Joey Rozier's Blog

It's Alive!

2006-10-11T12:20:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, Benson I went by the San Jose Museum of Art to check out their Suburban Escape exhibit (about representations of Suburbia in art).

While there, we also stopped by the Edge Conditions exhibit, which was installed just before ZeroOne.

By far the most interesting piece that I saw in these exhibits (as well as a smaller one in the basement) was Listening Post. Essentially, Listening Post provides a glimpse into the consciousness of the Internet. It collects real-time conversations and presents snippets of them in intriguing ways. For example, it finds bits of conversations starting with "I like" or "I love" and, both reads them out using a male computerized voice and displays them as scrolling text on one of a collection of small panels. This is done over a background of soft techno-y music. For example, when I returned yesterday, some of the statements were:

I like your pants.
I love kids.
I love men.
I like being able to be contacted.
I like Tony Blair.
I like the name of this chatroom.
I like terrorists.
I like him bareback.
I love dead Jesus lovers.
I like to receive.
I love Linux.

The way these are presented makes it difficult to really hear many of them. The synthetic voice messes up words sometimes, and people often have typos that the synthesized voice tries valiantly to pronounce. Although the text is also being displayed, it is being displayed only four letters at a time scrolling by, with many different statements scrolling at the same time, so it is hard to find the most recent one.

The effect is one of confusion, with just ephemeral glimpses into the worlds of other people. Combined, you end up getting a real sense of the enormity of humanity, the fact that at any moment there are billions of different lives going on with different thoughts, cares, concerns, et cetera. There's nothing new about this concept, but a work of art like this helps bring it into focus in your mind.

There are other sections of the work as well: longer phrases get read out overlapping each other; all of the panels fill with random four letter words; and different tones of the synthesized voice read out a series of words in a sing-songy manner. Although there is a separation between these different sections, they all end up having the same effect.

After the first visit (and during my second visit), I started to think about why I liked this piece more than most of the others I had seen. I realized the answer was that this piece of work was "alive." The creators had established a set of rules, and their art was applying those rules to the world as it is today. The work was ever changing.

An argument could be made that all good art is alive, because it involves a conversation between the audience and the art. How a picture is interpreted by an individual, at different times and in different settings. I can appreciate this, but to me the difference here is that there is a conversation of sorts between the audience and the art, but that the piece of art itself is static. (Okay, okay... sure, maybe the materials deteriorate over time such as many Eva Hesse works, but I enjoy those pieces of art for being alive as well.)

I'm not arguing that a piece of art being alive makes it better--only that I personally find it more appealing. Perhaps this comes from my background as an engineer, and my joy in seeing the interactions between things. In the case of Listening Post, the "aliveness" also comes from the Internet, something that is dominant in my life and work, making it even more interesting and, thus, appealing to me. My interest could also come from my time at the Media Lab, where we were all about presenting information in artistically appealing and interactive ways.

I was curious as to what happened to Listening Post at night, when there was no one around to hear or see it. (During the day, the synthesized voice and music bleeds into most of the museum.) I found out from one of the staff members that they shut it off at night. Funnily, I was a bit disappointed in this thinking that since the Internet doesn't sleep, the artwork shouldn't either. I realized that I was starting to assign qualities of life to the artwork, as if my thinking of the work as "alive" was going beyond the original sense I meant ("dynamic") and that I was thinking of it as an almost human channeler of the cacophony of the Internet.

Not much artwork can have this power over me.

I'm just glad we purchased a membership to the museum on that day, so that I can return whenever I want for free.

I'm Not Single

2006-10-01T08:54:00.000-07:00

One of the most annoying things about being in a domestic partnership is how often there is no valid option for me on forms requiring a relationship status. I'm not single and I'm not married.

The most glaring example of this is at tax filing time where I have to check a box saying I am "single," not "Married, filing separately." For taxes, aside from the obvious fact that I'm not single, it also has a significant impact on the amount of taxes I pay. With my partner returning to school, this will become even more egregious--if we were married and I was the only person earning an income, my tax rate would decrease significantly. But since we're partnered, and neither the state nor federal government allow us to file jointly, my income tax rate stays the same.

But, at least in California, this is no longer the case. Schwarzenneger signed SB 1827, allowing domestic partners in California to file joint taxes.

Supporters and opponents note that in California, joint tax filing was essentially the only right given to married couples in the state that was not provided to domestic partnerships. Now, in the eyes of California law, our relationship is treated more or less the same.

Of course, because the federal government (and the Defense of Marriage Act, we still can't file federal taxes jointly. Because you transfer information from your federal to your state tax forms, this means that we have to fill out our federal forms twice. Once for "real," both indicating we're single. Then once as if we were filing jointly so that we can move the information over to the state forms. (What I'm least looking forward to in this exercise is finding out how many thousands of dollars extra we're paying because of this situation.)

Incidentally, DoMA also means that there are many federal benefits that straight married couples get that aren't offered to me and my partner. Even if we were married in, say, Massachusetts.

There is the argument that the government shouldn't be in the business of giving special rights to married/domestically partnered couples at all, and that doing so discriminates against single people. If the tax code is reworked so that this is the case, I wouldn't shed many tears.

Of course, the politics of this is interesting too. When I first heard about the bill, I didn't have much faith that Schwarzenegger would sign it. But part of me wondered if the newer, more moderate-looking Schwarzenegger might not kowtow to the religious right and realize that the current state of things was discriminatory. When I woke up this morning to find that he'd signed it, I gave a little cheer and thought to myself "maybe he's not such a bad guy after all."

It has been harder to feel the same rage toward the guy that I did during the recall, during the 2004 election when he was supporting Bush and appeared at the Republican convention, and during the disastrous propositions he tried to push through last year. This feeling isn't just because of him signing this bill; it seems to come from the fact that he at least appears to have learned being right-wing won't get him too far in this state and that it makes sense to govern from the center. Of course, after he wins re-election (which looks likely), there's nothing stopping him from switching back.

And, of course, Schwarzenegger did veto the gay marriage bill that got to him, using the twisted logic that the courts should decide the matter (the opposite of the right-wing position when the courts are favoring gay rights). Angelides, on the other hand, has said that he would sign a gay marriage bill. So, on this issue, Angelides still comes out ahead. But, I'm not as disappointed with the current state of the polls as I once might have been.

Traffic Report

2006-09-16T18:40:00.000-07:00

It's been much more than a year since my last blog post. People have been asking me if I have a blog, and my blogging friends have suggested that I get back to it. (Some have also mentioned that my flickr photo stream--and my descriptions/comments--provide what is essentially a blog in a different form.)

I stopped writing the blog for the most part because it was focused on politics, and I'd become so dispirited with where our political system was (and still is) and the vitriol on all sides that I just couldn't get myself worked up enough to feel like I was contributing anything of substance. I still care passionately about certain issues (and if you've read my blog, you can likely figure out which ones those were), but I essentially pulled myself out of the system. I still read Daily Kos, but never contribute. I feel anger and disgust towards certain politicians, but I don't vocalize as often as I would. And I'm happy about the prospects of what's coming up in November, but not overly excited or optimistic about it as I might once have been.

So my problem wasn't with the concept of blogging, it was just that I didn't want to blog about what I had been blogging about.

So what got me blogging again?

It's funny--it's a minor feature of a Microsoft product. I read an entry on some new features on Yahoo! Local and Microsoft Live Local. I invariably use Google Maps for just about any search I'm doing, but one feature mentioned in the article intrigued me. Techcrunch mentioned that Microsoft Live "already offered a service to simultaneously connect your phone and a business’s phone with one click." I was curious about how that worked (I do work in a telecom-related group doing non-telecom stuff at the moment), so I went over there.

But that's not what I found most fascinating. When I was playing around with it, I saw a mention of "Traffic." If you pull up a map and click on Traffic, you can see the current traffic conditions and any accidents/incidents (as little exclamation point icons which, when hovered over, provide detailed information). Now I can pull up a traffic map and see immediately what the traffic will be like on the way home--and where incidents are.

I've mostly been using sfgate.com traffic for as long as I can remember. It's nice, but it doesn't say where there are slowdowns--it just lists accidents and such. There have also been other sites that list the same information as MS Live Local, but not in a map that I can also use for other things. I mean, I can easily find out how to get from Stanford the the MLK Library in San Jose and see the traffic conditions along the way. I don't have to correlate the places I'm going with a list of incidents--it's all layered on top of the same map.

Why would this prompt me to blog? Because traffic is one of those things I've actually been fascinated with for a long time. (It's a bit surprising since I didn't even get my license until after college because I was afraid to drive.) I even did a final project in school on the computer simulations done for the Big Dig (and got to interview Fred Salvucci, one of the principals that initiated the project).

Maybe it's just part of my fascination with presence in general. My Hear&There project for my Master's thesis involved dropping audio in an augmented space using GPS information, and more recently I've gotten into geotagging my photos (way before flickr introduced their built-in maps). Traffic seems to be nothing more than presence on the move, right? It's also (usually) what is keeping you from getting from one presence point to another.

So instead of posting a blog about politics, I figured I'd bring in something else I found interesting. And maybe I'll do this again before another year passes...

I Went To Oregon and Now I Love Bush?

2005-05-11T20:00:00.000-07:00

It's been over three months since my last post, and my more conscientious friends are beginning to make me feel inferior--at least when it comes to blogging. (And many other things, too, actually, but we won't get into that.)

Besides, I actually have something to write about now. Not that many different things have caught my attention, but it feels like there hasn't been anything to supply the necessary activation energy to write.

It's a little surprising, too. I've generally found myself wanting to write whenever I see something or come to a realization that I find unexpected in myself. And that has actually been happening a bit recently. Take, for instance, a piece of mail I got yesterday from "James Carville." On the outside of the envelope is the following text:

He led us into war under false pretenses. He turned trillions in surpluses into trillions in deficits. He sold out our children's health to corporate interests. AND HE WAS JUST GETTING STARTED!

My first thought wasn't the normal rage that fills me when I think of Bush or the election. It was "I wish the Democrats would stop just attacking Bush." Where did that come from? It's not a newfound love for the president's ideas or plans--it's that anti-Bush fervor isn't motivating me the way it used to. I want a party that has principles and stands up for them, and that can produce candidates I actually want to support. Sure, attack letters work some of the time, but it seems that this is ALL I get from them nowadays.

Anyway, something else surprising happened to me this last weekend. Benson and I spent the weekend in Oregon (where we took some photographs) for our fourth anniversary. Oregon--especially the northern coast--is one of the most gorgeous places I've been to. (We stayed at Coast Cabins in Manzanita, Oregon. The cabin was amazing--complete with a private hot tub and sauna. I'd certainly recommend this place to others.)

On the drive were scenes like this:

But there were also many scenes like this:

There were huge sections of trees that had been cut away, presumably for lumber. However, there is a ridiculously large number of trees in Oregon, so even these huge missing patches, as ugly as they looked, just didn't seem like that big a deal.

I was a little surprised at my reasoning and callousness. I could imagine someone that was impassioned about the environment sitting in the car with me and chastising me for not seeing the real problem here--the species that may have been hurt, the fact that this environmental damage is not the same as huge clear-cutting in the rain forests, and perhaps more.

This led me to realize that I have many progressive assumptions without first-hand knowledge of the facts. When we hear about the rain forests getting cut down, how much worse is it than what I saw in Oregon? I honestly don't know--and that is the problem. In the past, if someone had said how we needed to stop clear-cutting in Oregon forests, I would have had a knee-jerk reaction in support of them without looking for all of the facts, or experiencing it myself.

Of course, that's the problem. There is no way for me to research every topic that affects the world, and I certainly can't have first-hand experiences with everything. Instead, I can only focus on a very narrow range of topics, and assume that "allies" and people that think in a generally progressive manner will be honest brokers of information for other topics. Quite often, that works. But can I be expected to fight as loudly for those issues as the ones I know first-hand?

And that brings it back to what many of my entries are about--gay rights and gay marriage. I obviously feel quite strongly about it, and I expect other progressives to feel the same way automatically. But how can I do that if I'm saying I can't do the same thing for their issues?

I'm tempted to say that there is a difference here. Arguments about clear-cutting of forests relies primarily on facts--the species affected, the environmental side effects on water and air, et cetera balanced against the need for jobs. For gay rights, it is not an issue of facts--it is an issue of basic human rights and privacy.

The only problem is, I'm sure environmentalists don't see it that way.

Perhaps the answer is that the expectation of automatic support from other progressives just shouldn't be there--that seeking to provide the full story with a progressive perspective thrown in should be the focus instead.

Edit, 13 May 2005:

Interestingly, it turns out that an environmentalist has posted a "4000-word essay" that uses Google Maps' satellite images to show the effects of clear-cutting in British Columbia. (I found this link on Aldoblog when doing an unrelated search for Google Maps API's.)

On the Other Soft, Wrinkled Hand

2005-02-04T08:00:00.000-08:00

President Bush has been talking for some time about privatizing Social Security, and I have disagreed this proposal pretty much from the start. A lot of that antagonism, though, comes from my suspicions of Bush's motives (the ultimate dismantling of any sort of safety net, the creation of huge deficits to "starve the beast" without concern for the real economic effects on average people, and the transfer of yet more government money to private financial interests through account fees).

There is one factor that Bush hasn't likely considered--though I imagine it won't escape his attention (or the attention of other Republicans) for long. Because the federal government does not recognize gay marriage or near-equivalents, there is currently an inequality to the system. If one person in a married couple dies, the other person can continue to receive benefits based, in part, on the social security taxes paid by the deceased spouse. The same would not happen if one person in a gay marriage dies. If I died, Benson would see no extra social security payments. Right now, this means that Benson would go without approximately $2000 a month (in today's dollars) that he would get if he was a woman. Unfair, right? Trust me, when you are a gay American, you get used to the number of "unfair" situations there are.

Bush has promised that the private Social Security accounts will "be yours to keep" and that "the government can never take it away." He states that you can pass it on to your heirs. If I understand correctly, this means that I could pass this money on to Benson, just as I can pass my 401(k) money on to him. Instead of seeing no Social Security benefits, Benson would likely see a significant amount.

I am sure as soon as the Republicans hear that gay people might in any way benefit from their plan, they will modify it so that you can only pass it on to a defined set of heirs that does not include gay partners.

One could argue that in 40 years, gay marriage or some equivalent will be fully recognized by the federal government. We can only hope.

The problem with the appeal this twist on the Social Security plan has for me is that it is ultimately selfish. The greater good is having a plan that ensures all old people are not living on the street and can have some dignity. Bush's plan will no doubt lead to lower guaranteed benefits. The stock market is inherently risky--saying that it has proven over time to give benefits better than social security is fallacy, because as any mutual fund ad you read states "past performance is no guarantee of future results." Would you want to retire during a huge market downturn?

GLBT politics socialsecurity

Beware of the Lesbians

2005-01-26T10:30:00.000-08:00

The new Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, has criticized PBS for including two lesbian couples in a children's show that received some funding from the federal government.

The show, Buster features an animated rabbit that visits different places. In the show Spellings criticized, Buster visits Vermont where he meets two lesbian couples.

The show is not about the fact that the women are lesbians. It is about farm life and Vermont's famous maple sugar.

What irritates me about this is that PBS caved, and will not distribute the show. (The creators of the show, WGBH in Boston, will distribute it to stations that want it, so I have little doubt that KQED, my local PBS station, will get it.)

What angers me the most, though, is the notion that this is done to "protect children":

Congress and the Departments purpose in funding this programming certainly was not to introduce this kind of subject matter to children, particularly through the powerful and intimate medium of television.

This kind of subject matter??? What is wrong with showing two people in love? Would the people protesting this have protested if PBS showed an inter-racial straight couple? There are sadly a lot of Americans who wouldn't want their kids exposed to that "kind of subject matter" either. How many bigoted parents does it take for the Secretary of Education to get involved in making programming choices at PBS?

For those who say "why should my money go towards something I don't agree with," I'd respond "since when do taxpayers get a veto over the spending of federal money?" If I could stop all of the federal spending on projects I didn't agree with--even just projects that go against my moral beliefs--then we'd have significantly less budget troubles than we do now.

It is obvious that this is part of the Republican strategy to keep the "religious" reactionaries in their party happy. Since they can't actually pass the Federal Anti-Gay Amendment (and since they want to keep that issue alive into the 2006 election and beyond), they have to throw out these little scraps every now and then.

The funny thing is, these scraps are going to motivate the left far more than they'll motivate the right. Those people who applaud this hateful maneuver will not be satisfied, and will think it does not go far enough. But for people on the left, this reminds us of why we fight--because we do not want a country filled with hate and fear.

I had sadly found myself becoming less motivated about politics since the end of the election. It's hard to be in "campaign mode" all the time. But things like this are exactly the kind of motivation I need to make sure that progressives win in 2006.

[Update, 10:55pm] The New York Times has a more in-depth article about this:

Buster appears briefly onscreen, but mainly narrates these live-action segments, which show real children and how they live. One episode featured a family with five children, living in a trailer in Virginia, all sharing one room. In another, Buster visits a Mormon family in Utah. He has dropped in on fundamentalist Christians and Muslims as well as American Indians and Hmong. He has shown the lives of children who have only one parent, and those who live with grandparents.

Who would want their kids exposed to "this kind of subject matter"???

As for the suggestion that PBS mis-used the federal money, it turns out that this type of show does meet the stated purpose.

The question is, does the episode violate the grant under which WGBH received federal funds? Mr. Godwin said, "The presence of a couple headed by two mothers would not be appropriate curricular purpose that PBS should provide."

The grant specifies the programs "should be designed to appeal to all of America's children by providing them with content and characters with which they can identify." In addition, the grant says, "Diversity will be incorporated into the fabric of the series to help children understand and respect differences and learn to live in a multicultural society."

[Update, 1 February 2005, 2:40pm]

The Chronicle has an article that includes details on the "controversial" scenes:

A screening copy of the 30-minute program shows that less than 30 seconds is spent discussing the gender makeup of the two same-sex families included on the show. The longest exchange is a conversation between Buster and an 11-year- old girl named Emma, who lives with her mother, Karen, and partner, Gillian.

"So Gillian's your mom, too?" Buster asks the girl, who answers, "She's my stepmom."

"Boy, that's a lot of moms," Buster quips.

Later, Buster asks the girl about why she likes some framed photographs.

"Because they have my mom and Gillian, who I love a lot, and they mean a lot to me," Emma responds.

As I expected, KQED is going to air it tomorrow (Wednesday, 2 February 2005)

GLBT PBS politics progressive

Share in my Photographic Frustration!

2005-01-23T16:30:00.000-08:00

After reading my Photographic Frustration entry, you're probably thinking to yourself "How can I share in Joey's frustration?"

Fortunately, there is a way. I've signed up for flickr, which allows you to share photos. It has a bunch of interesting features, such as the ability to collectively label and comment on photos. Right now, I've set up most of my photos as "public," meaning that anyone in the world can see them. (Flickr also allows you to have photos that only friends and/or family can see.)

You can view my public photos, but if you want to be notified whenever I put a new photo up, you can use the Atom feed. (I access all of my feeds through Thunderbird.)

Flickr is a rather interesting service; I liked it so much I signed up for the "pro" plan for a year, even though it is still in beta. I particularly like that you can download the full-size original files (if the person is on the "pro" plan) and also that you can license your photos using Creative Commons (which tells other people whether and how they can use your photos; currently, all of my photos are licensed as Attribution/Share-Alike, which means that people can do whatever they want with my photos as long as they give me credit and allow anyone to do the same with the resulting product.

Who knows whether flickr will be around in a year or five or ten. (It's for this reason that I'm leery of posting images on my website/blog directly from flickr, even though that is one of its useful features.) Right now, though, it is something fun to play around with.

photography flickr creative+commons

Photographic Frustration

2005-01-23T14:00:00.000-08:00

I've enjoyed photography at least since I was in the 6th grade, when I took my first photography class. The curious part of me was enthralled by learning how photographs were actually made, and the part of me that likes creating things enjoyed taking the pictures and then developing and creating the prints. I enjoyed it so much, I just knew that one day I would have a dark room of my very own. (The concept of digital photography would remain unknown to me until a few years later.)

A couple of prints survived that experience (unfortunately, they were quite dirty and already deteriorating when I digitized them last year.):

I never developed any real photographic skills beyond snapshots after that. When I first got to college, I was obsessed with documenting everything in photos. I took pictures of orientation, I took pictures of me receiving my fraternity bid (staged a few minutes after the fact, of course), and I even took pictures of the first day of class. My fraternity Brothers were impressed with this enough that they voted me (and my fellow freshman Jason Wong) as the Historians, theoretically in charge of keeping a recorded history of the chapter. (They likely regretted their choice as the term progressed because our Histories just weren't that funny, which is what they traditionally were supposed to be.)

I stopped taking pictures after that term because it was just too expensive to buy the film and get it developed. At the end of college, I still had some rolls from freshman year that had been sitting around waiting for me to have some extra cash on hand to develop them. It wasn't until I got a hand-me-down digital camera during my Senior year that I finally started taking pictures again.

I did take the Strobe Lab at MIT. In this class, we took pictures that seem to stop motion using techniques devised by Doc Edgerton. Edgerton took famous strobe pictures like the one of the milk-drop crown and the bullet cutting through a playing card. We actually took pictures like these and others, and I did learn some useful camera information. However, most of the information applied most readily to strobe photography--a very particular way of taking photographs that typically relies on a very dark room, a camera shutter left open, and some technique for triggering a flash of a given length. Also, one of the guys in my group was a professional photographer, so he tended to take control, especially when it came time to develop the prints.

(Unfortunately, I lost my lab notebook, so I have no copies of the photographs that we took during the class. You can only imagine how frustrating that is. This is perhaps why I have such a love for digital and its easy backups.)

I tried at one point to take photographs for the "auspicious" MIT newspaper, The Tech. I attended a meeting, got a camera and a roll of film, and took some pictures of people in the Student Center food court. I dropped off the film, and never heard anything else from them--and the pictures never showed up. At the time, I was too apathetic about most things to pursue it any farther.

Except for these two cases, I never really focused on developing my pictures into something more than just snapshots. (Pun intended? You be the judge.) Looking back at my pictures from the time, they are interesting for the memories, but that's about it. I'd heard of the Rule of Thirds, but with a point-and-shoot camera that had no manual controls, that was about as far as I could go.

Benson and I finally bought a new camera (the Sony DCS-F828). It's not quite an SLR but it has a lot of manual controls. Unfortunately, I'm completely overwhelmed by the controls, and usually find myself just reverting to the "auto-everything" mode. The pictures come out looking a lot better than any pictures I'd taken before, but that's partly because it is a nice camera. (For indoor shots especially, having the external flash that we can bounce off the ceiling helps tremendously.)

And this is where the frustration comes in. I've spent some time lurking at DPChallenge, a web site that consists of "challenges," wherein people submit photos on a given topic and have others vote on and critique them. The quality of the pictures here run through a large range--some look highly polished and professional, and some look like snapshots. I looked through a recent contest, and it feels like my photos will fit on the lower end of this range.

Since I still do enjoy photography, I decided to go ahead and try submitting a photo for a challenge. I figured I could deal with a bruised ego, and could benefit from any tips the better photographers might offer. The topic of the challenge is "Old and New." In this challenge, we are supposed to simply take a picture that juxtaposes something old with something new.

I spent yesterday on a search for the perfect photo. I was going to drive up to San Francisco, thinking there may be some architecture shot I could get with an old church and modern building (though I'm sure there will be a lot of similar shots submitted for the challenge). On the way up, I kept looking around to see if I could find anything that would fit. I stopped by Stanford and wandered around a bit, and came across two "poles." One is a totem pole, the other is a free-standing metal column. This seemed like a nice fit for the topic, so I took a bunch of pictures from different angles.

The problem was initially that they day was too gray and I couldn't get the contrast correct (so the sky's gray would look too harsh). Later on, the sun came out--but then the totem poll was in shadows so the contrast between the two poles was too great. I also had trouble lining up the shots so that both poles were in the picture without one dominating more than the other.

The result was probably better than a snapshot that someone might have carelessly taken, but not that much better:

I keep thinking that if I knew the camera better, I could have taken a much better shot.

The problem isn't that I have no idea what is wrong with my pictures. In this picture, there are some obvious problems. The totem pole doesn't stand out enough from the tree in the background. The asphalt in the foreground is distracting, and is lined up with the totem pole face in a funny way. The colors aren't as vibrant as they could be, and the lighting could be better.

Figuring I would continue my search for a good picture, I went from Stanford out to Half Moon Bay. I only got a single photograph--a "W" in a weathervane for the Flickr One Letter group. On the way home, I stopped by an intersection that I had noticed on the way to Stanford--the intersection of St. Francis and Embarcadero in Palo Alto. This intersection had a very old street sign, but also had a more modern (easier to use but much less elegant) sign. This would fit perfectly with the "Old and New" topic of the contest.

Once again, I took several pictures. In my mind, this was so easy to set up. But I just couldn't get in the right position to make it work:

There are some things in life that I am content to "half-tushie"--things that I am not the best at but do not have the inclination to put in that much more effort to get better at them. Sure, it would be nice to be a Renaissance Man, but I think for most part it is easier to dabble in a lot of things and specialize in a few. Photography is one area that wished I excelled at--especially since it is the creative art that I have had the most opportunities to develop.

What does it say about me that I still can't take the pictures I want to take despite the two photography classes I have taken, my desire to take good pictures, and now a relatively nice camera. I'll choose to believe it means that photography is harder than it looks, and that it takes time that I just haven't invested up to this point. If that's true, then given a little more time and effort, I will finally be able to do more than just know what is wrong with a given photo, and will instead be able to actually take a picture that I'm not embarrassed to post on a site like DPChallenge.

photography frustration

The Inaugural Address

2005-01-20T11:00:00.000-08:00

Part of me didn't want to listen to President Bush's inaugural address. The feelings from the last election are still a little raw, and it I didn't feel like having seething anger boiling inside of me again.

I have avoided watching or listening to the run-up to the inauguration. Eric Boehlert's "Giving Bush a pass -- again" in Salon today has enough examples of the fawning coverage that make my blood pressure glad I did, such as:

Newsweek's Inauguration Eve cover story this week was equally fawning, insisting that contrary to what readers may have read or suspected, Bush is "hands-on, [is] detail-oriented and hates 'yes' men." He's a commander in chief who "masters details and reads avidly, who chews over his mistakes" and who "digs deep into his briefing books." According to whom? Bush's closest "aides" and "friends," of course.

Newsweek also reported that Bush's natural self-confidence was boosted by his "clear election victory" in November. But as Salon previously noted, in the past 80 years, only three times have presidents been elected with fewer than 300 electoral votes. Bush accounts for two of the three anomalies; in 2000 he won 271 electoral votes, and in 2004 he captured 286. (Jimmy Carter is the third example, with 297.) By way of comparison, Bush's final margin of victory was almost identical to Carter's win over Gerald Ford in 1976, when there was very little discussion of a mandate for the Democrat. Yet to Newsweek's eyes, Bush enjoyed a "clear victory."

But this morning, I decided to listen anyway. I am, after all, an American. Bush won the election, and he is being sworn in as the President. I don't agree with many of his policies, don't like him personally, and don't like many of the people in his administration. But in four years, when a Democrat is being inaugurated, I don't want to be hypocritical towards those who ignore the inauguration because "the Republican should have won."

Listening to the inauguration, I agreed with almost everything the President said. He delivered it well, which I could even tell listening to him on the radio. There was maybe a sentence or two that I cringed at, but the speech did make me proud to be an American.

And I think that might be part of the problem. Will the reality match the rhetoric? I hope so.

Consider this snippet, which I particularly liked:

In America's ideal of freedom, the exercise of rights is ennobled by service, and mercy, and a heart for the weak. Liberty for all does not mean independence from one another. Our nation relies on men and women who look after a neighbor and surround the lost with love. Americans, at our best, value the life we see in one another, and must always remember that even the unwanted have worth. And our country must abandon all the habits of racism, because we cannot carry the message of freedom and the baggage of bigotry at the same time.

(I'll leave aside the subtle reference that will play well with those opposed to abortion rights and go unnoticed by most everyone else.)

When Bush says

Liberty for all does not mean independence from one another. Our nation relies on men and women who look after a neighbor and surround the lost with love.

does he mean to challenge the Republican notion that each person is solely responsible for his or her own station in life and, as such, should not have access to a "safety net" when something bad happens?

When Bush says

[W]e cannot carry the message of freedom and the baggage of bigotry at the same time.

does he intend to oppose the effort to put bigotry into the Constitution in the form of the anti-gay marriage amendment?

In both of these cases, conservatives will be able to say "No, you misunderstood him." With regard to the talk of neighbors, Bush would prefer to see private charities provide services instead of having protections guaranteed by the government. And since conservatives don't see opposition to gay marriage as a form of bigotry, the President clearly wasn't speaking of that issue.

And that is the problem with this speech. It is easy to agree with because you can hear what you want to hear, putting your own beliefs into the framework that he provides. There were few of the lines spelling out specific policies for which it is easy to feel opposition.

Of course, even with generalities, it is easy enough for the president to oppose them. Remember Bush's first inaugural address? Here's a quote from that one:

The enemies of liberty and our country should make no mistake: America remains engaged in the world by history and by choice, shaping a balance of power that favors freedom. We will defend our allies and our interests. We will show purpose without arrogance. We will meet aggression and bad faith with resolve and strength. And to all nations, we will speak for the values that gave our nation birth.

Even Bush supporters can agree that he has acted with arrogance in our foreign policy, exclaiming that nations are "either with us or against us" and plowing ahead with policies without regard for the input of other nations. (Many Bush supporters don't see this as a bad thing.)

I hope that Bush lives up to the lofty ideals that I read into his inaugural address this year. More likely, he will either live up to the lofty ideals that someone else read into his inaugural address--or just ignore his address altogether.

politics George+W.+Bush inauguration inaugural+address speech

Postlet: Bush Unites 49% of the Country

2005-01-19T22:30:00.000-08:00

CNN released a poll indicating that 49% of Americans believe that "Bush is a uniter" while 49% believe that he is a divider. I'm sure I'm not the first to notice the irony of the country being evenly split about whether someone unites the country.

This poll also shows how useless polls can be. I'm guessing that most of the people who claim Bush will be a uniter are simply Bush supporters who would have responded yes to "can Bush levitate using nothing but mind power?" Most of the people who claim Bush will be a divider would have responded no to "can Bush read?" That is, many people aren't answering the question asked, they're answering some other question (in this case, "Do you support Bush?").

Bush said in his first post-election news conference:

With the campaign over, Americans are expecting a bipartisan effort and results. I'll reach out to everyone who shares our goals.

Bush wants to unite all of the people who share his goals--that is, people who agree with him. Apparently that's enough for the people who agree with him to see him as a uniter. Now if only he could meet the traditional definition of uniter and unite the whole country.

politics George+W.+Bush polls

He Ain't No Scharffenberger

2005-01-18T20:45:00.000-08:00

I've been to the Jelly Belly factory and the Scharffen Berger factory, and on both tours there was a little part of me that hoped there would be Oompa Loompas running around. They wouldn't have even had to carry off annoying kids while singing catchy songs--I would would have been happy with just the catchy songs.

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is one of those movies from childhood whose details I could only vaguely recall, but that I still remember loving. What I mostly remembered from it--besides all of the hysterically grotesque things done to the kids--was the uncomfortable feeling at the beginning of Charlie and his poverty-stricken (and mostly bed-ridden) family. Perhaps it was some pre-conscious fear of the possibility of plummeting to the depths of the socio-economic pyramid, but more likely it was just the 70's European feel to the thing. (Plus there were no oompa loompas at that point in the story.)

Browsing through iTunes the other day, I came across the trailer for an updated version, with the correct name, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with Johnny Depp in the Willy Wonka role. I'm generally past the point where I see a movie trailer and say "I can't wait for this movie to come out!" So I was a little flummoxed when I found myself replaying the trailer again and again. And then the next day. And thinking about the trailer when I wasn't watching it. And being angry at the calendar for making July so far from January, and Warner Bros. for not putting the movie out right now, and Johnny Depp for not using his considerable pull in Hollywood to provide me with an early release, and George Bush because, well, I am just always angry at him.

I don't even know why the trailer excited me so much. It may have had something to do with Johnny Depp. I liked him in Pirates of the Caribbean (in which his portrayal is apparently gay friendly), and his playful and weird look in this movie does provide a strong hook for me.) It may have also had something to do with the fact that Tim Burton directed.

Most of all, though, I reckon I liked the ad simply because it was "catchy," and look forward to the movie because it seems like it could be a stylistically visual feast.

That I'm uncomfortable with this ad's effect on me is risible. (Okay--that means "laughable;" I'm trying to restore some intellectual dignity here). I've become so hypersensitive to media bombardment that when my something slips through my cynical defenses it makes me uneasy. But sometimes it is okay to just relax and have fun. And maybe over-analyze things a little bit.

movies Charlie+and+the+Chocolate+Factory media over-analysis

You Say Greedy Lawyers, I Say Corporate Cops

2005-01-14T22:00:00.000-08:00

On January 6, there was a train crash in South Carolina that resulted in the leaking of chlorine gas and the death of nine people. One train had been parked on a side track, and the track switch was not moved back to the main line. The next train to come along was therefore diverted to the same side track, causing the crash.

I heard on NPR the other day that lawsuits were possible (and an article on Yahoo! today confirmed that two lawsuits have been filed).

My first reaction to this was "those damn, greedy lawyers" and, no less importantly "those damn, greedy people." Accidents happen, after all. Why does every accident seem to lead to lawsuits? It almost makes you want to support the Republican effort at "tort reform."

The idea of tort reform is to cap the amount of punitive damages that a person can sue for (that is, the amount intended to punish the offender beyond the actual damages). This will make lawsuits less attractive to lawyers (who will not be able to profit as much) and also less of a pain for businesses.

The problem here should be clear to anyone who has seen Fight Club. In this movie (which I coincidentally watched tonight for the fourth or fifth time), the character played by Ed Norton works for a car company. He explains his job thusly:

You take the number of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement (C). A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

With a cap on punitive damages, a business has an upper limit for "C" in Ed Norton's equation, making "X" easier to calculate with certainty. After these caps are put in place, "C" is also going to be much lower than it was before.

So businesses will find it easier to calculate how much they will have to pay out--and discover that they have to pay out much less than now--instead of fixing something that could cost lives or otherwise harm people.

In the case of the train wreck, there is technology to provide an electronic warning system to alert the train conductor about the switch position ahead on the track. Why weren't these put in place? I'm guessing that there was a cost associated with it that the Norfolk Southern (the railroad company) decided it was just not worth paying. Also, why weren't the tanks that held the chlorine reinforced so they wouldn't puncture so easily? These preventive measures cost money, and businesses want to spend as little money as possible (businesses after all are "in business" to make a profit). If businesses have less to fear from lawsuits when something they do causes death and destruction, then there will continue to be incidents like this in the future.

Apart from government regulation, the civil legal system is one of the few checks society puts on businesses. (Sure, in theory the "invisible hand" or "market forces" could force a business to act responsibly, lest they lose customers--but Norfolk Southern does most of their business with other businesses, who also care about profit margins. Consumer pressure on Norfolk Southern is too diluted to have any effect.)

Unfortunately, there are a few notorious cases that on their surface sound ridiculous. Everyone knows about the grandmother who sued McDonald's because she spilled hot coffee on herself, and probably thinks that this is the epitome of a frivolous lawsuit. Of course, as with so much of what people assume they know, this case wasn't entirely frivolous.

After learning that 700 people had complained to the company about the heat of its coffee, safety consultant Robert Knaff calculated that that equaled one problem for every 24 million cups sold. This was, he said, "basically trivially different from zero." One juror explained the decision to award millions in punitives: "It was our way of saying, 'Hey, open your eyes. People are getting burned.'"

(This may change the minds of those who think that companies don't actually do the type of calculations described in Fight Club.)

Regardless of the merits, cases like this sound bad when given as a news nugget or a late-night joke. There are also some really stupid cases that get a lot of attention. These make it easy for Republicans to make torts into one of the many "crises" from which they must protect Americans. (Of course the Republicans who support this would never have ulterior motives like, say, cutting off Democratic funding.) And it makes it easy for the average American to think that all tort cases are about greedy lawyers and fake grievances.

politics lawyers tort+reform Norfolk+Southern capitalism

Pragmatic And Secure In My Liberality

2005-01-11T23:10:00.000-08:00

Something I touched on briefly earlier was a sense of pragmatism I had when it came to some proposals coming from (or supported by) Governor Schwarzenegger. In that entry, I put it this way:

So on these two issues, I'm on Schwarzenegger's side. Does that make me a Schwarzenegger Democrat? Of course not. I'd be worried about myself if I just parroted the Democratic party line on all issues. I like to think of myself as a "Democratic-leaning independent," though I'm sure none of my friends would describe me that way.

I had a chance today to think some more about this pragmatism while reading Rising Tide, an article in The New Republic by Daniel Sarewitz and Roger A. Pielke Jr. Sarewitz and Pielke speak with disdain for those environmentalists who would use the tsunamis as scare tactics when talking about global climate change:

A December 30 article in Salon portrays the effects of the recent tsunami as "visions of just the kind of tumultuous weather that scientists have long viewed as a symptom of global warming." A day later, Sir David King, Britain's chief science adviser, told the BBC, "What is happening in the Indian Ocean underlines the importance of the Earth's system to our ability to live safely. And what we are talking about in terms of climate change is something that is really driven by our own use of fossil fuels."

Global climate change is real, and developing alternative energy sources and reducing global carbon-dioxide emission is essential. But the claim that action to slow climate change is justified by the rising toll of natural disasters--and, by extension, that reducing emissions can help stanch these rising losses--is both scientifically and morally insupportable. To minimize damage from tsunamis and the like, we need to focus not on reducing emissions but on reducing our vulnerability to disasters.

I agree with Sarewitz and Pielke's point. The pragmatist in me demands that issues be discussed rationally and without scare tactics, even if I support a certain position. When I reached this conclusion while reading the article, I began to think about where this pragmatism comes from and what it means to be a pragmatic liberal.

Being an engineer is closely linked to being a pragmatist. As an engineer, you learn how to look at things from a certain orderly perspective, and to make conclusions from rules and facts. (This is not to say that being an engineer does not require creativity; in fact, being an engineer requires a great deal of creative thinking.) This use of rules and facts that is fundamental to engineering is inherently pragmatic--you do not let extraneous, exaggerated or flawed rules/facts affect the solution.

Most engineers would recognize the feeling of elation I achieve whenever I find an elegant solution to a problem that meets all of the parameters required by the problem. This feeling of elation makes it easy to try to do the same thing for solving the problems of the world. You try to find some base rules--"people should not suffer," "we have a responsibility to consider the impact of our decisions of future generations," etc.--and then try to extrapolate from these in an orderly process to reach conclusions about all sorts of different policies. These rules, once discovered, should be fundamental and not changeable at whim.

From this grows my hyper-sensitivity to hypocrisy. Hypocrisy comes whenever a person discards an old "rule" in their beliefs in favor of a new "rule" because the end result of applying the old rule was distasteful. Whenever a conservative argues that states' rights mean that the federal government cannot get rid of Jim Crow laws, he is establish a "states' rights" rule. But when he sees that this "states' rights" rule would lead to assisted suicide in Oregon or medicinal marijuana in California, he discards the old rule and asks the federal government to step in.

As a liberal, my opinions in the above cases is the reverse of the conservatives. I believe the federal government should be involved in outlawing Jim Crow, but should not be involved in state issues like assisted suicide and medicinal marijuana. These positions could be just as open to the "hypocrite" tag I easily applied to the conservative positions. The pragmatist in me, though, works to find a solution to this problem.

I found the solution by adding another rule on top of the base set of rules I have developed to look at the world. This added rule is that "the federal government defines a minimum set of rights that states cannot curtail, but the states can provide a more expansive view of these rights." This rule does not contradict any of the rules that I used in the past, and is something I can believe in fundamentally (not just because it leads to a certain conclusion in one particular case).

(I could also get into issues of the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly allowing the federal government to interfere in the states when it comes to civil rights versus the preposterous claim that medicinal marijuana affects interstate commerce, but we'll leave that alone for now.)

There is a bit of chicken-and-egg problem: Am I an engineer because I'm a pragmatist, or am I a pragmatist because I'm an engineer? Not surprisingly, my answer is "both." I was attracted to engineering because of a pragmatic way of thinking, but studying and gaining experience as an engineer has reinforced my sense of pragmatism.

The other thing I realized after reading the Sarewitz and Pielke article was that I am secure in my liberality. I have no problem criticizing other liberals when they do something that I disagree with, and it does not make me any less of a liberal. As Sarewitz and Pielke say, it is "scientifically and morally insupportable" to claim that individual natural disasters can be attribute to global warming. (It is particularly tempting when natural disasters seem to happen in close succession, such as the huge mudslide in La Conchita. I understand that most scientists agree that climate change is real and is something we need to do something about. But trying to scare people into supporting regulations angers me as much as the Bush administration using fear of terrorism to justify unrelated policies.

Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant criticized liberals who think that all they need to do is educate people, and that the people will naturally support liberal positions. I admit that there is an allure to that way of thinking, but I agree with Lakoff's assessment. It is important to note that he was not advocating deception, though--and that is what people using the tsunami for political gain are doing. What he was advocating was framing. That is, instead of simply presenting the fact that climate change can have detrimental effects, it can and should be tied to something more emotional but still factual--such as leaving a better planet for later generations.

There was a time--even within the last few months--when I was not as secure in my liberality. I would have a tremendous internal struggle whenever I disagreed with other liberals. But as I've realized that being pragmatic isn't a bad thing and as I've become more comfortable with what I believe, I no longer mind letting a healthy dose of pragmatism get in the way of supporting every liberal goal, tactic or priority.

Us In Austin

2005-01-07T23:50:00.000-08:00

I'm writing this entry while in Austin--my second vacation in Texas ever. Benson and I are here for a wedding for one of his friends.

I'd heard that Austin was the only liberal enclave in Texas--and hence, one of the only places worth visiting (and living). It may be liberal, but the Bay Area still has it beat--the liberalism here seems to have a bit of a mean streak to it, and Austin is still located in a conservative state.

Benson and I had lunch at a The Pita Pit near UT Austin. The signs pointed towards a liberal-type establishment, with "fresh thinking, healthy eating" advertised on the door, and we could easily have imagined this place being in San Francisco--until we heard the anti-gay jokes from the workers.

After spending a few hours at the Texas state house (getting a tour and just walking around), we headed up to Central Market, which we thought was something like an outdoor farmer's market. In fact, it was essentially an over-sized Whole Foods, with a lot of organic foods and bulk bins. But still--this wasn't something I figured you'd see in Texas. (Leaving aside the fact that Whole Foods was started in Austin.) Again, though, there was a bit of an experience to remind us we weren't in the Bay Area. At the end, when I was paying at the checkout, one of the payment options was the "Lone Star" card. I asked if that was like food stamps, the cashier said (in an irritated manner) "Yeah; I can't believe people with food stamps shop here since I'm paying for it." It seemed like a rather cold-hearted thing to say--how could you possibly be upset with someone wanting to provide their kids with fresh, pesticide-free food?

Just when I was thinking that Austin's reputation for liberalism was a little bit tainted, we met up with a few friends who were also in town for the wedding (Kisa, Kenneth, Nessa and Nessa's cousin April). We had dinner at Ruby's BBQ near UT Austin, which serves "all natural beef" and vegetarian foods, then headed to Ruta Maya, a decidedly liberal joint. There were no mean streaks to these places. In fact, Ruta Maya featured anti-Bush bumper stickers and quite friendly people. We got coffees and sat outside playing Scrabble for a while--and in doing so more than one person came up to us and just started talking to us about the game and about where we were from. They also provided some recommendations on what to do while we're here.

I was quite surprised about the lack of Bush "pride" here in Austin. After all, Austin is the capital of the state of which he was governor. Maybe we're just going to the "wrong" places (or perhaps the "correct" locations). The only references to Bush were the official Bush portrait in the capitol rotunda, an annoying presence of "W" on half the computer screens in the House of Representatives chamber, and surprisingly few W bumper stickers. In fact, we saw more anti-Bush bumper stickers here than pro-Bush stickers.

So with barely 24 hours in this place, I could imagine myself being comfortable enough to live here. But then I remember the little things--like, oh, the fact that my relationship was illegal until just over a year ago and that no Domestic Partnership (or equivalent) exists here--or is likely to anytime in the future. Austin has the misfortune of being located in a decidedly anti-gay state.

This is something that straight people find hard to understand. Liberals can move to many "liberal enclaves" throughout the country. But if gay people want to have basic rights, we can only live in a few select areas. (Thankfully, the areas tend to be places you'd want to live anyway.)

My Family Should Be Happy My Towels Aren't Clean

2005-01-01T23:30:00.000-08:00

As I said last night after drinking some champagne, giving Benson a peck, and blowing a party horn--"Happy 2005 and good riddance to a crappy-ass 2004!" As is often the case with my pronouncements, there's a good deal of exaggeration in there. A lot of great things happened in 2004--several of my friends got married, I felt myself climbing out of an intellectual rut, and who can forget the new washer and dryer we bought??? But the bad things that happened were just so bad--the re-election of a man who has done so much harm to things I care about despite my efforts, a bad reaction to some anti-arthritis medicine I was taking (though fortunately it didn't cause my heart to explode), and, on a more global scale, the catastrophic tsunamis.

So I enter 2005 with hope that this year will be better than last. To help ensure that, I didn't do laundry today.

As an engineer, logic usually rules the day for me--so most superstitions just seem silly. There was one Friday the 13th when an E.T. poster that was hanging on the wall fell on its own. At the time, I was quite spooked out (then again, my Gremlin doll nearly led to a nervous breakdown once, too, so being spooked out wasn't that unusual for me). Looking back, it's clear that the poster falling on the day was simply a coincidence. If the poster fell the next day, I certainly wouldn't remember it nearly 20 years later.

But even though logic rules, there's a part of me that says "what if there is something to this?" I thought about washing some towels today, but then I stopped. I remember Mrs. Sampson in the 8th grade telling us about how you weren't supposed to do laundry on New Year's Day, or it would bring bad luck. She hadn't done it for years, and then one year she decided it was silly and did laundry. That year, her father died. (Doing a little google research, it turns out the superstition is that doing laundry will actually cause someone to die, not just bring bad luck.)

I didn't end up washing the towels today. I don't honestly believe that doing it would cause bad luck. But why take the chance? If something (God forbid) terrible were to happen, would I really want the burden of thinking I had somehow caused it? Isn't not doing the laundry a small price to pay for peace of mind? I reckon this is how most superstitions stay around even in an "enlightened" time.

I unfortunately did not get around to eating black-eyed peas today. That was another tradition I found out about from Mrs. Sampson; this seems to be more of a "positive" superstition, in that it will bring you good luck. I'd like to say that I purposely resisted eating black-eyed peas just to show how enlightened I truly am. In fact, I just didn't have any around. And now there's a bit of a nagging feeling that I'm going to miss out on something good this year because of it.

At least if 364 and 29 minutes from this moment I'm saying "Happy 2006 and good riddance to a crappy-ass 2005" we'll know why.

Personalizing Disasters

2004-12-28T22:00:00.000-08:00

On the evening of Christmas Day, as a get-together Benson had planned at home was winding down, I did a little web-browsing. I saw a report about how the largest earthquake in 40 years had struck, and the resulting tsunamis had killed a couple thousand people. I nonchalantly reported this information to Benson and his friends.

Since then, seemingly every time I check in on cnn.com or nytimes.com, the number killed rises. Right now, it's up to about 57,000--not including those who are in peril from disease, hunger, etc.

As I saw these reports, I couldn't help but compare my feelings to those of September 11th. When my Mom woke me up on that day to tell me what happened, and I saw the tapes of the building collapsing, I started crying and, like most Americans (if not most people), felt dumb-founded for a while afterward.

With all of this death and destruction of the tsunamis, though, I felt nowhere near the same level of emotions. I felt bad for the people who have died and their families, but to about the same extent that I would have felt if any stranger died. The magnitude of this disaster, the fact that whole communities are gone, the suddenness of the death, the terrible fear people must have felt--none of this brought me close to the September 11th feelings.

I've been asking myself why. Was it because 9/11 was murder, and this was a natural disaster? Because 9/11 happened in America, not around the world? Unconscious racism? For a while, I favored the first option--because the latter ones made me feel too uncomfortable about what it would mean about myself.

But just now, I think I realized what a large part of it is. With September 11th, I immediately saw the video images shortly after everything happened. Seeing the buildings fall to this day makes me emotional. Seeing the people running away, the stories of people desperately looking for their family (and wondering myself if some friends were okay) brought the tragedy down to an individual level.

With these tsunamis, I've not seen any video footage. I've had all of my news from the web--and by this point I have stopped reading any articles. The first articles I read (which were really the only ones I read until tonight) mentioned the general fact that tsunamis killed a lot of people, but did not provide any details or individual stories.

Tonight, I finally read some articles detailing the individual experiences of people. Reading these excerpts, like this one from Alan Sipress' In Indonesia, a boulevard of destruction, finally started to bring it into focus for me:

Haggard with unkempt, jet-black hair, Emi, who like many Indonesians uses one name, recounted how she and her family had dashed from their home in fright Sunday morning when the earthquake rocked the province, followed quickly by the onslaught of the dark sea.

As the water poured across Panglima Polim Street, many tried to outrun it. But the wall of water came too fast.

"Then, people started yelling, 'The water is coming! The water is coming!' " Emi said. "I asked everyone to get into the car."

Her husband, son and two grandchildren clambered into the family's jeep. Emi caught a ride from someone on a motorcycle. The beachfront was more than a mile away, but it took the ocean no time to flatten buildings for blocks in every direction and whisk vehicles off the pavement. Wooden fishing boats up to 75 feet long were heaved ashore, setting down atop houses and against storefronts. Emi's two grandchildren, she said, were drowned instantly.

"The water kept rolling us, rolling us," Emi continued, tugging anxiously on her brown-and-white sarong. "I ended up on a rooftop hanging on. My husband ended up in a tree."

From the branches, he clung desperately to the hand of their son. But the boy slipped away, dropping into the churning waters, vanishing. "So I keep searching and searching," she said. "How can I know the reasons for it? It is the power of God."

As she retold the story, the neighborhood was eerily still. In front of Emi was a broad lake where her block once stood, with islands of blasted brick walls and household furniture.

After reading this, and others like it, I'm finally starting to feel a level of emotion that is perhaps more appropriate for this kind of tragedy of humanity.

It is hard to comprehend what it means for something to have killed 57,000 people. When does something become tragic? Is it more tragic for 57,000 people to die than 20,000? What about 3,000?

Tragedy comes from the individual stories, like that of Emi. It is perhaps a human failing, but the real sense of tragedy for me comes from me being able to imagine myself in the same situation--or at least to picture the enormous heart-wrenching agony that she went through during that time. Once the event is personalized on that level, the thought that such a tragedy is multiplied many thousands of times finally becomes overwhelming.

This realization has taken away some of my anger at the attention some news sites paid to how many Americans died in the tragedy or, as CNN has, Tsunamis shatter celebrity holidays. These stories seemed in such poor taste--are they implying that an American life or a celebrity life is somehow more meaningful than the other lives lost? But any personalization of the tragedy helps those of us not directly affected by it to understand the loss.

Chicken Soup for My Soul (And, Okay, For Benson Too)

2004-12-23T20:00:00.000-08:00

Benson has a cold. It's the same cold that I had a couple of weeks ago, but as anyone who cares about someone else can empathize with, I'd much rather that I was still sick than that Benson was suffering. (Okay, that's a bit dramatic--it is just a cold after all.)

Doing what any guy would do, I thought about how I could make him feel better, and I hit on the idea of making him chicken soup from scratch.

I made chicken soup from scratch for the first time a couple of years ago, also when Benson had a cold. I was house- and dog-sitting for my friends Rob and Rachel in their beautiful Redwood City home, so I got to take advantage of their jealousy-inducing kitchen. I stopped by the Albertson's between my work and their house to pick up the chicken, carrots, onion, celery and parsley my googling had told me I would need. I dumped it all in a large pot, covered it all with water, brought it to a boil, then let it simmer for a couple hours.

Then the problems started. I didn't know you were supposed to skim the fat off of the top. (Chicken fat may sound good, but floating globules on the top of your bowl of soup isn't very appetizing.) I also didn't know that you were supposed to throw out all of the vegetables used in the soup. The whole point is that the flavor from the vegetables ends up in the water--so the vegetables end up as bland lumps of fiber. I'm sure Benson appreciated the thought--and the ounces of loved I infused the soup with must have made him feel better--but the soup just wasn't all that great.

This time around, I learned my lessons. Instead of relying on Google, I used Julia. Ms. Child and I are on a first-name basis ever since I saw her getting a tour of the Media Lab. Media Lab students spent a not insignificant amount of our time giving demos of group projects to visitors, including corporate sponsors and occasionally celebrities. On this instance, Julia Child was getting a tour and someone else in the group gave her a demo--and I saw her. So maybe we're not as close as me and my good friend Bruce Aidells, but there's a connection there. Even if she didn't feel it. Or ever see me.

Anyway, I found her basic instructions for chicken stock at the front of her book Julia and Jacques: Cooking at Home. (This book was actually a gift to me from a guy I went on a few dates with right after moving to California, but we don't need to let Benson know that.) A few of the key things I picked up were (a) you want to simmer immediately after the water starts boiling or else your stock will be cloudy and, most importantly, (b) after skimming the fat off, boil the stock down by half. (Or, if you're feeling pretentious, you can decoct the stock instead.)

Cooking in general--and in particular making something involved like chicken soup--is quite relaxing. It does take a long time. I had to prepare the ingredients, let it boil, skim the foam off the top, let it simmer, strain out the solids, chill the soup overnight to let the fat congeal, skim off the fat, decoct the stock, and add salt to make it just how Benson likes it. But the truth is, I enjoyed it. And the fact that I was doing it for Benson made me enjoy it that much more.

When I think about it, I realize that part of the reason I enjoy cooking almost every meal is the realization that I'm making something someone else might enjoy--usually Benson, but maybe someone at a potluck or a Thanksgiving dinner. There's a nurturing aspect of cooking that gets intensified when you're trying to make someone feel better, but it still exists when you're just trying to fill his or her belly with something tasty.

Scalia and the Last Paragraph

2004-12-21T22:10:00.000-08:00

Before heading to work this morning, I read Tom Curry's article Scalia's friends and foes prepare for battle. Well, I read most of it except for the last paragraph or two--I'd finished brushing my teeth and was ready to go. (This detail is important.)

The part I read this morning actually did make me think. Scalia is an interesting character; I don't agree with most of the opinions he reaches. But when reading his dissents it is often hard to argue with his logic (especially after reading some of the contortions that the Justices in the majority go through to reach their conclusions). My Supreme Court class professor said reading him was for many students a "guilty pleasure," and he was right. (I'll likely post some detailed examples of what I am talking about at some point...)

So since some people are bringing him up for Chief Justice, it is a scary thought--I disagree with the results of his opinions so much and wouldn't want that dominating the Court, but if his opinions are sound then why shouldn't he have the job?

My professor hinted at something in class with which I agree: Scalia is great at dissents, because he just has to pick at the arguments of the majority. He is free to pick and choose those portions that are weak, which makes his arguments look stronger. There's a certain luxury in being on the losing side. Someone good at dissenting, though, won't necessarily make a good Chief Justice.

I also dislike the role Scalia played in Bush v. Gore and the utter hypocrisy of using an Equal Protection claim in that decision while opposing that claim in so many others--and then stressing that it sets no precedent. (The details of his role are found in a Vanity Fair article giving behind-the-scenes details of the case.)

The Curry article also includes a quote giving another reason for why Scalia shouldn't be Chief Justice:

Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, said last week, I hate to give them any ideas, but Scalia would probably be the least effective choice out of that crowd for the Bush administration, strange as it may sound, because he is so divisive. He is so disrespectful of his fellow and sister justices on the court. The level of disdain for the other justices in his opinions comes through loud and clear. Im not sure how they would take being herded by someone who had such disdain for them.

To me, this is the big one; read his dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey:

Beyond that brief summary of the essence of my position, I will not swell the United States Reports with repetition of what I have said before; and applying the rational basis test, I would uphold the Pennsylvania statute in its entirety. I must, however, respond to a few of the more outrageous arguments in today's opinion, which it is beyond human nature to leave unanswered...One might have feared to encounter this august and sonorous phrase in an opinion defending the real Roe v. Wade, rather than the revised version fabricated today by the authors of the joint opinion...I cannot agree with, indeed I am appalled by, the Court's suggestion that the decision whether to stand by an erroneous constitutional decision must be strongly influenced - against overruling, no less - by the substantial and continuing public opposition the decision has generated.

Whether the argument he makes are sound or not, the snarky tone he uses--while sometimes fun to read--seems inappropriate for a United States Supreme Court Justice, much less a Chief Justice. Some of his writings would be more fitting for, say, a blog.

Anyway, remember how I said I hadn't read the last few paragraphs of the article? When I got home and turned my computer on, the web page was still on the screen so I went ahead and finished it:

If the court has become a super-legislature, then, Scalia said, We can have a sort of plebiscite each time a new nominee to that body is put forward.

And if Scalia is nominated to be chief justice, it will be a sort of plebiscite; not a debate over whether hes qualified, because, after all, the Senate unanimously confirmed him in 1986, but a struggle over his decisions and dissents on abortion, the death penalty, racial preferences and the exercise of religion.

This type of reporting is what gets to me. Earlier in the article, Curry quotes someone as providing a quite valid reason of why Scalia--even if he is qualified to be a Justice--may not be qualified to be a Chief Justice. So this last paragraph is just wrong and an oversimplification, and it even contradicts the article that contains it!

The desire to make an amazing insight in the last paragraph of some piece of writing--which I am clearly doing here--is a natural one. But amazing insights tend to be more amazing and insightful if they are actually the culmination of the rest of the piece in which they are contained. In fact, Curry should look no further than a Scalia opinion to learn this lesson. Scalia's dissent is Casey ends:

[B]y foreclosing all democratic outlet for the deep passions this issue arouses, by banishing the issue from the political forum that gives all participants, even the losers, the satisfaction of a fair hearing and an honest fight, by continuing the imposition of a rigid national rule instead of allowing for regional differences, the Court merely prolongs and intensifies the anguish.

We should get out of this area, where we have no right to be, and where we do neither ourselves nor the country any good by remaining.

Genuineness Under Siege!

2004-12-17T07:45:00.000-08:00

I can't believe I'm getting caught up in this, but I just heard on NPR that Wal-Mart is allowing Salvation Army ringers outside their doors. More than that, they are going to provide a match of up to $1 million!

Wal-Mart truly truly cares about our country, much more so than the anti-Christian, communist and anal-sex loving Target.

Or perhaps they are a desperate business whose sales are unexpectedly low this year, and are trying to stir brand loyalty by tearing the country apart.

I make no secret about not liking the Salvation Army. They are an anti-gay organization that actively works against gay rights. They have that right, but I shed no tears when Target banned Salvation Army ringers this year. (Target didn't do it because of a political stance, but rather because they were receiving a lot of requests for solicitors and didn't want to pick and choose who could be at their doors.)

It is disgusting that the Salvation Army involves itself in politics, and then tries to act like they are under attack by evil corporations. Helping the poor and being anti-gay do not have to go hand-in-hand. And I damn well do not feel bad about not supporting an organization that would rather I did not exist, even if they try to cover it up with "good works."

Wal-Mart, however, saw Target's decision as an opportunity. If the people who run Wal-Mart really felt stirred to give the Salvation Army money, they could have done so without issuing a press release and notifying the conservative media. Or they could have given the money at the beginning of the season, before people were crying that Christmas was under siege. Instead, in the face of declining sales, they broadcast this gift to the world. This is what corporations do--but anyone who thinks that Wal-Mart is a good company because they do this and goes and shops their is giving in to a cynical ploy. (People like Pat Robertson were already telling people to shop at Wal-Mart anyway.)

Like I said in my last post, I celebrated Christmas growing up and have no problem when people tell me Merry Christmas. I don't have a problem with the holiday itself. I have a problem with the way it is being used as yet another wedge by greedy (for power, money, or ratings) miscreants. Anyone who decries the "commercialization" of the holiday should take no solace in a corporate gift from Wal-Mart to the Salvation Army--the gift is commercialization at its most repugnant.

Merry Hanukkah!

2004-12-16T23:15:00.000-08:00

I love Frank Rich. This is the one guy whose opinion pieces always say what I've been thinking, but in a much more eloquent, convincing and funny way.

His latest, 2004: The Year of the 'Passion' goes into the whining of some Christians about how they are being persecuted--yet at the same time claiming to be a large majority of the country. Some of the choice passages:

In the latest and most bizarre twist on this theme, even Christmas is now said to be a target of the anti-Christian mob. "Are we going to abolish the word Christmas?" asked Newt Gingrich, warning that "it absolutely can happen here." Among those courageously leading the fight to save the holiday from its enemies is Bill O'Reilly, who has taken to calling the Anti-Defamation League "an extremist group" and put the threat this way: "Remember, more than 90 percent of American homes celebrate Christmas. But the small minority that is trying to impose its will on the majority is so vicious, so dishonest and has to be dealt with." If more than 90 percent of American households celebrate Christmas, you have to wonder why the guy is whining. The only evidence of what Pat Buchanan has called Christmas-season "hate crimes against Christianity" consists of a few ridiculous and isolated incidents, like the banishment of a religious float from a parade in Denver and of religious songs from a high school band concert in New Jersey. (In scale, this is nothing compared with the refusal of the world's largest retailer, Wal- Mart, to stock George Carlin's new best seller, "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?," whose cover depicts its author at the Last Supper.)

What is this about? How can those in this country's overwhelming religious majority maintain that they are victims in a fiery battle with forces of darkness? It is certainly not about actual victimization. Christmas is as pervasive as it has ever been in America, where it wasn't even declared a federal holiday until after the Civil War. What's really going on here is yet another example of a post-Election-Day winner-takes-all power grab by the "moral values" brigade. As Mr. Gibson shrewdly contrived his own crucifixion all the way to the bank, trumping up nonexistent threats to his movie to hype it, so the creation of imagined enemies and exaggerated threats to Christianity by "moral values" mongers of the right has its own secular purpose. The idea is to intimidate and marginalize anyone who objects to their efforts to impose the most conservative of Christian dogma on public policy. If you're against their views, you don't have a differing opinion you're anti-Christian (even if you are a Christian).

As Ms. Kissling points out, the 50 million Americans who belong to progressive religious organizations are rarely represented on television because "progressive religious leaders are so tolerant that they don't make good TV." The Rev. Bob Chase of the United Church of Christ agrees: "We're not exciting guests." His church's recent ad trumpeting its inclusion of gay couples was rejected by the same networks that routinely give a forum to the far more dramatic anti-gay views of Mr. Falwell. Ms. Kissling laments that contemporary progressive Christians lack an intellectual star to rival Reinhold Niebuhr or William Sloane Coffin, but adds that today "Jesus Christ would have a tough time getting covered by TV if he didn't get arrested."

I'd actually heard about O'Reilly's ridiculous "Christmas Under Siege" garbage a while ago, and then came across a longer article in Salon, entitled "The Grinch who saved Christmas", which covers some of the same territory as Rich. After reading that article, I thought about adding my rant about how whiney and confrontational these people have become, but I resisted because I felt like that was exactly what O'Reilly wants. They make money by antagonizing, and I didn't want to be a part of it. But Rich's article did such a perfect job of capturing my sentiments, I couldn't let it go by without a mention.

I grew up celebrating both Hanukkah and Christmas. I don't have a problem with it when people wish me a Merry Christmas. I actually hate the term "Happy Holidays" because it sounds so generic and half-ass: if you're going to try to be inoffensive, don't mention holidays at all because unless you are Jewish or Christian, there isn't really much of a holiday going on. (I know there is an overlap with Ramadan some years, but what about atheists?)

At MIT, there was a small tree put up outside the Student Center. It was known as the "Non-Denominational Holiday Shrub." So I took to calling my menorah a "Non-Denominational Holiday Candle Holder." It makes about as much sense.

I'm more bothered by the fact that corporations use these holidays and all other holidays as marketing tools. Does Wal-Mart really want me to have a Happy Holiday? No, Wal-Mart wants money--but getting people in the "Holiday Spirit" helps them do that.

John Boykin's "Can the 'Christ' Be Kept in Christmas" was an audio commentary on All Things Considered a couple of weeks ago that explored the commercialization of Christmas and also the weird idea of having a holiday that focuses so much on a baby. Boykin points out that we don't celebrate Martin Luther King Jr's birth on his birthday, but rather look at his life and teachings. Boykin would be happy giving up Christmas to total secularization (returning it to its pagan roots perhaps?) and celebrating Easter as a real Christian holiday instead.

So I am not offended by a "Merry Christmas" from anyone. I am offended by people trying to tear this country apart for ratings, for money, and for power. I am offended by people who are so mean-spirited and angry that they use the facade of a holiday as a reason to attack other people. I am also offended by people who are in the majority and who have power whining about persecution when there is so much real persecution in this world.

I Am Aidells' Sausage

2004-12-15T19:30:00.000-08:00

Sure, my friend Charity can rub in the fact that Gorbachev visited Google, but can she claim a visit from famous sausage chef Bruce Aidells? He stopped by Oracle today, taking over one of our cafes with all Aidells-themed food. (There was roasted pork loin, grilled sausages and sausage soup among other things.) I mean, sure, Gorbachev helped bring about the demise of the Soviet Union, but can the man cook? Did he give us chicken apple sausage? No, all he left us with are loose nukes and Putin.

I really do have fond memories of his sausage; when Benson and I first started dating I frequently cooked us breakfast on the weekend and made Aidells sausage. Of course, Benson doesn't remember--when I told him Aidells was coming today, the conversation went a little bit like this:

Joey: "Chef Aidells is going to be at Oracle tomorrow!"
Benson: "Who is that?"
Joey: "You know, the guy who makes the sausage?"
Benson: "Who?"

Then today:

Joey: "Look, I got Chef Aidells to sign a book for us."
Benson: "Who?"

The main reason for his visit was to promote his new book Complete Book of Pork. It felt a bit hypocritical getting a book signed. Benson works at a bookstore, and they have not-too-infrequent book signings. I've told him that the whole idea of getting a book signed by someone seems so meaningless. The process is too mechanical for the big names: sign the book, "next", sign the book, "next." When Clinton visited Barnes&Noble here in San Jose, it was specified that he would not write any personal messages, and he barely even spoke to the hundreds of people that came through.

But when I stopped by the cafe today, there was Bruce Aidells sitting at a table with his books, and no line. I had decided beforehand that I would buy one of his books and get it signed if it wasn't too much of a hassle--I sort of justified it to myself that this book could actually be useful. It is a cookbook after all. (I felt a bit guilty since I am Jewish and all, but pork just tastes so good.)

Since there was no line, and perhaps just because he is naturally friendly, we made some small talk. I asked him why he decided to write a whole book about pork (it turned out he was asked to by the publisher apparently).

He's also quite witty. He said that the book goes into details on how sausage is made. I asked "aren't we not supposed to want to see how it is made?" To which he responded "Much like programming."

Since he didn't have the same rule against personalization that Clinton apparently had, I asked him to make it out to me and Benson. He got a little flustered when spelling Benson's name:

It is amusing how celebrity works. After that brief moment, I feel some sort of connection to him, even though he wouldn't remember me if he saw me tomorrow. I can also feel a surge of brand loyalty building up in me. I find it funny that I am so uncomfortable with these feelings--and even moreso that I feel the need to justify it internally by thinking "he's a minor and local celebrity, with a wholesome and tasty product that I already enjoyed." Now if Gorbachev wants to come to Oracle with some Gorbachev-themed food, then maybe I'd let him sign a book for me.

A Penny Saved Is A Penny Thrown Into A Black Hole

2004-12-11T15:00:00.000-08:00

There was a time, not that long ago, when I finally decided that I did not need to make that much money. I looked at all of my expenses, and figured that Benson and I could easily live off of half of what we make now--we wouldn't necessarily have all of the little luxuries, but we would have shelter and food. I used this to justify changing careers to something that would have more of an impact on the world, perhaps doing more in the service of mankind.

Then we went on a small spending spree--buying a new washer and dryer (environmentally friendly!) and a new color laser multifunction device (consolidating other devices and saving space!). We've thought about buying a new refrigerator (again, doing our part to save the world), and a new espresso machine (okay, this one has no redeeming qualities.) I've somehow decided that I need a nice leather recliner or armchair (from Pottery Barn perhaps?) and could use a new ultraportable laptop (my current one is just too damn heavy).

I'm not sure where this materialistic streak has come from, but it so strong that even after reading a Mother Jones article about the poverty of the migrant workers in California's San Joaquin valley ("Migrants No More" by Maggie Jones) this afternoon, I had only minor pangs of guilt thinking about when and where Benson and I will buy our commitment rings.

If I have to think of a justification for this, I could point to two things that have made me question the worth of money: the weakening dollar and the potential of a real estate bubble.

The weakening dollar has been scary since at least before the election, but it has been picking up steam--at least in the media. The Economist (whose name assures me I can trust it in matters dealing with the economy) had a pair of cover articles about this, entitled "The disappearing dollar" and "The passing of the buck?". In essence, the articles argue that the huge deficits that we are running--up to 6.4% of GDP compared to a maximum of 3% of GDP required for all countries that use the Euro--have led to a weakened dollar and to fact that the euro is becoming more appealing as a reserve currency. The effect of this is that foreign governments that currently finance our debt and buy massive amounts of dollars will stop doing so, sending interest rates soaring and the value of the dollar tumbling.

The dollar has been the leading international currency for as long as most people can remember. But its dominant role can no longer be taken for granted. If America keeps on spending and borrowing at its present pace, the dollar will eventually lose its mighty status in international finance. And that would hurt: the privilege of being able to print the world's reserve currency, a privilege which is now at risk, allows America to borrow cheaply, and thus to spend much more than it earns, on far better terms than are available to others. Imagine you could write cheques that were accepted as payment but never cashed. That is what it amounts to. If you had been granted that ability, you might take care to hang on to it. America is taking no such care, and may come to regret it.

A weakening dollar means that any money I put into savings today will be worth less tomorrow. Why put money into savings if this is the case? I could put money in the stock market, but if we have the recession that some predict, then the stock market sure isn't a good bet. Is it not therefore better to spend money now on goods that last a little while--refrigerators, washers and dryers, espresso machines, recliners--than letting the money sit in the bank and devalue?

One of the major savings goals that Benson and I have established is having enough money to afford a large down payment on a house. In the Bay Area, you need at least $500,000 to get a tiny house in a not-that-rundown area. That is a discouraging proposition, and makes the amount that we are able to put into savings seem quite small. I sometimes think that our only realistic option is to save up some money and move to the middle of nowhere where houses are cheaper. (I dutifully sent Benson a link to CNN's Take the money and run--to Auburn?", an article about this very topic.)

Regardless, buying a house seems so overwhelming that when I read an article like "Bubble Trouble" in U.S. News & World Report, I think about giving up on getting a house any time in the near future anyway. A lot of people think that the housing market is a bubble, and that rising interest rates--which could be accelerated if The Economist articles mentioned above are right--will pop it. Part of me has thought this was a bubble that was going to pop in the past, it hasn't yet, so it won't in the future. That is the same thing I was saying around 2000, right before the stock market bubble burst. The article also mentioned something I hadn't been aware of--housing prices in LA in 1990 fell by 40%, and in Boston and SF by 20%. Who in his or her right mind would buy a house in this market???

So the need to save for a house starts to seem a little less pressing--we'll just wait for the bubble to burst and then move in.

With less of a need to save for a house, and the fact that money I save today could be worth less tomorrow, it just seems to make more sense to spend money instead of saving it. While this logic makes sense to me, it still has an unusual feeling to it. I'm worried that the American economy is going to collapse, along with the housing market. Instead of preparing for it by saving money for hard times, though, I've somehow decided that saving money is useless.

I am being a bit dramatic. As with most areas where my only expertise comes from reading articles, I am skeptical about my reasoning, so I hedge my bets quite a bit. In fact, we still are saving quite aggressively--only a little less so than we would have otherwise. (On the plus side, we get shiny new things to show for it.)

Of course, this still leaves the question about whether this money we are spending on luxuries could be better spent on, say, feeding the hungry or helping to end injustice throughout the world. Yup, it looks like those pangs are back.

A Message from Colorado

2004-12-09T14:00:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it is motivating to read articles from the other side. John Andrews' "What the Hell Happened in Colorado?" contained this:

The message gap was a consequence of this motivation gap. Democrats talked about making Colorado a better state, about not letting Republicans cut cherished programs, and about the GOP's supposed obsession with "gays, guns, and God." Republicans talked about . . . what? Other than denying their charges and hurling some back, we pretty much punted. Republican candidates picked their own issues locally. Churchill would have called it a pudding with no theme.

Andrews is wondering why the Democrats won big in Colorado (except, of course, for that whole voting-for-Bush thing). The Republican Senate seat became Democratic again. The Democrats took control of both houses of the state legislature for the first time since 1960.

His reason is that the Republicans had no message. Sound familiar? Switch the parties (and positions) around, and it sounds the same thing the Democrats have been saying nationally.

So is it possible that you simply pull out the excuse about message whenever your side loses? I'd like to think that the Democrats won in Colorado because the people there support its positions. It seems much less painful to say "they would agree with us if we had gotten our message out better," but both sides can't be right. If both sides got their messages out so that the public was completely informed, who would be winning elections?

Sure, it is possible that the Democrats in Colorado have done something right that the Democrats in other states did wrong, and that we should learn from what they did. But if John Andrews is right, the flip side could also be possible--that the Republicans in Colorado have done something wrong, and need to learn from the Republicans in other states.

NPR Proves I Found Mr. Right

2004-12-05T08:30:00.000-08:00

What are the chances???

This past week, NPR has proved that Benson and I were meant for each other. "How?," you may ask? Because in a single week there were stories on national NPR shows that mentioned both of our high schools. Now, we didn't go to Exeter or Stuy, so you likely never heard of our schools before. But that is what makes it so special...

Benson's high school--Mission San Jose High in Fremont, California--was mentioned on Morning Edition on November 29th in the story Immigrants Weigh Splitting from California School System. The story explores how the white students/families at Mission San Jose are annoyed at the majority of Asians (including Indians) at the school--and how some Asians are trying to split away. (There was a follow-up story the next day, Children of Immigrants Seek to Define Their Identity, but that one was a bit more generic and less about the high school itself.)

My high school--Lumberton Senior High in Lumberton, North Carolina--was mentioned later in the week on All Things Considered's Remembering Lance Cpl. Benjamin Bryan. This was a depressing story about a Marine from Lumberton that was killed in Iraq. He also went to Lumberton Senior High, and the school got a brief mention. (The local paper, The Robesonian, covered Bryan's death as well.)

Neither of these stories is particularly happy--one is about tensions with immigrants, and the other is about the death of someone in Iraq. But the coincidence of both of our high schools being mentioned nationally in a single week struck me.

My "What are the chances?" question is a bit tongue-in-cheek. One of my 6.042 (Math for Computer Science) professors, Tom Leighton, did a great job of ruining coincidences for me. His basic point was that if you think of all of the coincidences that could happen that don't then the few that do are statistically insignificant. So when I run into a friend I haven't seen in a long time in a store, what about all of the times that I didn't see that friend in the store? What about all of the other friends that I didn't see in the store? What about all of the other places I didn't see this friend?

Leave it to math to take the fun out of things. But just as I enjoy the slots in Vegas even though I know the mathematical odds are against me, I can be struck by coincidences even though I know they are "statistically insignificant."

Amazingly, People Have Different Perspectives

2004-12-01T20:30:00.000-08:00

This is one of those ground-breaking blog entries that point out the obvious as if it were actually a reflection on the sapience of the blogger:

People have different perspectives.

It is easy to forget that there are a lot of people out there whose experiences in life are totally different from my own.

I came across this in a The Economist article "Where have all the people gone?"

Women now far outnumber men in Zimbabwe, and the very young and very old outnumber adults of working age. In a typical household in Pumula South, a township of Bulawayo, ten children gobble maize paste from plastic plates under a hot tin roof. Their various parents have been out for several months, says their grandmother.

That is, they are in Johannesburg, flipping steaks or working illegally in shops. Sometimes they send back a bag of flour with a few folded banknotes hidden inside. But only sometimes. In other townships, the story is the same. Almost all my friends are in South Africa and my relatives are in Britain, says a man in Nkulumane, also on the edge of Bulawayo.

The sentence in bold above is what really struck me. This morning, I was talking to my mom about how she could send me some money for a gift. We spent about 5 minutes deciding how to do this--Paypal? Check? Transfer into my savings? Give a check to my sister, have her deposit it, then Paypal me?

It never crossed our minds that she could put the money in a bag of flour and send it to me.

And it never crossed our minds that there are a lot of people in this world for whom receiving a bag of flour--and the promise of food that it brings--would have been a happy enough occasion without any money inside.

Looking back at this blog and my thoughts over the past few months, I realize that I'm focusing a lot on the process of things--the legal structures, what it means to live in a democracy, etc. It is easy to ponder these things when you have all of the comforts that I have.

There is virtually no chance that I am ever going to see the world from the same perspective as the guy "flipping steaks" in Johannesburg to send money back to kids in Zimbabwe. But it is still useful to remember that no matter how important or big I think my thoughts or actions are, there are many other ways of looking at the world.