Exploration Through Example

I am disgustingly overweight. I would so kick me out of bed for eating a cracker. Hence the return of graphing my weight, as you see above. The embarrassment of displaying my lack of discipline to intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic is apparently what motivates me best.

I’m too embarrassed to show the starting weight.

An interesting commentary on the problem of global identifiers, via Michael Tsai. In a nutshell, global identifiers are for the benefit of the implementer, not the user. For many practical purposes, users care about many fewer people than implementers do, and they’re happy to identify those people idiosyncratically.

[…] this approach uses the social network to manage identity, by reducing the size of the problem space by about seven orders of magnitude. It’s perfectly feasible to keep track of the identity of a few hundred people using familiar attributes like names, faces and personal relationships: humans have been doing it for literally hundreds of thousands of years.

I myself am lukewarm on Facebook, but I’m finding Twitter oddly appealing for one of my jobs, keeping track of what interesting communities exist and where they’re going next. More on that later. (My twitter account.)

The cost of the Iraq post-war is roughly USD2,000,000,000 per week (EUR 1,442,760,000 today). The population of the US is roughly 300,000,000. That means each person’s share of the Iraq post-war is about… $6.66, or one centiBeast. I would have expected the world to end a couple of years ago, when we reached a full Beast, but this numerology stuff never does seem to work out.

Seven bucks a week isn’t that much, and think of all we get for it:

Switching gears, there are around 27.5 million people in Iraq (July 2007 estimate). So the war costs around USD73.0 per Iraqi per week. Could we just pay them to do whatever it is that they’re supposed to do for the post-war to be considered successful? Well, Sarbast Mohammed works seven days a week at two jobs and brings in around USD120.0 per week. He might appreciate the little top-up to his income. Might win his heart and mind.

Of course, we’d have to get it to him, and we and the Iraqi leadership haven’t done so well at handling reconstruction money in the past. I know the man for the job, though: Karl Rove. He was in charge of the post-Katrina New Orleans reconstruction effort, and we all know how well that went. Since he resigned his job at the White House, he’ll have even more time to do an even better job in Iraq.

Sorry, I’m feeling bitter. I’ve sat in on enough product design discussions to know that it’s easy for the external world to disappear. In many companies, each person’s career depends much more on how she positions herself in relation to her management peers than on how the product is positioned in the marketplace. That’s how silly product decisions happen. The more captive the customer base, the easier it is for primate status games to take over.

Well, I’m a captive customer, observing from the outside, and it seems by far most likely that this post-war will go on until someone figures out how to end it without much risk of taking the blame. The media/government network is too inward-looking to break out of the dollar auction, especially since they can personally lose only status, not blood or money.

On the other hand, 33% of US citizens still believe Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11th attacks. Sorry, 33%-ers, but that’s… not sensible. I could grant you “unsure”, like 9% of your peers—more people should answer polls that way. But “yes” seems so beyond the published evidence that I’m flummoxed: either you or I are not paying anywhere near enough attention to have an opinion.

Yet people do, based (as far as I can tell) solely on artful juxtapositions of “9/11″ and “Saddam Hussein” in speeches. A whole lot of people make bad judgments about political matters based on what really amounts to habit and confirmation bias.

We can’t look at that poll result and ask the Democrats to risk doing anything about Iraq. The populace is not sensible. Yeah, so 64% of people say today that they want withdrawal within the next year. But half of them will be convinced in 2012 that Iraq was just turning the corner in 2008, that they knew that at the time, and that the Democrats went and turned victory into defeat.

We are so screwed.

In such a mood, I find configuring a version control / deployment environment (with Twitter and Jabber notifications from subversion!) strangely comforting: there’s an unending stream of glitches, each of which can be solved.

P.S. Because the above seems too self-righteous, I’m compelled to admit that I’ve had some pretty stupid opinions, both geostrategic and otherwise. For example, my opinions about exercising with ankle pain turn out to have been really, really stupid. I don’t mind that, since one of my goals is:

This is bizarre.

The Guests Were Enjoying French Wine and Cheese on a Capitol Hill Patio. When a Gunman Burst In, the Would-Be Robbery Took an Unusual Turn.

Jason Gorman:

Contrary to - well - pretty much the entire software industry, I don’t believe that a software architect is someone who designs software. I believe that a software architect is someone who recognises a good software design when he sees one.

A Rails homage to the “I’m a Mac” commercials (via /\ndy)

The Wall Street Journal published an editorial containing this graph:

In what possible universe could you honestly fit that curve to that data? Who could, without shame, publish a curve that goes around the bulk of the data? One that goes through an obvious outlier? (Tukey’s brilliant and eccentric Exploratory Data Analysis counsels us to understand outliers before worrying about the “central tendency”. I wonder if the anonymous editorialist wondered what might be special about Norway? Perhaps a particular natural resource, drilled from under the ocean? If only there were a tool one could use to find information about that resource’s contribution to Norway’s GDP or any special tax rate applied to it!)

But, self-doubting liberal that I am, I can’t only conclude that unsigned Wall Street Journal editorials are written by people whose preferences and loyalties have made them—to use the precise academic terminology—bullshitters, people to whom the truth is completely irrelevant. I have to wonder to what degree I do the same thing, to what degree my own comfort and self-interest has led me to push back against the whole post-Agile thing, despite my respect for Jonathan Kohl and Jason Gorman.

Fortunately, I have morphing software to play with, so I can cut self-reflection short.

Hat tip to Economist’s View

The United States spends almost as much on the military as the rest of the world combined. That will continue.

To be taken seriously by the chattering and political classes, one can’t heed George Washington’s unmanly plea that the US avoid “permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations” nor the way Madison favored eggs over omelets when he wrote that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” In a world of talk, a world of strutting and posturing, no national politician can afford to show “a reluctance to travel a long distance to kill foreigners at great expense” (Jim Henley’s pointed definition of the modern meaning of “isolationism”).

In the world of reality, though, war means horrendous wounds and families desperate to find ways to be with their loved ones while they recover as much as they can. The charity Fisher House…

… donates “comfort homes,” built on the grounds of major military and VA medical centers. These homes enable family members to be close to a loved one at the most stressful times - during the hospitalization for an unexpected illness, disease, or injury.

There is at least one Fisher House at every major military medical center to assist families in need and to ensure that they are provided with the comforts of home in a supportive environment. Annually, the Fisher House program serves more than 8,500 families, and have made available more than two million days of lodging to family members since the program originated in 1990.

I will match donations to Fisher House made between now and July 21, up to a total of USD1000. Email me a copy of your confirmation. After July 21, I’ll mail confirmation of my donation to John Rogers, who’ll match it again.

UPDATE: John Rogers reminds me that Don Murphy will also match. Your $25 donation would turn into $100.

If you’re someone who spent your childhood and young adulthood as a more-or-less sedentary blob but has become an exercise enthusiast in your late twenties, take it from someone who’s twenty years further down the road:

Don’t just stretch, stretch.

You do not want to end up like this:

In the government of this commonwealth, the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers or either of them: the executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them: the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.

John Adams, Massachusetts Constitution (1780)

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