Isaac Smith

Hibernation

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:11:01 -0500

Bears do it, bats do it, even hedgehogs from Europe do it. I’m doing it too — not quitting the Internet, but scaling back, conserving resources, while waiting for warmer, brighter times to pontificate. See you all in the spring.

"Clothes should have words on them like fish should have clothes on them."

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 13:11:50 -0500

“Clothes should have words on them like fish should have clothes on them.”

- YES.

"Sadly this, if nothing else, is what unites us. This dreadful unease. This feeling that every option..."

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 10:06:12 -0500

“Sadly this, if nothing else, is what unites us. This dreadful unease. This feeling that every option we have is a bad one. And this resentment we feel from being told that it has to be this way, that there are no other options, because these are the rules of the game. But like Poe said, ‘there’s games and then there’s life. They ain’t the same thing.’ It doesn’t have to be this way.”

- From a great essay in McSweeney’s on Occupy Wall Street.

Remember: Uzbeks are the weak link in the great chain of...

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 22:35:28 -0500

Remember: Uzbeks are the weak link in the great chain of socialism.

Other great sketches from the “CCCP1” episode of SCTV include Tibor’s Tractor (in which the soul of Nikita Khrushchev is reincarnated as farm equipment) and What Fits into Russia.

While digging up these clips, I also found CCCP.TV, which appears to be a collection of old video from the Soviet era.

Reading Film Critic Hulk’s dissection of the Twilight...

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 21:01:45 -0500

Reading Film Critic Hulk’s dissection of the Twilight series brought this humorous nugget to my attention, and I think we are all better for having watched it.

What Are College Sports For?

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:26:05 -0500

They’re not for child rape, I think we can all agree. But the scandal¹ of Jerry Sandusky is the latest in a series of events calling into question the outsized influence of sports programs (football and basketball, mainly) in American universities. Too many schools today are basically sports franchises with a side business in education — and the players don’t even get paid! For all but a handful of universities, sports are money-losing propositions at a time when tuition keeps spiraling upward. Indeed, I can think of no other country that organizes its education system the way we do, where something ancillary to academic education has become not only one of the major draws, but can even distort a university’s own sense of purpose.

But what are college sports for — or any school sports program, for that matter? It has something to do with teaching virtue, doesn’t it? Or that’s what we tell ourselves, in any case.² When you play a sport, a team sport in particular, you (supposedly) learn about working together, following the rules, confidence, fairness, losing well, winning well, &c. Obviously, these aren’t qualities that couldn’t be learned elsewhere, but sports are a convenient vehicle for introducing them by taking advantage of young people’s natural competitive instincts. That would militate in favor of intramural leagues, maybe even intercollegiate matches between cross-town rivals; but would it entail the massive, profit-driven system that is the National Collegiate Athletic Association today? I doubt it.

Another thing that college sports could be for comes from the Roman concept of mens sana in corpore sano, or a healthy mind in a healthy body. Stereotypes about jocks and nerds notwithstanding, doing some kind of vigorous physical activity is good for the brain. That activity, however, could be anything: It could be football or basketball, but it could also be ballroom dancing or parkour; I myself took aikido classes in college, attracted as I was to the whole “achieve world peace through kicking ass” message. But again, nothing about that principle entails anything like the NCAA or big-time college sports as we know it.

Part of the problem may be the mixed legacy of the university system itself. In the Anglo-American world, at least, colleges used to function mainly as finishing schools for the aristocracy, where excelling at one’s studies was not required, and was even frowned upon. The birth of the modern research university and the rise of the meritocracy has largely swept that tradition away, but it remains the case that higher education is pulled in two contrary directions: In one, it is a bastion of privilege; and in the other, it is a servant to the community and the public at large. Although the headline college sports are incredibly popular, they strike me as being in the former camp, existing mainly for the benefit of university administrators, sports program directors, and alumni boosters, but not necessarily the students or the broader community. It’s a situation that is proving to be untenable, as the events of the last year (e.g., Penn State, U. Miami, the Taylor Branch article, the creation of the National College Players Association) have shown.

Is scandal too weak a word for the allegations being lodged against Sandusky and those at Penn State who are accused of enabling him? Perhaps; but then I am always reminded that “scandal” comes into the English language from the Greek word skandalon, which is frequently used in the New Testament to refer to traps, snares, stumbling blocks, and occasions for sin. “Woe unto the world because of scandals!” Jesus says. Given the behavior of Joe Paterno and others who witnessed or were informed of what was allegedly going on, “scandal” seems appropriate. ↩
Prior to Sandusky’s indictment, Joe Paterno was widely viewed as not only a great football coach, but a moral leader as well. But it’s telling that praise for Penn State football under Paterno often also mentioned how rare it was for a big-time sports program to not be racked by scandal, albeit of the comparatively petty, money-under-the-table kind. ↩

"Dating presents itself as an education in human relationships. In fact it’s an anti-education. You..."

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 14:40:28 -0500

“Dating presents itself as an education in human relationships. In fact it’s an anti-education. You could invent no worse preparation for love, for marriage, than the tireless pursuit of the perfect partner. Keep Looking, says dating. You’re Not Done Yet. What About That One? And That One? Dating, like the tyrant, seeks perfection (within a certain price range). Whereas the heart, like the eye, can only cling to imperfections: her funny stride, and the way her voice breaks, child-like, on the phone. And so the dater, self-baffling, seeks what the heart cannot understand.”

- n+1 personals: Dating: An Anti-Education

St. Vincent — Surgeon The song is based on a diary entry...

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:48:06 -0500

St. Vincent — Surgeon

The song is based on a diary entry by Marilyn Monroe.

"Here’s my main problem with the debate around “should people study liberal arts or STEM in college?”..."

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:00:50 -0400

“Here’s my main problem with the debate around “should people study liberal arts or STEM in college?” is that it portrays a false dichotomy. Until recently, there was little separation between engineering and the liberal arts. We really ought to go back to that. We need people with a familiarity with both science and humanities. In a perfect world, this is what high school should provide. In the current world, just as Oxford came up with PPE in the 20th century as a replacement for Greats (ie Classics—isn’t that an amazing name for a major?) some college needs to come up with a 21st century version that might be, like, Math, Econ & Literature. Or something. (France has a post-secondary curriculum, “Humanities and Social Sciences”, whose quadruple focus is philosophy, math, literature and economics/sociology. Not a bad education, I’d venture.)”

- Pacal-Emmanuel Gobry.

"Now, since I’m going to talk for a moment about culture, full disclosure is probably in order,..."

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 10:00:20 -0400

“Now, since I’m going to talk for a moment about culture, full disclosure is probably in order, to protect myself against allegations of conflict of interest and ethical turpitude: (1) Geographically I am a Seattleite, of a Saturnine temperament, and inclined to take a sour view of the Dionysian Bay Area, just as they tend to be annoyed and appalled by us. (2) Chronologically I am a post-Baby Boomer. I feel that way, at least, because I never experienced the fun and exciting parts of the whole Boomer scene—just spent a lot of time dutifully chuckling at Boomers’ maddeningly pointless anecdotes about just how stoned they got on various occasions, and politely fielding their assertions about how great their music was. But even from this remove it was possible to glean certain patterns, and one that recurred as regularly as an urban legend was the one about how someone would move into a commune populated by sandal-wearing, peace-sign flashing flower children, and eventually discover that, underneath this facade, the guys who ran it were actually control freaks; and that, as living in a commune, where much lip service was paid to ideals of peace, love and harmony, had deprived them of normal, socially approved outlets for their control-freakdom, it tended to come out in other, invariably more sinister, ways. Applying this to the case of Apple Computer will be left as an exercise for the reader, and not a very difficult exercise.”

- With excerpts from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the late Steve Jobs showing him trash-talking everyone from President Obama to John Mayer, I couldn’t help but remember this famous passage from Neal Stephenson’s essay, “In the Beginning was the Command Line.”

interfluidity » The lump of unfairness fallacy

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 19:29:53 -0400

interfluidity » The lump of unfairness fallacy:

mwfrost:

Fairness should never be a policy afterthought. Widely adhered norms of fair play are among the most valuable public goods a society can hold. A large part of why the financial crisis has been so corrosive is that people understand that major financial institutions violated these norms and got away with it, which leaves all of us uncertain about what our own standards of behavior should be and what we can reasonably expect from others. When policy wonks, however well meaning, treat fairness as a public relations matter, they are corroding social infrastructure that is more important than the particular problems they mean to fix.

"While I will readily confess I find it odd as something of a Burkean that I am sympathetic to these..."

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 15:44:45 -0400

“While I will readily confess I find it odd as something of a Burkean that I am sympathetic to these protestors, they are not looking to trot out the guillotines, in the main (though I did spot a “Behead the Fed” sign!), but rather, they have smelled the radicalism of body blows dealt to a representative democratic system presented by almost unfettered oligarch-like behavior among too many elites wholly disconnected from, yes, the 99% they speak of. They are acting to secure conservative aims of re-balancing a society that is becoming dangerously unmoored and increasingly bent asunder. They want accountability and dignity and prospects. Their leaders have failed them. So they have taken to the street to lead themselves.”

- Greg Djerejian, the Halley’s Comet of blogging, has a (mostly) positive assessment of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Well worth your time.

Video

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 11:19:01 -0400

A "Debt Jubilee"?

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 09:37:05 -0400

A "Debt Jubilee"?:

The idea seems to be gaining steam, though the usual caveats — i.e., total political paralysis — apply. As I’ve said, though, a higher inflation target would likely be a fairer and more efficient way to achieve the goal of debt relief than targeted measures for homeowners or whomever.

Reducing the Trade Deficit as the Keynesian Key to Growth

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 08:42:05 -0400

Thomas Geoghegan has an excellent essay in the latest issue of the Nation that aims to move beyond caricatures of Keynesian thought and explain what the man actually believed about getting economies out of depressions. As it turns out, Keynes was very concerned about countries running trade deficits and, related to that, the crowding out of investment in real goods and services by the financial sector:

For Keynes the key to getting the rich to invest in labor on the construction of durable assets was to hold down the windfall returns from loans, buyouts and financial speculation — the income he would call “interest.” That’s the nub of our country’s trade deficit problem. In Book VI [of the General Theory], Keynes adumbrates the one big thing he learned from the Bourbons, the Habsburgs, John Locke and even Adam Smith about the importance of holding down the rate of interest to stimulate trade, to make it less attractive to “invest” in short-term derivatives and relatively more attractive to invest for the long term in widgets. Keynes put it this way: “It is impossible to study the notions to which the mercantilists were led by their actual experiences, without perceiving that there has been a chronic tendency throughout human history for the propensity to save to be stronger than the inducement to invest.”

This argument jibes with, among others, Simon Johnson’s warning of the banking industry’s takeover of American politics, as well as long-running labor-liberal critiques of the recent Anglo-American model of outsourcing manufacturing and replacing it with financial services.

It’s important, however, to draw this out in more detail. To begin with, looking to Germany, as Geoghegan does, as a model of a more export-oriented economy is probably not a such a good idea right now, for obvious reasons. Admittedly, that has less to do with Germany’s actual economy than its hand in creating the eurozone and the insular, unaccountable European Central Bank.

More significant is the fact that closing the trade deficit isn’t something that can be achieved by reverting to the status quo with respect to manufacturing, which is what usually comes to mind when talking of boosting exports. Despite frequent lamentations that we no longer “make things”, the US actually remains the top manufacturing country in the world; it’s only the number of people employed in manufacturing that has fallen off a cliff. Some of that is due to outsourcing, but it also reflects rising productivity and automation. As it happens, Keynes addressed this question of technology displacing labor directly in “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (PDF); in it he predicted that the vastly richer world of 2030, a century after the essay’s publication, would allow people to work as little as 15 hours per week, while enjoying the same levels of prosperity. Obviously, that isn’t likely to come to pass for a variety of reasons — see this discussion in Dissent from a few years back — but the point is that the question of full employment needs to be disaggregated from the question of innovation and productivity improvements. American manufacturing today is much more efficient than it’s ever been, as Matt Yglesias has pointed out; it doesn’t strike me as advisable to give up that advantage for the sake of jobs, any more than it would be to give up modern farming equipment for the same purpose.

Indeed, if we want to discuss reducing the trade deficit and increasing employment, why don’t we start by observing that a great deal of the US trade deficit is oil? If it’s true that trade deficits impede long-term growth, then probably the most pro-growth measure the US could undertake is to vastly reduce oil consumption, which would have the nice side effect of insulating the economy against future price shocks. Alternatively, the US could more aggressively increase domestic oil production, but given the relatively trivial amount of untapped reserves, that doesn’t seem like a viable strategy.

"To tell the time using a sundial you’d need calculus."

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 17:44:42 -0400

“To tell the time using a sundial you’d need calculus.”

- NASA discovers a “Tatooine-like” planet orbiting a binary star system. I’m now concocting a SF story about a planet in a binary system where a Bronze Age civilization, out of necessity, discovers calculus millennia before their Earth counterparts, subsequently taking to the stars and conquering less-advanced planets in solitary star systems. Actually, I think I just recreated the backstory to Stargate.

A Brief Rant on Money

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:00:00 -0400

In a time of uncertainty like ours, money fetishism can take hold rather easily. You know — goldbugs, Bitcoiners, folks who think that a mild uptick in inflation is a sign that the President and the Fed are “debasing the currency” — those kinds of people. Why is that?

If you’ve ever taken a intro economics course, you know that money serves three functions:

As a unit of account;
As a medium of exchange;
As a store of value.

Function 1 is pretty self-explanatory. Things get more problematic with 2 and 3, since they are, at heart, in conflict with each other. As a medium of exchange, money is there to facilitate transactions; and thus, more money, more transactions. As a store of value, however, the less money there is in the system, the better, as it drives up the value of the money that does exist. And yet, there is a paradox: If money were purely a store of value, it would be worthless; and if money were purely a medium of exchange, no one would use it when buying or selling anything.

Why? Think about Bitcoin: With the maximum supply forever fixed at 21 million, those in possession of them are far more likely to hoard them and have them appreciate in value than spend them or sell them in those rare parts of the world where Bitcoins are accepted as currency. And indeed, as James Surowiecki has documented, that’s what’s been happening — which has had the effect of casting doubt on Bitcoin’s future.¹

At the same time, worries about currency debasement aren’t completely, er, baseless. If you’ve got 80 percent inflation and shopkeepers are changing prices on a daily basis, as was the case in Brazil not long ago, you’ve got a problem. Fortunately, developed countries are nowhere near suffering from high inflation, and are unlikely to do so anytime soon.

The point is that a successful currency keeps both factors in balance. A little inflation, in most circumstances, helps the money supply facilitate the functioning of the real economy, while preserving the bulk of asset values. At present, though, the money supply is too heavily weighted in favor of the latter than the former. That’s why I hope that Ben Bernanke’s recent remarks about inflation are a sign the Fed will press ahead with monetary expansion later this month. If only the same could be said about the European Central Bank…

After peaking in June, the value of Bitcoins in dollar terms has been on a downward slide — including a massive selloff last Friday. ↩

natashavc: New York 1916 (via blackandwtf / nevver)

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 18:25:33 -0400

natashavc:

New York 1916

(via blackandwtf / nevver)

Dave Winer: RSS is supposed to be really simple

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 09:40:39 -0400

Dave Winer: RSS is supposed to be really simple:

One of the creators of RSS says that the problem of RSS overload is due to the way most RSS readers are designed, not the format itself:

If you miss five days of reading the news because you were on vacation (good for you!) the newspaper you read the first day back isn’t five times as thick as the normal day’s paper. And it doesn’t have your name on the cover saying “Joe you haven’t read 1,942,279 articles since this paper started.” It doesn’t put you on the hook for not reading everything anyone has ever written. The paper doesn’t care, so why does your RSS reader?

Jacqui Cheng: RSS Is Poison

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 16:38:00 -0400

Jacqui Cheng: RSS Is Poison:

I’m an active user of Google Reader, to put it mildly; but even I can recognize that having an information firehose doesn’t necessarily lead to becoming more informed, still less productive. Fortunately, Google Reader’s own trends feature allows you to easily see which sites you actually read regularly, which makes feed-pruning a relatively simple task.

The problem of RSS poisoning also suggests a few other things:

The recommendation of the mid-aughts regarding blogging — i.e., post as often as possible, even if your thoughts aren’t fully fleshed out — needs to be discarded. Given the proliferation of content, the motto of a blogger in the 2010s should be, “better fewer, but better.”
The limited bandwidth that any one person has to process information means that any one author or publication attaining a mass audience will be exceedingly difficult; narrowcasting, or intense readership from a few people will by far be the more likely norm.
At the same time, some people — and these are likely to be the most widely read people — are going to have to subject themselves to RSS poisoning in order to avoid the creation of thousands or millions of echo chambers. We all have to make sacrifices, I suppose.