter alone, which would bring the cumulative decline in consumer wealth to $20 trillion. This wealth loss exceeds the combined expansion of the Fed’s and government balance sheet by a factor of ten. That should put the reflation-deflation debate into perspective. - David Rosenberg, North American Economist at Merrill Lynch, quoted by Mish

In other words: we have deflation right now because the shrinking of (and from) credit money matters more than the increasing of "base money" -- because most money is credit money.

If we are in deflation -- the payback for government-caused inflation -- and governmental printing and spending won't stop it (until it stops), isn't everything just going to get cheaper?

If economic recovery is to be achieved, the first thing that must be done is to stop “stimulus packages” and undo as far as possible any that are already in progress. This is because their effect is to worsen the problem of loss of capital that is the underlying cause of the economic crisis in the first place.

Unfortunately, they are not likely to be stopped. If they are implemented, especially on the scale already approved by Congress, the effect will be a decumulation of capital up to the point where scarcities of capital goods, including inventories of consumers’ goods in the possession of business firms, start to drive up prices.

Higher prices of consumers’ goods will result not only from scarcities of consumers’ goods (which, of course, are capital goods so long as they are in the hands of business firms), but also from scarcities of capital goods further back in the process of production. - George Reisman

What's the big picture here?

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit (debt) expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit (debt) expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved. - Ludwig von Mises

What would Ayn Rand say? Luckily she already said it. Besides Atlas Shrugged, there's the speech "Egalitarianism and Inflation," the original speech is available here and reprinted in Philosophy: Who Needs It. She gave this speech decades ago, during a time of "stagflation," but you can judge if it is relevant today. In part:

While the government struggles to save one crumbling enterprise at the expense of the crumbling of another, it accelerates the process of juggling debts, switching losses, piling loans on loans, mortgaging the future and the future’s future. As things grow worse, the government protects itself not by contracting this process, but by expanding it. ...

Do you think a spending orgy of this kind could be paid for out of current production? No, the situation is much worse than that. The government is consuming this country’s stock seed—the stock seed of industrial production: investment capital, i.e., the savings needed to keep production going. These savings were not paper, but actual goods. Under all the complexities of private credit, the economy was kept going by the fact that, in one form or another, in one place or another, somewhere within it, actual material goods existed to back its financial transactions. It kept going long after that protection was breached. Today, the goods are almost gone. ...
The value of the total tangible assets of the United States at present, was estimated—in terms of 1968 dollars—at 3.1 trillion dollars. If government spending continues, that incredible wealth will not save you. You may be left with all the magnificent skyscrapers, the giant factories, the rich farmlands—but without fuel, without electricity, without transportation, without steel, without paper, without seeds to plant the next harvest.

If that time comes, the government will declare explicitly the premise on which it has been acting implicitly: that its only “capital asset” is you. Since you will not be able to work any longer, the government will take over and will make you work—on a slope descending to sub-industrial production. The only substitute for technological energy is the muscular labor of slaves. This is the way an economic collapse leads to dictatorship—as it did in Germany and in Russia. ...

A dictatorship would find it impossible to rule this country in the foreseeable future. What is possible is the blind chaos of a civil war. ...
Is there any hope for the future of this country? Yes, there is. This country has one asset left: the matchless productive ability of its people. If, and to the extent that, this ability is liberated, we might still have a chance to avoid a collapse. We cannot expect to reach the ideal overnight, but we must at least reveal its name. We must reveal to this country the secret which all those posturing intellectuals of any political denomination, who clamor for openness and truth, are trying so hard to cover up: that the name of that miraculous productive system is Capitalism.

The bottom line is that wealth is something real in the world: it is not paper, it cannot be printed, and it cannot be increased by being redistributed. When government economic manipulations caused a boom of soaring paper-dollar asset prices, people the whole world over were lured into disastrously wasting their actual savings. Deflation is the economic process in which we are forced to accept this reality. Further governmental printing and spending now will only make things worse, by destroying even more real wealth. Instead we must demand that the government cease all bailouts, stimulus spending, and money printing.

Mish versus Schiff

2009-01-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

This is my take on Mish's post explaining that Peter Schiff was wrong (Schiff is a highly visible analyst who predicted the housing bust and recession):

Schiff ruined his own credibility. Even if he's pro-laissez faire, he's not a philosopher: foremost he's supposedly an expert on this economy, but he was dead wrong on the most fundamental economic trend last year which followed the housing bust: global deflation. He will get called out on this because he can be. It is far better the calling out be done by someone who deserves an audience for being right (Mish), than by the "MSM" defenders of statism. (Statism is what nurtures the mass corruption we suffer from among both politicians and their corporate clients, by the way. And if you don't mind a foul-mouthed, emotionalist tirade, this video -- not to be played at work or around children or nuns -- expresses something of the proper attitude towards the powers that be.)

I see nothing personal in the Schiff piece, I judge it to be objective and just. Mish laid out the facts which make the case that he's the real thing, he's what Schiff was supposed to be, both as investment advisor and as outspoken expert on our economic-political reality. Good for him, I hope he gets a lot more readers and customers. I think the post and the attention it gets can only be good for the cause of laissez faire.

This about sums it up

2009-01-12T08:55:00.000-08:00

But I think either one of these would have been a more appropriate picture:

Life in Hooverville

Death in Vietnam

Economics and the absurd

2009-01-09T09:09:00.000-08:00

Mish Shedlock is the only applied economist or market analyst I listen too. I wish I'd found his blog years ago when he was predicting this recession. Mish is always fact-based and level-headed, he seems to be extremely careful to differentiate between what he knows is probable and what he doesn't know. No crazy predictions, just a few very good ones, based on both fundamentals and technicals. He works 14 hours every day.

He is an analyst at Sitka Pacific, with two hedge funds which make money even today:

Mish may be at his best when concisely showing that the Keynesians and Monetarists -- Krugman, Paulson, Bernanke, Greenspan, Friedman, etc., etc. -- are flat out fools, that 8th graders could know better just by using common sense. Mish is a fan of the Austrian school. He likes to quote von Mises:

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit (debt) expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit (debt) expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

Here's the best place to start with Mish. If one spends an hour reading this and following some of the links to his other posts, it can be very educational.

Those with [Fiscal Insanity Virus] are trapped in academic wonderland with no ability to see anything from a real world logical perspective. Instead they rely on formulas that imply free lunch theories and/or perpetual motion.

Mish's predictions now are for housing to tank to at least 2012, the S&P to hit 600 or possibly 450 in 2009, and unemployment likely to go over 11% (from the 7.2% reported today). Among bears, these numbers are said to be too optimistic, especially that last. He is most "famous" right now for being one of the first to figure out that deflation has arrived. (He notes that deflation is a good thing; inflation was the problem. Most economists and all governments want to inflate some more, right about now.)

Here's today's update, where he notes that unemployment is really 13.5% -- not the more presentable 7.2% that is making headlines:

There is no official definition of depression. Here is mine: When the U-6 unemployment rate rises above 12.5 in conjunction with a stock market that is down close to 50%, the CPI is negative, and nominal wages are stagnant, it's an economic depression. We are in one.
...
The Fed is desperately trying to get you to borrow. I am suggesting you cut all unnecessary spending cold turkey. We cannot spend ourselves to prosperity. It is simply impossible. Job losses are going to mount, few jobs are safe and the best thing to do is to be mentally prepared to be working fewer hours.

My response to all of this mess is: how absurd!

It is absurd that 99% of economists did not see this coming, could not explain what anyone was doing wrong to cause a recession, cannot explain it now, and are recommending exactly the worst government actions possible.

It is absurd that Greenspan, who actually understood economics once upon a time -- thanks to Ayn Rand -- was the latest and greatest cause of this mess.

It is absurd that there is such a thing as "fractional reserve banking." It is absurd that many Objectivists either don't know what it is or think it could be okay in a capitalist system. It took me two months to figure it out -- I'm very slow -- but make no mistake: FRB is fraud. When a bank cannot pay back its "on demand" deposits on demand, the deposit notes it issued are fraudulent. How hard is that to understand? It would not even matter if there existed (as there can't; ask Iceland) some magical guarantee that depositors would never demand their money at the same time, FRB is legalized counterfeiting all of the time. How much counterfeiting? Try 1000% -- since 10-1 ratios are the norm at American banks. And that is inflation, massive inflation. Inflation causes price bubbles. And bubbles pop when reality crashes the party, sending prices back in line with actual wealth.

It is absurd that popular Objectivist blogs haven't been all over this for years, that there seems to be little sense of how bad the economy is going to get still, and that it hasn't been common knowledge among Objectivists since at least 2005 that housing was going to crash. Sadly I read about Objectivists who bought a house in the last two years, apparently thinking the worst was over.

It's absurd that I haven't seen a single comment by another Objectivist (I mean a real Objectivist, not some libertarian dork) on Mish's posts.

It's absurd that Atlas Shrugged has been out for over 50 years and this is still happening.

But my first point is the most important. How can the entire profession of economics be such a colossal failure? How can the very professionals tasked with understanding the economy be its worst enemy? We can blame politicians, Wall Street, sub-prime flippers, and "bankstas" all we want, but the bottom line is that none of this would have been possible if the economists hadn't been on board, i.e., if the vast majority of professional economists weren't incompetent or corrupt or both. (Most are both: not only do they not understand that a country can't consume its way to prosperity, they are collectivist statists anyway.)

Of course the blame goes back one more step -- to the philosophers and other intellectuals who allow and make possible such irrational economics. Why is your IRA or 401K a bad dream? Because philosophy PhD's couldn't care less about reality.

And with that final insight, I realize none of this is really absurd; it is ugly but it makes sense: social collapse is the only thing that can follow -- sooner or later -- the intellectual collapse of the 19th and 20th centuries, which was fueled by the philosophical collapse that began, ironically, in the Enlightenment, by the arch-enemy of reason: Kant -- and the monster he unleashed on Germany and the world: Hegel.

I end with a quote:

Inflation is a man-made scourge, made possible by the fact that most men do not understand it. It is a crime committed on so large a scale that its size is its protection: the integrating capacity of the victims' minds breaks down before the magnitude -- and the seeming complexity -- of the crime, which permits it to be committed openly, in public. For centuries, inflation has been wrecking one country after another, yet men learn nothing, offer no resistance, and perish -- not like animals driven to a slaughter, but worse: like animals stampeding in search of a butcher.

Ayn Rand, "Egalitarianism and Inflation", 1974, in Philosophy: Who Needs It

Bailouts: impractical and immoral

2008-11-19T10:34:00.000-08:00

Sent to my congressmen today. Find yours here.

Do not bail out any more failing companies with tax receipts.

Bailouts are not practical, they are financially destructive. Bankruptcy is a normal part of a free economy, because it allows capital to move from malinvestments to successful enterprises. Giving life-support to a failing company wastes money on a non-productive venture -- money that could be put to productive use, including the creation of viable jobs, at companies chosen by the free market for their ability to create the most valuable goods and services.

But more importantly, bailouts are immoral and statist. Appropriating taxpayer money to a private company is simply the road to fascism, in which the government controls the fundamentals of the economy, thereby violating every individual's right to freely pursue happiness.

Sincerely,

Brad Williams
North Portland

The beginning

2008-11-07T14:26:00.001-08:00

When was he elected, like three days ago, right? I admit I was actually relieved, because I think there would have been actual riots had the equally-repulsive McCain pulled it off. But already reality has set in, because on the change.gov website which supposedly speaks for "The Office of the President-Elect" -- an "Office" which doesn't exist, mind you -- the president-elect doesn't think it's too soon for this:

Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.

Actually, my kids won't be compelled to do jack fracking squat hours of "community service", thank you very much. If America doesn't just say "no" (or something a bit more colorful) to this, it will be more evidence of, let's say, those ominous parallels.

Update:

Already, there's more! With GM and Ford predicted to go bankrupt next year, the Senator has this to say:

I have made it a high priority for my transition team to work on additional policy options to help the auto industry adjust, weather the financial crisis, and succeed in producing fuel-efficient cars here in the United States.

Exactly which laws will the executive branch of the United States government be fulfilling when it helps two companies on the brink of insolvency "weather the crisis"?

In other news, the Federal Reserve's balance sheet just went to $2T, thanks to "bailouts". Meanwhile, unemployment is shooting up, which means tax revenues will plummet. Methinks car companies aren't the only thing insolvent around here.

The march to fascism continues.

Update 2:

Obama has replaced his plan to make students part-time slaves with a plan to make students part-time social workers. Now the site says:

Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by setting a goal that all middle school and high school students do 50 hours of community service a year and by developing a plan so that all college students who conduct 100 hours of community service receive a universal and fully refundable tax credit ensuring that the first $4,000 of their college education is completely free.

So the "service" won't be required -- but note that $4,000 is a fortune to a college student, especially for 50 hours of "service." This is still government coercion.

The scariest thing here is perhaps not the content, but the political method: float the statist proposal you really want, but if it attracts too much of an outburst replace it with a similar but evolved statist proposal that will silence the first criticism. I assume this is nothing new in politics, and I expect we will see it over and over again from this administration (which isn't even an administration yet). In the years to come, we are going to get every bit of statism that the filters of the left and right let through, and I fear that is going to be a lot.

db4oProviders Release 1.0

2008-11-05T07:30:00.000-08:00

db4oProviders Release 1.0 now available.

Description: Custom ASP.NET 2.0 providers which use db4o as back-end. Beginning with Membership Provider, Role Provider, and Profile Provider. Code is based on MSDN sample code and is unit-tested. Version 1.0 uses db4o 7.4 and C# 3.0. Prior versions of source use db4o version 6.1 and C# 2.0.

http://www.codeplex.com/db4oProviders

Where blame is due

2008-11-03T12:32:00.000-08:00

Blaming the crisis on anyone other than the government -- and its supporters -- is a big mistake. Investors, speculators, financiers, businessmen, house-flippers, real estate agents, banks, bad credit house-buyers, money managers, ratings agencies -- they are all proximate causes. Their failure to avoid risk on the present, catastrophic scale would not have been possible without specific policies of our governmental institutions, and primarily the central bank. In fact, the functioning of the central bank -- its very existence and the lack of a gold standard -- must lead to excessive, underestimated risk-taking and widespread malinvestment. This is explained simply and clearly in a book by Murray Rothbard (1.5MB PDF).

There is no need to look for the devil(s) in the details. The fundamental cause of the latest boom and bust is clear, and this path was generally predicted by many -- because decades of money and credit inflation ineluctably lead to deflationary meltdown.

As Amit Ghate explains:

When the free market functions--and failure is allowed--people become viscerally aware of risk, with the result that they voluntarily assume less of it.

Conversely, when the government tries to "manage" the economy--when the consequences of risky behavior are shifted from self-interested actors to taxpayers, as was done by the creation of the Fed and its various insurance programs, or when weak financial firms are propped up rather than being allowed to fail--people take on risks they would not otherwise. Banks are less careful, depositors no longer evaluate their institutions, and risks are concealed and amplified until they become catastrophic.

To put it negatively, don't blame speculation as such:

Speculators and short-sellers don't create facts, they seek to identify and respond to them; and in the process they help adjust prices to economic conditions and establish smooth and liquid markets. As a result--instead of being scapegoated and banished--they should be respected and welcomed for the productive role they play in our markets.

Doom and gloom

2008-10-30T01:03:00.000-07:00

What they don't know -- and neither does this country -- is that the United States is broke.

- Ayn Rand, 1974

It being Halloween, it's fitting to note that our economy is undead, a zombie moving on inertia from a life-force that is long gone. Despite a sucker's rally on Wall Street, I'm expecting stocks will go much lower within a year (as this thing gets properly priced in), and we'll see 10% or more unemployment in 2010. In the next few years, boomers who are retired or about to retire will tragically see that half of their life-savings has been wiped out, not to return in their lifetime; many homeowners who lose their jobs will quickly find themselves insolvent; and a growing wave of government entities of every kind and level will follow the dismal lead of Vallejo, California and go broke. There is not going to be another bubble to end the recession this time: deflation will be here for years, as the grim race plays out between the desperate quest for savings and the slaughterhouse of unemployment. The numbers of people and businesses and governments filing for bankruptcy in the next five years is going to be awesome and depressing. The cause of all of this, decades of federal economic policies and ad hoc measures of money and credit inflation, have zero chance of changing for the better; instead, we are already seeing these statist tendencies surging in both scope and depth. Meanwhile, the popular hatred of capitalism seems to be total now (if the chatter out of Republican candidates is any measure) -- but it, too, will grow as the financial pain reverberates, with capitalism taking the blame as it always has. At the same time, things have never looked so bright for the political aspirations of the Dark Ages-worshiping environmentalists; and when the economic meltdown evolves into a spiritual crisis, their unwitting friends, the Dark Ages-worshiping religionists, will be ready to lead. The only thing that seems to be missing from this perfect storm is a world war.

Given this setup, it will be miraculous if political crises do not erupt and alter our political reality quickly and catastrophically. How far off can Directive 10-289 be?

I am forced to the conclusion that we are witnessing the bitter end of the remnants of the American Enlightenment; and fascism -- in which every major enterprise is fundamentally controlled by the government -- will be here within a few years, perhaps a decade.

For America, I see only one hope: fully fund the Free Books to Teachers Campaign. Freedom will not survive the loss of Ayn Rand's influence. It never could have.

The intellectual betrayal of an age

2008-10-27T20:35:00.000-07:00

Seen in a blog comment:

There once was an Alan Greenspan
Who sat at the feet of Miss Rand
Her ideas seemed fine
For just the right time
But till then honest banking be damned

Greenspan's intellectual betrayal -- of individual rights, of capitalism, and of Ayn Rand -- is of epic scope, even if this doesn't turn into Great Depression 2 (or something worse). He thought he could manage world markets better than they could manage themselves. He sought to personally maximize our wealth more practically than by the gold standard he had praised in his youth. He didn't want to destroy -- he wanted to control.

But his control proved maximally destructive.

The epitaph of Greenspan's life will be that after learning of the logical necessity for free minds and free markets from the greatest genius since Aristotle, he then chose a career in economic coercion which ultimately brought financial calamity crashing down around six billion people.

He now says: "I still do not fully understand what happened."

I wonder if rather he understands too well: that this is the finale of decades of cheating on the principles he had once known in order to get away with a life of power-lust.

Peikoff 10/20/2008

2008-10-22T09:09:00.000-07:00

On the election:

I have this podcast to discuss ideas, not to choose among the lowest sub-humans.

The second answer in this podcast gives crystal-clear statements on the non-rights of fetuses before birth. The issue: biological dependence. I agree. And notice he does not mention the fact that fetuses have not yet started to exercise their rational faculty, which I've seen a few Objectivists make a big deal about, but I think it's irrelevant.

Economics in one post

2008-10-21T10:24:00.000-07:00

Not this post, this one.

Mish Shedlock says of it:

It's a sad state of affairs that Bernanke who fashions himself an "expert" on the great depression knows less about the cause and cure of it than anyone who reads and understands the above article.

Mish's blog is, by the way, must reading for anyone who wants to hear about the economic outlook from a very sharp economist. (The current outlook in one word? Unemployment.)

A couple other good recent articles: one explaining that our Keynesian banking system is guaranteed to melt down regularly, just as it has done every few years or decades; and another which soberly explained the dire situation back in March and what must be done about it. This last is by the brilliant Objectivist George Reisman, who was voraciously reading economic treatises at age 14 before coming to study under both von Mises and Ayn Rand. Read his magnum opus online here.

The common theme of all the above? Shut down the Federal Reserve, cut government spending, and replace fiat money (which is, increasingly, just a bunch of IOU's taken against future tax receipts, i.e, against ourselves) with gold -- that is: get the government out of the economy or risk another depression.

Objectivists Ed Cline and C. August consider just how bad things are about to get, given that the statist deck of cards is stacked against us. Indeed, since Obama and Pelosi and Bernanke and Paulson (and governments around the world) will soon be running the show in unison according to the Marxist-Keynesian script of economic destruction -- the popular contempt for capitalism having reached a new crescendo -- we can no longer rule out as far-fetched that we may experience an economic-political disaster of epic scope in the next few years. Of course, neither can one predict that such is very likely to happen: even if you are an economist and this is your area of expertise, everything still hinges on the unpredictable, arbitrary actions of those in power.

But it is at least time to face the fact that a government-generated wave of unemployment is already on it's way.

Genus

2008-10-17T00:44:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I started introducing the concept of "genus" to Elias. After only one or two examples ("animals" and "furniture"), he got it, to my amazement. Next he was telling me that the genus of his Legos is "toys."

The other night I was reading to both of the kids and brought up another example. That's when the smallest boo-boo decided that "genus" sounds like "penis." Things don't always go as planned with children, do they?

My purpose is to teach the methodology of figuring out explicit definitions. I can't think of any good reason we don't learn to habitually define our concepts from a very young age, though I'm sure many non-Objectivist parents would cringe (or scowl) at the thought. Part of Ayn Rand's genius must have been that she grasped the value of this, and did it, from a very young age.

Mainely in Maine

2008-10-15T10:22:00.000-07:00

Scenes from the Atlantic coast:

The ascendency of Lord British

2008-10-10T10:00:00.000-07:00

Richard Garriott was one of my heroes when I was 15. He wrote the Ultima series of computer games, and the one I owned, Ultima IV, was in a class of its own for making morality a central aspect of gameplay. Your character's moral status was a measurement of your compliance, throughout the game, with eight virtues. I still have the game box, including a super-cool cloth map of "Britannia." And I can still picture the pages of a magazine interview of Richard back then. His words which I dwelled upon amounted to: if you want to develop cool software, the most important thing is to master the dry technicalities of programming. That interview was very inspiring to me.

Now, Richard, the son of a NASA astronaut, is spending his own fortune on a ten-day spaceflight. When he looks out the window back at Earth, might he see something like this?

Waiting for Diogenes

2008-10-08T14:13:00.000-07:00

Since this is the part in Atlas Shrugged right before little civil wars break out all over the country, I thought it might be helpful to pre-emptively research some super-inexpensive meals: beat this. And remember, you can always use the clapboard siding off of your newly remodeled McMansion to build a nice big bonfire for the cooking of said entrees. (Hint: start the fire with your IRA quarterly statements.)

Emailing my congressmen

2008-09-24T14:19:00.000-07:00

Dear Senator/Representative,

Please take a stand against every version of the "bail out" under consideration. The fundamental cause of the housing boom and bust was government interference in the marketplace; more interference cannot now help. We have to accept that those investments failed -- pushing papers and enacting arbitrary powers in Washington will not bring back the actual wealth that has been lost. I believe the only possible solution to this crisis is for the government to quickly perform an orderly deregulation of the financial and housing markets, so that the free minds of a free market may find and utilize the real wealth that remains in the economy. Please take a courageous stand against those calling for a vast increase in central planning during this time of crisis.

Thank you,
Brad Williams
Portland, Oregon

Pragmatism and Disaster: Read the headlines

2008-09-23T11:02:00.000-07:00

From an upcoming article by Dr. Tara Smith entitled The Menace of Pragmatism:

[O]f course truth exists, says [William James], but truth is not a stagnant property. Rather, an idea becomes true—“truth happens to an idea.” Truth “lives on a credit system” in his view; what a truth has going for it is that people treat it in a certain way. The true is the “expedient,” “any idea upon which we can ride.” Any idea is true so long as it is “profitable.”

And yesterday, in an analysis, by James V. DeLong, of the current financial crisis and the pending government bail-out:

[T]here are fewer villains in this tale than the news and the political campaigns would lead one to believe. Three basically good things - the securitization of consumer credit, the extension of credit down the economic ladder, and the invention of derivatives - have combined, and the resulting mix turned out to be explosive. Well, live and learn, and do better next time. But first, ensure there is a next time.

This author doesn't seem bothered by the absurdity of his own analysis, that three "basically good things" somehow led to a global economic disaster. Why? Essentially he's claiming that the world is so complex (which means: unknowable) that we just have to "live and learn." This is the philosophy of pragmatism. Accordingly, it was not absolutely right or wrong for the government to have coerced the marketplace (via Fannie Mae and the like) so that billions of dollars were invested in high-risk mortgages which have failed spectacularly. And it is not absolutely right or wrong for the government, next, to confiscate a nearly unimaginable amount of wealth from taxpayers in order to bail out the investors (which means: to pretend we still have that cake we just ate). Instead, we just need to try things, solve problems as they pop-up, and keep moving ahead as best we can.

Notice the contrast between how "reasonable" this way of thinking is supposed to be with its actual, catastrophic results.

Pragmatism is the flawed thinking method (while altruism is the content) behind the housing boom, the subsequent bust, and the Marxist-Keyensian solution in the works. Pragmatism is a fundamental part of our culture, but is so unreasonable it can only lead us from one disaster to the next. As Dr. Smith says:

While pragmatism presents itself as a tool of reason and enjoys the image of mature moderation, of common sense and practical “realism,” in truth, it is anything but realistic or practical. Pragmatism has become a highly corrosive force in people’s thinking. And insofar as it is thinking that drives actions—the actions of individuals and correlatively, the course of history—as long as a person or a nation is infected by a warped philosophical approach, genuine progress will be impossible.

On Abortion

2008-09-19T12:44:00.000-07:00

The fundamental fact relevant to the legality of abortion is that an embryo or fetus is a dependent part or outgrowth of a woman's body, and thus hers to keep or destroy. Since it is only potentially an independent individual, an embryo or fetus has no individual rights, including no legal claim upon the sustenance it needs from the mother's body. A baby obtains individual rights only upon individuation, i.e., when he or she is born.

Because an embryo or fetus is an extension of a woman's body, the decision to give birth or to abort is profoundly personal. The choice confronting a pregnant woman is between two intense and potentially dangerous medical events, as well as between two starkly different versions of the rest of her life, both emotionally and financially. For her, the stakes could not be higher.

In light of this, I disagree with the criticism that "abortion-rights advocates keep hiding behind the phrase 'a woman's right to choose.'" Rather, by focusing on the issues of personal choice and whose-body-is-it-anyway, abortion-rights advocates are identifying the central fact that a woman's body and life are indubitably her own to do with as she pleases. The advocates have, in effect, correctly based their position upon the fact that a pregnant woman's choice is metaphysically personal -- and as such there can be no legal basis to question it, least of all on behalf of the potential future person of the embryo or fetus.

For these same reasons, I am repulsed at the spectacle of Objectivists who think it is their place to publicly comment on the morality of a specific woman's choice to give birth or to have an abortion. It does not actually matter what statements a woman has made to the media, or whether or not her child is expected to have a health problem: outsiders are simply not privy to the personal values and private reasons by which she made her decision, and publicly speculating about them is irresponsible and rude.

I'm out

2008-09-15T13:16:00.001-07:00

The god-awful Charlie Gibson interview of Sarah Palin has disabused me of any notion that there is anyone or anything worth voting for anymore. That such conceited ignorance (figure that one out) and unblinking spinelessness could create, not just a tenable candidate for VP, but an instantaneous national celebrity, says all I need to know about the hopelessness of our culture. Obama and Palin are two halves of a very bad joke, and our lives are the butt.

As I watch these creatures spit up word salads designed to appeal to everyone except themselves, I don't think about them -- they don't actually exist in the way that matters; I think about Roark and how absurd the rest of the world is compared to an individual with a soul, that is, with an absolute love of his own life.

Study Groups for Objectivists

2008-09-15T11:55:00.000-07:00

SGO, open to all Objectivists, has completed its first study group, covering chapter 5 of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. It was a great success with six contributing members, and I gained clarity on some points in the chapter.

I developed the SGO software from scratch using C# and db4o. I like to have complete ownership of an implementation like this, because it lets me experiment with improved architectural elements -- such as using an object database (db4o) rather than a relational database, and trying my hand at Domain Driven Design.

Two study groups are slated for the rest of this year. I'll be moderating one covering the first half of Ayn Rand's lecture and essay, "The Objectivist Ethics."

Here's my final post in the study group we just completed:

The challenge question I assigned myself a few weeks ago was this: Most people would think that knowing a word's definition is more than you need to know to understand a word, i.e., that one doesn't need to be able to formally define "justice" in order to understand what it is. How do we know that this is wrong?

One theme of chapter 5 is that knowledge is contextual: every element of one's knowledge is built upon and supported by other elements of one's knowledge, all the way down to one's actual perceptual experiences. Chapter 3 showed one way in which knowledge is contextual: conceptual hierarchy. For example, the concept "furniture" cannot be grasped before grasping concepts such as "table" and "chair" -- because tables and chairs are not similar enough in immediate perception to warrant "furniture" as a first-level concept; but "table" and "chair" as concepts are similar with regard to the more abstract distinguishing characteristic of "furniture": tables and chairs can support the human body and/or other objects. So, "table" and "chair" (or similar) are part of the cognitive context which is necessary to grasp "furniture". See 3.12 (chapter 3, paragraph 12).

The principle that knowledge is contextual has much broader application than just conceptual hierarchy. She gives an example at 3.13: "habitation" is not a unit of "furniture", but it is part of the necessary context for grasping "furniture" as an adult.

How is the contextual knowledge which supports a concept specified? By defining its units. A definition makes explicit the concepts and relationships one must grasp to distinguish a concept's units. When there is some question as to exactly what the essential characteristic of a concept is, and one just "kinda" feels what he or she means by a word, the concept is not actually retained because it has become unhinged from those other pieces of knowledge needed to identify its units.

Given the nature of concepts, no concept can exist on its own in one's mind, it must be properly related to the rest of one's knowledge -- which means in practice that it must be immediately definable. Otherwise it is at most an approximation of knowledge.

Speeches

2008-09-04T11:31:00.000-07:00

All three of the convention speeches I've seen have made me laugh: the Obamas', for their promises of the impossible, e.g., health care for all while lowering the tax burden on the middle class; and Palin's, for pointing out how laughable the liberal views on the economy and foreign policy really are. After Palin's speech last night, I think the democrats will be surprised to lose again in November. Six months ago I would have considered this virtually impossible, but it seems McCain will be able to distance himself from the Bush Establishment just enough, and things in Iraq are looking up just enough.

Still, I can't vote for anyone who opposes legal abortion, a fundamentally evil position. No matter what else their views: no vote. Those embracing such an absolute and absolutely clear rejection of individual rights -- and of reason in preference of faith -- must be granted no shred of support.

Funniest line read this morning

2008-07-30T08:28:00.000-07:00

"...but now we're talking about a small niche within another niche which is already so small as to be basically nonexistent."

- about a mini-helicopter/jetpack.

Religion comes to Portland

2008-07-18T09:44:00.000-07:00

We stood at the stage last night, as you can see by the perspective. It felt like my personal shrine. Even Amy enjoyed it quite a bit, despite never liking their albums. The songwriting is so good that once it's in your face, you will like it. I took some phone pics, and let the Exilim record audio -- which didn't really work out, but that's not too surprising considering the volume. It's okay because all of their shows on this go-around get recorded to death and uploaded to YouTube.

William of The Jesus and Mary Chain at Wonder Ballroom, Portland

Jim of The Jesus and Mary Chain at Wonder Ballroom, Portland

The second coming

2008-06-16T16:26:00.000-07:00

The Jesus and Mary Chain are coming to Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco in a month. Pinch me! If gas weren't a thousand dollars per gallon I might try to hit two of these.

My fourth music video

2008-05-28T10:40:00.000-07:00

Kids are too funny.

This song was written and recorded about the same time as number three.

Conservationism versus environmentalism

2008-05-20T11:04:00.000-07:00

We've become real conservationists at our house. We recycle or compost almost everything possible, shun toxic cleaners, and feel funny if a light is on in an empty room. The net is that our weekly garbage is about a quarter what it was a few months ago, there's not much that is poisonous on our property, and all our utility bills are lower. But we aren't environmentalists.

Here's a fine article that describes how conservationism is not environmentalism.

I didn't know Al Gore has said "the climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity." That's exactly wrong. If there really were human-caused global warming and it really were a bad thing and there really were something we could do about it, it would be primarily an engineering problem, not a moral issue.

Obama

2008-05-19T00:23:00.001-07:00

We forgot to take a camera to Portland's Obama rally today, but fortunately the press took a picture of us -- see, there we are finding a little bit of shade. We stayed for 20 minutes, catching very-occasional glimpses between strangers' heads of a small blue shirt which seemed to be about a mile away. They say that with 75,000 attendees this was more than double the size of any previous Obama rally. (An interesting fact to juxtapose is that Portland is supposedly the whitest major U.S. city.)

Although I think this man will probably become president even though his platform is almost entirely toxic, I didn't feel anything about the rally. The ominous thing to me is not that the pendulum is swinging to the left (it's gotta swing somewhere), but that popular politics are so a-rational. "Belief", "hope", and "change" are just plain vacuous. Is this intellectual void rooted in some aversion to cognition in politics? Why not depict a campaign with catchwords related to socialism, pacifism, environmentalism, and abortion rights if that's what you're itchin' for? (If the issue is just that such words don't fit on hand-held signs and bumper stickers, I have an idea: make an acronym out of them, then have seventy-five thousand people chanting "SPEAR! SPEAR! SPEAR!" under Portland's long-lost sun.)

Or are campaigns so vague because superficiality is the only way to amass majority support? Because everyone disagrees about any position much less watered-down than "war is bad" or "health care is good"? Perhaps this contentiousness explains why W turned out to be exactly what he said he was, yet somehow three-quarters of voters now disapprove of him.

Either way, it seems to me the euphoria of Obama's rallys evidence not so much a change in national politics, but the disintegration of culture as it stands circa 2008.

A little context

2008-04-15T21:10:00.000-07:00

There's at least 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe. You can't picture that, but you can picture 10,000 galaxies -- or rather, the Hubble Telescope can and did. In 2003/2004, it took 11 days worth of pictures of a tiny, "starless" chunk of the "sky", a visual field equivalent to one-tenth of the moon as seen from Earth. The picture spans more space and time than any other picture ever taken: the most distant red blips may be 12 billion years old, and thus 12 billion light-years away. There are a handful of our Milky Way stars, with tell-tale light crosses, getting in the way, but almost everything else here is a galaxy. Each little whorl, blob, and dot: an entire galaxy -- many, like the Milky Way, containing billions of suns and planets.

Click on it to see a bigger image.

Almost 2

2008-04-11T14:10:00.000-07:00

Dahlia, modelling Mama's fashion creations:

Founders

2008-04-11T13:12:00.000-07:00

Founders College has run out of money. Only insiders could know the why and how of it. But that wouldn't stop the Objectivist blogosphere from speculating about faulty curriculum, faculty, intellectual justification, or marketing -- would it?

UPDATE: Most of the speculation I'm referring to occurred in the very lively comments at the linked post, but it seems all the comments have been removed now. Good riddance.

I re-read "Our Cultural Value-Deprivation" last night. This is an excruciatingly irrational time and place to grow up in -- it's nearly impossible to turn 20-years-old in this culture and have the self-esteem proper to a man or woman. That some Objectivists would enthusiastically attack an attempt at a more rational college is just beyond me.

Game night

2008-03-25T21:21:00.001-07:00

Elias and I spent less than 10 minutes in our assigned seats -- too loud. Very exciting though! We had all-inclusive tickets to the special balcony area, where there's lots of TV's and free food. Elias followed some apple juice with a large pretzel, though he didn't eat it, he just held it and rubbed it on things (like his head) for an hour. I think he didn't want to ruin it -- boy, did it get hard in our fridge overnight.

Elias was fascinated by a break-time event in which a random person from the audience took a full-court shot to win a car. It was a great shot, actually, just bounced off the front of the rim. The rest of the night, whenever I said that a player had just made a long shot, Elias asked if he won a car.

"No."

"Why?"

"Players don't win cars."

"Why?"

When we were leaving, during the third quarter, we picked up a Steve Blake bobble-head. I don't do sports, but had decided mid-game that Mr. Blake is my favorite Blazer. The first thing Elias told Amy when we got home: "I got a bobble-head of my daddy's favorite player!!"

The next night, he wanted to go again. Aw.

Thanks for the tickets, Andy!

Logarithms

2008-03-17T12:03:00.001-07:00

The other day, when I was wanting to code some financial formulae in F#, I got side-tracked and derived something that's not intuitive to me:

Can that really be? I didn't see an obvious mention of this in the Logarithms article on Wikipedia, nor in the pre-calc book we have at home. So maybe I screwed up the math? I tried some test cases with F#, by defining a function that, given a b and an x, evaluates both sides of that last equation, resulting in a tuple of two floats:

> let logcheck b x = (Math.Log(x, b), (1.0 / Math.Log(b, x)));;
val logcheck : float -> float -> float * float

> logcheck 2.0 3.0;;
val it : float * float = (1.584962501, 1.584962501)

> logcheck 5.0 11.2;;
val it : float * float = (1.501091629, 1.501091629)

> logcheck 7.382 123.123;;
val it : float * float = (2.407742101, 2.407742101)

The equivalence seems to be checking out, so maybe I did the math right. As it turns out, this equivalence is noted in the middle of a Wikipedia page. But what the heck does it mean?

Book ordered:

Political economy

2008-03-17T00:50:00.000-07:00

Yaron Brook makes it plain for Forbes readers how crashes and recessions are not a necessary part of society, but are the result of the most popular political opinions.

So what's someone of unpopular political opinions to do in the age of McCain versus Obama? Despite the looming recession, I sent $4 to CafePress -- now I'm participating:

Rocky Butte

2008-03-17T00:34:00.000-07:00

The kids scrutinizing small flowers on top of Rocky Butte:

More Raveonettes

2008-03-17T00:30:00.001-07:00

The Raveonettes must be getting more popular, because they actually sold out Portland's Doug Fir Lounge last week. I hung back from the stage a bit this time, taking a few cruddy pictures with my cell phone while enjoying the wall of sound immensely.

My third music video

2008-03-17T00:05:00.000-07:00

I wrote and recorded this song, "Drive", in about 1993. My friend had offered to "drive till the cows fall down" when we were driving from Portland to La Grande for a hiking trip, and I proceeded to write the whole song in my head on a trail in the Wallowas. The video itself is nearly pointless -- recent scenes of a trip I made to central Oregon -- but since Elias and Dahlia starred in my first two music videos, I've run out of kids.

A boy and his rover

2008-02-27T00:23:00.000-08:00

Elias has been so enchanted by the idea of the Mars rovers, he'll figure a way to arrange almost any of his toys into one. Here some "city blocks" constitute a rover suspended by ropes from its landing craft.

Motivation

2008-02-26T14:45:00.000-08:00

On her email list, Lisa VanDamme says there are three common ways that educators approach student motivation today. There are,

first, the Waldorf types who evade the problem of motivation because they evade the responsibility of education; second, the Catholic school types who proclaim education a moral duty; and third, the public school types who think gold stars and pizza provide the only compelling reasons to learn.

The assessment of Waldorf seems right to me. In Portland, Waldorf schooling is very popular, and we've had a real time figuring out why college-educated parents want it for their children. It's not just that favorite activities of Waldorfians include: (a) pretending you're a fairy, (b) wearing drab clothing, hand-made entirely of felted wool, and (c) generally aiming for an existence that Laura Wilder would enjoy and Al Gore would enjoy reading about. The clincher comes when a parent tells us, with exquisite excitement, that at the Waldorf school they've just signed up for no one will be teaching their four-year-old to read. (Does the hatred of civilization get any more ironic? Let's pay $500 a month to send our child to be with professionals who will make sure there will be no tainting by advanced human culture.)

Still, I'm left wondering where the Montessori approach would fit into VanDamme's analysis. Montessori elementary is definitely not unschooling, and Maria Montessori was a pillar of the historical reaction against education-by-edict.

Update: David Elmore criticizes Lisa VanDamme for having a wholly determined curriculum; she vigorously defends herself here. I suspect David makes a good point, while Lisa attacks the straw man of unschooling. Her response makes one almost wish that, as children, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, and Ayn Rand hadn't been allowed to follow their "juvenile desires."

My wife's funny, #2

2008-02-26T14:22:00.000-08:00

I don't know where it all comes from, but it keeps on coming and cracking me up:

- Our kids might believe in God. Boy, that will be a tough cross to bear.

- For one, our box spring is a piece of crap. It's just a box.

- I'm never having two Peppermint Cocoa Joe's again ... I feel horrible.

- We're frickin' camping, I want to eat in a restaurant.

Witchcraft in the Kingdom

2008-02-14T13:36:00.000-08:00

Our great and noble friends, the Saudis, have condemned a witch to death. Perhaps something is lost in the Arabic-to-English translation of "witchcraft"? Sounds to me like a bunch of people just don't like her.

Barsoom*

2008-02-05T11:08:00.000-08:00

Elias and I have been having fun watching the videos on the NASA site about the various Mars rovers. I was surprised to learn that there are currently two rovers on Mars (Opportunity and Spirit), and another one on the way (Sojourner), and another super-advanced "science laboratory" rover planned to launch in 2010. My treasured issue of National Geographic with 3-D pictures taken by Pathfinder is seeming so passé.

Our favorite video is "Mars Science Laboratory Mission Animation", which looks so real you'd swear John Carter* had a camera crew.

* Annoyingly cute references are to Edgar Rice Burroughs's action-packed Mars series. The start-up, A Princess of Mars, is great fun (especially if you're a 14-year-old boy), but I thought episode 2, The Gods of Mars, is even more so -- I mean look at how creepy-cool the blue "plant men" are.

Saddam interviews

2008-01-28T12:47:00.000-08:00

Interesting details from the FBI interviews with Saddam. I hardly read about politics anymore, but this was worth a read to help clarify some recent history. In a nutshell: he was lying about WMD's in order to appear strong to Iran; he would have pursued WMD's again ASAP; he tried (and failed) to predict Bush's actions according to Clinton's record; and he had no love for Bin Laden. There's a few morals in there, but it's all either obvious or impossible depending on the observer.

From C# to F#, Part 1: Expressions with side-effects

2008-01-18T11:03:00.001-08:00

I'm going to start a series of posts as I learn F#, working through the excellent book Expert F#, which was published last month (and I wholeheartedly recommend it over Fundamentals of F#, by the way). The premise of these posts is that the reader and I have advanced C# skills, but we're new to F# and functional programming. The caveat is that since I'm new to F#, I'll make mistakes, but I'll come back and fix them as soon as I know better.

What is F#? From the download page for version 1.9.3.7:

F# is a variant of the ML programming language for .NET and has a core language similar to OCaml. F# is a mixed functional/imperative/object-oriented programming language excellent for medium/advanced programmers and for teaching. It also can be used to access hundreds of .NET libraries, and the F# code can be accessed from C# and other .NET languages.

Functional Expressions

F# gets its name and notoriety from the fact that it is, among other things, a functional language, so let's start off with functional code. Within an fsi.exe interpreter session, I'm typing the blue:

> let add x y = x + y;;

val add : int -> int -> int

Everything in blue up to the semicolons is an expression which is evaluated. The semicolons just tell the interpreter to go ahead and evaluate everything typed up to that point, I won't be continuing the expression on the next line. Here the let expression evaluates to a function, add, which maps two integers to their sum.

Next, the line of feedback from the interpreter displays the results of the evaluation -- hey, we've created a value, named add, that is a function of a certain type. The type of the function looks odd at first, but let's keep moving and try it out:

> add 3 4;;
val it : int = 7

The expression add 3 4 evaluates to an integer value of 7. The name it is just a placeholder for the unnamed value (7) that resulted from the evaluation.

Have you noticed that the type int was assumed by the interpreter for x and y? That's what F# does, it infers the types of an expression based on what the expression does and how it does it. While it may seem arbitrary that x and y are inferred as integers here rather than as floats or whatnot, the rules of type inference are well-defined (this one is directly inherited from OCaml, F#'s daddy). Type inference has some serious selling points: values are strongly typed without having to be explicitly typed. In some cases, when a type cannot be unambiguously inferred, F# requires an explicit type specifier -- this is the price for having the best of both worlds.

Now why is the type of add int -> int -> int? This means that add is a function which maps an integer to a function which maps an integer to an integer. That's a mouthful, but what does it mean? Don't try this in C#:

> add 1;;
val it : (int -> int) = (fun:it@11)

Look, no error! We can apply just one parameter (x) to add, and that expression (everything in blue) evaluates to a function which maps an integer to an integer. Don Syme, F#'s creator, calls such a result a residual function. Let's package this up in a named function, inc, that we can use later:

> let inc = add 1;;

val inc : (int -> int)

> inc 4;;
val it : int = 5

So inc is a function which maps one integer to another -- by evaluating, in effect, add 1 y. Now we can better understand the type of add:

int -> int -> int

This is the type of a function which maps one integer (the left int) to a function of (on the right) type int -> int, that is, to a function which, like inc, maps one integer to another.

...With Side-Effects

F# is not a pure functional language, it is also a fully-featured imperative and OO language. I'm led to believe F# could even be used as a total replacement for C# without ever using it's functional aspects. Here's an expression:

> printfn "Hello!";;
Hello!
val it : unit = ()

First, note that this is an expression, not a statement -- there are no statements in F#, and this is a clue as to why some things do not work as the C# brain expects. When this expression is evaluated, it results in a side-effect, the printing of Hello! to the console. The type of the expression is, we are told, unit, which is just F# for void. Such imperative code can show up in a function too. Let's try this:

> let hello = printfn "Hello!";;

val hello : unit

Hello!

Oops! I hoped to be defining a parameterless function, but it turns out hello is not a function, we can see this from its type, the hapless unit. Interestingly, the side-effect of printing Hello! to the console already occurred during the evaluation of the let expression.

A commentor has kindly pointed out that to define a function that takes no parameters, we can indicate one "empty tuple" parameter:

> let hola () = printfn "Hola!";;

val hola : unit -> unit

> hola ();;
Hola!

This is what I was after, a function which maps unit to unit but has a side-effect. The empty parens () is not an empty parameter list, that's just what it looks like to the C-derived-language eye. It is actually a special parameter, the empty tuple. I'll discuss tuples in part 2.

Mixed

Let's define a more interesting function with side-effects:

> let addandtell x y = printfn "The number is %d" (add x y);;

val addandtell : int -> int -> unit

> addandtell 8 9;;
The number is 17
val it : unit = ()

Function addandtell maps from two integers to unit, and it has the side-effect of printing a message with their sum out to the console. This time the side-effect from printfn happens exactly when sub-expression add x y evaluates to an int -- which happens when the 8 and 9 are supplied to addandtell. If we were to next supply addandtell with 10 and 11, then add x y would re-evaluate, causing the printfn sub-expression to re-evaluate and have a new side-effect: printing The number is 21 to the console.

As we did earlier with add, we can apply just one parameter to addandtell, and then use the residual function.

> let incandtell = addandtell 1;;

val incandtell : int -> unit

The sub-expression addandtell 1 is a residual function with a side-effect. The side-effect won't occur until the add "inside" of addandtell gets all of the parameters it is waiting for and can evaluate to the integer which printfn takes. Let's make it happen:

> incandtell 13;;
The number is 14
val it : unit = ()

And there's the side-effect, the printout of The number is 14.

Don't take the "waiting for" metaphor here literally. There's no blocked thread here. A residual function is produced by supplying some-but-not-all of the parameters to a function, so in a logical sense the original function is "waiting for" the rest of its parameters.

Next

In part 2 I'll look at some of F#'s special data types, and do some real work with recursive functions.

Dam, a new post

2008-01-16T11:00:00.000-08:00

After being buried in a blizzard of work for the final months of 2007, my New Year's resolution is to not let that happen again. And related to that is the resolution to get back to blogging. So first up is: Elias being wonderful Elias on Hoover Dam after Christmas. That was an interesting little day trip. As if the architecture of the dam and even the visitor's parking lot (!) weren't impressive enough, that highway bridge project in the background was just astounding. It's going to be very high and very long. I need to read up on how bridges are built, cause I just can't see how it's done. People are so smart!

Simply put

2007-10-17T01:40:00.000-07:00

ARI has many good articles on environmentalism, of course, but I especially like the way this one clearly identifies the gulf between what most reasonable people think it is and what environmentalism actually is.

It is simply not true that environmentalism values human well being. It demands sacrifices, not for the sake of any human good, but for the sake of leaving nature untouched.

Pretty simple, when you put it that way.

School day

2007-09-18T23:15:00.000-07:00

Elias went to school today, and even though there were just a few dramatic declarations of "I don't want to go to school!" early on, he ended up voluntarily leaving the house, getting into the car, and (Amy tells me, because I wasn't there) entering the classroom, all without a single tear. Well, the parents may have shed a few.

From his and the guide's report, Elias was involved and happy in class. We had been preparing for the worst -- and apparently there was at least one other child who cried his heart out when left in that Mommy-less environment -- so we are on the moon that the very first day went so well. I'm very proud of Elias for being so brave and excited about school!

Out, out damn carpet wrinkle!

2007-09-17T09:08:00.001-07:00

I've been skeptical of LINQ to SQL from the beginning. There is quite a bit of history (to understate) of attempts to "solve" the problem of the impedance mismatch between object-oriented applications and relational databases, and, like pushing down a carpet wrinkle, the problem never seems to go away, it just pops up somewhere else.

Now that the evidence is starting to come in, I can stop nursing my irresponsible speculation. And the web is confirming my suspicions:

1 - Scott Guthrie's most excellent introduction to LINQ to SQL is not one long post, nor three or even five long posts, but NINE long posts. Cancel my meetings, I've got a sharper axe!

2 - The stuff hasn't shipped and here's a very nice "gotchas" post. Turns out you have to know what's happening behind the scenes or your pleasant-looking C# will translate into horrendous SQL, after all.

3 - There seem to be about 3000 sessions on LINQ and the Entity Framework at this year's Dev Connections conference in Vegas.

Not to say LINQ to SQL isn't perhaps an improvement over classic (tempus fugit!) ADO.NET for many situations. But when I see a new subculture of support forming for an upcoming technology, I may just wonder if the previous stuff I'm used too isn't so bad.

To my mind, even more exciting than expressing queries in C# so that at run-time they can be automagically mapped to SQL queries, is expressing queries in C# that don't get mapped or translated at all, they just are what they are and do what they say.

Trojan Horse 1.0 released

2007-09-05T09:19:00.000-07:00

Silverlight 1.0 is released, and official Microsoft-Novell support for Silverlight on Linux is announced. From my point of view 1.0 is not exciting, because it's for building media players, not "real" applications. But version 1.1 is coming up fast, which means .NET+XAML will soon be running on the client. Every client: XP, Vista, Mac, Linux, and mobile devices -- if Scott Guthrie is to be believed, and he seems to be the single most dependable developer-liason Microsoft has.

Bottom line: in two years AJAX apps will seem about as flashy and hip as a 1995 web site feels today. I still wonder if/when Google will stick a toe in the .NET water.

Vic-20

2007-07-31T10:33:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I picked up a Commodore Vic-20 off of ebay for $20. Such was my first computer when I was 11, and I really programmed the snot out of mine. This one I planned to be Elias's first computer too. Every now and then we put the box on the floor and he takes all the components out and we talk about what they are.

The other day I decided to actually fire the thing up, which required one trip to Radio Shack for a part they don't make anymore that hooks to the inputs which aren't on TV's anymore. The guy at Radio Shack said the Vic-20 had been his first computer too, but then he got a Commodore 64, and those were his "gaming glory days." Whatever! Eventually I also got a C-64, but I seem to be the only guy who didn't just play games on these things, I did much much more programming.

On the Vic-20 I made a flight combat game, an Indiana Jones'-inspired multi-level game, and I got to where I could write a spaceship game in three (or was it four?) lines of BASIC on any Vic-20 on display at any mall. On the C-64 I learned assembly language and wrote the graphic engine for an Ultima-style game, but didn't write the game itself. I think I wrote a C-64 version of Jupiter Lander too, which had been a cool game on the Vic-20. But my ultimate project was installing a second sound chip in a C-64 and then writing a drum machine app with an assembly-language execution engine. Then I'd program in some Jesus and Mary Chain drums and play along with my electric guitar. I don't imagine anyone is possibly still reading this (least of all my wife), but if you are I hope it is now obvious just how cool I was as a teenager.

Anywho, it turned out that with a $1.99 part from Radio Shack we were in business. Except that as soon as I tried to plug it in, the connector broke, so I had to rummage around for a soldering iron, thus the crazy wires in this picture. The funniest thing was how Dahlia wanted to press the buttons too and watch what happened on the screen. She would bounce from one side of Elias to the other, trying to strain and get a few key pokes in. Elias figured out how to clear the Vic-20 screen off and put a number '5' right where he wanted it.

After the kids went to bed, I plugged in the Jupiter Lander cartridge. Check out that awesome high score! Okay I think this may be the most pathetic blog post I've written, although there's a lot of competition.

db4o ASP.NET Providers

2007-07-30T14:52:00.000-07:00

My open-source project of db4objects-backed Membership, Role, and Profile ASP.NET Providers is up on CodePlex here.

db4objects

db4objects is an object database that I'm fairly enamored with these days. Whereas with a relational database I'd have to write lots of SQL and plumbing to read and write objects, with db4objects in .NET 2.0 I can store an object by calling Set(object), and load an object by calling the Query<>() method with an anonymous delegate that simply expresses the identity of the target, like this:

IList<EnrolledUser> results =
db.Query<EnrolledUser>
(
delegate(EnrolledUser u)
{
return u.Username == username &&
u.ApplicationName ==
this.applicationName;
}
);

The Achilles' heel (to be dramatic) of db4objects for .NET is that it requires Full Security CAS privileges, since it uses reflection and Win32. That's a problem for hosted web applications which are constrained to the Medium Security model -- which is very common and proper. I've thought 'round and 'round this problem, and there's no readily plausible solution other than finding a host which is willing to run your web app with Full Security -- which is, of course, in general a very bad idea!

The Providers

My project contains implementations for three core ASP.NET providers so far. They are based on MSDN sample code, and they are "well" unit-tested, meaning: I tried to retroactively "drive" most of the behavior with tests, but there are some holes.

There was an older, similar project on SourceForge here, but that one was not based on the MSDN sample code, was not unit-tested, hadn't been touched in 18 months, did not include a Profile provider, and used an older version of db4objects and the older method of querying. So I wrote this one. And let me tell you, it is not easy to unit test a Membership Provider; I never could have done it had I not found an archived post of a blog that doesn't exist anymore which explained how to hack it!

I'm curious myself about what bugs I'll find once I (or others) start using this project more. It's been downloaded more than 40 times already, so I hope -- and fear -- some bug reports sometime soon.

Weekend pics

2007-07-15T22:29:00.000-07:00

Amy left on Saturday to get a haircut and color, and I haven't seen her since. However, the woman pictured here showed up at our house, and the kids immediately took to her.

We celebrated our seven-year anniversary today, but forgot to ask the waitress to take a picture during our date. So instead Elias got to do the honors when we got home, and he did well for a two-year-old. Since we were nearly naked (it's hot here) the pic has been color distorted to preserve us some shred of dignity. Notice that Dahlia is in our official anniversary picture, yet clearly she did not want to be.

4th, belated

2007-07-14T11:24:00.000-07:00

At the park on July 4th. Judging from this and the previous post, you might think this is the only shirt I ever wear.

The Raveonettes

2007-06-05T10:48:00.000-07:00

Witnessed The Raveonettes last night for a third time. It's just Sune and Sharin touring this time, which had me suspicious, but this turned out to be my favorite Raveonettes sighting. Half the songs had no percussion; the rest had Sharin or Sune or a woman from the opening band whacking it out on a tom-tom and a snare in back. Sharin switched between blasting bass and blasting guitar all night, and did it well. I was front and center at the stage -- could have reached out and strummed a guitar or two, and got completely doused directly by their amps. They were relaxed and down-to-earth. It was like hanging out in Sune's garage (not that I know if he has a garage). I didn't recognize several of the songs, but could tell there are some new diamonds in there, these guys are definitely due for another album sooner than later.

Nate and I wait front-stage while Sune and Sharin do last-minute set-up.

Let's rave on.

Small band, but not a small sound.

The songwriter.

Some songs just end with noise. And that's O.K.

Dahlia speaks

2007-06-01T00:27:00.000-07:00

Although Dahlia can say a few words now, to know what she is really thinking can be a challenge for most people. Fortunately, I've become quite good at sensing what she would say, if she could. Here are some examples:

"Get me off this picnic table -- we need to stain the wood before it gets dirty YOU FOOLS!"

"Hugs don't cause people to fall to the floor; brosephs do."

"My baby loves her mama!"

"I just need to sit and rest my feet for a second."

Dahlia collage

2007-05-08T12:40:00.000-07:00

I haven't uploaded pictures from the birthday party yet, but this collage was on the invitations. My favorite pic is of wearing a box as a hat and not caring.

Engineer

2007-05-02T12:22:00.000-07:00

From January: Elias tweaking his beloved Mouse Trap game for custom behavior. Can my life get any better?

Some Candy Talking

2007-04-30T00:35:00.000-07:00

Arrive LAX: 4pm
Depart LAX: 6am
Sleep: 0 hours
Experience: Priceless

I was 10 feet in front of guitarist/genius William Reid (whom I like to just call "God") at the show. That's my cell phone in the bottom right of this video.

Remembering Ayn Rand

2007-04-23T22:08:00.000-07:00

Petzold has unanswered questions about Ayn Rand's view of Earth Day, as he remembers one of her TV appearances in 1970. It's a very accessible view, though, because even if it hadn't just been noted on CNN on Friday (Going Green: Bad for Business?), she wrote a brilliant philosophical analysis of environmentalism (aka ecology) in 1971: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.

UPDATE: This line in the aforementioned article is similar to what gives Petzold nightmares:

Anyone over 30 years of age today, give a silent 'Thank you' to the
nearest, grimiest, sootiest smokestack you can find.

I consider this smart writing, exactly the kind of thing which makes Ayn Rand's words so memorable. Out of context it sounds absurd, but once you get her point that industry has caused a minor amount of pollution while tripling your life expectancy, then it's, well, a smart and memorable line.

More: here's a recent interview with MIT professor Richard Lindzen: Relax, the planet is fine.

No Coachella -- yes!

2007-04-23T14:56:00.000-07:00

What's better than being me and seeing The Jesus and Mary Chain play at Coachella (aka Crowdchella -- nice one, PLo!) in four days? Being me and seeing The Jesus and Mary Chain play a warm-up show at The Glass House, with a sold-out capacity of 800, in three days. Surprising side note: the starlet of Lost in Translation, which invoked the classic Mary Chain song Just Like Honey during its climactic scene, is rumored to have a guest spot in this Pomona, CA show.

Starring Dahlia

2007-04-20T14:59:00.000-07:00

My second music video stars Dahlia, who turns the big 1 in nine days. (My first music video, starring Elias, is here.)

Outlining versus thinking

2007-04-11T12:53:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure this is relevant to Toiler's psycho-epistemological comment about "the danger of ordered lists," but I've found that standard outlines are not as brain-friendly as we are led to believe in middle school. Structured data, such as a detailed outline with points and sub-points and sub-sub-points, actually has high impedance relative to humans and is very hard to cognize. It's just not the way we think. Such mechanical structure is useful for organizing data for reference, but not for working out or capturing a line of reasoning.

What does our thinking really "look like"? Like ordinary language. (What a coincidence!)

So if I were to write a book, I wouldn't expect to create any detailed outlines -- ultimately because I would expect my target audience to be people, not computers.

Grooming, international style

2007-04-04T16:05:00.000-07:00

I don't have much motivation to post my thoughts about the war anymore, because they are simply: it is too hopeless, as long as the conservatives are making things worse than even the lefties would be able to do by doing nothing.

But today I'm confused about which is worse:

A) Fifteen armed forces hostages laughing and shaking hands with their captor;
or
B) Blair stating: "Throughout, we have taken a measured approach: firm but calm, not negotiating but not confronting either."

The West is being "groomed", as psychologists say, to feel gratitude toward the offender, and comfort in doing nothing when offended. On these principles, what could go wrong in the future, really?

Coachella

2007-03-22T13:55:00.000-07:00

Top 10 reasons I'll be near L.A. on April 27th and only on April 27th:

10. The Jesus and Mary Chain is playing a show at Coachella.
9. The Jesus and Mary Chain is playing a show at Coachella.
8. The Jesus and Mary Chain is playing a show at Coachella.
7. The Jesus and Mary Chain is playing a show at Coachella.
6. The Jesus and Mary Chain is playing a show at Coachella.
5. The Jesus and Mary Chain is playing a show at Coachella.
4. The Jesus and Mary Chain is playing a show at Coachella.
3. The Jesus and Mary Chain is playing a show at Coachella.
2. The Jesus and Mary Chain is playing a show at Coachella.
1. The Jesus and Mary Chain is playing a show at Coachella.

But they broke up in 1999, you say? Exactly.

$100 ticket plus plane fare plus a day away from work and beloved family for what I'd guess will be a 45-minute set? This isn't extravagant, relatively speaking. Others fans are trekking from England, Sweden, Chile, and Australia (Niina describes it well) to see two Scottish brothers get up on the same stage for the first time in eight years and make it rain aural candy.

Apparently one or two other "bands" may be playing Coachella as well, but that's unclear to me.

Green day

2007-03-22T13:48:00.000-07:00

Dahlia has decided she can stand when and where she wants, and Amy even got her to take a half-dozen steps yesterday. Here she poses in a sea of green on a beautiful St. Patrick's Day. Below, an even-greener Elias incubates a love for climbing.

Index cards as bricks

2007-03-12T09:04:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting post by Charles Petzold on how and why he wrote Applications = Code + Markup the way he did. The most interesting thing to me is the peek into his writing process:

I spend a lot of time and energy organizing the material in my books. I draw big dependency diagrams on white boards; I make index cards for various topics and then lay them out on the floor in various experimental orders; I write sketchy early versions of half a dozen chapters to test if the material flows correctly. The ordering of material is a central problem in writing a programming tutorial, and I struggle to get it right. I want each chapter to progressively build on the last, like bricks in a wall of knowledge.

Good books always read as if the author sat down with perfect knowledge of the topic and then just said it on paper. Who knew authors litter their office floors with index cards, and their garbage cans with sketchy early versions of chapters. All in a quest to solve a problem that, ironically, the author doesn't have: the reader's lack of knowledge and context.

A large part of the difficulty in building the reader's "wall of knowledge" is a problem of getting the hierarchy right. There must be a buildup of logically dependent pieces -- the epistemological equivalent of a game of Tetris. Some pieces are especially crucial to the goal of completing the wall:

In any book I write, one of my constant goals is to demystify the [topic]. Anything that seems like "magic" is a target for me.

For "[topic]", he actually said "API", but I like this as more general advice for a writer: to maximize the value of your book, make accessible that which was previously least accessible. A corollary I'd like to note: if the topics are already sufficiently accessible, then a new book isn't worth writing.

Petzold regrets the lack of screen shots in ACM, but I have to wonder how much longer the book would have been with them. As it is, I'm on page 55 of 976.

The Reader

2007-02-16T08:50:00.000-08:00

Painting of Aristotle by Chris Howard.

Scratch

2007-02-08T16:07:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the best first programming language: Scratch.

Sample code:

When I was in college, a professor was hired whose research area was graphical programming languages, and I remember her presentation looked like this.

The death of privacy

2007-02-05T13:37:00.000-08:00

It surprises me how many smart, technical people will line up to use a full suite of online applications, such as Google's. When is it going to become well-appreciated that the data which we are now offering to Internet hubs, such as Google, is being integrated and stored in an emerging supercomputer -- and someday AI's which we cannot now imagine will "understand" it all, and people will do things with the results which we cannot now predict?

Here's a small example: Ever notice how people will try to encode their email address when posting to a newsgroup, such as "joe@dont.spam.me.hotmail.com"? This is fine for fooling today's email scrapers (let's presume), but how does Joe know that in a few years the email scrapers won't be clever enough to parse his feeble attempt at data-hiding?

The same principle -- that tommorow's AI will crack today's data -- applies to every email or blog post you now write, to any documents or spreadsheets you upload to Google Office, and to your browse and search histories. All your data goes onto the hard-drives of network computers -- which are relatively relatively dumb and inert, now. But in 30 years those computers will not be dumb. They will, somehow, be part of a supercomputer which will parse language and make (artificial) conceptual connections among all of your data; an integrated, subtle, accurate picture of you will emerge. This cannot be in doubt. We have every reason to believe that Google's fundamental strategy is to build that supercomputer. And why wouldn't they (or someone else) do it? There are six billion market forces behind such a strategy. All that is in question is the length of time until that supercomputer exists, i.e., the length of time before privacy as we now know it is dead.

We cannot predict what will be done with the data we are thoughtlessly dumping onto today's servers, but we can predict that someone -- maybe you, maybe me -- is not going to like it.

Functional programming versus patterns

2007-01-31T14:13:00.000-08:00

I haven't worked with a functional programming language since college, where LISP was big; I haven't touched Ruby or the C# 3.0 preview as of yet. Today I learned a couple of fascinating things about them: functional programs inherently support concurrent execution (Hejlsberg articulates this); and -- more of a "wow!" for me -- functional languages don't need no stinking design patterns:

In a functional language one does not need design patterns because the language is likely so high level, you end up programming in concepts that eliminate design patterns all together. Once such pattern is an Adapter pattern (how is it different from Facade again? Sounds like somebody needed to fill more pages to satisfy their contract). It is eliminated once a language supports a technique called currying.

I admit appreciating the dig at the pretentious and unreadable Gang of Four. But the important point is this: although we software engineers think of them as these happy helpful things, the very utility of design patterns reflects the inherent impedance between (imperative) programming and the software solutions we want to build. There is tremendous conceptual baggage involved in implementing a working system, and much of that baggage is necessitated by our implementation paradigms.

Now, whether or not this doesn't have to be the case, and functional programming's poop doesn't smell, as coffeemug at defmacro.org is implying, I don't know.

Niners

2007-01-30T09:40:00.000-08:00

Dahlia made nine-months yesterday. I have to see her pictures from months ago to believe how much her look has changed already. She continues to be very curious and ambitious, and happy happy happy. Do not get into her line of sight, for she will pummel you with baby smiles until you melt.

We've been making more of an effort to read books with Dahlia, which is harder with the second child. She really enjoys classics like Huggy Buggy Shapes and Baby Boo!, even between nibbles on the book edges. I also get her up to the piano whenever I think of it, and she immediately lays down some chords; we'll see if this interest in the keyboard lasts, but it's seeming she's a natural lover of music.

I often threaten, in the morning, to take Dahlia to work with me, because she's such a cute little squirt ball -- couldn't I just set her on my desk next to the plant? Alas, she would tire of that. And she would try to eat the plant's dirt. But yesterday I did have the whole family up to the new office. My company's just relocated to a big building with glass elevators looking out on an impressive atrium. Elias loved it, noting the large air ducts (he loves to talk about large air ducts), then wanted to ride the elevators all day. Dilly just hung on Amy's front, taking all the sites in and forcing my coworkers to do that melt-until-you-smile-back thing.

Having a baby with you is like having a very powerful weapon, one which cuts through all grumpy-adult seriousness. Such a weapon is dangerous, though, because it has no "off" switch, and must soon be removed from places of employment before all production ceases and starvation begins to set in. I seem to recall that this type of civil-degeneration-due-to-babies was explored in an old Star Trek episode, no?

Link shuffle

2007-01-26T09:45:00.000-08:00

I'm updating my humble links section:

Adding: The0phrastus, a software engineer-by-day and SF writer-by-love, apparently, who reads the snot out of Aristotle and paints nice pictures, such as a stylized nude of war-winning Athena, for fun.

Adding: Artchive, an archive of high-quality scans of fine art, such as breathtaking details of Mona Lisa.

Adding: Acid Free Paper, the thoughtful posts of an Objectivist fiction writer.

Dropping: Rough Type, because although Carr is justly and intelligently critical of the fall of civilization as manifest by far too many collectivist, anti-intellectual web-biz heads, there is good reason so many consider his blog to be a firehose of hatred. (Which reminds me of a funny comic-strip frame I saw years ago, about Jean-Paul Sartre at Christmastime: "Just look at this toy elf -- it's so hateful.")

Dropping: Charles Krauthammer, because not only have I realized he's not the somewhat-principled (ouch) defender of civilization I once thought (he's just one more rationalizer of neoconservative nonsense), but today he's even suggesting that a massive energy tax would somehow be an instance of "the essence of capitalism." Smoking something, he is. PrairiePundit supplies links to all the daily analyses of war I could want anyway.

Moving: The Intellectual Activist, from my Philosophy link-section to the Politics link-section. Although this has nothing directly to do with Tracinski's recent (though some say hardly surprising) bomb that philosophy doesn't really do anything, I am working on what I want to say about that.

Etymology search

2007-01-26T09:21:00.000-08:00

Want some hints about the etymology of a word, and somehow you've misplaced your 145-pound Oxford English Dictionary? Etymonline might be a good place to start. (Found via The0phrastus.)

Is CCDD part of TDD?

2007-01-25T10:33:00.000-08:00

Does test-driven development (TDD) entail what I'd like to call client-code driven development (CCDD)? Sells contrasted them in 2004, while admitting that what he called "client-driven development" (confusingly, since it more readily labels something else) may just be a degenerate case of TDD. Yesterday, Box noted what a good thing Sells's approach is. I agree.

Although CCDD -- which, in ad hoc form, must be just about as old as programming itself -- doesn't seem to be referenced explicitly in some common overviews of TDD, I find that in practice TDD entails CCDD.

In TDD, the software engineer follows this recipe for success:

1) write test A for a requirement
2) run test A, see it fail
3) implement production code
4) run test A, see it pass
5) go to 1, proceeding to test B

This appears simpliciter to define a fail-safe process for writing code. But if this is all you've got, as soon as you start, big questions arise about how to proceed that this recipe does not address. The rub is that step #1 assumes a test of something specific -- but what? Oftentimes, for me, the target production code is some method, but how was it chosen? The tests for method Foo() may drive the implementation of Foo(), but they cannot drive the need for Foo().

A wider scope is needed to choose which Foo() and which Bar() to create when and where. In a sense, one can stay true to the TDD dogma and say that higher-level tests -- ultimately, the user tests for stories and requirements -- have the necessary scope to drive all narrower decisions. My point is that, in practice, the meat of this process entails writing, over and over again, client-code calls to code that doesn't exist yet -- which forks a sub-process for the software engineer: these tendered client-code calls are the proximate causes of dependent units of code, whose implementations will be driven by their own tests.

In effect, tests will drive an implementation, which itself often "drives" the need for more code and thus more tests. CCDD is an intrinsic part of TDD.

Why people write?

2007-01-17T15:47:00.000-08:00

Quote of the day (meaning, the day that I found it):

Virtually every useful tutorial in the world was written by a moron-turned-expert.

Best Pleo video yet

2007-01-03T09:46:00.000-08:00

Yet another article on the forthcoming baby dinosaur robot, this one has a good five-minute video without any monologue, just an example round of playing with a Pleo: waking him up, poking at him playfully, inducing him to peer over the edge of a table, then picking him up until he goes back to sleep. The user in the video is the inventor. The three-page article is interesting too, giving background on the Idahoan inventor, who use to be a mime before creating the consumer-sensation Furby (which looks almost as annoying as those singing-and-dancing snowmen advertised during the holidays) and earning himself $10 million.

To be released in March at $250, the Pleo seems an unlikely purchase for us, but it sure is tempting. I'm just fascinated by the fact that we are at the cusp of the age of robots, and this will go down as one of the first mass-market attempts at a life-like robot. But then I am not sure if I want the kids to be around a robot pet just yet. Would it be fun for more than a week, then become a very expensive toy mistake? At the other extreme, would Elias get so emotionally attached to it that he'd cry when it breaks? What if he breaks it himself, will he be devastated? And is it just wrong to love a robot -- or is it good to develop a sense of both what a robot is and isn't? And isn't having pets and toys which need gentle care while they are alive/functioning a good part of life? Et cetera.

For my own part, I want to know more about the AI ware to get a good idea of how complex and therefore interesting this thing really is. Sounds like it is programmable to some extent (or maybe you can't write scripts, as you can for Lego bots, you can just set the Pleo's personality parameters), but there's not much it can physically do besides sleep, purr, wiggle, walk, and respond to pokes and pets. Hmm, sounds like a cat, minus the barf and litterbox ... that's starting to sound like a pretty good investment. Maybe this should be the marketing line: It's cheaper than a year of cat food.

UPDATE: Bill Gates compares, in five pages, the robotics industry today to the software industry of 30 years ago. Carr takes a quick glance.

Gates confirms something for me: the biggest challenges in robotics are software problems. But I'm skeptical of his suggestion that robotics is especially in need of multi-threaded software. His example of a robot too busy adjusting its drive motor to notice an imminent cliff is silly -- even Office bloatware is rarely that unresponsive -- and his praise for Microsoft's "concurrency and coordination runtime" just sounds like an ad to me. (Microsoft is obviously playing catch-up in robotics to other software giants ... like Lego.) If we've learned anything in software, it's that task switching on a Von Neuman architecture is a really, really good way to achieve virtual simultaneity. Moderately complex multithreaded programs are not just "difficult" to write, they're just shy of impossible for humans to get bug-free.

Montessori method turns 100

2007-01-03T08:41:00.000-08:00

Here's a picture of opening day of the Casa dei Bambini (home of the children), Rome, Italy, January 6th, 1907. More info here.

Snodgrass for president

2007-01-02T11:35:00.000-08:00

My post title may be juveline, but it gives some sense of how impressed I am with two articles on our war situation by Colonel Tom Snodgrass (found via PrairiePundit).

The first article begins with a quote of Clausewitz -- so you know where this is going. What follows is dispassionate analysis of the steps the West would have to take to win in Iraq and the wider Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). His identification of the cardinal errors of both the Left (we can't win!) and the Right (we are winning!) during Vietnam obviously applies just as well today.

Not to claim this summarizes the article, I can't resist quoting this pearl: "political negotiation has a Crusader's chance in Mecca of succeeding."

The second article gives a sketch of how US leaders became epistemologically resistant to the concept of victory after WW2, most notably in 1961, and we are still in that dark valley -- thus our current operations are fundamentally police actions premised on socio-political fantasy, and destined to fail. The critical issue raised in this essay is whether or not a modern democracy can sustain and win a war. I think: obviously it can, if it wants to -- but we will not want to without a lot more of this type of thinking.

McCoffee blues

2007-01-02T11:09:00.000-08:00

New Year's Resolution-time being prime time to review dietary choices, we made the mistake this weekend of imbibing the "nutritional" information for our favorite Starbucks drinks. It is hardly surprising that most of the drinks are sugar- and fat-bombs, but the bright side is that this demotivation dovetails nicely with another resolution: to spend less money.

The only good news for fans is that, as of Wednesday, Starbucks in Portland will have no trans fats in their foods -- though I don't know if that includes the all-evil "whip" which crowns the best* Starbucks drinks.

* "Best" is used in a purely relativistic sense here, since Starbucks is incapable of making an actual latte or cappucino -- or even, some would say, a good cup of coffee. But luckily, for any of those treats, Portland is Mecca. You have not lived until you've had a Stumptown cappucino in the downtown shop that is so cool, you have to be unemployed and in a band to get in.

Every family's got one...

2006-12-19T21:03:00.000-08:00

Someone with a lot of spunk, that is. In my case it is "Grandma Margaret", as Elias calls her, my 93-year-old grandmother. In this picture she enjoys some imaginary tea Elias has prepared. Grandma has more energy and optimism than I do at less than half her age, I've never seen her grouchy, and even now as she is working through some severe arthritis issues she is able to maintain a humorous spirit, and finds a way to turn the conversation again and again to how everyone else is doing.