Idiotprogrammer Blog

Month: August 2009

  • Joshua Bell and the Washington D.C. Metro

    Apparently I missed this outstanding essay by Gene Weingarten about a little social experiment. The writer invited world famous violinist Joshua Bell  to play a Stradivarius violin for almost an hour in a DC Metro. The results were astounding: Nobody paid attention; Bell received only $30 in tips, and almost nobody actually stopped to listen:

    This is one of those essays which is so beautiful that it’s hard to paraphrase or quote without doing it justice.

    What is this life if, full of care,

    We have no time to stand and stare.

    — from "Leisure," by W.H. Davies

    In his 2003 book, Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life, British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L’Enfant Plaza may be symptomatic of that, he said — not because people didn’t have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.

    "This is about having the wrong priorities," Lane said.

    If we can’t take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that — then what else are we missing?

    That’s what the Welsh poet W.H. Davies meant in 1911 when he published those two lines that begin this section. They made him famous. The thought was simple, even primitive, but somehow no one had put it quite that way before.

    Of course, Davies had an advantage — an advantage of perception. He wasn’t a tradesman or a laborer or a bureaucrat or a consultant or a policy analyst or a labor lawyer or a program manager. He was a hobo.

    Another great passage about childhood and observation:

    You can see Evan clearly on the video. He’s the cute black kid in the parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being propelled toward the door.

    "There was a musician," Parker says, "and my son was intrigued. He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time."

    So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between Evan’s and Bell’s, cutting off her son’s line of sight. As they exit the arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look. When Parker is told what she walked out on, she laughs.

    "Evan is very smart!"

    The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother’s heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

    There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

    Here’s a complete audio of the performance. Thanks Washington Post!

  • Roger Ebert and youth movies

    Has anyone noticed that Roger Ebert’s blog is one of the most happenin’ place on the Net?  It’s quickly becoming a must-read for me. Here are two articles not about health care (but still profound and interesting). Article #1 and Article #2.

    From comments on a Roger Ebert blog column about youth-oriented movies and the dumbing down of American tastes. I will not quote anything from Roger Ebert (although the article was great). :

    One day a few years back I walked into a store that sells posters of all sorts and asked the clerk if she had any posters of Beethoven. She said “The dog?” I said “no, the composer. She yelled out to a co-worker “Do we have any Beethoven posters?” the co-worker yelled back “The dog?”

    …

    Coming out of Pan’s Labyrinth, I heard a 20-something male proclaim to his friends, with no sense of irony, “Man, I haven’t read that much since middle school!” Case in point.

    (more…)

  • Just ordered: Thinkpad T400 laptop!

    Ok, for the last 6 months I’ve been hunting around for a new laptop.  I need a sturdy powerful laptop which had some bells and whistles which would be  useful especially for giving presentations. I ended up spending between $1250-1300. Some observations:

    1. I thought I was saving money by ordering my RAM and hard drive from a third party. Indeed, I did save about $40. In retrospect, that seemed like needless crimping. For $40 more, I could have had the peace of mind knowing that I had only one vendor for servicing my parts. Now I have two vendors to worry about.
    2. I upgraded to a bright NIT display. That cost about $150 more, but I really thought having a laptop whose screen would be clear and sharp in midday sun would be a good feature to have (and good to show off). The display technology apparently uses just about the same amount of energy as regular displays.
    3. One big factor was whether to buy a laptop with a builtin eSATA port. Esata is a standard which is faster than USB 2, but it only comes on high end laptops. After some checking around, I decided instead to buy a separate eSATA adaptor for my ExpressCard. I don’t plan to use this often, but that seems to be something I would use. (Interestingly, the Thinkpad didn’t seem to have firewire either).
    4. I saw lots of excellent laptops selling for $700 or less. The compromise you made was lack of customizability, inferior processors and 5400 rpm hard drives. Upgrading to 320 gig 7200 rpm cost you another $100 or so.
    5. I never ceased to be amazed at how many laptops still have 32 bit Vista on it. After placing my order, I just realized that Lenovo did not list which version of Vista they would install on it (I will need to call to make sure).  Update: Home Premium is 32 bit; what a pain to change!
    6. For $100 more, I paid for the 2 extra years on the extended warranty. Peace of mind.
    7. I had to choose between a 14 inch model and a 15 inch, and my choice ultimately come down to battery life. The smaller you get, the easier it is to carry and the longer battery life.
    8. Lenovo has one of the best reputations for being friendly to the environment and climate change. This means a lot to me.
    9. Two things I rarely found good information about were the ports on the laptop and the quality of the webcam (and Linux support). These sorts of things don’t make the manufacturer any extra money, and yet they are vital to being satisfied with your laptop.
    10. I did something unusual this time. I asked for advice on what laptop to buy on a forum. On Notebookreview.com I found a good forum entitled, “What laptop should I buy?”. You had to fill in a form giving your price range and preferences. Then, within minutes, you get suggestions by people knowledgeable about what you can get in today’s market.
    11. Lenovo is known for high quality Thinkpads, but in some ways, their website is incompetent. They don’t have 24 hour customer support or even weekend support. Shipping dates are  substantially longer than Dell and HP. They use only Intel processors, and the ecommerce tool is not as friendly. Their laptop prices haven’t declined that much over the last 6 months. On the other hand, they have been putting out 15% off coupon deals (in addition to the normal discount). But Thinkpads is their premiere laptop, and so I know the quality of the parts and the build itself is high. 
    12. I had to shop for a replacement router for my mom. Apparently, according to reviews, no one is happy with the performance of 802.11n wifi routers (even though range and performance of the standard itself is supposed to be better). Many savvy people are sticking with the Linksys 54xxx g router, which is surprising. I didn’t see one router under $100 which people are happy with.
    13. I was trying to deal with the dual boot issue, and someone referred me to wubi, which installs ubuntu as a kind of virtual machine on windows. From the faq:

    Is this running Ubuntu within a virtual environment or something similar?

    No. This is a real installation, the only difference is that Ubuntu is installed within a file as opposed to being installed within its own partition. Thus we spare you the trouble of creating a free partition for Ubuntu. And we spare you the trouble to have of having to burn a CD-Rom.

    I actually played around with the idea of buying a cheap 4 gigabyte laptop, but the quality of the builds were not as good; also you usually compromised on memory and ports.

  • Break 4 Love

    A techno song that intoxicated me recently.Techno remix of the song Break 4 love starring Pet Shop Boys.

    Update: The link is fixed.

  • Health Insurance and Amenable Mortality

    Here’s an article by Ellen Norte and C. Martin McKee that tries to compare mortality rates for incidents which might be prevented by health care intervention:

    The concept of amenable mortality was developed in the 1970s to assess the quality and performance of health systems and to track changes over time. For this study, the researchers used data from the World Health Organization on deaths from conditions considered amenable to health care, such as treatable cancers, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

    Between 1997–98 and 2002–03, amenable mortality fell by an average of 16 percent in all countries except the U.S., where the decline was only 4 percent. In 1997–98, the U.S. ranked 15th out of the 19 countries on this measure—ahead of only Finland, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and Ireland—with a rate of 114.7 deaths per 100,000 people. By 2002–03, the U.S. fell to last place, with 109.7 per 100,000. In the leading countries, mortality rates per 100,000 people were 64.8 in France, 71.2 in Japan, and 71.3 in Australia.

    The largest reductions in amenable mortality were seen in countries with the highest initial levels, including Portugal, Finland, Ireland, and the U.K, but also in some higher-performing countries, like Australia and Italy. In contrast, the U.S. started from a relatively high level of amenable mortality but experienced smaller reductions.

    The researchers estimated the number of lives that could have been saved in 2002 if the U.S. had achieved either the average of all countries analyzed (except the U.S.) or the average of the three top-performing countries. Using this formula, the authors estimated that approximately 75,000 to 101,00 preventable deaths could be averted in the U.S. "[E]ven the more conservative estimate of 75,000 deaths is almost twice the Institute of Medicine’s (lower) estimate of the number of deaths attributable to medical errors in the United States each year," the authors say.

    To restate: everybody’s amenable mortality rate has improved, but USA’s rate of improvement is so small that USA is now dead last in it.

    Ed from Gin and Tacos wonders why conservatives are so satisfied with their health insurance:

    My puzzlement is complete and my question is simple: what insurance do these people have and where can the rest of us sign? What the hell is this fantasy world in which medical decisions are “between patients and doctors” without the interference of panels of dour bean-counters, a labyrinthine and faceless bureaucracy, and actuarial tables? These columnists, screaming protesters, and talk radio audiences apparently live in 1923. Their doctor makes housecalls with his leather bag of Olde Tyme medical instruments and is paid for his services in cash or To Kill a Mockingbird style with bags of apples left on his porch. Or if they do have health insurance, it is a silent and unobtrusive entity that lingers in the background for the sole purpose of shelling out money without question for whatever procedure Chuck Norris desires.

    This isn’t remotely about patients’ rights or the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship. It is, as wingnuts so often fail to grasp, about preferences. A panel of government bureaucrats denying coverage for a procedure deemed experimental is an image worthy of pant-shitting rage; a panel of “reviewers” at Cigna or Aetna doing the same is fine. Having to ask an Obama-appointed bureaucrat for permission to recieve certain procedures is unthinkable; that we routinely do the same thing with our HMOs and PPOs is irrelevant. The mental gymnastics of defending the status quo require either dubious reasoning about why Aetna red tape is better than Uncle Sam red tape or, as is the case with so many demagogues, fabrication of their own curious reality in which we are infinitely free to do as we please and in total control of decisions which affect our lives

    Gin and Tacos really nails it about the problem with libertarian philosophy: it depends on reliable information being distributed equally.

    The good libertarian relies on the free market to solve problems on its own. Take a couple of hamburger chains, for instance. The one that makes bad food will go out of business. Customers won’t eat there! Thus the market, left alone, will punish those who fail to provide what people want. How cute. Let’s leave the airline industry alone – bust the unions, abandon all regulation, let the market set whatever wage it will, let the pilots be on for 36 hours at a crack – and let the same process go to work. Markets will force airlines to keep their planes safe, otherwise no one will pay to fly with them!

    In order for the market to punish the backsliders, consumers must be made aware that Airline X is unsafe. Since we don’t have regulations and inspections, how will we know? Well, look up. We will know which airlines shirk on maintenance and safety when we see their planes plunging out of the sky. Here’s where my Mises Institute friends come in.

    As market acolytes, I believe that they should volunteer to be on the plane(s) that serve the purpose of communicating this essential information to all of us. In the airline industry, the market’s way of telling us who is inferior involves a lot of people dying. The system works really well – let airlines be, see who fails, and punish them with one’s wallet – for everyone except the people on the plane.

    See also: Mark Thompson’s takedown of libertarianism with Monty Python quotes.

    Perhaps I’ve never been a full-fledged libertarian, but I’ve always been a free market enthusiast in general. But the last year has really shaken my political beliefs. Namely:

    1. The financial crisis of 2008 shows the extent to which major lenders will game the political system to extract political concessions. (This may not be a criticism of libertarianism per se, but some might say that more aggressive legislation might have prevented the catastrophe).
    2. The science for global warming is established and growing more urgent, and yet a significant portion of the population doesn’t want to face this fact. The problem with libertarianism here is that a)people don’t see proof of climate warning until the effects are upon us, and 2)private lawsuits intended to recoup damages from global warming are unlikely to happen soon enough (especially if it wreaks permanent damage on your habitat).
    3. In health care reform, libertarians refuse to provide a workable alternative to solve the free rider problem and the fact that certain individuals will be discriminated against because of their health condition.
    4. The American media landscape gives a lot of power to certain political viewpoints which  are friendly to  advertising. I see more similarities than differences between CNN and Fox. He-said/she-said journalism makes it easy for corporations to drown out negative news stories….so much that it begins to seem that a captive audience is more likely to see a Swift Boat attack than a news story debunking it.
    5. More importantly, how much ability do corporations  (and their mouthpieces) have to motivate individuals to become politically active?  Bernard Chazelle believes that in the  “A empowers B to elect C to serve A” paradigm, A= corporations, B=individual voters and C=politicians. Even if this is reductive analysis, I can think of many cases where this paradigm did play out; can individuals be persuaded to act on behalf of the corporation’s self-interest even if it goes against their own? At some point, will this misguided passion turn against the corporations that engendered it?  If astroturf campaigns are effective sometimes, does this imply that democracy itself is fundamentally  a sham?

  • Climate Change, Methane and Permafrost

    An environmental concept: precautionary principle.

    In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation. (principle 15).

    Speaking of which, here’s a summary of the latest research about amplifying methane feedbacks

    See also: Clathrate gun hypothesis.  I am not knowledgeable enough or well-versed in science to understand this or evidence, but it’s a term we might be hearing more about. Here’s an article about methanotrophs, methane-eating bacteria.

    if anything, these sorts of articles point to the enormity of the problem and hints that it is not always correct to focus the climate change debate entirely  on human CO2 levels.  There are a lot of things human can’t control – and that is a hard concept for humans to accept. 

    See also my post about permafrost a week ago.

  • Ebert on teen movie cliches

    Roger Ebert about the cute teen movie 10 Things I hate about you.

    I’m trying to remember the last movie I saw that didn’t end with a high school prom. “Ravenous,” maybe. Even the next film I saw, “Never Been Kissed,” ends with a prom. The high school romance genre has become so popular that it’s running out of new ideas and has taken to recycling classic literature.

    My colleague James Berardinelli made a list recently: “Clueless” was based on Emma, “She’s All That” was inspired by “Pygmalion” and “Cruel Intentions” was recycled from “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” (prompting Stanley Kauffmann to observe that it was better back in the days when high school students were allowed to take over city government for a day, instead of remaking French novels). To this list we might also add the film update of Great Expectations, Cinderella’s true story in “Ever After” and “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet,” which was anything but. There’s even “Rage: Carrie 2”–a retread of “Carrie,” a work that in my opinion ranks right up there with the best of Austen, Shaw and Shakespeare.

    …

    All teenage movies have at least one boring and endless party scene, in which everyone is wildly dressed, drunk and relentlessly colorful (in “Never Been Kissed,” some of the kids come as the Village People). These scenes inevitably involve (a) a fight, (b) barfing, and (c) a tearful romantic breakup in front of everybody. That scene was tedious, and so was a scene where the would-be lovers throw paint balloons at each other. I know there has to be a scene of carefree, colorful frolic, but as I watched them rubbing paint in each other’s hair, I began to yearn for that old standby, the obligatory Tilt-a-Whirl ride.

    It must really be hard watching mainstream movies as a fulltime job (probably like someone who has to review porn titles). Initially appealing, but after that, extremely dull.

    As for teen movies, I recommend Breaking Away, Baby It’s You (flawed but extraordinary), Flirting (realistic and extraordinary)  and (for cuteness factor) Bring It on. Also Election (which has more mature themes, but is really satirical), Caddyshack.  Revenge of the Nerds. Also, Hal Hartley’s Trust is an extraordinary, literate and cool film.  Rock and Roll High School is a fun, rowdy high school film (definitely countercultural).  Other than that, I really hate teen films if only because they’re syrupy and full of cliches about what high school is supposed to do.  Or if not, the teen film is about the weird Napoleon Dynamites who  become cool by virtue of their  weirdness. Back in high school, I was not interested in proms or throwing up, but I was passionate about books, debate team, psychology, Dungeons and Dragons, movies and girls (the last thing I hadn’t actually figured out).

    I just saw the  Star Trek movie which was action-packed, well-versed in Star Trek lore and full of nice surprises and jokes. I remember the first date I went on in high school was to see the film Return of the Jedi.  Other movies I saw with  Susan E:  Kurosawa’s Ran, Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, John Sayles’ Brother from Another Planet. Diva, Les Comperes, and one other zany French police comedy whose name escapes me.   Oh, we both loved movies and plays (We also saw Amadeus at the theatre and T.S. Eliot’s Cocktail Party).  Susan was much of a snob as I was; it was delicious. We left the River Oaks movie theatre convinced that Ran was the greatest film of all time. I still have a high opinion of that film (although I recognize that other films are on the same level as it).  Isn’t it ironic that none of the films we wanted to see would be classified as teen movies (except maybe Diva).

  • August Linkdump

    Various unrelated links of general coolness.  Looking over this, I see that a lot of links come from Marginal Revolution (a social science and economics blog).

    A philosophic debate about progressivism vs. libertarianism. Arnold Kling tries to describe progressivism. Tyler Cowen tries to elaborate in a less pejorative way.  Matt Yglesias tries to explain libertarianism (and how it’s supposed to work). Mark Thompson analyzes libertarian principles by looking at quotes from Monty Python.

    From a commenter on a blogpost about cross country comparisons:

    All the wingers I know hold three immutable beliefs:

    1) They believe everyone below them in society is immoral, lazy, contemptible and undeserving of anything they have.

    2) They believe everyone above them is moral, industrious, admirable and deserving of everything they have.

    3) They greatly overestimate their position in this food chain.

    Speaking of health care, I keep forgetting to blog this although I’ve mentioned it on facebook several times. Here’s a comparison of European health care with American health care. 

    Progressivefox on how I lost my health insurance at my hair stylist:

    Your ex comes by to pick up your son and tells you that the municipality he works for’s administrator told him in absolute shock that the insurance company slapped a million dollar surcharge on the municipality’s insurance policy, and said it would go on yearly until you are off, but since you had exercised your right to COBRA it would “do no good” if your ex was gone. The administrator said he was so shocked and offended that he went to ALL the other carriers possible, and one by one they all gave him back a “no bid” with the proviso that they would welcome the opportunity to bid…just as soon as that leukemia patient’s COBRA rights expire. So barring leaving all the municipality’s employees naked of insurance they were absolutely trapped.

    Matt Yglesias on the false use of the word “rationing" when talking about health care:

    Similarly, your kid is entitled to go to a public school. They’ll teach him reading and writing and some science and history and probably Spanish or French or some such. But in the vast majority of places, you can’t have your kid taught Japanese at taxpayer expense. Again, though, we don’t live in a dystopian universe of “language rationing” in which it’s impossible to learn Japanese, you’d just have to pay someone else to do it. We of course could ban the market in private foreign language instruction, but it’s not clear why we would do that, and the existence of public sector provision of Spanish language instruction doesn’t in any sense imply a ban on the teaching of other foreign languages. What’s more, even if you’re incredibly troubled by the fact that today’s poor children don’t have the chance to learn Japanese in public school it’s still the case that eliminating public schools and lowering taxes isn’t going to leave those kids any better off. They still won’t know Japanese and now they also won’t be able to read.

    David Goldhill proposes an alternate way to provide insurance: require  catastrophic insurance for  everybody and HSA’s for ordinary procedures. I don’t agree with the prescription, but he has a lot of interesting ideas in this article.

    Kathleen Hall Jamieson analyzes how the media is providing inadequate coverage of health care legislation by focusing on town hall meetings.

    BILL MOYERS: So the protests seem to be making some people more sympathetic to the protesters?

    KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: And potentially the press then picks that up, polls, finds that sympathy, creates a structure that suggests that health care reform initiatives are losing support. Now polls have driven press coverage which says "Obama on the defensive. Obama struggling to explain. Obama trying," when, in fact, the dynamic under that has been created by a news structure that decided to cover this in a certain way, to do polling in a certain way. And those two things played into the process to make it more difficult for the discussion to actually happen about the substance of what’s going on.
    DREW ALTMAN:     So it’s exactly right. So we have the protests, the media coverage, especially the 24-hour news cycle, follows the protests and the town meetings. Then the polls poll about the media coverage of the protests. And we create almost an alternative reality about what is occurring out there.
    When you look at the real polls about where the public actually is, what you see is there’s been a little bit of a tick down in public support and people are getting a little anxious as they follow the media coverage. But still the majority of the American people are for moving forward with this.
    And we have seen more people begin to say, "Gee, I’m not so sure that this is good for me and my family," but it’s still a small number. It’s only 20, 22 percent who say, "I’m a little bit worried about this." And a much bigger number say, "I still think this is good for me and my family." And then you’ve got a group in the middle who’s not so sure. And everyone’s fighting for that group on both sides.

    Gummy Bear song video. Wildly popular among children. (Found from a list of top 10 search terms by children).

    Google video has episodes of Sifl and Olly (a 20 minute puppet  show on MTV in the 1990s). Here’s episode 1. If you go on a watching marathon,  watch only the clips which are 20 minutes.

    Various essays about the role of sexual fantasies.

    List of the words most commonly looked up on the New York Times site.

    A commenter explains why “Google is the #1 search term on other search engines.

    Many users get confused between the search bar and the address bar. Also, if the URL is invalid ("google"), Internet Explorer will use the default search engine (often Google) to search for the invalid URL, then redirect the user to a search page. The user ends up where s/he intended to be, so this behavior doesn’t change and becomes ingrained.

    The end result is, yes, that Google users end up googling for Google. The top search term on Bing and Yahoo is "Google", unsurprisingly, and the top term on Google is "Yahoo". The second term on Google is now "Google", edging out the former top contender "sex".

    ˙ɟʇn sǝʌןoʌuı ʇı :ʇuıɥ ˙uʍop ǝpısdn ʇxǝʇ ɹnoʎ ǝʞɐɯ oʇ uoıʇɐɔıןddɐ qǝʍ ןooɔ

    I have been very busy with various things over the past few weeks. Sorry I haven’t had much time to blog regularly.

    Also, I’ve been watching Lost on my Roku. Can’t get enough of it!