Bluebird of happiness

The United States... of Awesome

Every year, Sarah Bunting of Tomato Nation holds a fall contest in which she asks readers to donate to one or more projects at Donors Choose. Donors Choose is this awesome charity-giving-clearinghouse where classroom teachers get to propose small-dollar projects and individual donors can page through and donate money to fund anything they think is important, or practical, or just cool. They ask you to contribute money to the Donors Choose overhead as well, though I believe this is optional. Some time after you donate you get a little thank-you packet from the teacher with pictures and letters from the students. It's really cute.

Anyway, this year's fall contest is on. Vote with your wallet!

Pursuant to a conversation elsewhere, a poll!

NOTE! For the purpose of this poll, "foreigner" refers to someone who is foreign in several ways:

1. he has no familial claim to the culture (no relation by blood or marriage);
2. he does not and has not lived in the culture;
3. he has no deep knowledge or understanding of the culture, and/or does not speak the language.

Use the comments to clarify anything you like.

(Note: I submitted blank answers but that's only so I can easily see poll results without changing them; one should not infer from that that I think all the options are inappropriate.)

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[Poll #1267976]

Large Hadron Collider: Interpretation and reinterpretation.

I have read some very good books this summer, and as if to prove to myself that other sorts of books exist, I just finished an awful one: Eleanor Rigby, by Douglas Coupland. It had every kind of misguided drama in the book, and then some: Teen pregnancy! Mysterious visions! A dead transvestite! Life-altering illnesses! The import of heavenly events! Love at first sight, with an international man of mystery! I sort of expected better from Douglas Coupland; his brand of whimsy worked well in Microserfs (geeks can actually be pretty whimsical people), but when trying to write a fat, lonely middle-aged accountant, he just got stuck in a wall of stereotypes with which the whimsy clashed horribly. Don't read it!

After a heated discussion last night about tipping points and the choice/need of women to work for pay, I decided to look at data on inflation. One person had asked whether there was an uptick in inflation during the years that women began to enter the workforce en masse (I'm talking middle-class women here; I know that poor women in cities have never actually had much choice).

Anyway. That's just backstory; the point is, I found a site that lets you graph a bunch of different US economic indices back to the earliest days of the republic. I figured the consumer price index would show me what I wanted to see, so I generated this graph (1800-2007).

The graph shows a few things I expected -- war related upticks, relatively higher growth in the fifties and sixties compared to what preceded it; and then it also shows this inflection point circa 1970, where you start seeing massive inflation that is never reversed. (You can see it in charts of yearly inflation, too; before 1970 there were years with positive and negative inflation; afterward, it's always been positive.) Yes, yes, the stagflation of the seventies is legendary, but why has the CPI continued to increase substantially every single year since then, when it didn't before? Did the rules of the economy change in some fundamental way? What's going on and what am I missing?

There is a pigeon horntail crawling around our kitchen window in confusion. It's outside, but somehow got to the inside of the screen (our windows are effed up; don't ask). It's a pretty scary looking bug, but as with the last scary bug to grace our yard, the long poky bit is an ovipositor; these guys don't sting.

Even knowing that, I find myself a little creeped by the idea of letting it crawl on my hand, like the guy in the photo. If it were some color combination other than "dark with yellow stripes," however, I don't think I would feel as strongly about it. Is this evidence for biologically-prepared fear triggers, or just a learned response to that color scheme? Either way I think it's kind of neat -- this gut reaction that I can examine, but not easily change.

Important political message of the day, via cos:

"If the President does it, that means that it is not illegal."
When Richard Nixon said that, it was an impeached ex-president who resigned in disgrace speaking.

But now, Congress is intending to pass a bill that effectively declares Nixon's statement true (while pretending disingenuously to do otherwise).

Nixon said it to justify his spying & wiretapping without warrants. FISA was the law Congress passed in response to the Nixon / Watergate scandal. It established a secret court that could issue warrants for for surveillance related to "foreign intelligence" in the USA, and made clear that any domestic surveillance without a warrant was illegal - something that should've been obvious to begin with. It made it illegal not only for the government to do it, but also explicitly made it illegal for phone companies to cooperate with illegal surveillance requests from the government.

The Bush administration broke the law. Major telecom companies in the US cooperated with this illegal surveillance. AT&T built a special secret room to collect all the data passing through their data centers and siphon it to the National Security Agency. Because the White House asked them to.

When the president asks companies to do something and the law says it is illegal for them to do so, and they do it anyway...

... it's time for Congress to pass a law declaring that the companies who colluded in the illegal spying conspiracy should be excused, that the cases against them in court should be cancelled. Even after some cases have gone far enough that we know the courts have ruled that this stuff was in fact illegal.

If this law passes, it is a declaration from Congress that if you break the law at the request of the president, you have legal immunity; you will be excused. In other words, "If the President asks you to do it, that means that it is not illegal."

"FISA" sounds like some obscure thing you don't need to care about, but this bill is a precedent set by Congress favoring a government by king, instead of rule of law. It also attacks the concept of checks and balances by allowing surveillance without court warrants, but that's a minor problem in comparison. If we don't have rule of law, checks and balances can't hold anyway.

It CAN be stopped. This winter, a similar law passed the Senate and was considered nearly sure to pass the House, but the House declined to pass it because of the volume of phone calls they received against it. Now, we have a supposed "compromise" that still gives everything away, and the House passed it. The Senate plans to vote today (though they may delay it). It has enough votes to pass. Can we generate enough phone calls to block it? Call your Senators (numbers are here).


* Barack Obama is in a good position to help block it. He opposes telecom amnesty but recently said he'd vote for this bill even if they don't remove the amnesty portion. Join the "Get FISA Right" group on his web site, and/or the Facebook group, and call his campaign office: 866-675-2008.

* Get someone else you know to call both of their Senators. Repost this information this morning.

From The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America:
"Observers should beware of using jizz as a substitute for careful study and thought."

Well, there's a sentiment for the ages.

So my plan while in Boston has generally been "be a tourist while normal people work, then hang out with folks in the evening." This worked well yesterday (the Arboretum is very pretty; and then I learned to play mah jongg!) and I figured it would work pretty well today, too, since usually when I come to Boston I am not primarily doing touristy things, so clearly there should be plenty of things to see. But, er, looking at the "things to do in Boston" page, it turns out I have seen rather more of them than I realized! At various points in the last ten years, I have visited the ISG art museum, the science museum, the public garden and Boston Common, the markets at Faneuil Hall, and the shops on Newbury Street. It'd be nice to walk the Freedom Trail, but it looks sort of wet today. What else should I see? (If anyone wants to come along, bonus!)

I have a new best friend! ukelele introduced us. We share the same values, and she just knows so much! Plus she's really into maps... I dig those people.

Meet my new best friend. Maybe you'll love her too.

Catching the NYT Most Emailed list out of the corner of my eye, I blended #5 and #6 to wind up with "Trees Block Solar Panels, and a Feud Ends in Orgy."

OTOH now that I actually read the real #6 title I'm not sure it's less bizarre. It even brings in the Nazis.

You know, when Graham and I went to vote this morning, I thought, huh, it's a little brisk today. Just checked the weather: turns out it's -3. Yes, in Fahrenheit. With a windchill of -15.

I voted for Obama. People keep asking me my reasons and they're hard to verbalize. Here are a few.

• Of the two remaining Democrats, I think he's got the best chance of respecting the rule of law and executive restraint. My reasons for this belief:
  
  • One of his key victories in the Illinois Senate was passing a bill requiring videotaping of police interrogations. This is important because it strongly limits police ability to coerce confessions out of people (which I hear is a distressingly common practice otherwise). This is a hard type of legislation to pass, but not only did he get it passed, he got it passed unanimously.
    
  • Many of the lawyers for the Guantanamo detainees support Obama.
    
  • On the flip side, I don't think Clinton can afford to do anything that puts White House power under further scrutiny, because she's beholden to protecting her husband.
    
  • I also think Clinton's campaign strategies are suggestive of a desire for power that is not particularly restrained by respect for rules. I say this because of the controversy she's courting regarding the party-invalidated primaries in Michigan and Florida. I want to emphasize: the desire for power is not a problem for me, but her apparent willingness to fight dirty to get it is, because I think it's indicative of what she'll do with the expanded powers now available to the White House: keep them, because it's more convenient.
    
• Obama is a good communicator. I've addressed this before, but I think that's a major part of leadership at this level.
  
• He's really smart. Okay, this does not particularly distinguish him from Clinton ;). But gosh it's nice to have the chance to vote for someone I respect intellectually. In particular I respect him because when he tells a story about his own thought process, he's willing to show off the messy bits where he changed his mind: see his memoir for a good example (written in 1995, so no, it's not a political hack job -- and dear God I just noticed that first printings of this book are collectors items going for hundreds of dollars on Amazon). This trait is a differentiator between the two leading Democrats: as far as I can tell, when Clinton changes her mind she sort of pretends she hasn't really ("we have always been at war with Eurasia"). This is still better than Bush's refusal to change his mind at all, but it's not intellectually honest and I don't like it as much.
  
• Above all, his message actually strikes me as really practical. This will probably surprise those of you who are turned off by his words about hope. I think the point of his rhetoric is to try to melt the cynicism out of people, liberals in particular, because cynicism is not useful. Oh sure, it's a good painkiller when you're trying to stanch a wound to the Constitution, but it won't actually repair a damn thing. For repair, you need a message that's a little more motivating than "Bush is an asshole and this country blows goats!" Obama gets that, and while I don't think he's the only one at this point, I think he's done the best job crafting a good replacement. The best idealists are also practical people, and my gut tells me he's one of them.

Your favorite candidate sucks.

"What on earth could possibly the danger in placing all of our eggs of hopes and dreams for a better life for ourselves and our kids in the basket of a single American Politician? Whenever has one of those people failed us? My favorite candidate, clearly, may be safely trusted to carry that basket into a Better Tomorrow. Your favorite candidate, who sucks, will likely drop the basket, break the eggs, and then fuck the shells."

For the puerile among us: Fox news states the obvious

Courtesy of Language Log.

I have been asking people recently who they're supporting for president and why. It's been fodder for some good conversations. Most of the rationales have been fine ones, even if they're not mine, and have given me stuff to think about. When discussing the two Democratic front-runners, the issue of experience always comes up, which is sensible. (The contrarian in me likes to note that Obama actually has more legislative experience than Clinton, though it's true that state and federal experience are not equivalent training for the presidency -- to the extent that legislation can ever train one for executive responsibility...) But there's a subspecies of this argument that I've found I really detest: the argument from prior White House experience. From my perspective, this is actually a major liability for Clinton.

I fear dynasties; I dislike the human tendency to let power bleed freely along family lines. And Clinton's previous position in the White House featured this sort of power: she did not have an official role in the Cabinet, and yet she was a profoundly powerful First Lady. From that, I think we can infer that a similar unofficial Cabinet role would be afforded to her husband. (He certainly has not had a hands-off approach to the campaign, a choice for which I kind of despise him, despite being generally well-disposed toward his prior service as president.) In my opinion, this active role is not one that befits a former president, not in the least. It reeks of double-dipping. I like term limits; I like firm expiration dates for the political power that one president can amass.

If H. Clinton had served as Vice President, or some other Cabinet official in the line of succession, perhaps it would be different. If she had never been the wife of the President, but had instead only been the wife of the Governor, it would be different. It would even be different if she divorced her husband now (bonus points to an ugly divorce that gives me confidence the backscratching is really over). In all of these cases, I would be encouraged by her prior executive exposure, while being much less worried about inappropriate, tit-for-tat redistribution of power to someone who's already had his chance. But as it stands, I do not feel good about the exposure she's had. This is not to say I absolutely won't vote for her: I think she's a capable leader and a good debater and if she's the Democratic nominee, I'll think about it. But if I do vote for her, it will be in spite of her White House years, not because of them.

(I know, I know, my principles suck for her: they rule her unqualified for office based on stuff her husband's done. Not Fair! But she's the one who chose to use marriage as a tool to pursue power, not by marrying into it, per se, but by selecting a partner who seemed competent enough to acquire it, and then helping him get there first. Maybe talented women in our generation will be able to find their way to political power without this crippling step of first enabling others.)

Different types of doughs really are different to work with.

1. Whole wheat? Feels totally different from white. That one is going through first-rise in the oven; we'll see how it works out. Exciting!

2. Rye? Feels totally different from bread. As in, actually feels more like Play-Doh. It isn't springy at all. Apparently, Graham tells me, one is not supposed to make dough out of 100% rye. Oops.

3. English muffins? I'll tell you when I'm no longer tired and demoralized, and have the oomph to start on those ;P

I get to come to Boston this weekend! Whee!

Anyone up for dinner in Davis Square on Sunday evening (1/20) and bowling at Sacco's to follow? I'm thinking dinner at 6 so the working folk aren't out too late ;). I know, some of you have tiny people and this timing may still be unrealistic for you, for which I do apologize...

Last night at a party there was a discussion about politics, which got me to wondering who y'all favor for president.

In 2000 I held forth that one should always support the candidate whose platform best matches one's own opinions regardless of how obscure that person is (...like every other 20 year old out there) because otherwise you'll never see the changes you want. In 2001 I reconsidered this.

In 2004 the guy I liked never made it, so I just toed the party line with sad resignation.

This year, I have such distrust of parties and platforms having any meaning at all that I'm currently leaning toward voting with my gut. (People keep talking about racism and sexism, but looking cynically at my preference, I'd say it's about ageism.) But I'm curious whether there's another strategy I should be using. Who do you support and why? What do you think the best strategy is? nonnihil, I am particularly interested in your answer. Also tiurin.

cos, I read your post about the candidates with interest, so you don't have to repeat yourself here, unless you want to :)

on the sanctity of life

EDIT: Fixed bad link.

A lot of good stuff happened to my friends today. I love me a happy friendslist page.

To steal a line from dancingwaves, what was the best thing to happen to you today? Yes, you!

( IT details which are probably boring, but perhaps instructive if you are responsible for any of your own IT )

The moral of this story, for me: Don't infer that simultaneously-appearing problems actually stem from the same root cause. They may, but it's not a given. (At least Dell makes it easy to return parts you realize you probably don't need!)

Now, here's hoping this next round of data collection is pure success!

The air smelled like shit as I left Brogden. This is maybe the fifth time this has happened in the last few weeks. I'm not sure whether this is manure season, so I start to wonder idly if maybe I'm having an aura of some kind. I've never really considered the possibility, never had the headaches or weakness or other events that accompany weird neurological conditions, but then again, what about those headaches, and do I really know the extent of the weird neurological shit that's out there, what if there's some kind of epilepsy that confines itself to your olfactory bulb? The weirdest thing is how these thoughts affect my conscious experience of walking -- suddenly I begin to notice the motion of the world around my head as I move, and everything feels unsteady. How strange to be the one behind a face, indeed!

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A young college girl is walking in front of me: short, pleasantly round, wearing butt-hugging jeans and flip-flops. As we pass the new wing of Grainger a long strand of sticky construction tape wanders in front of her feet. I see it, but don't warn her. She gets tangled; stops in surprise; exclaims something, indignant and unsure how to extricate herself. I feel somehow guilty as I speed past her.

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In the bookstore, a young male clerk is trying to balance several small stuffed animals on his body, and failing miserably. I can't help but laugh at him, but I don't think he sees. I am in the store for maybe seven minutes and at the end of it he is still trying. The young, pretty female clerk at my register is laughing too and I think, Ah, friend, it's working.

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Heading back I catch a glimpse of the flag over Bascom Hall. The evening light has burnished the white stripes to a tawny gold and fused them with the red, and the resulting impression is one of a small blue square on fire in the sky.

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As I head west -- there's that smell again. I guess I'm not having a seizure. Must just be one of those land grant things.

If you're an academic you have probably seen a person meeting this description: a man of indeterminate age, with a long scruffy beard, who builds things -- whether mechanical, electrical, or digital. You give him the specs and, some time later, probably sooner than you think, the desired device shows up and it is perfect. You may never have any idea how he did it -- he may not be able to explain it to you -- but there it is. Ta-da!

We have a couple of great basement guys in my department, but my current basement angel is at a university a thousand miles away, and yet he helps me troubleshoot his completely inscrutable programming language for no fee, always within a few hours. I've yet to send him a problem he couldn't solve with it.

Have you thanked your local bearded basement guy lately?

New favorite phrase: "On further reflection." It lets you change your mind and not sound like an idiot. I have been way overusing this one lately.

Readers, what word/phrase have you been overusing?