Who's willing to pay for increased density?

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In an interesting post, Upzoning Manhattan, Matthew Yglesias asks, "Should Manhattan get even denser?" and answers "Yes".  Cities are green, and denser cities are greener.

Despite the fact that the demand for increased density is ever-present in economically successful cities, people who already live there usually resist. This is certainly true here in Cambridge. As I've mentioned before, there is a struggle in my neighborhood to decrease the density of residential units being built on what was once a commercial greenhouse and a heating oil distributor.  People are quite angry about the negative externalities of having more people in their neighborhood (traffic, mostly).

Pretty much everyone who lives here does so because of the density, which results in easy access to food, entertainment, specialty stores, and interesting neighbors. Those additional neighbors will help support more of all of these things. And if we don't provide places for new people to live, housing prices here will continue to rise, and they will move elsewhere, eventually to some other part of the country. We lose not only liveliness, but economic growth and political influence.

Current neighbors have a vote, potential neighbors don't. And let's not get into that annoying issue of private property, and the pesky rights that go along with it. The solution is always to rezone so that people who bought the property hoping to develop it under the old zoning no longer are able to do so. Eventually, no building will occur, and Cambridge will become a retirement community with universities and biotech firms in it. I don't see that as a viable future.

 

On "The Comfort of Strangers"

 

Gordon Van Gelder asked me for some comments on "The Comfort of Strangers", the story I have in the latest issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. When he got it (complete with diagram), it disturbed him in some obscure way, and he didn't print it, save for an out-of-context mention of a Penrose Triangle.

So, just in case you wanted to figure out what I meant, here is a somewhat extended version of what I sent Gordon.

While "The Comfort of Strangers" seems pretty light and funny, it is also an actual hard SF story that struggles directly with the real fact that the more realistic the far-future hard Sfness of a story, the less likely it is to be emotionally engaging to a reader in the early twenty-first century. This is particularly true since this story involves the reactions of alien species evolved under conditions quite different than the ones that guided our own evolution.

But stores should  have some emotional resonance. Otherwise, they are really essays, not stories--and, yes, many science fiction stories are essays with characters, kind of like the dialogues of Plato or Bishop Berkeley's Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous or Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

So, like any writer in our genre, I bootlegged current-day emotional content back in, and translated the incomprehensible emotional connections of that future into terms we can relate to, even though the translated would make no sense to the actual beings in the story. An far-future alien sense of loss has to be comprehensible for the reader as a human sense of loss.

But it's actually worse than that.  Given the type of people attracted to written science fiction, the genre has evolved stories that are the equivalent of those ivory figurines Chinese ladies of earlier Chinese dynasties supposedly used to indicate to doctors where it hurt, since the doctor was not allowed to investigate the woman's actual body, or like a child might tell you his stuffed animal is worried about the arrival of the new baby. These stories show readers "where it hurts", while using characters and situations that are more focused and safer than real ones, and thus more interesting.

So the story is also about the biological constraints on emotional choices, told with fun alien hand puppets. I had started out writing a kind of rebuttal to stories like Kij Johnson's "Spar", which is about the emotions of sex, not the needs of reproduction. I wanted to show how you can't escape from the constraints of biology, and ended up writing something about frustrated reproduction that looks very much like a story about frustrated emotional relationships.

This is true despite the fact that the alien reproductive requirements are as realistic as I can make them--though they are mostly based on actual insects and other creatures in our own real world. I tried to play as fair within the constraints as I could--SF with the net up, as people say.

I'm not sure all of those things can be done at the same time, or at least, comprehended at the same time. It’s a little like a Penrose triangle, where every vertex makes sense, but the shape as a whole cannot literally exist.

 Diagram of "The Comfort of Strangers"

Pretty fancy underlying intellectual content for a story about sex with aliens!  That’s why I am the major literary figure that I am.

 

Comparative effectiveness: what the big money should be funding

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  • Do aid programs work? If so, which ones are the most effective?
  • Does education increase value? By how much? Which methods work best? For whom?
  • Does this or that medical treatment actually benefit the patient? Is there an easier, cheaper method that's just as effective? What routine practices would reduce death or morbidity rates?
  • Does increasing density benefit the economic life of cities? What mix of density and sprawl gives maximum freedom and happiness to the population?
  • Which practices most effectively preserve biodiversity, or decrease atmospheric carbon, or preserve scarce resources?

These are all difficult questions. They are hard to answer because there are so many vested interests and existing practices, and the benefits aren't clear cut. There is a huge amount of noise in each of these systems. And testing comparative effectiveness is extremely expensive and time-consuming.

This is where the big charitable foundations, like the Gates Foundation, should be putting their money. And I mean, all of it. There is huge potential value in improving all of these systems. Only large amounts of disinterested money, with no stake in the outcomes, can effectively fund studies that will provide credible, reliable results.

But, oddly, many of these foundations continue to fund actual programs. Educational programs. Aid programs. Urban development programs. Even though no one really knows which of them works, and what the most effective procedures are.

Even these guys want to seem to be doing something. Just learning what works seems so removed from human affairs, so academic. But it isn't. Without such studies, we are wasting our time and money.

Part of it, of course, is that everyone is afraid of the answers. Which treasured programs, practices, and beliefs actually don't do anything, or are actually harmful? A lot of vested interests stand to be disrupted.

And no big foundation is in the disruption business. They are in the cultural assumption validation business. No one goes to a fancy charity ball to celebrate proving that the past five decades of aid to some country's poor has been entirely wasted.

Still, I want to see someone do it. In fact, that's a charity I would donate to.

The plight of the payer

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Confirmation bias is the defining cognitive error of physicians.  Physicians want to help you. Therefore, by definition, whatever they do to you must be helping you. Plus, you are demanding, and if they actually do manage to say "well, actually, there is nothing we can really do about that", you get mad and search around for someone who will finally do something. Finally, they get paid more if they do something than if they don't. They will tell you that that has no effect on their decisions, but they are, of course, wrong.

Hence my essential healthcare cost equation:

Bias-to-action, income-requiring physicians + patients demanding that someone do something = excess spending on healthcare

(Please note:  I don't mean to imply that physicians are not actually performing useful services, or that patients are hypochondriacs.  I'm just pointing out a tendency)

And who has to do that excess spending? Health insurers. And by necessity...you, the premium payer.

So if insurers discover that some medical procedure really, genuinely doesn't do anything useful, can they stop paying physicians to do it?

Consider the dubious practice of vertebroplasty, where someone injects cement into a vertebra to alleviate the pain of vertebral compression fractures. Back pain is awful and debilitating, and sufferers will go to almost any lengths to find something that works. Doctors who provide vertebroplasty are sure that it works.

An interesting article in Health Affairs, "Can Coverage Be Rescinded When Negative Trial Results Threaten A Popular Procedure? The Ongoing Saga Of Vertebroplasty" (HT: The Incidental Economist) covers this issue in detail. (The article was ungated when I looked at it, but seems to be gated now.  Pressure from vertebroplasty providers? In any case, unfortunate: it's a good article.)

There is no good clinical trial that shows that it works.  Insurers started covering the procedure here and there, and as a result are stuck:

 ...after insurers had covered vertebroplasty for so long, however, they feared that any attempt to change their “yes” to a “no” would be publicly perceived as cutting off access to beneficial care.

Because insurance covered the procedure, that very coverage had created a landscape of providers, manufacturers, and patients with a vested interest in continuing the status quo.

Because the procedure is covered, it is hard to recruit for a clinical trial by offering access to a new procedure. Two studies were done comparing the results of a vertebroplasty against a sham surgery, both indicating that the procedure, as you might expect, does nothing. There is a lot of "need to act" and money (and ego) involved now, so those who do these procedures are pushing back hard:

Because vertebroplasty is a technique requiring manual skill, the clinicians who perform the procedure often believe that the results of any related study will be driven by the training and expertise of the study practitioners.

It would be nice if "does the procedure do anything?" was the standard of coverage, but this is the real world here:

The vertebroplasty trials illuminated a divide between the highest-quality scientific evidence available and the dominant opinion in the clinical community about the benefits of the procedure. Payers reported that when making policy, they must strive to take both into account.

There is no good solution to this conundrum. I'm sure it happens in single-payer systems too. At the edges of provable benefits, patients become big babies and doctors turn into self-deluding egomaniacs. That's the rock-solid foundation under every healthcare system.

 

The Red Queen's race of innovation

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Randall Parker of the ever-interesting Futurepundit had a post earlier this week pointing out that we need to continue to innovate just to maintain our current standard of living. This is a corollary to Tyler Cowen's notion of the Great Stagnation.

The Industrial Revolution happened when a relatively small group of people in northwestern Europe figured out how to unlock the energy in black sunlight, coal, and use it to move heavy things around. Water first, then other stuff, then people. Once they had it around, the energy proved useful for other things, and let them grab a lot of minerals and reform them in useful ways. The intellectual system that resulted proved useful for finding and using yet other hiding-in-plain-sight resources, like oil, atmospheric nitrogen, underground water, previously unaccessible soils, deepwater fish. Each time they climbed over a new lip, there was a big pool of resources to be used.

We had a good run. Now every one of those resources is getting more expensive in terms of energy and effort. Those big pools are gone. If the price of these resources goes up in absolute terms, in energy and time, then we will have to use less. We need to be constantly figuring out ways to get and use them more efficiently in order to have water, food, warmth, light, and entertainment. Innovations need to come regularly just to keep us as comfortable as we are now.

It may well be that our dramatic advances in information manipulation have somewhat misled us on how obdurate physical reality is. Our airy towers get higher and more beautiful. Maintaining the foundations is a constant effort. Do we understand how much effort that really is?

Properly used, of course, it is just that information that will enable us to understand that, and do something about it. Or it might just let us clearly perceive the looming disaster, while enabling an incredible amount of futile squabbling about whose fault it is.

The 2008 financial meltdown and the current pathetic Eurozone refusal to recognize that a snappy new pair of jeans doesn't really do anything about the gangrene in your leg will look like minor intellectual errors in comparison to the history of that collapse.

Recent reread: The Instant Enemy

I've mentioned elsewhere that I like mystery fiction, and that I like a detective without a lot of personal issues intended to make him seem like a real character. You know, a love of jazz, alcoholism, an estranged adolescent daughter, that kind of thing.

So I like Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer. Archer seems to work in order to earn money. At least he shows some semblance of pleasure when it seems he might get some. But who knows what he spends it on--he seems to live in his office. He may occasionally get sexually aroused, but doesn't really have a lot of tastes, hobbies, pet peeves, or friends who can't help him. He's a pure private eye. His reward is in seeing the truth. His only pleasure is solving crossword puzzles made out of human lives.

The Instant Enemy (1968) is a good example of Macdonald's high style, which is that of Greek tragedy told backward. In classical Greek tragedy, the audience knows the family history and its ancient crimes, and waits to see how the characters on stage will learn about it, what their reactions will be, and what effects those reactions will have. In Macdonald, Archer is hired to investigate a crime, often a fairly mundane one. As he digs into the motivations of the acts, he gradually uncovers a long and brutal history that connects a huge number of seemingly unrelated characters. Sins are visited on children and grandchildren, and no one ever seems to escape.  And, of course, the investigation of the crime then sets off a series of other crimes, as suspended or forgotten stresses are released.

A paradigmatic Macdonald novel might be where Archer is hired by a man to find out why his daughter was arrested for jaywalking on her way to school, only to finally reveal that the people who built the intersection murdered someone and buried him under the crosswalk, that the daughter is actually the illegitimate daughter of the cop who arrests her, and that her teacher is her father's deranged ex-wife, the one who murdered the crossing guard's son in a kidnapping gone wrong, but not before someone is beaten to death in the squash court and the driver of the car that beeped at the girl in the crosswalk drives off a cliff after realizing the true meaning of those events at recess, thirty years before.

The Instant Enemy is a fast and entertaining example of the genre.  I lay down on my couch and read it until I was done, fairly late at night. And I'd read it before! The pace is of a sports car with great steering and tight suspension tearing down a twisty mountain road in the dark. In a rainstorm.  If he ever seems to let up, it's just to lull you into a false sense of security. There's a lot to learn from here.

Each Macdonald book is really a pocket family saga, with all its crimes and illusions,  uncovered by the obsessed archeologist, Archer.  Each is about the image Archer has in The Instant Enemy after he gets knocked out by a bad former cop: "Huge turning wheels, like the interlocking wheels of eternity and necessity". But instead of making you wade through hundreds of pages, he gives it to you in compressed form. In a world of morbidly obese literature, it's quite a relief.

Can successful people teach you how to deal with failure?

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As in self-help books, bloggers like to write about failure, defeat, and frustration. Unfortunately, also like self-help books, they tend to write about these things in the context of...well, of success.  The author of the book, the author of the blog, are qualified to tell you about failure, because they are successful.

In this context, failures are learning opportunities. Frustration is surmounted and eliminated. The blogger is now a successful venture capitalist. Or award-winning (or even best-selling) writer. Or happily married with two kids and another on the way. Or just really good looking.

There is clearly a role for this kind of thing, as there is in belief in an afterlife. "Well, right now this sucks, but ultimately it will all work out." I too read these posts, looking for signs that the troops I've left on the battlefield did not die in vain, that all those corpses are really just a learning experience, fertilizer for the growth of future victory.

Part of the problem for me is that the failures of these now-successful people are also kind of like successes. They fail out of Harvard Law School even though their professors are in awe of their intellect. They lose a $5 million company. They sleep with 100 incredibly-hot-but-wrong-for-me people. They become desperate alcoholics, neglect their families,  and spend most of the award banquet after they win their Pulitzer puking in the bathroom.

So I understand I can't even fail successfully.  Or, as the old joke has it, "look who thinks he's nothing".

I understand that failure can sometimes only be discussed when an intervening success makes it less painful to contemplate. I just suspect that I'm not getting the real story, just as it seems that no photo you now see of a person shows you what they actually look like (I like the toggles in Figure 5, particularly the third and fifth ones).  We are curators of our own image, after all, and few people like to truly reveal the vomit-inducing pain of failure unless they fundamentally see themselves as successful. If you sometimes feel your being had by these stories, you are not alone.

I'm a middle-aged man trying to maintain a writing career that has never taken off the way it should have. I have not stopped trying, and will not. I'm not particularly confessional, so I doubt I will plumb the depths of failure for you here. But I will try to be clear about what this means, and what it requires.

Newt Gingrich: a science fiction writer's idea of a politician

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What, you need an actual post to go along with the title?

I guess, now that we are in the future, we need one of those technocratic visionary leaders the future was always going to ruled by.

Science fiction writers don't create futures you want to live in. They create futures that are fun to read about. This one is turning out to be neither.

Intertemporal hostility in the American author

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A couple of weeks ago I whined about revision. The great thing about revising a novel is that whining becomes a marathon event.  I'm marking up a draft of a YA novel involving a young man who gets shanghaied into an alternate world, gets home, and finds that his problems have only just started.

I try not to get too angry at that slacker of a few months ago who thought that an easy departure from the riverside hotel in the steam-powered world without a direct confrontation with the interdimensional Bad Cop was a great way to end a section. He didn't have the advantage of having the whole book in front of him.  All he had was a blank screen.

Well, cry me a river.  Now I have to face the fact that he didn't get Mom out of where she was stuck and just kind of abandoned her until she pops up suddenly at the end. Again, his excuse is that pesky blank screen. Does he think that gets him out of everything? That smug bastard, with his nice word counts and his sense of satisfaction at writing The End!  He barely did anything.

He knew the day would come when "and then a miracle occurs" would no longer cut it. And I'm uneasily conscious of the future self who will regard my way of busting Mom out and getting her home without having her actually prevent her son from diving into a dangerous alternate world to save his father as lame and predictable. Screw him. Doesn't he know how hard this is?

When you're a writer, you don't really need other enemies. Your past and future selves are quite enough.

Invisible progress: surgical hemostats

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I too sometimes go for the "where's my jetpack?", Great Stagnation negativity about technological progress over the past few decades.

But progress is steady, and to a large extent invisible. I recently wrote a press release for a client about surgical hemostats, internal tissue sealants, and adhesion barriers.  This is a whole range of materials the control internal blood flow and connect up tissues, largely during surgery. There is intense competition, and new forms of these are constantly being developed. If you go into surgery, one of these is probably used during the procedure. But who outside of a surgical suite has ever heard of the things?

And, yes, I presume a new combination thrombin/gelatin surgical hemostat (thrombin for the clotting, gelatin as a physical blood barrier) is more expensive than its predecessor.  Surgeries have certainly been performed successfully without it. But each small advance adds up. I bet a surgeon in 2011, if he or she had to perform a surgery in 1991, would be startled by how many taken-for-granted little advances there have been in those two decades, and how retrospectively difficult and dangerous surgery back in that dark age really was.  Ditto for someone in 2031 coming back to now.

Dull for a science fiction writer to fit compellingly into a story, however, unless maybe the gelatin is made to hold some mysterious material with more dire effects... SF is not usually about the use of technology, but its creative misuse.

Progress is a bunch of nanobots transforming things at a level below the visible.

Hey!  Where are my nanobots? I figured we'd all be gray goo by now....

 

Our only real choice on global warming: adapt

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David Zetland at Aguanomics has the best simple description of our global warming choices. Short summary: no one is ever going to agree to reduce carbon emissions, even though when the sky falls it will fall on every one of us. So our only option is to work out how we are going to live in a high-carbon world.

I care about global warming.  I am also flying my family to visit my mother this Christmas holiday. Am I evil? A fool? No. Just complicit. Just making the same choices everyone makes. We have only one life, we have the opportunity to live it in pleasure and comfort, and so we will take it. If we think about it, we'll bicycle somewhere rather than driving or put a solar panel on our roof.  I believe the technical measurement for how much that helps is on the close order of "jack shit".

So, how do we live in a warmer world? We need to think about it, because, assuredly, we are going to be living in it. And blaming someone else, no doubt.  Those pesky Chinese! Don't they know cars and single-family houses are merely vanities? What's wrong with them?

If the sky is going to fall, figure out how to strengthen your roof. That's the highest value for your dollars, like it or not.

BTW, Aguanomics (note the 'g'), mostly about water but also about other topics, is one of the most informative blogs around.  Scarcity of potable water is going to be a major issue in the coming decades. I'm currently reading Mr. Zetland's The End of Abundance, a compendium of good sense on water policy. From his accounts, he travels all around the world, doing interesting things and meeting interesting people. And his photo indicates that he is good looking to boot. I'm feeling the uneven distribution of resources here. I'll just have to live with that, and suck as much value from him as I can. Look for stuff I've stolen from him in my fiction.

 

The violent detective as a type

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I do like reading detective novels and police procedurals.  A couple of recent ones are interesting because of what they have in common: main characters, professional policemen both, who brutally assault someone when they are not personally under threat. And they are not portrayed as anomic thugs, but as sympathetic protagonists.

Snow Angels is set in Finland, but is written by an American, James Thompson. So it's a bit of a Nordic thriller with training wheels. Kari Vaara, Thompson's Finnish cop, explains things to us, or to his American wife, like an expression about the passing of time that's based on the fact that you have to let a reindeer urinate every so often to avoid kidney problems, that are revealing and interesting. The book overall, however, is both unpleasant and incomprehensible.  It has a high level of sexual violence and degradation, and murderers pop up out of nowhere. One main suspect kills himself without, as far as I know, ever having been on stage at all. Vaara never, at any point, figures anything out. He sucks as a detective, and deserves to suffer the consequences of this, since he deliberately misleads others in order to stay on the case. Occasionally, he calls someone, who quickly provides the necessary answer--not that these answers get Vaara too far. Writing a real detective story is hard--believe me, I've tried it. Thompson doesn't have the knack yet.

But, the violent detective part. At one point Vaara beats and threatens to kill a suspect, his ex-wife's current husband, because the man insults Vaara's American wife. Real smooth police work there, Vaara. I suspect that this type of behavior is frowned on, even in Finland.  I'd say Snow Angels is mildly interesting (I did finish it), and decently written, but there are a huge number of better Nordic detective stories out there.

In the rural Wyoming Cold Dish, by Craig Johnson, the sheriff, Walt Longmire, beats someone up because of something bad he did, and breaks his nose. The victim is not a suspect or even anyone involved in the investigation, and this would, in the real world, endanger or even end Longmire's career.  I'm not quite done with Cold Dish, and so can't say what consequences this has in the book. And Cold Dish has significant virtues which I will discuss in another post.

In both cases, these are not even remotely fair fights. In one case the victim is a suspect in custody, in the other he's just walking down the street. Both detectives are portrayed as sympathetic (Longmire more so than Vaara). These acts make them look like volatile morons. What gives?

I'm starting to suspect this is just a cliche, a sign that the detective, despite some sensitvity, is not to be messed with. It's like alcoholism, a liking for jazz, a history of divorce, a troubled relationship with an adolescent child--a signifier of late-stage hardboiled fiction, which tries to be sensitive, then gets nervous about it. I may have to just live with it.

I prefer my detectives opaque and focused on the job. I'm not much interested in their inner conflicts. So unprofessional behavior based on their deep inner flaws just irritates me. If they actually suffered the consequences of their actions, I might get more interested.

 

Is "psychology" to blame for poor electric car sales?

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This post on Wonkblog tries to puzzle out why people aren't buying electric cars. It seems that people are nervous about an expensive (around $40K for many models) vehicle that will only go 65 miles before needing a lengthy recharge.  Most Americans drive less than 40 miles a day, advocates say. What's the problem?

For about a century we've had vehicles that go hundreds of miles on a tank and can be refueled in a minute or two pretty much anywhere.  And they cost $40K only if we really really want to show off.  The article implies that we have an irrational attachment to the notion we can go out of our driveway and drive across the country if we want to.

Well, it is great that we can do that if we want to. Because if we can do that, we know we can do all sorts of other things without a second thought. We can make an unexpected trip to visit a client in another city, or go to the seashore to walk on the beach, or help a friend move, or spend a day or two not worrying about whether the battery is charged.  Even if we were upgrading from horses, that range restriction might give us pause.

The plain fact is that carbon compounds store a lot of energy in a compact and easily transportable form, a form that is easily converted into motion, heat, or whatever else you need. Nothing else comes close. So carbon compounds are going to make us go for a long time to come, unless someone puts electric strips down the middle of highway lanes, turning our vehicles into big slot cars. The expedient of having a backup internal combustion engine, as in the Chevy Volt, takes care of the range problem, but is what makes that car so expensive--it's a car that also has an electric motor in it. 

I'm an environmentally concerned blue-stater who bikes almost everywhere. I've never even liked driving. I still think electric cars are dumb. Like most of our so-called "alternative" energy devices (there's actually not much "alternative" about the coal-plant-generated electricity used to charge these cars) they, like wind or solar, are actually devices for generating tax credits and a sense of virtue, not practical solutions to real world problems.

Just to be clear, I'm reacting more against the clueless rah rah enthusiasm such gadgets encourage than against the idea that we should investigate alternatives to carbon-based transportation and power generation.

But few people who actually need to get anywhere are going to buy the current models. So don't blame the Stonecutters.

The indignities of the day job

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OK, so it's pretty much my fault. I had a number of time-sensitive tasks with my client, and I put one of off that seemed less time sensitive...one that suddenly had to be designed and delivered. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving (the client is not in the US). For a conference.

I did it, with the help of an incredible designer (thanks, Ruth!)  Unfortunately, after she left, I found something that needed to be changed, so I had to download a trial version of Adobe Acrobat and cut and paste logos from one PDF to another.  I lack the visual skill to be a designer. I barely recognize myself in the mirror.

Dumb. It was dumb. Every time I looked at that particular project there was something more pressing to do. But, of course, eventually sunken bodies bloat and float to the surface. Fortunately, I work fast. And, fortunately, I partnered with someone else who does too. The client was grouchy, needless to say, but at least has what she needs.

Will I never ever do this again? I sure would like to think so!  I can take comfort in the fact that it happens a lot less than it used to--and I have been incredibly busy with deliverables.  But no excuses. Gratitude. Gratitude for the help I got, for the fact that the client reviewed and commented quickly, and for the fact that I am still (somewhat) alive.  Have a good Thanksgiving, everyone.

Do we deserve our doom?

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How will future descendants view us?  I think most of us are honest, hard-working, decent folks. But, across the entire developed world, we have managed to get ourselves into a horrendous mess. A freaking dumb mess, because we already have as much stuff as anyone could possibly ever use.

And what are we doing to get ourselves out of it?

The childishly named Super Committee has come back out of their sekrit clubhouse with...nothing. Of course, they swore they would shoot their favorite dogs if they did not solve our problems. So now, having sworn this, they will, of course, return home, pour a last bowl of Iams, scratch  Maggie behind the ears and then put a hollowpoint through her skull. That will make them sorry they couldn't figure out the incredibly hard problem of how to reduce the world's largest military budget, out-of-control entitlements, or comical healthcare costs.

But look how useful that dang dog is, they will say. Nothing is be gained now by destroying such a fine animal now, is there? Only a fool would think of reducing value in this way.

Southern tier Europeans are rioting because the magic beans that were going to get them to the giant's hideout to steal talking harps and treasure have turned out to be...beans.  Those take a long time to grow, and then all you have are more beans. "But the guy said..." The Germans who kept funding the Mercedes their layabout brother-in-law was building out in the garage have finally opened the door only to find a couple of tires and lots of empty tall boys, and they are mad. How could anyone have hoodwinked them so cleverly?

Will my descendants see me as a ludicrous fool for even living in this time? Because I can see how things can easily tip into a real disaster.  And it's not going to be an accident, like getting hit by an asteroid or something. It's because that stack of wedding china we built to get to the bourbon we think Dad hid in that top cabinet is really starting to wiggle and we have no idea of how to get down. It's because we're morons.

My grandchildren will come to visit me wherever my irritated offspring have warehoused me and say "Grandpa, why were you all such morons?" And all I'll be able to say is "Just you wait, you wretched sprat. Just you wait. If you think you're smarter it's because you haven't managed to build your stack high enough. Isn't there a gravy boat in the sideboard you haven't tried to balance on the top yet? The problem with your generation is that you just lack enterprise."

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go off and work on my hollow laugh. I can see that it will really come in handy.

 

I'm a fan of RoboKopter

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I've been wondering why news agencies aren't sending unmanned drones with cameras and microphones into areas too dangerous for ground reporters, just to give an idea of what's going on. Prices have been dropping, while capabilities continue to increase.

One Polish activist used such a device, RoboKopter, to film police at recent riots in Warsaw that I have to admit I had heard nothing about (HT: Kottke)

This page has two of the best. Here is a video of the device itself, flying around a stadium (no need to watch the whole thing).

Kottke has the fascinating observation that the different camera views in Madden NFL video games inspired the NFL to devise actual ways of delivering those kinds of views, since their audience was growing the expect them. He anticipates the same happening for news footage, as cinema quality and news quality merge.

The quality of the RoboKopter video is fantastic. For a long time, movies have used grainy, washed-out, blueish imagery to signify the "authenticity" of surveillance camera footage, and vomitcam jerkiness to do the same for handheld camperas.  What signifier will you use when all video images, no matter what their source, are of smooth brightly colored RoboKopter quality?

I'm still not seeing as many of these things as I would expect. Maybe the change will come quickly, and within a year or two they will be omnipresent. That's the way it happens.

 

Do you really want a bike that reads your mind?

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OK, this is a little too much intrusion of science fiction into daily life:  a bike that allegedly shifts in response to your brainwaves (HT: The Infrastructurist).

Now I know why so few people bike: it's just too hard to decide when to jump up or down a cog. Although I'm not sure a mind-reading bike really solves that particular problem, since you still have to decide to shift, though it says it can also remember previous shifts by location, and then shift again at the same place, say downshifting before you hit a hill. No indication if it takes a wind reading before doing so.

This is kind of fun, if creepy, but it's really a solution in search of a problem. If the problem is the intellectual demands of shifting, it should measure muscular effort and cadence, and shift to maintain constant pace and effort. Your mind shouldn't really have much to do with it.

Or it could measure sweat (maintaining an effort that keeps you from getting to the office soaked in sweat) or passerby perception (if someone attractive is watching you, you'd like to be showing some real speed and form). There are lots of possibilities.

Or you can get a fixie, like I have, and just follow its cruel dictates.

Do you really want to know how much time you waste?

in

We don't know how many calories we eat, we don't know how many times we lie or delude ourselves during the day, and we certainly don't know how much time we waste.

I work on the screen all day. Early in the mornings, before paying client work, I use the Writer user on my Windows computer to do my fiction writing. It has no internet access. It is also oriented vertically, and my documents are green Lucida Console on black. This, incidentally, terrifies my offspring when they see it.

Not that I don't wander off and get distracted, but it's good old-fashioned distraction, requiring a magazine or seeing if the newspaper has been delivered yet. Character-building distraction.

The rest of the day, I am connected up to everything in the world, just like the rest of you. I started to wonder how much time I spent "recharging my batteries". I knew it was too much, but how much?

I put on RescueTime, which lets you track exactly that.  Some days weren't too bad.  Others, when I was stressed, were terrible. So, just like when the scale starts to go up and tracking is particularly imjportant, I stopped looking as much. I'm not a confessional blogger, so it will take me some time to decide to share any real numbers with you (and thus with my clients).

Now I put on Leechblock, a Firefox add-on.  This is more punitive (though RescueTime has nanny functions too--they just aren't free along with the basic time tracker).  You tell it what sites you waste time on (for me, Google Reader, Slate, Andrew Sullivan, and other commentators on events of the day), tell it how much time you want to limit yourself to, and it turns the spigot off when you reach the limit.

I don't generally hit my hourly limit.  But I do hit the daily limit. Do I really need to read that much well-informed commentary on the Euro crisis, the Republican debates, and human population genetics? Obviously, no.

The question is, will putting these limits on make me more productive on the things I want to produce? I'll follow up in a couple of weeks and let you know.