“you don’t have a self unless you have a secret”

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Kieran Healy  joins the fun (or is it nervous laughter) of discussing the way our identities are being forced to collapse into a singularity.

But this is obvious, and I don’t think I’ve heard it called out clearly before:

“In a very deep sense, you don’t have a self unless you have a secret, and we all have moments throughout our lives when we feel we’re losing ourselves in our social group, or work or marriage, and it feels good to grab for a secret, or some subterfuge, to reassert our identity as somebody apart,”

The article that’s drawn from is fun too.

Denaturing the New

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This quote from Alan Kay is very nice.  It explains a lot

It’s largely about the enormous difference between “News” and “New” to human minds. Marketing people really want “News” (= a little difference to perk up attention, but on something completely understandable and incremental). This allows News to be told in a minute or two, yet is interesting to humans. “New” means “invisible” “not immediately comprehensible”, etc.

So “New” is often rejected outright, or is accepted only by denaturing it into “News”. For example, the big deal about computers is their programmability, and the big deal about that is “meta”.

For the public, the News made out of the first is to simply simulate old media they are already familiar with and make it a little more convenient on some dimensions and often making it less convenient in ones they don’t care about (such as the poorer readability of text on a screen, especially for good readers).

For most computer people, the News that has been made out of New eliminates most meta from the way they go about designing and programming.

One way to look at this is that we are genetically much better set up to cope than to learn. So familiar-plus-pain is acceptable to most people.

I observe this pattern often.  The listener is ready and willing to accept some News, but the story I want to tell is something New.  It remains invisible, and while I can denature it until it is impedance matched to their appetite for News I come away frustrated.  Yes yes, rope is indeed very cool; but you have missed the elephant connected to my tale.

you can never say what you will never do

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It makes me physically ill to think that the right wing and the idiot media managed to turn this eloquent beautiful speech into baseless acquisition of racism. It makes so angry that some moron in the Federal government decided to fire this wonderful woman. Shame!

This was not chance. This was a malicious act by those on the right. And everybody who went along with it is guilty of the crime. If you are not livid your not paying attention.

Consider this a warning. This is what we have to look forward to after the fall elections.

Sleep late learn more

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The results reported here about this Brown Univeristy study have been known since at least the 1970s.  I think I read about them in the 1980s.  They make for an interesting case study in how hard it is to change some things.

“Starting times were shifted from 8 to 8:30. All class times were cut 5 to 10 minutes to avoid a longer school day that would interfere with after-school activities. Moss said improvements in student alertness made up for that lost instruction time.

The portion of students reporting at least eight hours of sleep on school nights jumped from about 16 percent to almost 55 percent. Reports of daytime sleepiness dropped substantially, from 49 percent to 20 percent.

First-period tardies fell by almost half, students reported feeling less depressed or irritated during the day, health center rest visits dropped substantially; and the number of hot breakfasts served more than doubled. Moss said the healthier breakfast probably aided classtime alertness….”

But it’s not impossible, since a few school districts have managed to make the switch.

Squirrels

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Some notes on the ongoing battle: squirrels v.s. houses.

The house should be, to the extent possible, inaccessible to the squirrels.  I.e. cut back the trees.  It is mandatory that your seal any holes the squirrels create or discover.

Squirrels are very territorial.  During the spring they fill out the region in a patch work of territory.  If you manage to keep your home unoccupied in the spring your good for the season.  If you eliminate the squirrel that took up residence in your territory it is unlikely another squirrel will move in until next year.  If you capture a squirrel and relocate it the squirrel into whose territory you move it will kill it or drive it out.

Squirrels reproduce in large numbers.  Far more than the landscape can support; so most of them die young.  This assures they almost always fill all available territory every year.   Following a mast year more die.  But really they are always dying in large numbers.

Catching a squirrel in a trap is easy, but it demands patience and good practice.  They love peanut butter, maybe with a few raisins and nuts added.  You first need to train them that food is appearing, once a day, at whatever location you plan to trap them.  Then place the trap near that location.  Finally, slowly (over a few days), move the small tray your placing the bait on into the trap and onto the trigger.  Once on the trigger you can expect them to manage to steal the bait once or twice before they trigger it.

The kindest way to kill the squirrel you have trapped is to place the trap with squirrel into a large box.  Then, place a tea kettle containing water and dry ice into the box.  Finally, seal the box reasonably tightly.  The dry ice will be converted into carbon dioxide, which will put the squirrel to sleep, and then kill him.  Of course since you can’t predict what day you are going to need the dry ice on, you will want to have already planned out how to obtain the ice quickly.

The most convenient way to kill him is to transport him into another squirrel’s territory and delegate the job.

Do not kill the squirrel if you have any reason to believe its offspring are currently residing inside your house!  Don’t seal the holes with the squirrel inside!

Finally, watch the funny video.

Happy Birthday Mr. Blog

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The Blog was apparently the eight years old on the 22nd.  He has been pestering me for a content distribution network but I’m afraid that will have to wait for another year.

Happy Birthday kid!

I’ve enjoyed having your around more than I ever expected I would.

FYI – I will be in paris tomorrow for a long week.  It looks like it will be over busy, but if anybody would like to hook up maybe we can make that happen.

You call that a name?

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Nice posting, rant?, about names.  Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

And let me also draw your attention to this extremely interesting talk on “Face Blindness,” or the inability to recognize faces.  A more serious case, suffered by  3% of the population, lack that ability to recognize themselves in a mirror!  It was unclear how many people suffer from less serious versions of this; but even with 3% that’s approximately one in every school room.  So we all know a lot of people who have this.  I got to wondering what it must be like at the other end of this spectrum; is that another affliction?

Cost Benefit Analysis

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Plucked from this poignant post about externalities (which reminds me of my realization that limited liability corporations evolved from pirates)  is this bit from a Rolling Stone article.  It’s a nice clean example of cost benefit analysis in the “real world.”

BP has also cut corners at the expense of its own workers. In 2005, 15 workers were killed and 170 injured after a tower filled with gasoline exploded at a BP refinery in Texas. Investigators found that the company had flouted its own safety procedures and illegally shut off a warning system before the blast. An internal cost-benefit analysis conducted by BP – explicitly based on the children’s tale  The Three Little Pigs – revealed that the oil giant had considered making buildings at the refinery blast-resistant to protect its workers (the pigs) from an explosion (the wolf). BP knew lives were on the line: “If the wolf blows down the house, the piggy is gobbled.” But the company determined it would be cheaper to simply pay off the families of dead pigs.

Billions of years ago, in a course on Biotechnology, I got a A+ for writing a long paper outlining a cost benefit analysis for some research on kidney machines.  I’d written the entire paper in a similar sardonic tongue in cheek tone and I was shocked that the instructor seemed to be oblivious to that.  It was, I thought at the time, the most interesting lesson I took from the course.

I must look for a chance to use the The Three Little Pigs as design framework!

Wii Meditation

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It appears that AJ Jacobs is writing a book on self experimentation and  this very  lovely article on managing the many daemons in your brain is a portion.  It is a good addition to the thread about self control and attention management.

My favorite bit involves a shocking idea.  Language evolved so we could talk to ourselves.  Or, I’d say, so our various inner daemons could talk to each other.  I even find myself wondering if one of them didn’t stumble upon it and discover it now had a huge competitive advantage over it’s siblings.

The less shocking, but still fascinating, is that one way to keep your attention focused is to talk – preferable out loud – about what your doing.

So, what was the catastrophe?

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I always assume there was a catastrophe.  Something happened.

A hurricane leveled the forest.  A fire leveled the city due to lack of water.  There was a riot.  An economic bubble swept over the landscape.  The troops came home and a swarm of babies appeared.

The system you are gazing at, which seems a given and maybe slightly odd, is the result.  I learned this rule from “Reading the Forested Landscape,”  if you stand in the forest and all the trees are about the same size it tells you when the catastrophe happened.  That works just as well for housing developments.  If you take the rule seriously then one of your first questions is always: what were the  catastrophes?

You can turn this rule around.  Pick your favorite catastrophe and ask how it changes a range of systems.  Catastrophe: Moore’s law, modern managerial practice, the great depression and war?  System: healthcare, civil rights, work?

I was reminded of all this reading an interesting book about the work week, e.g. how long.  I read this book some time ago, so my memory maybe fuzzy.  But broadly starting with the industrial revolution and ending with the great depression there was a broad movement and consensus that the number of hours a person should work each week was and should be declining.

The rational for that trend varied and evolved.  One  argument  was that democracy demands a contribution from it’s citizens and if they were working all the time they could hardly make that contribution.  Civic duty competing with the employee’s duty to his  employer.  Interestingly I don’t recall a religous duty  argument  being mentioned.  Another  argument  was about productivity, e.g. that 12 hours work day didn’t actually deliver much more output than an eight hour day.  I gather the data on that is compelling.  There was a economic  argument  that citizens needed more time off so they could consume more.  And others.

The number of hours worked stopped declining during the great depression and have slowly and  steadily  risen since then.  Apparently that catastrophe changed the framing.  Suddenly people were horrified that the world economy appeared structurally incapable of employing most of the labor.  One reaction to this was that work should be treated as a scarce good with tight regulations to assure it was distributed equitably.  In that framing number of hours worked have an entirely new rational.

The Congress passed 30 hour work week laws twice during the depression.  Both times the President was convinced by industry to veto the new law.  Both times industry assured him that the depression as almost over, so not to worry.  Both times they were too optomistic.

So that’s an interesting example of how a  catastrophe helps to  explains a system.

But he tells a story my thoughts keep returning to.

Apparently, to hear him tell it, the depression caused a huge shift in the way that Science  perceived  and explained it’s role in society.  Before getting into that it might be fun to pause and think: “what is Science’s role in society?”  When I was a kid I recall two common answers: to explain how the world works (often v.s. religion), and the arms race.  But then, pretty much everything’s purpose was the arms race.

Before the depression scientists would appear at the government’s door and explain why they should  receive  funding.  The argument was largely that they were making the world a better place by relieving man of his labors and improving the  efficiency  of industry.  But then, 60% of the planet’s labor was out of work and the scientists woke up to discover that they were getting a share of the blame.  So they were like “Oh!  No!  … ah …  That’s not we meant!  (Could you put down that pitch fork please?)  Science?  Why Science’s social purpose is … ah … ah … new frontiers!  Yeah, that’s it!  We discover new frontiers; and each of these creates jobs!  Why just look at radio and air conditioning!  Lots of job, right?”

Of course Science is not the only institution who’s entire purpose was remade by the Great Depression and it’s spouse the Great War.  Government’s was too.