It's only just beginning to get cool enough that it's pleasant to work in the garden again. That leaves me with an impressive stand of weeds four feet high and sunflowers twelve feet high in many areas of the garden. I'm chipping away at them, but it's slow going.
I blame the government shutdown.
Price signal opacity & third-party payors
Louisiana WalMart shoppers go feral when the food-stamp computer shuts down, stores become unable to verify whether any benefits are left on EBT cards, and one store decides to put its shoppers on the honor system for the duration. It was looting without guns.
Return to New York
Some months ago, Cassandra (and others) took sharp issue with Grim and me over the striking down of New York's stop'n'frisk laws, on the ground that we were blithely underestimating those laws' effectiveness in making many areas of New York fit to live in. This article very much takes her side of the argument, attributing the recent uptick in horrific Big Apple crime to the "ongoing dialog between police and criminals" that sends a clear message about what will be tolerated. I'd still like to see cops exercise their discretion without using racial rules of thumb, but there probably is a lot to be said for not requiring them to explain too much about their gut hunches, and especially for not dragging them into endless racial-grievance tribunals over it.
H/t Maggie's Farm.
H/t Maggie's Farm.
Locks
Part four: in which it becomes clear why I've never learned to pick a lock. Nearly all the locks I encounter in daily life are some form of a cylinder within a cylinder. The outer cylinder (green in the diagram below) is attached to a fixed door, while the inner cylinder (yellow) is meant to rotate freely within the door when unlocked.
[Corrected per Doug's comment:] When locked, the inner cylinder is prevented from rotating past the outer cylinder by little "driver pins" (blue) protruding radially through the boundary between the two cylinders. The driver pins are lined up in a row along the shared axle of the cylinders. There is some kind of spring mechanism that snaps the driver pins into place, each being brought up snug up against a "plug pin" (red). The driver- and plug-pins together make a smooth shape that exactly fits a shaft that's radial to the axle shared by the cylinders.
When each red plug pin is pushed just far enough, the point where it meets the blue driver pin will line up exactly with the "shear" boundary between the yellow inner cylinder and the green outer cylinder, at which point the blue driver pin can slide sideways past the red plug pin, and the yellow inner cylinder can rotate past the green outer cylinder. But each red plug pin must be pushed a slightly different distance in order to make it line up properly, and the cylinder will not move unless all of the plug pins are lined up at the same moment.
A key typically takes the form of a rod intended to be inserted along the shared axle of the two cylinders, one edge of which is notched up and down in a pattern that, when fully inserted, will push each spring-loaded plug pin just far enough to move it out of the way and let the inner cylinder rotate with the twisting action of the key. This rotation is connected in a variety of ways with a lever or cam that retracts a bolt out of the doorframe and back into the door lock.
If a cylinder lock is not constructed carefully, its plug pins can be pushed back one at a time until they're just at the release point. The cylinder will then turn just enough to keep that pin from slipping back, while the other pins continue to obstruct rotation. A lock picker exploits this weakness to push each pin back one at a time until all are released, using a variety of springy bent wires and a delicate sense of touch to detect when each pin has been pushed into the right position.
I tried to find information on how fast professionals can really pick locks, but it's hard to sort through the anecdotal evidence and casual bragging on the Internet. On TV, the pros from Dover can do it in just a few seconds.
[Corrected per Doug's comment:] When locked, the inner cylinder is prevented from rotating past the outer cylinder by little "driver pins" (blue) protruding radially through the boundary between the two cylinders. The driver pins are lined up in a row along the shared axle of the cylinders. There is some kind of spring mechanism that snaps the driver pins into place, each being brought up snug up against a "plug pin" (red). The driver- and plug-pins together make a smooth shape that exactly fits a shaft that's radial to the axle shared by the cylinders.
When each red plug pin is pushed just far enough, the point where it meets the blue driver pin will line up exactly with the "shear" boundary between the yellow inner cylinder and the green outer cylinder, at which point the blue driver pin can slide sideways past the red plug pin, and the yellow inner cylinder can rotate past the green outer cylinder. But each red plug pin must be pushed a slightly different distance in order to make it line up properly, and the cylinder will not move unless all of the plug pins are lined up at the same moment.
A key typically takes the form of a rod intended to be inserted along the shared axle of the two cylinders, one edge of which is notched up and down in a pattern that, when fully inserted, will push each spring-loaded plug pin just far enough to move it out of the way and let the inner cylinder rotate with the twisting action of the key. This rotation is connected in a variety of ways with a lever or cam that retracts a bolt out of the doorframe and back into the door lock.
If a cylinder lock is not constructed carefully, its plug pins can be pushed back one at a time until they're just at the release point. The cylinder will then turn just enough to keep that pin from slipping back, while the other pins continue to obstruct rotation. A lock picker exploits this weakness to push each pin back one at a time until all are released, using a variety of springy bent wires and a delicate sense of touch to detect when each pin has been pushed into the right position.
I tried to find information on how fast professionals can really pick locks, but it's hard to sort through the anecdotal evidence and casual bragging on the Internet. On TV, the pros from Dover can do it in just a few seconds.
Action
Part three: being an examination of the many parts of my piano's action that I never gave any thought to. Here's something that seems obvious in retrospect: the piano has to be constructed so that depressing a key makes a hammer not just land on a string but strike it and immediately rebound; otherwise all that happens is a dull thud. At the moment of the "strike" the hammer has become a free projectile.
At about the turn of the 18th century, a bright fellow named Bartolomeo Cristofori worked out the piano action that allowed musicians to produce both soft (piano) and loud (forte) notes by striking strings instead of plucking them harpsichord-style. His early model embodied many principles still in use, such as the interaction of levers to translate a small finger motion into a larger percussive impact on a string some distance away, and a mechanism to keep the hammer from bouncing and restriking, called an "escapement." The original single-escapement device was improved by the nineteenth-century double-escapement, which allowed the musician to repeat notes very quickly without waiting for the key to come fully back to its resting position.
Among the prized characteristics of a good piano action are the immediacy of the connection between the key and the string (no simple matter considering the Rube-Goldberg intervening mechanism), the smoothness of the action throughout the range of motion of the key, and the responsiveness of the key to the whole range of volume from piano to forte.
Pictured below is a grand-piano action. For some reason, it never occurred to me before this instant that a grand piano hammer strikes from below the string, even though that should have been clearly visible to me all along; it's right out there in the open. The link above at "double-escarpment" provides the key for all the little parts as well as helpful animations.
What should piano actions be made of? Some experts are coming around to the acceptance of composite materials instead of wood. In that connection, I was surprised to read this expert's glowing praise of a brand I've never heard of: the Fazioli piano, apparently outstanding for all of its sound qualities, not just the superb responsiveness of its action.
At about the turn of the 18th century, a bright fellow named Bartolomeo Cristofori worked out the piano action that allowed musicians to produce both soft (piano) and loud (forte) notes by striking strings instead of plucking them harpsichord-style. His early model embodied many principles still in use, such as the interaction of levers to translate a small finger motion into a larger percussive impact on a string some distance away, and a mechanism to keep the hammer from bouncing and restriking, called an "escapement." The original single-escapement device was improved by the nineteenth-century double-escapement, which allowed the musician to repeat notes very quickly without waiting for the key to come fully back to its resting position.
Among the prized characteristics of a good piano action are the immediacy of the connection between the key and the string (no simple matter considering the Rube-Goldberg intervening mechanism), the smoothness of the action throughout the range of motion of the key, and the responsiveness of the key to the whole range of volume from piano to forte.
Pictured below is a grand-piano action. For some reason, it never occurred to me before this instant that a grand piano hammer strikes from below the string, even though that should have been clearly visible to me all along; it's right out there in the open. The link above at "double-escarpment" provides the key for all the little parts as well as helpful animations.
What should piano actions be made of? Some experts are coming around to the acceptance of composite materials instead of wood. In that connection, I was surprised to read this expert's glowing praise of a brand I've never heard of: the Fazioli piano, apparently outstanding for all of its sound qualities, not just the superb responsiveness of its action.
Siphon power
Part two of my exploration of things I thought I understood but didn't, really: the water closet or flush toilet. Even before looking it up to write this piece, I guess I had a fairly decent understanding of the easily accessible drain-and-refill mechanisms located under the lid of the toilet tank. It's a big tank with small, straightforward moving parts whose function is easily observed and understood. The flush handle pulls a "piston" out of position at the bottom of the tank, allowing gravity to drain several gallons of tank water quickly through a large opening at the bottom. As the water level falls, a float valve drops, operating another lever that opens a refill valve connected to the house's water supply. (This resupply valve being a very small opening, the refill takes a minute or so while the draining operation takes only a few seconds.) When the tank is full again, the float-ball lever should come back into position and shut off the refill valve. Just in case, there's a little overflow pipe that lets excess refill water drain harmlessly down the drain, so that the worst that can happen is that you hear the refill water continue to run long after the flush cycle should have been completed. That's called "The toilet won't stop running" or "why is the water bill so high this month?"
What was a little more mysterious to me was the bowl mechanism, which has no moving parts except water. This part is a clever use of the siphon principle to provide waste-moving power with a built-in gas-trap seal. While some commercial toilets use the building's water pressure to compress air gradually between flushes so that it can be used for moving power, most domestic water closets rely entirely on the potential energy stored in the raised water tank. The clever part is the sideways-S-shaped wiggle built into the bottom of the bowl, which for some reason is called a "P-trap." The S-shaped drain goes down from the bottom of the bowl, then up a few inches higher than the bottom of the bowl, then down again into the drainage system. The high point of the bump-up is called a "weir," just like the dam-like affair that allows a pond to overflow when it reaches a certain level. When the bowl is in stable "ready" mode, its water level is just high enough to fill the P-trap to the level of the weir, thus forming the gas seal that so contributes to our domestic comfort. (Our sinks have P-traps for the same reason.) If, at this point, we spill small amounts of liquid into the bowl, they will simply rise slowly over the weir and drain rather than flood the bathroom floor. But if instead we dump several gallons quickly into the bowl, we activate a siphon that exerts a strong pull on the contents of bowl for several seconds until the siphon is broken again. Assuming the drainpipe isn't clogged, we would be hard-pressed to pour enough water into the bowl quickly enough to make it overflow; it's a robust failsafe device.
No doubt many of us have learned that, when the water supply is temporarily off, the toilet can be made to flush pretty well simply by pouring a two-gallon bucket of water into it. The bucket substitutes for the capacitor action normally performed by the water tank. In normal action, though, a well-designed toilet tank adds two mechanisms that the emergency bucket does not duplicate: it sends part of the water through "rim holes" near the top of the bowl, which wash down the sides, and it sends the rest through a siphon-jet hole near the bottom of the bowl, in order to jump-start the siphon mechanism. Either way, unless the drainpipe is clogged (a melancholy prospect), all it takes to complete a flush is to introduce a couple of gallons of water quickly into the bowl. To get this done in a pinch, we don't need water pressure, let alone a gas or electrical connection. It's one of the things that works well in post-hurricane/zombie apocalypse conditions, if you've remembered to fill some bathtubs with water and the floodwaters outside remain lower than your bowl's weir.
All the finicky stuff inside the tank is just a much more convenient way of schlepping a couple of gallons of water into the bathroom for each flush, dumping it into the bowl quickly and without splashing when we want it to happen and not otherwise, and then refilling the tank slowly (while we leave the room and go on about our day) without much risk of overfilling the tank and flooding the floor. Modern toilets do have extra wrinkles mandated by code, such as anti-siphon devices built into the refill water supply. We're more careful now than we used to be about preventing back-flow from faucets or toilets into the house's clean water supply. It's true that we're still using the potable water supply to transport our sewage, which is pretty primitive and wasteful, but that's another subject.
This video isn't bad except for its annoying sound effects; I recommend watching it with the sound off.
What was a little more mysterious to me was the bowl mechanism, which has no moving parts except water. This part is a clever use of the siphon principle to provide waste-moving power with a built-in gas-trap seal. While some commercial toilets use the building's water pressure to compress air gradually between flushes so that it can be used for moving power, most domestic water closets rely entirely on the potential energy stored in the raised water tank. The clever part is the sideways-S-shaped wiggle built into the bottom of the bowl, which for some reason is called a "P-trap." The S-shaped drain goes down from the bottom of the bowl, then up a few inches higher than the bottom of the bowl, then down again into the drainage system. The high point of the bump-up is called a "weir," just like the dam-like affair that allows a pond to overflow when it reaches a certain level. When the bowl is in stable "ready" mode, its water level is just high enough to fill the P-trap to the level of the weir, thus forming the gas seal that so contributes to our domestic comfort. (Our sinks have P-traps for the same reason.) If, at this point, we spill small amounts of liquid into the bowl, they will simply rise slowly over the weir and drain rather than flood the bathroom floor. But if instead we dump several gallons quickly into the bowl, we activate a siphon that exerts a strong pull on the contents of bowl for several seconds until the siphon is broken again. Assuming the drainpipe isn't clogged, we would be hard-pressed to pour enough water into the bowl quickly enough to make it overflow; it's a robust failsafe device.
No doubt many of us have learned that, when the water supply is temporarily off, the toilet can be made to flush pretty well simply by pouring a two-gallon bucket of water into it. The bucket substitutes for the capacitor action normally performed by the water tank. In normal action, though, a well-designed toilet tank adds two mechanisms that the emergency bucket does not duplicate: it sends part of the water through "rim holes" near the top of the bowl, which wash down the sides, and it sends the rest through a siphon-jet hole near the bottom of the bowl, in order to jump-start the siphon mechanism. Either way, unless the drainpipe is clogged (a melancholy prospect), all it takes to complete a flush is to introduce a couple of gallons of water quickly into the bowl. To get this done in a pinch, we don't need water pressure, let alone a gas or electrical connection. It's one of the things that works well in post-hurricane/zombie apocalypse conditions, if you've remembered to fill some bathtubs with water and the floodwaters outside remain lower than your bowl's weir.
All the finicky stuff inside the tank is just a much more convenient way of schlepping a couple of gallons of water into the bathroom for each flush, dumping it into the bowl quickly and without splashing when we want it to happen and not otherwise, and then refilling the tank slowly (while we leave the room and go on about our day) without much risk of overfilling the tank and flooding the floor. Modern toilets do have extra wrinkles mandated by code, such as anti-siphon devices built into the refill water supply. We're more careful now than we used to be about preventing back-flow from faucets or toilets into the house's clean water supply. It's true that we're still using the potable water supply to transport our sewage, which is pretty primitive and wasteful, but that's another subject.
This video isn't bad except for its annoying sound effects; I recommend watching it with the sound off.
Exaggerated confidence
My newly purchased book, "The Invisible Gorilla," discusses how we over-estimate our mental powers. Tests like the "gorilla on the basketball court" show not only that people fail to see the gorilla (because they're concentrating on adding up the number of passes made by players), but also that they are terrible at predicting how well they'd be likely to do on this and many other cognitive/attention tests. The section I'm reading now asks how well we think we understand seven basic gadgets: (1) a bicycle, (2) a zipper, (3) a flush toilet, (4) a cylinder lock, (5) a car speedometer, (6) a piano key, and (7) a helicopter.
Now, that gives me pause! I'm pretty confident of my understanding of a bicycle. The author claims that people challenged to make a sketch of its workings do things like omit the chain, or connect the chain to both wheels, or draw the pedals outside the chain, but I don't believe I'd make any of those mistakes. On the other hand, if zipper technology were erased tomorrow, the world would be using buttons and hooks for a long time if they were relying on me to re-invent that mainstay of modern fashion. I know a flush toilet has something to do with siphon power, but that's about where I quit. Years of dusting the perfectly visible workings of the hammers in my piano have left me a bit vague about how all the levers fit together, though I do understand generally that the key tilts on a lever and that eventually translates that motion to a final hinged piece that strikes a string. All I really know about speedometers is that they know what fraction of a mile represents one revolution of my tire; years ago I was warned that putting the wrong size of tire on your car will make your speedometer mislead you about your speed. Helicopters and cylinder locks might as well be black magic.
So perhaps some education is in order, beginning with the onomatopoetic zzzzzzzipper.
The basic idea is a row of interlocking teeth that fit tight when in a straight line but loosely when bent into an arc. If the row is in a spiral shape, it generally is made of polyester, while "ladder-type" arrangements typically are made of metal. According to Wikipedia, "A special type of metal zipper is made from pre-formed wire, usually brass but sometimes other metals too. Only a few companies in the world have the technology." This is the sort of thing that sets one's conspiracy-detectors buzzing, but a helpful Forbes article explains how one Japanese firm came to dominate the zipper business by the early years of this century, including a charming anecdote about growing pains as an Asian company attempts to expand overseas:
Here are some do-it-yourself repair guides for a broken zipper, which should be easy to complete with our newfound understanding of the mysterious mechanism.
DNA molecules operate very much like a zipper. In fact, all enzymes employ the trick of opening up a clasp so that an interlocking shape can be inserted or removed before the clasp springs back.
Now, that gives me pause! I'm pretty confident of my understanding of a bicycle. The author claims that people challenged to make a sketch of its workings do things like omit the chain, or connect the chain to both wheels, or draw the pedals outside the chain, but I don't believe I'd make any of those mistakes. On the other hand, if zipper technology were erased tomorrow, the world would be using buttons and hooks for a long time if they were relying on me to re-invent that mainstay of modern fashion. I know a flush toilet has something to do with siphon power, but that's about where I quit. Years of dusting the perfectly visible workings of the hammers in my piano have left me a bit vague about how all the levers fit together, though I do understand generally that the key tilts on a lever and that eventually translates that motion to a final hinged piece that strikes a string. All I really know about speedometers is that they know what fraction of a mile represents one revolution of my tire; years ago I was warned that putting the wrong size of tire on your car will make your speedometer mislead you about your speed. Helicopters and cylinder locks might as well be black magic.
So perhaps some education is in order, beginning with the onomatopoetic zzzzzzzipper.
The basic idea is a row of interlocking teeth that fit tight when in a straight line but loosely when bent into an arc. If the row is in a spiral shape, it generally is made of polyester, while "ladder-type" arrangements typically are made of metal. According to Wikipedia, "A special type of metal zipper is made from pre-formed wire, usually brass but sometimes other metals too. Only a few companies in the world have the technology." This is the sort of thing that sets one's conspiracy-detectors buzzing, but a helpful Forbes article explains how one Japanese firm came to dominate the zipper business by the early years of this century, including a charming anecdote about growing pains as an Asian company attempts to expand overseas:
Yoshida told the employees he sent abroad to melt into the local population as much as possible. In one incident an employee sent to Holland spent months studying Dutch so that he could make an opening day speech to his employees in their own language. After his speech the workers are reported to have said, “Wow, Japanese sure sounds a lot like Dutch.”Of course, no sooner had Japanese entrepreneurs sewed up the zipper market than China began to give them a run for their money.
Here are some do-it-yourself repair guides for a broken zipper, which should be easy to complete with our newfound understanding of the mysterious mechanism.
DNA molecules operate very much like a zipper. In fact, all enzymes employ the trick of opening up a clasp so that an interlocking shape can be inserted or removed before the clasp springs back.
Return to sender
Barrycades are being carried across town and dumped at the White House.
One of the Zero Hedge commenters adds: "BREAKING: Washington Redskins drop "Washington" from their name because it's embarrassing." Ross Douthat, on the other hand, probably would say their methods are unsound. And Glenn Beck organizes volunteers to clean the Mall up, because the National Park Service has been too busy harassing veterans to do its job.
One of the Zero Hedge commenters adds: "BREAKING: Washington Redskins drop "Washington" from their name because it's embarrassing." Ross Douthat, on the other hand, probably would say their methods are unsound. And Glenn Beck organizes volunteers to clean the Mall up, because the National Park Service has been too busy harassing veterans to do its job.
Suspending the critical faculty
Robert Weissberg, Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, at The University of Illinois-Urbana, outlines a cure for what ails the American university.
H/t Maggie's Farm.
Now here's my plan. The Koch brothers will secretly underwrite a version of the traditional "Junior Year Abroad" with a strong Peace Corp component. Have students live among the locals, on small stipends, eat their food and so on. University credit will be given and everything will be totally free, including transportation. Meanwhile, there will generous "supervision" fees (i.e., bribes) to the university and professors. For a start, send out perhaps a hundred students from each of the top 25 universities.
...
We'll use a seductive name--"Promoting Economic Justice, One Village at a Time" or "Peace Through Understanding." ... Locals, including the wise village elders will teach the courses with lots of hands-on experience working in the fields harvesting crops, clearing brush and similar Peace Corps-like activities (recall the early 1960s glory years of helping in the Cuban sugar cane harvest was the ultimate liberal status symbol). For pedagogical purposes, illnesses will be exclusively treated with traditional, natural remedies (no Big Pharma pills, no greedy doctors!) while all disputes will likewise be settled in accord with indigenous customs. Critically, students will be told that they are there to learn, not proselytize Western values, and so if men beat their wives, don't criticize; try to understand. The model is participant-observer anthropology, not the Western missionary.Once the graduates of the new program return and start raising uncomfortable questions in class about the evils of American society and the socialist paradise on other shores, Weissberg has an even more brilliant and cost-effective plan for dealing with the outraged professors.
H/t Maggie's Farm.
The Everything Store
We rely on Amazon out here for a great many things, from tablecloths to appliances to whatever food our (single) local grocery store doesn't carry. Bloomberg is running excerpts from a fascinating new book about this useful company and the surprising life story of its founder, Jeff Bezos, who recently bought the Washington Post and moonlights once a week on a company that's trying to establish affordable commercial space flight.
What keeps me coming back to Amazon? I rarely shop for anything I can't find somewhere on its website. They offer a year's reliable two-day shipping at a flat rate. Their customer reviews are reliable. They make it easy for me to check out, without any of the tiresome repetitive logging in or glitchy "shopping cart" pages that plague so many other e-tail sites. In every way, they focus on pleasing customers.
What keeps me coming back to Amazon? I rarely shop for anything I can't find somewhere on its website. They offer a year's reliable two-day shipping at a flat rate. Their customer reviews are reliable. They make it easy for me to check out, without any of the tiresome repetitive logging in or glitchy "shopping cart" pages that plague so many other e-tail sites. In every way, they focus on pleasing customers.
Jeff Bezos has a public e-mail address, jeff@amazon.com. Not only does he read many customer complaints, he forwards them to the relevant Amazon employees, with a one-character addition: a question mark.
When Amazon employees get a Bezos question mark e-mail, they react as though they’ve discovered a ticking bomb. They’ve typically got a few hours to solve whatever issue the CEO has flagged and prepare a thorough explanation for how it occurred, a response that will be reviewed by a succession of managers before the answer is presented to Bezos himself. Such escalations, as these e-mails are known, are Bezos’s way of ensuring that the customer’s voice is constantly heard inside the company.
...
Amazon employees live daily with these kinds of fire drills. “Why are entire teams required to drop everything on a dime to respond to a question mark escalation?” an employee once asked at the company’s biannual meeting held at Seattle’s KeyArena, a basketball coliseum with more than 17,000 seats. “Every anecdote from a customer matters,” Wilke replied. “We research each of them because they tell us something about our processes. It’s an audit that is done for us by our customers. We treat them as precious sources of information.”
On the Feast of St. Edwin
Columbus Day may be right out, and anyway it was one of those days that chases a Friday or Monday in the hope of making a day off for people. But there's no reason to concede that the 12th of October is just some ordinary day. It's also the feast day of one of the great Anglo-Saxon saints, the kind Tolkien might have loved: St. Edwin of Northumbria, a worthy man whose life exemplifies the virtues of hospitality, clear thought, friendship, and defense of the innocent.
Tough review
A Slate contributor takes the ever-popular pop-psy author Malcolm Gladwell to task:
Accessorizing your otherwise inconsistent or incoherent story-based argument with pieces of science is a profitable rhetorical strategy because references to science are crucial touchpoints that help readers maintain their default instinct to believe what they are being told. They help because when readers see "science" they can suppress any skepticism that might be bubbling up in response to the inconsistencies and contradictions. I believe that most of Gladwell’s readers think he is telling stories to bring alive what science has discovered, rather than using science to attach a false authority to the ideas he has distilled from the stories he chooses to tell.Malcolm Gladwell's name inexplicably tends to take up the space that more properly in reserved in my memory for Matt Ridley, an excellent author who deserves considerably more attention. (My favorite popular science writer, however, remains Nick Lane.) This Slate review also suggests to me that a better use of my time than reading Gladwell's latest ("David and Goliath") would be to read the reviewer's own "The Invisible Gorilla." The title refers to a video experiment many of us probably have watched, in which viewers are asked to count the number of passes in an excerpt from a basketball game, and uniformly fail to notice a man in a gorilla suit who runs through the players in the middle of the action. The book is about our deceptive intuitions concerning our powers of attention and memory.
"I don't know what that means"
And yet, the Senate Majority Leader employed words adapted to the meanest understanding:
"Don't screw this up."He was responding to the brash decision of the Mayor of D.C. to walk across the lawn and horn in on Sen. Reid's press conference to demand that the Senate pass the House's measure to fund D.C. during the government shutdown. Sen. Reid walked off in a huff, leaving the Mayor and another flack to try to pour a little oil on the waters. What did he think Reid meant by "Don't screw this up"? He couldn't imagine.
How thick is your bubble?
It's Friday, and that means it's Quiz Time! For once, I've found a quiz where I score right smack in the middle of the road. Apparently I'm neither working class nor upper class, but truly middlebrow. Score: 44.
Focussing the mind wonderfully
I love recalls. Legislators are way too complacent without them. Legislators should live in either constant fear of their constituents, or serene indifference to staying in office.
An Occasional Lapse in Absence
I would like to thank Tex especially, and the rest of you also, for carrying on so well in my absence. I will continue to be mostly not around for a while, but today I have had some time to catch my breath and look around a bit. I don't know if it will last, but it has given me a chance to come by and see what you have been doing.
Thank you all who have written to inquire about my beloved wife. She is doing better. It will still be a while before she is fully recovered, but I hope that in a few weeks she will at least be more mobile. For now, as Tex put it, I am much occupied with her care; but this is good, in a way. It is a chance to honor my oath, and to focus on love in sickness -- or, at least, in injury -- as well as in the joy of robust health.
On which subject, more or less, a set of word clouds broken up by various ages, by sex (far less interesting differences are discovered here than usual, this time), and by various emotional states. I think there is an interesting correlation between the positive emotional states and certain age groups. See what you think.
Thank you all who have written to inquire about my beloved wife. She is doing better. It will still be a while before she is fully recovered, but I hope that in a few weeks she will at least be more mobile. For now, as Tex put it, I am much occupied with her care; but this is good, in a way. It is a chance to honor my oath, and to focus on love in sickness -- or, at least, in injury -- as well as in the joy of robust health.
On which subject, more or less, a set of word clouds broken up by various ages, by sex (far less interesting differences are discovered here than usual, this time), and by various emotional states. I think there is an interesting correlation between the positive emotional states and certain age groups. See what you think.
Grownups only
Gov. Christie often alienates me with his statism, but I have to admit it's an unusually sensible and honest brand of statism. He also charms me with his ability to step out of traps and ruts and think on his feet. You can watch him here demolishing his opponent in a debate, without veering one step from the path of truthfulness and courtesy. She's left looking like a snide teenager who stumbled into an event meant for adults. Ronald Reagan couldn't have done it better.
What do Tea Partiers want?
Our rulers are as clueless on this subject as Freud about women. From Kevin D. Williamson this morning:
But our so-called liberals are committed Hobbesians. Argue for a reduction in taxes, or a more restrictive interpretation of delegated powers, or allowing the states to take the lead on health care and education, and they’re sure that the next step is a Hobbesian hootenanny in which all of our rump roasts are crawling with bacteria, somebody snatches Piggy’s glasses, and, worst of all, there’s no NPR to ask what it all means. Like Hobbes, they believe that you hold your property at the sufferance of the state, and that you should pipe down and be grateful for whatever you are allowed to keep. But the American creed is precisely the opposite: The state exists at our sufferance, not the other way around, and while few of us actually hold the beliefs that Senator Reid attributes to us and long to abolish the state as a general principle, more than a few of us are interested in making some deep changes to this state. We may not want to shut it down entirely, but we aren’t sure we want it to load another few trillion dollars in debt onto us. We aren’t throwing bombs, but we aren’t going to give it everything it demands, either. Not 40 percent of the last dollar, not a dime to subsidize abortions, not control over our children’s educations or our own consciences. Hobbes wrote about subjects. We’re citizens.It might be more accurate to say we have a tradition of aspiring to be citizens, which has never been universally honored among us and is not guaranteed to survive if we persist in agreeing to act more like subjects in return for physical security and our share of the plunder.
Not talking like a Martian
Thomas Sowell sums up our frustration with conservative leaders who can't communicate a simple point to save their lives:
When the government was shut down during the Clinton administration, Republican leaders who went on television to tell their side of the story talked about “OMB numbers” versus “CBO numbers”—as if most people beyond the Beltway knew what these abbreviations meant or why the statistics in question were relevant to the shutdown. Why talk to them in Beltway-speak?
When Speaker Boehner today goes around talking about the “CR,” that is just more of the same thinking—or lack of thinking. Policy wonks inside the Beltway know that he is talking about the continuing resolution that authorizes the existing level of government spending to continue, pending a new budget agreement.I've worked with way too many lawyers like this: addicted to meaningless acronyms. Would it kill Boehner to get in the habit of calling it a "blank check" instead of a clean CR?
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