Mark's Blog

April 20, 2006

Older, wiser

Sports Illustrated online has a short article to say that Lance Armstrong is planning to run the NYC marathon, and to do so without, "plans to run marathons ... professionally." After a few months off the bike, he finally came to his senses, realizing sports involving special equipment and machines are less direct and natural than running. Or maybe he just wore himself out to the point where he figures training for a marathon is a rest.

Posted by Mark at 07:03 AM | TrackBack

April 19, 2006

Libertarianism in One Lesson

David Bergland ran for US president on the Libertarian ticket in 1984. Dad bought me his book, Libertarianism in One Lesson, which has gone through eight printings at least.

What interested me in reading this book was to compare my own leanings to those of a Libertarian who has thought out his position and written it up. Libertarianism seems like an ascendant current in US politics for two reasons in my very humble opinion. The first reason is that Libertarians greatly favor self-determination and freedom, even if it's at ones own expense, a position more and more Americans consider the right one. The second reason is that Libertarians see the free market as a better solution to economic problems, and most Americans agree with that.

On the one hand, I found much to agree with in this book. I definitely agree that free markets were and are better than having the king decide what commerce can take place, and are better than having some "representative" bureaucracy decide in place of the king. (The current US and Western European economies have this kind of state intervention to varying degrees.)

On the other hand, I don't agree that we cannot do better than free markets, nor that we cannot think about alternatives. Bergland would call parecon Utopian, then he would continue believing in a magical free market alternative that has never existed either at scale. Some experimentation is called for.

Posted by Mark at 06:45 PM | TrackBack

April 15, 2006

Track cycling

We watched track cycling this afternoon. Strange sport in some respects.

The speeds those track cyclists reach are amazing, especially considering they're on the flats. The teams of four typically covered 4 km in just over 4 minutes. In one race a guy managed to average over 71 kph (44 mph) for a one lap sprint. I need a good downhill slope to achieve that as my max speed.

Posted by Mark at 06:23 PM | TrackBack

April 14, 2006

Ubik

Reread this book again. Still not sure what to make of it.

Philip K. Dick published Ubik for the first time at the close of the 1960s. His 1992 has people who've not changed much since then. Except the protagonists' line of work is protecting people against folks who've evolved extra sensory perceptions, precognitions, and standard PKD psi-fi fare.

At the core of the story is that battle for half-dead people's souls, and the difficulty of knowing whether what you're experiencing is reality or only a very good fake thereof. What I like about PKD is that he comes out more blatantly than Borges with the conclusion that it's all fake.

If you were a storyteller, would you not want it to turn out that way?

Posted by Mark at 08:23 PM | TrackBack

April 12, 2006

Not exactly real time

This arrived in my mailbox at 10:55 am this morning:

Flight NW 40 departed Detroit-Wayne County Int'l, MI at 3:56 pm on April 11 from Gate A34 and arrived in Amsterdam-Schiphol, Netherlands at 5:30 am. Gate subject to change. Verify at airport.

I'd requested to receive an update 2 hours before arrival. Good thing I wasn't counting on that notification.

Posted by Mark at 08:52 PM | TrackBack

April 10, 2006

How powerful is the virtual pen

Andy wrote an entry covering his letter to the editor about unsafe helitour practices where he lives. He seems to have spent some time researching the situation.

How powerful will Andy's virtual pen prove to be? I presume the Garden Island News letters to the editor are going to remain online and get indexed. That wouldn't happen with paper news. Will knowing the admonitions are just a click away in the search engine from the company name discourage irresponsible flying?

Posted by Mark at 08:07 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 09, 2006

Paris and Paris-Roubaix

Didn't watch any of the Paris Marathon this morning. Looks like Gashaw Melese won in 2:08:03.

Watched the last 50 km of Paris-Roubaix. France 2 was having trouble with the cameras. Fabien Cancellara won, breaking away less than 20 km before the end. He rode for a bit over 6:07, including the rough paved sections, at 42.24 kph on average into headwinds much of the way. He could not speak to the reporters when he finished. Looked like he was having a heart attack or something.

Tom Boonen seems to have run out of gas around the last attack. The announcers thought one of the reasons nobody went after Cancellara right away is because they were waiting to ride in Boonen's wake.

The rough paved sections are truly rough. Hincapie went down and seems to have fractured his collarbone or something. He didn't get a flat. His handlebars broke.

UPDATE: Looks like Tom Boonen got second place, although he finished fifth! Three guys got disqualified in the end for crossing train tracks when the bars were lowered. That's against the law and against race rules. You're allowed to kill yourself in a crash but not by potentially getting hit by a train.

Cancellara's lucky too. What if the train had been 30 seconds faster and he'd've been disqualified?

The only reason Boonen and the guys he was with stopped is because the train was literally going through the intersection when they arrived.

Posted by Mark at 05:10 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 07, 2006

Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

Stuart lent me Pirsig's other book, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals. Not sure what to make of it. In this one Pirsig expounds on his Metaphysics of Quality, setting up Dynamic Quality as that from which everything else flows.

On one hand, the atmosphere of the book reminds me of those thoughts you have at 4 am, thoughts that seem visionary insights when they show up in the insomniac consciousness. Later in the day the thoughts you esteemed so well early in the morning turn out embarrassing. I had the impression throughout that Pirsig was grasping at straws.

On the other hand, this book is a novel, not a treatise. So what's Pirsig telling us? Maybe it'll come to me at 4 am.

Posted by Mark at 10:58 PM | TrackBack

Global warming fatalism

The Straight Dope has Cecil's answer to the question, "Is global warming for real?"

The human contribution to atmospheric carbon in the form of CO2 is small, less than 5 percent of the total carbon reservoir. Ergo, humans aren't causing global warming. I omit a lot of ancillary discussion, but that's the nub.

One might raise scientific objections to this reasoning, but there's no point. Fact is, there's little that can be done to reduce CO2 emissions regardless of their impact on the environment.

Cecil goes on to say the real challenge is the gradual disappearance of fossil fuels. That we're going to have to do something about, whether we want to face it or not.

Posted by Mark at 10:47 PM | TrackBack

Constraints

Andy sent along a link to an article by Paul Graham on software patents. It's balm for my conscience, since I've used a few second-rate ideas to try to get patents for my employer. Invention disclosures are perhaps the only self-serve bonus available in engineering.

Paul does however write that, "it's better, even from a purely selfish point of view, to be constrained by principles than by stupidity." Let's just say some of us are too dumb to understand what he means.

In a nutshell, Paul figures that patents are obligatory defensive weapons in a system where, "Business is a kind of ritualized warfare." Yet because they're similar to nukes as defensive weapons, young startups needn't worry about accidentally infringing a patent or two. You only need to worry if you're very successful. He concludes that patents are better than earlier alternatives in history, like secrecy and severe punishment for revealing things.

Posted by Mark at 10:11 PM | TrackBack

April 05, 2006

CUPS web interface

The CUPS system lets you manage printers by connecting to http://localhost:631. I'd not used this before. Just tried it on Ubuntu 6.06 (alpha) and it's great. Better than the Gnome printer setup application.

Posted by Mark at 02:32 PM | TrackBack

April 04, 2006

A new hobby

C|Net has an article about advertisers looking to have other people do their ads in their spare time:

"Traditional marketing methods have fallen short," Decker said in explaining why he expects viewer-created ads to take off in the market, particularly for the 18- to 34-year-olds who watch Current TV. "This demographic does not respond positively to something overly produced and (that is a) hard sell."

At what point does it sink in that people just don't need any more of your stuff?

"The holy grail for me as a marketer would be to have an entertaining viral video that was getting passed around and it doubled as a commercial," said Brian Monahan, who oversees online and offline ad campaigns for Microsoft at the Universal McCann ad agency. "Can we produce work like that? I don't know. But I'm counting on the kid in his bedroom who has a really funny idea."

The main problem seems to be with volunteers who aren't sticking to the script. They end up making ads the companies don't really like.

Posted by Mark at 06:03 PM | TrackBack

March 23, 2006

Fat man walking

Perhaps you already saw this elsewhere. A guy named Steve got fed up with being fat and out of shape. So he decided to walk across the US.

It looks like Steve got a big welcome in Indiana.

In any case, he started from this:

3/26 - 1 mile - almost killed me. The back and leg pain was unbelievable.

Later, in Illinois and Indiana, he was averaging 15 miles per day. Hats off.

Posted by Mark at 09:46 PM | TrackBack

March 22, 2006

Why We Can't Wait, part II

BBC News has an article today entitled, One in three French 'are racist'. Only a few days ago I wrote, "The words racist, and even more so segregationist have an atavistic connotation." Apparently I'm living in country where 1/3 of the people think the term racist is right up to date. Hmm.

Posted by Mark at 08:49 PM | TrackBack

Too rich for my blood

Performance Bike sent me mail with Subject: Buy 2 Tires and Save up to $70. Cycling is for the independently wealthy.

Posted by Mark at 08:21 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 20, 2006

Why We Can't Wait

Martin Luther King wrote Why We Can't Wait soon after and indeed even in the midst of the direct action in Birmingham that eventually began to eliminate segregation there and the famous march in Washington in late summer of 1963. Someone had left this paperback on the shelf at work, so I read it. I wanted to know whether Dr. King's speaking voice carried across into his writing.

To some extent it does. Trouble is you find yourself reading this book in your own voice. Despite King's powerful arguments, his commanding rhetoric, his stately phrasing, the text does not have the same force when your inner voice delivers it. It would be better coming from him.

To someone of my generation it is remarkable to see how far the US has come from the early 1960s. The words racist, and even more so segregationist have an atavistic connotation. At the same time some of King's later ideas, like his Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, have not yet come true. Instead we've had affirmative action, for example.

What they have to say over at Wikipedia is voluminous. It even includes a conspiracy theory. In a wrongful death civil trial, 'The jury of six whites and six blacks found Jowers [the defendant] guilty and that "governmental agencies were parties" to the assassination plot.' (Source) He certainly would've made powerful enemies in the last few years of his life. Listen to the end of his April 4, 1967 speech calling for an end to the war in Vietnam.

Posted by Mark at 08:41 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 19, 2006

The Cyclist's Training Bible

Matt lent me Joe Friel's Cyclist's Training Bible after I'd asked about maximum heart rate again. My guess about the run in Paris is so many runners had heart rate monitors that my average reading of 183 is just a fluke. At the outset I was joking with a man and woman next to me about being a little excited, since my heart rate was reading 223. But the man and woman next to me had 221 and 229 respectively.

Friel's book looks just right for someone taking cycling seriously, and wanting to get more out of training. Friel bases training efforts on power and lactate thresholds (LT), so power and especially LT are the two measurements Friel suggests to the cyclist gauging training intensity.

The measurements are probably easier to make on the bicycle than on foot. You can get a power meter like the one Matt and Colette share, although they're probably expensive. You can also get an indoor trainer on which you can adjust the resistance during the test rides. Friel's test for LT has you start at 100 watts, increasing 20 watts per minute until you have to give up after 15 seconds. You should do this with companion (or lab technician) who notes your subjective effort level on a scale of 1-20 (20 hardest), and watches when you reach your ventilatory threshold (labored breathing). Your LT is where you said effort was between 15-17 and you'd reached your ventilatory threshold.

On foot I don't have a good way of stepping up the power in measured increments. I'd have to guess at LT, probably my avg. heart rate for a 10 km workout or a 15 km race. If I can count Pontcharra last year for the latter, my LT heart rate is then 177 or thereabouts. That gives me the following zones:

• 1 Recovery 116-145
• 2 Aerobic 146-158
• 3 Tempo 159-165
• 4 Subtheshold 166-176
• 5a Superthreshold 177-180
• 5b Aerobic Capacity 181-186
• 5c Anaerobic Capacity 187-193

I may not be taking it easy enough in recovery, and perhaps too hard for my body to recover quickly much of the time. That could be why I'm so exhausted after intense speedwork like last week. I'm not up to match hours with the cycling pros at any rate. Friel says they should train 800-1200 hours/year, the heaviest trainers are therefore training more than 3 hours/day on average. No wonder he recommends you get plenty of sleep.

Although I'm hardly a cyclist, I found the book entertaining. Recommended if you want to take your cycling seriously.

Posted by Mark at 08:09 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

March 13, 2006

Going quiet

Should've found this one when I was making resolutions for the New Year. It's from the How To Wiki, a procedure for doing nothing.

Posted by Mark at 02:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 12, 2006

Shaun of the Dead

Nathalie brought home a silly video last night, Shaun of the Dead. We watched it in French, though it probably would've been better in the original version.

Shaun of the Dead mixes standard horror movie formulae with an unbroken string of understated gags. The characters are quite well done. Check out the DVD.

Posted by Mark at 09:00 AM | TrackBack

March 10, 2006

Brain waves

I'll try lots of things once. So the Digg to SBaGen was enough for me to download the software and try it.

The aim is to bring your brain into sync with certain frequencies using the beats generated by slightly to significantly out of tune sine waves, one in the left ear, one in the right. So far all I've done is make a couple of MP3s, which I'll try out on the player.

The SBaGen developer has a link to somebody who considers this stuff the absolute cat's pyjamas, and for a fee will sell you CDs on your own hypnotic suggestions in your own voice.

I'll stop if I get sudden cravings for microbiotic rice and mashed yeast.

Posted by Mark at 10:30 PM | TrackBack

LSE a takeover target

BBC News has an article about the London Stock Exchange rejecting a takeover bid by the NASDAQ. According to the article, the LSE seems to be bidding up it's price. Apparently both exchanges benefitted, but the NASDAQ is up even more than the LSE.

The market caps are such that LSE is worth about 2 billion GBP, the NASDAQ worth about 3.5 billion USD. Over the last year, LSE has not quite doubled, but NDAQ has gone up fourfold.

Can you buy an index of exchanges? Could you corner the markets market?

Posted by Mark at 08:35 PM | TrackBack

March 09, 2006

Please don't feed the lemmings

Slashdot pointed to a Times Online article about financial missteps and mistakes Google executives made when presenting to analysts.

“The time has come for Google to step into line,” one analyst said. “It is in the interest of all shareholders, including the company’s employees and officers, that the share price achieves some stability.”

Gee, I wonder why no one was complaining about the upside instability? Now these folks want someone else to protect them from having suggested you purchase a bunch of shares in a website with a P/E of 100.

Posted by Mark at 09:50 PM | TrackBack

On the glut of dark fiber

Digg had a link to a Telephony Online article covering the Chief Architect from BellSouth saying TV over the Internet is going to call for, “massive amounts of cheaper bandwidth.”

Apparently each residental broadband customer today costs the service provider an average of $1 per month. That's pretty close to what you're paying, right?

High definition TV could eat up over 500x as much bandwidth. I remember Ed Zander on stage in 1999 saying network use was doubling each 4-6 months. 2^9 = 512. We should be there in 3-5 years I guess.

Regular definition TV over IP is already on offer here in France, but you need to be close to the phone box where they switch your traffic onto the main network. We're too far away.

Posted by Mark at 03:39 PM | TrackBack

Toward the End of Time

This paperback version of John Updike's book, Toward the End of Time, was sitting on the shelf at work. My original intent was to read it while Nathalie was skiing with the children. Instead I became bogged down online. The World Wide Web is my substitute for television.

Updike writes this one in the first person of the protagonist, a mostly retired financial advisor suspiciously well versed in the names of his local New England flora. Maybe you acquire that vocabularly when you retire. Maybe Updike's vocabularly is so much larger than mine he cannot remember what it was like to document the world through a meager 10,000 words or so.

Yet I found buried in this book one case I'm virtually sure was a typo, protons when he meant photons. That threw me off the scent. I cannot figure it out. How could a financial advisor be so in tune with plant names, yet not know the difference between protons and photons? Is this some deep statement about finance? Is Updike just thumbing his nose at us? If it was a mistake, what about the rest of the story?

I'm nitpicking. In the end I had a hard time getting hooked with this one. It's obvious John Updike can write circles around me, even in areas where his subject matter expertise is thin. I still didn't like his book.

Posted by Mark at 06:53 AM | TrackBack

March 08, 2006

International Women's Day

I heard it was International Women's Day. Nathalie laughed wryly and said this was the worst day in a while. Diane was giving her grief this morning. With the rain and snow, they all stayed inside this afternoon and drove each other up the wall.

BBC News online had an article for International Women's Day about the gender gap in Europe:

Statistics released by the EU to mark International Women's Day show European women do better in school than men, but get lower pay and fewer top jobs.

That trend seems to be stable over the years. My only contributions today were making dinner, doing the dishes, and getting up to calm Diane down after nightmares. The rest of the time I was at work, increasing my lead.

Posted by Mark at 07:41 PM | TrackBack

March 07, 2006

FreedomWorks and CGEG sites

Dad sent a link to FreedomWorks.org, a site devoted to events and issues on the political scene in the US, with a focus on fiscal conservatism. You can get RSS feeds for news articles, and read lots of articles there.

The site appears to be provided by an organization called the Center for Global Economic Growth.

The principle mission of the Center for Global Economic Growth (CGEG) is to work with public policy organizations which advocate free markets and limited government, and to assist them in developing citizen action groups to promote policies that will foster economic growth and opportunity.

One of the CGEG articles, Hope for Europe?, sees "old Europe" countries eventually moving in the direction suggested by economists such as Hayek and Friedman, whether the upcoming generation has the political capital to do it or not.

Looking at the European political landscape, my own guess is that neither Miss Merkel nor Mr. Sarkozy will have the conditions, luck and spine to do what Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Reagan did. But what they may be able to do is buy a little more time for Europe until the people understand there is no constructive choice other than following the Anglo-Saxon model of lower taxes, spending and regulation.

Author Richard W. Rahn is probably right that people in Germany and France will eventually vote for supply siders. The European Union might also manage to establish more capital friendly policies without direct intervention by voters.

UPDATE: A factoid: "Milton Friedman's best known work is on the Quantity Theory of Money." (Source) Always wondered where Will Self got the idea for the title of his collection of short stories.

Posted by Mark at 09:45 PM | TrackBack

Complexity hurting sales

Andy sent a link to an article from Reuters on Yahoo! that states Complexity causes 50% of product returns.

The average consumer in the United States will struggle for 20 minutes to get a device working, before giving up, the study found.

Product developers, brought in to witness the struggles of average consumers, were astounded by the havoc they created.

The problem with those of us making products is that we get used to complexity that we found incomprehensible initially. When we are making something ourselves and can take the time to get to know it, we work around many of its strange idiosyncracies. Then we end up legitimately surprised when no one new to it can make heads or tails out of our creations.

Powerful, yet simple and unsurprising, is hard to do.

Posted by Mark at 09:23 PM | TrackBack

March 03, 2006

Podcast for the road

Luke pointed me to the 12 free podcasts out there from Ricky Gervais and his two henchmen, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington. It's The Ricky Gervais Show. You have to root around for all 12, but they weren't too hard to find.

The folks originally hosting the show claimed this podcast was quite a success:

Ricky Gervais and his team were this week awarded the Guinness World Record for the most downloaded podcast, gaining an average of 261,670 downloads per episode of The Ricky Gervais Show. during its first month.

It's probably Karl. The whole show roughly boils down to Ricky and Steve slagging Karl off. It's as polished as a pile of rubble, and as grown up as Dr. Seuss, but had me laughing so hard I almost rear-ended somebody at a roundabout.

Posted by Mark at 10:32 PM | TrackBack

February 28, 2006

Dapper Drake Flight CD 4

I tested the LiveCD version of Ubuntu 6.04 Flight CD 3, due to release in April. It's close enough now for horseshoes and hand grenades, so I've actually installed Flight CD 4 on this laptop.

My first impression is that the install went more smoothly for 5.04 and for 5.10, but then I did wait until those were fully baked before trying to install.

• What's with the huge pause after the kernel gets loaded and the installer starts?
  Was Ubuntu trying to start an X-based installer and couldn't get X configured for the laptop?
• How did I so easily manage to perform an OEM install?
  I didn't notice anything was amiss until it asked me for a user password without allowing me to provide a username. It just seemed like the install was bugged. Then I got out of that, ran sudo oem-config-prepare after updating 233 packages (!).
  This left me in a state where I had to go to failsafe install. I couldn't get my user added with the right groups to do any administration. It's not clear to me whether that's a bug, or something I was supposed to know since I installed as an OEM. But installing as an OEM was pure accident.
• Has Evolution gotten good enough to give it a chance?
  Thunderbird should at least be a default option for the mailer.
• Ekiga Softphone (the program formerly known as GnomeMeeting) now helps me get signed up with a SIP address at the associated website. Very nice.
• Sound setup still does not seem to work.
  Had to killall esd before ekiga could get configured.
• Although I had to identify the trident driver in xorg.conf using a text editor, at least the default vesa driver worked fine. No weird colors on the laptop screen when X starts.
• Whereami and a wizard to configure should be there by default if anything looking like a laptop is detected.
  If I had the energy I'd do the work myself.

If I had the energy, I'd get to work on Matt's idea of network-based configuration settings. One should not have to set up one's browser and emailer each time one changes systems.

Update: It wasn't enough to add the trident driver in the appropriate section. I had to make the Device section in xorg.conf look like this:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Generic Video Card"
        Driver          "trident"
        BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
        Option          "ShadowFB"      "true"
        Option          "accel"
EndSection

Otherwise the windows get repainted very slowly when scrolling or being displaced.

Posted by Mark at 11:24 PM | TrackBack

Pffsssttt...

BBC News has an article about GOOG shares deflating. George Reyes is quoted as remarking, "The search monetisation gains have now been largely realised."

Web 2.0 and house prices to pop at the same time?

Posted by Mark at 07:47 PM | TrackBack

Music for running again

Caress of Steel dates back to 1975, back when Alex Lifeson was still listening to Led Zeppelin and hadn't yet floated off into the pastels of the mid 80s. According to Wikipedia, this album was a flop. It is dated and in many respects silly. The 20 minute Fountain of Lamneth idea just doesn't come off that well over 30 years later.

But it's good for a short, up tempo run. The interplay of these three guys jamming provides a solid metronome. The Necromancer, though a corny idea, still sounds effective. The sort of Lord of the Rings aura, Geddy Lee high nasal vocal, blown dry hair, and goofy bell bottom pantleg ambiance balances out how heavy Lifeson seemed to think he was. Thankfully these guys took themselves less seriously than Metallica later did with their extrapolation of what was going on here.

Plus, Neil Peart grooves his way through. His grace-under-pressure percussion motivates well during a run.

Posted by Mark at 03:48 PM | TrackBack

Heavy rain coming

Metcheck.com's predicting ugly weather coming up this weekend in Paris, where Stu, Luke, and I are going to be running.

What I look forward to most when I'm out there running 21 km (13 mi) are the expected 39 kph (24 mph) winds out of the southwest. Maybe I should pack a parachute. At least I'm not trying to qualify for anything or expecting to run a particular time.

Posted by Mark at 01:38 PM | TrackBack

February 27, 2006

Top of the housing bubble perhaps

According to a headline at WSJ.com, new home sales fell 5% in January. That's probably just for the US right now, but maybe it's headed this way.

Would be a good time to sell our house no doubt, but global warming has not yet advanced to the point where we can live outside here in the winter. Nor is free wireless Internet available to everyone living out of cardboard boxes under bridges.

Posted by Mark at 06:22 PM | TrackBack

February 25, 2006

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, which I think of as being five years after the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik encouraged the US to react by pushing science in schools over some other subjects. A few years later when I was going to school, history had been almost left out of the curriculum. We no longer studied Latin either.

Kuhn examines the history of science, in particular what we thought of in school as physics and chemistry, to disclose how science evolves from one paradigm to another, passing through periods of relative calm "normal science" punctuated by crises provoking revolutions, when scientists' consensus worldview moves from an older, well-explored paradigm to a newer paradigm, one which does a better job of resolving the problems that led to crisis. It is, according to Kuhn, the rigidity of the scientific approach that forces scientists from paradigm to crisis. The trained scientist notices interesting anomalies when the current paradigm is well understood, and the methods of measurement it suggests turn up data that do not fit the paradigm. In a way the best creativity arises when the most rote and disciplined application of the current consensus is accompanied by a capacity to drop the current way of looking at the problem and try other approaches.

This book was not for me a page turner. I had to force myself to read it. Yet it is worth reading. I wonder about its implications for the study of history. I wonder how it applies to things I do. It ends with Kuhn comparing his explanation to Darwinian evolution in biology, which is to say that science does not progress towards a goal, but instead evolves to more and more complete and specialized explanations of observable facts. For some reason that's a calming thought.

Posted by Mark at 09:45 AM | TrackBack

February 23, 2006

Interlocking theories and gibberish

Over at Wikipedia.org, I found an article that draws Castaneda and Thomas Kuhn together, concerning chaos magic:

The idea is that belief is a tool that can be applied at will rather than unconsciously. Some chaos magicians think that trying unusual, and often bizarre beliefs is in itself an experience worth having and consider flexibility of belief a form of power or freedom in a cybernetic sense of the word.

At one end of what I'm reading this week lies Castaneda, to whom applies what Borges's narrator of the story of Tlön observes of his friend, Bioy Casares, who seemingly comes up with the encyclopedia article on the imaginary land as, "a fiction devised by [his] modesty in order to justify a statement." At the other end stands Kuhn, explaining The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by means of scientists' dependence on paradigms.

Funny how the most entertaining stories are the fake ones. Kuhn knocks me out like melatonin. Yet he doesn't knowingly introduce fictions to justify his statements. Once you start introducing the fictions, where do you stop?

Posted by Mark at 10:10 PM | TrackBack

February 22, 2006

The Active Side of Infinity

Who is more Yoda-like, Juan Matus or Peter Drucker? Picture Peter Drucker wielding a green light saber.

Carlos Castaneda apparently died the same year The Active Side of Infinity was published. This particular book covers a period preceding don Juan's departure with his coterie on the next part of the trip.

I still don't know what to make of Castaneda's work. It runs the gamut from slapstick comedy to spiritual fiction, leaving the sneaking suspicion that perhaps he's not in fact making all of it up. Although the italicized concepts like seeing, dark sea of awareness, and so forth leave the alert reader surprised that such nonsense still remains a pleasure to read, there's a sort of gestalt that holds together quite well, and a few ideas, such as flyers, almost too far out to fake.

In the end this book is a relief. Maybe I should read more fiction.

Posted by Mark at 08:46 PM | TrackBack

February 21, 2006

False Prophets

Rob lent me this book, False Prophets, in which James Hoopes, a history professor, retraces the lives and works of American management gurus Taylor, both Gilbreths, Gantt, Follett, Mayo, Barnard, Deming, and Drucker. Hoopes sees the gurus as wanting to skirt around and finally in this century striving to downplay or even eliminate the role top-down power must play in the hierarchical organization, eventually suggesting to managers they should be showing the way through some inspired form of moral leadership.

As Hoopes observes, this suggestion serves mainly to prevent those at the tops of the orgcharts from confronting the top-down power they exercise whether fully consciously or not. This missed confrontation may ease the conscience of those who believe in democracy and also function as corporate dictators. Yet Hoopes argues that in the end it not only further alienates those subjected to disingenuously wielded power, but also prevents those at the top from correctly interpreting situations in which they must lead those beneath them.

Hoopes offers his criticisms from near the center of mainstream corporate America. On the one hand, his book therefore could be read by folks at the tops of the heaps, encouraging them to face their top-down power head on, and to use it without obfuscation. On the other hand, the gurus worked hard to establish their apology for tyrannical power in the midst of what's supposed to be a democracy. Once we started being honest with ourselves, there'd be more explaining to do. A public works program for management guru/apologists, anyone?

Posted by Mark at 07:54 PM | TrackBack

February 19, 2006

Amazing speed

Diane and I watched some speed skating before it was time to take her bath. The best woman in the bunch did 1 km on skates in less than 1:17. That's as fast as the guys riding in the Tour de France!

We were both impressed, though somebody liked tickle matches more than the Olympic games.

Posted by Mark at 06:00 PM | TrackBack

More online robbery

Now that I'm looking into things at Free.fr, I also see that despite their posted tarifs for telephone calls, they've been charging us for calls they say are no additional cost.

It's not much money, but needs to be corrected. Since it's going to cost me time to fix their mess, I wonder what I can do to cost them as much as possible. Maybe some letters to editors would help.

Update: Aha! The thieves seem to have protected their theft on a technicality. They don't propose the offer, but I have to go read 20 pages of fine print again to find the differences between what they proposed to me at the end of December and what I'd have to accept now that I'm signed up. Hmm. So if I'm going to get a fair shake for my work, it's going to need to cost them dearly.

Another update: It's not 20 pages. It's 41.

Posted by Mark at 01:03 PM | TrackBack

February 18, 2006

The end of sleep

According to a digg on Sky News, sleep may soon be a thing of the past. Scientists are finding out how to medicate us so we hardly need to sleep, with the expectation according to Russell Foster at Imperial College London that:

"In 10 to 20 years we'll be able to pharmacologically turn sleep off. Mimicking sleep will take longer, but I can see it happening."

Great for taking care of sick kids, surfing late into the night, or meeting impossible project deadlines. Maybe that'll reduce our life expectancy enough that we won't have to work through age 85.

Posted by Mark at 04:09 PM | TrackBack

February 17, 2006

Intuition justified provided advance notice

New Scientist has a Slashdotted article covering research findings that suggest you'd do better not weighing your options too long on complicated decisions. Of course this is great news for the INFJs among us who typically reach conclusions before we're sure what the issue is.

Or is it?

It seems you have to give your unconscious mind a chance to mull things over while your conscious mind is occupied elsewhere. According to the findings, it doesn't help to make a quick decision if you haven't primed your unconscious mind beforehand.

Posted by Mark at 10:03 PM | TrackBack

February 16, 2006

Capitalism for Beginners

Capitalism for Beginners is another of Antonia's comic books from about 1981. I read this one last night instead of watching Combien ça coûte ? with Nath.

You can perhaps see the characters on the "business cycle" starting with Adam Smith and finishing with Milton Friedman steering. At the end of the second oil crisis in the west, this book has Friedman and the monetarists appearing on the scene to send the Keynesians packing. I didn't get as much out of this one as the one about Marx's work on the subject.

Milton Friedman's book, Capitalism and Freedom, has been in my Amazon wish list since I read Hahnel's book on economics. Friedman's book seems like it might be the canonical text on how markets set you free, even though he was writing against central planning by a commissar class. (Note to rhetoreticians: Always set up a straw man.) Furthermore understanding Friedman seems fundamental to understanding how we see capitalism.

Posted by Mark at 08:20 PM | TrackBack

What are the facts

On France Inter this morning Stéphane Paoli interviewed Ali Larijani, who claimed IAEA inspectors and their cameras were on site in Iranian enrichment plants.

On BBC News this morning, Douste-Blazy says Iran has a secret weapons program.

According to a short resolution the IAEA is not able to prove that there are no undeclared nuclear materials or activities in Iran, and that Iran has been less than perfectly cooperative:

(f) Recalling that in reports referred to above, the Director General noted that after nearly three years of intensive verification activity, the Agency is not yet in a position to clarify some important issues relating to Iran's nuclear programme or to conclude that there are no undeclared nuclear materials or activities in Iran, (g) Recalling Iran’s many failures and breaches of its obligations to comply with its NPT Safeguards Agreement and the absence of confidence that Iran’s nuclear programme is exclusively for peaceful purposes resulting from the history of concealment of Iran’s nuclear activities, the nature of those activities and other issues arising from the Agency’s verification of declarations made by Iran since September 2002,

So for Douste-Blazy, they're guilty until proven innocent. I cannot find anything stating how well the US and France are complying with IAEA inspectors.

Posted by Mark at 11:25 AM | TrackBack

February 14, 2006

Notice a broken heart

According to a BBC News article covering a Dutch study, women are more likely than men not to notice their breaking hearts (when they have heart attacks). Women are more likely to attribute the symptoms to severe flu, and to experience pain in the shoulders rather than the chest.

Posted by Mark at 08:30 PM | TrackBack

February 13, 2006

Hegemony or Survival

Noam Chomsky wrote Hegemony or Survival about the time the US administration was making the case to invade Iraq. In a nutshell he's looking at the push to world dominance by the US state through recent history, and some of the dangers the push has caused and continues to cause for human survival. I listened to the audio book version, which is Brian Jones reading the text.

Chomsky's generally preaching to the converted. His criticisms cannot make it in the mainstream, though if you're flaky enough to hear him out, his criticisms hold together. He's even come up with a plausible explanation of why his stuff won't be able to make it into the mainstream. What he writes ends up being too well thought out and documented to attack frontally, but there are two forms of criticism easily adopted, and that you can recommend to keep everything he says from getting to 99.9% of people.

1. Attack the character, not the content. Chomsky is a crank from the lunatic fringe.

2. Ignore what McGeorge Bundy referred to as critical "noises." We don't have time to listen to every sore loser and disgruntled leftist who hates America.

Both of those techniques work well. Consider this interview on America Morning with Chomsky and Bill Bennett. Chomsky takes a rhetorical beating from Bill, who's better at the TV game. (Maybe Bill's book is good, too. I haven't read it.) On TV image is everything, and time is short.

If time isn't too short to listen, you may find Chomsky's perspective entertaining, and occasionally even useful.

He fills some holes left in what I'd learned about history (very little).

He demonstrates rules of thumb for evaluating policies and procedures. Facts and actions speak more clearly than rhetoric and pronouncements, so check what actually happens regardless of what is said. Evaluate your friends using the same yardsticks you use for your enemies. Don't confound the representatives with the represented. History is usually written by the victors. When reading news, recall that the press is privately owned, and the customers are advertisers, not readers. Etc.

His sense of humor is blacker than Kafka and funnier than Dilbert.

The trouble I have with Chomsky and Marx (not with Hahnel or Alpert) is that the well-designed criticism goes on and on, and then the solutions proposed at the end seem wishful and insubstantial, an exercise left entirely to the reader. In the end, maybe that's right, though. After all, both these guys are leading to the conclusion that what we need is all of us getting involved and contributing. If we rely on an elite to decide what's good for us, we'll end up dead. The first step is to take charge of ourselves.

Posted by Mark at 09:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 12, 2006

Kapital for Beginners

Kapital for Beginners, a comic book by David Smith and Phil Evans published in the early 1980s, makes clear some salient points of Marx's theory concerning how capital and labor interact, and how the capitalist to prosper must extract surplus value, value that can be created only through labor. Since I have not managed to read even the abridged version of the real thing, I borrowed this one from Antonia.

This book and the book it dumbs down have at one level an hilarious ironic cast that reminds me of Kafka's parable of the gate or the Philip K. Dick's story, A Scanner Darkly, in which narcotics officer S.A. Powers investigates his own increasing addiction, eventually getting himself incarcerated and blowing his mind in the process.

In the US and probably much of the developed world, the line between labor and capital is blurry in the top quintile, where we'd expect to rely on equities for retirement. In other words, we aspire to finish our lives as capitalists, and indeed are so intent on getting there that we invest to ride big capital's coat tails as it exploits us while we work and aims to play us off against cheaper labor elsewhere. Our fathers and mothers working in the private sector eventually lose their jobs, but seem to make it to financial security, provided we keep the scheme going.

Most of my compatriots from the top quintile would likely remind me that Marxism has been proven to be bunk, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc being the ultimate demonstration. Interesting that this comic book points out (years before the implosion) that Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Castro, and dictators like them missed the point. Or maybe they got a different set of points, those made by Machiavelli. Quoted in this book Rosa Luxemburg wrote instead, "Only the working class, by its self-activity, can bring about socialism. That means workers control. Nobody can bring about socialism 'On your behalf.'" Guess the French "Socialists" didn't read Rosa Luxemburg either.

Posted by Mark at 04:23 PM | TrackBack