tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4169413139245991412024-03-13T06:01:58.663-07:00Thoughts, Ideas, Reflections - Bryan BentzPolitics, science, current events, art, education, history, artificial intelligenceBryan Bentzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07104322876538668788noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416941313924599141.post-44349083364531504242020-10-01T06:10:00.000-07:002020-10-01T06:10:01.061-07:00<p> I've recently enjoyed a number of "Sherlock Holmes pastiche" stories by Donald Thomas. He's written nonfiction about Victorian crime, and his depth of knowledge shows - the stories evoke a wonderful atmosphere. I always liked the Conan Doyle stories, but you can only read them so many times, so finding his work was a real pleasure.<br /></p><p>As my trade involves Artificial Intelligence applications, a few weeks after finishing most of his Sherlockian works, a thought began knocking around. Could one write a "Sherlock Holmes AI system"?</p><p>It might work like this: taking an image (or consecutive stills from a video) it would, for instance, examine a person and categorize what it could: is the clothing a good fit, is it in style, is it worn in unusual ways; are there environmental indicators such as being wet from rain or snow. Concerning the face, are there any telltale signs of illness, stress, makeup, etc. Gait might be analyzed for its medical or employment implications. I think we all know the typical Sherlock Holmes story passage in which he deduces amazing stuff from such information.</p><p>I realize that the author of such stories has the freedom to put in what he wishes Holmes to get out of his observations, so it's somewhat contrived, but some of that works in reality. Years ago when commuting in Boston I used to play a kind of game (not really inspired by Sherlock) of trying to guess what I could about someone from the appearance of their vehicle. Bumper stickers give away a lot. I recall riding with a friend and I just commented on the driver ahead of us - "A former marine, with a son in the Army, and a daughter at <I've forgotten the private school> who's into equestrian activities". This did surprise my companion, but it wasn't my intent. The whole game was driven by the boredom of being stuck in slow-moving traffic. One could also tell a lot from the car itself - had it been in accidents, the nature of the repair history (and possibly the economic status of the owner), the residential or academic parking stickers, the cleanliness of the windows. So I do know that some thinking along these lines really does work.</p><p>An AI system might similarly also look at other aspects of scenes - lighting, mirror reflections, furniture type and condition, indicators of taste or travel, family photos, pet presence, education level, political orientation, level of social activity - to be the basis for further analysis/deduction. At this point it's just a matter of basic information collection and interpretation. In fact that may be enough for such a system to be useful; making that information available to a human in some way that allows exploration and correlation with other data might be as far as it needs to go.</p><p>The thing that seems "hard" about what Sherlock Holmes would do is it's comprehensiveness - normal people only pay attention to the key elements in a social interaction, not all of the ancillary detail. This of course is a key trope in the Sherlockian world, but it's very hard to do in reality, certainly for any length of time. But a computer system could do it, being "always fully on". Toss in facial recognition and the like and it might be very powerful.</p><p>The other element in the stories is that Sherlock had a sort of encyclopedic knowledge of arcane topics, with a library at 221B Baker St. to back it up. Now we have the web, which might even be better.</p><p>Maybe such systems are out there for specialized use; not sure anyone would fund one for practical use, but maybe there's grant money out there... if not, it might be a great basis for a story.<br /></p>Bryan Bentzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07104322876538668788noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416941313924599141.post-4032853553567433302016-07-15T11:55:00.001-07:002016-07-15T11:55:24.009-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The upcoming Olympics are to be in Rio; the news is worrisome. Crime, disease, a marginally-functioning security and public infrastructure all raise questions about whether it will be a success or failure. Thinking back, many cities have had "successful" Olympics, but big financial problems - it took Montreal 30 years to pay off the debts it incurred hosting the 1976 Olympics.<br />
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Why not have a permanent home for the Olympics, say in Greece, near Olympia? Other countries could still act as hosts for specific games (and receive significant revenue thereby); but the permanent facility itself would be improved each time. Ongoing maintenance would be much cheaper than build-from-scratch every four yearas. Our current alternative leaves former Olympic sites without any clear purpose. See, for instance, "<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/abandoned-olympic-venues-around-the-world-photos-2015-8">What Abandoned Olympic Venues from Around the World Look Like Today</a>".<br />
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Greece might not be enough; Winter Olympics, for instance, might also want a permanent home in a colder climate. There might be other specific sports that need their own unique sites; but the principle of establishing a long-term venue still seems a sound one.<br />
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Bryan Bentzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07104322876538668788noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416941313924599141.post-57314641061542075222013-11-26T17:24:00.002-08:002013-11-26T17:24:37.604-08:00A retrospective bit on Obamacare<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">I remember a conversation I had with a Democrat years ago, when Obamacare first burst onto the national stage. I had expressed skepticism on a number of points, to which he replied (as best as I can recall):</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">"Bryan, you just don't get it. This will result in a permanent Democratic majority - and the fun part is that your tax dollars will be paying for it. In a little while the benefits will be so central to people's lives that [it] will be impossible to remove. Republicans will always be the ones wanting to limit benefits, so we'll always be 'the good guys'. Not only will people vote for us because they know we'll not cut what they need, but we'll be able to paint you as 'meanspirited' from here on out."</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">It was a very depressing thought, but it looks like it's not quite working out that way... </span><i class="_4-k1 img sp_eyiyiq sx_f6995b" style="background-color: white; background-image: url(https://fbstatic-a.akamaihd.net/rsrc.php/v2/y5/r/EtWrwzVRlUf.png); background-position: -153px -903px; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: auto; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; height: 16px; line-height: 17px; vertical-align: -3px; width: 16px;"></i></div>
Bryan Bentzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07104322876538668788noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416941313924599141.post-56070828820938125752013-04-18T19:05:00.000-07:002013-04-18T19:07:59.745-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A term popped into my head the other day: "Theoretical Genealogy". By it I mean the mathematics of populations - genetic diffusion, the probability of surname survival, how population growth skews the pool of descendants, etc. This post is about just one topic, suggested by some recent research: diffusion.<br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Diffusion</b></div>
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While using Family Tree Maker’s search capabilities, I found
I could add quite a lot of ancestors; there is no sound way to be sure they’re
correct, and it’s hard to get an intuition about the reliability of the data,
but it is a relatively rapid process. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As
I chased lines back into the Middle Ages the doubts increased – but if nothing
else the information may be used in the future as a starting point for, say,
using DNA to verify links.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, it’s
better than nothing, though perhaps not as reliable as I would like. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I noticed one phenomenon early on – many of my lines run
through England (1600’s, 1700’s), and occasionally one of these would lead to
some minor nobleman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That person would
in turn lead back to more important nobility, and finally to some recognizable
king (e.g., William the Conqueror).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>After this sort of thing happened a few times I began to be concerned
that this really represented wishful thinking of someone, or some genealogist, along the line. Am I really descended from Billy (above), as well as Charlemagne (several ways), along with various Viking and early Irish kings? I didn't think so because it seemed so surprising, and began that slightly unnerving process of figuring out where in the line of descent fiction crept in.</div>
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Now I’m not so sure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The records of the minor nobleman and his ancestors seem fairly sound, I
expect because property, wealth, and some level of authority changed hands with
each generation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The main weak point was
the link between my known ancestry and that nobleman – that is a big jump.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Often it seemed to be the third daughter or
so of the nobleman marrying my ancestor, who might have been a well-off
farmer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That sort of thing doesn’t seem
unreasonable. In the cases when this happened in the 1600's-1700's, sometimes coincident with travel to America, it was documented. It might not have been were it just one more element of small town life in England.</div>
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Moving backwards in time from the minor nobleman the links
seem fairly solid, for the same reason as above, it mattered at the time in substantial ways.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m sure there is questionable data in there
– perhaps the occasional infidelity not identified as such ("Yes, he's your son, ignore the red hair") – but otherwise the
genealogical data seems as sound as one might expect.<o:p></o:p></div>
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However, looking at the totality of the lines I’ve traced, I
find I’m related to all sorts of kings and notables, in Ireland, France,
Scandanavia, etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is this reasonable, or
is it the cumulative effect of past genealogists fudging the data a bit to
claim famous ancestors?<o:p></o:p></div>
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To address this I turned the problem around, and imagined
one of these notables (king, count, whatever) – they often had some semblance
of wealth and a number of children.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The oldest few, particularly the males, would likely have married into
other noble families, and it is from those lines that the people holding the
noble titles today are descended.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
other kids did as well as they could, but often married significantly lesser
nobility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When this process repeated
itself it eventually would mean some descendants were marrying commoners - perhaps on the well-off side, but non-nobility nonetheless. This is not at all unreasonable - and if you think about it, the descendants of the original king/count/whatever would end up spreading out throughout the population. Working backwards, then, as genealogists do, it isn't implausible that one might be caught up in that spread and then subsequently be led to the original notable as an ancestor.</div>
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What this really is is just genetic diffusion in the
population, and when looked at from that perspective it seems unsurprising.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There have been recent articles about Genghis
Khan’s descendents – apparently about 10% of males in the area of his former
empire are related to him (or his family; one might imagine a brother, for
instance).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As future generations arise
the mixing will of course go further, until nearly everyone will be able to
claim him as an ancestor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course the
number of generations back to Genghis is so large that the percentage of
genetic data from him is quite dilute, and will become more so, but this is just the other side of the genetic diffusion coin.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<o:p>Of course just as many people might trace their lineage back to Charlemagne, or Genghis, there are also some likely unknowns who cast similar genetic shadows over the future - some unknown peasant father and/or mother, who had numerous children, healthy, good looking, both sons and daughters, whose descendants spread out just as widely. We just don't know their names. The nobility, even minor nobility, shows up in church and civil records; the farmer doesn't. Perhaps DNA analysis might at some point in the future reveal his existence, even if tentatively. </o:p></div>
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(It is one of the striking things about doing this kind of research - how many people left so little trace other than through their children. Even their names are missing. I wish I had a at least a page, or even a paragraph, of information about each - I'm sure their challenges weren't fundamentally so different from ours.)<br />
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So - is there any way to quantify any of this, even crudely?<br />
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My background is European; the population of Europe in 1700
was about 50 million.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is about the
number of your ancestors back 25 generations (assuming no repeating
ancestors).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At 20 years per generation,
that’s 500 years. By 'repeating ancestors' I mean no ancestor appearing twice or more - saying it that way makes it seem easy. Turning it around - it means that say, at the 15th generation, two people who marry must have absolutely no ancestry in common. I think this would be rather hard in a society where long-distance travel was rare. The 500 year figure might well be half of that - 250 years - which, while long, is perhaps close to accessible oral history, particularly in fairly stagnant populations. In either case, 300+ years on, a crude analysis suggests that pretty much anyone in Europe then might well be one of my (or your) ancestors.</div>
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The process of genetic diffusion is an intriguing one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One might imagine as a simplified ideal a
uniform population in which any person is likely to marry any other person in
the population with roughly equal probability (excluding close relatives).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In that case the mixing will be maximized, that is it will happen as
rapidly as possible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course such
populations may not really exist – social stratification, for instance, will
lead to several (possibly overlapping) subpopulations that intermix that way,
but not so much with each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or
there may be geographical separations that cause small ‘pockets’ of population
to intermix internally but not externally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I would think population genetics might be able to detect traces of such
historical isolation from the genes and histories of people today. It would take the right sampling to be able to draw solid conclusions, but it might be done. While it seems an abstract notion, I think it might be practical, at least for recent cases.</div>
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For example, a number of my ancestors were among the early
Dutch settlers of what is now New York City.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>When the city became British in 1665, the Brits considered the Dutch
second-class citizens, and intermarrying with them was rare; consequently the Dutch who
remained ny necessity intermarried among themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The end result is that, very loosely speaking, if you have a Dutch
ancestor in that group it’s not unlikely you’re related to many of the other Dutch
families who were present. This phenomenon should be detectable by
examining the DNA of descendants of that time – there would be areas of
commonality due to that (socially) isolated population mixing as it did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would be more interesting to deduce such
isolated populations entirely from the DNA as a way to augment history. Doing it in the more distant past might depend on tracking mutations, and these might not happen rapidly enough to spread through a location such as 17th century New York City. It might be different for, say, 6th century Naples.</div>
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The resulting model might be one of relatively static pools of population, connected by some punctuated diffusion. This might not match historical reality exactly (say, an individual might have married into an immigrant family in his town, then his descendants might have moved back to the source of the immigration), but it might be a useful model nevertheless. It seems ripe for mathematical modeling.<br />
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<o:p> </o:p></div>
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Bryan Bentzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07104322876538668788noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416941313924599141.post-26344166474973467022012-10-06T13:45:00.003-07:002013-02-25T06:44:30.528-08:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The God Abandons Antony (C.P.Cavafy)<br />
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When suddenly, at midnight, you hear<br />
an invisible procession going by<br />
with exquisite music, voices,<br />
don't mourn your luck that's failing now,<br />
work gone wrong, your plans<br />
all proving deceptive - don't mourn then uselessly.<br />
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,<br />
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.<br />
Above all, don't fool yourself, don't say<br />
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:<br />
don't degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.<br />
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,<br />
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,<br />
go firmly to the window<br />
and listen with deep emotion, but not<br />
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;<br />
listen - your final delectation - to the voices,<br />
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,<br />
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.<br />
<br />
(Edmund Keeley, Philip Sherrard, translators)</div>
Bryan Bentzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07104322876538668788noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416941313924599141.post-2143636825777798802011-07-14T13:21:00.000-07:002013-04-18T19:11:13.687-07:00Thoughts on the Multi-Universe Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Just looking around the 'net I see much written about quantum mechanics that isn't, well, sound; I hope I'm not contributing to that genre, and fear that I might be. I should start by saying I have studied it a bit, and have a degree in Physics from MIT, but I'm certainly not an expert, and many of its intricacies I'm sure lie buried by the detritus of years of other thoughts. I'd like to lay out the outline of an idea, as much to get it down so it won't be forgotten.<br />
Very briefly and somewhat loosely, the multi-universe interpretation of quantum mechanics says that everything that can happen will happen; when a random event occurs (say one with two outcomes), the universe splits into two universes - in one the first outcome holds, in the second the second outcome holds. Wikipedia has a fairly decent overview <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many_worlds_hypothesis">here</a>, worth taking a moment to scan. At first this explanation sounds a bit extreme, wasteful in universes, so to speak. But it does address some fundamental issues that are otherwise hard to make sense of, like quantum mechanical wave collapse (when an observation transforms a system properly described by a wave function to one described essentially classically) . In the multi-universe interpretation, this never needs to happen, because each split universe has its own observer and its own result.<br />
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I have a small (and possibly testable) modification to suggest, which I'll get to shortly, after I describe its genesis - or at least the thought that provoked the idea. It was years ago, and I was driving to work, and pulled into a bank near my office to get some cash - something I'd done many times over the years. As I pulled in I saw a decent place to park about halfway down the lot, and a thought sprang up unbidden: "If I park there I'll be in an accident." So, I didn't park there. I went into the bank, stood in line, got cash, came out - and a car was in that spot, the driver exchanging papers with a second car that had hit it.<br />
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This was of course somewhat shocking - it'd never happened before, this isn't the sort of thing that occurs in my life (I can't think of another example, certainly not as striking). I'm not a mystic, so I began to wonder how it could have happened at all.<br />
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I've always wondered about the instant we call "now" - a Euclidean point on the time axis, of zero thickness, has always struck me as somewhat absurd. Einstein reportedly said "There is no 'now' in Physics", meaning there is no model of it, no description of it, indeed it doesn't appear in physical theories. If you give this a few moments of thought it's quite amazing - our only experience of life is in the instant we call 'now', and our physical theories don't consider it at all.</div>
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My thought after the bank parking lot episode, many years ago, was that maybe we don't proceed through time linearly moving forwards - on average we do, perhaps for thermodynamic reasons, but maybe we move forwards a little, back a little, oscillating about what we consider to be "now". (If you like you could take the furthest point into the future we go and label that 'now', so all of this oscillation is entirely in the past - it is only a naming convention). Moving backwards in time would change the physics of brain processes so that it would be very unlikely that we'd have any coherent memories of the future. Occasionally these might persist, perhaps with enough internal consistency that they would be recognizable as useful information - so I might have been 'remembering' an accident, in a manner that felt like a strong intuition to avoid the situation. This thought has been lying dormant for a long time - perhaps appropriately, as there seemed no way to test it or explore it further.</div>
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Back to the multi-universe interpretation: all of those splitting universes seem a bit unnatural. What if, instead of splits, they are different excursions into the future, that is they all occur in this universe. Let me describe this by analogy. Imagine a snow-covered football field, with distance along the field analogous to time (think of one goal line being a few minutes ago, the other being a few minutes on, and where you are being "now"). You start walking at the first goal line, go a few yards, walk back, go forwards again, but perhaps not in the same route; you're moving down the field slowly, but making many tracks forwards and backwards as you go. These tracks represent the excursions into the future mentioned above, each being something like one of the split universes; and, as you walk, you may interact with the tracks you've already laid down, stumbling over earlier footprints (analogous to the sort of effect one sees in the two-slit experiment, when a photon can 'interfere with itself' and seemingly go through both slits at once), or gravitating to well-trodden areas (analogous to high-probability outcomes). Eventually you get to the final goal line, and can think over what you've done.</div>
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Wave function collapse reappears because we're back in one universe, but it might be a tiny bit clearer: Your consciousness holds memories, and those of the future excursions are very weak. As your mind makes sense of where you are it sees multiple tracks behind it, as perhaps it should (see this interesting paper on the possible literal meaning of the 'sum over histories' technique: <a href="http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/3780/1/quantum_path_integral.pdf">http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/3780/1/quantum_path_integral.pdf</a>)</div>
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I'm glossing over lots of details, such as the nature interference can have, what provokes the random wandering in time, etc. Some of these may be fatal to the entire approach. One implication of this idea is that the movements forwards and backwards in time are discrete (you will walk across a given yard line some integer number of times, indeed an odd number of times); given that interference between the excursions is possible, there might be an experimental way to detect this, how long they might be, etc.</div>
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Bryan Bentzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07104322876538668788noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416941313924599141.post-54322351537422133432010-12-08T12:27:00.000-08:002010-12-08T12:27:07.166-08:00The Ideal MinimallLarge supermarkets I don't really like, with the exception of Whole Foods - and even then there is much in the middle of the store (organic toilet paper and the like) that I have no use for. I tend to shop daily now - life circumstances change fast, with kids doing this and that, so it is hard to plan long-term, and I don't particularly want to most of the time.<br />
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For a few years an idea has been bouncing around my head - the 'ideal minimall'. It would have four separate stores as its core. One would be a good butcher shop, with a knowledgeable butcher and a wide selection of meats - quality meats, meaning no hormones, antibiotics, etc. Local organic meats would be ideal, but that's probably not practical. I'd also like to be able to find the kinds of things that supermarkets no longer seem to carry, like bones for making stock, or the more unusual organs (for that occasional haggis craving).<br />
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Next to this would be a greengrocer, a thing so rare that the term seems to be falling out of use. A place to get quality vegetables, run by a person who knows something about them. I would add fruit to this store as well.<br />
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The third store would be a fish market. We have some fish markets in the area, and given the proximity to the sea and the existence of a local fishing fleet, these are pretty good. The selection can be limited in some, and in others the staff doesn't seem to know as much as it should. One of my favorites was one in Waltham, MA (I don't remember the name) which seemed to have 3 or 4 people working at all times, had a large selection, and was a place one could buy things like fishheads or lobster bodies for stock and stew purposes. Of course there has to be enough business to justify the stock size, and enough turnover to maintain quality, so this might be difficult. One think I love about Whole Foods is their seafood, which seems to be of high quality at every store - so I'm sure it's doable.<br />
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The fourth store would be a bakery. Supermarket bakeries seem to bake premade or preformulated mixtures - I'm sure it guarantees uniform quality, but that quality isn't very high. One of my fond memories from childhood is walking into a (good) bakery, and smelling the buttery sweetness that seemed to hang in the air. A good bakery should do the full range of baked goods, from breads to cakes and pastry. <br />
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Of course all of these stores would be able to handle custom orders, and ought to have knowledgeable staff that could offer advice as necessary. <br />
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There might be other stores as well - a liquor store (perhaps more focused on wine than hard liquors) would be a nice addition, and a cheese/dairy outlet would be a fine addition, particularly if the products were from local farms. A coffeehouse at one end of the minimall might provide a nice gathering place as well.<br />
<br />
One could drive in to such a minimall and stroll from store to store, assembling a dinner. One would likely have to make occasional trips to supermarkets for soaps, napkins, etc., but I think this sort of minimall might be quite an attraction. One way to do it would be to find an investor willing to put up the money to buy or build the physical infrastructure, then lease to the individual markets, perhaps also with some equity in those businesses as well. Such a plan would have to cover the contingencies of a market failing, or key personal leaving, but that shouldn't be insurmountable. Bryan Bentzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07104322876538668788noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416941313924599141.post-77148316443096884392010-12-08T12:05:00.000-08:002010-12-08T12:05:10.945-08:00Issues When Working With MP3sI recently spent some time trying to put my collection of .mp3 audio files in better shape; this has been an ongoing project for years. There really aren't any good tools to do it, which, given the popularity of that file format, is somewhat surprising. I usually find myself doing one task in one app, then a different task in a different app. Part of the reason I thought to write this post is to see if others have had similar experiences, or found solutions to some of the problems.<br />
<br />
My ultimate, ideal goal is to have each .mp3 file be 'complete', with music, lyrics, album art, and credits for everyone who worked on that particular piece. This would actually be useful - for example, one might want to listen to every piece of music Alan Parsons worked on (beyond the Alan Parsons Project). One might trace careers of writers, producers, etc. if the tags were complete.<br />
<br />
Another goal I've had is to attach years to each piece of music. The goal would be to let me select music that I might hear on a radio station in a given year, say, 1977. Of course radio stations play older music, so players really should have some algorithms for picking music from earlier times to add to the playlist. But attaching years is a necessary first step.<br />
<br />
This is harder than it might seem, because work is republished. If one takes a CD issued recently, the dates attached to the album and the music will be recent, even if the CD is a re-issue of an older album. The problem is worse with compilations - the dates are often determined by the ISBN of the CD, <em>not</em> the original issue dates of the music.<br />
<br />
I've found attaching dates to be an interesting but laborious process - looking up a given song one might find much earlier versions, live versions, long versions, short versions for AM radio play, etc. I try to use a date that reflects when I might first have heard it on the radio. In part its interesting because some of the older versions show the evolution of the song. For instance, while trying to date Taco's "Puttin' On the Ritz" I found that the song had been written by Irving Berlin in 1929, with several notable versions (Clark Gable 1939, Fred Astaire 1946) before Taco's version in 1983. See for instance <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puttin'_on_the_Ritz">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puttin'_on_the_Ritz</a>. A surprising number of rock songs go back to early Blues songs of the 1910-1920 period, with likely earlier, but undocumented, roots.<br />
<br />
Just managing the MP3s isn't trivial - take 'artist name', a category in pretty much every player or library app. Now, should The Beatles be listed as "The Beatles" (which will sort with the "T"s), "Beatles" (which will sort well, but isn't the real band name), or "Beatles, The" (which kind of gets at both the real name and the right sort order). Ideally player and library software should let you specify the name as "The Beatles", which is the correct artist name, but then show this in an alphabetical list under the "B"s, not the "T"s. Almost inevitably one will have some songs in both categories, and the separation of B and T is such that it may be quite hard to notice this.<br />
<br />
Some band names are listed inconsistently, e.g. Pinkard & Bowden or Pinkard and Bowden. Some music pieces are by a particular band, but feature a guest artist - one would like this piece listed for both the band and the artist. Then there are case issues, e.g. John McCutcheon vs. John Mccutcheon - these kinds of spelling variants creep in for a variety of reasons. And, would one like to find the music of Carlos Santana in the "C"s or in the "S"s? Add to this foreign names with accent marks (sometimes); bands which stay the same but make small changes to their names (e.g. John Cougar, John Cougar Mellencamp, etc.). Semantically these should be grouped together, but they won't be.<br />
<br />
For classical music I describe the composer as last name first, then first and middle names. It's just how I think of classical music. There may be other genres with other common guidelines as well. And, while on the topic of classical music, I often tell my player to play in random order - but I really would never want to mix classical and, say, rock. This isn't trivial to achieve; of course one may construct playlists of all classical or all rock, but then when one adds new music one must update these playlists. The player foobar 2000 does some dynamic list assembly, which is a start. It is a good player, but I have yet to fully tame it, and don't really have the time to dedicate to figuring it out.<br />
<br />
Then there is 'genre': one player of mine has hundred of genres, many I just don't understand. I don't know what "Trip Hop" is, nor how "Electronic" differs from "Electronica". What I'd like is a smaller subset that isn't too ambiguous, and a way to constrain any new entries in the library to use one of the existing genres that I've found acceptable. In the absence of this, I've taken to using a kind of 'path' approach, so that similar genres appear next to each other when sorted - so I'll have "guitar" (meaning guitar instrumentals), then "guitar: Spanish", "guitar: electric", etc. <br />
<br />
Then there is 'album': many of the songs I've got have appeared on multiple albums, e.g. the original release album and perhaps a 'greatest hits' album later on, or a different kind of compilation, perhaps one containing many artists (e.g., a Christmas album). I would really like to link the song to all of those albums, but there is usually no way of doing this (short of keeping duplicate songs around).<br />
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'Rating': many players and managers keep ratings for songs in a separate database, not in the mp3 file itself. I'm not sure why - perhaps because the ratings are personal, and the songs are assumed to be shared, though that makes little sense. Every once in a while I'd have to rebuild the database for an app, and all of that information would be lost. I find it to be very useful when putting together playlists, so I adopted a somewhat radical approach: I have subdirectories named "5", "4", "3", etc., and I move all the songs rated 5 into the "5" subdirectory. If I have to reestablish the ratings in a given player I sort the songs by file path, then select all of those in the "5" subdir and set their rating to 5. It takes a few minutes, but is far better than losing that information.<br />
<br />
So - that's a quick list of issues I've had when trying to manage my mp3 library. With all of the money and time that's been poured into the production and sale of these, I'm surprised no one has done a player or library manager that can handle all of these issues. Foobar 2000 seems to come closest, but it's always doing something a bit strange, and I just haven't had the time to master its idiosyncracies. I would very much like feedback on how others have dealt with these problems.Bryan Bentzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07104322876538668788noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416941313924599141.post-23887541254179601632010-03-02T12:04:00.000-08:002010-03-02T12:04:45.321-08:00Government ≠ SocietyThere's much talk nowadays about the apparently irreconcilable differences between the Left and the Right. In nearly all of this talk I think one important, indeed central, point is missed. Acknowledging it will be a necessary first step in finding common ground, the sort needed to craft future policies with broad support. <br />
<br />
Those on the Left argue that government should be used to advance social welfare in all its forms, beginning with providing basic necessities. One hears phrases like "No one should starve in a civilized society", or "Everyone deserves health care". These ends are pursued through various forms of legislation, taxation, 'redistribution' of income, etc.<br />
<br />
Those on the Right (and by this I mean what people are beginning to call "Conservatives", or even classical Liberals) view government as a necessary but limited institution, largely because of the danger its power presents. As George Washington said, "Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." Liberty takes precedence over goals, however noble, because otherwise government power will eventually expand without limit. It is this outlook that is at the root of the Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, and of course has helped ensure basic freedoms for quite some time now.<br />
<br />
Can these two views of government be reconciled, at least to the extent that policies may be found that are acceptable to both the Left and the Right? I believe it might be possible - that the social goals of the Left may be pursued while respecting the libertarian requirements of the Right. As the wealth of the world grows, enabling more and vaster collective social projects, it will be increasingly important to get this right.<br />
<br />
I think the problem stems from confusing 'society', or even 'civilization', with the government. Without this distinction I believe we will be doomed to a relatively primitive stage of political development. This confusion shows up quite frequently, and few seem aware of it. A recent letter in the Wall Street Journal about Obama's health care proposals noted that some key ones should pass because "Society should guarantee basic health care". What struck me was the unwarranted assumption that " Society = Government". At first this seemed innocuous, perhaps because I'd heard statements like it for years; but on second thought it expresses a somewhat extreme world view, that government is the only significant social actor. Why would anyone think that? How did this idea get traction?<br />
<br />
I know from local politics that the resources government has act as a great draw - for instance, for small nonprofits, getting funds from the government is usually much easier than raising them independently. Fund raising requires time, effort, expense, and offers no sort of guaranteed return. On the other hand, gov't are of such a scale that the lobbying efforts required are paid back many times over. Government is the one easily accessible institution that can provide this kind of support. Then there are projects seemingly possible only to something with the resources of the federal government: building the Panama Canal, going to the moon, etc. This is often mistakenly used as justification - because the government is the only actor capable of acting, that it should. In a society with relatively little wealth, it may indeed be the case that the government is the only entity with the resources for large-scale projects, but as the wealth of the citizenry increases, this is less and less true. There are many billionaires now; Bill Gates has a net worth of nearly $100 billion. Individuals such as this, and particularly groups of such individuals, are capable of marshalling resources comparable to that of many sovereign states.<br />
<br />
What are the implications of declaring that "Government ≠ Society", not only philosophically but practically? This distinction may offer some surprising solutions, generally involving social actors capable of substantial efforts but without the coercive power of government.<br />
<br />
Consider the following proposal - intended as an example more than as an actual policy proposal, though some variant of it might well be practical. Government functions are divided into two parts: the "libertarian core" and the "optional social support" components. Your tax bill is similarly partitioned; and you only have to pay the bill for the "libertarian core" part. You're encouraged and expected to pay the "optional social support" part as well, but it's not required. Whether you do or not (or the percentage of it that you pay) is public information.<br />
<br />
This should satisfy the most libertarian citizen - no longer will state power be used to extract money from citizens for projects of dubious constitutionality. It might well satisfy the most progressive citizen as well, as it would remove the moral and constitutional barriers to many efforts to alleviate perceived problems. Would it work? Would people pay more than they were absolutely required to? They might if it affected how they were perceived in society, whether they were hired by certain companies, or their chances when running for office ("Candidate X always paid the bare minimum!"). And of course if it wouldn't work, if the citizenry rejected funding social initiatives dreamed up by politicians, perhaps that's a better outcome - a kind of national referendum on those initiatives.<br />
<br />
One could modify this proposal in many ways to make it more practical and effective, but I offer it as only one of many possible innovations that might spring to mind once one has broken away from the idea that society's only agent is government. We may eventually look back and see that the separation of social reform efforts from government is as necessary a step as the separation of church and state, and for similar reasons: social reform is usually predicated on a particular view of what an ideal society should be, and there are a multiplicity of such views, just as there are different religious catmas and dogmas. In a free society these choices should not be made because of government coercion.<br />
<br />
Until then, we face the issues that arise when the coercive power of the state is used to further questionable ends, often for political reasons. As Robert Heinlein said, "A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul" - it is this sort of politics that can corrupt democracy.Bryan Bentzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07104322876538668788noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416941313924599141.post-29287707740723948282009-10-06T12:19:00.000-07:002009-10-06T13:29:04.408-07:00"When" We AreI've been watching over my kids' shoulders as they take history classes, both in high school and college, and I got thinking about the class titles: "ancient history", "modern history", and so forth. It's not that I have any quarrel with these labels, but they seem far too optimistic. I think we're now <em>living</em> in the ancient world.<br /><br />I don't mean that life hasn't changed since, say, A.D. 1. Rather, when some students a few thousand years in the future look back, our times will be grouped with more primitive eras, and be considered the mere beginnings of civilization. I'm not sneering at life nowadays, or saying that we're still barbarians; in fact we may have most of the ideas today that will be alive and well in a few thousand years. But these ideas aren't widespread, they're intermixed with a lot of nonsense, and we have no traditions or mechanisms to pass them on to future generations.<br /><br />Our knowledge and experience is very very new. Literacy itself, at least in widespread form, is a relatively recent occurrence. It was only within the last 100 years or so that humans managed to set foot on all the continents of the Earth (Antarctica being the holdout; that was discovered in 1821). The wave of Europeans and others who migrated to the Americas goes back perhaps 500 years, but has had significant waves within living memory. We've only been able to map the planet within the last 100 years or so.<br /><br />Our knowledge of ourselves, primarily through biology but also through psychology, sociology, economics, and political science is quite incomplete. While it may never<em> be </em>fully complete, it isn't unreasonable to think that at some point we will have a deeper and essentially stable knowledge of human physiology, nature, and behavior. The physical sciences have advanced further, amazingly so, but much of that has been within the last 100 years as well: quantum mechanics and relativity both arose within that period. We still don't know many answers concerning the nature of the universe, and we may not even know the right questions.<br /><br />Politically we seem awfully capable of forgetting lessons we've painfully learned time and time again; the same pathologies seem to keep returning in altered forms in different eras. I would like to hope that in the future we are all free, with autonomous spheres of action untouched and unregulated by any level of government. There always seems to be someone coming along with an agenda that requires abridgement of freedoms, and it never leads anywhere good. I hope that after a few thousand years we will have gotten it right, and know enough not to yet again repeat mistakes. When we do, we'll look back at this time the way we now look back at a time of tribes, small kingdoms, or city states.<br /><br />It will be interesting to see how religion fares in what is likely to be an increasingly rational and scientific world. If it stands against hubris, it may be an essential element to a world in which humans have increasing power to alter the world. If it stands against reason, it will be lost. I wish we allowed no religion to advocate or encourage killing. Most say they do not, but a cursory glance through history will show substantial exceptions. Any ideology that aims to provide a comprehensive explanation for the world and all the answers to all of the questions seems inevitably to get to the point where it must forciby eliminate doubters. We ought to have learned this pattern by now, and recognize and call it for what it is.<br /><br />In every area we're learning more, but an equal if not greater challenge is passing this knowledge on. Every generation starts over, with of course no innate knowledge beyond what has been built in genetically; there is little reason to think that human beings will be much different in a thousand years, so the culture and education that exist at that time will have to pass on all that we do discover. This seems so very fragile to me.<br /><br />Maybe figuring this out, how to pass along accumulated knowledge and wisdom without placing a straightjacket on thought and behavior, will be the advance that will move us beyond our current era. Just as we think of the rise of rationality in the Renaissance as the root of the modern era, perhaps in a few thousand years the development of techniques for the preservation and propagation of wisdom will be seen as the key turning point, the one that finally got us out of our 'ancient' phase.Bryan Bentzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07104322876538668788noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416941313924599141.post-89818351422248226302009-01-16T16:01:00.001-08:002009-01-16T16:03:37.632-08:00Internet RadioI've really enjoyed listening to streaming audio from "internet radio stations"; you can find programming from many countries and in many languages - a great way to tune your ear and refresh a language you may have forgotten.<br /><br />For day-to-day listening, one of the best 'stations' I've found, with quite a variety, is Radio Paradise, at <a href="http://www.radioparadise.com/">http://www.radioparadise.com/</a>. It's modern, so don't expect soft rock or classical music, though the mix does span a huge range.Bryan Bentzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07104322876538668788noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416941313924599141.post-82266482798555598782009-01-02T08:50:00.000-08:002009-01-02T09:00:02.001-08:00Book Recommendation: The Nuclear Express<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zX7c7Irnwxc/SV5GIVD0ddI/AAAAAAAAAAU/B_YCC2i9RY0/s1600-h/nuke.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 200px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zX7c7Irnwxc/SV5GIVD0ddI/AAAAAAAAAAU/B_YCC2i9RY0/s200/nuke.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5286740121485604306" border="0" /></a>I just finished "The Nuclear Express", subtitled "A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation", by Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman. I'd ordered it a while back, then forgot about it - when it came my interest was a bit reduced. I picked it up, and after not that many pages I couldn't put it down.<br /><br />In one way it one of the best kinds of history: it is written by knowledgeable people who use specifics of persons, time, and place to illustrate the points they are making. There is little fluff here - even personal opinion is labeled as such. It is fact after fact after fact, not in an unordered recitation but rather laid out to underpin the historical themes within the book.<br /><br />By the end I felt somewhat fearful about the future. During the Cold War people worried about nuclear war, but I think the danger of the use of nuclear weapons is much greater now (though not, at least initially, in the context of an all-out war). I hope those responsible for relevant policy decisions read this book, including the new President.Bryan Bentzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07104322876538668788noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416941313924599141.post-44972140439725824882009-01-02T08:25:00.000-08:002010-03-28T14:42:02.564-07:00On Accidental Reincarnation"And now for something completely different."<br />
<br />
This may seem a bit mystical, and I'm not - so it isn't, really.<br />
<br />
On a recent birthday I recalled a thought I'd had when much younger, when I wondered if I would be much different as a person if I'd been born another day. The main difference might be one that perhaps provides a shadow of a rationale for the personality predictions of astrology: I'd have spent my first months of life in a different season, and one might imagine that this could color one's view of the world. My first six months or so were spent during the cold and dreary months of the year - perhaps I'd be slightly different if it were Spring and Summer instead.<br />
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That isn't really what I was after, though; I thought it might be an interesting exercise in imagination to toss away personal details, and see how much of "me" was left as I went along. Would I be the same person if I'd been given a different name? I think so, without a lot of doubt, though having a "B" at the beginning of my last name got me through lots of institutional processes faster than I would have been had my last name been "Zuppa" or "Zabaglione". So there might have been some small difference, but I don't think it'd have been significant.<br />
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It's an interesting exercise to try - what if you'd been born in a different country? What if you'd been born in a different century? How much of your personality, your "soul" if you wish to consider it in those terms, would be the same, and how much would be different? <br />
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My view is that I'd be the same person, though my different experiences might have led to different choices in life. I can't get away from the sense of having a central identity that wouldn't be subject to the vicissitudes of time and place.<br />
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A recent TED talk (Technology, Entertainment, Design; www.ted.com) by Steven Pinker, <a href="http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_chalks_it_up_to_the_blank_slate.html">"Chalking it up to the blank slate"</a> (just under 23 minutes long; well worth the time) addresses this from a neuroscience point of view. The evidence he cites for surprisingly similar behavior from identical twins, even raised in different environments, he uses to point to the importance of underlying brain structure as a determiner for human nature. Even twins aren't *exactly* the same - and if one of us were born in another place and time, physically identical to who we were at birth, we'd be even more similar to our current selves than twins are, despite environmental differences..<br />
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Then I began to wonder: who in the past might have shared some or all of the elements that make up that identity? It really doesn't matter if you get to be the way you are via nature or nurture - what you are in terms of outlook, personality, affinities, and so forth may have existed before, and may exist again at some time in the future, in whole or in part. I don't know quite what to call this: perhaps 'accidental reincarnation". It doesn't require any mysticism to consider it a possibility.<br />
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Perhaps this has happened to you: you'll be reading some bit of history, before you turn the page you think that if you were there/then, you'd say something specific, or react in some way - and you turn the page, and find that the person said or did just that. Now in the obvious cases this isn't so striking - if nearly anyone would have said or done it. But what about when almost no one would have? It can be a very eerie experience, the sense that some part of your mental life existed before you were born.<br />
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A few years after this idea had occurred to me (this was in the 1970's), I stumbled on a poem of Jorge Luis Borges. It's not his best, but the fact that it touches on the same point was a bit of a surprise:<br />
<blockquote style="color: #336666;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Inscription On Any Tomb</span><br />
<br />
Let not the rash marble risk<br />
garrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence,<br />
in many worlds recalling<br />
name, renown, events, birthplace.<br />
All those glass jewels are best left in the dark.<br />
Let not the marble say what men do not.<br />
The essentials of the dead man's life -<br />
the trembling hope,<br />
the implacable miracle of pain, the wonder of sensual delight -<br />
will abide forever.<br />
Blindly the willful soul asks for length of days<br />
when its survival is assured by the lives of others,<br />
when you yourself are the embodied continuance<br />
of those who did not live into your time<br />
and others will be (and are) your immortality on earth.</blockquote><br />
Perhaps my surprise when reading this was that it almost proves the point: while wondering if there were others in the past who'd thought similar thoughts to my own, I'd found someone else thinking the same thing!<br />
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The "(and are)" part in the last line hadn't occurred to me (and I must admit this whole topic was something of a passing thought). It's not just that there may have been people in the past (and may be in the future) who to a lesser or greater extent were "me", but that this may be true of others alive now. And of course it's not that they're identically me; they may just have some overlap in attitude, imagination, instinct, emotional response, world view, sense of humor, or any of the other aspects that make up the mental life of an individual.<br />
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Maybe we do intuitively understand these kinds of mental life overlaps; when reading history, or even watching a movie, we identify with some characters, and can at least appreciate the actions of others, even if we wouldn't act like they did. If we couldn't do this, there'd be little value in history or literature. To the extent that I understand Christian thinking about the brotherhood of man, I make sense of it this way: we each share a little bit of each other.<br />
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One can take this further - Terence (Publius Terentius Afer, 185 BC - 159 BC) said "Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto " (I am a man: nothing human is alien to me). When I first read this I thought it to be quite powerful, but over time I've come to doubt it: when I read of certain types of crimes, too bizarre or disgusting to mention here, I feel I'm touching something alien. On the other hand, these human actions may just reflect mental illness. Or perhaps we define something as mental illness precisely when we can't empathize with it at all.<br />
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The type of overlap of mental outlook I'm speaking of might even cross species boundaries, though probably with some inherent limits. Anyone who has spent time around dogs knows they have distinct individual personalities, and, even ignoring the anthropomorphism we sometimes bring to such observations, one may find traits that humans share. I wonder how far one might take this - say, if the mind of a dinosaur that walked her 70 million years ago, perceiving similar landscapes, may have had some overlap with how I see the world. It may be that such similarities are an inevitable hallmark of consciousness.<br />
<br />
I found another poem recently, unpublished for some time, this one by <a href="http://users.hol.gr/~barbanis/cavafy/">Cavafy</a>. He's perhaps most famous for <a href="http://users.hol.gr/~barbanis/cavafy/barbarians.html">Waiting for the Barbarians</a>, but others of my favorites are <a href="http://users.hol.gr/~barbanis/cavafy/ithaca.html">Ithaca</a> and <a href="http://users.hol.gr/~barbanis/cavafy/thermopylae.html">Thermopylae</a> (if you've never read them they are worth the web detour). While this may have more to do with the specifics of Cavafy's life, it still touches on the same theme:<br />
<blockquote style="color: #336666;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Hidden</span><br />
<br />
From all I've done and all I've said<br />
let them not seek to find who I've been.<br />
An obstacle stood and transformed<br />
my acts and way of my life.<br />
An obstacle stood and stopped me<br />
many a time as I was going to speak.<br />
My most unobserved acts,<br />
and my writings the most covered -<br />
thence only they will feel me.<br />
But mayhaps it is not worth to spend<br />
this much care and this much effort to know me.<br />
For - in the more perfect society -<br />
someone else like me created<br />
will certainly appear and freely act.</blockquote>So I'll die, my specific memories vanish, but some day, maybe many days, a new person will be born who will more or less, in many combinations, be me.Bryan Bentzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07104322876538668788noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416941313924599141.post-34935307098073697672009-01-02T08:14:00.000-08:002009-01-02T08:25:03.883-08:00Book Recommendation: Conquistador<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zX7c7Irnwxc/SV4-sxHlutI/AAAAAAAAAAM/Oaii0dKEoS4/s1600-h/conq.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 133px; height: 200px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zX7c7Irnwxc/SV4-sxHlutI/AAAAAAAAAAM/Oaii0dKEoS4/s200/conq.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5286731951399877330" border="0" /></a><br />I'd like to recommend the book "Conquistador", by Buddy Levy (Bantam, 2008). It is very readable history, and covers an epoch I'm sure we've probably all studied in school - but I had no idea how fascinating the people era, and events were.<br /><br />In places it reads like the script of a fictional adventure movie, but it is a true story. When I was about halfway through I thought "What more can there be?", and it just got better and better. If you like to escape into fiction from time to time, give this a shot - while it also is a completely different world you'll enter, it has the virtue of actually having existed.Bryan Bentzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07104322876538668788noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416941313924599141.post-83783533879021081402008-10-09T10:45:00.000-07:002008-10-09T15:51:38.996-07:00I see two emerging trends that may threaten the core of our nation. One is an erosion of respect for our Constitution, the other what might be a disease of democracy, a tendency for one part of the population to vote itself benefits at the expense of another.<br /><br /><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Constitutional Belief</span></strong><br /><br />What makes our country's Constitution work is, ultimately, that people believe and expect that it should. Other countries in the world have constitutions, often ones that promise rights such as freedom of the press, but these guarantees are routinely ignored. Why is that? Why did the Soviet Union not respect its constitution's guarantee of the rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the right to relivious belief? Mainly because the citizenry understood that "that's just not the way it's done", that is the common citizen's expectations were quite different from what the document stated.<br /><br />One striking example of an American symptom of this occurred when I was working in the campaign office of (U.S. Congressman) Rob Simmons: a man came in and asked loudly where in the Constitution the federal government was granted the authority to establish Social Security. This seemed somewhat jarring to me (and often does to others), as Social Security seems such a established program that one thinks that such questions must have already been fully resolved; it seemed a laughable question.<br /><br />Yet if you look at the Constitution, we have a federal government that is only supposed to have the specific powers enumerated there, with all others residing with the states and the people. And there is no enumerated power giving the federal government the authority to establish Social Security. The Constitionality of Social Security was decided in May of 1937 by the Supreme Court, but (according to the Social Security Administration's own web site on its history, <a href="http://www.ssa.gov/history/court.html">http://www.ssa.gov/history/court.html</a>) only after Franklin Roosevelt threatened to pack the court with extra judges to get his way.<br /><br />These days (I'm writing this in 2008) some are saying that President George Bush has been "shredding the Constitution" through the Patriot Act, the Guantanamo jail, and telecomm surveillance of terrorists - yet none of this required threatening the integrity of the Supreme Court, and none is geared towards changing the electoral dynamics within the country.<br /><br />And today, how many people have even thought of the constitutionality of the $850 billion "bail out" bill, or that of the new proposals for the federal government to buy ownership of selected banks? Have we lost any real feel for what our country's founding document really means? If so, we're headed towards a mindset shared by much of the rest of the world, in which a constitution is a nice collection of noble thoughts, but doesn't reflect "the way things really work".<br /><br /><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Raiding the Public Purse</span></strong><br /><br />This brings me to the second trend, in which it seems increasingly common for Congress to vote benefits to powerful constituencies. This too goes back to FDR, as illuminated by his aide Harry Hopkins commenting on Democratic Party strategy 1933: <strong>"Tax, tax, tax; spend, spend, spend; elect, elect, elect."</strong> In other words, use the government's taxing ability to collect vast funds, and then use those funds to establish programs that benefit important blocks of voters - once hooked, they'll never vote to remove the largesse they're receiving.<br /><br />The Fabian Society in Britain supported a move towards socialism through such gradual steps, counting on the populace to never desire to give up such benefits once it had acquired them. The 'political pendulum' might swing back and forth between left and right, but if incremental gains were made and preserved after every leftward swing, eventually a socialist society would result. They took their name from the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus ("the Delayer"), who used a similar incremental approach to beat Hannibal in the Punic Wars.<br /><br />The premise of our Constitution was that it provided a structure which would be adequate to perform the essential services of government, within fairly strict and specified limits. In a full democracy without such limits, the people would be able to vote in any arbitrary measure: to expel all left-handed people, or confiscate the property of any unpopular minority group. Clearly this is not what the founders intended - the idea of freedom requires that many areas of human activity remain beyond government's reach, and they wrote those boundaries into the Constitution. Now we've reached a point where those barriers are being knocked down, not because of some overarching social need or imperative, but as a means to political power. And, like the Soviet citizenry mentioned above, we just accept this as "the way things are", regardless of what our Constitution says. The idea of Social Security being challenged on such fundamental grounds seems laughable only because we no longer seem to care very much about that issue.<br /><br />I will acknowledge that the motivation behind many of the vast social initiatives of the last 50 years or so may have been partly, or even largely, idealistic. Certainly it seems that the Great Depression may have warranted extraordinary action, though now it's becoming clearer that FDR's steps may well have lengthened and deepened it (see for instance <a href="http://www.amazon.com/FDRs-Folly-Roosevelt-Prolonged-Depression/dp/0761501657">this book</a>; the comments on the Amazon page are worth a quick glance as well). And I'm not sure even <em>that </em>event justified the permanent damage to the Constitution that we've sustained by removing any real barriers to federal involvment in just about any area.<br /><br />Even if the constitutionally problematic elements of the New Deal were a good idea at the time, to adopt them required an "The ends justify the means" attitude that is unhealthy at best and disastrous at worst. History has shown that freedom is fragile, and at any given moment there may be numerous good and powerful reasons to curtail it or give it up, often sounding quite compelling: social unrest, global warming, religious or philosophical compulsions. Against these there is only one reason to keep it, though it trumps all the others: it is essential to the life of a fully-functional human. It is the only state which allows us the full range of moral action, to live the life that a human ought to live.<br /><br />It is the confluence of these two trends that is dangerous: our citizenry is slowly but clearly losing its expectation that government officials and institutions closely adhere to the Constitution, and simultaneously is rewarding politicians who bestow gifts from the vast federal budget. The quote below (variously attributed to de Toqueville, Disraeli, and others, though apparently from the Scottish judge Alexander Tyler):<br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#000099;">Democracy in America is doomed when the people learn to vote themselves money from the public trough. A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage.</span></blockquote>Lest you think I'm going too far, consider this recent campaign ad by Hillary Clinton, in which she sits under a Christmas tree and presents new programs as 'gifts' to voters:<br /><br /><p align="center"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dxUXyav4SfDiLRkGRpb4rx57RrxzhK9l_f-IrsYfuBAy6y5zwccIIiIoxYCB8n0nD6q81foD2CWafvJ4GoMmg' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></p><p>(This may also be found on YouTube <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzBvQ9EeF3k">here</a>, should the above format not be congenial.) This ad so directly illustrates the problem that it hardly seems that more is necessary.</p><br /><p>A more subtle use of the same "you'll get something for nothing if you vote for me" approach is the campaign argument brought forth first by John Kerry, and now echoed by Barack Obama: that various proposed tax cuts are "tax cuts for the rich", and are therefore unfair. What they know but don't tell you is this: the rich pay the vast majority of taxes. (scroll down if this blog presentation inserts too much white space above the table.) <table cols="2" align="center" border="1"><br /><tbody><tr><td><b>Taxpayers by Income Level </b><td><b>Percent of Tax Burden Paid</b></td><tr><br /><td>Top 1% <td>34.8%</td><br /><tr><td>Top 90% to 99% <td>30.2%</td><br /><tr><td>Top 75% to 90% <td>17.6%</td><br /><tr><td>Top 50% to 75% <td>13.1%</td><br /><tr><td>Everybody else <td>4.3%</td><br /></tr></tbody></table><br /><em><span style="font-size:78%;">(This data is from the Tax Foundation, "Distribution of the Federal Income Tax", Special Report No. 101, November 2000.)<br /></span></em><br />Two things to note here: first, most any sort of tax cut will <em>of course</em> leave more money in the hands of "the rich", because they're paying most of the taxes (the top 10% pay <strong>65%</strong> of the total tax bill) - anything but a tax cut very much skewed against the rich will have this effect. It has long been a goal of those pushing 'progressive' taxation that the rich pay more; now they do, and consequently any tax cut will as a consequence leave them with more of their money. <em>The people who have advocated this shouldn't now complain that tax cuts benefit the rich: that was implicit in their plan.<br /></em><br />The second thing to note is that a tax cut that <i>didn't</i> "benefit the rich" would move <em>more</em> of the burden of taxpaying onto them - if one cut the percentages paid by lower-income segments, "the rich" are the only ones left to foot the bill. The logical conclusion of this process is one in which many, many Americans will pay very little in taxes, while "the rich" will pay most of it (indeed we're pretty much there already). Now, what incentive will the average American have to <em>not</em> vote for expensive programs? He or she won't personally have to pay much if anything - something for nothing! Voters may then make all sorts of choices without any significant personal accountability, which will inevitably be a disaster.<br /><br />I've put "<em>the rich</em>" in quotes because that's the current term in political circulation, but it isn't quite right. What it should be is "people <em>with high income</em>", which is emphatically not the same thing. Many people who are indeed rich have tax-exempt income, or may just spend saved dollars; <i>income</i> tax won't touch them very much at all. On the other hand, someone who struggles through medical school, practices for a number of years, and finally has a hefty income will be hit very hard as one of "the rich", even if he or she carries substantial educational debt and might well need to make up for a number of low-income years.<br /><br />I believe there are steps we might take to get out of this bind, before we're in even deeper. They will require a greater respect for the Constitution, and a more ingrained cultural scepticism about candidates promising various sorts of goodies. One glimmer of a solution, which I'll address in a separate post, is to separate the coercive power of the state from the more charitable functions of society, so that any of the various forms of "bribing the voters" become much more transparent and more difficult.<br /></p><p></p><p></p>Bryan Bentzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07104322876538668788noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416941313924599141.post-71518273828839682192008-10-08T11:58:00.001-07:002008-10-09T15:14:04.258-07:00BeginningsI have a number of topics to address, and I've finally decided to get to them. What I write might not be the most polished, but I intend for each post to convey at least one point worthy of consideration.Bryan Bentzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07104322876538668788noreply@blogger.com0