Sam's L33t Journal

Programming: Here's an article on binary math in C. For more practical stuff (in you're a Python programmer), read this bit on the fileinput library in Python (very useful, but I hadn't heard of it previously).

Essays: Ever play Monopoly and wonder why the game (as you were taught) is so slow? That's because you were taught wrong.

Douglas Hofstatder makes a point about language by analogy.

A piece on the book and television series Game of Thrones and how it relates to the aesthetic of fascism.

Economics and Society: Foxconn (major Chinese electronics manufacturer) to replace workers with robots. But of course the increased automation will lead to new opportunities for those workers, once freed of the drudgery of such boring jobs?

Meanwhile, there's this HuffPo article about women increasingly turning to prostitution (called by other names) in order to pay tuition or student loans.

A Bit of History: A story about a computer virus that DDOSed the entire internet in 2003. (The Akami tech featured in the article is a friend of mine, he currently spends his time making the mathematical art published here.)

A story about the short and violent life of Robert "Yummy" Sandifer, gang member, murderer, and murder victim before he was killed in 1994 at the age of 11.

Misc: A talk on organizing an art show featuring 100 different artists, who are all the same artist.

An article on the challenges involved in Arabic-language localization for film.

A short story titled Nanolaw with Daughter.

Education: An essay on why going to any non-top-tier law school is a one-way ticket to penury. Ditto (most of the time) for getting a PhD. An article on the overuse of homework in elementary school.

Music: A love note sent indirectly, a twist on the multitrack music video, an OverthinkingIt essay on the song Like a G6.

The Internets Attack: An article on memetic epidemiology in the Cooks Source plagiarism scandal (more background on that), and a hypothetical story of a flash mob gone wrong.

Clowns Attack: Clowns versus clowns, an anarchist army of rebel clowns.

Politics: Why the health care bill won't be repealed (basically all of it is popular), an article on the downside of diversity, an article on the reaction to deadly airline terrorism before 9/11, an article on pilot unions and airlines.

Food: Making porchetta, omelets inside the egg.

Clothes: A post from the author of Dresden Codak on costume and character, a talk about fashion and free culture, more than you ever wanted to know about men's dress shoes.

Other Interesting: Augmented reality for the colorblind, The World's Greatest Drunk, a psychological history of David Foster Wallace, translating early modern philosophy texts from English to English, a video asking "what do sex workers want their significant others to know?" (produced by Scarlet Alliance, a sex workers' rights organization in Australia).

Finally: Denki Groove's latest video, Fake It!

Despite my continuing insistence that I'm not looking for a new job, recruiters have been hard at me lately like they sense blood in the water. Not sure pressure-sales is a good tactic for getting someone to switch jobs from a job they really like. I probably should be more aggressive about telling particularly annoying recruiters to get lost.

Still, it was enough to motivate me to update my resume (for the first time to a post-college, already-have-a-real-job state). I'm not sure if I should think of myself as a freelancer or a dedicated company man or something in between, but at the very least, I don't think "stop thinking about the job market entirely because I'm securely employed now" is a good strategy. There are not-working-at-ITA things I might want to do incompatible with working at ITA, so the answer to how long I want to work at ITA might not be "as long as possible". (And even if it is, despite my current job security, I can't assume "as long as possible" = "until retirement", so I'd still have reason to keep my eyes open.

It's odd, thinking about what would get me to take on the opportunity costs of changing jobs (even without a change in living situation, there's the obvious risk of changing from a job I like to a job I might not like, plus giving up on the benefits of working at ITA (financial and otherwise) that accrue over time). As I've said before, my job doesn't quite pass the Lottery Test,* so something equally cool, still in town, that paid much more money could grab my attention. But that's a weak statement: Much more money would be a lot of money (quite possibly more than I could secure) and my current job is very cool (at least for the sort of person who finds large-scale software systems written in Common Lisp implementing incredibly complex logic for a huge, high-stakes industry cool (e.g. me)). Of course, there may be opportunity costs to waiting, too, especially given the usual catch-22 of negotiations: I'm in a much better position to negotiate for a different job with good terms when I don't particularly want a different job.

* i.e. "If you won the lottery, would you still keep your current job?", though actually making life-changing decisions based on one-time windfalls, no matter how large, tends to work out poorly for psychological reasons, so a better wording might be, "If you were independently wealthy, would you necessarily keep your current job?"

Charger for the Kyocera TNT: $20
Replacement battery for the Kyocera TNT: $20
New Kyocera TNT phone with charger and battery (no contract): $10

Note that the charger and battery in question will also work on some more expensive phones, so the pricing isn't entirely nonsensical, but this is an interesting form of price discrimination in that it relies entirely on cognitive factors instead of incidental costs or a captive audience. Also odd is just how fast the price drops for whichever cell phone is the lowest-end model.

Speaking of odd features of our modern world, one odd thing I neglected to mention in previous posts: JetBlue has, among other cost saving measures, replaced the lemon wedges used in beverage service with packets of dehydrated lemon powder. How futuristic.

On to my predictions for the coming decade!

Peak Oil: I expect that the peak is behind us and that will be a major cause of economic trouble. Sticking to my "major trouble by end of 2015" prediction. Oil prices will go up, but will remain very volatile. Fuel will get expensive or scarce unless the economy declines ahead of oil supply. Either way, American cities will see a lot of trouble in the next decade.

Efforts to Sustain the Unsustainable: There will (still) be a lot of attention on things like efficient combustion engines, plug-in hybrids, electric cars. But Americans aren't going to be buying 300 million new cars in the next decade or two. On the electricity side of things, there will be a lot of attention paid to "clean coal" and carbon capture and sequestration schemes before renewable energy gets the attention it should. Maybe we'll get around to talk of solar and wind and wave and tide, electric passenger trains, and walkable communities before the end of the decade, but solutions that don't benefit existing players will be largely ignored until things are quite bad.

Ubiquitous Computing: Augmented reality will not come in the form of heads-up displays or VR goggles, but cheap smartphones with cameras and internet access. How much of an effect this has (and what sort of effect) depends on how cheap it gets, how widespread wireless broadband gets, and how much internet access spreads to the poorest areas of the world. Location-based social networking is a cool toy, but that's just the beginning. Combining information about product certifications with visual search could go a long way, for example. Mobile computing could also help mitigate transportation problems if fuel gets too expensive and centralized solutions are absent. I mentioned Avego before and thought it was a bit premature, but startups like that might take off during the next decade. I said that real cellphone use didn't begin until this past decade, and I expect I'll say the same at the end of the next decade.

The Long Tail vs. The Fat Head: Media companies will actually reach a point of change or die in the coming decade. The question is whether they'll have to change their business model, or whether they'll first change our political system in increasingly extreme ways. This is one reason why "net neutrality" will be an important issue, many of these increasingly desperate media companies are closely tied to companies that provide the lion's share of internet access. I expect that on this one reformers will be able to squeeze out some sort of victory, but TV and radio are not out of the picture yet, so don't underestimate the power of the persuasion machine.

No Reform Without Revolution: The US has a shot at real political change if things get bad enough, but that could go in any number of directions. Best guess: At some point during the decade, Republicans will get elected and they will go flying back to Bush-era policies with a vengeance, even if that's not at all what the people who elected them wanted. Who knows where things will go from there. (Past predictions reiterated: Obama will definitely be the Democratic candidate in 2012. And if he's not, things will be so bad that the Democrats will definitely lose.) If the Republicans can't win in 2012 or 2016, either things will have gone far better than even my most optimistic predictions, or there will have been some other radical deviation from the status quo. Without radical deviation from the status quo: Intellectual property reform might happen. Electoral reform probably won't happen. Who knows how healthcare reform will go in the long run. (Tax reform or foreign policy reform, maybe, depending on how pressing the financial constraints on the federal government are and whether we get ourselves into any new wars.)

Regularly Scheduled Apocalypses: On December 21, 2012, the 14th b'ak'tun will begin and nothing of significance will happen (nothing not caused by some crazy people doing something crazy, anyways). There will be lots of awesome parties. No prediction on how Pinchbeck will react to the non-event. (Also, good odds that this will be yet another decade in which no nuclear weapons are used on actual targets. WWIII will probably not happen. The LHC will produce lots of data of technical interest to particle physicists, but fail to destroy the world. The US will remain united. Etc.)

Things Get Worse for the "Global South": Only massive investment in alternative energy in the developing world could keep the global (real) economy growing, but that probably won't happen. At best, they'll get some money for disaster mitigation. The effects of climate change will get worse. Less screwed parts of the world may start to have more of a problem with refugees. There will probably be some efforts directed at mitigating climate change (see below), but not enough to do anything significant climate-wise.

The Carbon Bubble: There will probably be some sort of cap and trade scheme for carbon dioxide emissions because Goldman Sachs seems to want it and they get what they want. Such a scheme will probably involve giving away wealth to those who currently pollute the most and include some sort of "offsets" scheme that hurts the poorest people in the world at the expense of the richest without actually decreasing emissions.

Terrified or Not: Either the American people will find a way to ditch the security theater that's honestly been more of a problem than it's worth post-9/11, or they'll accept more and more of a police state. Not sure which is more likely. Also, if the color-coded terror alert system is kept, it will remain at orange at least 90% of the time (no one wants to reduce it below orange, since if it's below orange and a terrorist attack does happen it will seem like they were caught with their pants down, and no one wants to increase it to red because then they look foolish when nothing happens; besides, there's no incentive to change it from current levels because changing the alert level doesn't actually specify that anyone should do anything differently).

Roadmap in Pieces: During the next decade, the peace process in Israel will probably remain in tatters. Hamas will not abandon their delusion of provoking the Arab nations into action. A shift of opinion in Israel is perhaps somewhat more likely. The US could apply political pressure, too, and at least get Israel to lay off the war crimes. But despite Obama's minor revisions of US position with regard to conduct in war (opposing torture, trying to close the prison at Guantanamo), the US government will probably remain deeply ambivalent about (when not openly hostile towards) international law.

Main Street Strikes Back: The main thing that makes me optimistic about the coming decade is that there will probably be some real effort towards solving systematic problems in our economy / society. Probably a lot of those efforts will be wrong-headed, but there's still some real potential for positive change. The end of denial is an extremely important step, and I don't think it's possible for the "9/11 changed everything so go shopping" mentality to persist. Though the public response to Wall Street control of government has been subdued so far, the key words are "so fare". The situation on the ground is still bad, and the next decade will probably be more interesting than the last.

Note that I make no claim that I am good at predicting the future. (If I was, I'd have more invested in individual stocks!)

Questions, comments, predictions? Things I missed prognosticating on that you'd like me to take a crack at?

(Because today is evidently blog too much day, I'll wrap up my chapter-by-chapter series on Megatrends, John Naisbitt's futurist analysis from 1982.)

The tenth and final trend that Naisbitt cites in his book is "Either/Or → Multiple Options".

The chapter starts by focusing the rise of alternate family structures, citing two-career families and the influence of feminism in the workplace (both in terms of the entrance of women into formerly men-only occupations and women delaying marriage and children in favor of career goals) as important causes. He also notes that the meaning of "family" is being expanded and correctly expects that conflict between conservatives and liberals over the term will be an increasing source of contention. Furthermore, he predicts that "the basic building block of society is shifting from the family to the individual". Reminds me of an essay I read recently, suggesting exactly that is at the root of much of the conflict between liberals (who view society (including things like family) as based on free association between individuals) and conservatives (who view society as based on traditional structures and inherited obligations).

Naisbitt does somewhat less well with the second half of the chapter. He notes the explosion of choices in art and other creative goods, but does not identify the potential of rising information technology (though he talks about such technology quite a bit earlier in the book) to connect eclectic art consumers with obscure art producers. He notes the huge boom in selection at the supermarket, but fails to identify some of the potential downsides: Further decline of local and seasonal eating, erosion of food culture that allowed the nutritional science / marketing fads of the 80s and 90s to finish replacing most of the American diet with soy and corn, plus other consequences of importing food from all over the world that you'd think would be more obvious with the energy crises of the 70s not that long gone. He notes the rise of cable television, and while that has indeed become somewhat "like the special-interest magazines", the whole market is still dominated by just a few companies (with even closer to monopoly conditions locally). Finally, he cites the increasing trend towards ethnic diversity and multiculturalism, but does not seem to expect that will continue to be a source of significant political conflict decades later.

So, will we see this trend continue into the future? When it comes to media production, will the long tail prevail or the few corporate players at the fat head? When it comes to social structure, will liberal free association and heterogeneous structures prevail or will conservatives be able to convince America to return to "traditional family values"? Don't know.

Certainly when it comes to consumer goods, energy constraints will limit the space of choices, but I'm not sure to what extent that will limit the number of options actually available to consumers. For one thing, I still don't think the potential of information technology to affect the outcome of this problem has been fully explored.

Yesterday, walking on the street, I was surprised when I passed three people talking on cell phones in a row. I noticed the fourth guy I passed wasn't talking on a cell phone. But then I saw he was texting.

Sometimes I forget we live in the future.

Trend #8 of Naisbitt's work is Hierarchies to Networking. This one seems quite obvious. Businesses at least have embraced non-hierarchical structures in terms of work structure (if not long-term decision making). If all interdepartmental coordination requires management involvement, that adds a lot of unnecessary overhead. There's now a whole consulting industry based on helping businesses measure and foster such lateral connections.

There are a few problems with this, though. First and foremost, networks and hierarchies are not exclusive. Replacing a tree with a DAG does not make it less hierarchical. Sure, removing management oversight from interdepartmental coordination does mean delegating some decision-making ability, but that doesn't necessarily mean delegating a significant amount of power. Looking at the income share of the rich and the changing ratio between CEO and floor-worker pay does not indicate a society that has become less hierarchal since the late 80s, even if such floor-workers are more likely to be organized into "Quality Teams".

Naisbitt also mentions network communications as a way of managing information overload, but fails to predict that the same tools that allow us to manage information overload often become sources of information overload. I wonder if a sort of Jevons Paradox applies, where improvements in a communication technology ultimately increase the amount of irrelevant information delivered.

(A few months ago, I had been doing a series of chapter by chapter posts on John Naisbitt's Megatrends. Then I got busy / distracted. But since I'm not one to leave things half-finished, I'm going to get back to that.)

The sixth trend Naisbitt cites is "Institutional Help to Self-Help". While the title seems similar to that of the previous chapter, that chapter primarily discussed shifts from federal to local government, while this chapter is focused on a wider set of organizations and the behavior of individuals. Strangely, while the last chapter focused on government more overtly, this chapter seems far more political. In the intro, Naisbitt notes that the Depression was a "trauma" which shook "our traditional faith in ourselves", motivating people to ask government to "provide food, shelter, and jobs" and eventually to "regulating the environment and much of the economy", functions which in Naisbitt's view don't fall under the government's purpose "to safeguard citizens". Pointing out that that the Great Depression shook faith in large financial institutions and big business would have also fit the theme of the chapter, but Naisbitt seems a bit eager to paint government as the villain.

Some of the predictions in the chapter seem hard to evaluate: Did the proliferation of self-help groups in the early 80s continue, and to what extent did such groups make a meaningful difference in society? Did dissatisfaction with the public schools in the 80s lead to meaningful improvements (even though widespread dissatisfaction persists today)? (And do the trends in SAT scores that Naisbitt cites mean anything?) Small business remains important and entrepreneurship remains a buzzword, but the late 90s and early 2000s seem full of economic-bubble entrepreneurs, not looking to become the next [household name here] but just looking for a big company buyout, so to what extent did that represent a "self-help" trend?

There is one area where Naisbitt seems to have gotten things wrong. Regarding healthcare, Naisbitt notes that in the early 80s, more people were getting structured exercise, more people were thinking about nutrition, smoking had dropped, the idea of holistic medicine was gaining ground, and businesses were springing up to support such endeavors. Smoking, at least, continued to decline, but as to the rest... I don't know to what extent such trends have been effective in improving health, but since Naisbitt cites "diet" and "exercise", it's worth pointing out that obesity, at least, continued to rise.

I think Naisbitt makes a mistake in citing the rise of supporting businesses in this area as a supporting trend. Business can certainly support that sort of social change, but it can also co-opt it for marketing purposes. The 90s were full of "low-fat" processed "foods", fad diets, and "just a few minutes a day" exercise machine infomercials. While there's lots of sound stuff under the umbrella of holistic medicine, that too has been drowned in a sea of commercially-motivated woo ("detox pads", homeopathic remedies, etc.).

Furthermore, given political issues that are getting lot of attention recently, it's worth mentioning that there are some healthcare related problems that self-help simply doesn't solve. Sure, preventative care may reduce the rate of serious illness, but that doesn't mean insurance becomes a poor investment (especially since reducing the proportion of people ill at any one time will make insurance cheaper). Avoiding the risk of being seriously ill and financially ruined is worth some regular expense. Insurance prevents catastrophe by sharing risk, and sharing risk is something that cannot be done individually.*

* I have more than that to say on the current debate, of course. But that will wait for a future post.

The third chapter in Naisbitt's book isn't nearly as exciting as the previous two, since the trend in question, globalization, is an obvious one, and one that's indeed happened in a big way. Most of the interesting reasons behind this trend were already discussed in the first chapter. There's a bit of funny-in-retrospect in that Naisbitt criticizes the US government's thinking that we can solve our problems by bailing out Chrysler and invading the middle east, which is more or less still where we're at, policy-wise.

It will be interesting to see how the other side of this trend plays out. It will be a novel situation, since the disruption of shipping will likely be way faster than the disruption of telecommunications (sure, eventually it might get tricky to maintain oceanic cables or launch telecom satellites, but for now that remains a very effective investment).

Decline in oil supply will make shipping expensive eventually (way eventually, since it takes quite a bit of transportation cost to make up the cheap-ness of third-world wages), but currently prices are way down due to crashing demand. The shipping industry could well end up in an airline-industry-like competition vs. costs dilemma, where charging too low is like shooting yourself in the foot and charging too high is like shooting yourself in the face. Wonder how many industries will end up in this odd state: Vital to the global economy but impossible to make money in.