Dear Reader,
If you are reading this through an RSS feed you probably didn't see the alert I put in the header: I have folded this blog into Cooking with Charles. This blog will no longer be updated. You are probably a handful of posts behind at this point.
Charles
| This blog is no longer being updated. You're looking for Cooking with Charles. |  |
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Art Project!
So, perhaps it's a stretch to call this an art project. I certainly don't consider myself an artist, and in fact the specifics of this project required nearly no artistic skill at all. But I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of people who might mistake it for art, so we'll run with that.
I've taken on several cosmetic projects for my bedroom. During the summer I bought a primed (but unpainted) dresser at a yard sale. I painted it a nice bold blue. More recently I got rid of the old pulls (they were the flappy kind you often see on old furniture); since the screw holes were at such an odd spacing anyway -- 2.25" when the modern standard is 3" -- I ended up just filling those holes, sanding them down, re-painting, and putting on new knobs that I like a lot better. I also sanded, primed, painted, and gave a new knob to an old nightstand that was starting to look a little sad from years of use. Between these, the paint job, and the curtains I felt like the room was really putting together a coherent color scheme.
(Note that despite how it appears in this picture, the wall color is uniform.)
Unfortunately, after looking at it a few too many times, two problems became evident: first, the walls were completely and conspicuously naked; second, the purples were too far away from the blues. I don't even know if that's a real thing, but it was certainly bothering me.
The obvious solution was to track down some art for the wall to bridge the gap and flesh out the color palette of the room. I spent some time on Etsy, eBay, and Craigslist trying to find something to fill the gap. Nothing really was quite what I wanted and everything seemed very expensive. I eventually just about settled on a woman out east somewhere who did mini-paintings, near-monocolored in any color you want, with all sorts of visible brush strokes to make things a little more interesting.
I decided that the nonuniformity was the part of her work I liked the least, given that everything else in the room is very much one flat color. After some sifting around on art supply websites it also became pretty clear that I would be able to produce similar work for much cheaper than buying it.
So I bough some canvas -- twenty six-inch squares -- and I picked out some paint samples at Menards. A few four-square-foot samples was plenty to do what I wanted.
The actual painting was time consuming but certainly not difficult. One color at a time, I laid out a few canvases and painted them each with a few coats of flat uniform color. I also put a layer of clear protective spray coating on them; it was something that artists on Etsy played up and the spray itself (certainly not intended for this purpose) was quite inexpensive.
The most frustrating part was hanging. My initial instinct was to drill a few shallow holes in the back of each canvas's frame and stick those on nails. It turns out that's very time consuming and has a lot of failure points. Eventually I realized that the better solution was just to put a pair of nails in the wall for each canvas (for those counting at home, that's forty nails I now have in the wall over my bed) and set the inner edge of the frame on them. The difference in the thickness of the frame is certainly no larger than my uncertainty in putting in the nails. Because I'm impatient I hung the squares as I went (though in the pictures I think that makes it easier to see what's going on).
They aren't arranged in any particular pattern, other than having one of each of my four colors in each column.
You can judge for yourself, but I feel very good about how this turned out. It seems to me that the room makes more sense now.
I've taken on several cosmetic projects for my bedroom. During the summer I bought a primed (but unpainted) dresser at a yard sale. I painted it a nice bold blue. More recently I got rid of the old pulls (they were the flappy kind you often see on old furniture); since the screw holes were at such an odd spacing anyway -- 2.25" when the modern standard is 3" -- I ended up just filling those holes, sanding them down, re-painting, and putting on new knobs that I like a lot better. I also sanded, primed, painted, and gave a new knob to an old nightstand that was starting to look a little sad from years of use. Between these, the paint job, and the curtains I felt like the room was really putting together a coherent color scheme.
 |
 |
(Note that despite how it appears in this picture, the wall color is uniform.)
Unfortunately, after looking at it a few too many times, two problems became evident: first, the walls were completely and conspicuously naked; second, the purples were too far away from the blues. I don't even know if that's a real thing, but it was certainly bothering me.
The obvious solution was to track down some art for the wall to bridge the gap and flesh out the color palette of the room. I spent some time on Etsy, eBay, and Craigslist trying to find something to fill the gap. Nothing really was quite what I wanted and everything seemed very expensive. I eventually just about settled on a woman out east somewhere who did mini-paintings, near-monocolored in any color you want, with all sorts of visible brush strokes to make things a little more interesting.
I decided that the nonuniformity was the part of her work I liked the least, given that everything else in the room is very much one flat color. After some sifting around on art supply websites it also became pretty clear that I would be able to produce similar work for much cheaper than buying it.
So I bough some canvas -- twenty six-inch squares -- and I picked out some paint samples at Menards. A few four-square-foot samples was plenty to do what I wanted.
 |
 |
The actual painting was time consuming but certainly not difficult. One color at a time, I laid out a few canvases and painted them each with a few coats of flat uniform color. I also put a layer of clear protective spray coating on them; it was something that artists on Etsy played up and the spray itself (certainly not intended for this purpose) was quite inexpensive.
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
The most frustrating part was hanging. My initial instinct was to drill a few shallow holes in the back of each canvas's frame and stick those on nails. It turns out that's very time consuming and has a lot of failure points. Eventually I realized that the better solution was just to put a pair of nails in the wall for each canvas (for those counting at home, that's forty nails I now have in the wall over my bed) and set the inner edge of the frame on them. The difference in the thickness of the frame is certainly no larger than my uncertainty in putting in the nails. Because I'm impatient I hung the squares as I went (though in the pictures I think that makes it easier to see what's going on).
They aren't arranged in any particular pattern, other than having one of each of my four colors in each column.
You can judge for yourself, but I feel very good about how this turned out. It seems to me that the room makes more sense now.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Punishment and Rehabilitation
Just as two wrongs don't make a right, the idea that criminals must be "brought to justice" through punishment is primitive and even harmful. When we step back from our emotions it's obvious that a rehabilitated criminal is better for society than a punished one. Furthermore, statistics show pretty clearly that those two are not the same thing; two thirds of those released from prison commit another crime within three years and half are back in prison in that same time.
It seems to me that after a crime is committed there are two most important actions: reversing (if possible) the damage done, and using knowledge from that crime to prevent future crimes. Punishment of a wrongdoer may bring emotional closure to the wronged, but if this punishment doesn't actually reduce crime then we need to look for another solution.
And it doesn't -- the United States keeps a higher fraction of its population in prison than any other country on earth. With 5% of the global population we have something like 25% of the inmates. Far more than half of inmates are nonviolent offenders, largely due to mandatory minimum sentencing. But compared to other developed nations the United States has similar overall crime rates.
If a crime is committed for economic reasons -- to feed a family perhaps -- then it's a symptom of a fixable problem. In fact, it ought to be fixable for much less than the cost of punishment. Keeping one person in prison for a year costs the country something like $40,000. You can buy for a lot of community college or job training for that much money. Obviously making training opportunities available as a response to someone committing a crime is awkward positive reinforcement but a proactive approach seems very practical: reduce crime by reducing poverty by investing in social programs that create skilled workers.
Saving the money on prison is great. But it seems reasonable to expect that putting breadwinners to work instead of in prison might decrease the dependence on welfare programs as well.
More extreme than prison time is the death penalty. It is impractical to say the least, and yet another way that the United States is more like a developing country than a wealthy one; the practice is banned in Canada, Australia, and almost all of Europe. Nobody has been executed in South America in the last decade and Africa is moving away from the practice as well. For the most part, capital punishment exists here, in China, in India, and in the Middle East.
Implementing the death penalty gambles that a prisoner will never be exonerated. Furthermore it implies that the prisoner can never be rehabilitated. There is no matter of the rehabilitation being too costly; the cost of implementing the death penalty is comparable to -- and perhaps more expensive than -- the cost of a life sentence without parole. As this paper puts it, "We try to maintain the apparatus of state killing and another apparatus [the preceding legal deliberations] that almost guarantees that it won't happen. The public pays for both sides."
There is significant disagreement as to whether the death penalty is an effective deterrent for crime, and near-consensus that it is an ineffective use of law enforcement funds.
Of course, not all crime is committed out of economic desperation. In fact, there is debate as to the causal relationship between poverty and crime (though it's certainly true that there is a correlation -- the states with the highest poverty rate/lowest average income also tend to exhibit high crime rates). Certainly an example of non-economic crime could be the recent shootings in Aurora, Oak Creek, and the many others that routinely make it into the news. Dealing with criminals who have non-obvious motives is more complicated.
It's possible that some individuals are highly predisposed to violent outbursts from birth. If so, even if you had a way to screen them as children, what action would be appropriate before these people have done anything wrong? Similarly, abuse during formative years can lead to acting out violently (for example, see here). Can a person damaged far in the past be rehabilitated effectively?
How do you prevent crime by those who aren't getting the help they need for psychological or emotional issues? How do you handle them afterwards?
If crime is lucrative (for example, dealing drugs), how do you combat it? Marijuana is something I'll talk about in an upcoming post but I'll have to do a lot of reading before I have anything intelligent to say about harder drugs.
And there's likely something to be said for the gun culture we exhibit in this country. We have close to thirty gun homicides per day in the United States, which is close to triple the highest per capita rate you see in any European country. We also have the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, double that of Switzerland at number two. It seems likely that there are systematic and cultural issues at play.
Unfortunately, not only are these issues nebulous, they're probably interrelated. It's a mess.
We can quickly look at Norway's system for comparison, as it draws sharp contrasts to ours. In Norway the maximum prison sentence is 21 years, though it can be extended if the individual is deemed to still be dangerous. Their prisons are notably nicer than ours, in some cases being compared to resorts. There is no capital punishment. Their crime rate is low; per capita our murder rate is about eight times larger than theirs. In Norway there is only a 20% rate of returning to prison within two years of release; in the United States that number is closer to a 50%.
What a socialist hellhole!
It seems to me that after a crime is committed there are two most important actions: reversing (if possible) the damage done, and using knowledge from that crime to prevent future crimes. Punishment of a wrongdoer may bring emotional closure to the wronged, but if this punishment doesn't actually reduce crime then we need to look for another solution.
And it doesn't -- the United States keeps a higher fraction of its population in prison than any other country on earth. With 5% of the global population we have something like 25% of the inmates. Far more than half of inmates are nonviolent offenders, largely due to mandatory minimum sentencing. But compared to other developed nations the United States has similar overall crime rates.
If a crime is committed for economic reasons -- to feed a family perhaps -- then it's a symptom of a fixable problem. In fact, it ought to be fixable for much less than the cost of punishment. Keeping one person in prison for a year costs the country something like $40,000. You can buy for a lot of community college or job training for that much money. Obviously making training opportunities available as a response to someone committing a crime is awkward positive reinforcement but a proactive approach seems very practical: reduce crime by reducing poverty by investing in social programs that create skilled workers.
Saving the money on prison is great. But it seems reasonable to expect that putting breadwinners to work instead of in prison might decrease the dependence on welfare programs as well.
More extreme than prison time is the death penalty. It is impractical to say the least, and yet another way that the United States is more like a developing country than a wealthy one; the practice is banned in Canada, Australia, and almost all of Europe. Nobody has been executed in South America in the last decade and Africa is moving away from the practice as well. For the most part, capital punishment exists here, in China, in India, and in the Middle East.
Implementing the death penalty gambles that a prisoner will never be exonerated. Furthermore it implies that the prisoner can never be rehabilitated. There is no matter of the rehabilitation being too costly; the cost of implementing the death penalty is comparable to -- and perhaps more expensive than -- the cost of a life sentence without parole. As this paper puts it, "We try to maintain the apparatus of state killing and another apparatus [the preceding legal deliberations] that almost guarantees that it won't happen. The public pays for both sides."
Of course, not all crime is committed out of economic desperation. In fact, there is debate as to the causal relationship between poverty and crime (though it's certainly true that there is a correlation -- the states with the highest poverty rate/lowest average income also tend to exhibit high crime rates). Certainly an example of non-economic crime could be the recent shootings in Aurora, Oak Creek, and the many others that routinely make it into the news. Dealing with criminals who have non-obvious motives is more complicated.
It's possible that some individuals are highly predisposed to violent outbursts from birth. If so, even if you had a way to screen them as children, what action would be appropriate before these people have done anything wrong? Similarly, abuse during formative years can lead to acting out violently (for example, see here). Can a person damaged far in the past be rehabilitated effectively?
How do you prevent crime by those who aren't getting the help they need for psychological or emotional issues? How do you handle them afterwards?
If crime is lucrative (for example, dealing drugs), how do you combat it? Marijuana is something I'll talk about in an upcoming post but I'll have to do a lot of reading before I have anything intelligent to say about harder drugs.
And there's likely something to be said for the gun culture we exhibit in this country. We have close to thirty gun homicides per day in the United States, which is close to triple the highest per capita rate you see in any European country. We also have the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, double that of Switzerland at number two. It seems likely that there are systematic and cultural issues at play.
Unfortunately, not only are these issues nebulous, they're probably interrelated. It's a mess.
We can quickly look at Norway's system for comparison, as it draws sharp contrasts to ours. In Norway the maximum prison sentence is 21 years, though it can be extended if the individual is deemed to still be dangerous. Their prisons are notably nicer than ours, in some cases being compared to resorts. There is no capital punishment. Their crime rate is low; per capita our murder rate is about eight times larger than theirs. In Norway there is only a 20% rate of returning to prison within two years of release; in the United States that number is closer to a 50%.
What a socialist hellhole!
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Football Scoring
I guessed some time ago that football games would have the same outcome if touchdowns were worth ten (or even a hundred) points and field goals only a single point; now that I have done some research I can actually discuss the problem in some more detail. It turns out that in American football, for practical purposes, field goals, safeties, and two-point conversions do not matter. They serve only as tiebreakers for touchdowns.
I of course am speaking only from a practical reading of games that have happened in the past. I'm sure having field goals be worth almost half of a touchdown makes them feel relevant while watching a game. I'm sure it's exciting to imagine catching up to a touchdown incrementally through field goals and conversions.
But it doesn't happen.
Without a good way of accessing game history data I was limited by my patience in looking up final game scores and, more importantly, the scoring patterns that make them up. I ended up looking up the past twenty Super Bowls on Wikipedia. Each one supports my hypothesis, though some more obviously than others.
First, a quick overview of the types of scoring we see.
Two-Point Conversions (±1 point) -- In some cases a team will choose to attempt a two-point conversion instead of kicking the extra point for a touchdown. This essentially amounts to gambling a point since the kick is almost never missed. In most games no team will attempt a two-point conversion, though in some games they will be attempted several times. According to Wikipedia, these succeed about half the time.
Field Goal (3 points) -- If a drive is unsuccessful at reaching the end zone for a touch down, the team can choose to kick a field goal instead. The kick takes place from the current field position, so the rate of success of the field goal depends on the penetration of the drive into opposition territory.
Safety (2 points) -- Sometimes the team in possession of the ball will be driven backwards and tackled in their own end zone. In this case the defense is awarded two points. This almost never happens.
It was my hypothesis that seven points, being more than double three points, might as well be infinitely more. In order to make up a deficit of a single touchdown, a team has to attain a three field goal surplus, or two field goals plus a successful two-point conversion. Since possession changes hands after each scoring event (meaning that the team that's behind must also prevent the other team from scoring on multiple drives) this seems unlikely to happen.
In thirteen of the past twenty Super Bowls, one team has scored more touchdowns. All thirteen of those teams have won.
In six of the remaining seven, the teams have earned the same number of touchdowns, but one team has had more field goals. The team with more field goals has won all five of these. There was a safety and a two-point conversion attempt here and there, but none changed the outcome of the game.
The final game was the 2004 Super Bowl, in which the Panthers and the Patriots each scored four touchdowns and a single field goal. The Panthers attempted a pair of two-point conversions, failing both; the Patriots attempted only one and got it.
The same winners would result in each case if, for example, touchdowns were worth ten points, safeties and field goals were worth a point each, and after each touchdown a team had the option of wagering a single point on a conversion.
This would perhaps be less of a tease on the viewer, who can no longer reasonably imagine that you can make up a touchdown deficit, but my (admittedly small) sample does not show that the outcomes of games would change. I do not intend to continue researching this topic, but would be interested to hear of a game that defies this rule.
EDIT: Alex found an easily-processed play-by-play list of every football game played in the NFL since 2002 on http://www.advancednflstats.com/. More thorough analysis will follow but our preliminary estimate is that field goals matter in about 5% of games (one in twenty). This holds up pretty well for each of the past ten years. We are not able to comment on years before 2002.
I of course am speaking only from a practical reading of games that have happened in the past. I'm sure having field goals be worth almost half of a touchdown makes them feel relevant while watching a game. I'm sure it's exciting to imagine catching up to a touchdown incrementally through field goals and conversions.
But it doesn't happen.
Without a good way of accessing game history data I was limited by my patience in looking up final game scores and, more importantly, the scoring patterns that make them up. I ended up looking up the past twenty Super Bowls on Wikipedia. Each one supports my hypothesis, though some more obviously than others.
First, a quick overview of the types of scoring we see.
| Touchdowns (7 points) -- These make up by far the bulk of points scored in Super Bowls. A touchdown is achieved by running the ball to the end zone or throwing it to a receiver there. Strictly speaking a touchdown is worth only six points, the seventh being a kick through the goalpost immediately following the touchdown. |
 One million points to Gryffindor! |
Two-Point Conversions (±1 point) -- In some cases a team will choose to attempt a two-point conversion instead of kicking the extra point for a touchdown. This essentially amounts to gambling a point since the kick is almost never missed. In most games no team will attempt a two-point conversion, though in some games they will be attempted several times. According to Wikipedia, these succeed about half the time.
Field Goal (3 points) -- If a drive is unsuccessful at reaching the end zone for a touch down, the team can choose to kick a field goal instead. The kick takes place from the current field position, so the rate of success of the field goal depends on the penetration of the drive into opposition territory.
Safety (2 points) -- Sometimes the team in possession of the ball will be driven backwards and tackled in their own end zone. In this case the defense is awarded two points. This almost never happens.
It was my hypothesis that seven points, being more than double three points, might as well be infinitely more. In order to make up a deficit of a single touchdown, a team has to attain a three field goal surplus, or two field goals plus a successful two-point conversion. Since possession changes hands after each scoring event (meaning that the team that's behind must also prevent the other team from scoring on multiple drives) this seems unlikely to happen.
 Don't bother, kid. | It turns out that this is true; touchdowns seem to always determine the winner of the game, with all other scoring methods being only important as tiebreakers. It doesn't even really matter how exactly we rate conversions, field goals, and safeties with regard to one another. From the past twenty Super Bowls, we see the following: |
In thirteen of the past twenty Super Bowls, one team has scored more touchdowns. All thirteen of those teams have won.
In six of the remaining seven, the teams have earned the same number of touchdowns, but one team has had more field goals. The team with more field goals has won all five of these. There was a safety and a two-point conversion attempt here and there, but none changed the outcome of the game.
The final game was the 2004 Super Bowl, in which the Panthers and the Patriots each scored four touchdowns and a single field goal. The Panthers attempted a pair of two-point conversions, failing both; the Patriots attempted only one and got it.
The same winners would result in each case if, for example, touchdowns were worth ten points, safeties and field goals were worth a point each, and after each touchdown a team had the option of wagering a single point on a conversion.
This would perhaps be less of a tease on the viewer, who can no longer reasonably imagine that you can make up a touchdown deficit, but my (admittedly small) sample does not show that the outcomes of games would change. I do not intend to continue researching this topic, but would be interested to hear of a game that defies this rule.
EDIT: Alex found an easily-processed play-by-play list of every football game played in the NFL since 2002 on http://www.advancednflstats.com/. More thorough analysis will follow but our preliminary estimate is that field goals matter in about 5% of games (one in twenty). This holds up pretty well for each of the past ten years. We are not able to comment on years before 2002.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Personal Identification
Identity is so crucially important to our society that it's surprising we haven't come up with a better way to handle it. Current systems are awkward while existing technology could offer a dramatic increase in security and cleanliness.
Let's start with computers. Each person has usernames and passwords -- sometimes dozens of each. Usernames must be unique to the user. Passwords must be gibberish according to whatever standards the website chooses to require (mix of capital and lowercase letters, must have numbers, must/must not have special characters). Security is decreased if the same passwords are used on multiple websites, and some mandate that passwords be changed periodically.
Some websites (Facebook, for example) conveniently allow you to use your email address as a username in order to decrease by one the number of strings you need to remember. The browser can do some of the work as well by remembering information. But these just mitigate a few problems in a system which fits our needs in the most basic way possible.
Because passwords can so easily be forgotten the system necessarily includes a way for people to prove their identities through "security questions" and social security numbers. Unfortunately those questions rely on information which isn't really a secret -- with a little knowledge about someone even their social security number can often be guessed.
Humans are uniquely identified in enough natural ways that we shouldn't need to rely on artificial means such as usernames and passwords. Voice patterns, signature dynamics, fingerprints, and retinal blood flow patterns are all unique identifiers but even a photograph of your face will get very close to unique identification. Some of these can be forged (for example your voice can be recorded) but a combination of several identifiers quickly becomes harder to hack than a text password.
Furthermore, it is increasingly common to see webcams and microphones built right in to monitors, laptops, phones, and tablets. If you're online, odds are that the device you're using has all the hardware it needs to verify your identity. Analysis of a voice is easy enough, as is taking a picture of a face or an eye. Signature dynamics could certainly be captured on a touch screen (and note that smartphones and tablets are a rapidly growing share of the computing market). And fingerprint scanners can already be built into laptops or even USB sticks.
You may be concerned that this essentially amounts to using the same login information everywhere -- one sketchy website and suddenly your bank accounts are empty. There are several ways around this problem.
One solution is to have a different phrase for each website. Since your voice is the identifier this does not need to be a secret (that is, forgettable) password; to log in to Google you could say "Google." This means that even if your voice is lifted by www.stealmycash.com, they haven't got enough information to log in anywhere else. This only works to a certain extent, though, as with enough samples they can interpolate your entire voice (as was done for the hologram Tupac).
The more secure option is to have verification done by a central authority, something like an OpenID. Rather than logging in with each website individually, you hit the "Log in with Google" button and let Google, which you trust, handle the verification.
Of course there's no way to make it completely foolproof -- identity theft will always exist -- but to me it seems that the entire premise of a login could be significantly more convenient and intuitive without losing security.
Real life presents a similar situation. Just about everything you carry on your person serves the same purpose. Your drivers license, passport, credit cards, bus pass, and even keys have no function other than to explain who you are in a very specialized way. Replacing all of these with visual, auditory, or fingerprint identification is perhaps unrealistic, at least in the foreseeable future. Airports and other large establishments certainly have the resources to implement fingerprint or voice recognition software but mom and pop shops may not have the means to acquire so much new hardware. At the very least, however, we can do some consolidating.
For example, it would be logistically trivial to combine your drivers license and passport into a single card and eliminate the booklet altogether. In fact passport cards already exist, though they are not approved for air travel (this is a bureaucratic problem, not a technological one I'm sure).
Any sort of membership card or pass can easily be added as well, since this passport/license both uniquely identifies you and contains an RFID chip; any door that could be opened with your work ID can be programmed to accept your passport code instead.
RFID credit cards exist as well, though there are concerns over security. But whether or not the RFID technology is linked to financial information, it's increasingly the case that no more than one card is necessary to access your money (and why not combine that into your passport as well?).
Banks already allow you to set up default accounts; my old check card was linked to two checking accounts and a savings account. At the ATM I was able to specify where I wanted a withdrawal to come from and online I set one account to be the default that would be accessed when the card was swiped. A credit line could in principle also have been added to that card, even multiple lines, with no additional problem.
And online settings could even allow conditional default accounts; it would not be complicated to set it up so that making an airline purchase would automatically be charged to your SkyMiles card while groceries would go on your other card which gives better rewards for those.
This could even be done across multiple banks!
These specific options are not available but the technology to implement them is. None of this is more complicated than moving money between accounts, which can already be done online in real time.
As with any credit card/passport/identification, this super-card is not something that you would want stolen. A giant picture on the front of the card can impede fraudulent use. And as long as we're making use of technology we might as well include a GPS chip small enough to fit within the card.
(If this is getting a little too Orwellian for you, keep in mind that you probably already have GPS functionality in your phone.)
Of course the most secure solution would just be to eliminate the card entirely in favor of something which cannot be lost, such as an RFID implant (not so different from what they use in animals). This of course requires RFID readers anywhere you need to use your credit card, though in principle that's no different from a card scanner. The final step would be one past that where you actually use biometric identification everywhere, not just online; the hangup here is that it requires the distribution of a LOT of hardware.
Let's start with computers. Each person has usernames and passwords -- sometimes dozens of each. Usernames must be unique to the user. Passwords must be gibberish according to whatever standards the website chooses to require (mix of capital and lowercase letters, must have numbers, must/must not have special characters). Security is decreased if the same passwords are used on multiple websites, and some mandate that passwords be changed periodically.
Some websites (Facebook, for example) conveniently allow you to use your email address as a username in order to decrease by one the number of strings you need to remember. The browser can do some of the work as well by remembering information. But these just mitigate a few problems in a system which fits our needs in the most basic way possible.
Because passwords can so easily be forgotten the system necessarily includes a way for people to prove their identities through "security questions" and social security numbers. Unfortunately those questions rely on information which isn't really a secret -- with a little knowledge about someone even their social security number can often be guessed.
Humans are uniquely identified in enough natural ways that we shouldn't need to rely on artificial means such as usernames and passwords. Voice patterns, signature dynamics, fingerprints, and retinal blood flow patterns are all unique identifiers but even a photograph of your face will get very close to unique identification. Some of these can be forged (for example your voice can be recorded) but a combination of several identifiers quickly becomes harder to hack than a text password.
Furthermore, it is increasingly common to see webcams and microphones built right in to monitors, laptops, phones, and tablets. If you're online, odds are that the device you're using has all the hardware it needs to verify your identity. Analysis of a voice is easy enough, as is taking a picture of a face or an eye. Signature dynamics could certainly be captured on a touch screen (and note that smartphones and tablets are a rapidly growing share of the computing market). And fingerprint scanners can already be built into laptops or even USB sticks.
You may be concerned that this essentially amounts to using the same login information everywhere -- one sketchy website and suddenly your bank accounts are empty. There are several ways around this problem.
One solution is to have a different phrase for each website. Since your voice is the identifier this does not need to be a secret (that is, forgettable) password; to log in to Google you could say "Google." This means that even if your voice is lifted by www.stealmycash.com, they haven't got enough information to log in anywhere else. This only works to a certain extent, though, as with enough samples they can interpolate your entire voice (as was done for the hologram Tupac).
The more secure option is to have verification done by a central authority, something like an OpenID. Rather than logging in with each website individually, you hit the "Log in with Google" button and let Google, which you trust, handle the verification.
Of course there's no way to make it completely foolproof -- identity theft will always exist -- but to me it seems that the entire premise of a login could be significantly more convenient and intuitive without losing security.
Real life presents a similar situation. Just about everything you carry on your person serves the same purpose. Your drivers license, passport, credit cards, bus pass, and even keys have no function other than to explain who you are in a very specialized way. Replacing all of these with visual, auditory, or fingerprint identification is perhaps unrealistic, at least in the foreseeable future. Airports and other large establishments certainly have the resources to implement fingerprint or voice recognition software but mom and pop shops may not have the means to acquire so much new hardware. At the very least, however, we can do some consolidating.
For example, it would be logistically trivial to combine your drivers license and passport into a single card and eliminate the booklet altogether. In fact passport cards already exist, though they are not approved for air travel (this is a bureaucratic problem, not a technological one I'm sure).
Any sort of membership card or pass can easily be added as well, since this passport/license both uniquely identifies you and contains an RFID chip; any door that could be opened with your work ID can be programmed to accept your passport code instead.
RFID credit cards exist as well, though there are concerns over security. But whether or not the RFID technology is linked to financial information, it's increasingly the case that no more than one card is necessary to access your money (and why not combine that into your passport as well?).
Banks already allow you to set up default accounts; my old check card was linked to two checking accounts and a savings account. At the ATM I was able to specify where I wanted a withdrawal to come from and online I set one account to be the default that would be accessed when the card was swiped. A credit line could in principle also have been added to that card, even multiple lines, with no additional problem.
And online settings could even allow conditional default accounts; it would not be complicated to set it up so that making an airline purchase would automatically be charged to your SkyMiles card while groceries would go on your other card which gives better rewards for those.
This could even be done across multiple banks!
These specific options are not available but the technology to implement them is. None of this is more complicated than moving money between accounts, which can already be done online in real time.
As with any credit card/passport/identification, this super-card is not something that you would want stolen. A giant picture on the front of the card can impede fraudulent use. And as long as we're making use of technology we might as well include a GPS chip small enough to fit within the card.
(If this is getting a little too Orwellian for you, keep in mind that you probably already have GPS functionality in your phone.)
Of course the most secure solution would just be to eliminate the card entirely in favor of something which cannot be lost, such as an RFID implant (not so different from what they use in animals). This of course requires RFID readers anywhere you need to use your credit card, though in principle that's no different from a card scanner. The final step would be one past that where you actually use biometric identification everywhere, not just online; the hangup here is that it requires the distribution of a LOT of hardware.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Sangria
Rather than have two blogs I'm absorbing Cooking with Charles into Thinking with Charles. This blog exists for me to write about whatever. Sometimes I want to write about food, but probably not often enough to maintain an additional space to do so. You'll also notice that old Cooking with Charles posts have been imported here.
One of my goals for this summer is to figure out how to make a good sangria. I perused several recipes online until I found one I liked the look of, though I did not adhere to it particularly closely. Here's the recipe I used, which is a half batch due to the size of my pitcher. To use the whole bottle of wine, double this.
As the recipe recommends, I let the fruit and sugar sit in the rum and triple sec for a few hours before adding the wine. I mad to mush the fruit down a little bit to get it all to be covered. Before serving I poured in the wine and stirred it up. I did not serve it over ice, though all of the ingredients were cold.
When I fished out a piece of pear later in the evening it wasn't particularly boozy so I don't know that letting the fruit sit in the rum had much of an effect. In the future I'll probably just combine all of the ingredients at the same time then let it sit for at least an afternoon, maybe overnight, to really let the flavors blend.
I used the sugar because it appears in most recipes but I don't think it belongs. Most of it did not even dissolve (you can see it at the bottom of the pitcher) but the drink was plenty sweet. It's hard to tell how sweet it would have been had I followed the recipe more closely; I left out the orange juice but did use triple sec which is very sweet.
This drink was good, but I intend to experiment more with sangrias this summer to really get a feel for them. There are a lot of potential ingredients -- fruits, beverages, herbs, and so on -- to try out. At the very least I'd like to have in my repertoire a good recipe for red wine and another for white.
UPDATE: After drinking the first batch (short work with so many helpers) I repeated this with the second half of the bottle. I used the same recipe, minus the sugar, and reused the same fruit. All ingredients were added at once. The mix sat in the fridge for about 24 hours before being tasted. The sangria itself was about the same -- still plenty sweet -- and the pear chunks were very boozy and delicious.
One of my goals for this summer is to figure out how to make a good sangria. I perused several recipes online until I found one I liked the look of, though I did not adhere to it particularly closely. Here's the recipe I used, which is a half batch due to the size of my pitcher. To use the whole bottle of wine, double this.
|
 |
As the recipe recommends, I let the fruit and sugar sit in the rum and triple sec for a few hours before adding the wine. I mad to mush the fruit down a little bit to get it all to be covered. Before serving I poured in the wine and stirred it up. I did not serve it over ice, though all of the ingredients were cold.
When I fished out a piece of pear later in the evening it wasn't particularly boozy so I don't know that letting the fruit sit in the rum had much of an effect. In the future I'll probably just combine all of the ingredients at the same time then let it sit for at least an afternoon, maybe overnight, to really let the flavors blend.
I used the sugar because it appears in most recipes but I don't think it belongs. Most of it did not even dissolve (you can see it at the bottom of the pitcher) but the drink was plenty sweet. It's hard to tell how sweet it would have been had I followed the recipe more closely; I left out the orange juice but did use triple sec which is very sweet.
This drink was good, but I intend to experiment more with sangrias this summer to really get a feel for them. There are a lot of potential ingredients -- fruits, beverages, herbs, and so on -- to try out. At the very least I'd like to have in my repertoire a good recipe for red wine and another for white.
UPDATE: After drinking the first batch (short work with so many helpers) I repeated this with the second half of the bottle. I used the same recipe, minus the sugar, and reused the same fruit. All ingredients were added at once. The mix sat in the fridge for about 24 hours before being tasted. The sangria itself was about the same -- still plenty sweet -- and the pear chunks were very boozy and delicious.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
A Break
All,
I'm taking a break from blogging to take my preliminary oral exams. I need to write a paper, put together a talk, and study furiously in preparation for getting grilled by four professors for two hours about any physics they feel like asking me about.
Expect updates to resume soon after May 3rd.
Thanks for reading!
Charles
I'm taking a break from blogging to take my preliminary oral exams. I need to write a paper, put together a talk, and study furiously in preparation for getting grilled by four professors for two hours about any physics they feel like asking me about.
Expect updates to resume soon after May 3rd.
Thanks for reading!
Charles
Thursday, April 5, 2012
The American Political System
Our political architecture is a mess. Our entrenched two-party system rewards dickishness and limits voter preference to one political dimension. Our voting scheme damps the possibility of a third party. The electoral college is fundamentally undemocratic. It's no wonder our government is viewed as ineffective.
Let's start out with voting. Though perhaps the most intuitive, ours is not the only way to vote; there are many possible voting schemes. Though it's been proven that no voting scheme can be perfect, we can do better.
As we have it everyone gets to cast a single vote for a single candidate. If there are two candidates that they like they must choose between them. If we were directly electing representatives this would be great at ensuring proportional representation (for example, if distributing 100 seats, 48% of the vote for Democrats means that they get 48 seats). However, in electing a single president, our system is easily disrupted by third-party candidates "splitting the vote."
One of the simplest alternatives is having each voter rank their choices first through Nth in the case of N candidates. For example if 55% prefer Gore to Bush he would win, even if 10% prefer Nader to Gore.
Approval voting is similar, though rather than a rating each candidate simply gets a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. The candidate with the most thumbs up wins; this avoids the possibility (however implausible) of having a majority prefer Gore to Bush, but also having a majority prefer Nader to Gore, but also having a majority prefer Bush to Nader.
Beyond how the votes are cast we can draw issue with how they're counted. The electoral college has been opposed by the strong majority of Americans for decades, according to the Gallup Poll. Proponents of the electoral college (according to Wikipedia), argue that it is "an important, distinguishing feature of federalism in the United States," giving a halfway point between a direct election and a congressional appointment for the office of the president. Furthermore it ensures that the small states are not marginalized.
In principle the electoral college prevents a politician from campaigning only to the big states; the twelve most populous states contain over half of Americans. Suppose I run for president, and my platform is to dramatically increase the taxes in the thirty least populous states while abolishing federal taxes in the most populous states (this is probably unconstitutional, but you get the idea). If there were no other issues, I would presumably win all of the large states in a landslide, and thus the popular vote. The electoral college gives extra say to the small states to make them relevant. This is the same reason that we have a Senate rather than just a House of Representatives.
However, people are not rational voters and they make choices based on a variety of issues so I would argue that this advantage is overshadowed by the disadvantages of the electoral college system.
The overrepresentation of small states is dramatic. Effectively each person in Montana gets triple the vote of a person in Texas. It also marginalizes almost all of the voters. Voting Democrat in a blue state is redundant while voting Republican in a blue state is futile. Only swing states are important since other states are so predictable. On the rare occasion that a blue state votes for a Republican (as in Reagan vs. Mondale) the votes in that state still didn't matter because the candidate was strong enough to carry the election using red states and swing states.
The presidential primaries, which at this point are a half-year spectacle or more, already choose candidates as if the vote were popular. The preferences of Florida, which is crucially important, are not held above those of California and Texas, which are completely predictable. It wouldn't make for much of a show, but a more electable candidate could be found by only counting swing states; that's where the vast majority of general election campaigning will be anyway.
Switching to a popular vote would be trivial, since we already count all the votes. In addition to making our representation more uniform this removes the possibility of faithless electors. No faithless elector has ever changed the outcome of a presidential election (and many states even have laws against the practice) it seems foolish to invite the possibility.
Additionally, a popular vote makes it easier for minor parties to accumulate recognition, as they do not need to be the majority in any single state to be acknowledged.
A strict two-party systems makes strange bedfellows; in order to vote for the openly Christian candidate, a working class man must vote against his own economic interests (that is, be taxed more and see less for it). Similarly a pharmaceutical corporation, to experience lower taxes, must support the party that opposes teaching biology in public schools.
There's plenty more political dysfunction in this country to talk about but this is about as much as I can expose you to at once in good conscience. Perhaps at a later date we'll compare our year-and-a-half-long, multi-billion-dollar, TV-attack-ad-filled, presidential selection routine to that of some countries.
Let's start out with voting. Though perhaps the most intuitive, ours is not the only way to vote; there are many possible voting schemes. Though it's been proven that no voting scheme can be perfect, we can do better.
As we have it everyone gets to cast a single vote for a single candidate. If there are two candidates that they like they must choose between them. If we were directly electing representatives this would be great at ensuring proportional representation (for example, if distributing 100 seats, 48% of the vote for Democrats means that they get 48 seats). However, in electing a single president, our system is easily disrupted by third-party candidates "splitting the vote."
One of the simplest alternatives is having each voter rank their choices first through Nth in the case of N candidates. For example if 55% prefer Gore to Bush he would win, even if 10% prefer Nader to Gore.
Approval voting is similar, though rather than a rating each candidate simply gets a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. The candidate with the most thumbs up wins; this avoids the possibility (however implausible) of having a majority prefer Gore to Bush, but also having a majority prefer Nader to Gore, but also having a majority prefer Bush to Nader.
Beyond how the votes are cast we can draw issue with how they're counted. The electoral college has been opposed by the strong majority of Americans for decades, according to the Gallup Poll. Proponents of the electoral college (according to Wikipedia), argue that it is "an important, distinguishing feature of federalism in the United States," giving a halfway point between a direct election and a congressional appointment for the office of the president. Furthermore it ensures that the small states are not marginalized.
In principle the electoral college prevents a politician from campaigning only to the big states; the twelve most populous states contain over half of Americans. Suppose I run for president, and my platform is to dramatically increase the taxes in the thirty least populous states while abolishing federal taxes in the most populous states (this is probably unconstitutional, but you get the idea). If there were no other issues, I would presumably win all of the large states in a landslide, and thus the popular vote. The electoral college gives extra say to the small states to make them relevant. This is the same reason that we have a Senate rather than just a House of Representatives.
However, people are not rational voters and they make choices based on a variety of issues so I would argue that this advantage is overshadowed by the disadvantages of the electoral college system.
The overrepresentation of small states is dramatic. Effectively each person in Montana gets triple the vote of a person in Texas. It also marginalizes almost all of the voters. Voting Democrat in a blue state is redundant while voting Republican in a blue state is futile. Only swing states are important since other states are so predictable. On the rare occasion that a blue state votes for a Republican (as in Reagan vs. Mondale) the votes in that state still didn't matter because the candidate was strong enough to carry the election using red states and swing states.
The presidential primaries, which at this point are a half-year spectacle or more, already choose candidates as if the vote were popular. The preferences of Florida, which is crucially important, are not held above those of California and Texas, which are completely predictable. It wouldn't make for much of a show, but a more electable candidate could be found by only counting swing states; that's where the vast majority of general election campaigning will be anyway.
Switching to a popular vote would be trivial, since we already count all the votes. In addition to making our representation more uniform this removes the possibility of faithless electors. No faithless elector has ever changed the outcome of a presidential election (and many states even have laws against the practice) it seems foolish to invite the possibility.
Additionally, a popular vote makes it easier for minor parties to accumulate recognition, as they do not need to be the majority in any single state to be acknowledged.
A strict two-party systems makes strange bedfellows; in order to vote for the openly Christian candidate, a working class man must vote against his own economic interests (that is, be taxed more and see less for it). Similarly a pharmaceutical corporation, to experience lower taxes, must support the party that opposes teaching biology in public schools.
Having only two parties disincentivizes compromise. The Republican congress has shown us that through filibustering and strict party unity they can essentially shut down any legislation that is not in line with their agenda - and since the Democrats are the ones trying to implement changes this means that the Republicans are winning the political game.
The existence of additional parties (the most obvious would be a fiscally conservative but socially tolerant - Libertarian - party and a fiscally liberal and socially conservative - Orwellian? - party, though there are of course more than two degrees of freedom) would give voters more freedom in what they want the government to do, as well as giving legislators more angles from which to pursue compromise.
This is a dimension present in the legislatures of many other countries, though I'll have to explore that in detail in a later post.
The existence of additional parties (the most obvious would be a fiscally conservative but socially tolerant - Libertarian - party and a fiscally liberal and socially conservative - Orwellian? - party, though there are of course more than two degrees of freedom) would give voters more freedom in what they want the government to do, as well as giving legislators more angles from which to pursue compromise.
This is a dimension present in the legislatures of many other countries, though I'll have to explore that in detail in a later post.
There's plenty more political dysfunction in this country to talk about but this is about as much as I can expose you to at once in good conscience. Perhaps at a later date we'll compare our year-and-a-half-long, multi-billion-dollar, TV-attack-ad-filled, presidential selection routine to that of some countries.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Introduction to Abortion
Abortion is a complicated issue. Any claim otherwise would be convenient but does not hold up to scrutiny.
A single egg is not a person (or women would charged with murder every time they menstruate). Similarly a single sperm is not a person (with, very conservatively, 100 million men of reproductive age each producing 100 million sperm per day, and with 4 million babies born per year, that's about one sperm out of a trillion -- 1,000,000,000,000 -- that will ever become a baby). So before conception, obviously, there is no issue.
Even after conception nothing is certain. Though figures vary, somewhere around half of conceptions are aborted naturally, mostly before the woman is even aware of the pregnancy, and mostly due to defects in the fetus. This is even more pronounced among women over 40 and those who have previously miscarried.
Personhood is not well defined but certainly it has some correlation with biological complexity. The complexity of a zygote is not much more than a sperm plus an egg. It grows quickly, but a human embryo is not really distinguished from that of any other mammal (such as the cow you kill to eat or the mouse you kill for convenience) until quite a few weeks into development. At nine weeks, after which abortions decline sharply, the fetus is roughly the size of a grape. And it's not a grape-sized person by any means; it's just starting to develop a skeletal structure.
Plot of abortions in the US vs. gestational age in 2004
On the other side of that coin, late in pregnancy a fetus is basically a baby. Provided some intensive care immediately after birth, babies even a few months premature can lead normal lives. Appropriately enough, very few abortions take place at this stage. The United States lags other developed nations in this respect, but even so 98% of abortions in the US take place before 20 weeks (halfway through pregnancy).
In terms of effects we can measure on a societal level (that is, not counting the erosion of America's soul), legal access to abortions is good for us as a country. Abortions still take place in nations with laws restricting or outlawing them. In these cases they are much more likely to be unsafe and the woman is much more likely to suffer complications, including death. Something like 68,000 women die per year due to unsafe abortions, mostly in developing countries. Furthermore, though it's controversial, some argue that legalized abortion lowers crime by reducing the number of children born into families that won't take care of them. Historically there has been a drop in crime 18-24 years after abortion becomes legalized in a state (as well as nationwide from Roe vs. Wade).
Abortions can be divided between elective and theraputic (to save the life of the mother, or protect her from very probably harm). I have to believe that proponents of banning theraputic abortions are in the fringe minority; at any point in pregnancy the mother is obviously more of a person than the fetus. The loss of a perhaps viable child is tragic, but less so than the loss of a woman.
Perhaps even more extreme is recent legislation (Georgia HB 954) that outlaws the surgical removal of an already stillborn fetus, even in the interest of the mother's health. It is the norm in politics right now to treat abortion as a simple issue that you can either be for or against. That is simply not the case.
A single egg is not a person (or women would charged with murder every time they menstruate). Similarly a single sperm is not a person (with, very conservatively, 100 million men of reproductive age each producing 100 million sperm per day, and with 4 million babies born per year, that's about one sperm out of a trillion -- 1,000,000,000,000 -- that will ever become a baby). So before conception, obviously, there is no issue.
Even after conception nothing is certain. Though figures vary, somewhere around half of conceptions are aborted naturally, mostly before the woman is even aware of the pregnancy, and mostly due to defects in the fetus. This is even more pronounced among women over 40 and those who have previously miscarried.
Personhood is not well defined but certainly it has some correlation with biological complexity. The complexity of a zygote is not much more than a sperm plus an egg. It grows quickly, but a human embryo is not really distinguished from that of any other mammal (such as the cow you kill to eat or the mouse you kill for convenience) until quite a few weeks into development. At nine weeks, after which abortions decline sharply, the fetus is roughly the size of a grape. And it's not a grape-sized person by any means; it's just starting to develop a skeletal structure.
Plot of abortions in the US vs. gestational age in 2004
On the other side of that coin, late in pregnancy a fetus is basically a baby. Provided some intensive care immediately after birth, babies even a few months premature can lead normal lives. Appropriately enough, very few abortions take place at this stage. The United States lags other developed nations in this respect, but even so 98% of abortions in the US take place before 20 weeks (halfway through pregnancy).
In terms of effects we can measure on a societal level (that is, not counting the erosion of America's soul), legal access to abortions is good for us as a country. Abortions still take place in nations with laws restricting or outlawing them. In these cases they are much more likely to be unsafe and the woman is much more likely to suffer complications, including death. Something like 68,000 women die per year due to unsafe abortions, mostly in developing countries. Furthermore, though it's controversial, some argue that legalized abortion lowers crime by reducing the number of children born into families that won't take care of them. Historically there has been a drop in crime 18-24 years after abortion becomes legalized in a state (as well as nationwide from Roe vs. Wade).
Abortions can be divided between elective and theraputic (to save the life of the mother, or protect her from very probably harm). I have to believe that proponents of banning theraputic abortions are in the fringe minority; at any point in pregnancy the mother is obviously more of a person than the fetus. The loss of a perhaps viable child is tragic, but less so than the loss of a woman.
Perhaps even more extreme is recent legislation (Georgia HB 954) that outlaws the surgical removal of an already stillborn fetus, even in the interest of the mother's health. It is the norm in politics right now to treat abortion as a simple issue that you can either be for or against. That is simply not the case.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Nudity and Pornography
The puritanical idea that we must convince our children that sex does not exist, and that a naked body is sinful, is unsustainable. Asymmetry in indecent exposure precedent is perhaps not measurably bad for the country (as abstinence-only sex education is) but it is certainly awkward and pointless. For most adults in this country, sex - even recreational sex - is a regular part of life. Premarital sex is nearly universal and nearly all sexually active women have used contraception.
I'll accept that genitals ought to be covered. It's probably justifiable from a hygiene angle. But mandating that a woman's nipples must be covered is, as far as I can tell, nonsense. It's certainly incorrect to have gender asymmetry in the rule; the idea that a female nipple is more sexual than a male nipple is hard to justify. If you're unconvinced, try to tell which sex each of these nipples belongs to.
(Just a heads up - be careful about putting "nipple" into a Google image search; apparently nipple enlargement, nipple torture, and giant nipple piercings are pretty popular on the internet.)
Furthermore, if our goal is to protect children from explicit material, banning the female nipple is a really bad way to do it (of course it is generally easy to tell if a picture contains a female nipple; you'll notice that discussing complex issues as if they're black and white is a recurring pet peeve of mine). For example, you'll notice that of the four images below, three have exposed nipples. The first is art. The second is educational, helping teach how to do a self breast exam. The third, breastfeeding, I had to modify because a Google bot flagged it as pornographic. However, only the last image, "Sexy Bikini Girl," who has her nipples covered, is undeniably sexual.
And though this should go without saying, acknowledging that a nude body is not inherently dirty is not the same as insisting that everyone be naked all the time. Men are free to bare their entire torsos in public but few do. When not constrained by laws we are still constrained by practicality.
This is of course not to say that a naked body cannot be sexual; it obviously can be. But nudity is not inherently pornographic and it should not be censored as if to see it is shameful. Like comprehensive sex education, the stigma associated with pornography comes from the religious notion that we must be sexually pure. This is completely irreconcilable with reality.
According to surveys, only a quarter think pornography is protected under the First Amendment, just over a third think it's "morally acceptable to look at pictures of nudity or sexually explicit behavior," while 82% of adults think that laws against online obscenity should be "vigorously enforced." Meanwhile, back in fact land, one in four web searches is for pornography, one in ten emails is pornographic, half of all online spending is pornographic, and thirty million Americans - about one sixth of online users at the time - access online porn per day. Two thirds of men between 20 and 40 admit to looking at online porn regularly, as do a third of churchgoing women. These figures are from 2005, but you get the idea.
Shame over the sexual act is obsolete. Kinsey showed us sixty years ago that just about everyone is sexual; there comes a point where you can no longer act surprised and indignant.
That said, pornography is overwhelmingly aimed at men. It portrays sex as a male-dominated, even misogynistic, act. This is a norm I don't think we should accept as a culture. However, that's hard to change, as I imagine that porn production is market driven. And with annual porn revenues conservatively at ten billion dollars (in 2005), producers have a pretty big sample as far as gauging what sells.
(The nipples were all male.)
I'll accept that genitals ought to be covered. It's probably justifiable from a hygiene angle. But mandating that a woman's nipples must be covered is, as far as I can tell, nonsense. It's certainly incorrect to have gender asymmetry in the rule; the idea that a female nipple is more sexual than a male nipple is hard to justify. If you're unconvinced, try to tell which sex each of these nipples belongs to.
(Just a heads up - be careful about putting "nipple" into a Google image search; apparently nipple enlargement, nipple torture, and giant nipple piercings are pretty popular on the internet.)
Furthermore, if our goal is to protect children from explicit material, banning the female nipple is a really bad way to do it (of course it is generally easy to tell if a picture contains a female nipple; you'll notice that discussing complex issues as if they're black and white is a recurring pet peeve of mine). For example, you'll notice that of the four images below, three have exposed nipples. The first is art. The second is educational, helping teach how to do a self breast exam. The third, breastfeeding, I had to modify because a Google bot flagged it as pornographic. However, only the last image, "Sexy Bikini Girl," who has her nipples covered, is undeniably sexual.
And though this should go without saying, acknowledging that a nude body is not inherently dirty is not the same as insisting that everyone be naked all the time. Men are free to bare their entire torsos in public but few do. When not constrained by laws we are still constrained by practicality.
This is of course not to say that a naked body cannot be sexual; it obviously can be. But nudity is not inherently pornographic and it should not be censored as if to see it is shameful. Like comprehensive sex education, the stigma associated with pornography comes from the religious notion that we must be sexually pure. This is completely irreconcilable with reality.
According to surveys, only a quarter think pornography is protected under the First Amendment, just over a third think it's "morally acceptable to look at pictures of nudity or sexually explicit behavior," while 82% of adults think that laws against online obscenity should be "vigorously enforced." Meanwhile, back in fact land, one in four web searches is for pornography, one in ten emails is pornographic, half of all online spending is pornographic, and thirty million Americans - about one sixth of online users at the time - access online porn per day. Two thirds of men between 20 and 40 admit to looking at online porn regularly, as do a third of churchgoing women. These figures are from 2005, but you get the idea.
Shame over the sexual act is obsolete. Kinsey showed us sixty years ago that just about everyone is sexual; there comes a point where you can no longer act surprised and indignant.
That said, pornography is overwhelmingly aimed at men. It portrays sex as a male-dominated, even misogynistic, act. This is a norm I don't think we should accept as a culture. However, that's hard to change, as I imagine that porn production is market driven. And with annual porn revenues conservatively at ten billion dollars (in 2005), producers have a pretty big sample as far as gauging what sells.
(The nipples were all male.)
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Pokemon Types
Pokemon is a pop culture phenomenon (primarily a video game but also made television series, movies, playing cards, toys, and so on) in which you capture monsters and battle them for sport and profit. Five generations of Pokemon games have been released for Gameboy and each has been a top selling game; the popularity of the franchise has ingrained Pokemon into our pop culture lexicon.
And that's great - the game has broad appeal, high replay value, and is more fun when played with friends. However it's doubtless that the core of the Pokemon game is battling Pokemon. And the type system by which that happens is, in hindsight, inelegant.
Each Pokemon has one or two elemental types inherent to its species. Additionally, each Pokemon can learn up to four attacks, each of which has an elemental type. Pokemon need not learn attacks of their own type, though they receive a bonus for doing so.
These types are crucial to making Pokemon battles interesting. For example Charizard is a fire- and-flying type Pokemon. Suppose my Charizard knows Fire Blast, Wing Attack, Scratch, and Bubblebeam. It will receive an attack bonus every time it uses Fire Blast or Wing Attack, but no bonus for the other two. Furthermore, Fire Blast will be super effective (double damage) against an ice-type Pokemon, but not very effective (half damage) against a rock-type Pokemon. On the other hand Bubblebeam, a water-type attack, will give Charizard no bonus by itself but will be super effective against a rock-type Pokemon.
The idea of having types interacting with each other adds significant depth to battles, but we see awkwardness in the types themselves.
The first issue is grammatical. I do not think it's unreasonable to expect that all elemental types be nouns (as most of them are). Some of the problem types even suggest an obvious choice; flying may as well be air or wind and electric could be lightning or electricity. There are a few more offenders, though I'll touch on those later as I look at other issues.
There are too many types. In total there are seventeen Pokemon types (initially there were only fifteen but dark and steel were added for balance reasons after the first generation of games). That means that in order to keep the game at a manageable level of complexity, on average a type will have no interaction with about two thirds of the other types. With fewer types we could have a less sparse interaction matrix. Some types have strong flavor overlap with one another; for example rock and ground or bug and grass. And some types are just bad from a creative standpoint.
For example, bug and dragon aren't elements; they're kinds of animal. The type itself constrains what the Pokemon can look like. Furthermore, Charizard and Gyarados show pretty clearly that a Pokemon can look like a dragon without being dragon-type. There are plenty of Pokemon shaped vaguely like a lizard, a fish, a bird, and so on without needing lizard, fish, or bird types. But in practice the existence of a bug type means that if any Pokemon wants to be bug-shaped it must be saddled with that type, depriving it of a spot that could have a real element. Particularly given the near-nonexistence of bug- or dragon-type attacks it seems to me that these types might as well not exist.
Similarly, the fighting type is awkward because it mandates that a Pokemon of that type be a close human analog. Fighting-type attacks are generally kicks and punches, so fighting-type Pokemon must have feet and fists.
The normal type is Pokemon that have no elemental proclivity. It's also the type that goes along with early attacks like Tackle and Scratch. It's basically the boring type that you encounter early on in the game then move past. I would advocate merging the fighting and normal types, perhaps call the new type strength or muscle. This seems fine thematically; it was never obvious how a punch could be super effective against something resistant to tackling.
The psychic, ghost, and dark types all feed on the same general theme of creepiness; they certainly don't need three distinct types. Psychic has a decent lexicon of moves but ghost has few. Dark moves tend to just correspond to fighting dirty (stealing their items, sucker punching, fake crying) which is thematically questionable. Perhaps one new type (shadow? darkness?) could replace the three together.
Of course merging types throws off game balance in a significant way, so the entire type interaction chart would need some reworking. But that's fine, because it's got issues too.
Some existing types are pretty noninteractive. Only ice- and dragon-type attacks are super effective against dragon-type Pokemon, and dragon-type attacks are super effective against nothing else. Electric, a common Pokemon type, is weak against only ground, a pretty rare attack type. Dark-types also rarely have to worry about weaknesses; rather than having to weigh the pros and cons of having a Pokemon of that type, it's more a matter of using one as soon as you can find it.
No types are mutually weak to one another. It's an option for an interesting game dynamic that simply doesn't exist. One might expect, for example, that water would be super effective against electricity and vice versa; when you drop a toaster in the aquarium it's bad for the fish of course (electricity super effective against water) but it's also bad for the toaster... and your home wiring (water super effective against electricity). The closest Pokemon comes to that is having dragon-type be super effective against dragons, but you already know how I feel about that type.
We would perhaps expect the type setup would be inelegant if it were carried through from the first generation of games, before the Pokemon franchise was swimming in money. But it wasn't. After the first generation the steel and dark types were added to address balance issues. Some other weaknesses and resistances were modified as well. It seems to me that makes criticism reasonable.
Chart from Bulbapedia
And that's great - the game has broad appeal, high replay value, and is more fun when played with friends. However it's doubtless that the core of the Pokemon game is battling Pokemon. And the type system by which that happens is, in hindsight, inelegant.
Each Pokemon has one or two elemental types inherent to its species. Additionally, each Pokemon can learn up to four attacks, each of which has an elemental type. Pokemon need not learn attacks of their own type, though they receive a bonus for doing so.
These types are crucial to making Pokemon battles interesting. For example Charizard is a fire- and-flying type Pokemon. Suppose my Charizard knows Fire Blast, Wing Attack, Scratch, and Bubblebeam. It will receive an attack bonus every time it uses Fire Blast or Wing Attack, but no bonus for the other two. Furthermore, Fire Blast will be super effective (double damage) against an ice-type Pokemon, but not very effective (half damage) against a rock-type Pokemon. On the other hand Bubblebeam, a water-type attack, will give Charizard no bonus by itself but will be super effective against a rock-type Pokemon.
The idea of having types interacting with each other adds significant depth to battles, but we see awkwardness in the types themselves.
The first issue is grammatical. I do not think it's unreasonable to expect that all elemental types be nouns (as most of them are). Some of the problem types even suggest an obvious choice; flying may as well be air or wind and electric could be lightning or electricity. There are a few more offenders, though I'll touch on those later as I look at other issues.
There are too many types. In total there are seventeen Pokemon types (initially there were only fifteen but dark and steel were added for balance reasons after the first generation of games). That means that in order to keep the game at a manageable level of complexity, on average a type will have no interaction with about two thirds of the other types. With fewer types we could have a less sparse interaction matrix. Some types have strong flavor overlap with one another; for example rock and ground or bug and grass. And some types are just bad from a creative standpoint.
For example, bug and dragon aren't elements; they're kinds of animal. The type itself constrains what the Pokemon can look like. Furthermore, Charizard and Gyarados show pretty clearly that a Pokemon can look like a dragon without being dragon-type. There are plenty of Pokemon shaped vaguely like a lizard, a fish, a bird, and so on without needing lizard, fish, or bird types. But in practice the existence of a bug type means that if any Pokemon wants to be bug-shaped it must be saddled with that type, depriving it of a spot that could have a real element. Particularly given the near-nonexistence of bug- or dragon-type attacks it seems to me that these types might as well not exist.
Similarly, the fighting type is awkward because it mandates that a Pokemon of that type be a close human analog. Fighting-type attacks are generally kicks and punches, so fighting-type Pokemon must have feet and fists.
The normal type is Pokemon that have no elemental proclivity. It's also the type that goes along with early attacks like Tackle and Scratch. It's basically the boring type that you encounter early on in the game then move past. I would advocate merging the fighting and normal types, perhaps call the new type strength or muscle. This seems fine thematically; it was never obvious how a punch could be super effective against something resistant to tackling.
The psychic, ghost, and dark types all feed on the same general theme of creepiness; they certainly don't need three distinct types. Psychic has a decent lexicon of moves but ghost has few. Dark moves tend to just correspond to fighting dirty (stealing their items, sucker punching, fake crying) which is thematically questionable. Perhaps one new type (shadow? darkness?) could replace the three together.
Of course merging types throws off game balance in a significant way, so the entire type interaction chart would need some reworking. But that's fine, because it's got issues too.
Some existing types are pretty noninteractive. Only ice- and dragon-type attacks are super effective against dragon-type Pokemon, and dragon-type attacks are super effective against nothing else. Electric, a common Pokemon type, is weak against only ground, a pretty rare attack type. Dark-types also rarely have to worry about weaknesses; rather than having to weigh the pros and cons of having a Pokemon of that type, it's more a matter of using one as soon as you can find it.
No types are mutually weak to one another. It's an option for an interesting game dynamic that simply doesn't exist. One might expect, for example, that water would be super effective against electricity and vice versa; when you drop a toaster in the aquarium it's bad for the fish of course (electricity super effective against water) but it's also bad for the toaster... and your home wiring (water super effective against electricity). The closest Pokemon comes to that is having dragon-type be super effective against dragons, but you already know how I feel about that type.
We would perhaps expect the type setup would be inelegant if it were carried through from the first generation of games, before the Pokemon franchise was swimming in money. But it wasn't. After the first generation the steel and dark types were added to address balance issues. Some other weaknesses and resistances were modified as well. It seems to me that makes criticism reasonable.
Chart from Bulbapedia
Monday, March 26, 2012
Science and Christianity
In the claims that it does make, science is outstandingly reliable. Our systemic use of observation to deduce patterns of reality has been honed over centuries. Science uses mathematically rigorous analysis of data and review by experts to separate reputable theories from crackpots. A consensus by the scientific community is not earned lightly. To dispute such a consensus on an ideological basis is intellectually dishonest. It is the worst of religion; using deception to exert control over the uneducated.
There would be no conflict if the Bible made no testable claims, concerning itself only with parables and philosophies (though we would perhaps still be wrestling with the misogyny, bigotry, and sense of entitlement it can easily be used to promote). But that's not the case. The Bible lists the age of the universe on the order of thousands of years. The entire creation story is full of holes if taken literally. The Bible strongly implies that the earth is stationary - and by some readings flat - while the sun revolves around it. It tells of a sudden recent global flood. The list goes on and on with testable (and disproven!) natural claims in the Bible. And there is an entire political movement that revolves around getting these stories equal representation in our science classrooms.
The analogy that comes to mind would be if science textbooks included passages where they claimed that Jesus was a prostitute, then, through legislation and propaganda, threw a tantrum on a national scale when Christians declined to include those lessons in Sunday school. As Asimov said, "Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
It seems to me that if science and Christianity are to coexist in harmony, rather than acting as foils to one another, each must respect the expertise of the other. Christianity must defer to accepted science even if it conflicts with a claim made in the Bible. The idea that ancient texts can trump evidence when considering knowledge of the natural world is unacceptable. Relatedly, scientific cannon speaks nothing of the supernatural. It is certainly not a problem that some scientists are also outspoken on the topic but in those cases we must insist that our arguments be coherent and intelligible rather than ignorant and embarrassing.
Of course the reason that critique of science is different from critique of Christianity is that they're different kinds of knowledge. In a religious context, no matter what I believe, as long as I'm respectful and articulate my opinion gets a spot at the religious pluralism table. Others may even learn from me. In science there is a right answer and we drive towards it (see this story by Asimov to understand why science is valuable even if we're not right yet). We use peer review to drive towards consensus. Once we have a solid grasp of something - for example evolution, the basis for modern biology - significant evidence is needed to make an argument against it. This is just not the case when discussing faith, as it's personal rather than evidence-based.
Another distinction is that Christianity makes explicit recommendations for how society ought to be run. There is a significant population that views the Bible as an infallible document mandating bigotry and misogyny. As a result there are those who speak out against religion as an institution. There isn't really an analogous situation with science; while being educated in science can help us make lifestyle choices, science itself is knowledge, not prescriptions. If you're educated in the underlying science you can critique the prescriptions; it's hard to do the same for Christianity without unraveling the faith structure.
Dawkins is probably the scientist most well known for speaking out against religion. He insists that we understand the universe well enough to posit the nonexistence of God. It basically comes from Occam's Razor. We have an understanding of the universe that does not require the existence of a creator God; in fact the existence of such a being with the power and will to suspend the laws of reality demands that we add significant complexity to our model with no supporting evidence. We are compelled to accept the least complicated hypothesis that can explain all observed phenomena. To me this seems like a very elegant argument, and about as sciencey as you can get when discussing something which by definition cannot be observed.
(The other side of that coin is the plausibility argument - there are an awful lot of parameters that have been tuned just right to allow life to exist in the universe. Had the speed of light, the matter/antimatter ratio, and the amount of dark matter in the universe been off by even a small amount from Big Bang parameters it's likely that we wouldn't have planets, much less life. This argument doesn't do much for me, though, as it's just the anthropic principle; if the universe weren't suitable for life, nobody would be around to notice.)
(Of course Dawkins is known not only for being an outspoken against belief in God in the abstract but also for opposing the effect of religion on society. That'll have to wait for another post, as it's certainly a deep topic. My favorite resource on the topic is a debate between Hitchens and Tony Blair.)
We can have conversations about God. And we can have conversations about science. But, no matter how important an ancient text is to you, it should only ever be a part of one of those conversations.
Centuries ago Galileo was ostracized for teaching a revolutionary new astrometric model despite that fact that it matched observations better than the church-approved model; centuries later that's still used as an example of the church's fallibility. Now the evangelical church is fighting to keep evolution and climate change - topics which have been well accepted by experts worldwide for decades - out of American schools while the rest of the world facepalms.
There would be no conflict if the Bible made no testable claims, concerning itself only with parables and philosophies (though we would perhaps still be wrestling with the misogyny, bigotry, and sense of entitlement it can easily be used to promote). But that's not the case. The Bible lists the age of the universe on the order of thousands of years. The entire creation story is full of holes if taken literally. The Bible strongly implies that the earth is stationary - and by some readings flat - while the sun revolves around it. It tells of a sudden recent global flood. The list goes on and on with testable (and disproven!) natural claims in the Bible. And there is an entire political movement that revolves around getting these stories equal representation in our science classrooms.
The analogy that comes to mind would be if science textbooks included passages where they claimed that Jesus was a prostitute, then, through legislation and propaganda, threw a tantrum on a national scale when Christians declined to include those lessons in Sunday school. As Asimov said, "Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
It seems to me that if science and Christianity are to coexist in harmony, rather than acting as foils to one another, each must respect the expertise of the other. Christianity must defer to accepted science even if it conflicts with a claim made in the Bible. The idea that ancient texts can trump evidence when considering knowledge of the natural world is unacceptable. Relatedly, scientific cannon speaks nothing of the supernatural. It is certainly not a problem that some scientists are also outspoken on the topic but in those cases we must insist that our arguments be coherent and intelligible rather than ignorant and embarrassing.
Of course the reason that critique of science is different from critique of Christianity is that they're different kinds of knowledge. In a religious context, no matter what I believe, as long as I'm respectful and articulate my opinion gets a spot at the religious pluralism table. Others may even learn from me. In science there is a right answer and we drive towards it (see this story by Asimov to understand why science is valuable even if we're not right yet). We use peer review to drive towards consensus. Once we have a solid grasp of something - for example evolution, the basis for modern biology - significant evidence is needed to make an argument against it. This is just not the case when discussing faith, as it's personal rather than evidence-based.
Another distinction is that Christianity makes explicit recommendations for how society ought to be run. There is a significant population that views the Bible as an infallible document mandating bigotry and misogyny. As a result there are those who speak out against religion as an institution. There isn't really an analogous situation with science; while being educated in science can help us make lifestyle choices, science itself is knowledge, not prescriptions. If you're educated in the underlying science you can critique the prescriptions; it's hard to do the same for Christianity without unraveling the faith structure.
Dawkins is probably the scientist most well known for speaking out against religion. He insists that we understand the universe well enough to posit the nonexistence of God. It basically comes from Occam's Razor. We have an understanding of the universe that does not require the existence of a creator God; in fact the existence of such a being with the power and will to suspend the laws of reality demands that we add significant complexity to our model with no supporting evidence. We are compelled to accept the least complicated hypothesis that can explain all observed phenomena. To me this seems like a very elegant argument, and about as sciencey as you can get when discussing something which by definition cannot be observed.
(The other side of that coin is the plausibility argument - there are an awful lot of parameters that have been tuned just right to allow life to exist in the universe. Had the speed of light, the matter/antimatter ratio, and the amount of dark matter in the universe been off by even a small amount from Big Bang parameters it's likely that we wouldn't have planets, much less life. This argument doesn't do much for me, though, as it's just the anthropic principle; if the universe weren't suitable for life, nobody would be around to notice.)
(Of course Dawkins is known not only for being an outspoken against belief in God in the abstract but also for opposing the effect of religion on society. That'll have to wait for another post, as it's certainly a deep topic. My favorite resource on the topic is a debate between Hitchens and Tony Blair.)
We can have conversations about God. And we can have conversations about science. But, no matter how important an ancient text is to you, it should only ever be a part of one of those conversations.
Centuries ago Galileo was ostracized for teaching a revolutionary new astrometric model despite that fact that it matched observations better than the church-approved model; centuries later that's still used as an example of the church's fallibility. Now the evangelical church is fighting to keep evolution and climate change - topics which have been well accepted by experts worldwide for decades - out of American schools while the rest of the world facepalms.
Free Will and Consciousness
Free will is an interesting topic which carries significant religious baggage and has been a focal point of philosophical thought for centuries. Intuitively it seems to us that we have the free will to make choices but upon closer inspection it becomes less obvious.
The brain is a machine that operates according to the laws of physics. The complexity of the brain is very high - it's certainly not understood fully - but we know how big neurons are and how they communicate. And at those length and time scales we would not expect quantum mechanics to be relevant; that is, we would expect the behavior of the brain (and, by extension, the entire physical self) to be a deterministic result from sensory input.
(Of course quantum mechanics introduces perfect randomness, so that doesn't give you free will anyway, but it would at least be somewhere to start.)
Now the way we test whether this is the case is as follows. I give you the choice between chocolate and strawberry ice cream. You choose one. Then I rewind the universe and ask you the exact same question in the exact same environment while your brain is in the exact same state, over and over again. If you choose chocolate every single time, your brain is deterministic; otherwise you have free will.
Unfortunately this test is not possible, for obvious reasons. And the brain is far too complex for us to assemble a perfectly controlled test without time travel. Barring significant advances in brain-related technology, testing free will in any conclusive way is a bust. There plenty of science trying to inch towards understanding free will, of course, but studies are extremely limited in scope. In general they aim to influence or predict the subconscious actions of an individual.
Since there's no known physical or biological mechanism by which we could reasonably expect free will to arise, its existence is starting to seem unlikely.
This seems strange, at least at an intuitive level, because we are conscious beings (I am at least!). I can process information and make decisions. I can choose to take particular actions. If you ask me a question I can think about it, consciously come to a conclusion, and use my mouth and lungs to tell you the answer.
The problem is, as far as I can tell, nobody has a clue why that is. In an academic context consciousness doesn't seem to be well defined (which is unsurprising as it's inherently subjective). Studies regarding consciousness, like those regarding free will, seem more or less in line with tests of the limits of subconscious behavior. That leaves me feeling not much closer to an answer, but at least I'm feeling like I've come up with a good question:
I am conscious, whether or not I can rigorously explain to you what that means. Is there some mechanism by which my consciousness exerts control over my body? Or is my consciousness a by product of a complex but deterministic machine?
The brain is a machine that operates according to the laws of physics. The complexity of the brain is very high - it's certainly not understood fully - but we know how big neurons are and how they communicate. And at those length and time scales we would not expect quantum mechanics to be relevant; that is, we would expect the behavior of the brain (and, by extension, the entire physical self) to be a deterministic result from sensory input.
(Of course quantum mechanics introduces perfect randomness, so that doesn't give you free will anyway, but it would at least be somewhere to start.)
Now the way we test whether this is the case is as follows. I give you the choice between chocolate and strawberry ice cream. You choose one. Then I rewind the universe and ask you the exact same question in the exact same environment while your brain is in the exact same state, over and over again. If you choose chocolate every single time, your brain is deterministic; otherwise you have free will.
Unfortunately this test is not possible, for obvious reasons. And the brain is far too complex for us to assemble a perfectly controlled test without time travel. Barring significant advances in brain-related technology, testing free will in any conclusive way is a bust. There plenty of science trying to inch towards understanding free will, of course, but studies are extremely limited in scope. In general they aim to influence or predict the subconscious actions of an individual.
Since there's no known physical or biological mechanism by which we could reasonably expect free will to arise, its existence is starting to seem unlikely.
This seems strange, at least at an intuitive level, because we are conscious beings (I am at least!). I can process information and make decisions. I can choose to take particular actions. If you ask me a question I can think about it, consciously come to a conclusion, and use my mouth and lungs to tell you the answer.
The problem is, as far as I can tell, nobody has a clue why that is. In an academic context consciousness doesn't seem to be well defined (which is unsurprising as it's inherently subjective). Studies regarding consciousness, like those regarding free will, seem more or less in line with tests of the limits of subconscious behavior. That leaves me feeling not much closer to an answer, but at least I'm feeling like I've come up with a good question:
I am conscious, whether or not I can rigorously explain to you what that means. Is there some mechanism by which my consciousness exerts control over my body? Or is my consciousness a by product of a complex but deterministic machine?
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Healthcare
The USA has a bad health system. That's a fact. Among developed nations we rank poorly with regard to obesity, infant mortality, and life expectancy. Yet we pay significantly more per person than any other country on earth (if measuring as a fraction of GDP instead of per capita, only East Timor edges us out). As a culture it would be of significant benefit to emulate the successes of our allies rather than be stuck on pride and partisan ideology.
Sweden is one example of a healthcare system much better than ours. Despite being a supposed European socialist hellhole, their system is significantly more efficient. Private insurance exists for those who want to buy it but the government is the main healthcare provider.
Details of their system aside (those can be found, at length, on Wikipedia) Sweden's healthcare system costs 9% of their GDP (this is a typical number for a developed nation). This has been stable for decades. The state pays for approximately 97% of medical costs including, in some cases, lost wage due to illness, and transportation to a medical facility. There is a limit to the health care fees that can be accumulated by an individual over the course of a year ($360, which includes prescription drugs, tests, and visits to a specialist); the rest is covered by the government. You can see any doctor in the country and collect a prescription at any pharmacy. Waiting times are guaranteed to be no more than three days for a primary care physician or ten for a specialist.
On the other hand 17% of the United States GDP is spent on healthcare, and the rate has been rising for decades (it was about 10% in 1980 and is expected to hit 20% around 2020). The government covers about half of healthcare costs total, though how that's distributed is extremely uneven. Insurance rates are rising faster than wages or inflation. Which health care facility can be visited depends on the private insurance carrier. One out of six Americans has no health insurance at all (in fact we're the only wealthy nation that does not ensure that all citizens are covered). Medical costs contribute to about half of all bankruptcies in the United States. Emergency rooms in the United States are mandated to accept anyone, regardless of ability to pay, but the mandate comes with no funding to make up the difference. The costs of medical services are inflated; we pay more despite having fewer doctors and hospital beds per capita than any other developed nation. Significant money is swallowed up by the profits of the pharmaceutical industry (profit margins around 25%, while 3% is more typical for a large corporation), private insurance administrative costs (about 7% of health care spending), and doctor salary (by far the highest of any developed nation).
Though not a huge fraction of the total cost, the average income of a doctor in the United States is something like $150k. The developed nation average is closer to $100k, with Sweden closer to $75k. However, this is significantly mitigated by the fact that college and medical school are free there, so doctors do not emerge from school saddled with debt.
For comparison, there are about 600k doctors and 60k medical students in the United States. The average cost of medical school is well under $100k per year, even accounting for books and living expenses. That means that cutting average doctor salary from $150k to $130k (which is still higher than any other developed nation) would be sufficient to make medical school completely free, with enough left over to erase all existing medical school debt within a few years.
Of course administration of a large system is a complicated issue. For one thing the United States has a much larger population than any country in which universal healthcare has been implemented. Japan is the closest at less than half our population and there are thirty Americans for every Swede. However, it's not obvious from available statistics that quality of healthcare degrades with population; Japan's healthcare system uses 8.5% GDP to pay for 70% of all medical care. It's hard to imagine that we need to be spending twice the developed nation average for care that consistently ranks badly.
Nation Comparison Statistics
Wikipedia - USA Healthcare
Wikipedia - Sweden Healthcare
Physician Income
Wikipedia - Education in Sweden
Number of Doctors in the USA
Cost of Medical School
Number of Medical Students in the USA
Sweden is one example of a healthcare system much better than ours. Despite being a supposed European socialist hellhole, their system is significantly more efficient. Private insurance exists for those who want to buy it but the government is the main healthcare provider.
Details of their system aside (those can be found, at length, on Wikipedia) Sweden's healthcare system costs 9% of their GDP (this is a typical number for a developed nation). This has been stable for decades. The state pays for approximately 97% of medical costs including, in some cases, lost wage due to illness, and transportation to a medical facility. There is a limit to the health care fees that can be accumulated by an individual over the course of a year ($360, which includes prescription drugs, tests, and visits to a specialist); the rest is covered by the government. You can see any doctor in the country and collect a prescription at any pharmacy. Waiting times are guaranteed to be no more than three days for a primary care physician or ten for a specialist.
On the other hand 17% of the United States GDP is spent on healthcare, and the rate has been rising for decades (it was about 10% in 1980 and is expected to hit 20% around 2020). The government covers about half of healthcare costs total, though how that's distributed is extremely uneven. Insurance rates are rising faster than wages or inflation. Which health care facility can be visited depends on the private insurance carrier. One out of six Americans has no health insurance at all (in fact we're the only wealthy nation that does not ensure that all citizens are covered). Medical costs contribute to about half of all bankruptcies in the United States. Emergency rooms in the United States are mandated to accept anyone, regardless of ability to pay, but the mandate comes with no funding to make up the difference. The costs of medical services are inflated; we pay more despite having fewer doctors and hospital beds per capita than any other developed nation. Significant money is swallowed up by the profits of the pharmaceutical industry (profit margins around 25%, while 3% is more typical for a large corporation), private insurance administrative costs (about 7% of health care spending), and doctor salary (by far the highest of any developed nation).
Though not a huge fraction of the total cost, the average income of a doctor in the United States is something like $150k. The developed nation average is closer to $100k, with Sweden closer to $75k. However, this is significantly mitigated by the fact that college and medical school are free there, so doctors do not emerge from school saddled with debt.
For comparison, there are about 600k doctors and 60k medical students in the United States. The average cost of medical school is well under $100k per year, even accounting for books and living expenses. That means that cutting average doctor salary from $150k to $130k (which is still higher than any other developed nation) would be sufficient to make medical school completely free, with enough left over to erase all existing medical school debt within a few years.
Of course administration of a large system is a complicated issue. For one thing the United States has a much larger population than any country in which universal healthcare has been implemented. Japan is the closest at less than half our population and there are thirty Americans for every Swede. However, it's not obvious from available statistics that quality of healthcare degrades with population; Japan's healthcare system uses 8.5% GDP to pay for 70% of all medical care. It's hard to imagine that we need to be spending twice the developed nation average for care that consistently ranks badly.
Nation Comparison Statistics
Wikipedia - USA Healthcare
Wikipedia - Sweden Healthcare
Physician Income
Wikipedia - Education in Sweden
Number of Doctors in the USA
Cost of Medical School
Number of Medical Students in the USA
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Measurement Systems
The only use of a measurement system is communication, and communication is obviously easier when the measurement system is shared by all parties. Given that the metric system is already used by nearly all of humanity, and given that it is a much more elegant system than the imperial system, it is only logical that the metric system be adopted by the United States as early as possible.
In terms of measuring temperature perhaps the imperial system is more intuitive; humans typically live in the range of 0 to 100 F. Furthermore, the smallest temperature change detectable by humans is thought to be about 1F. The Celsius scale has water freezing at 0C and boiling at 100C, which is more convenient in academic contexts, but potentially less convenient in everyday life, which occurs over the range of roughly -20C to 40C.
Now that we've seen the success of the imperial system, let's examine its failings.
As far as measuring sizes the imperial system is woefully awkward. In length the four units - inch, foot, yard, and mile - are all based on obscure historical precedents and are all commonly used. Yet the conversion between inches and yards (how good are you at dividing by 36?), or between miles and anything else, is more or less impossible to do precisely without a calculator. The metric system deals only in factors of ten from the base unit, a meter, which comes from the size of the earth. Similarly for volume, one milliliter is the same as one cubic centimeter (and so on with powers of ten) while imperial units have the fluid ounce, the cup (8 ounces, half of a pint), the pint (the size of one pound of water), the quart (2 pints), and the gallon (4 quarts, 231 cubic inches).
When measuring mass and weight, the imperial system is not only awkward but lazy. The metric system distinguishes mass (the amount of stuff something is made of) from weight (how hard something is pulled down by gravity). In the imperial system both are measured in pounds. Gravity is very close to constant on Earth - varying by less than one percent between Mount Everest and the Dead Sea - but this is still inelegant, particularly in a scientific context. Similarly to length and volume we see that imperial weight is measured in several distinct units: the avoirdupois ounce (about the weight of one fluid ounce of water), the pound (16 ounces), and the ton (2000 pounds). On the other hand the metric system, predictably, uses powers of ten from the base units gram (or ton, which is exactly one million grams) and Newton (on Earth, gravity is about 10 m/s/s so you get ten Newtons for each gram).
Seconds are used by both metric and imperial systems, so of course changing them is not up for debate - though the system could obviously be more elegant.
For all of time humanity has had one constant time scale: the day. It's a length of time that is natural to anyone who has ever lived outside the arctic and antarctic circles. The year is next, as it comes with the passing of seasons. However, the time scales we use in our day to day lives - seconds, minutes, and hours - are all arbitrary. One second is 1/86400 day. That means that we could have easily decided to put ten "hours" to a day, one hundred "minutes" to an "hour," and one hundred "seconds" to a "minute." In that case a "second" and a second would have been nearly the same and a few "minutes" (aka a few millidays) would have been about a few minutes.
We run into more arbitrary units and inelegance when we look at days and months. For example, we have twelve months which can be 28, 29, 30, or 31 days long, and, as such, generally don't divide into an even number of weeks. The year also does not divide into an even number of weeks. And perhaps my favorite: the names September, October, November, and December come from the numbers 7, 8, 9, and 10 (but they're the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th months).
It takes just over 365 days for the Earth to go around the Sun. Unfortunately 365 factors into 5*73. Five months of 73 days each and vice versa both seem pretty awkward. If we knock off one day, however, we find that 364 factors to 13*7*2*2. That allows for 13 months of 28 days or 14 months of 26 days. A month of 28 days will allow a whole number of weeks per month (a 26 day month can be divided only into two weeks of 13 day), which seems nice. Furthermore, 28 days is pretty close to the lunar month.
We end up neglecting 1.24 days per year. There's a whole family of proposed reforms to the Gregorian calendar which in large part vary in how they aim to deal with this little amount. It's a mess. Some favor keeping the equinoxes on the same date while others want the same date to always fall on the same day of the week. I like the idea of having a leap month every twenty years, which allows significant drift of equinoxes. (For higher order accuracy a leap month would need to be skipped once every few centuries, just like leap days are now). This is by no means a provably best system, but I think it is clear that we can do better than the current system.
In terms of measuring temperature perhaps the imperial system is more intuitive; humans typically live in the range of 0 to 100 F. Furthermore, the smallest temperature change detectable by humans is thought to be about 1F. The Celsius scale has water freezing at 0C and boiling at 100C, which is more convenient in academic contexts, but potentially less convenient in everyday life, which occurs over the range of roughly -20C to 40C.
Now that we've seen the success of the imperial system, let's examine its failings.
As far as measuring sizes the imperial system is woefully awkward. In length the four units - inch, foot, yard, and mile - are all based on obscure historical precedents and are all commonly used. Yet the conversion between inches and yards (how good are you at dividing by 36?), or between miles and anything else, is more or less impossible to do precisely without a calculator. The metric system deals only in factors of ten from the base unit, a meter, which comes from the size of the earth. Similarly for volume, one milliliter is the same as one cubic centimeter (and so on with powers of ten) while imperial units have the fluid ounce, the cup (8 ounces, half of a pint), the pint (the size of one pound of water), the quart (2 pints), and the gallon (4 quarts, 231 cubic inches).
When measuring mass and weight, the imperial system is not only awkward but lazy. The metric system distinguishes mass (the amount of stuff something is made of) from weight (how hard something is pulled down by gravity). In the imperial system both are measured in pounds. Gravity is very close to constant on Earth - varying by less than one percent between Mount Everest and the Dead Sea - but this is still inelegant, particularly in a scientific context. Similarly to length and volume we see that imperial weight is measured in several distinct units: the avoirdupois ounce (about the weight of one fluid ounce of water), the pound (16 ounces), and the ton (2000 pounds). On the other hand the metric system, predictably, uses powers of ten from the base units gram (or ton, which is exactly one million grams) and Newton (on Earth, gravity is about 10 m/s/s so you get ten Newtons for each gram).
Seconds are used by both metric and imperial systems, so of course changing them is not up for debate - though the system could obviously be more elegant.
For all of time humanity has had one constant time scale: the day. It's a length of time that is natural to anyone who has ever lived outside the arctic and antarctic circles. The year is next, as it comes with the passing of seasons. However, the time scales we use in our day to day lives - seconds, minutes, and hours - are all arbitrary. One second is 1/86400 day. That means that we could have easily decided to put ten "hours" to a day, one hundred "minutes" to an "hour," and one hundred "seconds" to a "minute." In that case a "second" and a second would have been nearly the same and a few "minutes" (aka a few millidays) would have been about a few minutes.
We run into more arbitrary units and inelegance when we look at days and months. For example, we have twelve months which can be 28, 29, 30, or 31 days long, and, as such, generally don't divide into an even number of weeks. The year also does not divide into an even number of weeks. And perhaps my favorite: the names September, October, November, and December come from the numbers 7, 8, 9, and 10 (but they're the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th months).
It takes just over 365 days for the Earth to go around the Sun. Unfortunately 365 factors into 5*73. Five months of 73 days each and vice versa both seem pretty awkward. If we knock off one day, however, we find that 364 factors to 13*7*2*2. That allows for 13 months of 28 days or 14 months of 26 days. A month of 28 days will allow a whole number of weeks per month (a 26 day month can be divided only into two weeks of 13 day), which seems nice. Furthermore, 28 days is pretty close to the lunar month.
We end up neglecting 1.24 days per year. There's a whole family of proposed reforms to the Gregorian calendar which in large part vary in how they aim to deal with this little amount. It's a mess. Some favor keeping the equinoxes on the same date while others want the same date to always fall on the same day of the week. I like the idea of having a leap month every twenty years, which allows significant drift of equinoxes. (For higher order accuracy a leap month would need to be skipped once every few centuries, just like leap days are now). This is by no means a provably best system, but I think it is clear that we can do better than the current system.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Marriage
As religious definitions are laid out in ancient texts, I'm specifically discussing the government institution here. It's not the place of the state to tell a religious organization which ceremonies they are to perform, but the other side of that coin is that the legal definition of marriage ought to be based on facts and reason (as should any other legal policy).
The first amendment prevents the government from establishing marriage based on biblical prescriptions. And rules based on our sexual or reproductive habits would be an affront to personal privacy. As a result, from the standpoint of the government, marriage is little more than a statement of financial partnership; taxes can be filed jointly, money can be easily inherited, and insurance can be joined. Marriage also allows sharing of privileged information such as medical documents even when an individual is incapacitated.
When viewed this way it's obvious that gay marriage is just as valid as straight marriage. But it's not obvious at all that a marriage must be a contract between exactly two people.
It's clear that we can't go back to polygamous times - one man owning several wives - but I would contend that the problem with that is the gender asymmetry rather than the multi-adult household. There are Americans who choose to engage in non-binary long term romantic relationships. It's a small minority, of course, but so is homosexuality. Only a few percent of Americans are gay. And as we are learning in the marriage equality movement, allowing people who love one another to get married does not negatively affect anyone.
The only possible downside of group marriages that I have been able to come up with is that of tax evasion. A super-wealthy individual could in principle acquire dozens of dependents through a massive group marriage, thereby dodging their tax responsibilities. However, this right already exists, more or less, through the formation of a corporation or LLC.
The first amendment prevents the government from establishing marriage based on biblical prescriptions. And rules based on our sexual or reproductive habits would be an affront to personal privacy. As a result, from the standpoint of the government, marriage is little more than a statement of financial partnership; taxes can be filed jointly, money can be easily inherited, and insurance can be joined. Marriage also allows sharing of privileged information such as medical documents even when an individual is incapacitated.
When viewed this way it's obvious that gay marriage is just as valid as straight marriage. But it's not obvious at all that a marriage must be a contract between exactly two people.
It's clear that we can't go back to polygamous times - one man owning several wives - but I would contend that the problem with that is the gender asymmetry rather than the multi-adult household. There are Americans who choose to engage in non-binary long term romantic relationships. It's a small minority, of course, but so is homosexuality. Only a few percent of Americans are gay. And as we are learning in the marriage equality movement, allowing people who love one another to get married does not negatively affect anyone.
The only possible downside of group marriages that I have been able to come up with is that of tax evasion. A super-wealthy individual could in principle acquire dozens of dependents through a massive group marriage, thereby dodging their tax responsibilities. However, this right already exists, more or less, through the formation of a corporation or LLC.
Sex Education
The USA has the highest rate of unplanned pregnancy and abortion in the developed world. Everyone can agree that this is a problem.
The solution is not abstinence-only sex education. Empirically that's hardly better than none at all. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which has for decades conducted surveys regarding sexual and reproductive health, premarital sex is nearly universal among Americans. Abstinence-only sex education does not correlate with lower rates of premarital sex. It does correlate with lower rates of contraception use, and as a result higher rates of unplanned pregnancy. These correlations hold even when adjusted for socioeconomic factors.
The solution is obvious. Comprehensive sex education must be compulsory. Children should be literate in matters of sexual health by their teens, at which point half of them will be sexually active, educated or not. The government does not have control over the body of a child but it can do its best to ensure that he or she makes educated choices.
Since it is a fact that young people will have sex, even if they've been told it's unsafe, and even if they've signed an abstinence pledge, the effort must be to ensure that contraception is available to them when they do. This is particularly the case for those who live in poverty, as becoming pregnant at a young age creates positive feedback, sabotaging educational and career options, and making it less likely that the individual will rise from poverty.
Source
Source
The solution is not abstinence-only sex education. Empirically that's hardly better than none at all. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which has for decades conducted surveys regarding sexual and reproductive health, premarital sex is nearly universal among Americans. Abstinence-only sex education does not correlate with lower rates of premarital sex. It does correlate with lower rates of contraception use, and as a result higher rates of unplanned pregnancy. These correlations hold even when adjusted for socioeconomic factors.
The solution is obvious. Comprehensive sex education must be compulsory. Children should be literate in matters of sexual health by their teens, at which point half of them will be sexually active, educated or not. The government does not have control over the body of a child but it can do its best to ensure that he or she makes educated choices.
Since it is a fact that young people will have sex, even if they've been told it's unsafe, and even if they've signed an abstinence pledge, the effort must be to ensure that contraception is available to them when they do. This is particularly the case for those who live in poverty, as becoming pregnant at a young age creates positive feedback, sabotaging educational and career options, and making it less likely that the individual will rise from poverty.
Source
Source
Written English
Despite being the most widely spoken language on Earth (though Mandarin has far more native speakers), English is very poorly constructed. Sentence structure and verb conjugation aside, we can critique the very phonetic system that written English uses. Between phonetic degeneracies and pronunciations imported from other languages (eg. pizza, ballet, school), it is not at all obvious from the spelling how many words in the English language pronounced. Since the purpose of written language is to record the oral tradition this is an obvious problem.
The problem is historical, of course; English was built over the course of centuries and through the merging of cultures. Significant efforts have historically been made to standardize it and have, to various extents, been successful. But, unlike ever before in history, the majority of all written English right now is screened by computers. Emails and internet content of course never make it to print, but even books and newspapers are arranged digitally. The standard spell-check dictionary means that an imposition of phonetic changes to English would be much less technically difficult - and much less painful - than it has been in the past.
If we assume (semi-reasonably) that the ubiquity of automated typesetting would handle implementation, we can simply outline the changes that would need to be made.
Sometimes in English it's just the case that the wrong letter is used in a word. For example, there's no need to have PH or GH make a sound like an F; we have the letter F! Similarly, G is used as in GORGE or GROAN, leaving J perfectly suited for words like JILL and GEORGE. The letters S and Z see this problem as well, though perhaps due to their similar sounds and our lazy pronunciation. Z is pronounced as in OOZE, ZEST, and TOPAZ. S is as in SLEEP, SONG, and OATS. Though CHARLES is spelled with an S, it's obviously pronounced with a Z.
Silent letters are almost a non-issue. Since they aren't pronounced, nobody should even notice if they're removed; note that THROUGH is already often abbreviated THRU. This could also be done for some vowels, usually E. Removing the E from the end of a word like DONE necessitates a root change (to DUN) but in some cases the letter is just outright skipped; note that CHARLES is universally pronounced CHARLZ.
The next two issues go hand in hand. Some consonants are redundant, and some sounds don't have letters.
The letters K and S are unambiguous (ignoring for a moment the existence of digrams like SH). And between the two of them they obsolete the letter C (which is sometimes a K and sometimes an S) and the letter X (which is always pronounced KS). We also see that Q is redundant with K, perhaps having QU replaced by KW or KOO.
(English has several consonants - Y and W - which defy their definition. In the middle of a word, Y produces a sound that could just as easily be attributed to I; see for examples OYSTER and ACRYLIC. At the end of a word it's perhaps EE or IE, depending on the word, but certainly some vowel sound or diphthong. W, on the other hand, is always a short OO. Whether that's deserving of its own is a topic for discussion by someone better versed in vowel architectures than I am.)
Looking at the consonants we can see that we've freed up, at least, C, X, and Y. And we have without letters the digrams CH, SH, and TH. The obvious solution is to use the character Y to mean TH, the character X to mean CH, and the character C to mean SH.
So rather than CHARLES, we would write my name XARLZ. It has one vowel, appropriate for a word with one syllable, and each letter represents a unique consonant sound.
When we move on from consonants to vowels, the whole issue becomes much more complicated. Phonetically English has at least a dozen vowel sounds, and of course we have only five characters for them. In Spanish this is solved by the extensive use of diphthongs while in Hungarian the use of dots, accents, umlauts, and double accents is used to cheat them up to fourteen vowel characters. As a result neither language has the vowel ambiguity we see in English. It's not obvious which, if either, of these two is best but they do offer a proof of concept that vowels can be done in a consistent way.
Beyond that we reach the topic of capital letters. They serve no real purpose. Capital letters are used to begin sentences, titles, and proper nouns. However, sentences and titles are denoted using punctuation and style as well. And a proper noun is clear from context in all but the most obscure situations. When reading, the meaning of a word is clear whether not it's capitalized.
On the other hand the concept of capitalization adds a whole dimension of arbitrary rules to writing. Is "Pokemon" supposed to be capitalized? How about "god"? In what cases do you capitalize the second part of a hyphenated word in a title? Should "French fries" and "Brussels sprouts" be capitalized? Each of these questions has a correct answer (though it may depend on context or who you ask) yet none of them add any any information to the text.
The problem is historical, of course; English was built over the course of centuries and through the merging of cultures. Significant efforts have historically been made to standardize it and have, to various extents, been successful. But, unlike ever before in history, the majority of all written English right now is screened by computers. Emails and internet content of course never make it to print, but even books and newspapers are arranged digitally. The standard spell-check dictionary means that an imposition of phonetic changes to English would be much less technically difficult - and much less painful - than it has been in the past.
If we assume (semi-reasonably) that the ubiquity of automated typesetting would handle implementation, we can simply outline the changes that would need to be made.
Sometimes in English it's just the case that the wrong letter is used in a word. For example, there's no need to have PH or GH make a sound like an F; we have the letter F! Similarly, G is used as in GORGE or GROAN, leaving J perfectly suited for words like JILL and GEORGE. The letters S and Z see this problem as well, though perhaps due to their similar sounds and our lazy pronunciation. Z is pronounced as in OOZE, ZEST, and TOPAZ. S is as in SLEEP, SONG, and OATS. Though CHARLES is spelled with an S, it's obviously pronounced with a Z.
Silent letters are almost a non-issue. Since they aren't pronounced, nobody should even notice if they're removed; note that THROUGH is already often abbreviated THRU. This could also be done for some vowels, usually E. Removing the E from the end of a word like DONE necessitates a root change (to DUN) but in some cases the letter is just outright skipped; note that CHARLES is universally pronounced CHARLZ.
The next two issues go hand in hand. Some consonants are redundant, and some sounds don't have letters.
The letters K and S are unambiguous (ignoring for a moment the existence of digrams like SH). And between the two of them they obsolete the letter C (which is sometimes a K and sometimes an S) and the letter X (which is always pronounced KS). We also see that Q is redundant with K, perhaps having QU replaced by KW or KOO.
(English has several consonants - Y and W - which defy their definition. In the middle of a word, Y produces a sound that could just as easily be attributed to I; see for examples OYSTER and ACRYLIC. At the end of a word it's perhaps EE or IE, depending on the word, but certainly some vowel sound or diphthong. W, on the other hand, is always a short OO. Whether that's deserving of its own is a topic for discussion by someone better versed in vowel architectures than I am.)
Looking at the consonants we can see that we've freed up, at least, C, X, and Y. And we have without letters the digrams CH, SH, and TH. The obvious solution is to use the character Y to mean TH, the character X to mean CH, and the character C to mean SH.
So rather than CHARLES, we would write my name XARLZ. It has one vowel, appropriate for a word with one syllable, and each letter represents a unique consonant sound.
When we move on from consonants to vowels, the whole issue becomes much more complicated. Phonetically English has at least a dozen vowel sounds, and of course we have only five characters for them. In Spanish this is solved by the extensive use of diphthongs while in Hungarian the use of dots, accents, umlauts, and double accents is used to cheat them up to fourteen vowel characters. As a result neither language has the vowel ambiguity we see in English. It's not obvious which, if either, of these two is best but they do offer a proof of concept that vowels can be done in a consistent way.
Beyond that we reach the topic of capital letters. They serve no real purpose. Capital letters are used to begin sentences, titles, and proper nouns. However, sentences and titles are denoted using punctuation and style as well. And a proper noun is clear from context in all but the most obscure situations. When reading, the meaning of a word is clear whether not it's capitalized.
On the other hand the concept of capitalization adds a whole dimension of arbitrary rules to writing. Is "Pokemon" supposed to be capitalized? How about "god"? In what cases do you capitalize the second part of a hyphenated word in a title? Should "French fries" and "Brussels sprouts" be capitalized? Each of these questions has a correct answer (though it may depend on context or who you ask) yet none of them add any any information to the text.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)