Belligerati

I was helping a friend get data out of PDF files with limited tools yesterday. Your best bet is to use the text select tool while holding the ALT key, so you can select a column at a time. I use OCR software that came with my scanner, OmniPage, and in general I find it pretty easy to get data out. When I used to work in banking I didn't have access to such software and I used to dread extracting such data. My friend writes me this morning to mention he discovered PDF to Excel, which he really liked. I haven't tried it yet but I will give it a shot on my next data extraction project. Fingers crossed that it can do something intelligent with foot notes and Greek symbols.

Posted by OEM at 8:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In U.S. Shifts Strategy on Illicit Work by Immigrants, the NY Times reports that our immigration policy has improved from plain to evil to merely insane. It seems we've moved from treating undocumented workers as violent criminals to white collar ones or drug addicts. Thanks for small blessings I guess.

In New Evidence on the Foreclosure Crisis at the WSJ, Dr. Stan Liebowitz reports that the primary cause of home foreclosure was negative home equity, i.e. owing the bank more than your home is worth. He says that

...only 12% of homes had negative equity, they comprised 47% of all foreclosures
.... Only 8% of foreclosures had an interest rate increase of that much. Thus the overall impact of upward interest rate resets is much smaller than the impact from equity.
...To be sure, many other variables -- such as FICO scores (a measure of creditworthiness), income levels, unemployment rates and whether the house was purchased for speculation -- are related to foreclosures. But liar loans and loans with initial teaser rates had virtually no impact on foreclosures, in spite of the dubious nature of these financial instruments.

This makes sense to me from a single cause explanation. If you have positive equity in your home you will find a way to hold on to it. If you cannot borrow money to refinance you will scrimp and save to hold on to your valuable asset, even if you are a liar or have a ballooning loan. However, there maybe be a lot of overlap in these categories. I suspect that a substantial number of those foreclosed houses with negative equity were also liar loans or balloons.
That is:
P(Default | negative equity) < P(Default | negative equity and balloon/ARM mortgage)
P(Default | negative equity) < P(Default | negative equity and liar loan)
and of course
P(Default | negative equity and neither a liar loan nor a balloon/ARM mortgage) < P(Default | negative equity)

I'm also concerned about the use of this in inference. Many home fell much in value precisely because other people who lived in the area depended on liar loans and balloon/ARM mortgages. When that demand dried up with changes in the financing supply, prices fell, some people had negative equity, and they defaulted.

Posted by OEM at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Congress's Travel Tab Swells: Spending on Taxpayer-Funded Trips Rises Tenfold (WSJ)

My guess is that spending has gone up because lobbyist spending on jaunts has fallen significantly due to growing restrictions on gift giving to politicians.

Update:
Jonathan Adler at Volokh says it is up 70 percent since 2005 when a ban on lobbyist-funded travel was imposed

Posted by OEM at 3:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I came across the following discussion of the optimal royalty structure for an author.

The agent is really high on The Unicornians. She thinks it's the next Twilight. So she submits it to several editors at once. Editor 1 comes back offering $300,000 for three books. Editor 2 offers $30,000 for three books but with a significantly better hardcover royalty. (Say, 20% instead of 10%.)

Putting aside the (very important) questions of which editor would be a better fit and which publisher is doing a better job with Unicornian-esque books, I would argue that the author of The Unicornians is always better off signing with Editor 2.

Let's say that The Unicornians is not a tremendous success. The first book in the trilogy sells 8,000 copies in hardcover; the second two sell 6,000*. With Editor 1, the author gets her $300,000^^, but The Unicornians comes up $240,000 short^^^ of earning out. With Editor 2, the author only makes $80,000 on the series, but $50,000 of that is royalty, and the publisher has also made a (modest) profit. The publisher will likely ask the author for another series, perhaps something focused in on the werewolf dude...

Okay, so now let's say The Unicornians IS successful. Let's say the first book sells 250,000 copies in hardcover**, because they make a movie, and teens squeal about how hot the unicornian boy's horn looks. The second and third books also sell 250,000.*** With Editor 1's deal, the author earns back her advance and makes $1.2 million, for a total of 1.5 million dollars. With Editor 2's deal, the author earns out and makes $2.7 million in royalties, for a total of $3 million.****

A few comments. First, if an author has some indication that his book will sell as in the first example, he will make much more money. In fact, it would take five trilogies to earn this much money. Even if that publisher is made at you, the author proved he could sell 14,000 books, and so the next publisher should be interested in giving them another contract, even if it is at the much lower advance level. You also could take the money and give away your next book series on your website. This probably is not an important strategic situation because publishers have more expertise in understanding the commercial viability of the books than their authors do. After all, the authors specialize in writing books while publishers specialize in publishing and marketing them.

Another comment is that economists have discussed optimal contracting. It comes up in labor economics, game theory, and IO at a minimum. The optimal way to split uncertain revenues depends primarily on two factors, the relative risk aversion of the participants and the way that work quality can be observed. A few examples will help.

Let's say that you sew buttons onto suits. Since that can be observed perfectly the optimal contract is simply to pay a flat fee, say a $1 for each one you sew. When you work harder you make more. Slack off and make less. The lesson here is when you can contract over observable quality and productivity it makes sense to have employees bear the risk.

Now say you have a job where no amount of testing will predict how good you are at it, just that experience shows that 50% of people selected will be good at it. Presume also that your effort doesn't matter either. If the employer can employ hold a large number of such employees, then they can diversify all their risk, having little or no risk in aggregate production. In this situation it is optimal to pay employees a flat rate. Employees have to take a single job, so they can't diversify away from the risk of being bad at the job they take. The employer has no aggregate risk. If employees are risk neutral or risk loving, they'd take high pay if they are revealed to be of high quality and low pay if of low quality, but that doesn't describe most people. The lesson here is that when there is uncertainty in the productivity because effort cannot be clearly observed or there are sources of risk outside of the employee's control, those risks are best born by the people who either do not mind risk or can diversify that risk, which is usually the employer.

Now back to authors and publishers. Having a large advance provides a smaller incentive to write a better book than a larger royalty does. Once they give you your advance only your artistic integrity, reputation, and desire to be given more work in the future motivate you to write the best book possible. Your advance size shouldn't motivate you because it is a sunk benefit. That is, it is fixed based on your effort. On the other hand, a larger royalty provides less of an incentive for publishers to promote your book because they get a smaller share of the upside. There is residual risk that is born by the publishers because they front all the money to print and market the books. Giving them less of the upside but leaving the costs the same means that they should be less willing to take a risk on publishing your books.

This doesn't have a clear general solution. You want the most upside to write the best book possible, but you want to leave as much upside as possible to the publisher to ensure that they sell as many of your books a possible. A publishing house is diversified, so they are in a natural position to bear more risk than you are. That suggests that they take more royalties and you take a larger advance. However, we know it cannot be optimal to give the author no upside, because the advance alone would provide limited motivation to write a good book.

Publishers seem to distribute their marketing budgets in a lumpy way. That is, some books with small advances get large marketing budgets. This suggests that publishers can (or believe they can) distinguish much more about commercial viability after the book is written. That alone may be enough to motivate authors if they have a utilitarian value from seeing their book sell well. Alternatively, if they have at least some royalty payments then writing a good book means making more money even though the advance is a fixed payment because it raises the likelihood that publishers will promote your book. That suggests a compensation structure like the one we observe in publishing business, a combination of effort monitoring and risk sharing in the form of advances and royalties. Economics doesn't have anything obvious to say about the relative sizes of these parts without knowing more about risk preferences, the probability of commercial success, and the role of marketing in book promotion. It is however a tractable problem. If we knew the odds of a book being a commercial success dependent on author effort and publisher's marketing budget then we could solve for the optimal contract of profit sharing.

Hat Tip to Boing Boing at Proposal to raise book royalties, lower advances

Posted by OEM at 7:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Is China Really an ‘East Asian success story’? by John Lee

Posted by OEM at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

But even sealed windows don’t solve the soot problem entirely. Mr. Nelson and others said that gases created by basement heating systems often rise through buildings’ interiors.

Because the gases tend to follow load-bearing walls, which are continuous, they concentrate around the edges of rooms, he said.

The gases leave oily deposits as they pass through carpets, which are really room-size filters.

And when dirt hits those deposits, it sticks. One result can be a dark line around the perimeter of the room, known as filtration soiling.

As if there weren't enough problems to worry about, now I have to worry about greasy invisible gases causing dirt to stick to my carpets. I guess it isn't too bad since I've never noticed it before, but it certainly sounds awful.

Posted by OEM at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The brain is a very expensive organ in metabolic terms. Each unit of brain tissue requires over 22 times the amount of metabolic energy as an equivalent unit of muscle tissue.

Posted by OEM at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Does the G.O.P. want to be the party of sex scandals and polluters or does it want to be a partner in helping America dominate the next great global industry: E.T. -- energy technology?

Isn't it a nice coincidence that what is best for the planet is also best for economically and as a matter of international relations.

I am deeply skeptical. Why should the economic benefits of being a C02 cleanup first-mover are anywhere close to the costs? It is also important to remember that jobs spent cleaning up the environment are COSTS not BENEFITS of cleanup programs. Their labor is spent cleaning up waste not building things and delivering services we want.
Consider the major environmental cleanup legislation in the last hundred years. Taking lead out of gas, building nuclear plants, reducing DDT usage, CFC reduction to heal the ozone, particulate emission reductions, cleaning up our rivers, and building wildlife refuges. Not a single one of these policies produced enough growth to offset their costs. The argument for these cleanups was that there were aesthetic, health, and consumption benefits that made them worth their enormous costs. I can't help that feel that those trying to persuade us that this global warming prevention stuff is good for the economy are selling us a bill of goods. Preventing global warming may well be worth doing. But we need to be grownups and admit that fixing the problem will be expensive. There may be enormous economic advantages to not being a first mover.

From an international relations perspective, I think there are very few people who care about the US position on global warming issues. I suspect no meaningful CO2 reductions will occur until the BRIC countries get on board anyway, so this is all environmentalism theater anyway. One possibility there is conditional carbon tax. In the last election Maryland passed a bill (Dropping out of the electoral college) that said that the winner of the national popular vote would get all of Maryland's electoral votes, but only if enough states had done so to ensure that the winner of the popular vote also won the presidency. Until then, Maryland continued to issue their electoral votes to the party that won the most votes in Maryland. We could easily say that we will impose a carbon tax that binds the US, but only when a certain number of the large countries have a system in place that makes the other major producers do so too. That costs us nothing, and also makes us part of the solution.

Posted by OEM at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Malcolm Gladwell says there is no iron law of information's price falling to zero in Priced to Sell. That reminded me of a major issue I had with Cory Doctorow's science fiction novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, where free energy and immortality (the ability to be reincarnated from software) had combined to eliminate all other scarcity on earth. In reading the book I couldn't escape that land and information need not be free in such a world. In fact, just as cheap food has made other things like acting and teaching much more expensive, Doctorow's hypothesis that free energy and long life expectancy would lead to the end of scarcity seems backwards. I expect that such a situation would cause the remaining scarce goods to become much more expensive. A sort of Baumol's cost disease on steroids.

It is impossible to know how the death of newspapers and the growth of electronic books will change the face of information distribution. Perhaps the price of information and entrainment will fall to zero, and only non-profits and volunteers will create any. That's the story that the futurists seem to like, but that is hardly the only possible one. Maybe that was clearly the right narrative for music, but I'm skeptical that is the right model for video and print.

Posted by OEM at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Why is it that many people can be happy with the mass killing of geese, chickens, pigs, horses, cows, goats, and sheep, but it bothers them when we kill seals?

A NY Times article, Canadian Chefs Serve Seal, With a Side of Controversy, discusses a flourishing restaurant trade in seal meat in Canada, despite bans in Europe and the USA. It seems that the fur as waste can't be the real issue, because if fur is cruel and leather is not, then eating seal makes things less cruel, not more:

Canada allows two distinct hunts each year: a small one by Inuits in the Arctic, mainly a subsistence hunt for food, and the much larger Gulf of St. Lawrence hunt on the Atlantic coast, driven primarily by the fur trade.

In the latter hunt, which has been the focus of protests by animal rights groups, fishermen are allowed to kill 280,000 seals out of a herd that Canadian officials estimate at 5.6 million. About 15,800 Canadians hold seal hunting licenses.

...
Christian Archambault, a second-generation fishmonger at the Atwater Market in Montreal, flatly refuses to stock seal, but he acknowledged a distinction between urban diners simply exploring a new trend and Inuits following a tradition. “They have a right to eat it locally,” Mr. Archambault said.

The Canadian humane society also does not oppose the small hunt in the far north. Its main objection to seal dishes in restaurants, it says, is that the cuisine deflects attention from the bigger hunt, which the society has been working to end. “If they’re selling meat, they’re promoting the commercial seal hunt,” said Rebecca Aldworth, a director of the Canadian Branch of Humane Society International. “The restaurants aren’t the story here. The seal hunt is the story.”

Ms. Aldworth added: “If the restaurants believe the hunt should end, they should not be serving seal meat. Most countries are taking steps to end the hunt, not promote it.”

I also don't understand why indigenous consumers deserve special rights. Perhaps for limited resources like whales, we can give any limited hunting rights to those who hold the most long established rights to do so, which in this case would be the Inuit. However, there are plenty of Canadian seals. If killing them for their food and skin is wrong for white Canadians, it should also be wrong for Inuit ones.

I'm really having trouble seeing the difference between the seal hunt and the American deer hunt, and that comparison makes me less sympathetic with the seals. Public opinion on this matter could just come down to Denis Leary's bit:

What are you?
I'm an otter.
And what do you do?
I swim around on my back and do cute little human things with my hands.
You're free to go.
And what are you?
I'm a cow.
Get in the fucking truck, ok pal!
But I'm an animal.
You're a baseball glove! Get on that truck!
I'm an animal, I have rights!
Yeah, here's yer fucking cousin, get on the fucking truck, pal! We kill the cows to make jackets out of them and then we kill each other for the jackets we made out of the cows.

Posted by OEM at 8:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The court was remarkably polarized in the 74 signed decisions it issued this term, dividing 5-to-4 or 6-to-3 in almost half of them, up from roughly a third in the three previous years. The court reversed lower courts about three-quarters of the time, up from two-thirds in the last term. ... Justice Kennedy was in the majority 92 percent of the time and in all but 5 of the 23 decisions in which the justices split 5-to-4. Those decisions were, moreover, often divided in the expected way: in 16, all four members of the court’s liberal wing were on one side and all four of its conservatives were on the other.

And in between them was Justice Kennedy, the most powerful jurist in America. He joined the liberals 5 times and the conservatives 11. That was a significant shift to the right: in the previous term, Justice Kennedy voted four times each with the liberals and the conservatives in cases divided along the traditional ideological fault line.

None of the inference discussed above is persuasive. We don't know what the natural variation in the ideological make-up of cases they can select. For all we know this is a perfectly natural level of variation and the cases were suited to policy and legal areas appealing to his conservative preferences. Sure, Roberts might have persuaded Kennedy to move a bit to the right, but we can't know if that explanation is required or natural variation is enough.

Posted by OEM at 8:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Taylor is particularly scathing on the subject of primate rights. "I don't understand why conservation of the great apes has become synonymous with human rights and their similarity to us, whereas conservation of wetlands or a million other species doesn't carry any such conflations," he says. In this he echoes the Telegraph columnist Steve Jones, who has argued that it is a mistake to apply a human concept, such as rights, to an animal: "Chimpanzees share about 98 per cent of our DNA, but bananas share about 50 per cent, and we are not 98 per cent chimp or 50 per cent banana. We are entirely human and unique." ... Over the past five years, he points out, our understanding of genetics has become much more sophisticated. While there might only be a 1.6 per cent difference in the genome itself, the way it shapes our minds and bodies is radically different. "The key thing for me," says Taylor, "is that when you compare chimps and great apes with humans you notice how much more gene expression there is in humans."

Gene expression is when certain genes damp down or speed up chemical processes. A team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology showed that in human brains, there is a five-fold increase in the rate of gene expression. Other research has shown that more than 90 per cent of the genes in human brains have been "up-regulated" – that is, they have higher levels of gene expression. Most of these genes are associated with the speed of transmission of nerve impulses or energy production to fuel the brain. As Taylor says, "Bigger, faster, greedier, longer-living – that's the evolutionary story of the human brain."

Another genetic difference between us and chimps is "copy number variation". This is where a gene becomes copied, inserted into another part of the genome and yet still works. For instance, GLUD2 is a gene that governs an enzyme involved in nerve signalling in the brain. It is common to all the great apes, including humans – but with us, the gene has been copied, which makes the enzyme work faster. The resulting neurological intensity, says Taylor, "is like swapping a Lee-Enfield rifle for a machine gun".

Along with other genetic innovations, such as inversions, where whole chromosomes are flipped over, and gene splicing (in which one gene controls up to 50 proteins), the gulf between human and chimpanzee brains starts to widen dramatically. "If you add all this up," says Taylor, "the genetic similarity between humans and chimps drops to 87 per cent."

We don't need them to be our equals to decide that they are worthy of treatment better than mere things. That's sufficient but hardly necessary.

I've often wondered how we would persuade a vastly more powerful, long lived, and intelligent species to value our lives above those of farm animals. I'd like to think that creatures meeting a minimum standard of brain power and emotional complexity would earn the limited respect of a more powerful race. That's the frame of mind that gives me special respect for the dignity, happiness, and suffering of animals like wolves (and dogs), horses, elephants, whales, dolphins, and the great apes. Which reminds me of two science fiction stories. In The Uplift Saga there are special punishments for killing members of those sorts of animals, proto-sentient races that are capable (with genetic tinkering) of making it to full sentience. In Accelerando a character makes the case that how we treat emerging artificial intelligences will become important because it will dictate how they will treat us when they inevitably eclipse us in power and intellect.

Posted by OEM at 4:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ballard considered this childhood ordinary. “People who read Empire of the Sun have often said to me, ‘What a strange life, how unusual,’” he told the BBC World Service in 2002. “And I say to them, actually, the life I led in Shanghai before and during the Second World War was not strange; it wasn’t unusual. The majority of the people on this planet today and for most of this century and previous centuries have always lived lives much closer to the way I lived than to, say, the comfortable suburbs of Western Europe and North America. It is here where I live today that is very strange by the world’s standards. Civil war, famine, flood, drought, poverty, disease are the norms of human experience.”

Another voice sharing the opinion that it is wealth and not poverty that has causes.

Posted by OEM at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today, the U.S. ranks next to last among the 28 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations in total federal revenue as a share of GDP. Our federal revenues represent 18% of national output, down from 20% just 10 years ago. That makes the mismatch between our spending and our revenue very large, producing the huge deficits we face.

Posted by OEM at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm reading the fantastic The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, and in one of the stories, a ethical and talented lawyer helps defend a speak-easy operator during alcohol prohibition. The police bust in and arrest her. The law is openly mocked, and she isn't in much trouble for that, even though she's in possession of between 15-20 gallons of illegal booze. Compare that with today.

A typical marijuana cigarette ("joint") contains between 0.5 and 1.5 grams of marijuana.. Most states that I know of have some sort of possession with intent to deal rule, like this one in Indiana kicking in at 30 grams. In contrast, there are 33.8 oz in a 1 liter bottle of liquor. Take a look at your liquor cabinet. I'm probably safe in guessing you have no intent to distribute alcohol for money, yet any one of your unopened bottles would be enough to upgrade you from misdemeanor to felony if it were an equivalent number of psychotropic doses of marijuana. Where as once prohibition laws treated even the equivalent of a corner bodega's worth of booze as a minor crime, today we consider far less than a household's booze for private consumption a major felony.

I also thought it was interesting that the upstanding, anti-corruption lawyer in the story is shown drinking in a another illegal drinking environment, and that includes at least 5 drinks. It is hard to imagine a story like that today. This suggests to me that drug prohibition will not end soon. The level of public contempt of the drug laws by good men has not reached the appropriate level.

Posted by OEM at 7:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Powerful voices on the court, including Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion on Monday, began to call for something close to a zero-tolerance policy when it came to government counting its citizens by race for any purpose. And the court became skeptical of Congress’s making its own legislative judgments in ways that threatened to expand the boundaries of the court’s own narrowing constitutional vision.

Surely this is better than nonsense like this:

Under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s “four-fifths rule,” a test that one racial group passed at less than 80 percent the rate of another group would place an employer in presumptive violation of Title VII.

Posted by OEM at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

TheBlueEyedGirl and I enjoy playing dominoes. One of my friends got us an antique eboy and ivory set. It is a work of art. Now though we eat meat, we regard elephants as animals worthy of special moral consideration due to their intelligence. We certainly we wouldn't buy any elephant meat or ivory that came from a elephant today. So last night when we played a few rounds we wondered if continuing to play a gamemade from the teeth of a sentient animal was cruel. On the one had, I can see us as honoring the elephant by continuing to use the dominoes. It doesn't do anyone any good to throw them away. We cannot undue the suffering caused to the animal and by using them and admiring their beauty I could see us as adding dignity to its death. On the other hand, let's say that someone had a Nazi or Cambodian genocide horror that made a set of dominoes from human bone.Would anyone get behind the argument above? That by using them I somehow honor the dead? I don't think anyone would accept that argument there. I cannot put my finger on the difference, but I sense there is one.If I decide that I need to bury the elephant teeth with dignity, I'm not sure how to do that. I can't exactly fly to an elephant graveyard in Africa. Further, I've seen the fossils of our ancestors in natural history museums, and there doesn't seem to be a big ethical problem there. So what is it about human dice that summons our digust instinct that isn't troubled by museams with staged skeletons of astralopithicus? Where do elephant dominoes belong on that scale? I'm at a loss.

Posted by OEM at 5:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'm into role playing games. Yes, I know that is somewhat odd for a grown man, but it is fun. I came across this categorization system for non-player characters (NPC) for dramatic purposes.

There are four sorts of non-player character: spear carriers, informants, patrons, and trouble-makers. Spear carriers (called extras in the movies) serve to provide atmosphere, needed skills the players might not have, or cannon fodder (in case a referee wants to show what great danger the players are in by killing someone but does not want to do in one of the players). Informants serve to give the players information, and are ideal for those situations in which the referee needs to give false data, but does not feel like lying to the players outright. Informants may be experts the players consult (such as a university professor or scholar) may be passengers or crew of a starship which the players are on, or may be people that the players casually meet in the course of seeking rumors or employment. A patron is a NPC who has a job offer for one or more of the players. The patron provides some of the information the players will need to carry out the job (rarely will all information be provided; the players must find some things out for themselves), and will offer a reward of some sort. ... Trouble-makers are specifically intended to cause problems for the characters. Trouble-makers include police, customs, tax, and immigration officials, other government red-tapers, thugs, ruffians, hi-jackers, thieves, con-men, and characters who strut around in opera capes and samurai helmets talking like James Earl Jones.

Traveller - Books 0-8: The Classic Books

I like these categories. Though certainly people move between these categories, especially moving from spear carriers, informants, and patrons into trouble-makers. In my own games, spear carriers are the rarest categories and trouble makers are the most common. I see extras as a fifth category distinct from spear carriers. A spear carrier is an extra with lines or a name. A real extra is someone in the background who you never talk to, or interact with physically, verbally, or socially beyond perhaps holding a door open for them, accidentally spilling your coffee on them, or being an anonymous hostage.

Posted by OEM at 4:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I read on The Consumerist that the E.U. Agrees To Universal Standard For Phone Chargers. Many critique the current variety of charging systems as profit maximizing waste. That is, cell phone manufacturers create needless variety to raise the price of accessories to ensure healthy profits. Defenders say that different electronics, battery, and form factor (size) specifications necessitate different adapters. In any case, there now exists generic hardware requiring only simple adapter plugs when upgrading your phone. See for example the Igo system. It is also true that within a single manufacturer there are often few different chargers required. When the BlueEyedGirl upgraded to her new phone she was able to keep the same charger because she moved from a Razor to a Krazor and they used the same adapter. That was one reason why she picked it. Those desiring to retain the same accessories can easily choose from a few updated models that will continue to use them. However, a generic charging system probably will differ from the current ones, necessitating that everyone buy new equipment, including that small group that actually wanted to avoid buying new accessories.

Let's recap. Many people won't care, and will have possibly sub-optimal generic accessories. Some people will care, but they will have to buy new accessories because phones using their old systems won't be available. Economies of scale and competition will probably reduce prices on accessories, though I've been buying cheap (well below retail) accessories on Ebay for years, so I'm skeptical of the savings here.

I'm curious what will happen in the US market. I'd say we can judge the effectiveness of this regulation by its consequences outside the region. If there really are big savings from additional standardization and competition, one would expect that phones offered in the US will conform to the EU standard. However, the world's best selling phone, the Nokia's 1100 handset has sold over 200 million units, so I'm skeptical that there are additional scale economies. Additionally, manufacturers must already make somewhat different charging system for the varying power systems around the world, and there is some variation within product lines, so it can't be too expensive to have differing hardware by region. We shall see.

Posted by OEM at 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Coup d'état, a sudden and decisive action in politics, esp. one resulting in a change of government illegally or by force.

According to the WSJ:

That Mr. Zelaya (Honduran President) acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court's order.

The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.

The NY Times essentially agrees with these facts, and yet gives the headline Honduran President Is Ousted in Coup. If the congress impeaches the president and he won't go and so they have to call in the military, would they call that a coup? I doubt it. But when the supreme court does the same thing the NY Times seems to think that is a coup.

Reminds me of the famous quote of Andrew Jackson about the Supreme Court's holding that the state of Georgia could not impose its state laws upon Cherokee tribal lands, "John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can." Was that a coup too?

Mr. Zelaya is surely naive if he believes this:

“They are creating a monster they will not be able to contain,” he told a local television station in San José. “A usurper government, that emerges by force, cannot be accepted, will not be accepted by any country.”

PS
I think David Bernstein at Volokh agrees.

Posted by OEM at 7:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"We want to celebrate this black man,” Mr. Foxx said of Michael Jackson. “He belongs to us and we shared him with everybody else."
In Jackson’s Death, Black Ambivalence Fades

A man owes nothing to other members of his race simply by virtue of a few shared genes. Michael Jackson was born free, but in many ways lived an unhappy life trying to serve the needs of others. His life may end up serving as testament to the power over attitude of means. Richer than virtually every man on earth, one-time sex symbol, famous, and a decent family, yet he couldn't find happiness. I can't help imagining a world where he never made it as a solo- artist and ended up a much happier background singer/dancer as an adult. It really does seem as though some performer children's lives are forever ruined in childhood. It just leads to a cascade of bad choices. Is it a lack of social capital from being a child when all adults are sycophants and defendants? Is it having a concentrated skill portfolio lacking teamwork, compromise, and a tolerance for mild suffering? Is it an unnaturally high set point for consumption? Does it do something to our risk tolerances or discount rate? I don't know.

Posted by OEM at 7:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Source: The Pearl of Allah: Largest Pearl in The World. It bears that name because it looks like a man wearing a turban. Unlike most of the pearls you've seen this one formed as a burr attached to the clam's shell, not a free floating bit inside. An interesting write-up of the pearl's discovery over at natural history magazine from back in 1939: The Pearl of Allah

Posted by OEM at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“The temporal resolution of our vision,” said Barbara Shinn-Cunningham of Boston University, “is an order of magnitude slower than what our auditory system can cope with.”

On the other hand, if vision didn't work this way, movies would require 10 times as much film and 10 times faster cameras and projectors. This would mean vastly brighter lighting on film, faster film emulsions, and wider aperture lenses. All of these factors may have prevented motion picture technology from being invented or delayed or prohibited its commercial adaption. Same deal for computer monitors. Imagine if CRT needed 600htz refresh rates instead of 60htz to avoid users noticing flickering. That would have severely impeded the adoption of graphical user interfaces for computers.

I'm used to thinking of my vision as my best sense. Deeper reflection suggests that it is only the best in distinguishing certain kinds of information. The superior ability of hearing to distinguish speed, smell to evoke memory, touch to provide unidirectional information suggests that there really isn't a best sense.

Posted by OEM at 3:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How is the following for an unintended consequence, when the police cracked down on liquor law and organized crime at the Stonewall Bar, they ended up unleashing the gay rights movement:

A prominent Stonewall myth holds that the riots were an uprising by the gay community against decades of oppression. This would be true if the “gay community” consisted of Stonewall patrons. The bar’s regulars, though, were mostly teenagers from Queens, Long Island and New Jersey, with a few young drag queens and homeless youths who squatted in abandoned tenements on the Lower East Side.
...
Another myth is that the police raid on the Stonewall was part of a broader crackdown on gay bars in the summer of 1969, a mayoral election year. In fact, the Stonewall operation was the work of a Police Department deputy inspector, Seymour Pine, and officers from the morals unit, and they carried it out without the knowledge of the officers of the local police precinct, whom they suspected of taking payoffs from the Stonewall and other Mafia-run gay bars in the Village.

Deputy Inspector Pine had two stated reasons for the raid: the Stonewall was selling liquor without a license, which it was, and it was being used by a Mafia blackmail ring that was setting up gay patrons who worked on Wall Street, which also seems likely.

The owner of the Stonewall, Tony Lauria, was reputed to be a front man for Matty Ianniello (known as “Matty the Horse”), a capo in the Genovese crime family who oversaw a string of clubs in the city. New York’s gay-bar scene at the time was a corrupt system apparently designed to benefit mobster owners, who served watered-down drinks at inflated prices, often made with ill-gotten liquor from truck hijackings.

It is interesting to think that without licensing requirements to serve alcohol, they might never have been a gay rights movement. The unintended consequences of public policies are so large that one could easily despair at any hope of improving them by design. Another vindication for Hayek.

Posted by OEM at 9:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In ancient graves excavated previously, Bowles found that up to 46 per cent of the skeletons from 15 different locations around the world showed signs of a violent death. More recently, war inflicted 30 per cent of deaths among the Ache, a hunter-gatherer population from Eastern Paraguay, 17 per cent among the Hiwi, who live in Venezuela and Colombia, while just 4 per cent among the Anbara in northern Australia.

This is tricky. We know that many cultures have special honors for those dying in battle. We don't know if those dying a violent death were singled out for special burial resulting in their skeletons lasting into the present day. If they were, then examining the burial evidence doesn't tell us how violent these societies were.

Posted by OEM at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

But Gardner, a professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius award" in 1981, has had enormous influence, particularly in our schools.

Briefly, he has posited that our intellectual abilities are divided among at least eight abilities: verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.

...
The only problem, with all respect to Gardner: There probably is just a single intelligence or capacity to learn, not multiple ones devoted to independent tasks. To varying degrees, some individuals have this capacity, and others do not.
...
The theory of multiple intelligences fundamentally conflates intelligence and motivation. It's a fatal flaw. Motivation is certainly important, and it works alongside intelligence to produce results. However, having the raw biological machinery of intelligence is simply irreplaceable.

Posted by OEM at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just finished reading The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross. They are the stories (4 among the two books) of a mid twenties man working for the UK government as an anti-occult agent. The world is one in which the H P Lovecraft / Cthulhu stuff works and that some sorts of philosophy, mathematics, and computer science are fully function sanity eating magic, but the vast majority of us don't believe the world is any different from our own. Though he says in an appendix that he'd never heard of Delta Green, the series reads like a series of Delta Green stories set in a better world where these horrors aren't quite as threatening, the government isn't quite as bad or incompetent, and magic and horrors don't as rapidly consume your sanity.

The first book (The Atrocity Archives) was great. It was dark, dangerous, interesting, and exciting without being anything like a bond movie. The world had some eldritch horrors in it, but not so many dark gods, black magic, and zombies that you wondered how the rest of the world didn't know about it. A horrible (in the other sense) and wonderful story.

The second story (The Jennifer Morgue) was more like a sloppy parody of the first book. The first book wasn't the most well written science fiction book, but a good read. The second is a sloppier mess, with shifting vantage points, dream sequences, way more magical elements (making you wonder how anyone could keep that stuff under wraps), and tons of chatty footnotes (a la Terry Pratchett but they don't work nearly as well here), all indicating the author couldn't tell this second book int he tight, organized the way he told the first one. The second book has way more Bond-like stuff in it. Which is great in James Bond movies but sloppy here, even with the geas-driven plot driving some of it, this reader just didn't care for it.

I don't believe that Stross has written sequels to any of his other books, so I wonder if he rushed it to market for commercial reasons. I'd strongly recommend reading The Atrocity Archives, but you can take or leave The Jennifer Morgue.

Posted by OEM at 8:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The blue eyed girl and I went on a nice long, hot hike today. On the way down our feet hurt and we took off our shoes to allow our feet to cool. As we were relaxing, a large rattle snake slithered within a foot of us. I noticed it and she did not. I got her attention, we stood upon the long on which we had been sitting and moved as far away as our bare feel allowed. The snake passed by us without looking much at us or rattling even once. Though intellectually I knew that the absence of a rattle meant that we were in no danger, the emotional part of my mind experienced enough fear that I lacked the presence of mind to snap a picture.

I was a hot day but a very nice hike of about 1700 feet of elevation gain and 7.5 miles of trail. Strangers can be stunningly nice. We walked back through some camp grounds. I found a nice couple and I asked for some directions to ensure I was on the right track. Not only did they help me but they offered me a delicious ice cold beer.

Posted by OEM at 7:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)