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.

Alternate Reality

A great piece:

http://nymag.com/news/politics/conservatives-david-frum-2011-11/

It puts voice to many of my own frustrations: we have a Grand Old Party with many of the right core ideas -- economic liberalism, federalism, and self-determination -- and a window of opportunity to be a positive creative force at a time of unique need. But those ideas have been taken to such an extreme, and twisted, and carried by people of such scant leadership, that I truly fear for the political and economic future of my country.

Death and Taxes -- Well, Just Taxes

The Super Committee's deadline to announce reform of U.S. spending and taxation is rapidly approaching. (Am I the only one who hears a little doodly-DOOP-dee-DOO whenever I hear "super committee"? Anyone? Anyone?) That means it's time: the world needs my tax plan. Brace yourselves.

Scrolling in Lion

Let me take a time out from my usual intellectual musing for a brief rant.

I have just upgraded to Mac OS X Lion. I. Hate. The. New. Scrolling.

Stuff

"Add things until it starts sucking, take things away until it stops getting better."

Another pearl of wisdom from Frank Chimero.

The Ratchet Effect

This is something I had intended to post last March. In an election season that's heating up, I think it remains relevant.

IOZ, "The Ratchet Effect":

Considered historically, it will become clear that the job of Republican governments is to invent novel, ad hoc expansions of state power, while the job of Democratic governments is to consolidate and systematize them. Far from repudiating supposed Bush-era "excesses," the Obama regime has sought -- usually successfully -- to entrench and to codify them.

This is in response to a Salon piece on the Bradley Manning WikiLeaks case.

A disappointing and disturbing reversal of the Obama administration.

Drill Where? Follow Up

Three years ago, I wrote about the "drill here, drill now" frenzy that had taken over the presidential campaign at that time. I called my post "Drill Where? Drill When? Drill Why?". The crux of it was that U.S. oil consumption is so high, and U.S. oil reserves are so low, that no matter how much we pull from the ground domestically, we will never make a big dent in pump prices.

I was right. Sorry. Really -- it would have been great to have been proven wrong on this one.

Balance of Power

"Hey!", the TSA agent called to the other passengers in line, pointing at me. "This guy doesn't want us to take naked pictures of him, but he does want some guy he's never met before to feel him up!"

I could have responded, "What you're doing isn't right. So I'm not choosing the 'better' option; I'm choosing the option that forces you to do it in public, so that these people can see that it's happening. So that I don't forget that it's happening."

Talking To My Phone vs. On My Phone

Google is promoting the speech-recognition capabilities of its Android OS for smartphones. Apple will reportedly be dramatically enhancing speech capabilities in its mobile products in the fall. Nokia and Microsoft are plugging their voice capabilities too.

I don't get it. I use my mobile device when I'm mobile -- that is, surrounded by lots of complete strangers in public places away from my home or office. The second-to-last thing I want to do is share with all of those people what I'm doing on my phone: what I'm reading, who I'm talking to, and what I'm saying to them. And the last thing I want to do is to share all of their conversations. Do you really want to spend your train ride to work every morning listening to all your fellow passengers sext their boyfriends out loud?

Sometimes silence is golden.

The Man Who Carried The World

Frank Chimero on the value of online relationships:

The benchmark I’ve been using lately is to equate psychic weight with physical weight. The new criteria is that I will follow you on Twitter if I would help you move. If I’m willing to carry a box full of photo albums, kitchen gadgets, and spare blankets, I’m probably also going to be interested in hearing about how it’s annoying to file receipts, in seeing photos of your coffee, and in knowing how it smells like wet dog on your subway ride to work.

Balanced Budget Amendment: Nonsense

There are parts of the constitution that protect us from the government (a good idea) and parts that protect one branch of the government from another (also a good idea). But an amendment to protect a branch of government from itself? Truly bizarre.

Understanding the Cost of Energy

Chris de Morsella, writing for The Green Economy Post:

When I hear anyone mention that nuclear or coal electricity is cheap they are ignoring the catastrophic potential costs that are associated with each of these energy systems. Just because our society chooses to try to ignore these costs and to sweep them under the carpet does not mean that they go away and cease to be a factor in reality. ... These costs should be factored into the price of this energy. ... Why can the nuclear sector as well as the coal, oil and gas sectors offload these costs onto our backs and force us to bear them while they continue to pocket the products from their artificially less expensive energy products? Shouldn’t the producer pay the true cost of the product that they produce?

It frustrates me to see such an important viewpoint argued pretty poorly. The article reads like a stream-of-consciousness high school essay. Nevertheless, Chris is exactly right. The answer to a more sustainable energy economy is not for government to pick winners and losers or to set up artificial incentives and barriers. The answer is for each industry to pay its own way. Their customers will choose among them based on their respective costs.

Recognizing Marriage When We See It

When I was a kid, our church took up a collection to pay for the marriage of a young woman from Sierra Leone. She had lived faithfully with a man for many years, they had a child together, and they had always wanted to get married. But the government of that country used marriage as a tool to control its people, and the price of a marriage license -- worth several months' income -- was beyond the reach of many poor families.

Many years later, in the United States, I would celebrate my own wedding. My wife and I have talked about this on more than one occasion: that our wedding was a wonderful opportunity to receive the blessings of our family and friends and to celebrate with them. But we had felt ourselves to be married before that. We lived together, I had asked her, and she said yes. We had made the commitment in our hearts, we had voiced it out loud to each other, and we were living it every day.

A government does not have the ability to control the love and commitment that are in the hearts and minds of its people. It does not have the ability to create or prohibit families. It has only the ability to recognize them -- or not. If it does not, there is "hard" a price to pay by the families affected. (Taxes, child custody, hospital visitation, and inheritance are just a few examples.) There is also a "soft" price to pay by the broader society, which experiences the degradation of a critical social contract and a split between private and public, personal and civic morality.

This coming November, Minnesota will become the latest state in which a majority votes on the marriage rights of a minority. (In this case, marriage between gays is already denied in law, but so great is the fear of the deniers that they want to move the ban into the state constitution.) Minnesota is as powerful and as powerless as Sierra Leone in this matter. To any Minnesotans reading this: do the right thing in November. Recognize Minnesota families. Vote no on the constitutional marriage ban.

Protecting the Dignity of Women

Now, back to that letter Piroska Nagy [who accused Dominic Strauss-Kahn, her boss, of coercing her into an affair] sent to the independent law firm in charge of investigating the affair. She says, in substance, that DSK may not be ideally suited to manage a company with female workers, hinting at a certain degree of harassment on his part. She also said she was ill-prepared to reject his advances. So he was pushy, which is reprehensible since he was her boss, and she was weak, which is human. ... I guess the Hungarian economist felt ill-prepared because she probably never worked in France, or she would have recognised DSK as a typical French womaniser who wouldn't abide by strict American behaviour regulations in the workplace. Any woman who has worked in France knows his type by heart, and has suffered their endless soliciting. But French men too have to sometimes endure the advances of a female colleague. For better and for worse, this attitude belongs to French culture....

-- Agnès Poirier in The Guardian, writing about Dominic Strauss-Kahn in 2009

It seems that our friend DSK has quite a long history as a ladies' man. Boys will be boys, no?

Meanwhile, the French seem so preoccupied by what women wear on their heads. How unfortunate it would be if these women were oppressed or manipulated by the men in their lives.

Apple TV (Set)

I don't generally make product predictions, but today I'm going to.

The web these days is abuzz with rumors of an Apple TV set. Not the Apple TV set-top box we know today -- an honest-to-goodness 50-inch piece of glass. My thought on that idea so far has been No way. Every company should consistently ask itself "What can we be the best in the world at?" Apple is very good at answering that question and at following through with an implementation of exactly that thing and nothing else. Apple's model is to (1) control the integration of their products in order to (2) create a premium user experience, and as a result of these things to (3) drive margins. This model doesn't make sense when it comes to TVs as we know them today, because the user experience (picture quality during a movie) and component costs (huge frickin' LCD) are driven almost entirely by things Apple is not the best suited to control. Can they make a TV screen that is so much better than Samsung's that people will immediately see Avatar playing on that thing and say, "Wow, you got that from Apple!" No. And without that perception, they certainly can't charge a premium price -- LCD TVs are already extremely expensive. Can they do the opposite: source the components so much more cheaply than the incumbents that they can redefine the price points, as they did with the iPad? Not likely, and unless they also redefine the category, as they simultaneously did with iPad, a discount price would risk eroding their brand in any case.

There's the crux: redefining the category. That's where two things I've read or heard recently clicked for me.

"It forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty"

I hate [slavery] because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world -- enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites -- causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty -- criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.

- Abraham Lincoln, 1858

As a comment on slavery, Lincoln's statement is true and poignant. But what I love about it is its more general character: it speaks to the essential conflict between eternal values and expedient action. Insert other examples of the latter in place of "slavery" and you'll see what I mean -- "waterboarding" for example.

(Which) People Kill People

The Texas state legislature is moving to legalize handguns on college campuses. The theory goes that this would make everyone safer, because law-abiding gun shooters would be able to take out rampage shooters before they do too much damage. But it didn't work out that way in Arizona, did it? In fact, there is a high correlation between permissive gun laws and shooting deaths. And the famously permissive Arizonans now poll ahead of national averages in favor of stricter gun control.

There is also a deeper problem here. We may buy our Second Amendment rights at the price of our Fourth Amendment rights.

It sounds reasonable that those without a history of violence should be unfettered in their exercise of the Second Amendment. But such a regime can only ever stop the second attack, never the first. (Jared Loughner had no history of violence and was under no court order restricting his access to a weapon.) In order to allow the "good guys" to buy guns and not the "bad guys", the state must be able to predict who will become violent in the future -- for example, based on mental health records. That means that they must have those records, must be allowed to share them across agencies, and must be allowed to restrict your actions based on hypotheses about future crimes you may commit -- despite doubts about the predictive usefulness of such records.

This is not just about health records. This is about a culture of surveillance. In an Information Age, we must protect our digital selves as we protect our physical selves. We have a choice to make: expose the personal information necessary to distinguish us from one another, and risk its misuse, or accept principled limitations on everyone's behavior while maintaining our privacy.

Y1969

Y2000 Problem: Software failures due to two-digit years rolling over to zero. Fixed by increasing the range of numbers used to store dates.

Y2038 Problem: Software failures due to the UNIX clock -- measuring seconds since January 1, 1970 -- erroneously rolling over into negative territory. Fixed by increasing the range of numbers used to store dates.

...and came up in conversation today; could be a big issue in the future and in the past but never in the present:

Y1969 Problem: Software failures due to the UNIX clock correctly rolling over into negative territory while the subjective time of the affected systems remains monotonically increasing. Only observed when traveling backwards in time. No known fix.

Cultural Misunderstanding

Me, in a restaurant in Texas: "That half-rack of ribs -- are those spare ribs or baby back ribs?"
Waitress: "They're pork ribs."
Me: briefest of pauses "Sounds good -- I'll go with that."

Reminiscent of this classic:

Lloyd: "What's the soup du jour?"
Waitress: "It's the soup of the day."
Lloyd: "Mmm, that sounds good. I'll have that."

FaceBook vs. Twitter

I've been meaning to repost this for a while, because I thought it was quite clever and well put. Yves Lande, by way of Claude Baudoin, who kindly forwarded and translated:

We're on Facebook in order to lie to our closest friends, and on Twitter in order to say the truth to perfect strangers.

- Yves Lande, via Twitter
(Originally in French only: "On est sur Facebook pour mentir à ses amis les plus proches. Et sur Twitter pour dire la vérité à de parfaits inconnus.")

High on My Stats

This is a small blog written with small expectations. I write it because I am an opinionated introvert, which means that I have more things to say than I have people to say them too. (More precisely, the ratio of opinions to listeners is so large that I could expect the denominator to shrink rapidly were I to share every little thing that crosses the transom of my mind.) The blog pleases me, and I hope it pleases those among my friends and family with the inclination and the patience to read it.

A few months ago, Blogger started tracking page-view statistics for all of its hosted blogs. I just got around to checking out my own stats for the first time. My first reaction was disappointment. Only 16 page views today? Some of those are mine, of course. My ego had been whispering to me, though I tried to shut it up: "What if you have the next 'Conscience of a Liberal' on your hands and you just don't know it yet?" I now know empirically that this isn't true.

But wait a sec. Sixteen just today? So half of them are from me.  I'm fairly certain that my few dedicated readers, bless them, are unlikely to ping me back on a daily basis, panting for new material. That means that people whom I don't know may occasionally read what I have to say. I swell with journalistic pride. I am a tiny New York Times.

I have two page views each this month from Latvia and Slovenia. I wrack my brain: have I been serving my Baltic constituency well this month? And where is Slovenia anyway? I head immediately to Wikipedia. I learn that it is between Italy and Croatia. Its capital is Ljubljana, which I have no idea how to pronounce. If I have not irrevocably alienated my Slovenian constituents by now with my shocking ignorance of their country, perhaps one of them will leave a comment helping me out with this.

After the United States, the second most-represented country among my readers is Brazil. (Nearly 6% of all page views.) As far as I know, I do not know anyone in Brazil. I am ecstatic by this point. My fingers quiver as they strike the keys. I will not let you down, my loyal South American brothers and sisters. If one of you will do me the favor of sending me prepaid plane tickets to visit your beautiful country, I will return the favor by writing more about it.

I take a breath. Most of these welcome strangers are just passing through. Most recurring traffic is probably still from people I know well.

There's just one thing: most of the people whom I know are reading me on a regular basis are Mac users. Those who aren't are nerds. So why are 43% of my page views coming from Internet Explorer -- the highest of any browser? My friends, I see what you are doing.

You are reading my blog at the office. Shame on you. Is that what they pay you for? You can hide no longer.

Choices to Make

I will fly again soon. When I do, I will make the choice many air travelers have been making for months now and that all air travelers will make soon: whether to allow myself to be photographed naked or to be frisked like a criminal and have my private parts touched. I will continue to choose the latter. This is not an easy choice to make, and if you choose other than I do, I will not call you unethical or a fool. But I will try to convince you that I am right.

Suppose that every time you entered or left your home, you were stopped by a government agent who disassembled your belongings, searched and inspected them all, and then undressed you, touching and examining your naked body. Surely, you would not stand for this. You would speak out. You would be in the street. You would lament loudly the loss of your liberty and of the moral center and political legacy of your country.

Now, suppose that all this happens out of sight. Your belongings and your body are searched as thoroughly and invasively as before. But the search is electronic and invisible to your eyes. You are not touched physically; the person violating you is in another room; you never see him. What would you do?

Where is the wrong: is it in being touched, or is it in being searched?

If the answer is the former, then there is nothing left to you that you may keep private. You can rightfully be recorded anywhere: at your business, among your friends, in public or private conversation. The things you say and do in your home with your children or your spouse can be filmed. So long as the person or persons recording you are unknown to you, and so long as the purposes to which they put those recordings are beyond your sight, you have no right or reason to complain.

I hold that the wrong is in being searched. My right to be secure in my person, house, papers, and effects has not been altered by the progress of time or of technology. The scope of that security is the knowledge of those things; the means by which my security may be violated are immaterial.

Indeed, an invisible search is more insidious than a visible one precisely because of that difference. You may be unaware of what is being done to you; you may be confused. Your neighbors, not seeing you in visible distress, will not come immediately to your aid. And over time, you may forget that you are being searched at all. You will lose all expectation of privacy, and any legal recourse you may once have had will have melted away.

When you opt for sexual touching instead of sexual recording (I do not say you are "opting out," because you are not getting out of anything), you are helping to make this invisible injustice a little more visible. You are participating in an act of nonviolent resistance.

"Nonviolent" is not a limitation to "resistance." It does not answer the question, "to what extent will you resist?". Nonviolent resistance does not restrain the brutality of those who are resisting; it exposes the brutality of those who are resisted. Gandhi and King did not win despite allowing themselves to be beaten; they won because they showed their neighbors that their opponents were willing to beat them.

Resist.

---

Don't we have to accept molestation as the price of our personal safety? Consider:

• Your risk of being killed by a terrorist is about the same as that of being attacked by a shark.
• In contrast, one September-Eleventh-worth of Americans is killed by drunk drivers every two months.

Is Pakistan a Failed State?

Legal organizations in Pakistan have expressed strong support for the assassin of Punjab's governor, Salman Taseer. They are not defending his right to a fair trial; they are defending his actions. The first paragraph of the above-linked article:

Lawyers showered the suspected killer of a prominent Pakistani governor with rose petals when he arrived at court Wednesday and an influential Muslim scholars group praised the assassination of the outspoken opponent of laws that order death for those who insult Islam.

The first tasks of any government are to protect its people and enforce the rule of law. The Pakistani people no longer have either of these things. In this country of nearly 200 million people, the supposed guardians of the latter have laid aside their duty in solidarity with one who attacked the former, a murderer and a traitor. It is a black time for Pakistanis especially, but we will all feel the repercussions.

Why I Love Apple Products

Because they do just what I want and nothing more? Because they're so easy and pleasant to use? No.

It's the packaging. These guys think of everything.

Case in point: I just got a new iPod Nano. When it comes in the mail, and you take it out of its corrugated shipping shell, this is what you see:

It's wrapped up like a present. A sleek, modern, tantalizing present from them to you. Is that little red ribbon functional? No. But it's adorable. The box is tiny: it fits in the palm of your hand without extending over your fingers. The top is square; the sides are a little shorter. (I thought that the side panels might be golden rectangles; I was wrong. They're 2 1/4 by 1 3/4, for a ratio of just 1.29, as opposed to the wider and more golden almost-1.62.)

Then you unwrap it, and you see this:

Is it just a matter of opening a lid, and out the thing comes? No! The whole box unfolds in a lovely, perfectly symmetrical, origami blossom. As the box flattens away, the device rises up on a little crystalline pedestal, sharp-corned square inside round-cornered inside sharp-cornered. The icons on the screen (actually a sticker; the device is off, of course) repeat this pattern in reverse. Oh, and the base of the pedestal? It is a golden rectangle, or nearly as close as our English units can get: 2 3/16 by 1 3/8, or 1.59 and change.

Does Dell take this much care and pride in their work? Does HTC? No. This is what the "devices are commodities" gigahertz-reciters just don't get. Laptops, mobile phones, and MP3 players aren't just boxes filled with parts with statistics printed on their sides. We carry them against our bodies every day. And I, for one, take joy in products that recognize and reward that intimacy.