Elections are one of the times I really feel my irritation with mainstream media. They get so excited about announcing the results as early as possible (their job) that they run the risk of screwing it up (not their job). “Dewey Defeats Truman!”
So the TV networks break in with special coverage of… what exactly? They don’t have the answers yet. The polls close on the west coast at 11pm EST - if you can assume you know who won in what states the moment that happens - and, California counts for quite a lot of Electoral College votes.
The excitement is real enough, but that’s not an excuse for wasting an entire evening of newscast blabbering on about what little you know so far. It’s a pleasant surprise to wake up in the morning and know for certain who won.
My Concession Speech:
As our Time Zone approaches the 9 o’clock hour, I am feeling gravity’s pull. The people have spoken, and… I don’t know what they said. Surely the Reef will have it on the big-screen TV, along with some fine domestic micro-brewed beverages. About seven beers changed on Friday and it’s going to take me a while to taste them all at the rate I’m going.
Also, I got an important-looking piece of mail for my old roommate. One of her doctors still had her listed at my address. For all I know, it’s just a packet of junk, but to be on the safe side, I can look for her at the bar - the only place I ever see her anymore - and possibly hand it off to one of our mutual bartender friends for safekeeping. They are sure to have her phone number.
An Interesting Fact:
Today is the second time I voted for the guy that won… In the presidential election. I was just a little too young to vote in 1988, and it bugged me. In 1992, I walked into my local junior high school and voted for Bill Clinton. Sixteen years ago. Sometimes I voted for somebody I knew would not win. There was a transcendental meditation party fielding a candidate in ‘96; Nader got my vote in 2000 because I wanted a good showing for his party and I didn’t have to worry that Gore wouldn’t win DC. If I remember correctly, I voted for Kerry - I really like brie cheese, by the way.
Today I am back in alignment with the will of 51% of the people.
Tonight I dream of presidents who do not grin like an idiot; Presidents who take ideas seriously; Presidents who display genuine concern; Presidents who speak to me.
I watched the election results at the bar, and I didn’t expect there to be an answer until tomorrow. There were dozens of fanatical supporters - people waking up from a nightmare. Now the streets of DC are a party, like the day they tore the Berlin Wall down. People in this town believe tomorrow is going to be a better day. I hope they’re right.
It appears to be done.
Posted in politics, bar-scene | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 05 Nov 2008 01:04:00 GMT
As of 9am, I haven’t voted yet. The polls open at 7, and I meant to show up early, but I did not wake up in time to line up that early… I got there precisely at 7 to find the line snaked around the block.
As I half-suspected, first thing in the morning is no longer the appropriate time for me to vote. Since I don’t have a specific place I need to be, I shouldn’t delay anyone who does. My hope is that, line the crowd on the 42 bus - favored by Dupont and K Street office workers living in fancy Mr. Pleasant townhouses - everyone will be gone by 10. At the very least the line will be back down to manageable size. I brought a granola bar something to read while I waited, but once I had the issue framed in terms of inconveniencing people that wouldn’t be back home in time to vote tonight, waiting to take advantage of the lull was a no-brainer. And my polls are just a block away - I can check back often to sample the progress of the line.
After the first overcrowding disappointment, I doubled back to the little coffee shop to sit and write. I miss the morning staff, especially one woman who would banter with me in half-English, half-Spanish. But there was no banter today, because it was all she could to to tend to the line. These construction workers in front of me were incredibly indecisive - or maybe I thought they were done ordering when they hadn’t even started yet. Between the inane radio-DJ chatter over the speakers and the conversations of the other patrons, it was not an environment conducive to writing. But I filled a page with one or two quick ideas, then went for another survey of the voting queue.
It was the same length an hour after opening! Who knew I had so many neighbors? - the voting precinct is about a four-block radius, and some of the other voting locations seem like a very short walk from my place. How come I never meet all these people in daily life? I was looking for the precise end of the line when I bumped into someone I actually did know. My new ping-pong partner Leah. She had me fooled for a second. “I didn’t know you voted here!” She never changed her address after splitting with her husband, so based on that address, she was in the right place. Does this strike anybody else as a weakness in our system? All that nomadic mobility? The state-by-state demographics are always in flux. A system based on fierce state loyalty is probably cheating us out of fair representation.
Everyone Was Gone At 10…
Well, not… everyone. But, the line to sign in was entirely inside the lobby of the building when I arrived at 9:45. I was back home before 10.
Posted in politics, urban-studies | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 04 Nov 2008 13:56:00 GMT
Thanks again to Jason Kottke for pointing out an interesting thing I might have missed: Obama has apparently read Michael Pollan and taken him seriously (…full Time interview with Obama here. A book excerpt and Pollan interview here ).
My dear sweet mother has been telling me all my life that “they’re messing with the food”. As a kid I already knew her theory that chemical additives and cheap substitutions were causing the rise in childhood allergies. I took it seriously, even when I was skeptical (in fact maybe I owe my skepticism to her).
It’s the same old story of Prometheus that we get into with every new technology, isn’t it? Ham-fisted attempts to take the benefit of a new idea ignore the dark side of tinkering with nature and suddenly you’ve got high rates of cancer in your neighborhood, or soft cadmium leaching into your bones - and you don’t know why.
But that’s okay - they assure us - it will all be fixed in version 2.0… I’ve got as much enthusiasm for new technology as the next guy, but it does seem to be a youthful obsession - I could be losing my grip on it. And, technology is mute on the problem of risk management and quality assurance - those things are up to us. Which takes me right back to externalities and the temptation to cheat for higher profits. And the need for us to all make these decisions together. One of the effects of profit is to abstract away all those externalities, making them seem not to be anyone’s fault in particular.
The Pollan article is right up my alley: It’s another angle on the Peak-Oil Problem. I just wrote a big thing on inflation last night, then spent part of this morning editing it, and it just occurred to me that cheap energy will naturally worm its way into everything we do. I see an analogy with money bidding up derivatives in lieu of raising consumer prices: Supply and demand operating on ingenuity. But, the ingenuity is only in plentiful supply because the raw inputs are so cheap. Pull that pin out of the machine, and the whole thing could fall apart. If cheap energy boosts the process at every stage, then prepare to see the process decidedly unboosted.
This is all to remind us that economics is not just about money. Much of the theory of economics has developed in recent centuries, long after money hit the scene. To live life obsessed with money is to ignore the processes by which wealth is actually created; It results in all manner of streetcorner hustle - no matter if you’ve got a three piece suit and a downtown office suite.
It also emerges that people will play some dangerous games with nature when they’ve got their eyes on the dollar. Well intentioned folk come up with reasonable standards for the mass market, then ingenuity strikes: Every loophole is exploited, studies are commissioned to find the minuscule benefit in an additive. From Pollan’s book “In Defense Of Food”:
Yet as a general rule it’s a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound “whole-grain goodness” to the rafters. Watch out for those health claims.
Posted in politics, economics, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:23:00 GMT
I’m a voter in a democracy. Don’t be fooled by my constant whining - I take that role very seriously.
But, inexplicably, I’ve been growing extremely weary of the coverage of the upcoming presidential election in my affluent little nation. I’m getting mixed signals about how we’re doing, and I bet you are too. Unless you’ve somehow managed to ignore some of the signals. We’re one of the richest nations of any respectable size (Hi, Luxembourg!), but it may be just a handful of billionaires separating us from mid-list obscurity (Check out Argentina, for instance).
I watched all of the presidential debates, and I have started to suspect that we might be talking about the wrong things. This entire process will yield no insights if we are.
Reading Jim Kunstler this week, and even as far as the peanut-gallery comments - sorry if the very title of his blog is an obscenity, but the writing speaks for itself - I ran into one of my old favorite rebuttals:
Kunstler starts by criticizing the $700 billion bailout, moves to suggesting that we “reorganize our society and economy at a lower level of energy use (and probably a lower scale of governance, too), but then ends with an endorsement of Obama without mentioning that Obama voted for the bailout and is for centralizing power, not localization! Obama is for offshore drilling, not conservation; Obama is in favor of military interventions, not non-interventionism; Obama is for free trade, not protectionism. Kunstler is too smart not to realize that Obama stands on the opposite side of every issue from him, I can only surmise that Kunstler has been dazzled by the Obama’s empty platitudes, oratory skills, and rhetoric like everyone else on the Left, or is so blinded by hatred for Bush that he is willing to support someone who holds opposing positions on every issue. - Posted by: Empedocles
I suddenly realized why this line of argument is a red herring.
Perhaps we’re asking the wrong questions.
The political debate carried on by the media and presented in gatherings of the faithful is a farce. My recent experience of participating in the farce of a job that would continue to exist if only everyone could pretend that the business would survive taught me an important lesson about the short term and the long term. You say and do a lot of things that you don’t agree with because it is only through survival that you can carry out your plans for the future. Neither of these guys feel the slightest pressure to say what they will actually do, because that is essentially unknowable. Not just unknown, mind you. They will have to be like jazz musicians, or even stranger still.
In a time of uncertainty, the rules of the game go flying out the window. The people will inevitably concern themselves with the wrong problems, focusing on what will soon become irrelevant and ignoring the dangers ahead. I wonder what the people who complain about $4 gasoline will say when it cannot be had at any price. There were some days at the bookstore when I spent long hours on troubleshooting the electronic order process, sitting on hold with the supplier, retrying for order confirmation reports on books that I didn’t know would arrive on the doorstep of abandoned store. Knowing all, I would have worried about other things. Not knowing all, I had to make those calls and pretend everything was going to be okay. Now, I even read that some people locked in contracts on winter heating oil to avoid further a further rise in price. Prices fell instead. This game is played all day every day, but most people, most days are spared the drama.
To argue personalities over policies might actually be a good idea, after all: No one knows what damage the sound policies of today could do in the near future if the rules of the game change. Commitments to an ideal might become serious liabilities. The more voters call for concrete policy statements, the less chance we have to know about a candidate’s flexibility and resourcefulness. We should be looking for a style of leadership that recognizes the uncertainty of the future and exhibits a record of dealing creatively with new situations. We will need both the liberty to try speculative solutions and adequate protection for those who fail in the attempt.
With a fixed problem, you want one best solution. And, you want a concerted effort to pursue that solution, damn the torpedoes. But with impending shifts in the entire problem space, you want continual experimentation - trial and error. And, you want the widest possible variation of solutions to be evaluated.
So when Empedocles up there asserts that Mr. Obama’s positions run counter to Mr. Kunstler’s, I don’t believe a word of it. We are so busy nit-picking the particulars of the platform that we fail to notice the cliff we are about to drive off… Or, in a less dramatic fashion: I’m less interested in the change Obama keeps talking about because I am more interested in how he will respond to the changes coming which none of us has the power to stop. Whatever they are.
On that basis, I almost never take a Republican seriously.
And, we normally get the leaders we deserve anyway. If they can see further than us, we’re happy to burn them at the stake for being witches.
Posted in politics | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:04:00 GMT
Okay, I’ve only browsed the book, never really sat down to scrutinize it… But one of the things I remember that they say White People Like is “Not Owning A Television”. Mainly for the purpose of bragging that they don’t.
We’re headed into an uncertain future for television, perhaps: I know people who watch TV on a cell phone. Not, you know - a lot of people like that - but all the same… I can watch some shows on my laptop - not too shabby. Meanwhile, ever larger flat screen plasma or LCD or whatever they are come on the market - screens so big you might not have a big enough wall to hang them on… And, watch out for tight turns in stairways: once I got a couch stuck in mine.
I was deliberately unplugged for a time in the 90’s. When my sister and I first moved in together, we watched a lot of dinnertime Simpsons episodes on the tiny B&W I salvaged from my childhood. Then she dropped it. The tuner knob was busted. I took it as an omen… but later on I discovered that a pair of pliers could tune it just fine. I left it on UHF and discovered a channel with lots of foreign films and newscasts. After that, I inherited first one bulky Zenith, then the Sony from my dad - a man with plenty of televisions. Coincidentally, also the only person who ever mentioned “Stuff White People Like” to me, despite having worked for a bookstore when it came out and having reported it many weeks as a best selling item.
Such a short period of time - such a brief experiment in… well, what would you call it exactly? Am I more overwhelmed by culture because I have a more developed critical sense, and can’t let anything upsetting slide, or is that all just a load of crap? I must have something of the spirit of the intellectual - even if I haven’t really done much with it.
All of this is prelude to something I just read in “Nixonland” this afternoon. The same paragraph that just had me fussing about the “eggheads”…
(Nixon went on television to defend himself against calls to resign as vice-presidential candidate in 1952…) There weren’t all that many televisions in America then, though the number of sets was growing exponentially, as part and parcel of America’s postwar economic boom. These were the types [the eggheads] who took pride in themselves, already, for not owning them… They saw themselves as the guardians of American decency.
Incidentally, I see myself in a similar relation to mobile phones: As the market for these things was still approaching saturation, I had a lot of disdain for all those people who didn’t seem to have anything worth communicating. It felt like a poor use of the airwaves, and a sure sign that the resource was not being priced correctly - no doubt the management of those airwaves was the reason. Anybody who complains about their cell phone bill now is an idiot: it could be a lot more expensive, and they could be using it for only the most urgent needs. But that’s off-topic.
There are probably going to be many waves of technology with the same effect: inspiring a backlash of conservatism from all corners of the political spectrum. Take the book - now in danger, but once the world changing new technology that humbled manuscripts, papyrus, and stone tablets.
I have to wonder now… Over the course of a few paragraphs, Perlstein has really stirred up my mind:
The liberal capitalism that had created this mass middle class created, in its wake, a mass culture of consumption. And the liberals whose New Deal created this mass middle class were more and more turning their attention to critiquing the degraded mass culture of cheap sensation and plastic gadgets and politicians who seemed to cater to this lowest common denominator - public-relations-driven politicians who catered to only the basest and most sentimental emotions in men.
You know who else catered to the basest and most sentimental emotions in men?…
Study well the man at Nixonland’s center, the man from Yorba Linda. Study well those he opposed. The history that follows is their political war.
Posted in politics, media-studies, books | 1 comment | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 12 Oct 2008 22:56:00 GMT
One of the last books I bought at Olsson’s was Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland: The Rise Of A President And The Fracturing Of America”. Admittedly, I have a minor obsession with things that were happening in history around the time of my birth, but maybe as I think about it, this is just an illusion. The time of my birth is simply a convenient benchmark when trying to understand what lead us to this moment - continuous processes all, to be sure.
Richard Nixon: I’ve heard the name tossed about all my life. It was just too soon for me to think of him as history until lately. As I embark on Perlstein’s account of the man, I see that there really was somebody standing at the imaginary point so many changes appeared to pivot around. Silly me… This must be yet another illusion: identical to the cosmological problem of every point in the universe appearing to be the center from which the whole thing is expanding. But I’m not so sure. Let me tell you what I’ve got so far.
In Jonathan Chait’s “The Great Con”, which I read last summer, I discovered something about how the Conservative wing of the Republican party was ousted. John McCain is in some ways trying to reclaim that territory, but perhaps none of those voters will trust him after so many years of playing along with the neo-conservatives. It doesn’t matter how many times Sarah Palin says “Maverick”. If you dream of a time when Republicans were truly conservative, you’re also dreaming of balanced budgets and racial segregation - Eisenhower apparently thought tax cuts were irresponsible fiscal policy. Instead we get Reaganomics and the Laffer Curve - dubious in the long term, but guaranteed to rev things up in the short.
One more distant point of reference here is Jefferey Scheuer’s “The Sound Bite Society”, which seemed to say: Television favors arguments that are easier to express quickly; You’ll run out of time trying to map out the nuances of a more complicated policy. This is how we got Bill Clinton: A guy who understands all the subtle gradations will only get so far in politics without charisma. Hey - he’s the only Democrat in the White house since Carter. Maybe Obama will clinch it when McCain implodes. Not exactly an attractive trait. Hmmm… remind me that there is an important thread here for later.
Nixon came along at the right moment to pass himself off as a “regular guy”. In contrast to the establishment “eggheads”. A striver among elites. A striver suppressed by the elites. Plenty of people could identify - people who don’t want some smug bastard at the helm. The elites were correct when they complained about Nixon pandering to baser sympathies - but that just made them look even worse.
Posted in politics, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 12 Oct 2008 21:22:00 GMT
When I talked to my friend (and Olsson’s coworker from long ago) Troy, I told him that my choice of the wood-grain design for the Olsson’s Testimonial page was an attempt to capture a feeling I had about the wooden bookshelves. His reply was “and, it’s like a coffin, too!”.
Yes, well…
Soon we were off on a tangent: Because of that page, and the necessity that someone moderate the comments, I have been doing it. I didn’t see a setting for allowing all comments, and frankly, I wanted control over the nonsensical - like botnet spam or incoherent ravings. To which Troy replied “you mean, like a Sarah Palin speech?”.
Not… exactly.
So that was weird, but in “The Drunkard’s Walk”, Leonard Mlodinow reminds us not to be fooled by patterns we think we see in random events. Sarah Palin is obviously in the news, so for someone to mention her name the same day I was just looking at a Sarah Palin interview parody is not weird at all. Nor is it weird that the very same book about randomness should talk about Markov chains, which are the method that generates those fake Palin speeches.
And Markov chains are the mechanism I couldn’t recall that generated the text in that old program we had on our Mac when I was a teenager (what was that thing called?… I found it fascinating). I started to think about how to reverse-engineer that program recently, and came up with a sketch of associative arrays in Perl, or the essentially identical hash object in Ruby. If you think about it, Markov chains are just the framework - probability for any word showing up after any other - and, that means a couple of things, at least: 1) You have to have one program component learn these probabilities from existing texts, unless you want completely synthetic results (I can’t help thinking about music synthesizers vs. music sampling). And, 2) you might need a lot of memory to store a probability for each ordered pair of two words. This gets worse if you plan to extend the concept to what word will follow a particular combination of words - the so-called ‘memory’ of the chain. This is what suggests associative arrays in the first place - they’re more efficient for large but sparse matrices.
If you take a look at the Wikipedia page on Markov chains, you’ll notice that there are a lot of equations. One of my high school physics teachers was convinced that normal people just ignore the equations in a text. Therefore, good science/math writing has to explain everything well, but I love equations because they save me the trouble of wading through so much descriptive text. It’s the same issue with computer code, like when I wanted to tell those guys on the bus the other night about how the politicians should shut up and show me the code revisions they were proposing.
If you’re not going to look at the equations with me, just remember this: The probabilities in that article are context dependent - Every different Markov chain is like a chart with values for those numbers filled in. The numbers are a kind of ‘signature’ that we experience subjectively as uncanny reproductions of Sarah Palin speeches, or scholarly journal articles. Every different generator (i.e. set of those probabilities) applied to a specific vocabulary falls on a point in a multidimensional phase-space - an inherent product of the vocabulary itself (this is referred to as the ‘state-space’ on the Wiki). Even if you consider a two word ‘vocabulary’ like the Heads and Tails of a coin toss, the Markov chain concept implies a continuous space of different actual Markov chains for that vocabulary. Texts generated from those mechanisms are going to feel subjectively similar if the points in phase space are close - i.e., all the probabilities are close enough. This is fortunate, because an exact point in that space can only be estimated in practice: We estimate it by analyzing the texts we want to imitate.
But rest assured, I’m often exhausted by equations like the ones in that article. I have a threshold for what equations I can comfortably examine while reading, too.
I feel a bit relieved by all this: If I ever want to take a break from blogging, at least I know that I could write a Markov chain generator and train it to the previous posts. How long would it take for people to decide that I wasn’t just writing in a self-conscious imitation of my own style?
Posted in politics, programming, books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 02 Oct 2008 13:49:00 GMT
There was a guy waiting for the bus last night, flouting the rules on audio devices. The mini-speakers attached to his bag were pumping out soul music, and it didn’t stop when we were on the bus. His taste in music was relatively inoffensive - not my choice for tunes, but it didn’t distract me from reading… What distracted me was the conversation he started having with another guy - who, coincidentally, was also trying to read. Soul Music looked over at the aging, light-skinned hipster and said “Now, I know you listened to the debate.” Hipster had a thousand times more class than the youngsters who normally interrupt my bus-time reading. He was reluctantly drawn into a conversation with Soul Music, just as I eventually was, one pithy reply at a time. Soul Music drove the conversation with his folksy indignation. This is Obama country around here, and these are Obama people - liberal to the core, no matter their skin color - people who grumble over the “stolen” elections of the past, and wonder at the sense of giving in to the needs of the merely greedy. At one point the African man sitting between the two was examining the contents of his worn Walgreens shopping bag, and I swear I saw him crying over receipts of some sort. No, he was definitely trying to hide his sorrow over something printed on those slips - grocery bills? lotto tickets? For a moment there, I thought it was our fault - I was worried that the conversation was too depressing for him.
I had my economic theories at the ready, and I tried to inject some balance. I said that everything both the politicians had said was meaningless, to some general agreement, and I said that they have no choice but to be meaningless if they want to win. But what I did not say was this, not sure if it would even help: “Hey, look, I program computers, and so when they say they’re going to decrease our dependence on foreign oil by investing in alternative energy, or that they are going to end wars and bring the troops home… I need to see the code for how they intend to accomplish that, otherwise it’s all just hot air”.
But, these are not the men who will know the details - it’s about teamwork and leadership, and so maybe it’s not such a bad thing that we elect them “Miss Congeniality” (which apparently Obama has lost repeatedly in the senate). They need to impress the other men in suits to do their bidding. I’ve been saying that the job of president has become progressively less important as time goes by. They must inspire the actions of others, and so it isn’t so weird to elect the cheerleader Bush over the technocrats Gore or Kerry. And that’s just charisma.
Posted in politics, DC-roaming, ontology | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:35:00 GMT
I’m going to bundle some quick reminders for myself here…
I went over to Reiter’s Books today because I’ve been coveting a particular statistics textbook. I was tempted by a couple other books that were new to me, but for the price - and with the thought of the groaning shelves back home - I managed to fend off temptation.
Well, I got a second book anyway: Another book that I had noticed on a previous visit: “Advanced Windows Debugging”. I didn’t pick it up then because it’s very technical, and I wanted to research it first… I’ve been very frustrated with Microsoft Windows. The other day, I saw an article with screenshots of the next version. I don’t know about you - perhaps I’m concerned with different matters - but, I couldn’t care less about the design of the graphic user interface - I thought those could be altered quite easily. I care mainly about system internals. Why do I see so many books that instruct me on how to use an interface that hasn’t changed fundamentally in years? Likewise, I think I remember how to drive a car, but I don’t know much about fixing them.
Presidential Debates
Friday I went out to the bar to watch the presidental debate. Those Octoberfest beers will be gone before you know it, and somehow it feels like an American tradition to talk politics with strangers in a bar. More than that, it’s possibly one of the foundations of democracy. One couple next to me was voiciferous - or at least the woman was. I heard some good, insightful heckling from all corners of the room.
But as the debate wore on - did it have anything to do with the beer? - I started to lose the thread.
Posted in books, programming, politics | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 27 Sep 2008 23:46:00 GMT
