tadhg.com

Marriage, Same-Sex and Other

Tadhg — Mon, 14 May 2012 06:17:19 +0000

Same-sex marriage has been a major news topic this week, because of the passage of North Carolina’s Amendment One and Barack Obama’s statement that he thinks same-sex couples should be able to marry. A good time, then, to explore the subject.

That North Carolina would pass a popular measure banning same-sex marriage isn’t too surprising, but particularly disheartening was how mean-spirited Amendment One is. Any measure whose spirit is “those people can’t have something that we can have” will always be mean-spirited, but Amendment One goes out of its way to be worse. Popehat has the details, but in brief, it outlaws all domestic partnerships that are not marriages between a man and a woman (which has plenty of collateral damage for different-sex partners who aren’t married, too), and potentially:

Strips health benefits from existing couples in domestic partnerships.
Invalidates domestic violence laws covering unmarried couples.
Removes visitation rights, and health-related decision-making abilities, from partner in non-married relationships.

I have a hard time understanding the support for this. This makes the lives of many people much, much harder, and incidentally makes them significantly harder in some of life’s toughest situations. All this for what? To deny some people the right to have their relationships recognized by the state[1]? None of the arguments against same-sex marriage seem at all worthwhile, and seem to come down to:

Belief in the regulation of relationships and interpersonal behavior of other people[2].
Belief that it’s right to privilege one group by denying specific privileges to others.
Appeals to tradition/“that’s how it’s always been”. But it hasn’t always been that way, and in any case, that’s hardly a good reason for anything.
“Religious beliefs”—scare quoted because this is not a fucking argument[3].

Hearing the turmoil over this issue, Obama emerged from the White House to say, on the one hand, that same-sex couples should be able to marry, but on the other hand, that it shouldn’t be a federal right. This pronouncement was hailed by many as a great step forward, but I don’t see it that way, since that translates to: his personal preference is that same-sex couples be allowed to marry, but that they should only have the right to do if they happen to live in a state that grants such a right to them. No luck for those in North Carolina, for example.

I don’t care about “political realities”—i.e. pandering to those in the wrong because it’s expedient to do so—and thus find Obama’s qualified support less than impressive. There is no argument against same-sex marriage that is worth more than any of the arguments against interracial marriage. It is blatantly obvious that it’s discrimination to deny specific people rights granted to others[4], and such discrimination must pass a very high bar to be justified—and this discrimination clearly fails to do so.

While social and state sanction of some couples’ committed relationships and not others’ is itself a problem, there are ancillary problems often highlighted by those seeking marriage rights for same-sex couples. These underscore other social problems, particularly in the United States. Health insurance is often cited, because in the US spouses are eligible for their partner’s employer health coverage. This leads to an obvious inequality, where an opposite-sex couple can marry[5] so that one of them can gain coverage, but a same-sex couple cannot, and this is significant because the economic value of such coverage can be considerable.

But is that problem, isolated, a problem with the lack of same-sex marriage, or with the health care system? Why should health care be tied to employment at all? In a society that gave health coverage to all of its members, this would simply not be a problem as not only would gender and sexual orientation be irrelevant, but employment status would be also[6]. There’s another layer here, which is the privileging of certain types of relationships over others—not opposite-sex over same-sex, which is one part of it, but “committed” over “other”, or “lover” over “friend”. If health coverage is tied to employment, and one of the benefits of employment is the right to be able to pay more for health coverage in order to extend that coverage to others, why should those others be eligible only if they’re in a committed romantic relationship with the employee? Simply put, why can’t I pay extra to extend my health insurance to a friend of mine[7]?

In another health-related realm, why are hospitals allowed to be so restrictive about visitation rights? This is often cited by same-sex marriage proponents as one of the reasons to end marriage discrimination against same-sex couples. They’re right, but why should the hospital be concerned—or be allowed to be concerned—about your relationships so that they can decide who gets to see you?

There are more, many more, and while the drive for same-sex marriage exposes them as points of discrimination against same-sex couples, it also exposes them as points where people in certain kinds of relationships are granted privileges denied to others. Why is that acceptable at all? Why should a couple who have agreed to a committed relationship be given these privileges?

A common answer would be that it’s because we want to encourage child-bearing/-raising; the validity of that is a question for another time, however, as this is clearly not the case—the privileges I’m referring to are not granted only to those with offspring, or tied to actual child-bearing/-raising in any way. Given the lack of such a tie, that’s clearly not what these privileges are for—so what justifies them?

There is a widespread feeling that these relationships—committed, long-term, monogamous[8] relationships—are the most “responsible” and “respectable” kinds of relationships, and should thus be encouraged by society and the state, and for that purpose be privileged. The reason for the scare quotes around “responsible” is that there’s not much to back up the notion that long-term relationships are somehow more responsible than other relationships—they can be, but they can also involve or enable all kinds of irresponsible behavior. As for “respectable”, that’s a term that deserves scare quotes wherever it’s used, a pernicious concept that means little other than conforming to the expectations of those currently running the social order.

If people want to encourage or discourage certain kinds of relationships, let them do so with their own personal approval or disapproval. Let them shun others, or laud others. Let them speak at weddings, or denounce in public and private. But that should be the extent of it—enshrining their prejudices in law, and turning their personal disapproval into something enforced by the power of the state, is simply indefensible[9].

I have a problem with the campaign for same-sex marriage because I think they’re arguing on both sides of that previous paragraph.

On one side, clearly, they’re arguing for the elimination of such personal prejudices from determination of state power, for the elimination of homophobic bias as a factor in determining who can and cannot marry.

On the other, by focusing on marriage as the site of the equality struggle, they are essentially forced to support it as an institution, and to support its privileges. I look at the debates over marriage and see that true equality would be limiting the privileges of those in married couples[10], as well as allowing any gender combination to marry. But the message that “same-sex couples deserve marriage too”—while true—inherently suggests that marriage as we currently construct it is worthy of its privileges. Rather than seeking a larger degree of equality for all, the focus is a narrow one—expanding the privileged club to include same-sex couples instead of dismantling the club entirely.

It’s still a necessary step, which is why I support it, but I support it with these misgivings, and while I understand the impetus behind the messages used to promote it, I regard many of them as suspect also. The move towards “respectability” is one of those suspect messages. The crux of this can be seen in the use of “friendly” same-sex couples to underscore the inequality of denying them marriage rights and highlight the discriminatory nature of doing so. They’re almost universally middle-class, long-term, committed, monogamous[11]—highlighted because they’re highly similar to stereotypical opposite-sex marriages except that both of the partners are the same gender. The primary message is highlighting the discrimination—but the secondary message is that marriage and its privileges are properly reserved for those kinds of relationships.

Compare that to the Queer movement, which sought[12] to undermine the notion of “respectability” in the sexual and relationship arenas, and to throw off social restrictions applied to them. That approach is a long way from the “we’re just like straight couples” approach favored by the gay marriage campaigns.

This is not to say that same-sex couples should be different from straight couples, either; that’s just as stereotypical and reductionist. But many are quite different[13], and what message, exactly, is the campaign for gay marriage sending to them? Even if the nod to “respectability” is entirely understood as a tactical maneuver, it’s a message that affects society in general, and plays its own part in determining what may or may not be culturally and politically acceptable. And that message is essentially conservative.

There seems to have always been a tension in the struggle for LGBTQ rights between the more conservative approach and the radical one, where the radical goal was to deconstruct more than the “hetero” part of heteronormativity, and to reject the notion that there was anything “abnormal” in the realms of consensual adult sexual and relationship behavior—and certainly that consensual adult sexual and relationship behavior should not be regulated by the state. The campaign for same-sex marriage, by opting to emphasize the “respectability” of same-sex couples who seek marriage rights, is lending support to the notion of “respectable” sexuality and relationships, mirroring the intertwined support they’re giving to the privileging of marriage.

Same-sex couples deserve the same rights as opposite-sex couples; it’s profoundly depressing that this is even a question. But do only certain kinds of relationships deserve the privileges granted by marriage, should marriage be privileged at all, and should anything but scorn be directed towards the notion that only certain modes of relationships and sexualities be granted social (and state) approval?

No, no, and no.

[1]	And by society—it’s just that denial of recognition by the state is the most effective way these people have of attempting to legislate denial of recognition by society.

[2]

It won’t be expressed this way, but they always imply the “of other people” rider; people with these views don’t ever believe that their own lives should be thusly regulated, although they will often claim that this is because they’re not acting in any way warranting such scrutiny—either having conveniently sculpted the proposed rules as to fit their existing lives, or believing that they can act as they like and will never be subject to the rules in question.

[3]

What is it other than an appeal to authority, where the “authority” in question is usually some ancient tome of highly questionable authorship? Given the proliferation of religions, also, it leads right to an impasse of “my religion believes this”/“my religion believes the opposite”, at which point you can either give up or have a real argument.

[4]

Although, of course, we do this with young people all the time; at least in that case there’s some argument to be made that this is for their own good, although the US likes to pile on here by making it illegal for some of them to drink even after they’re old enough to vote and serve in the military.

[5]	Some states/companies don’t require marriage but a “domestic partnership”, variously defined—which is a policy likely now illegal in North Carolina.

[6]	A properly functioning free market for health care could achieve similar results from a different direction; associating health coverage with employment rather than providing competing coverage that anyone could buy is bizarre from an economic standpoint.

[7]	The answer to these problems is really universal health care, as that takes away some of the weird economic incentives for a restrictive policy, but that’s another argument; here I’m concerned with why we think it’s okay to discriminate based on relationship types in this way.

[8]	Although there’s actually nothing to guarantee that marriages are any of these.

[9]	Unless, if you’re not an anarchist, it meets some very high standard of proof that state intervention is warranted—the point is that the discrimination discussed here clearly fails to meet such a standard.

[10]

For example, I think it would still be reasonable to make sure that married partners are protected from certain kinds of economic abuse, particularly in terms of breakups and division of assets, etc.—it makes sense to have sets of expectations and rights available in a uniform fashion, rather than to require each and every set of partners to negotiate a new contract.

[11]	I’m referring to their public presentation; I’m not making any comment on the realities of these relationships.

[12]	As far as I understand it; this is not an area I’ve researched heavily, and it’s entirely possible I’m oversimplifying here.

[13]	As are many opposite-sex couples, for that matter.

Tags: anarchism, culture, homophobia, law, politics, power, prejudice, sex

“Dream, 2012-05-05 04:21”

Tadhg — Sun, 06 May 2012 17:40:11 +0000

Afternoon, a sunny suburban backyard. In the background, fluttering like clothes on a line, is a large sheet of white paper. Unintelligible writings in blue and black cover it. In the foreground, white-shirted Benedict Cumberbatch[1] drinks from a beer bottle, talking to unseen others.

(Haziness. Time passes, unclear how much, it could be hours or years.)

Bruce Willis[2] drives through an American suburb in the late afternoon. Despite the warm weather, he is wearing a fedora and a trenchcoat in the car. He’s looking for her; she’s been hiding for years, but the government have finally tracked her down and he knows she’s nearby. He just has to get a better fix and report her precise location.

I call her, warn her that they’re close, that she has to go. She’s in one of the houses nearby, living with Benedict. She looks like Gina Carano[3], and was washing dishes in the sink when the call came. Benedict asks her who it was, and she tells him that they’re close, that they’re going to find her. She may be in shock, and goes back to washing the dishes.

Benedict makes a snap decision and punches her hard in the side, doubling her over, and then forces her head under the water in the sink, putting all of his weight on it. He knows that he cannot beat her unless he takes her by surprise. She struggles but cannot free herself, and goes still.

We see the scene from further back in the kitchen, slightly above and looking out onto the suburban street through the window. It’s gotten slightly darker. On the other side of the street, able to see into the kitchen and make out Cumberbatch holding a woman’s head in the sink, are Gordie Lachance and, wheeling a bicycle, Vern Tessio[4]. Benedict ignores that they’ve seen him, figuring that’s something he’ll be lucky to have to worry about later.

He’s underestimated her lung capacity, however, and she’s managed to recover from the surprise and get ahold of a knife. She slashes at him enough to get him to ease off, and that’s all she needs to yank free and breathe. It’s clear that he can’t win, now, and that once his surprise attack failed he could not prevail against her. Not merely because she is more skilled as a fighter, but because she’s more than merely human, and more powerful than he is. The rest is one-sided, and she kills him with a sampling of the sharp edges available in the room. For some reason there is little blood, but he is nevertheless dead.

She staggers away from the kitchen, and the phone rings. She picks it up. I tell her she has to go, now, that they know where she is and they have better tech, she cannot fight. She hangs up, and looks at her front door, which is frosted glass.

There is a silhouette at the door, clearly outlined. It is Captain America[5]. The silhouette is monocolor, except that around his shield there is blood red.

She turns and runs, and under her control a silver sphere drops into the hallway, heading for the door.

Her sphere is not alone, but it and the others must contend with opposing spheres, more advanced than they are. Fire, explosions, and blasts of energy erupt around the house as she sets her drones against her pursuers. Despite the fireworks, hers are clearly overmatched, and while she and Captain America are lost from view in the ensuing chaos, her drones are swiftly picked off.

She reappears, racing across a nearby backyard. Now she looks like Sigourney Weaver[6], and is putting on the last pieces of powered armor, a metallic dark red sleek suit with a couple of fin-like parts near the shoulders, probably to help control flight. She is running very fast, faster than any human could run, and after she snaps the last piece into place she moves smoothly to flight. She continues to fly low, knowing that her suit is not enough for her to escape, and reaches a small jet that is emerging from below the grass. She swiftly gets into it, now looking more like Wonder Woman[7] but still in powered armor, and takes off.

All of this has been seen from the side. Her run, her flight, her climbing into the jet, the jet’s takeoff—a side-on view, like a cinematic side-scrolling video game. As the jet begins to leave the ground, a white streak flashes in from the left of the view, and Iron Man[8] grabs onto the jet’s tail. She despairs at the realization that not only is their suit tech faster than her suit tech, but their suit tech is faster than anything she has.

The perspective breaks from its side-scrolling lock, and she jumps out of the jet. Iron Man flings it away, and they close for battle. A bitter but one-sided battle. She is slower, weaker, underpowered, outgunned. Their energy weapons are the most evenly matched, so Iron Man seeks to make it close combat. She tries to get away, he grabs her legs and slams her to the earth. He keeps her there and hits her viciously, repeatedly. She escapes, but briefly, and the cycle is repeated. And then again. A few more times. Her desperation, and all her attempts, are not enough. When she is weak enough, he prepares to rip off her armor so that he can kill her.

Something lands, or emerges, onto the street behind the park where they are fighting. Something colossal, the size of a large building. Its shape is constantly changing but is approximately rectangular, longer than it is tall or wide. It is made up of grey/black cubes of smooth metal, each about 4 meters per edge. The cubes on the bottom fire jets towards the ground, and some other cubes fire jets in other directions, controlling its movements. Smoke surrounds its lower sections, perhaps from the jets, or perhaps as a defensive measure of some kind. The upper cubes, on the near side, are the ones in constant movement, and they extend into thinner limb-like arrangements. These have demispheres of green and red energy on their near faces, and are energy weapons.

These energy weapons open fire on Iron Man in a broadside, stopping him from taking off her armor or doing anything else. The drones that had earlier defeated her drones arrive, and try to shield him from the barrage, but this can only be a brief respite, as the firepower is too great. Still, this allows Iron Man to escape, the energy weapons still firing at him as he flees.

This vehicle belongs to Cobra[9], and it takes her aboard. On it, she stands on a platform, without her powered armor, now looking like the Black Widow[10]. I’m there, also on the platform. In front of us is Guile[11], who is asking her to join Cobra. She refuses.

I go to her and have a quick and quiet conversation, my face close to her ear. I tell her not to be a fool, that if she doesn’t join they’ll leave her here for Iron Man’s backup—which we all know is coming, and which we need to leave to avoid, but apparently Guile won’t leave until she’s decided one way or another—and that if she chooses not to join it’s choosing death. She assents, I go back to where I was, and Guile asks her again. She says she’ll join.

Guile nods, and the vehicle takes off, flying hard. He approaches the front of the platform and gestures that she can leave it. He’s clearly not happy with her initial refusal, but equally clearly under orders to recruit her. He starts to tell her about the initiation process, and is about to describe uniform requirements when the ship’s AI speaks. It tells her not to let him trick her into putting on a ridiculous purple, green, and yellow costume that they often make young cadets wear as part of hazing.

Guile scowls as he was obviously about to try this, and the AI laughs, and I laugh, and she laughs, and it’s all going to be okay.

[1]	Dark-haired, the way he looks in the new Sherlock Holmes series, although his facial features are more muted somehow.

[2]	Looking, apart from his clothes, similar to how he looked playing himself in Ocean’s Twelve.

[3]	Specifically, in Haywire, but perhaps a little less muscular.

[4]	Aged about 12, as they were in Stand by Me.

[5]	Even the little eagle wing things he has on his head are visible in the silhouette.

[6]	Probably closest to how she looked in Alien: Resurrection.

[7]	The Linda Carter Wonder Woman, obviously.

[8]	The suit is close in color and style to the movie version, but without the glowing white part of the chest plate.

[9]	Yes, the bad guys from the GI Joe universe.

[10]	Although not in any of the costumes I’m aware of; she is in all black, with body armor like a standard flak jacket plus some extra arm/shoulder protection. She has black hair and looks Eastern European.

[11]	A thinner and more wiry version of the Street Fighter II Guile.

Tags: dreams, fiction, short-fiction, weekly, writing

“Flickerings”

Tadhg — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 06:42:30 +0000

Caroline gestured, and the two acolytes came forward, hustling Bethany between them. She was gagged and her arms bound behind her, but she tried to struggle anyway, her eyes wide and wild. While they tied her to the slab, Caroline began lighting the candles in sequence, waiting for them to finish and step outside the circle before she lit the final one.

Agent Gastusky reversed fast, too fast, out of the driveway. 20 minutes of sneaking around, 10 minutes of brandishing a gun and threatening, and finally the realization that someone had transposed numbers on the address. Someone along the chain, or him, he couldn’t swear it wasn’t his mistake. He yanked the wheel around and shifted into first, flooring it. The delay likely meant the girl’s death, and if she died he knew he’d have to account for it in his report—and that no-one would likely own up to the address mistake.

The sacrifice was bound, the candles were lit, and Caroline finished the circle of salt. Then she walked to each of the acolytes, kissed their painted masks, and whispered their appointed sacred names in their ears. At the end of the ritual, she would cry out one of those names, and that acolyte would become her priest for the night. She did not know which name; that was to come through revelation.

Gastusky was closer now—assuming this was the right fucking address—and he turned off his lights, then the engine, coasting slowly to a halt before reaching the driveway. The he looked at how ridiculously far back the McMansion was from the road, and rolled his eyes, and turned the car back on. To have a chance of being on time, he had to give up on a perfect approach. The lights were off, but that didn’t mean much, and he was sure his targets would be underground in any case, for “authenticity”.

Caroline could sense Bethany’s fear. She could sense the nervousness, excitement, and arousal of the acolytes. Something would rise tonight, she was certain. The stars were right, the girl was right, she was right. She flung off her robe, to mirror the sacrifice in nakedness, then picked up the scabbard. Clutching it tightly between her thighs, she whispered the sword’s name—a name, she realized with some trepidation, among those she might be compelled to utter after the ritual—and then pulled it free. It glittered in the candlelight, and she let the scabbard drop to the floor.

Gun in hand, Gastusky prowled through the rooms on the ground floor. So far, nothing. So far, a maddeningly typical suburban home. But it couldn’t be another wrong address. He just hadn’t found it yet. On his second time through, he did. The bookcase. They actually had a hidden bookcase door. He got it open, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust enough to see what was behind it—a stone spiral staircase, descending. This was taking it a little too far, he thought, but started down. A few moments later, he heard the scream.

The first strike was for the pain, a deliberately nonlethal blow. The second was for the blood, and Caroline had to grip the hilt tightly to make sure it didn’t slip for the third strike. The killing strike. Pressure mounted in her head. Excitement rose around a feeling she had never had before. She brought death into the room, a perfect thrust through the heart. All the wounds were perfectly placed. All the words, correctly uttered. All the candles, the lines, the acolytes—perfect. She could feel something.

Gastusky burst in just after the sword bit for the last time. He swore, and they all looked at him, the one on the altar twisting awkwardly to see where the noise came from. The nearest acolyte made a grab for the gun, and took a bullet to the head. Three tried their ceremonial daggers, and he shot each in turn. The last one was fumbling with an ankle holster—probably not part of the ceremonial garb—when Gastusky killed him.

Caroline was mute, shocked, as the acolytes died around her, and she flinched when the man, uncaring, walked into the circle. He grabbed her arm and twisted, making the sword clatter to the ground. He yanked her off the altar to the floor—across the salt!—and put his head to Bethany’s chest, then fingers to her throat. Caroline sat up and looked dazedly at him as he whirled and glared.

“She’s dead. Just a girl, and dead, and for fucking nothing.”

Caroline shook her head. She still felt something. “Not for nothing.”

“No? Then for what? Where’s whatever you hoped to raise? What old fairy tale did you think would violate the laws of physics in appreciation of your little show?”

She had made the sacrifice, said the words, performed the ritual. The man had been too late, and something should have happened, it was true. While he was fighting the acolytes, it should have happened, and only Caroline should have been safe to bargain, inside the circle. She had performed the ritual, said the words, made the sacrifice! She stood unsteadily, and the man hit her, knocking her back and again onto the floor. The pain bit into her mind, and he came towards her again, his eyes cold.

She felt rising panic, panic and frustration. She had felt something building, and felt it change when she brought the dagger down. It couldn’t all be suggestion and hope. It couldn’t be, and she felt her mind writhe in rage, and she pushed.

She pushed, and he flew back, landing heavily on the ground, his pistol skittering away from him. She got to one knee and saw him raise his head, and in his eyes she saw first confusion and then fear. She went for the gun.

There was a muffled crunch as his kick caught her in the ribs; he had risen fast, very fast, to prevent her from reaching it. The pain coursed through her as she fell, and he picked up his weapon.

There was a pause, as she tried to deal with the pain and he didn’t move.

“What the fuck was that?”

She looked at him, shook her head. She didn’t know how to answer. He looked around suspiciously, at the ceiling and the walls. He looked back at her.

“I’ve read all the reports. I’ve been to countless tests. It doesn’t work. None of it. Not psychic powers, not witchcraft, not thaumaturgy. It doesn’t work. What did you just do?”

“I followed the ritual.”

“So? You think you’re the first? You think of all the billions alive and dead, you’re the first to follow that particular ritual? It’s been done many times. It never does anything but add one more murder to the world.” He approached her again, and then she heard, “Where am I?”

Startled, she looked at Bethany’s body. Then she looked back at him, and realized he hadn’t heard it. Then a moment later, a scream. A terrible, awful, scream, much worse than when she’d used the sword. Worse, louder, more piercing. She put her hands over her ears, but that didn’t help, it kept going, longer than breath could allow, and he didn’t react at all, just came closer, but she had to make it stop, to shut it out, and she felt the pressure again.

There was a flash, and a thump. Her eyes took some time to clear, and when they did, it was quiet. The man was on the other side of the room again, by the stairs, crumpled but breathing. Bethany was silent. The pressure, the change, that she had felt was gone. Caroline stood up and slowly made her way to the stairs.

Gastusky heard her approach, and when she was near enough he turned over with the gun, still in his hand.

“Safety’s off, trigger’s under my finger. Think you can beat a bullet?”

She stopped, shook her head.

“Once, fluke. Twice, that’s something. You ever done something like that before?”

“No.”

“No. Nor anyone else I’ve heard of. I told you, I’ve read the reports. I’ve been in the room for some of the tests. There’s no coverup—this shit doesn’t work. If it did, we’d use it ourselves.”

“But something worked tonight.”

“That’s right. But not what you intended. And maybe you can do it again, maybe you can stop this gun from firing and kill me with your mind. But I might get you too, or first. Let’s not try that.”

“What, then?”

“Listen, you kill me and they’ll get you. They’ll hunt you down and put you away. And if you use whatever this is to resist, they’ll still get you, but instead of prison they’ll put you in a lab. They’ll put electrodes in your brain and needles in your heart and when they’re done with that they’ll dissect you to find out what it is.”

“I don’t know what it is.”

“That won’t help. But there’s another way. I’ve been doing this a long time. I know all the rich nuts who’ll pay for something like this. For something real. If we can figure out how to do it again—and no sacrifices next time—they’ll pay. A lot of money, and no electrodes, no dissection.”

“But you came after me, you have to bring me in.”

“I can write you out of it. I can make it just the five dead guys and the girl; we’ll start a fire and I’ll say it started during the struggle and there were just five. And that’s what I’ll do, but then we’re partners.”

“Partners.”

“Partners in figuring out what happened down here. If we can—you know what that could bring.”

They walked up the stairs together.

Tags: fantasy, fiction, short-fiction, weekly, writing

PixelJAM’s Snowball

Tadhg — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 06:21:44 +0000

PixelJAM won me over with Dino Run, and I like pinball games—and who doesn’t like snow?—so I was happy to see them take on the genre in their own way with Snowball, which feels more relaxed than your usual pinball game. Oh, and snowballs are apparently magnetic.

(Blog posting of the usual length will hopefully resume next week.)

Tags: games, weekly

Impressions of the Grand Canyon near Supai

Tadhg — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 06:57:09 +0000

The very first time I saw the Grand Canyon, it had a helicopter in it, rising above the sides. I was looking from the car as we approached, and the blue and white helicopter was there, hanging in space, space with walls of rock behind it, white and ochre stone.

The light green creek water flowed under the branches that were the crossing. Four steps: one close, another to the middle of the first branch, then a third onto the second branch, and a fourth onto a stone at the other side. I refrained, for fear of drowning my camera.

The path was red dust. Softer and finer than I expected, so that going up involved sinking deep into it, and required a run in order to make any progress. At the top, nothing but an enclosed small grassy patch, the end of the trail, and shoes full of sand.

Zooming down, wings tucked close, then spread out for the turn, up and around and close to the top of the falling water, then to the side for an updraft, flapping a few times to gain enough altitude to allow another dive, this one close to the curtain of water.

All the time, whenever there’s light and you’re outside, the canyon walls rise around you. Red and reassuring, beneath the sky, as if to say that whatever beauty may exist above, there is a solid beauty within touching distance. Perhaps even simpler, as to me they said, “there is beauty”.

To my right, the water fell straight. I lay flat on the rock, trying to line up the perfect shot of the creek’s path at the falls, down to the roar of white at the bottom. The canyon extended in front of me, walls helping define the drop before me.

Lack of water did not prevent the rock from being perfectly shaped like a prow, pointing the way down the canyon, steady beneath my feet as we plotted our course, together. I had to leave it to go on, aground, but waiting for the next traveller in need of direction.

The horses and mules do the heavy work, carrying packs and supplies in and out of the canyon. I never saw fewer than four per pack. Some looked spry, others worn. I saw one, in play or petulance, trying to push his pack brother off the trail onto rougher ground.

On a ridge over a waterfall, a line of black, burnt trees. The ground is yellow beneath them, or grey, sickly and unlike anything else nearby, creating the sense that the ridge wasn’t really part of the canyon, and would not be so again until it healed from the fire.

As I was about to cross, it settled on one of the planks. An inch long and apparently all black, it had taken its name to heart. And, indeed, I paused. But as I was about to move forward again, the dragonfly departed, having made its challenge and its point.

As it flitted by, I thought it was a bird. Too dark for a bird? And small, perhaps it was a hummingbird passing too quickly to be properly seen. No, as I saw when it settled on a rock nearby: a butterfly, black or a deep deep blue or both.

Looking upstream, past a fallen tree and around branches and between rocks and shrubs, there were four. Each a glory in its own right, but from here four of them. Four waterfalls, all visible from that one spot, and while none was at its best, together they more than sufficed.

Chains. Slippery handholds. Two ladders. Tunnels, of a sort—certainly it’s dark in them and there’s stone all around you. Viewed from a distance, ochre shapes like icicles. Up close, a safer climb than it sounds, but it’s so makeshift and haphazard a way to traverse so paradisical a waterfall.

Apparently it’s the presence of limestone that adds the color. The unearthly green color seen in the creek especially near the waterfalls, and where it shades from being shallow enough to seem clear above the white bed to being deep enough to seem more like an expected color of water.

After miles of canyon, and stone, and dust—trees. Trees and plants, not struggling to be seen, nor attempting to blend with the rest. Instead they announced themselves to the world, proud flagbearers of green, claiming their place alongside the red of the rock and the blue of the sky.

Guaranteed shade in this place, always, although sunlight was in easy reach. Slightly raspy rock as I ran my hand along it, but not the softness of sandstone that might soon crumble. Impossible to guess how much stone there was above. I hoped it wasn’t borne by the overhang alone.

It wasn’t much of a climb, perhaps ten feet, but it was soft sandstone. There was one more waterfall to see, and it was near. My climb was a false trail, and for emphasis holds collapsed to debris twice as I went up and down. Somewhat expectedly, so no damage.

Along the dry riverbed, each step sounded alike underfoot. At first. No two stones were the same, and each crunch involved different sets of them, different numbers of them, different types of them. Could such a sound be simulated, accurately, without mapping every rock in the canyon, and much more?

Two paths diverged, not for long, and merged again. Always within sight of each other, never much apart. I took the left, because it was less sandy ground. There was nothing nearby except for stone and rock. Yet as the paths merged, I checked for traffic over my right shoulder.

I did not feel many flashes of insight while there. No stories came to me unbidden. No chapters descended whole from the heavens. Nevertheless, the environment drove home to me the importance of expression and creativity. Creation simply seems necessary, mandatory, in the face of such beauty, such uncaring grandeur.

Tags: creativity, personal, travel, weekly, writing

Some Clues to How Creativity Works

Tadhg — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 03:43:46 +0000

Last Wednesday I went to a talk by Jonah Lehrer on the topic of creativity, and left it feeling quite inspired. This post is a brief summary of why.

(Any inaccuracies in this outline are my own, as there is no guarantee that I understood what Jonah Lehrer intended to convey; I intend to read his book Imagine: How Creativity Works for more insight, but have not yet done so.)

One of the key points in the talk was that two very different brain states are required for two different classes of problem:

The focused state, in which we concentrate intently on the problem at hand and solve it by methodically working through it.
The relaxed state, in which “flashes of insight” are possible.

What was new to me about this was the claim that these two states are exclusive—we cannot put our brains into modes where we can work on both types with any efficacy. Further, both modes require training—something that sounds more obvious than it is, as it’s not a particularly common idea that we need to learn how to relax in order to be creative.

While the notion of the “genius” has been steadily undermined, and the importance of practice and hard work strongly emphasized as we’ve studied the components of high achievement, Lehrer was claiming that the creative process is really about the alternation between the “grind” approach and an approach that involves leaving the problem and doing something else and, essentially, waiting/hoping for inspiration to strike.

He related an anecdote involving a Tibetan monk—all the best neuroscience stories involve Tibetan monks—brought in to participate in a study of so-called “insight problems”, problems that could not be solved by methodically working through them. This monk was hooked up to an EEG and given problems to solve. He began very poorly, failing repeatedly at every one. As his failures stacked up, the scientists began to think there might be something seriously wrong with him, as no previous candidates had had so many consecutive failures. After about 20 of the problems, however, he began solving all of them. He reeled off about 30 in a row, more than they had seen anyone solve.

They examined the EEG records and found that his brain wave state changed after the first 20, and their hypothesis was that he had thought that the questions were of the methodical type requiring intense focus, so he focused intently on them. So intently that he had no flashes of insight whatsoever, and so failed to solve any. Then he decided that this wasn’t the right approach, and that he needed to be in the other problem-solving mode, so switched his brain state to that and had tremendous success. The implication is that his meditation training allowed him to move between brain states at will.

Apart from strongly suggesting that I should learn how to meditate, I was also inspired by this concept of the different domains being exclusive because it seems to provide a certain freedom—not too much, as in the model where you have to wait for inspiration to strike, but enough to promote a balance between the hard work and the need to get away from it. As a creator I can certainly stand to do a lot more hard work, but I feel better thinking that when I get stuck, it’s not necessarily due to a lack of that work, nor can it necessarily be remedied by hard work. It also makes the “grind” sections easier in that it takes away some of the pressure to be “creative” in them. This gels with another inspiring post I read recently, “How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day”, which advocates an approach compatible with this, where the flashes of insight come during planning, and the production is managed during the focused periods[1].

On the other hand, I’m not particularly good at relaxing, so in a way this adds more pressure to that state. But the message that you have to give up the grind sometimes to solve problems still strikes me as more of a liberating one, rather than one that seeks to “productize” relaxation.

Lehrer also made the claim that cities promote creativity in their inhabitants, and that the larger cities become the more this is true. The opposite, however, is true of companies. In examining why this might be so, Lehrer suggested that random contact between people, even contact that produced friction, was a boon for creativity; that contact between people who were different to each other sparked creative output; and that a large number of “weak ties” to many different people would likely aid your creativity. He stressed the importance of information sharing, of bringing ideas to new environments, and of having ideas mix and clash. Strict hierarchy and structure, particularly structure that tends to place people in silos and encourages them to deal only with other people in the same silo, all act as barriers to creativity.

As a city-dweller, and someone who loves cities, and further whose attendance at this talk was due to fairly random events and social connections, I found that inspiring also.

Further, as an extrovert who doesn’t like to talk to strangers for fear of imposing myself upon them, this provides an excellent rationale for doing so: if random connections aid creativity, then random social connections—even awkward ones—are likely to aid not merely my creativity but also that of whoever I talk to.

Those were the key concepts I took from the talk. I’m curious about the relationship between the states he discusses and the flow state, and relatedly wonder about how his model fits my own experience of writing, which seems to have at least three modes:

The insight mode, where I get ideas, most often the basic ideas for stories, but sometimes critical points later in works.
The grinding mode, where I know mostly what I want to write and simply have to get the words down, which often seems to require a lot of determination.
The “inspired” mode, almost like a cross between the two, where insights don’t seem as major, but where getting the words down isn’t a grind, and where I will go in directions I don’t expect while also feeling that I’m focused and know where I’m going.

If the first two are as exclusive as he suggests, what is that third mode? Is it a form of the first that’s simply going on for longer? (If so, it would be nice to stay in it all the time…)

[1]	This is my interpretation of Rachel Aaron’s post, and while she was hardly the first to advocate heavy planning prior to the “actual writing”, I still found her post useful and inspirational.

Tags: creativity, neuroscience, personal, psychology, weekly, writing

Corruption: Ireland’s Mahon Tribunal

Tadhg — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 06:34:51 +0000

Dublin has grown a great deal over the last 30 years, and in so doing has become a case study in how not to manage urban/suburban development, planning, or transit policy[1].

The urban planning process for Dublin County in that period was endemically corrupt, which was common knowledge at the time but has been made extremely clear by the final report, released 22 March 2012, of the Mahon Tribunal, a body set up in 1997 to investigate such matters. It seems unlikely in the extreme that the corruption and the terrible urban sprawl aren’t connected.

The corruption, combined with a property bubble that everyone wanted to keep inflating, created an environment where slowing development of any kind was extremely difficult—and one where corruption was ever more easily overlooked, thanks to the amount of cash suddenly available. That economic boom proved to be primarily illusory, and now Ireland struggles with debt, economic stagnation, and free-falling property prices. It’s in that environment that the Irish have to contend with the problems created by urban sprawl.

The Mahon Tribunal was created primarily in response to allegations regarding payments to then-Minister Ray Burke, but had a wide mandate to investigate planning-related corruption throughout Dublin. It found rather a lot of it, but the odds are that what it uncovered is only a tiny amount of what was going on at the time.

I didn’t read the entire report, which is over 3,000 pages long, but did read the introduction, summary, the summary of recommendations, and some other sections.

The sections I read include many sections that are telling, hilarious, and sad. A number of these follow.

The first I remember fairly well from when I was living in Dublin:

[…] in February 1993, during the course of a Dublin County Council meeting, Cllr Trevor Sargent […] waved in the air a cheque, which had been sent to him by a developer, proclaiming that it was ‘part of the corruption in here.’ […] Cllr Sargent had to be escorted from the chamber for his own protection from some of his fellow councillors.

—4. Alan P. Mahon, et al. The Final Report of the Tribunal of Inquiry into Certain Planning Matters and Payments. Dublin: Government Publications Office, 22 March 2012.

That one strained belief at the time—not regarding the corruption itself, but that it could continue to go on. Relevant here is the fact that Sargent was a Green Party councillor, and that the Greens were then a relatively new political party, making it entirely plausible that Sargent hadn’t been exposed to the corruption by then inculcated in the cultures of the other parties—and that the other councillors would be irate at his statements given the likelihood that they were indeed on the take, and that their livelihoods might be threatened by his accusations.

The following three extracts are illustrative of the political environment in which the Tribunal was operating:

On several occasions, journalists, politicians and other individuals suggested that the Tribunal itself was complicit in arranging or facilitating the leaking of information. […] the Tribunal believes that at least on some occasions individuals attributed leaks to the Tribunal in an attempt to discredit it […]

—25. ibid.

The Tribunal’s efforts to establish the source of leaked information was successful in one instance, involving Mr Michael Bailey. In that instance, the Tribunal found that Mr Bailey himself was the source of the leaks in question. Mr Bailey had cynically used the leaks to question the integrity of the Tribunal and relied on them to delay furnishing information to the Tribunal.

—26. ibid.

[O]n 26 September 2006, the then Minister for State Mr Noel Tracy TD stated in the course of a radio interview […] that it was a well known fact that the Tribunal constantly leaked for political purposes […] when the Tribunal subsequently questioned Mr Tracy regarding his statements, he conceded that he had no information to support it and was unable to give any credible reasons for having made the allegation in the first place.

—26. ibid.

That last one in particular is quite something, given that a sitting Minister was clearly attempting to undermine the credibility of the Tribunal and in doing so was entirely prepared to go on the record with statements he later admitted had no basis.

The 16th chapter of the tribunal is focused on Liam Lawlor, who was under suspicion of having engaged in corrupt practices, and this section also has some gems. Note that I am not suggesting in the least that Mr. Lawlor was exceptional as a Dublin politician at the time.

An examination of other documentation made available to the Tribunal revealed the existence of twelve additional bank accounts of which there had been no mention by Mr Lawlor.

—2390. ibid.

Lawlor was imprisoned three times due to his refusal to furnish to the Tribunal the documentation regarding his financial affairs that the Tribunal requested. After the third period of imprisonment, it seemed clear that there were still missing records, and the report drily notes:

Following his release from prison, there followed a further series of correspondence between Mr Lawlor and the Tribunal.

—2393. ibid.

Overall the report comes across as trying to state only that which can be clearly proven, and unwilling to make unsubstantiated claims, which makes the following line all the more remarkable:

The fact that Mr Lawlor had an insatiable appetite for money was without doubt.

—2406. ibid.

I strongly suspect that this section, while stated in reference to Mr. Lawlor, was representative of the goings-on at the time:

The methods often used by Mr Lawlor to obtain and receive money were occasionally ingenious. These methods included the use of third party bank accounts, false and bogus invoices, the use of third party payees, the false use of names to endorse cheques, and falsely claiming that his own off-shore funds were in fact repayable loans made to him.

—2406. ibid.

That the state’s enforcement apparatus was, at the very least, functioning poorly, and was more likely part of the problem, is evident from the lack of prosecutions pursued prior to any of the high-profile cases exposed in the media, but is made even more clear by these statements from the report:

The Tribunal was satisfied that complaints made to the Gardai […] about Mr George Redmond, Mr Liam Lawlor and Cllr Finbarr Hanrahan were not thoroughly investigated by the Gardai […] The Tribunal was puzzled as to why the final Garda report went to such lengths to exonerate Mr Lawlor and Mr Redmond in the absence of a more comprehensive inquiry into complaints of corruption involving those two individuals.

—2457. ibid.

The report makes an obvious but crucial point in its summary regarding the amount of money at stake and the disparity between the money required to bribe politicians and the money gathered in profit:

[…] the financial rewards for the relevant landowners/developers were enormous by any standards […] While the potential financial gain was immeasurable, the outlay necessary to achieve the rezoning of the land in question (in the form of, in particular, payments to councillors) was, in most instances, relatively modest, often involving sums of IR£1,000 or IR£2,000 being paid to a handful of councillors.

—2514. ibid.

While the Mahon Tribunal primarily deals with property development and mostly Fianna Fáil politicians, corruption at the time was hardly limited to that sphere or that party—as the findings of the Moriarty Tribunal make clear.

The Mahon Tribunal report provides very solid evidence of the corruption, but I don’t know anyone in Ireland who would be surprised by this—as stated, it has been common knowledge for quite some time. Why has it been able to persist, and is Ireland in some relevant way radically different from other Western democracies?

The questions are intertwined, but the Irish “national character” is not the reason for the corruption. While there are certainly technical aspects of the way democracy is structured in Ireland that are part of the problem—and it is primarily those technical aspects the report addresses in its recommendations—the most important factor may be the political tribalism so pervasive in the country. This fosters corruption because the corrupt can shelter behind the loyalty accorded to their “side”, and because they can rely on their supporters to decry anti-corruption measures as politically-motivated attacks by the other “side”. Put another way, the partisan view of politics overrides other views and reduces everything to an inane “us versus them” mentality[2].

Having said that, it’s not at all clear that Ireland is “more corrupt” than other countries, despite the evidence of the various Tribunals. Certain aspects of its political culture are likely more corrupt that in other countries, but that’s not quite the same thing.

Political corruption is present throughout the West—elsewhere too, but the West tends to regard itself as more politically advanced than the rest of the world, and with that self-regard should come the responsibility to live up to its pretensions. The Mahon Tribunal’s turning over rocks in Ireland has lessons for all the Western democracies, each of which has its share of nasty wriggling things trying to hide from view.

Critical to this discussion is a definition of corruption. The final report of the Mahon Tribunal addresses this, and states that:

Aside from bribery, the Tribunal’s definition of corruption encompassed the following behaviour, or attempted behaviour: (1) destroying, hindering or perverting the integrity or fidelity of a person in the discharge of his duty; (2) the abuse of influence or power or duty by any person and; (3) inducing another to act dishonestly or unfaithfully. It also covered circumstances of control, influence or involvement with a person in the discharge of his duty to the extent that it gave rise to a reasonable inference of unequal access, or favouritism, or a set of circumstances detrimental to his duties.

—12. ibid.

That quite a broad definition, but a reasonable one. Unfortunately, the game of politics, as played almost everywhere, involves the trading of favors, deception, and myriad forms of influence. This is not to claim that corruption is inevitable, but rather that it is extremely close to the fundamental nature of politics itself[3].

Technical attempts to excise it, while worthwhile, will tend to failure. This can be seen in examples from other systems generally regarded as less corrupt than the Irish one as seen through the lens of the Mahon Tribunal. If, instead of paying them lump sums, the property developers had instead led the councillors and other participants to believe that upon retiring they might have lucrative consultancy jobs waiting for them, that would not technically have been bribery, and would probably not have broken any laws. But the outcome would have been quite similar—and this is how a significant chunk of the American system works.

Moving to another system, what about Britain’s entry into the Iraq War? That’s not generally regarded as an act of political corruption, because no overt bribery was alleged—but it certainly involved dishonesty, the hindering of the integrity of various parties, and the abuse of influence, power, and duty by a variety of extremely high-ranking politicians.

Nevertheless, some countries are less corrupt than others. There are two main potential explanations for this:

The characteristics of the country’s population make the difference.
The structure of the country’s political institutions make the difference.

The two are obviously intertwined, and the former often determines the latter. But since we know that power corrupts, it seems foolish in the extreme to depend on the strength of character of politicians to be the main bulwark against corruption. Which means structuring institutions to avoid corruption, and that means minimizing power concentration as much as possible. Ensure that individuals or groups cannot gain enough power to think themselves above the rules, and insist on accountability for everyone, at all times.

That can only be done with a significant increase in political participation, where a larger percentage of the population insists on inspecting, and criticizing, the work of the state and its agents.

The answer to corruption—to broken democracy—is more democracy. The answer to terrible decisions foisted upon the populace at large by small, self-interested groups is to deny small, self-interested groups the power to make such decisions. The answer to hidden actors and hidden actions resulting in disaster for the majority is to bring the actors and actions into the open, and insist on accountability as a fundamental principle.

Almost all politicians, of course, would nod and purport to agree with everything in the prior paragraph. Until it interfered with some prerogative of theirs, at which point they would find a rationale to oppose it. The same goes for any anti-corruption measures.

The fight against “corruption”, in truth, is not merely the fight against cash in brown paper bags being handed over to secure rezoning decisions. It’s about democracy itself, and requires a recognition that the current system has a ruling class, and that by definition the current system suits that ruling class extremely well, and that any changes to it will be resisted by some of them as a result.

When is power given up voluntarily? Rulers, “leaders”, do it almost never. But we do it all the time. We, as voters, as citizens, as primates susceptible to the most crass manipulations, give up our power over and over, and we do it most often by not protesting the expansion of the state’s power—and we do that most often because we’re scared. Not necessarily of the state itself, nor of our “leaders”, but of something else. Each other, perhaps, or some band of primates differentiated from us by some small detail.

Does this analysis have to lead to full-blown anarchism? I think it does, but maybe that’s not true. Maybe there’s a way to have a responsible state, one whose politicians and bureaucrats can be trusted not to enrich or empower themselves to the detriment of everyone else. Maybe responsible “leaders” are possible on a large scale, and maybe a sense of civic responsibility prevalent enough to ensure that most of the “leaders” adhere to it can be achieved.

But it won’t happen through waiting for the current ruling class to make it so. Only political engagement on a massive scale can move us that way, political engagement refusing to accept the current structure and the excuses of “that’s how things are done”, political engagement that isn’t only greatly inclusionary, but also deeply patient and willing to rein in “leaders” not only in the short term but even much later, when the ones we were sure we could trust turn out to have succumbed to the lures of power and need to be returned to a simpler life.

Making that happen is impossible in a stratified society; the first steps would have to involve merging those strata[4].

This is deeply frustrating to write, as almost any engagement with the political has become for me, because I can see only part of what needs to be done, and it’s not the part that seems most important. There’s a bridge, between the personal and the political, and I can’t find it.

The personal aspects are all relatively obvious; accept responsibility for your actions; understand how privileged you are[5]; treat others as you would wish to be treated; practice integrity; share—I could go on, but everyone knows those things at some level anyway, and most act against them only when they can rationalize doing so in some way—normally a way provided by some aspect of our political system[6].

The political aspects are those I outlined above. But the path to connect the two remains unknown, and that seems an awful failure—not mine alone, by any means, but mine, yours, ours.

Ireland has had multiple leaders whose political corruption is quite easy to see, with occasional details whose amusement value must be acknowledged[7]. But corruption is not an Irish phenomenon, and—again—all the evidence suggests that corruption follows power. At the least, the very least, we must try to hold those with power accountable, always, for how they use it.

[1]	The lead author of a 2006 European Environmental Agency report characterized Dublin as a worst-case scenario of urban sprawl. See http://www.politics.ie/forum/dublin/9125-dublin-cited-worst-case-scenario-urban-sprawl.html or numerous other online sources.

[2]	This partisan mentality is also obvious elsewhere, as in the conservative versus liberal arguments in the US.

[3]	My definition of what politics is: the mechanisms by which power is distributed in a society.

[4]	Yes, all we need to do is first realize Marx’s dream of a classless society…

[5]	Almost by definition, anyone reading this is tremendously privileged. Even if you don’t feel that way; your not feeling that way is part of the harness our cultural/social/political system has put you in.

[6]	Thus supplying an alternative definition of “politics”: a system that provides excuses for us to act immorally.

[7]	For example, the fact the former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, while he was Finance Minister earlier in his career, didn’t have a bank account and dealt only in cash.

Tags: anarchism, ireland, law, personal, politics, power

Jeter’s Flip

Tadhg — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 06:54:32 +0000

Unlike the previous one, this “transcendent sports moment” is one I watched live on television. 13 October 2001, I was in San Francisco, and it happened not that far away, in Oakland[1].

It stands on its own merits, but has additional cultural relevance because it’s likely that without it the book Moneyball would never have been written.

Entering the third game of the 2001 American League Divisional Series[2], the New York Yankees trailed the Oakland Athletics by two games to none. The Athletics had taken both of the games at Yankee Stadium, needed one more to advance, and were playing at home.

The Yankees were reigning champions, and had been since 1998; they still had the “Core Four” of Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada, and Mariano Rivera.

Behind the phenomenal pitching trio of Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Barry Zito, the Athletics won 102 games in the regular season[3], seven more than the Yankees.

The game was a tight pitching duel between Zito and Mike Mussina, with the only score coming from Posada’s fifth-inning home run. Mussina made that lead hold up, recording eight straight outs after the home run before giving up a two-out single to Jeremy Giambi in the bottom of the seventh inning.

With Rivera likely coming in at the start of the eighth, the Athletics must have felt that this was their best chance[4]. Mussina was as tired as he was going to get. Their batter, Terence Long, was a strong hitter on a hot streak[5]. If they could break through here, and nullify the advantage the Yankees had due to Rivera, they had an excellent chance of taking the game and the series.

Long came through with a line drive into deep right field, a clear double. This would normally mean an easy score for a runner at first base, but Jeremy Giambi wasn’t known for his baserunning ability. If the Yankees could execute correctly, they would have a chance to catch him.

In order to prevent the run, the Yankees had to tag Giambi—touch him with a hand or glove containing the ball—before he reached home, and the player in position to make that tag was Posada, the catcher, guarding the plate. Since the ball was in right field, it would be difficult to get it to Posada—300 feet away—in time.

Despite the drama of the moment, in many ways this was a typical baseball play, with various participants all well aware of their roles:

Jeremy Giambi: get to home plate.
Terence Long: advance as many bases as is reasonable, but under no circumstances risk being the third out.
Jorge Posada: get in position so that when the ball arrives, a tag on Giambi is possible.
Shane Spencer: get the ball to Posada as soon as possible.
Alfonso Soriano: get in position to catch Spencer’s throw when it falls short.
Tino Martinez: get in position to catch Spencer’s throw when it falls short if it goes over Soriano.
Ramón Hernández (Oakland’s next batter, not on the field): signal Giambi to slide if it looks like it will be a close play.

Everyone in the stadium understood how important this play was; its outcome probably affected the win probability for the teams more than any other in the series[6].

Spencer grabbed the ball in the right field corner and spun around, throwing down the first base line. Perhaps aided by adrenaline, it was a very strong throw. It clearly had the speed and range to allow a tag on Giambi.

It wasn’t quite on target, but no-one expected it to be—that’s what the cutoff men, Soriano and Martinez, were for.

It went over Soriano, who was out past first base.

It went over Martinez, near first base. Posada wouldn’t have a chance to get it without giving up his position at the plate.

Spencer’s throw was too strong. The combination of his strong throw with Soriano and Martinez’s positioning meant that the Yankees had no player to relay the ball to Posada, and Giambi would score.

But Jeter, standing by the pitcher’s mound, saw that the ball would go over Martinez, and ran to cut it off. At nearly a full run, he caught the ball with both hands while facing away from the plate, and while still running perpendicular to the foul line threw a kind of sidearm shovel pass to Posada—a throw so perfectly on target that Posada could continue the momentum from catching it with his glove to move around and tag Giambi, who never saw the signals Hernandez was giving him and so didn’t slide.

Giambi was out at the plate, the Yankees retained the lead, Rivera came in for the last two innings, and the Yankees had their first win of the series. They would go on to win the next two, setting up the opening scene of the Moneyball movie and, according to the story, prompting Athletics General Manager Billy Beane to try to find new ways to compete with the bigger-spending clubs.

The combination of the play’s importance with the situational awareness and the athletic ability required for Jeter to do what he did means that this easily makes my list of transcendent sports moments. The relationship to Moneyball, itself an important development in baseball history, is merely a bonus.

The play has also been controversial in an odd way: Jeter claimed that it was a play the Yankees had practiced at some point, and many people in baseball didn’t believe him. It’s not clear why he would lie, as it would look even better for him if he came up with it without ever practicing. Whether or not they did practice it doesn’t change its amazing qualities. Also oddly, new Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine recently made the claim that the ball would have gotten to Posada in time without any intervention from Jeter, which seems extremely unlikely, to say the least.

As with “Bird’s Steal”, it had to be Jeter to make the play, as it’s hard to imagine anyone else doing it—and, again similarly, it was a play that seemed to alter the path of fate: the Athletics were going to tie the game, and then Jeter did something unbelievable to take their run away.

(I’m not embedding video because Major League baseball have a terrible history of both taking down video and of using poor technologies for their own hosted video—if the link to it on their Division Series Video fails for you as it does for me, an internet search for “Jeter’s Flip” will probably get you there. It’s worth the search—Oakland’s third baseman at the time, Eric Chavez, later had this to say about it: “We’re probably never going to see that play ever again. A shortstop making that play behind first base, in foul territory, then flipping the ball to the catcher with his momentum carrying him away from the play—it’s unheard of.”)

[1]	The obvious question of why I didn’t go to this game, expense be damned, is not one I have a good answer for.

[2]	A best-of-five-games elimination round, effectively the quarterfinals for determining the American baseball champion.

[3]

And yet were still a wild-card team whose opponents had home-field advantage. 102 games is the most ever won by a wild-card team; they were second that year to the Seattle Mariners, who took the west with a record-tying 116 wins. The Yankees had home-field advantage over the Athletics because baseball decrees that divisional pennants must “mean something”, and the Yankees won their division while the Athletics placed second in theirs.

[4]	Jermaine Dye did get a double off Rivera in the 9th, but really, it’s Rivera, and no miraculous broken-bat bloop helped the Athletics out.

[5]	Batting average .389, on-base percentage .421, total bases divided by at-bats .889.

[6]	I couldn’t find a citation to back up this assertion, though I suspect one is out there.

Tags: baseball, sports

Too Few Good Men?

Tadhg — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 07:03:32 +0000

I don’t usually comment on vapid “lifestyle” articles, particularly when they’re also year-old Wall Street Journal op-ed pieces, but Kay Hymowitz’s “Where Have The Good Men Gone?” has recently been shared by at least two friends and appears to need refutation.

Unfortunately, while it annoyed me greatly on first reading, further readings exposed a lot of difficulty in discerning what arguments it was making—mostly it’s composed of cultural buzzwords, snobbery, socially conservative hankering for the mores of yore, and the anecdata-driven slandering of an entire generation of males.

Hymowitz paints an ugly picture of males lost to “toys and distractions”, summing them up as “aging frat boys, maladroit geeks or grubby slackers”, living in “pig heaven”, unneeded and ultimately rejected by women out of “fear and disgust”. She tries to make the case that these males cannot be considered “adults” or “men”, apparently because they’ve only achieved the first two of the four milestones of adulthood she describes: a high-school diploma, financial independence, marriage, and offspring. She further claims that these “pre-adults” are representative of the current 20-something generation of American males.

Into this mix she throws some statistics about female education levels now outstripping those of males, and some references to Playboy and Maxim, as well as an argument about how this generation of males isn’t drawn to marriage and children partly due to its higher levels of education and career focus. Which is somewhat at odds with the picture she’s painting of the men—her descriptions are hardly suggestive of focused and ambitious go-getters, but she cites “our increasingly labyrinthine labor market” as a factor in delaying adulthood as she defines it[1], claiming that this generation is looking for work to provide their identities[2]. So, apparently, these “pre-adult” males are grubby maladroit slacker geek frat boys who can’t keep house because they’re more highly educated and career-driven than in the past.

There are numerous assumptions underlying her approach, and the privileging of the nuclear family and the intertwined notion of “financial independence” is one that I’ll have to follow up on in another post.

Apart from what I summarize above, I think the message of her piece can be gotten across with the first paragraph and the penultimate two paragraphs.

She opens with:

Not so long ago, the average American man in his 20s had achieved most of the milestones of adulthood: a high-school diploma, financial independence, marriage and children. Today, most men in their 20s hang out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. This "pre-adulthood" has much to recommend it, especially for the college-educated. But it’s time to state what has become obvious to legions of frustrated young women: It doesn’t bring out the best in men.

—Kay Hymowitz. “Where Have The Good Men Gone?”. The Wall Street Journal, 19 February 2011.

Those four milestones could be ungenerously rephrased as: prove you’re a useful worker, and then start a nuclear family so that you can act as a force of social conservatism without a lot of pesky communal bonds that might interfere with the capitalist project[3]. Travel, battle, sex, mastery of a trade, and many other things have also been considered “milestones of adulthood”, and their absence here makes very clear that Hymowitz is concerned with the loss only of a very specific period in history.

I don’t know what “semi-hormonal adolescence” means, or even that it could have any specific meaning, but it certainly sounds both bad and vague enough to cover a lot of behaviors that many people find objectionable.

Without citations, the claim that most men in their 20s today hang out in that novel limbo is suspicious at best. My impression is that many American men in their 20s are struggling to pay college debt, or to work their way through college without accumulating too much of that debt, or trying to find decent jobs in a worsening labor market, or trying to scrape together enough cash to move out of their parents’ homes. Given the number of trend pieces over the last several years about how it takes longer and longer for children to stop living with their parents, I’m not sure where the legions of self-reliant males living in bachelor pads with their former frat buddies are located.

A statement that something has become obvious to “legions of frustrated young women” is also entirely suspect without data to back it up, but this is offset by the fact that the something in question is rather difficult to define. What would “the best in men” be, anyway? If, as Hymowitz herself argues in the same piece, there’s currently a lot of cultural uncertainty about men’s roles, then by definition there’s no consensus, or anything close to it, about what “the best in men” is.

Which makes it rather easy to lump multiple sources of female dissatisfaction[4], potentially with disparate and unconnected causes, into one amorphous book topic—and Hymowitz doesn’t shy away from taking that low road.

Third paragraph from the end:

Single men have never been civilization’s most responsible actors; they continue to be more troubled and less successful than men who deliberately choose to become husbands and fathers. So we can be disgusted if some of them continue to live in rooms decorated with "Star Wars" posters and crushed beer cans and to treat women like disposable estrogen toys, but we shouldn’t be surprised.

—Kay Hymowitz. “Where Have The Good Men Gone?”. The Wall Street Journal, 19 February 2011.

There’s a clear causation/correlation problem with that first sentence—are single men more troubled and less “successful” because they’re single, or are they single because of their troubles and lack of “success”? Further, what if marriage brings “success” due to social prejudice[5]? It’s certainly not easy to unravel that causal web, but Hymowitz clearly believes that men need marriage to fulfil their potential—a claim unlikely to be easily proven.

The next line is quite something, sneeringly combining snobbery, stereotyping, and allegations of misogyny. It’s the second time in the article that Hymowitz suggests that liking Star Wars is a sign of immaturity; unfortunately, regardless of one’s opinions on the films, they’re major cultural works, and Hymowitz’s “you like something I don’t like, so you’re immature” attitude is hard to read as anything other than the sniff of a snob. Conflating that with poor housekeeping is merely another low blow, which she immediately one-ups by conflating both a liking for Star Wars and poor housekeeping with misogyny—or at least I assume it’s misogyny she’s complaining about, and not no-strings attached sex, which there’s nothing wrong with assuming consenting adults.

Misogyny is certainly a problem for the generation of males in question. It’s also a problem for prior and succeeding generations. I haven’t seen evidence that it’s worse for 20-somethings, and Hymowitz doesn’t present any, she just throws it in there as part of the ongoing slander.

We can be disgusted with misogyny, because it hurts people. Poor housekeeping? If directly confronted with it, sure, but in the abstract, it’s not really something to drive disgust with an entire generation. As for driving that disgust with the fact that they like Star Wars movies—does that even need addressing?

The penultimate paragraph:

Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven—and often does. Women put up with him for a while, but then in fear and disgust either give up on any idea of a husband and kids or just go to a sperm bank and get the DNA without the troublesome man. But these rational choices on the part of women only serve to legitimize men’s attachment to the sand box. Why should they grow up? No one needs them anyway. There’s nothing they have to do.

—Kay Hymowitz. “Where Have The Good Men Gone?”. The Wall Street Journal, 19 February 2011.

I’m still not seeing how these 20-something males are relatively affluent in today’s economy, but it’s possible, again, that Hymowitz is restricting her analysis to the relatively affluent. They must be somewhat affluent to be entirely free of family responsibilities—no parents to support, no relatives to help out, no medical crises in their extended families. That affluence presumably aids the acquisition of “media devoted to his every pleasure”, which I have to assume is a reference to Star Wars, pornography, Comedy Central, and computer games[6].

I can’t say much about “pig heaven” other than just calling it out as disgust-based rhetoric. The next line goes even further afield: that women would leave in disgust makes sense given the scenario Hymowitz has created, but fear? There’s nothing in the piece to that point suggesting anything scary about these “pre-adult” males, but suddenly women are recoiling in fear from them? Smearing them as disgusting wasn’t enough, apparently.

As for the reaction of the women described here: if your potential mate disgusts and scares you, then you should absolutely leave, and that’s that. But generalizing to all potential mates, and giving up on your previously-cherished goals of getting married and having kids, is probably an overreaction. Not one that I’ve come across too often, either—in my experience women who find their prior mates unsuitable or unwilling for child-rearing responsibilities often later find suitable partners[7], rather than giving up on the whole thing.

Having already cast them as immature, culturally deficient, disgusting, misogynistic, and frightening, Hymowitz finishes by adding pathetic to the mix. “No one needs them anyway.” Isn’t that the height of social isolation, to not be needed by anyone for anything? By being too repulsive to women for any woman to partner with them for the purpose of raising children (or any other purpose, apparently), these men exist outside the only social entity Hymowitz seems to recognize—the nuclear family—and as such have no conceivable use.

For the kicker, she finished with a line that’s partly an extension of the prior one, but also serves as an explanation for it: “There’s nothing they have to do.” Since they don’t have any responsibilities, they don’t have any use, or purpose; their existence is hollow because they haven’t bought into the set of duties and priorities that Hymowitz considers acceptable.

This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever when combined with her earlier claims that these are highly-educated and career-focused individuals seeking jobs that express their deepest passions—jobs that they basically must have in order to maintain the economic independence she says they have. Don’t their jobs need them? Don’t they have responsibilities there? Don’t they have plenty to do, in going to work every day and paying the rent? How did their entire economic existence disappear from their lives in the second half of her article?

I’m deeply skeptical than any but a tiny proportion of American males in their 20s have the existence Hymowitz lays out. Many more struggle economically, and those struggles likely affect their relationships and their attitude to marriage and offspring, and their potential for finding mates, far more than any liking for Star Wars or the Cartoon Network.

That’s the largest problem with Hymowitz’s piece: 20-something males who are economically struggling don’t make good objects of scorn, because in many ways they’re victims of the poor job market, but 20-something males who aren’t economically struggling must either be from wealthy backgrounds (in which case their travails are less relevant) or they’re navigating the modern economy in responsible and successful ways—which makes it much harder to cast them as wastrel hedonists with. And if I’m wrong, and the 20-something males are making tons of cash in large numbers while in fact being wastrel good-for-nothings (which is not the case Hymowitz is making), then the question is obviously not about gender relations, but about what the hell is wrong with the economy[8].

Shifting cultural gender roles are both confusing and interesting at the moment, but Hymowitz’s piece doesn’t engage with them in any useful or insightful way. Here are some of the more important points she doesn’t address:

What’s the definition of “a good man”?
Who gets to decide what that definition is?
Why should child-rearing be privileged to the extent that you’re not an adult without it? That it’s always been privileged in the past[9] isn’t a good answer, given that this entire situation has come about due to other changes that are culturally novel.
The same question applies to marriage.
If women are dissatisfied with their options for mates, is that necessarily a social problem, and does it necessarily point to problems with their male counterparts[10]?

If you’re interested in an interesting and cogent examination of gender roles and some of the points Hymowitz touches upon, as well as many others, I recommend Roy F. Baumeister’s “Is There Anything Good About Men?”[11].

[1]	Or rather, fails to define it.

[2]

Her description of the labor market is of course ridiculous; the notion of a “career” is out of the reach of the majority of American workers, because they’re just struggling to string enough jobs together to make ends meet, and only the rather privileged get to worry about jobs that can “express their deepest passions”. Either way, the “trend” she’s describing is unlikely to affect the majority of the population, and any similar trends are likely determined to a far greater degree by economic struggle and suffering—an argument unlikely to be seen in Wall Street Journal.

[3]	The “nuclear family”, as a group tightly bound within itself but largely independent from community forces outside it, is a relatively recent invention, and as its rise coincides with industrial capitalism it certainly shouldn’t be considered a socially or politically neutral concept.

[4]	It’s unclear, without data, that this dissatisfaction is significant, or significantly greater than at other times in the past—and, indeed, whether or not it’s rooted in changing male behavior or not.

[5]	For example, as expressed in this scene from The Departed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAReS2JnJ18

[6]

Hymowitz goes after Comedy Central in the piece, and also twice attacks games. When called on the latter point in a post-article chat and asked to explain the distaste, as well as how those games are “different from the masculine interests of our fathers, like sports, or poker”, she merely asks, “Could it be that video games do not encourage the kind of manners and thoughtfulness that a lot of women might want?”—a answer that is typical of the vagueness in the whole piece. What kind of manners? What kind of “thoughtfulness” (not one that’s related to solving problems, apparently, since games tend to help problem-solving ability)? But more than that: which games? It’s a huge field, but Hymowitz pretends it’s some kind of monolith.

[7]	This is merely anecdotal, of course, but then so is Hymowitz’s entire article.

[8]	It’s really obvious that this isn’t happening. There are of course many things wrong with the economy despite this, and I don’t mean to imply that if it were happening it would be anywhere close to the top of the list of what’s wrong with the economy. But it would be pretty weird.

[9]	Which may not actually be true, although it’s probably been privileged in most societies.

[10]

There’s a line from Julie Klausner’s book I Don’t Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters and Other Guys I’ve Dated. that Hymowitz quotes approvingly, stating that the unsuitable males are “more like the kids we babysat than the dads who drove us home”. If it’s creepy for some American men to yearn for women who are more like women were when they were young (which apparently drives demand for “mail-order brides”), then why isn’t it similarly creepy for some American women to yearn for throwback men?

[11]	I don’t endorse everything in Baumeister’s piece by any means, but many of the issues he deals with are interesting and in need of attention by many mainstream feminist cultural critiques.

Tags: culture, economics, feminism, gender, politics

Blog Features I Want

Tadhg — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 05:44:20 +0000

A discussion of common and custom blog features, and candidate applications that might provide them.

At time of writing, this blog runs on WordPress. After issues arising from my recent downtime I’m considering moving to something else, and outline below the implications of switching or staying put.

The broad characteristics I’m looking for are:

Customizability: I need to be able to adapt it, in terms of both aesthetics and functionality.
Durability: The blog shouldn’t break easily, should be easy to maintain, transport, and back up, and be reasonably secure. The technology driving it should be one that I understand well.
Simplicity: The blog software itself should be easy to understand, and preferably consist of a small number of parts.
Scalability: The blog software should be able to handle any sudden rise in popularity without much trouble.
Scriptability: I should be able to interact with it via command-line tools, ideally in a well-documented fashion.

I’ve customized my current setup extensively, and have created scripts for a lot of functionality I rely on. However, WordPress has some major disadvantages:

Fragility: It’s relatively easy for things to go wrong. It’s a complex piece of software with lots of parts, and not tremendously robust. In addition, because of its reliance on a database, it’s possible to lose state unless explicit backups are scheduled.
Performance: It can be rather slow, and can suffer under load. While I don’t have a huge amount of traffic, I would like any outages to be due to my running out of bandwidth rather than anything else, and in its current home I’ve already seen it fail due to database load.
Security: WordPress is fairly notorious for having security holes, and while that can be obviated to a certain extent by running it in a chroot, it’s still a problem. In fairness, any blog platform with comments and live editing will have similar security problems.

WordPress is also written in PHP, and that’s not a language I want to write in. I’ve written some plugins, but no longer have much enthusiasm for maintaining or improving them, and would far prefer to make any improvements to my blog in Python.

I would like to move to a static-site system—similar to taking every possible page from my current blog, saving it as HTML, and then presenting the resulting HTML as the blog, having thus removed all of the server-side dynamic elements. This eliminates a number of problems, performance first among them, as the server doesn’t have to do anything other than return HTML pages from disk.

Of course, much of the point of blog software is to make it easy to write posts without having to put HTML files in specific places and deal with other overhead. There’s a trend in blogging applications to attempt to get the best of both worlds by having the software do the traditional blog tasks but then publish an entire static site. WP Super Cache effectively does this with WordPress, but purely for performance purposes, without addressing the other issues.

Since I have a strong preference for Python, I’ve been looking at Python static site generators, and specifically blogofile, which appears to support a lot of the common features:

Categories (although I’m not sure I use this that much).
Chronological post listings.
Clean URLs.
Code syntax highlighting.
Post summaries/excerpts.
RSS feeds.
Tags (although not to the extent I want).

blogofile also supports comments, by offloading that functionality to third-party comment service Disqus, something I’m hesitant to do (because I like to run all my own services) but may have to accept.

Some common features it doesn’t support:

Chronological post lists for month, year, and day—if you visit http://tadhg.com/wp/2011/01 you get a list of all posts from January 2011, but blogofile doesn’t do that for some reason; that should be easy to add to the build step.
Full-text search. My best bet there would be to offload it to Google Custom Search, at least at first, and look at running either a Python or JavaScript service for it later.
In-browser editor and administration. I don’t need these, but they matter to some people.
RSS feeds for comments. Disqus might support this, however.
Searching by tag combinations. WordPress has limited support for this, but not blogofile. It might be possible to write support for it in JavaScript, as the tag/post combinations should be small enough to allow the user’s browser to do the work.

Finally, the features that aren’t popular but which I want for my blog:

Change-only site generation. Irrelevant for WordPress because it doesn’t generate the site, I want this for blogofile because I have over 1500 posts and don’t want to rebuild everything whenever I add a new one.
Command-line posting. I use pyblog to hook Vim up to WordPress’s XML-RPC functionality, and any blog has to support a similar interface. blogofile operates entirely from the command line.
Comments visible to search engines. Disqus loads comments onto pages using JavaScript, which search engines don’t see, so to rectify that with blogofile I’d have to write custom code to pull comments out of Disqus and insert them at time of publication, while still pulling later comments from Disqus.
Dynamic header graphics. This is a little silly, but the header on my current blog randomly serves an image from a set based on the post category. Adding a Python or JavaScript service to do the same with a static site should be simple enough.
Export. WordPress supports this, but I don’t think blogofile does, perhaps because it’s counterintuitive for a flat-files system to do so. However, I want to be able to move back to WordPress in future if I need to, and so might have to write a way to generate a WordPress backup file from blogofile.
Pages, i.e. blog content that isn’t really part of the blog; WordPress supports this, and it’s very easy to do in blogofile.
Random posts. I like the ability to provide random posts to users—this feature is currently broken on my blog, a sign of WordPress’ fragility. To do it in blogofile would probably require JavaScript, but doesn’t seem too hard.
Series support. My blog doesn’t have this, but I want it: UI indications that certain posts are part of a series, and easy navigation within that series. Adding that to blogofile seems straightforward.
Showing related posts by tags. I wrote a plugin that determines which other posts match the most tags for the current post. This is the best way to determine topic similarity that I’ve encountered. blogofile doesn’t support this or anything like it, and it would take some work to add this to the build process.
URL shortening. I like clean and descriptive URLs, but I would also like to be able to supply my own shortened ones in some cases. There are WordPress services for this, and I suspect it would be quite easy to add a Python service that sat next to blogofile to do this.
Version control support. I have good version control integration for WordPress in the sense that the source files for recent and some older posts are in a git repository. blogofile has good git support, but tweaks are required to make it do exactly what I want.
reStructuredText support. I write all my posts in it, and have put a lot of work into a pipeline that lets me go from reStructuredText in Vim to a published post in WordPress. blogofile supports reStructuredText, which is one of the reasons I’m considering it.

Bringing what I want to blogofile is a non-trivial amount of work, as is getting my current blog and source files into the required state for migration. WordPress will only add complexity in future, primarily features I don’t need, so moving is a good long-terms plan. For the moment, though, I’ll have to stick to WordPress.

Tags: Blog, blogofile, coding, JavaScript, personal, python, reStructuredText, software, tech, Vim, web-development, WordPress

Always Have Good Backups, Reprise

Tadhg — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 04:19:05 +0000

Last week I went through a data loss scenario similar to last year’s, but with a less happy outcome—no miraculous recovery of the data this time. I screwed up some things in my backup infrastructure, so I did lose some data—and this should serve as a warning to you all. Backup your stuff, do it well, do it often, and don’t leave any holes.

The amount of data you have in digital form is quite significant, and likely includes:

Books.
Code.
Contact information (how many current friends’ phone numbers can you remember?).
Correspondence.
Databases.
Financial data.
Health records.
Music.
Notes.
Personal writing.
Photos.
Professional writing.
Public writing.
Software.
Video.

It might not be on your computer, but it’s digital somewhere, and that means one of two things:

It’s on a consumer-grade storage device, most likely a hard drive.
It’s stored by some online service (your email, your blog, your contact information).

Neither of these is sufficient on their own.

Intertwined with your data is your services: email is both data and a service, as are Twitter, Facebook, your blog, your instant messaging accounts, and so on.

Threats

Here are the common threats to your data (and services):

Digital obsolescence: You have all of your data organized and backed up… but on hardware that readers are no longer made for, or in formats that are now difficult to find software to read—or, this is what will happen to you in the future.
Hardware failure: Extremely common. Hard drives fail way more than is comfortable. Other storage media get damaged too, and none are durable to the extent that they can be considered trustworthy. Also covers disasters, such as fire or flood destroying your home and its contents.
Malice: you’re subject to some attack, targeted or random, that deletes your data and/or strips your of your access to services
Privacy loss/exposure: A special case, but worth mentioning; here you don’t lose data, but are adversely affected by its becoming public beyond the extent you wish it to.
Rights revocation: You have your data entrusted to some highly-reliable service, and they decide that you can’t see it anymore.
Security failure: You have everything organized, backed up, and locked away with secure encryption—but then you lose the key.
User error/data corruption: common too. You fall for the rm -rf / trick (never execute that unless you really understand what you’re doing!), or you move something instead of copying it and later forget and destroy the “copy”, or you save your brief set of notes for your next project over your almost-finished thesis—endless possibilities. Also in this category: due to software or hardware issues, your files become damaged in some way that doesn’t involve deletion or noticeable hardware failure, so you don’t realize for some extended period.

Suggestions

A description of increasing levels of backup safety follows. If you’re one of the first three, rectify that as soon as possible.

Two caveats:

Individual circumstances differ, and it’s possible that some of these suggestions may not work for yours. As always, carefully evaluate instructions given out by Some Internet Person.
I’m concerned primarily with avoiding data loss, and not with privacy or security—sensitive data should be handled with additional care, and if most of what you do is secret and must not be seen by others, you should not follow these suggestions.

No Backups, Local

The typical case, where your data is on your computer and nowhere else. You are entirely at the mercy of the hard drive gods; history suggests they should not be trusted. Malice and user error could really ruin your day too.

No Backups, Remote

You’re past that “my computer” mindset, and instead you need only to connect to various online services to access your data. You don’t keep any of it locally, because your service providers have excellent backup strategies and very competent systems administrators. The hardware gods have little sway over you; instead, you are at the mercy of your service providers and malicious actors, who may deliberately or mistakenly revoke your rights to your own data at any moment.

RAID, Local

You’re onto the hardware gods, and so have automatic mirroring to help you avoid their wrath. However, you’re now at the mercy of your RAID controller(s), as well as user error.

Local Backups

I think this is just slightly better than RAID, if only because you don’t have a single point of failure.

None of you should be lower on this list than this item. Local backups are the absolute minimum. Hard drives are cheap. If you’re on a Mac, use Time Machine, and either have it run all the time, or run it once per day. There are equivalents for other platforms—use whichever one is easiest for you.

Remote Backups

Better than local backups because there’s no longer a single geographic point of failure. These services can cost money, or require you to be selective and organized about what you back up—although I don’t use it myself, Dropbox should be a perfectly reasonable online backup solution for data that isn’t photos, music, or video.

Local and Remote Backups

You should be here at minimum. Hard drives are cheap, Dropbox gives you 2GB for free.

You should be backing up everything to a local external hard drive and select data to a remote service.

At this point, your local machine and hard drive could be stolen or consumed by flames, but you’d still have the most important stuff online. Conversely, your chosen online backup service could suddenly disappear and your hard drive could fail, but you’d still have your local backup.

Local and Remote Backups Plus Basic Version Control

Time Machine gives you something like version control already, and a 30-day version of this can be enabled for free Dropbox accounts (paid accounts can look back indefinitely). This is important because it protects you from yourself; file deletion isn’t necessarily permanent.

Local and Remote Backups Plus Strong Version Control

As above, but using a distributed version control system so that you have the entire history of your important data both locally and remotely.

I use git for this, and it’s great: any of my machines has the full history of my important data, and it’s easy to keep them synchronized. It is a programmer’s tool, but the basic concepts are very easy, and to use it effectively you’d need to understand maybe six commands. It’s file-based, so you could use it locally (i.e. without synchronizing to other machines) and still have it backed up by your existing backup tools. It’s also better for text formats, and wouldn’t be ideal for photo backups[1].

This is where I was before the recent data loss[2], and where I am again, several days later. I did not lose any data covered by version control or local backups.

Local Backups, Multiple Remote Backups, Strong Version Control, Services Backup

This is where I would like to be[3]. While multiple remote backups are additional peace of mind, the real value here is in “services backup”.

The setup for this is different for me because I’m comfortable running my own services, but the basic concept is the same: have a backup for each of the services you rely on, and ensure that you have a plan for switching over to that backup.

What would you do if your email address disappeared?
What would you do if, after using Facebook for your online social contact for years, Facebook banned you?
What would you do if your blog was deleted due to a spurious legal claim and your provider had no interest in your side?

The technical answers are different if you run your own services, as I did, but the basics are the same: have a backup email address that you can tell people to contact you at, and have communication channels that let you announce this (among other things, this means you should have an email address book that’s separate from your primary email service). In addition, have a list of the services that use this email address and a way of switching them to the new one; control of an email address is the Web’s de facto proof of identity system.

For each other service that’s important to you, have a backup plan. Make sure you download and back up any data of yours stored in the service. In addition, have multiple communication channels; for example, Twitter is a reasonable way to tell blog followers where they can find you.

What I Lost This Time

I run my own blog and ran my own email, as well as the master repository for my version control system. The machine I used for these suffered multiple hard drive failures over the course of a couple of days, ending up with it no longer able to boot.

I did not have a backup plan for what I would do if this happened.

I have a backup service for my email (a Gmail account), but no backup for the email data itself[4], an almost inexcusable oversight.

My blog is composed of three elements: the code, including modifications I’ve made to WordPress; the content I created (i.e. the posts); and the comments of others, stored (along with a lot of other details) in the WordPress database. The code and the content were covered by my version control system—but the database was not, another almost inexcusable oversight on my part.

The master repository for the version control system was easiest to remedy: since git is a distributed system, it was easy (if a little time-consuming in terms of file transfer) to copy a local repository to a new server and make it the master[5].

Since I didn’t have a plan for this eventuality, I had to create one while everything was down. That plan was to sign up for a cheap virtual private server on a hosting service and then move things there.

I had some luck, in that someone else had made a backup of the contents of the now-dead machine about three weeks prior to the hard drive failure, so I had my email and my blog database to that point. Even so, the restoration process took considerably longer, and was markedly more stressful, than it would have been if I’d had a plan in place beforehand.

So far, the price of the holes in my backup strategy:

3 weeks of email correspondence—not that much, since I haven’t been emailing a tremendous amount these days, but still more than I would like.
An unknown amount of lost email—whatever might have bounced during the time the hard drive problems were occurring but before I noticed and pointed my email elsewhere.
3 weeks of blog comments—also not that much, since a lot of commentary seems to be on Facebook these days, and in any case there’s less commentary now that I’m only posting once per week.
About a week of blog downtime.
A lot of time, stress, and effort in setting up the new server and getting services running on it; I still haven’t set up email for myself on it, and the other websites I host are still down.
My WordPress blog’s ability to post automatic new post notifications to Twitter is now broken, so I have to do this manually and haven’t yet figured out why.

If I had not been lucky regarding someone else having made a backup three weeks before, I would have lost an unknown but large amount of past email, and all comments on my blog going back to March 2011, an obviously much worse outcome. There’s not really much excuse for my having run such a risk, given how little work it would have taken to have backed both of those things up regularly myself.

On the positive side, I didn’t lose any personal or financial data, nor any code, nor any of my configuration files[6].

Next Steps

I have to restore the rest of the services I lost, and then determine how to get a backup machine so that I don’t remain with a single point of failure.

You need to make sure you’re at least at the “Local and Remote Backups” stage, and to figure out what your backup plans for your remote services are[7].

We should probably all think about the data and services on our phones, and how to effectively deal with backing those up.

Finally, we should review the list of threats and consider how to better protect ourselves against them.

[1]	But what is? This seems to remain an unsolved problem.

[2]	So at least I learned enough from the previous failure to move to a distributed version control system, which definitely made things much easier this time.

[3]	It’s not the ultimate level by any means. The next one would have “Services Failover” instead of “Services Backup”, meaning that without my having to do anything significant, my services would come up and run on backup machines, ideally in a manner seamless to users (including myself).

[4]	I discovered the hard way something I should already have known—local IMAP data isn’t really a backup for your email.

[5]	More accurately, make it the “origin”; I’m technically misusing “master” here, but using it this way makes that paragraph briefer and clearer.

[6]	That last is no small thing, as I’ve put considerable time and effort into making and tweaking the tools I use every day. My Vim configuration involves a lot of custom code and would take a long time to recreate if lost.

[7]	If you have all that covered already, excellent work. You should probably just do a quick review of your backup strategy and see where any remaining weaknesses are.

Tags: Blog, organization, personal, tech, version-control

Considerations for a Space Opera Setting: Neuroscience

Tadhg — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 05:07:03 +0000

A clear implication of my having settled on some kind of “bioAI” in my examination of AI in the setting is that neuroscience must be quite advanced indeed, given that a strong understanding of brains and how they work would be necessary to bio-engineer them. In the gap between bio-engineering and “pure” manufacture there are clearly many mysteries, but even so, the setting’s neuroscientific understanding must be formidable.

I may pull back from the “bioAI” approach, as aspects of it make me uneasy[1], but there are plenty of other neuroscience-related questions that arise in any setting with highly advanced technology:

Virtual reality.
While we tend to think of this as belonging to the realm of computer science, it’s doubtful that anything even approaching a true virtual realm[2] would be possible without some form of direct brain interface—for which we require far more advanced neuroscience than we presently possess.

True virtual reality capabilities lead to narrative situations where the reality of everything can be questioned. While that can make for highly interesting stories, it runs counter to two aspects I want in my setting: grittiness (because it allows a form of escape) and an outward focus. A culture with virtual reality technology would be highly inward-looking, but this setting is one where the focus is on continual expansion[3].

So, neuroscience in the setting has not been able to achieve true virtual reality.
Digitized consciousness.
With sufficient understanding of the brain, it might be possible to map and decipher memory, or personality, or consciousness, or some combination of the three. If the state of consciousness could be recorded in some way, that allows:
- The ability to “re-install” it, presumably in a new host body (cloned from the original person, perhaps), which allows for tremendous longevity and the ability to effectively cheat death into taking not the entire life but just the parts of it that have happened since the last backup.
- With other advances, the ability to house that consciousness in a digital realm, which basically provides a backdoor route to both virtual reality and strong AI, albeit with certain constraints.
While again fascinating to explore, those don’t belong in the setting.
Memory erasure.
Wired thinks we’re already close. This is a far cruder process than the prior two, and doesn’t necessarily require some kind of digitized input to or output from the brain. Drugs inhibiting the formation of short term memory already exist, and excising certain memories is likely possible.

Inducing short-term memory loss certainly seems like a highly useful ability, but it’s going to be something that certainly confuses people, and that will also be detectable chemically—making someone forget something and not realize that they’ve forgotten anything will be possible but require a lot of effort and ingenuity.

Excising long-term memories will be possible, but as a messy process most often practiced by therapists on willing participants. Forced memory erasure will be fraught with danger to the person involved, and will be unreliable. It will also demand a certain amount of cooperation from the target. It will also have been misused in many ways and have a terrible and unpopular reputation, making it it more or less equivalent to torture in terms of its acceptability.
Memory implantation.
A weaker version of the same issues involved in digitizing consciousness, and this is also absent in the setting.
Personality alteration.
Quite related to memory erasure, in the setting this is another unreliable and dubious set of techniques. Initially embraced by many branches of society, this is now viewed similarly to lobotomization.

Overwriting someone’s personality with a specific other personality is not possible, but less precise changes are; however, they tend to leave the subject seeming “not quite right” to others and themselves.
Tailored drugs.
In some forms, these are equivalent to short-term personality alteration, which is already the case today. However, the drugs in the setting will be far more advanced, and the notion of taking drug cocktails for all kinds of specific uses will be extremely common. This is particularly true for focus and, perhaps, for “intelligence”; efforts will also have been made to eliminate the need for the drugs by genetically engineering humans to synthesize them automatically, with varying results.

These drugs will be broadly similar to drugs available today, but customized to individuals and with fewer side effects. They will be powerful, but there will still be no “genius pill”[4].
An explanation for/of consciousness.
There still won’t be a satisfactory one, and debates will still rage over what the definition of consciousness is. If the bioAIs are present, there will be arguments over whether or not they are truly conscious. As the only known sentient race, humans will still wonder whether the notion of a non-human consciousness has any real meaning[5].

Advances in neuroscience, especially the first two and the last in the above list, have the potential to change our conception of existence at a very fundamental level—and this setting depends on conceptions of existence at least broadly similar to our own, which drives the conservative choices here.

[1]

Partly the technology implications, partly the introduction of characters who would be fundamentally non-human, but mainly that I don’t want the humans in this setting to have things to compare themselves against. The reasons I didn’t include aliens or traditional strong AI still apply here—I want the universe to still be one where humans are stuck with only themselves for guidance and example.

[2]	That is, a virtual reality experience that people would have trouble differentiating from the real world.

[3]	On some level the setting is one made for exploring certain aspect of capitalism. A story focused on capitalist colonization of virtual realities would also be extremely interesting, but it’s not this story.

[4]

Although certain professions will have competition that results in people taking “intelligence drugs” more or less constantly; it will be open to debate at the time whether or not this has actually produced more “geniuses”, and, to the annoyance of the neurochemists, breakthrough insights in all fields will still occur to people who are not taking these drugs.

[5]

The bioAIs, if they exist, will have been based on human brains crossed with animal brains, and so any consciousness they exhibit that humans recognize will be due to their human heritage. The debate over animal consciousness will also still go on, with adherents on both sides claiming that the bioAIs make their case.

Tags: genre, science-fiction, weekly, writing

Kirby Ferguson’s “Everything is a Remix”, Part 4

Tadhg — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 05:55:02 +0000

I mentioned this on Facebook earlier in the week, but it’s important enough to also write a post about.

You can see it either on its own website or on Vimeo.

The two most important arguments in it are:

Laws restricting copying were meant to serve the public good and have been warped far beyond that original purpose.
Ideas and information are not like physical objects, and are deeply entwined with the ideas and information that precede them, making attempts to demarcate them precisely rather difficult, if not impossible.

All laws should be to serve the common good, of course, but today I rarely even hear the “common good” argument for the extension of copyright restrictions; instead the main argument is to “protect the rights of creators”, strongly implying that these rights exist prior to any law and that laws must be extended to match them. This is perhaps because it’s difficult to claim that, for example, retroactively extending the copyright term another 20 years will either a) extend back in time to promote the creation of new works or b) actually have any impact whatsoever in making creators more likely to create.

The video makes clear that the current state of affairs is bad for the common good; while some copyright is perhaps a good thing, that absolutely does not mean that more of it is a better thing. And now that we’re firmly in the Information Age, it should be clear that the social costs of fencing off ideas, and patrolling those fences, are vast, and that our future will be a better one the more freely we let information flow.

Kirby is also correct in asserting that it’s important to change people’s attitudes about this; even with the lobbyists on their side, the copyright cartels will eventually be defeated if nobody accepts their paradigm. Ideas are not property, and while we all deserve just payment for our intellectual labors, we also all suffer when others’ intellectual labors are difficult to access. Jealously guarding the former and ignoring the latter (partly because we don’t realize how valuable the free access we’ve acquired in the past has already been) and its pernicious effects is imposing a larger and larger burden on society, primarily to the benefit of a very small group of people—most of whom are not, incidentally, actual creators themselves.

Tags: copyright, culture, economics, free speech, law, politics, video

My Choice of Writing Style Guidelines

Tadhg — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 02:31:17 +0000

Stylistic choices I’ve made for my writing.

The Oxford Comma

I didn’t use this when I was younger, which was a mistake. Partly because it seems difficult to consistently omit it, whereas I’ve never found consistently using it to present problems. (I was happy to discover that this is the same stance taken by Garner’s Modern American Usage.) While I prefer the Oxford comma, more important is consistency—mixing and matching between its inclusion and omission can only create ambiguity.

As for the potential appositive phrase [1] confusion, with the classic “my mother, Ayn Rand, and God” example, I would write that only in the three-person case, while favoring “my mother—Ayn Rand—and God” in the two-person case.

Dashes

The key to the right of 0 on the standard keyboard is a hyphen, and should be used for hyphenation purposes only if other options are available.

The em dash is a separate character, and I favor omitting spaces around it. When restricted to ASCII, I use two hyphens to represent it.

The en dash is another distinct character, and I use it most often for sports scores. When restricted to ASCII, I use a single hyphen to represent it.

The minus sign is also its own character, and I hardly ever use it, and only recently started distinguishing it from the hyphen. When restricted to ASCII, I use a single hyphen to represent it.

Lists

Periods at the ends of list items, unless semicolons are specifically called for, and capital letters at the start of each list item.

Spaces After Periods

One. Mostly invisible online since HTML will ignore spaces after the first, but I write everything in monospaced fonts, and it’s one space. Not two, which is wrong no matter what your teacher might have told you. (This is one of the very few places I disagree with PEP-8.)

Quotations

In keeping with typical American style, I use double quotation marks for the first level. I don’t use straight double or single quotation marks at all, with various Vim shortcuts to make it easy to enter the proper equivalents. (This also means that I can assume every straight single quotation mark in my writing is an apostrophe and can be replaced by a right single quotation mark.)

I favor the British/International English style regarding punctuation in quotations, where it’s only included inside the quotation if it’s actually a part of it:

He described the cat as “very strange”.

Rather than:

He described the cat as “very strange.”

The latter, American, style makes little sense to me, an attitude that probably comes from programming.

Spelling

I use standard American spelling for the most part, except for inflections and the -er/-or suffixes to some words ending with consonants, such as “traveller” or “worshipper”. This is inconsistent, as I use e.g. “counselor” and a variety of other single-consonant spellings. I don’t like the inconsistency but can’t bring myself to use “traveler” or “worshiper”, as they just feel wrong and as if they should be pronounced differently.

I use “-wards” rather than “-ward” in most cases, which isn’t standard American spelling.

In all other cases I can think of I follow American spelling, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few more exceptions in my usage.

Title Capitalization

I follow the American “capitalize most words” approach, although not without some confusion.

Numbers

I spell out numbers up to nine (including zero), and use digits for 10 and up, and for negative numbers. I still forget from time to time whether the switch to digits should be at 10 or above 10, resulting in occasional inconsistency.

I use words rather than numerals where I would precede the number with “a” in speech, e.g. “a dozen”, “a hundred”, “a thousand”.

When dealing with large numbers, I’ll use “million”, “billion”, etc., most of the time, rather than inserting strings of zeros.

I’m inconsistent about using the comma in numbers to indicate thousands. It makes reading the numbers easier, but I don’t like using it for anything less than 10,000—something I should just get over.

If I’m referring to math or code in the sentence, I use digits exclusively. If the context involves numbers above and below 10, I use digits. Scores are also digits, as are years, and decades don’t include an apostrophe before the “s”.

Ellipses

Here’s I’m at odds with Garner and most authorities: I use the typographical ellipsis rather than simple periods, am resistant to placing a space before the ellipsis if I’m not using it for elision, and don’t like adding a fourth dot after an elision to signify the end of the sentence.

Hyphenation

Following typical American usage, I’m aggressive about removing hyphens, so will use e.g. “pushup” instead of “push-up”.

I’m inconsistent when hyphenating phrasal adjectives, and instead of writing “credit-card application” as recommended by Garner’s Modern American Usage, would probably write “credit card application”. This is something I need to consider correcting.

Acronyms/Initialisms

No periods, and capitalized throughout, regardless of pronunciation: “NASA”, “CIA”. Where “of” is present as a word represented by the initialism, I won’t capitalize it, e.g. “WoTC” for “Wizards of the Coast”. Those that have become words in their own right, such as “radar” and “laser”, are no longer abbreviations. Where a second letter from a word is present, I don’t capitalize it, e.g. “MSc” for “Master of Science”[2].

There are exceptions, following common usage: “an mp3 file”, “20mpg”.

The first instance of an abbreviation in a piece should explain it, unless it’s extremely well-known.

Citations

I use a slight modification of the MLA citation style:

Pages referenced. Author name. “Article name”. Publication name, publication location: publisher, publication date. ISBN: [number].

The difference between standard MLA style and mine is that if my citation is inline, which it is in most cases, I use “first name last name” instead of “last name, first name”.

If the piece is online, its name is a link; the same goes for its parent publication, if any.

Links

This only applies to writing hypertext, but much of what I write is just that. Link text should be descriptive but can remain in context—it doesn’t have consist of the title of the linked piece. If it does not, however, then it must have a title attribute which does contain that title:

It’s clear that two spaces after a period is wrong.

If a title attribute is unavailable for some reason, that should be changed to:

It’s clear from “Space Invaders” that two spaces after a period is wrong.

[1]	I had to look that up; my grammar knowledge isn’t developed to the point where I knew that was the term for what I was thinking of.

[2]	That I use “MSc” at all is slightly inconsistent, as I should probably be using the more common American “MS”, but in my head that means “multiple sclerosis” and not “Master of Science”.

Tags: Blog, grammar, language, spelling, writing

Giants Versus Patriots II: Better Lucky Than Good?

Tadhg — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 04:44:45 +0000

Since moving back to the US, I’ve only missed one Super Bowl: XLII in 2008. I was quite down at the time, didn’t have much faith in the Giants, and couldn’t stand the thought of witnessing a Patriots win and their subsequent enshrinement as the best team in history[1].

Oops. I missed one of the biggest upsets in Super Bowl history, and one of the most dramatic game-winning drives.

In both that win and today’s, the Giants seemed inordinately lucky, albeit in different ways. In 2008, much of the luck was concentrated in a single play on that last Giants drive, the famous Tyree catch. On that play, Eli Manning miraculously escapes a sack (even now when I watch the replays part of me thinks he’s going to go down) and unloads a pass to David Tyree, who makes an outrageous catch, partly by using one hand and his helmet.

It’s hard to call that luck, given the amazing athleticism displayed by the Giants players in it. It’s hard not to call it luck, given how small the margins were and how a number of improbable events had to turn the Giants’ way not just to make it a successful play, but to avoid total disaster.

In today’s rematch, I thought the Giants had a much better chance at victory, but that the Patriots were slight favorites. That’s more or less how it worked out; the Giants won, but rode a significant amount of luck to do so, and just barely, 21–17. Two huge pieces of luck: twice the Giants fumbled the ball, and twice they recovered the fumbles. Fumble recoveries are coin flips, and had the Giants lost either of those fumbles I’m pretty sure they would have lost the game. Furthermore, while I may be doing Manning a disservice, I kept thinking that he was flirting with interceptions[2]. His receivers kept coming down with the ball, however, and eventually, late in the fourth quarter, he led the Giants down the field with time running out to set up the most interesting situation in the game.

Trailing 15–17, the Giants have the ball inside the Patriots’ 10-yard line. The Patriots have one timeout remaining. A field goal gives the Giants a 1-point lead, a touchdown gives them at best a 6-point lead. On the Patriots’ sideline, waiting for the ball, is one of the best quarterbacks of the modern era.

What to do? Going completely all-out for the touchdown is unwise, because throwing the ball is inherently riskier than running, and any incompletion stops the clock. Running the ball is the obvious play. But if you can run it freely, do you score at the first opportunity?

Bill Belichick, the Patriots’ “evil genius” coach, apparently decided to force the Giants to take the points or the time, but not both, and Giants running back Ahmad Bradshaw tried to avoid scoring but couldn’t. That was one of the strangest football plays I’ve ever seen, a player heading full steam towards the end zone and then trying to come to an abrupt halt but failing, with the only nearby defender apparently pursuing in order to, if necessary, knock the running back into the end zone.

In the Saints–49ers game three weeks ago, both teams had similar opportunities, but the circumstances were less clear, and in those cases the plays came on sudden deep strikes. This was different; the Giants had time to talk it over, and it’s highly possible that the coaching staff told Bradshaw not to score quickly. I doubt any of them talked over the possibility of what would happen if the Patriots let them score on purpose. It’s not clear that this is what Belichick did, but it makes quite a lot of sense for him to have done so. Otherwise, the Giants can take too much time off the clock, go for a short-yardage touchdown attempt on third down, and then kick the field goal for the win with almost no time left.

Belichick’s call, if it was deliberate, was the right one, and Bradshaw would have served the Giants better by kneeling at the one-yard line. Instead, the Patriots got the ball with 57 seconds remaining, and the Giants had to endure the stress of defending a couple of Hail Mary attempts before their defense prevailed and won them the game.

It was an extremely dramatic game, and had that interesting piece of game theory in it, but I’m not sure I’d call it a great game. Much of it felt bogged down and somewhat fractured, which may be a hallmark of Super Bowl games featuring the Belichick-era Patriots.

While it’s a difficult thing to pin down, I suspect that the Patriots were the better team this year. Maybe not by a significant margin, but play that game a hundred times and they’d win more than half. That’s not how it works, of course, and perhaps the best adjective for the Giants isn’t “lucky” but “opportunistic”. They took their chances to turn their season around and make it into the playoffs, partly by getting healthy at the right time. They pounced on the league’s best team, the Packers, when the Packers were a little rusty. They hung tough with the 49ers before turning utterly improbable special teams mistakes (not to mention non-interception good fortune and a ludicrous non-fumble call) into a trip to the Super Bowl. Finally, they pressured the Patriots into coughing up two points on offense before the Patriots settled down—two points that would prove crucial at the end of the game—and then weathered the Patriots’ long drives bracketing the half, and hung around, just barely, to get and then seize their chance at victory in the closing moments.

The Giants now have four titles (1986/1990/2007/2011), while the Patriots remain at three (2001/2003/2004). Given that the Patriots won those three by rather small margins, it seems just for them to lose some close ones—although the Giants have won all three of the close Super Bowls they’ve played in, including the closest Super Bowl ever.

The MVP award went to Eli Manning, which seems fair as he did, yet again, drive for the winning score in the fourth quarter.

[1]	It was mainly dread of a Patriots win—while I was born in New York and am a hardcore Yankees fan, I didn’t form any football allegiance until much later in life, and I became a staunch 49ers fan in Ireland.

[2]	Although not as much as he did against the 49ers, where he was unbelievably lucky twice to see interceptions instead turn into instances of 49er defenders injuring each other.

Tags: football, sports

Djokovic Wins Longest-Ever Grand Slam Final

Tadhg — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 02:28:13 +0000

Novak Djokovic beat Rafael Nadal in the Australian Open final, 5–7, 6–4, 6–2, 6–7 (5), 7–5, in 5 hours and 53 minutes. It was an incredible final, one in which both players exhibited astonishing speed, endurance, and resilience. Djokovic was not quite at his best, but still had enough—eventually—to overcome Nadal. I rank it among the best matches I’ve seen, probably just behind the 2008 Wimbledon final.

Djokovic started out slightly off, likely as a result of having played for almost four hours against Murray the night before. Nadal had played his semifinal a full day before that, beating Federer in a comparatively brief four sets. Nadal did look mentally a little shaky at the start, and let Djokovic back into the first set before making a successful push for it. At that point the tennis was already extremely physical, with long and arduous rallies showcasing ludicrous court coverage.

In the first set, it seemed that Djokovic just wasn’t getting the usual amount penetration, on his groundstrokes. It was apparently very humid, and this might have been making the balls move slightly slower—enough to take a slight edge from Novak. That, combined with Nadal’s amazing defensive ability, meant that Djokovic had to do quite a lot of work to actually win points. On the other hand, Nadal was making quite a few unforced[1] errors, and Djokovic would punish any short ball that came his way, so it remained close throughout.

The sense was that even though Nadal was winning, Djokovic was beginning to find his form, and Nadal was able to just snatch the set before Djokovic hit his stride. The next two sets were a clinic from Novak in both power tennis and how not to get frustrated. No matter how many amazing defensive plays Nadal made, no matter how many points Nadal won after it was clear that Djokovic was in control of the rally, Djokovic refused to be fazed, and simply got back to work.

As he’s proven repeatedly over the last year, Djokovic’s offense is better than Nadal’s defense. Consistently better; unlike Federer, who has to play his very best tennis to overcome Nadal’s defense, Djokovic’s game doesn’t allow Nadal any easy outs, and Djokovic is able to play at a sustainable level and still overcome Nadal.

Nadal’s best periods were when he played more aggressively and pushed to take control of points immediately. He won a lot of points where he did that, but it’s a very difficult shift for him to maintain. As the ESPN commentators noted, his defensive game is good enough to beat everyone—except Djokovic. Against everyone else, Nadal can play defensive tennis until he reaches a stage in the rally where he’s presented with a clear opportunity, and that’s a winning formula. Djokovic puts him under too much pressure, most of the time, when Nadal is on the defensive. That he should go on that attack sooner is clear—but it’s also extremely difficult to do, especially against the best player in the world.

Nadal’s struggles in this match reminded me quite a lot of what it’s like to watch Federer play Nadal: one gets the impression, somehow, that Federer “should” be winning. The points seem to be under his control, and it seems as if he has the ability to win but loses his concentration or lets his play slide, and that if he just worked past that he’d win. Against Djokovic, it looked as if the same were true for Nadal. He won many of the more spectacular points. When he stepped up to attack, he’d win. But then he’d make errors, and appear to be handing control back to Djokovic.

In addition, this match is the first time I can remember seeing a player appear to be consistent, “unbeatable”—and losing. With Federer, his brilliance comes most often in quick strikes, so in a way one can see how it can be there one moment and gone the next. With Nadal, his brilliance is in sustained defense and rallying, and it’s much harder to see how he can consistently play in a way where he simply gets back everything and waits for a small moment of vulnerability and then takes the point, yet lose the next. It was extremely rare for Djokovic to lose control of a point and still win it, whereas Nadal appeared to have lost points over and over again only to suddenly turn things around. That’s what I mean by his looking unbeatable, and yet he was, clearly, losing.

We can’t really see on the screen all that’s important in the match. We can’t truly see the weight of shot the players are hitting, or the ways in which ball spin and ball speed put them under pressure. Just as it’s very difficult to truly appreciate the phenomenal coordination it takes for Federer to deal with Nadal’s forehand to Federer’s backhand, it’s very difficult to see what an achievement it is for Nadal to cope with the power of Djokovic’s shots coming right to his feet. Particularly when Djokovic does this relentlessly, and has court coverage equal to Nadal’s own. What look like poor shots, “unforced errors”, are actually more-or-less inevitable failures under repeated strain.

Nadal’s resilience in the fact of this was formidable. This was perhaps the most physically gruelling tennis match I’ve ever seen, and at times I thought that Nadal would win it because of that, because he was just going to keep Djokovic on court forever until he broke down. Late in the fourth set Nadal found the right mix of aggression and tenacity, saved three break points at 3–4, 0–40, and forced a tiebreak in a set where Djokovic had seen almost no pressure on his own serve and had made Nadal fight tooth and nail to avoid being broken. In the tiebreak, he kept forcing Djokovic to hit the extra shot (or several extra shots), and Djokovic eventually missed one or two—and then Nadal took the tiebreak, 7–5, on his first set point.

It looked as if Nadal had willed himself to victory; Djokovic was clearly suffering physically, and it seemed Nadal had simply ground him down. Nadal broke, and with Djokovic serving at 2–4, 0–30, Nadal again ran down everything in a long rally and had a fairly open shot at a passing shot, with Djokovic out of position at the net (and, I think, having given up on the point)—but he pushed the passing shot just wide of the line. Suddenly, Djokovic had energy again. His body language changed, and he started hitting more winners and covering more court, and he broke back to level the fifth set. At 5–5, he constantly pressured Nadal’s serve, which had been sub-par (in terms of power) for much of the day, and eventually secured a break (although the point he won at deuce was slightly tarnished by the fact that Nadal thought Djokovic’s ball had been called out, misled by crowd noise). When he did secure that break, it seemed clear that he would now not relinquish his hold on the match, and he didn’t.

This title is Djokovic’s fifth major, and Nadal is the first man in the Open Era to lose three consecutive Grand Slam finals. If Novak wins in Paris—which must be considered a possibility—he would become the first man since Laver to hold all four major titles at once. Much will depend on the draw; Djokovic’s chances are better if he doesn’t have to face Federer, and I assume that on clay Nadal will be favored against anyone other than Djokovic. Last night’s match makes me think that while it’s possible that Djokovic could beat Nadal at Roland Garros, it would take a near-superhuman effort to do so, similar to what it took from Nadal to beat Federer at Wimbledon. Meanwhile, I think that Murray has closed the gap with the Big Three a little, while Federer has slipped slightly. Barring some major unexpected event, the Big Four will be the only relevant men in the draw when the French Open begins.

[1]	At least, in the sense that any error while being pressured by probably the best exponent of pure baseline power tennis in the world can be considered “unforced”.

Tags: sports, tennis

SOPA and Why I’m Against it

Tadhg — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 07:52:50 +0000

Earlier this week I “blacked out” tadhg.com as part of the widespread protests against SOPA. This post includes a number of my reasons for opposing it.

The legislation allows for ex parte hearings to be held to determine whether or not sites accused of a dizzying array of vague things could be taken down. It’s a rather stupid idea to give any schmuck with a lawyer the ability to yank sites from the web.
Building a censorship mechanism into the Internet—which the bill would have required—isn’t something I would ever support.
I’m much more willing to risk copyright infringement in order to facilitate free speech than I am to risk restricting free speech in aid of reducing copyright infringement.
Unlike Lamar Smith, I believe that if 25% of the Internet’s traffic really is “infringing content”, then the laws should be changed to decriminalize what a substantial number of people believe is acceptable behavior, and not to pursue enforcement strategies in order to impose behavioral controls[1].
Copyright holders have sufficient—or too many—rights and remedies available to them already, and further social engineering to add to those rights and remedies are unnecessary and harmful.

At root, I see this as an issue of control, and I’m naturally inclined towards agitating for less control rather than more. The benefits brought by a less-regulated Internet are obvious.

Furthermore, I have little trust or liking for those who pushed for this legislation, partly because they habitually lie (particularly about things like how much money they supposedly lose to copyright infringement, but also about things like how much money their movies make), have been consistently wrong in the past about the harms new technologies would do to their industries (e.g. Disney and the VCR), and generally act like control freaks and constantly try to push the bounds of how far they can push that control (such as the NFL claiming in broadcasts that “any … descriptions, or accounts of this game without the NFL’s consent is prohibited”). They exert too much control on our culture as it is, and I have no desire to give them any more.

The boycott attracted some attention, and achieved the short-term goal of delaying SOPA. It’s inevitable that they’ll be back, and effectively fighting measures like this one will require more than symbolic gestures. Constant defensive maneuvers are bound to fail, and without some kind of offensive action (such as threatening to pass legislation to cut the copyright term, cut the penalties for infringement, or enshrine fair use and other copyright exceptions in law so that they are easily usable rather that being fraught with risk) the bill’s constituency will have all the time needed to eventually prevail.

Getting into that, however, requires dealing with the legislative process and its various flaws, which is clearly too large a topic for this post.

[1]	This is not a fundamental rule; there are clearly situations where large swathes of societies engage in behavior that’s indefensible. This is not one of those situations.

tadhg.com

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