Prop 19 and Huck Finn

BuzzNet Tags: prop19,marijuana,legalization,marktwain

While reading Huckleberry Finn to Annelise I came across the following:

Pretty soon I wanted to smoke, and asked the widow to let me. But she wouldn't. She said it was a mean practice and wasn't clean, and I must try to not do it any more. That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don't know nothing about it. Here she was a bothering about Moses, which was no kin to her, and no use to anybody, being gone, you see, yet finding a power of fault with me for doing a thing that had some good in it. And she took snuff too; of course that was all right, because she done it herself.

For those that voted “no” on California’s recent Proposition 19, it seems like Huck has got your number.

Nature

This is a riff on something I heard some mad philosopher say on NPR, so the original idea isn’t mine (I don’t have any original ideas). This guy was ranting that “Nature” had replaced “God” as our cultural conscience. The clichéd assumptions are everywhere: everything that is Natural is good, Nature is harmonious and in balance,  humanity should strive to align itself with Nature - if/when we ever do, all will be well.

In truth Nature is anything but balanced. It only looks that way to us because our timescales are so ridiculously short. "Nature” is one giant cataclysm after another. Not once, but five times has this planet seen mass extinctions where, for example, 70% of the land species were completely wiped out. Massive floods of magma could bubble up from the Earth’s core (tomorrow) and wipe out the human race (along with all other mammals, most birds, reptiles, etc.). To “Nature”, this wouldn’t be that big of a deal. Nature isn’t our mother and Nature doesn’t care if we live or if we die. “Nature” doesn’t care if we do or don’t try to “live in harmony” with the current equilibrium point (however short-lived it may be).

I think we should stop deifying Nature and get pragmatic. Take the best telescopes we’ve got and look out at the universe. Do you see, anywhere, any place where humans beings can live that we can get to? No. Alright then, what we have here is a liferaft situation. We are living in the only place that we can live and we have to take care of it because we have no idea how long we may need it to last.

BuzzNet Tags: philosophy,green,god,practical approaches to the survival of the human species

Buckets of Rain

My college roommates and I were fanatical about music. When we moved in together in the fall of 1983, our combined record collection spanned the length of our living room wall (long ways). In it you would find generous helpings of XTC, The Clash, Elvis Costello, Dire Straits, The Ramones, what little there was (at the time) from REM and U2, along with the classics we’d grown up with (Beatles, Stones, Who, etc.)

One thing I could never get my roommates to appreciate, however, was Bob Dylan. I’d first been turned on to Dylan late in high school. Who knows why these things happen? My older sister had left behind a copy of “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume II” when she’d gone off to college and it had infected me (the very best version, ever, of “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” is on that album). Since then I had bought a bunch of Dylan records, earlier and later, but my favorite was “Blood on the Tracks”. I had tried several times to get my roommates to appreciate Dylan but, like most people, they couldn’t get past his voice (and this is before he took to basically speaking his lyrics).

So it’s late in that last year of school. Some random, rainy afternoon; between classes there’s just Ken and me in the apartment. Ken is doing dishes and I’m doing I don’t remember what (not stressed at this point – must have already landed first job). I’m playing “Blood on the Tracks” and Ken is putting up with it. “Buckets of Rain” comes on:

I like your smile and your fingertips
I like the way that you move your hips
I like the cool way you look at me
everything about you is bringing me misery

Ken laughs. He’s thinking about his girlfriend, Kim. He says something like “That’s good” or “I like that”. Small victory.

Firefox Updates and Magic Formation

For awhile now I have used a little gesture-based launcher called Magic Formation. Like many of the things that are designed to make my life simpler but end up consuming all my time, I found out about this tool on Lifehacker.

The tool is pretty simple. You draw a quick little circle with your mouse and up pops this circle of launch icons. It is also pretty addictive. When using a computer that doesn’t have Magic Formation installed, I find myself reflexively drawing useless little circles before realizing “Oh yeah, I’ve got to find the launch bar.”

One thing that keeps biting me, though, is that when Magic Formation is running, Firefox updates won’t work. When Firefox tries to apply an update you get “The update could not be installed. Please make sure there are no other copies of Firefox running on your computer, and then restart Firefox to try again.” Obviously Magic Formation is holding a handle to some kind of resource that Firefox update wants to change (firefox.exe?) and Firefox doesn’t like this.

The solution is simple. Just “Quit” out of Magic Formation, start or restart Firefox, let it update, then restart Magic Formation.

My only hope is that I will either remember I wrote this or goog will pick it up and I’ll find it the next time I have problems updating Firefox.

Technorati Tags: firefox tools,tools

Intuit, What Were You Thinking?

The exercise of preparing taxes always sets me on a organizing binge where I try to get a handle on the chaos that surrounds me. This year one of my big pain points was medical expenses and the management thereof. For reasons I won't go into, we wracked up a lot of medical expenses last year and will probably continue to do so this year. Due to a certain, shall we say, disaffection for the treatments prescribed by the biomedical industrial complex (all of which seem to involve the use of patented pharmaceuticals with side-effects that can only be remedied by additional, patented pharmaceuticals with side-effects that . . . (recurse until death or complete exhaustion of funds)) none of these expenses are covered by my employers health plan (as another branch of the previously mentioned biomedical industrial complex, why would it?). So that brings in my "Flexible Spending Account", multiple, related transactions of slightly different amounts, etc. Obviously I need software to manage this mess.

It turns out that my old friends at Intuit have something called "Quicken Medical Expense Manager". Now I'm a Quicken user from way back. I used Quicken back in the days when you connected to the net with a 28K modem and SLIP. I was the guy constantly pestering his bank for Quicken integration and explaining over and over how I managed my money with a program that I ran on my computer, at home, which I would like to connect to their computer so I could save both them and me time and money. I still prefer to use the native version of Quicken despite my general enthusiasm for Software as a Service (or is it "cloud computing" now? . . so hard to keep up).

So I come across this Quicken Medical Expense Manager (MEM for short) and initially I'm thinking "Great! I'll buy this puppy online, download, install it and use it to keep track of all this stuff." My initial assumption was, of course, that MEM would integrate with Quicken. By "integrate" I mean something like "If I enter a transaction in Quicken that matches certain criteria (category, payee, tag, etc.) it will automatically show up in MEM." and "If I enter a transaction in MEM it will automatically be imported into Quicken". How else, right? But something made me dig in a little further.

It turns out that MEM is not integrated with Quicken nor does it seem that it ever will be (please, somebody prove me wrong). MEM is a stand-alone tool with no more links to Quicken than any other program you might download and install. If you enter a medical expense transaction in Quicken, you have to manually enter the same transaction into MEM and vice versa. WTF?!? Talk about out of touch with your customer base! Quicken users are, by and large, the type of people that are driven crazy by having to perform duplicate, manual tasks. We will pay money (and suffer through the unnecessary "upgrades" designed to milk us for more) for tools that save us from this time-sucking drudgery. Why would you try and sell us a tool that adds to this problem?

And what's with the "Quicken" label? How is "Quicken Medical Expense Manager" related to Quicken at all if they aren't integrated? "Intuit Medical Expense Manager" would be a more honest title. Note to Inuit: the secret to selling a software suite is to make sure that every application in the suite integrates with every other application in the suite so that, even though the individual applications may not be the very best application you could get for a particular task, the suite as a whole delivers greater value than a collection of unrelated/unintegrated applications. This is just common sense to the ordinary individual but, in the world of software marketing, it looks like a stunningly brilliant strategy ("in the land of the blind . . .")

The decision not to integrate Quicken and MEM is so dumb it must have been made by Inuit's upper management. I'm guessing that the thinking went something like this: "Because we have no way of measuring how much integrating the two products will increase sales, it isn't important enough to devote resources to. As long as MEM is 'good enough', people will buy it." They could actually have a point, but it's this kind of irksome decision that erodes customer loyalty and, when times get tough (like . . uh, now), you're going to wish you had that loyalty to fall back on. Ask yourself, "what would Apple do in a case like this?" Of course they would integrate the two even if you couldn't prove that it would result in more sales this quarter! That's why Apple has fanboys and Intuit doesn't.

Technorati Tags: software,personal

Cool Ways to Teach History

Just saw this article in The Register and it made me think of an old idea for teaching what life in Rome was like circa whenever. Basically you start with the information in "Ancient Rome 3D" and you use it to create a mediated MPORG in which the students can participate as individual characters. I use the term "mediated" because I think it is important to allow the teacher to control plot lines and external events to illustrate specific points such as food riots, etc. The idea is not to replace reading and discussion, but to help provide a more immediate context for these more traditional types of instruction.

Obviously this same technique could be applied to just about any time and place for which we have enough data to create the 3D environment. You could hit all the high points, Athens circa 500 BC, Tenochtitlan circa 1400, San Francisco circa 1965. What is really exciting is that, technically, this should be relatively easy to do. That is to say, it could be done with an awful lot of work by artists, programmers, writers, etc. like any game, but we don't need to invent any new technologies to make it happen. All we need is a business plan whereby somebody can make money off of this idea while simultaneously providing it to schools for little to nothing.

Computer "Science"

Someone brought this up at a recent WS-I meeting and I thought it was funny enough to riff on; "Things with 'science' in their names usually aren't". Examples were provided such as "Political Science", "Social Science", and "Scientology" (the last one is a stretch). The shared joke being that we all felt our profession, despite outwards appearances, to be much more akin to political science than physics.

Certainly there are sub-fields of computer ccience that are scientifically rigorous, but I would guess that the majority of "programmers" rarely measure anything more than simple performance metrics, rarely use any math more complicated than basic combanitorics, etc. Obviously you need to be able to think logically and express your ideas in a non-ambiguous language in order to program, but that doesn't make us scientists any more than reheating frozen waffles makes someone a chef. I've always thought that Computer Science (the programming part - not the designing chips part) would be more properly thought of as a "Applied Philosophy" than as a sub-branch of mathematics, science, or engineering.