Where Are My Teeth?

Ain't technology wonderful

I was thinking about all the ways the world has changed from when I was a kid -- electronic, medical, automotive -- as we were whizzing down the highway at 70+ miles an hour, perfectly smooth in the rain with no worry on the curves, while in the seat passenger seat Julie stuck her finger, collected a drop of blood and fed it to the cellphone-sized gizmo that not only reads her blood sugar but remembers all previous readings and displays them sorted by meal, time of day, phase of the moon and political preference.

And no one even blinks.

Who is this peeping tom anyway?

No matter how cynical you get dept:

An amendment inserted in the current omnibus spending at the request of Rep. Ernest Istook of Oklahoma, chairman of the House Appropriations Transportation Subcommittee:

"Hereinafter, notwithstanding any other provision of law governing the disclosure of income tax returns or return information, upon written request of the Chairman of the House or Senate Committee on Appropriations, the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service shall allow agents designated by such Chairman access to Internal Revenue Service facilities and any tax returns or return information contained therein."

Good thing bills like this are always considered under rules that allow every member of congress plenty of time to read every provision.

UPDATE: According to reports, Istook is claiming that he and his staff never intended that agents of the appropriations committee be allowed to read anyone's tax returns, and had no idea that the language he inserted in the bill could be read to allow anything like that. I guess it's better that he and his staff are functional illiterates than would-be Stasi members. But not much.

The pleasures of working at home

And of having a well-stocked refrigerator. A personal-size (what's that, 12" around here?) asparagus and mushroom pizza really isn't particularly easy to eat, but it looks just great.

Because they can

Even though Salon told us to see my friend Laurie's movie instead, we went and saw The Incredibles this weekend. I enjoyed it immensely, from hearing Holly Hunter's voice again to the terrifying depiction of what an infant's superpowers might be, but I wondered whether in another 10 years or so it might seem almost as dated as TRON.

Not because the graphics are so clumsy, but because they're so good. For instance: the cars (especially Mr. I's tiny wreck) just had to be late 50s and early 60s styles, because those have enough texture and detail to be worth modeling -- anything from the 80s forward looks pretty much like a medium-resolution rendering of itself even in real life, complete with the cheesy highlights, so why bother? When the camera pans lovingly over the memorabilia in Mr. I's home office, you can just feel the hours every one of those hundreds of people listed in the credits spent modeling the wood, the newspaper photos, the fabric. Same with the leaves in the jungle or with Every Single Hair on the characters' heads. A real camera wouldn't have captured nearly as much detail.

A filmmaker with a real camera wouldn't generally want to capture nearly as much detail. The point of the pictures is to tell a story or set a mood, only very occasionally (and usually to the detriment of a film) to be heat-stoppingly gorgeous in and of themselves. So I think that by 2020 or so, when the spare pc in your closet can generate pore-perfect renditions of every charioteer in Ben Hur on the fly, movies like The Incredibles will stand as charming reminders of the time when being able to draw computerized pictures on a movie screen was still a big deal.

Oh, and I didn't particularly like the return of Freakazoid as a villain.

Pay more, get less

This article from the NYT on computerized audits of employee and contractor travel expenses is sad and a little remarkable. All of the anecdotes are ultimately about companies that installed complex, expensive software to force their employees to spend more time on paperwork and spend more corporate money. Yet the writer and the consultants seem to think that enforcing persnickety rules to discourage people from choosing cheap but unconventional travel methods is a good thing, or at worst just another one of those necessarily encroaching evils of our computerized age. Sheesh.

The Internet is a wonderful place

Sometime I still get a kick out of things online, like this discussion of how to translate computer-science jargon into Turkish. Here's a group of people spread across the entire world, with less than nothing personally in common, discussing the finer points of head-cracking metaphors, all for some fuzzy greater good. And I even learned something: who would think that a language could get by without separate words for a stack (of plates) and a heap (of rocks)?

Have a miscarriage, go to jail

It's stories like this one that make me glad I live in a country where a woman's authority over her own body is an undisputed right.

Oh, wait. Nevermind.

My 15 minutes

Thanks to my old friend Glenn a couple hundred thousand nerds now know what I look like.

That's not really fair. The whole point of the article in question is that they aren't nerds. And except for the ones who keep the magazine in their bathroom, maybe a few hundred of them read that page at all. I hope.

War is controlled waste

So said the head of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution (later known as the Applied Physics Laboratory at John Hopkins) while they were developing the proximity fuzes that arguably won the second world war.

As evidence of this principle, yesterday I got up about six in the morning, waited for some friends to arrive, and went to New Hampshire to knock on doors and attend a Kerry rally in Manchester. Everyone on our route who was home told us that they and the other adults in their households -- all inundated with fliers and phone calls -- were planning to vote (not surprising in light of the fact that we were working from a map supplied by folks working out of the New Hampshire State Employees Union). Maybe we provided the extra impetus for two or three people who might otherwise have stayed home if it rains tomorrow to go to the polls, maybe not.

Given the hours of travel time this might seem like wasted effort. But then again, given the peculiariies of the winner-take-all US electoral system, if tens of thousands of hours spent by thousands of volunteers in New Hampshire (and the same story in other closely-contest states) getting people to the polls make for the margin of victory, it will have been well worth it.

I started thinking about this while reading a discussion of the latest results in the Prisoner's Dilemma problem. Some folks have found that if you have a cabal of players, some of whom always sacrifice themselves for others in the cabal, you can win the compettion for highest single-player score. (You also get the lowest single-player score, and your group as a whole gets a lower score than many other groups.)

You can think of this as fooling some of the people all of the time, but you can also see it making perfect sense in real-world situations where the payoff is not linear in terms of score. Such as wars and winner-take-all elections. Yet another way of thinking about it is that the rules of the classic Prisoner's Dilemma game embody the near-universal economist's mistake of measuring utility in terms of money, simply because it's the easiest score to measure.

Meanwhile, I have to say I was impressed with the union get-out-the-vote effort. Not only were there piles of people from as far away as Chicago knocking on fellow union members' doors in New Hampshire, but the organization was meticulous. We had maps of the route to walk or drive, with directions to the first house and back from the last. And for each household a name, a space to check if they'd already voted, another space for notes and a phone number if they needed help getting to the polls. Back at HQ the walls were covered with lists of every government workplace in the stage, with the name of someone assigned to ask all their co-workers if they'd voted already, and to get them to the polls after work if they hadn't.

If only a certain someone had planned a certain invasion with nearly as much care.