Attention Span

My favorite radio program, This American Life, covered the 1982 massacre in Dos Erres, Guatemala. Those few among the perpetrators who have been brought to trial have each been sentenced to over 6,000 years -- 30 years for each man, woman, and child murdered. And I thought: what if we made them serve it?

I'm not speaking of a fictional world in which criminals live for 6,000 years. I am speaking of a fictional world in which the living remember for 6,000 years. We dig up the graves of Egyptian kings and send their bodies around the world to be photographed and gawked at. Suppose we also kept the bodies of Egyptian murderers, never buried, in locked boxes -- unshipped, unphotographed, and ungawked. "Here stands ____, who on the twelfth day of the third month of a year 3,879 years before the birth of a man later deemed a god did rob, rape, and kill 202 people: ____ and ____ and ____ and.... Not to be released until March 12, 2181."

The living would fail at that project. They have not the fortitude for it. It feels just to say to the families of victims, "The murderer will pay with one lifetime for each he took." But the punishment of the dead weighs lightly upon the dead and heavily upon the living. The criminals would become celebrities, celebrated alongside the kings (even when the two were not the same to begin with). The cost of maintaining them would be astronomical, and within less than a millennium would dwarf that of maintaining living prisoners.  And under such conditions, their sentences would inevitably become political chess pieces.

Remembrance is an investment, and grief, and punishment. Each pays its dividends, and each carries its price.

You must pay for everything in this world, one way and another. There is nothing free, except the grace of God. 

-- Mattie Ross, "True Grit"

All the Children are Below Average

New research suggests that the canonical bell curve doesn't accurately characterize human performance. We aren't a small group of low performers, a small group of high performers, and a large group of average folks doing most of the work from the middle. In fact, in many areas, a small number of very high performers produce a disproportionate percentage of all output; the mean is much higher than the median.

In other words, in a meritocracy, the emergence of The One Percent is expected, and not just when it comes to finance.

What are the implications for our democratic values?

On Insurance: Follow-Up

I recently posted on the subject of health insurance and contraceptives. One aspect that I did not cover in that post is the financial one: how do we pay for health care, and which ways lead to better financial outcomes? Let me get into that now.

Dear Target: Don't Be Evil

There was an interesting article on NYTimes last month about how Target uses the data it gathers about you to guess -- very accurately -- whether you're pregnant. The fact that companies do things like this should not come as any surprise; what did you think those club cards were for, anyway? But one bit jumped out at me:

“We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them [...].

“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”

In other words: Target got explicit feedback that their customers hate being spied on. They think it's creepy. They get very angry. How did Target respond? Rather than respecting their customers by not doing the thing those customers told them not to do, they acted to deliberately obscure their creepy behavior.

A class act, guys, really. Did you feel proud of yourselves when you came up with that stunt?

Who Has the Right? On Insurance and Contraception

We're in the middle of a heated debate about contraception, and who pays for it, sparked by a provision in the recent health care law requiring health insurance providers to cover contraception. I have heard a lot of disgusting hate speech, and I have heard a lot of entitlement that is ugly in its own way. Both groups of speakers exclaim loudly about their rights, and neither listens too closely to what the other is saying. I could add my voice to this debate with a one-liner on Facebook; that would serve to identify which camp I belong to. Since I've never liked the idea of choosing camps in the first place, I'm going to tell you what I actually believe. Read ahead at your own risk.

On John Kennedy and Throwing Up

When John Kennedy ran for president, he gave a speech about the separation of church and state and about anti-Catholic sentiment. Rick Santorum wants to throw up when he hears it. Why?

Because the first line, first substantive line in the speech says, "I believe in America where the separation of church and state is absolute." I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.

This is the First Amendment. The First Amendment says the free exercise of religion. That means bringing everybody, people of faith and no faith, into the public square. Kennedy for the first time articulated the vision saying, no, faith is not allowed in the public square.

This is incredibly important, and not because Rick Santorum said it. (I happen to believe that his values are far outside the American mainstream, and I would hate to see him as my president. But that's a post for a different day.) This statement is important because it highlights two very different concepts of what church/state independence should look like. The American legacy on this issue is quite different than that of much of the rest of the world, and it bears some emphasis.

Big Data for Dummies

"Damn, that rock is heavy."

-- Grrrg, son of Booog, discoverer of The Big Data Problem

Big Data is big business, and all the nerds are talking about it. Since many of my readers are not nerds (and I mean that in the nicest way), I'd like to break down what Big Data is, and then I'd like to put it in a historical context that I think has been somewhat neglected.

People and devices are more connected than ever before. Fortunately for you, you represent only one of those people, and you have only a handful of devices and a few friends. All of your data, and all of the relevant data from the people you care about, fits in less than a cubic foot on your desk. If you search for a particular piece of information stored there, your computer can find it in a couple of seconds. Congratulations; you're doing fine: you don't have a Big Data Problem.

Your ISP has tens of thousands of customers just like you. LinkedIn had 100 million members as of a year ago. Facebook has almost 900 million members. And They. Save. Everything. In other words, they have 5-10 orders of magnitude more data than you do. That's far too much to store in one place, and if they searched their data the way you search yours, your one-second search would take them a week. If you typed a query into Google.com and had to wait a week for your search results to come back, you'd be pissed -- like, really pissed.

That, my friends, is a Big Data Problem.

Apple's TV, Again

I wrote last spring about the persistent rumors that Apple is working on a TV set. (Steve J. himself later confirmed that something TV-related is in the works.) Re-reading my piece, I think I got a few things right. For example, Apple will not get into the business of selling giant pieces of phosphor-coated class beyond the traditional computer screens it sells today. But I sold the vision short. I didn't get it. Then today I read this article in The Globe and Mail (via John Gruber).

How could I have been. So. Blind.

It's not about the TV screen. It's about the connections.

Not a Christmas tree

I noticed, in the run-up to this Christmas, that our insatiable collective appetite for all things green and conical has led to some confusion as to exactly what constitutes a Christmas tree.

While small, this is a legitimate Christmas tree -- namely, some sort of pine. See also "Charlie Brown Christmas tree".

This is a cypress tree, not a Christmas tree. See also "arborvitae".

This is a rosemary bush pruned into the shape of a Christmas tree -- the plant version of a dog in a sweater. Embarrassing.

Storm damage, potentially comprised of pieces of former Christmas tree relatives.

The Way Is Shut

...through my front gate.

...on the way to my office.

...on the way to Trader Joe's.

Not the storm's fault.