Ramblings

1. Posting this list online for the benefit of the approximately 3 readers of my crappy blog.
2. Reading about Carriage Return and Line Feed characters in plaintext files. Nodding my head knowingly, since this, sadly, reminds me of my time in Iraq as Your Company's Computer Guy. I spent a full 12 hour shift once trying to figure out why my text file wasn't working with a specific program.
   
3. Taking this really long quiz to find out that no, I'm not an Austrian, but that I'm still surprisingly sympathetic to the Chicago School.
4. Reading MLK's Letter from Birmingham Jail, as I do every year.
5. Thinking about phone banking for Coakley, since health care reform sorta hinges on tomorrow's very close special election. Deciding against it because I'm lazy. I mean, I haven't even put on a shirt or my contacts yet, and it's 1pm.
6. Reading through the archives of Buffalo Wings & Vodka and wondering whether it's making me want to go to law school more or making me not want to go at all.
7. Going through law school spam, wondering if my numbers really are so terrible that only 4th tier schools are emailing me. The answer, of course, is yes, my numbers really are that terrible. And my googling reveals that indeed, some 4th tier schools are desperate for applicants.
   
8. Going through my throwaway email address, finding out that the President of the United States and his staff have been spamming me for months about health care reform.
9. Spending about 30 minutes looking for the post where Tyler Cowen observed the optimal lists tend not to have nice round numbers. I didn't find it. But I did spend half an hour not cleaning up this mess around me, or washing the sink full of dishes.
   

 

In this amazing post at the official Google blog, Google exec David Drummond outlines the background of Google's complicated relationship with China, and explains that they will no longer be providing filtering services at google.cn. He also explains that it may very well mean the end of Google China:

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

 

A lot of people are upset that the intelligence agencies didn't stop Umar Mutallab from smuggling explosives on board an American civilian airplane, despite his father alerting U.S. authorities beforehand.

To be fair, this was the email he sent:

Subject: URGENT ACTION REQUIRED

Dearest Sir:
I will like to begin by introducing myself to you. I am Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, a wealthy Nigerian businessman. I was formerly the chairman of the FIRST BANK PLC, the oldest financial institution in Nigeria. I hope that this letter meets you in a good mood. Though I have not met with you before, but I believe that you will be able to use thisinformation about my family.

My son Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab departed my beloved Nigeria to pursue studies in Arabic and mechanical engineering. Recently he has been associating with extremists in the Yemen. He intends to use attacks on the United States of America. You must arrange for this transaction to stop. Please contact me for more information on how we may proceed. Please we urge you to keep this matter very confidential until it's threat is completed.

Yours Truly,
Alhaji Umaru Mutallab

I mean, not everyone checks their spam folder every day, ok? Cut these guys some slack.

 

I'm sick of hearing "But the decade starts in 2001 so it ends at the end of 2010!" Stop it. You are pissing everybody off.

You may argue that 1900 was part of the 19th century, but you can't argue that it was part of the "eighteen hundreds." Similarly, 1990 was part of the "nineties" and not the "eighties." It is therefore popular convention to group decades as the 10 years from years ending in 0 to years ending in 9.

That is all.

 

I found this entire exchange to be hilarious. Best moment of unintentional comedy was when a commenter said that they don't respect Ta Nehisi Coates because he has an unusual name, while praising Sarah Palin. As if TNC chose his own name, and Sarah didn't name her children Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, and Trig. A close second was the entire point of the post flying over Althouse's head and demanding an apology, while making the same mistake that started the whole thing.

All I can do is take to the hallways and yell "BLOG WAR EVERYBODY!"

 

GEN McChrystal is testifying before Congress this week about the change in strategy and the Afghanistan surge outlined by President Obama earlier. Spencer Ackerman, one of my favorite defense reporters, explains that Republicans are misunderestimating GEN McChrystal's loyalty to the President. Trying to use a military commander as a tool to bludgeon the political opposition is disgraceful. And it's not working anyway.

So ClimateGate looks to be a lot worse than I originally believed. The Bayesian in me, however, still sees nothing close to enough evidence to overturn my original belief. So if the tree ring data may have been improperly "corrected," that doesn't change the fact that the polar ice caps and ice shelves are shrinking rapidly while glaciers are receding. It doesn't change the fact that changes in seasonal weather patterns (e.g. glacial snow melt in the Himalayas) will lead to sweeping changes in agricultural production in some of the least politically stable regions in the world. Or that the basic mechanism for global warming was established and confirmed long ago.

It's time to think about gift giving. Some economists, who apparently like to model human behavior after simple interest-maximizing robots, claim that gift giving is economically inefficient, and that it's better to give cash. I dunno. I think that gift-giving can very well leave society economically better off. I like to think that people don't always know what they want, and that sometimes the people who know them may know enough to give them something that they'd love more than the cash it's worth, AND would never have thought to buy for themselves in the first place. My mom once bought me a North Face bag that I love and that has gone all over Hawaii, Texas, Alaska, and Europe. If I would have known such a product existed, I would have bought it myself. But I didn't, and that's what makes it a great gift. My mom, apparently an awesome gift-giver, also bought me some pretty expensive headphones while I was in Iraq. Again, if I would've known how useful they were, I would've gotten them for myself for that money. That's the kind of gift that people should be striving for. Think about it - a professional chef has expertise to buy a kitchen utensil his friend, the amateur home cook, may appreciate. Everyone has some kind of expertise over their loved ones - it's appropriate to use it when selecting gifts. So go out and buy gifts that are better than the cash you spend - by buying things that the recipient didn't even know he/she wanted. Easier said than done, but articulating the ideal makes it easier to strive towards the goal.

 

If you have never heard of Thomas Kuhn, you are not entitled to comment on ClimateGate. Don't tell me how science is supposed to work when you haven't even read the core texts in the discipline of the history and philosophy of science. In any case, I'm with Steve Levitt on this one. And his comments to that post prompted me to say something.

So. Let's recap. There are gatekeepers in scientific journals. They don't publish everything they see. In fact, they will interpret and massage data and views into their worldviews. This is ordinary, in fact labeled "normal science" by Thomas Kuhn. It's not political any more than ordinary office politics is. Scientists resist information that goes against their theories, until the information can no longer be ignored. Then someone steps in and kick starts a scientific revolution (aka paradigm shift). This is like Intro to Philosophy of Science type stuff. And these ideas have been refined further by criticism and commentary by the likes of Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, and Paul Feyeraband.

It's not every day that I get to say "hey my philosophy degree gives me expertise on this topic in the news," so I'm going to savor it.

 

From SMBC:

 

There is a huge number of people saying stupid stuff like "if only military bases weren't essentially gun-free zones, the Ft. Hood tragedy wouldn't have happened." This is retarded. I mean, if even the relatively smart commenters at The Volokh Conspiracy are holding this opinion, then this viewpoint needs to be addressed.

First, trying to formulate policy based on an incredibly rare event is stupid. Especially when such a policy is guaranteed to have unintended negative consequences. People who say that soldiers should carry weapons must have never seen soldiers get in stupid fights for stupid reasons. I don't know if the accidental discharge/negligent discharge reports are available to the public, but armed soldiers quite obviously increase risk of potentially fatal accidents. In a war zone, the risk is worth it. At home, it isn't.

Second, saying that this policy would do much to prevent such an occurrence is blissfully naive. You know, I remember a base where EVERY soldier carried weapons and ammo EVERYWHERE they went. It doesn't help prevent these things.

Finally, proponents of an armed soldier policy implicitly suggest that MPs and on-base police departments are insufficient. At Ft. Hood, a civilian cop (who by the way is a badass and deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom) responded and exchanged fire within 3 minutes of the start of the shooting. That is nearly ideal. In many ways, arming the soldiers would have made this situation MUCH worse. Even if the shooter was taken down before reloading, having many armed people working independently could have gotten more people killed. Initial reports were that there were at least 3 shooters. If the cops believed that, and everyone had guns drawn, it's not hard to see how additional innocent victims would have died for the crime of being proactive.

So. Again, I stress that there aren't much in the way of lessons to be learned, and that people shouldn't use isolated tragedy to advance political agendas.

 

James Fallows is right when he says that there are no deeper meanings in mass murder events than "people are sometimes nuts." Let's give the victims and their families the respect they deserve by not shoehorning their experiences into our own political theories. And this letter that Kevin Drum published, from an eyewitness, was more informative than the total of everything that cable news has produced in the past 36 hours.

I still remember going through SRP myself and how densely packed the rooms were. The vast majority of the people don't really know what's going on - it's like cattle being herded around single file. A lone gunman could certainly do quite a bit of damage in that situation. But, as Kevin Drum's letter explains, having that many medical personnel around, as well as nearly everyone there being competent at first aid (from the combat lifesaver course that nearly every deployed soldier gets) means that the death toll could have been much, much higher.

My heart goes out to the Ft Hood community. This is a nightmare for so many people, especially on the eve of deployment.

 

Delayed posting written on 10/15: I don't like to post more than one thing per day, but I really wanted to comment on this. As this goes up I should be flying somewhere over the Atlantic.

Medicare Advantage is the reason why I don't take conservative concerns seriously, when it comes to public (government-owned) health insurance and health care costs. Here's Ezra Klein, a Washington Post blogger who I just recently found out is younger than me:

Philip Rucker takes a good, hard look at the scam that is Medicare Advantage. Essentially, it works like this: Congress allowed private HMOs to compete for Medicare patients under the rationale that they could offer better service at lower cost than the government. They couldn't. So Republicans in Congress began boosting their payments, to the point that Medicare Advantage gets paid 114 percent what Medicare gets paid to care for a patient. That leads to some fun perks, like free gym memberships and complimentary aspirin and band-aids, which in turn leads seniors to defend the program because they like their perks. But it also means a lot of unnecessary expense for taxpayers.

So we have a program in which private insurers are only able to compete with public insurance when given a 14% advantage. That is a lot of money. And only 14% of that (or about 2% of the total Medicare Advantage cost) actually goes to increased benefits for seniors. Medicare itself is a program that disproportionately benefits the rich, and Medicare Advantage is even worse in this regard. Why should we continue to pay the insurance companies overpayments for something? Why is it that the "small government" conservatives (and I mean those quotes to be as sarcastic as is textually possible) like Sen. Kyl and Rep. Boehner are defending this clearly non-optimal, wasteful use of tax dollars?

We SHOULD allow seniors to opt out of Medicare and apply those savings to private insurers if they so choose. We SHOULDN'T give them a 14% bonus for doing so. In fact, it should probably be a 5-10% penalty, if the private insurance market were as efficient and awesome as some politicians are claiming they are (note: they are not). Since about a quarter of American seniors are on Medicare Advantage, ending the overpayment and shifting those costs onto improving traditional Medicare. Or expanding eligibility to younger people. Or giving the cash back to the American taxpayer. Or whatever.

So. Private insurers aren't as cost-efficient as the government. Costs are spiraling out of control. Conservatives seem very concerned about the increasing deficit (emphasis on "seem"), but suddenly don't like to eliminate clear examples of waste. Business as usual in D.C.

 

Malcolm Gladwell's latest piece focuses on the silent brain damage that many football players suffer from, and asks whether it's inherent in the sport or whether it can be prevented.

The stained tissue of Alzheimer's patients typically shows the two trademarks of the disease—distinctive patterns of the proteins beta-amyloid and tau. Beta-amyloid is thought to lay the groundwork for dementia. Tau marks the critical second stage of the disease: it's the protein that steadily builds up in brain cells, shutting them down and ultimately killing them. An immunostain of an Alzheimer's patient looks, under the microscope, as if the tissue had been hit with a shotgun blast: the red and brown marks, corresponding to amyloid and tau, dot the entire surface. But this patient's brain was different. There was damage only to specific surface regions of his brain, and the stains for amyloid came back negative. "This was all tau," Ann McKee, who runs the hospital's neuropathology laboratory, said. "There was not even a whiff of amyloid. And it was the most extraordinary damage. It was one of those cases that really took you aback." The patient may have been in an Alzheimer's facility, and may have looked and acted as if he had Alzheimer's. But McKee realized that he had a different condition, called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.), which is a progressive neurological disorder found in people who have suffered some kind of brain trauma. C.T.E. has many of the same manifestations as Alzheimer's: it begins with behavioral and personality changes, followed by disinhibition and irritability, before moving on to dementia. And C.T.E. appears later in life as well, because it takes a long time for the initial trauma to give rise to nerve-cell breakdown and death. But C.T.E. isn't the result of an endogenous disease. It's the result of injury. The patient, it turned out, had been a boxer in his youth. He had suffered from dementia for fifteen years because, decades earlier, he'd been hit too many times in the head.

McKee got up and walked across the corridor, back to her office. "There's one last thing," she said. She pulled out a large photographic blowup of a brain-tissue sample. "This is a kid. I'm not allowed to talk about how he died. He was a good student. This is his brain. He's eighteen years old. He played football. He'd been playing football for a couple of years." She pointed to a series of dark spots on the image, where the stain had marked the presence of something abnormal. "He's got all this tau. This is frontal and this is insular. Very close to insular. Those same vulnerable regions." This was a teen-ager, and already his brain showed the kind of decay that is usually associated with old age. "This is completely inappropriate," she said. "You don't see tau like this in an eighteen-year-old. You don't see tau like this in a fifty-year-old."

It's interesting, sure, but the whole time I was thinking about the Army's new focus on Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and its relationship with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I'm also wondering what the long-term effects of these wars will be. If it's possible for a man who boxes in his 20's later suffers from Alzheimer's-like symptoms in his 60's, the VA is going to need to fund and conduct more long-term research on the link between brain trauma and mental degeneration. Before veterans and their families start asking questions around 2050.

 

I mentioned last week that neither party really could say "if you like the health insurance you have you can keep it" because the status quo is unsustainable no matter what. Stuff will be changing whether Congress passes reform or not, no matter what policy they end up choosing (doing nothing counts as a choice).

On Tuesday, Max Baucus snapped at Mike Enzi (tied with Chuck Grassley for my least favorite senator at this point in time) and it was cool (and by cool I mean totally sweet). Tim Noah at Slate:

4:45 p.m.: Sen. Baucus is roused from his torpor after Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., grouses to Elmendorf that this bill will cause people to lose what health insurance coverage they have by taxing it away. "The fact is," Baucus answers, sounding sincerely annoyed, "you can't keep what you like in many, many cases without passing any law. And that's because employers are changing plans all the time." I don't think I've ever seen Baucus display irritation before. It's especially gratifying (given Baucus's bipartisan-to-a-fault outlook) to see him tell off a Republican.

Word.

 

I cringe whenever I hear Obama or any other health-care proponent say the line that we get to keep the health insurance we like. Frankly, it's not true and I'm pretty sure they know this.

Generally speaking, the most cost-effective health care coverage in this country tends to come from employer-based plans. Premiums enjoy a favored tax status (tax-deductible for the employer, non-taxable for the recipient), and large risk pools allow the insurers to provide the type of insurance normal human beings actually want - the kind that comes in to pay for rare, expensive stuff when necessary.

And I don't know anyone who expects to have the same employer in 2013 when all these proposed health care reforms take effect. Sorry - my friends and I are mostly in our mid-20's, which honestly is a time of rapid change in our careers and employers. In my case, I can't keep health insurance that I love (zero deductibles or co-pays, even when I go out of network for a $60k surgery) unless I agree to stay with a job I hate. Some of my friends MAY stay with their current employer for another 4 years, but it's hardly a guarantee for any of them.

Finally, there's no guarantee that the employers themselves won't cut benefits. The trend line is clearly in that direction, given the runaway cost of health care, and it's not completely unexpected for struggling companies to cut costs somewhere.

So no, we won't get to keep our current coverage, unless we're already on Medicare. I think policymakers are right to focus on the markets for individuals or small businesses, but they shouldn't lose sight of everyone else in the reform proposals. The system is broken, and I fear that those of us in the least-broken part of the system will be missing out on the best parts of reform.

EDIT: I guess this is all a roundabout way of saying that I support Sen. Wyden's free choice amendment to the Finance Committee bill.

 

Tim Ferriss has an excerpt from a new book called The Leap, covering Bill Gates' early years, which he says demonstrates that you don't have to take big gambles to achieve incredible success:

His family’s money and position provided cover for his youthful computing hijinks and helped assure that he would have the best education available. As for the famous Harvard dropout story, he didn’t really. Rather, he took a formal “leave of absence,” a kind of emotional umbilical cord that kept him tied to Harvard long after he had vacated the campus, just in case things didn’t work out. But by then, he had already turned the odds in his favor. After half a decade of dancing with the opportunity, beginning early in high school, he had already covered most of his downside risks. He knew, for example, that he loved the work, and the early Micro-Soft had projects in the pipeline.

Outliers explained that Bill Gates was at the perfect place at the perfect time to allow himself to take advantage of the computer revolution. All these little details of the early years just reinforces the notion that Bill Gates got hooked up by circumstances outside of his own control - his dad got him access to the computer at the local University, his mom got him in contact with IBM executives that led to the MS-DOS deal that put Microsoft on the map.

But if you read this excerpt, it's pretty clear that he had that perfect combination of marketing savvy and technical skills to go and make his own success. And that's pretty much how I view the world now - opportunities are mostly luck, but you still own your own success.

I'll have to try to remember this as I start looking towards the next phase of my career.

 

It feels like it happened an eternity ago.

Photo by Flickr user sizeofguam, used under a Creative Commons license.

 

From an IM conversation with my old roommate, an army brat of Indian ethnicity:
(11:49:34 AM) Shane: except you'd have to be comfortable around the rednecks
(11:49:52 AM) Sam: dude i grew up in killeen, texas
(11:50:26 AM) Sam: as far as i knew the only ethnicities that existed were rednecks, blacks, samoans, and koreans
(11:50:35 AM) Shane: and...your own?
(11:50:53 AM) Sam: i just assumed i was samoan for a while

 

Glenn Beck still has the ability to surprise me - my mouth actually gaped open for a few seconds at around the 50 second mark on this video:



Maybe he should perform some research on Google first.

 

I kinda called out Apple fanboys yesterday. Today I discovered that not only do Microsoft fanboys still exist, they are coming back out of the woodwork now that Windows 7 is coming out.

Read the comments on this article. I couldn't believe that there are people out there who actually still believe that Windows is the best. I also couldn't believe how many of them there were. And the spelling! How fun!

Linux users aren't any better, either. Just open a random Slashdot summary and start reading about why Linux or BSD is the best thing ever for computing.

But I want to know why people insist on defending the products they buy from criticism. I've sat and watched all sorts of arguments between people defending and attacking Blu Ray, Playstation, XBox, Nintendo, Windows, Macs, Nikons, Canons, and freaking everything else, from cell phones to automobiles. Dudes. Shut up. Nobody cares - when it comes time to buy a product, it's a LOT easier to do research when you're not cluttering up the forums with your misinformation. Most importantly, the company making the best stuff today won't necessarily be making the best stuff tomorrow - showing loyalty to a corporation is probably a sub-optimal consumption strategy.

 

For the approximately 2 people who care, I ended up getting the Dell over the Macbook. They shipped it with an unformatted SSD, which means I had to install my own OS. It's an amateur mistake that I highly doubt Apple would have made. And a handful of my Apple-using friends told me so. Repeatedly.

Fast forward a few weeks and I realize why I'm glad I'm not one of those "Apple guys" with the smug sense of superiority. I'm googling for some stuff and I stumble across this press release about LED backlit monitors. It's from April 2007. Down at the bottom is a smug Apple fanboy saying "Apple has been using the LED technology on a 24 inch wide screen for 8 months or more ... it is good to see that other companies are taking up Apples lead in this LED technology."

The press release was over 26 months old when that comment was made.