http://xkcd.org/967/
October 21, 2011 at 11:26AM

I knew, before I moved, that I would be tempted to spend a lot of
money on books, and so I deliberately gave myself a time-consuming
reading project to prevent it:

I got ebooks for the entire (except for the unpublished final book)
Wheel of Time series.

According to the Wikipedia page, this is 3.7 million words long. 3.6,
I suppose, because I haven’t looked at the prequel yet.

I started just before moving_day(tm). I finished tonight. While this
hasn’t been the only thing I’ve read in that time – I’ve downloaded
some erotic ebooks, I borrowed a book from kindle library, and I did
some hardcover book reading on the plane – it’s been the overwhelming
majority of my reading in the last seven weeks.

Oddly, my reaction is to want to read it again. Motly because it would
be interesting to see the new characters again, knowing where they are
going; in part because it would let me see what foreshadowing was
present; in part because I really enjoyed it, to my somewhat surprise.

I’d tried reading it back in the mid-90s, and got a bit of the way
through it, and then gave up. I have no memory of that reading at all,
but I wouldn’t be surprised if it came around book 6/7 … a point at
which the series got incredibly slow-moving and somewhat tedious. My
problem when I read that part of the series this time was the way it
broke stories up; rather than giving me one book following one
plotline and then another book following a different plotline, etc, it
split the plotlines up, meaning that no book actually ever felt
complete within itself, and no plotline ever felt like it was
advancing; a one-two punch which I can easily imagine causing me to
give up.

Taken as a whole, though, the series is quite good, if … a bit
overwhelming. It dragged a bit in the middle, but by Crossroads of
Twilight (book 10) it was picking up, and the two books by Sanderson
just flew by (one of the things that I find interesting about
Sanderson’s writing is that it is somehow very easy to read quickly;
his two books only took me on the order of a day and a half each, a
much faster pace than the preceding eleven).

That said, the world building is/was fantastically complex, and while
some of the character arcs seem a little bit strained, the characters
definitely grew and changed over the course of the series, in a way
which was (mostly) enough to keep interest.
October 20, 2011 at 08:07PM

According to conservatives, Ronald Reagan won the cold war by building
up the nation’s military and deliberately pushing the Soviets into
bankruptcy.

According to liberals, Ronald Reagan was an irrelevant bystander whose
actions did not matter; the Soviets collapsed from within and would
have no matter what we did.

According to the author of The
Rebellion of Ronald Reagan, both groups are wrong: Ronald Reagan
helped end the cold war by talking to Gorbachev (an act which pissed
off both the Republican foreign policy establishment and movement
conservatives) and giving Gorbachev negotiation successes, which
allowed Gorbachev the time and space he needed for perestroika to take
root, which then in turn resulted in the end of the cold war.

(The book also contains evidence that the old canard about former
presidents not undermining sitting presidents’ foreign policy is
nonsense; apparently Nixon quite openly opposed Reagan’s foreign
policy in the last years of his administration. On the other hand,
maybe Nixon is an outlier.)

It’s an interesting thesis, whether or not it’s true. It’s an
interesting thesis because it maintains the conservative view of
Reagan as a pivotal figure while simultaneously rejecting the
reasons conservatives advance for their view. And he seems to
have marshalled a great deal of evidence supporting it; the book is
rife with citations to mid-to-late-1980s newspaper rants condemning
Reagan.

Of particular note, beyond the general thesis:
* Obama SecDef Bob Gates was the CIA’s top Soviet specialist in the
mid-80s, and he believed that Gorbachev wa ss”simply a new and more
clever and subtle proponent of Soviet global imperialism abroad and
communism at home.” Gates, it turned out, was wrong on one of the key
issues of the twentieth century; it doesn’t seem to have hurt his
career much.
* Reagan was serious about nuclear abolition as a goal, and
conservatives were aghast
* “In early 1987, Reagan met in the Roosevelt Room of the White
House with a group of conservatives, such as Paul Weyrich of the
Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, Phyllis Schlafly of the
Eagle Forum, and Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus. The
conservatives condemned Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union and
his negotiations with Gorbachev. When the season ended, the president
left amid a frosty silence.”
* Newt Gingrich apparently said, of Reagan’s foreign poliicy in
1987, “he will never again be the Reagan that he was before he blew
it. He is not going to regain our trust and our faith easily.”
* The Reagan administration got the E. German government to help
provide security, on the E. German side of the wall, during the
tear-down-the-wall speech.
* George Shultz kept lecturing Gorbachev on the future of
globalization, the information revolution, real-time transfers and the
difficulty in distinguishing what products were truly national;
basically he seems to have predicted the late 1990s/early 21st century
economy.
* Dan Quayle was one of the leading figures in challenging Reagan’s
Soviet policy, and his selection as VP was part of an effort by GHWB
to distance himself from Reagan’s policies. Reagan himself was
worried, when GHWB took over, that this would cause serious problems.
* Howard Phillips, head of the Conservative Caucus, once called
Reagan “a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda”

I find it particularly intereating how the conservative opposition -
strident though it was – has just dropped out of the history books;
*nobody* seems to remember it.
October 20, 2011 at 07:57PM

http://theboweryboys.blogspot.com/2011/09/mayor-laguardias-former-home-and-its.html

October 17, 2011 at 02:25PM

I went out Friday night to a concert hall, the first time I’ve done
that since moving. The show was at Webster Hall, a
place which Wikipedia describes as “the country’s first modern
nightclub”. The physical layout is a little bit strange; there’s a
ballroom space upstairs where concerts are held in the early evening,
and then, while the concert is still going on, a seperately ticketed
club night starts in two rooms downstairs. After the concert ends,
they clear and clean the ballroom, and then the club night switches to
three rooms, with the headliner in the ballroom.

I was going to see Trentemller, a
Danish electronic musician whose music is so hauntingly beautiful, and
whose shows are so incredible, that when I saw him at Coachella in
April, I described
the experience as being “like touching the face of God”; I bought
tickets to this show the day they went on sale (while I still lived in
California). The club night headliner was Wolfgang
Gartner, a DJ who I had twice missed due to scheduling conflicts
despite really wanting to see him; as soon as I found that out (about
two weeks ago), I got a ticket to the club night, too.

Webster Hall has a “dress to impress” dress code and notes, in the
description of the dress code, that they reserve the right to not
admit anyone for any reason, so I wore dressy clothes (dressier than I
would wear to work); this turns out to possibly have been unnecessary,
as there were people in shorts and hoodies at the concert and cute
young things in tight pants and tank tops at the club night. (OTH,
it’s possible that it would be harder for me to get away with this
because I’m older; it’s hard to tell. The entire notion of nightclub
dress codes is so alien to me that I’m utterly confused by it). So,
dressed up in shoes which hurt (I need to wear extra-wide shoes, but
the best dress shoes I have for this kind of event I bought before I
knew that, so they’re … confining), I wandered down to the village
around 7 (for an 8pm opening act; it takes ~45 minutes to get to that
part of town from here).

The opening act was Xylos,
whose music sounded a bit like what you would get if you crossed
Trentemoeller with This Mortal Coil, with a bit more of a rock beat.
They were fun to listen and dance to. The crowd slowly filtered in
during their set, but the place wasn’t really packed until they were
done (no surprise).

In the crowd between sets, I saw a gay couple making out, which I’d
never seen at a show in the bay area, and the overall density of gay
couples seemed unusually high. That was … surprising. On the other
hand, there was no obvious pot or e use the entire evening, which was
astonishing.

Trentemoeller’s set didn’t reach the heights of his set in April, but
really, that was no surprise. It was still a quite good set; the
music remains hauntingly beautiful, even after repetition, and it was
nice to hear a full 90 minutes rather than an abbreviated festival
set. I’m glad I went; I would go again. There were *moments* in the
set which brought an incredible high, and i’m still – albeit tired -
emotionally bouyed by it.

An oddity about the ballroom’s bathroom: it’s a multi-stall
mixed-gender bathroom (with a woman there handing out paper towels to
dry your hands and selling snacks and earplugs). This caused
substantial grumbling among the men in the bathroom line. (I was more
annoyed at the women who would push through the line, not to use the
toilet, but to get to the mirrors so they could redo their hair and
makeup. WTF? does this happen in womens’ restrooms in clubs all the
time?)

The concert ended around 10.45; I exited through the narrow deathtrap
staircase and then got in line to re-enter for club night. For club
night, unlike for the concert, they were conducting pat-down searches,
which caused them to seperate the line by gender, breaking up
mixed-gender groups (to their considerable annoyance).

The house DJ (as in, the DJ who works for the house, not the DJ
spinning house music; this is an irritating linguistic ambiguity) was
quite good, and it was fun to dance and watch people dancing as the
crowd filled up.

Around midnight they let us back into the ballroom, which led to a
huge crowd-herd movement back up the staircase.

The opening DJ, DallasK was
fantastic. I’ve said before that there’s nothing quite like going out
and coming home covered in the sweat of your thousand closest new
friends, and DallasK was that: a tightly packed crowd dancing to music
it loved and sweating profusely. At some point I took of my dress
shirt, wearing only the tank top underneath; it was *still* too warm.
Although this did result, at some point, in a big dude who was moving
through the crowd hi-5ing people rubbing my chest and exclaiming
“you’re really hairy!”. The music was good dance music; I now have to
add DallasK to my list of people to follow.

Wolfgang Gartner came on around 1.30. By this time I’d decided I
needed water (I hadn’t had any since re-entering at 11, which was a
mistake). So I moved back to the bar, slowly, at which point I
discovered something which made me surprisingly unhappy: the tight
sardine-can packed crowd maintained its density from the front of the
stage *all the way to the bar*. It didn’t thin out towards the back of
the room at all; there was no breathing space. Worse, if you’re close
to the bar, as people filter to the bar and then try to leave, there’s
a strong “move forward” physical pressure which was missing in the
center of the floor.

It’s irrational, I think, but this totally freaked me out. I’m fine
with the tightly packed dense crowd as long as it thins out; I can be
in the middle of it and be perfectly happy as long as there’s
somewhere to go. But this … triggered a crowd-claustrophobia-panic
reaction. (I never get these at concerts. I had something similar,
once, at the Madonna set at Coachella when she was half an hour late
and the crowd turned angry – but that was an angry-crowd panic
reaction. I was worried I might have one at Mumford+Sons, after I’d
spent a couple hours narrowly avoiding heat exhaustion; but I didn’t
actually have one. Friday night, I had one). Combined with the heat
and the dehydration, I was almost physically ill; and Wolfgang Gartner
wasn’t enough to hold me, even though I really wanted to see his set.

I fled outside at about 1.45.

I was basically fine as soon as I got outside. Albeit thirsty; when I
got off the subway an hour later (the subways don’t run very often at
that hour), I stopped at a market and downed a liter of water in the
time it took me to walk 14 blocks.

So: Trentemoeller was awesome. THe first part of club night was a lot
of fun. I’d certainly go see a concert there again; club night, I’d
have to think twice, and I’d probably avoid the main ballroom. And
chaining them together? Definitely a bad idea.

Even so, I’m glad I went. Because Trentemoeller was awesome and the
first part of club night was a lot of fun.
October 16, 2011 at 11:42AM

From the Washington
Post, a horrifying story: state police infecting computers with
trojan horses which transmit a screenshot every 30 seconds and which
also use laptop webcams to surreptitiously surveille the population.

In Germany, in particular, this isn’t going to go over well.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, a Frankfurt newspaper,
devoted five pages this week to printing the raw code of the software
that the Chaos Computer Club analyzed, saying it wanted to dramatize
the power and incomprehensibility to the layman of relatively
uncomplicated computer coding in ordinary life.

(FAZ is, roughly, the German equivalent to the WSJ).
October 16, 2011 at 11:04AM

Today’s Washington Post has an interesting analysis
of an idea which, the report says, is gainign currency among those whose
business it is to study such things:

“the average persons’ body contains about 100 trillion cells, but only maybe
one in 10 is human.”

The idea – one which comes straight out of science fiction and which will
have particular appeal to people who tend to prefer to view everything as
integrated systems – is that human beigns have symbiotic relationships with
large numbers of independent bacteria, and that one side effect of many
trends in modern medicine is that humans have reduced their exposure to
their symbiotes, with the result that human health is suffering.

It’s an interesting and plausible notion, and it’s one that appeals to the
part of me which thinks our obsession with sanitation has led to weaker
immune systems. And, really, the history of modern medicine which emerges
from such a theory is one which, at a high level, seems to be generically
characteristic of human behavior: humans discovered bacteria and linked them
(accurately) to disease, but didn’t have the ability to tell good bacteria
from bad bacteria, and so overreacted, which caused problems of its own …
this is a kind of overreaction to initial data which seems quite common, so
it would really be no surprise to find it here.
October 11, 2011 at 02:38PM

Brad De Long passes on this interesting chart
demonstrating (to no great surprise) that the Republican presidential
candidates misunderstand what businesses today are afraid of.

It’s a commonplace claim among such candidates that what businesses are
worried about is taxes and regulation. And that was true, a decade ago. But
now, the number one concern among businesspeople, according to the graph, is
… low consumer demand.

Taxes and regulation aren’t quite as important when nobody’s buying your
stuff.
October 10, 2011 at 12:48PM

A disturbing exchange from oral
arguments
yesterday:

October 06, 2011 at 06:56PM

James Fallows passes along this interesting
chart involving the consolidation of the banking industry this morning.

It’s a fairly standard part of microeconomics 101 that in a market with high
barriers to entry, the market will tend towards domination by 3-5 players
who will then be more or less able to set their own prices at a rate which
is *higher* than the market clearing rate were the market actually
competitive. This seems to be what is happening with the commercial banking
industry, and explains (to a certain extent) why the banks are able to get
away with things like the new debit card fee. (It’s a little bit odd,
though, because retail banking still has a lot of competition,
mostly from very small firms; I suspect there’s some mass psychology reason
for people not abandoning jp morgan chaseapple s bank in favor of apple
savings bank, for example).

What’s interesting to me about the chart is that it suggests that something
changed substantially in the mid 1990s. It *could* be that the barriers to
entry in the banking industry suddenly went up; or it could be that some
artificial barrier to consolidation disappeared. A lot of the consolidation
happened after 1999 – the four majors of today were 20 seperate institutions
in 1998 – which points largely at the repeal of Glass-Steagall, a law which
had (by design) artificially restricted the consolidation of the banking
industry because of a depression-era belief that such consolidation was a
contributing factor to the depression.

All of which brings to mind the following questions:

(a) was the consolidation of the banking industry an intentional
byproduct of the repeal of Glass-Steagall, or was it an unintended (if
predictable) side effect?

(b) did the consolidation of the banking industry contribute to the 2007
economic crisis?

(c) to the extent that (b) is true, and particularly to the extent that the
answer to (a) is yes, shouldn’t the architects of the repeal of
Glass-steagall be held accountable for the outcome, including the entire
Clinton economic team?
October 05, 2011 at 10:14AM