Has anyone else noticed that whenever the iPhone comes up on in an internet forum (e.g. slashdot) or in the media there is always someone who feels the need to rag on it and say it’s nothing special? I don’t mean the people who legitimately prefer having a physical keyboard or simply don’t like the design. I mean the people like the one in this slashdot story who say thing like:

After seeing the iPhone introduction, I was totally confused by how much excitement it generated in the US. It offered no features I could see beyond my Casio W41CA’s capabilities. I had a lot of apprehension towards the idea of a virtual keypad and the bare screen looked like a scratch magnet. Looks aren’t enough. Finally, the price is ridiculous. The device is an order of magnitude more expensive than my now year-old Keitai even with a two-year contract. After returning to the US from Japan, I’ve come to realize the horrible truth behind iPhone’s buzz. Over the year I was gone, US phones haven’t really done anything.

Amazingly this guy manages to rag on defects he hasn’t even seen. Now the iPhone only has a bit higher screen resolution than the phone he mentions but having 8 gigs to store movies and music seems like a big advantage over the W41CA’s 70 megabytes of memory. The iPhone’s interface and consistent UI is genuinely new (to the consumer) and warrants a big buzz while phones like the W41CA look and behave just like any other phone. You don’t have to like the iPhone but it just doesn’t make sense to pretend you don’t see it’s a big deal.

Apparently some people feel attacked by the introduction of popular new technology. Fifteen years ago you could certainly find people saying the same things about how their typewriters were just as good as a computer and I bet today you can hear people pretending that HDTV isn’t any better. But I still don’t understand it. Back when I thought I would keep my Treo and avoid the hefty iPhone price tag I was still planning to write this post and didn’t have any problem admitting that the iPhone would be nifty to own if I could afford it. So what is it that makes people feel the need to hate on new technology they don’t have?

So I got an iPhone as an early birthday present. I hadn’t been planning on getting a new phone but my calls just kept cutting out in my apartment on sprint and then I ended up losing my phone. Since my contract was about to end I took the opportunity to switch over and get an iPhone. Not only is it just really fucking awesome I can also actually talk to people from my apartment.

The downside is that sprint is utterly fucking evil. My contract with them expired on the 25th of august, i.e., august was my last month of service. I’m like fine I’ll pay them the money for august and be on my way but no they refused to let me pay the money for august and told me that if I tried to use number portability before then I would be charged the full $200 for breaking my contract. I’m fairly sure this is illegal in several respects (according to the contract terms number porting didn’t qualify as breaking the contract) and I probably could have fought my way to getting my number transfered but it was just more difficult to fight with them then to get a new number so my number is now 510.457.5716.

This was only the latest in a long list of evil and sometimes illegal behavior by sprint. From the guy at the sprint store refusing to even try the number I wanted because he disapproved (it had 666 in it) to their fraudulent refusal to give me palm treo the unlimited data rate that applied to all non windows ME devices (a representation I had relied on when signing my contract with them). I was trapped with them for many years because of my treo but now I’m free and I will never purchase service from sprint again for any reason.

A recent study using the data from The Framingham Heart Study found that obesity spreads to friends. While it’s always possible that some unidentified common cause is actually behind the correlation between a friend becoming obese and later becoming obese yourself it seems they were pretty careful. Their analysis seems to take into consideration the fact that obese people might be more likely to befriend each other, any effect from smoking cessation, and effects related to where an individual lives. They even claim to account for the possibility that obesity might result from some common outside event. Of course one should always be wary of possible errors/oversights when evaluating complex statistical claims like this and be aware of the studies limitations¹ but it is at least suggestive of a harmful effect from having fat friends².

In fact one might reasonably explain this result by saying being around fat people creates the perception that being fat is acceptable and reduces the effort people put in to avoid being fat. Maybe not³ but assume it’s true. This would mean that merely seeing fat people on the street or in the store might increase your risk of becoming fat⁴. Sure we might never prove that a casual glance at an obese person harms your health but we might infer it on the same grounds people infer that any secondhand smoke is harmful⁵.

If so should we pass laws limiting the amount of time fat people could be outdoors? Or maybe stop them from eating at fancy restaurants where they might be especially effective in suggesting to other patrons being fat was acceptable? Sure, such laws might marginalize and vilify the obese but isn’t that what we are deliberately doing with smokers and exactly what this hypothesis suggests would improve public health? Of course you might object that smokers can just choose not to smoke fat people can’t just choose to be skinny but this argument doesn’t fly. After all in the broadest sense of the word obese people could choose not to be obese. It’s an indisputable fact that if they sufficiently restricted their calorie intake they would slim down. Now this may be preposterously difficult to do and genetic/developmental factors may put some people substantially more at risk than others but the same could be said for cigarettes.

Of course I don’t really think such laws would be a good idea. But the point is that simpleminded slogans about cigarette smokers hurting your health simply aren’t useful. Nor is it the case that simply finding the practice annoying/disgusting enough since many people find the sight of obese people disgusting. Obviously what we have to do is balance the harms of banning some activity with the harms of allowing it and be consistent about how we draw the line. So while there is a tiny bit of room to claim that the indoor bar/workplace bans on smoking have been justified the idea that the arguments⁶ for various sort of outdoor restrictions that rely on totally non-quantitative claims like these are compelling is just absurd. At the very least a compelling argument for such a law would have to estimate the risk to health posed as well as the amount of inconvenience such a law would incur.

In an entertaining turn of events four Brandeis alums have pitched in and created a searchable interface to Madam Palfrey’s phone records. If you want to try a number for yourself head on over to dcphonelist.com and once you are bored of that the story in the Hill about the the project is worth a read. Apparently one lobbyist has already been outed through the site but given the difficulty. In case you aren’t familiar with the DC madam case so far I give a brief summary after the break.

Now some people seem to think that reporting on or distributing this information is immoral as the sex lives of politicians should remain private and others find this an unpalatable invasion of privacy. Presumably this is the reason that ABC refused to identify any of Palfrey’s non-politician clients. But this is mind bogglingly hypocritical. I mean jesus christ the men on this list are faced with potentially losing their job or being divorced. Ms. Palfrey is facing prison time. It’s insane to think that prostitution is bad enough to throw Palfrey in jail for it but not bad enough to cause some guys to be embarrassed. Unless the guys calling are on the record as supporting the legalization of prostitution I have no sympathy for their plight.

Every day the government takes away people’s freedom for no other reason than prudish moral disapproval¹. It is the people who don’t really believe prostitution (or drug use) is that bad (such as the johns) but stay silent out of ambition or fear of censure who are really guilty here not Madam Palfrey. None of us would defend the person who let an innocent man go to jail rather than reveal he was having an affair and tacitly supporting the criminalization of prostitution is even worse. You don’t even need to admit you have been to a prostitute to argue for it’s legalization. Just like homosexuals working for gay bashing senators these clients deserve to be punished for their hypocrisy if anyone does and more importantly we ought to discourage this sort of hypocritical behavior.

If we really knew the names of everyone who used drugs or visited prostitutes they would become legal within the week. I’m hopeful the loss of obscurity (aka privacy) that everyone complains about will bring us to a point where this sort of hypocritical moralizing is no longer possible.

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The news sites I read have been covering the (unofficial) opening of The Open Library site today. This site, backed by the Open Content Alliance, aims to…well it’s not totally clear. Their vision ‘book’ reads like a feel good oil company advertisement, lots of optimistic “imagine a world” type statements but no clear statement of what this particular website hopes to accomplish. In any case what they are doing right now is presenting (only a few so far) public domain books scanned at high dpi on the web in a very pretty interface¹, even if this sometimes comes at the expense of reading convenience. Obviously it’s good to have a more options to access public domain books and for some books the high resolution scans really make a huge difference. However, I simply don’t understand how the Open Content Alliance is managing to convince people it is the noble defender of public access fighting off google’s evil closed system.

I mean the article linked from slashdot had this to say about the situation:

But the only realistic alternative may well be the library that Google is building, a proprietary database full of low-quality digital copies, a semi-accessible public domain prohibitively difficult to use or repurpose outside the Google reading room, a balkanized landscape of partner libraries and institutions left in its wake, each clutching their small slice of the digitized pie while the whole belongs only to Google, all of it geared ultimately not to readers, researchers and citizens but to consumers.

Even wikipedia has this to say about the Open Content Alliance:

It was conceived in response to Google Book Search’s closed nature, and aims to keep works in the public domain on-line.

These all sound a lot like what the Open Library vision book says:

Won’t some of the big commercial digitalization projects deliver on this future? They are a part of it but, if we go no further, we may have an expanded bookstore, or a single means of organizing the materials, but we may not be building on the open tradition of a library: a place where librarians can help organize and present materials, where patrons can draw from and add to the holdings, where the right to private study is upheld, and where physical facilities offer a meeting place and environment for learning.

All this vague feel good talk about Open Library without any actual concrete arguments as to why we should regard this organization, instead of google, as the defender of these principles is bad enough but when the next paragraph in the Open Library vision book starts like this it’s enough to make one sick.

We have been asked if authors and publishers will play a role in this vision. The answer is a resounding Yes! Publishers and authors create the works in our libraries.

Obviously they aren’t simply stating the blatantly obvious fact here that authors and publishers are causally responsible for the books they will digitize. Rather they are expressing their support for reduced fair use rights. The real difference between the google book search and the Open Content Alliance is that google book search believes that indexing copyrighted books falls under fair use and will index a work (and show only snippets) unless the copyright owner opts out while the Open Content Alliance will not index a book unless the owner opts in. Especially in light of this provocative article from [freakonomics] which policy do you think better represents the public library tradition? Trying to sneak in substantive and harmful attitudes about copyright (minimization of fair use) while posing as the defender of the public domain and free access really pisses me off

What then about all this clap trap about the danger of google’s closed system. I mean sure google has a closed system for copyrighted books but google actually lets you download the full pdfs and the OCRed text of books that are in the public domain. No one has copyright on these books so you can do what you want with them. Google isn’t trying to lock them down so no one else can have them they are just providing the additional service of letting you find them using google book search. Moreover, providing a flashy user interface can hardly be said to be a great contribution to public knowledge. Especially when it seems better suited to attract attention and impress people than to be a workable interface for reading online. Also many (most? all?) of the books the Open Library has released so far were already available from the internet archive in text form and most of their hyped services seem to be nothing more than better presenting books already available elsewhere on the internet.

The high resolution scans by the Open Content Alliance and the fancy interface are nice features to have but Adobe, MSN and the like are hardly funding this out of the goodness of their heart. These companies are scared that google will become the place to go to for information and they want to make sure that isn’t the case. Not to mention blunt the PR benefit google books gives google. Sure I’m glad they are providing this service but this doesn’t make them the ‘good guy’ anymore than the fact that google lets you search the internet for free makes them a good guy.

I take it as a given that the constitution ought to be interpreted in much the same way as we interpret any kind of instructions. If you are house sitting for your professor saying that you thought it was a silly rule isn’t a valid excuse for ignoring his command, “Don’t let anyone else into the house.” On the other hand if his dog gets violently ill it is perfectly reasonable to allow the vet into the house since the situation is radically different from those the professor had in mind and he obviously doesn’t expect or want you to follow it in this case. However, this does not give you leave to supplant the professor’s judgment even if you believe it will better serve the aims he had in mind. Even if you know his intent in forbidding guests is to avoid scaring his dog it still wouldn’t be acceptable to invite over your friend who is really good with animals. After all if he had wanted you to use your judgment about who to invite he would have told you so.

So what does this framework say about the second amendment? In short: everyone is wrong. The collective rights theorists are blatantly substituting their judgment for those of the framers¹ while the individual rights theorists clearly misconstrue the framers intent. Let’s start by explaining why the collective right theory is totally absurd since this is likely to be the most controversial.

As wikipedia notes the collective rights camp can be divided into two groups, those that merely hold that the right to bear arms is simply one “the people” have collectively and those who take the view that it is a right reserved only to “members of a well-regulated militia.” The first view is absurd on it’s face. What would it mean for the people as a body to lack the right to keep and bear arms? That we weren’t allowed to form an army? Who would take this right away? Is it just saying that we can always repreal our gun laws if we so desired? Presumably so long as the constitution is in force we can always vote to repeal any laws banning gun possession.

But perhaps I’m being unfair. Maybe the second amendment should be understood as guaranteeing states’ rights in a very narrow specific way. Namely the national government can regulate individual gun ownership as it likes but can’t prevent from maintaining an armed force. But that would be extremely odd. The Bill of Rights is almost exclusively concerned with the rights of individuals (with the tenth amendment split half and half) so it doesn’t seem plausible that the authors of this amendment thought it would be clearly understood as guaranteeing a right to the states. Moreover, even the sources that support a collective interpretation of the people understand that term to be referring to a national community. So while in some sense the second amendment obviously protects states rights it is implausible to think that it does so by granting states the right to keep an official armed force without ever mentioning the word state.

The militia interpretation makes little more sense than a the purely collective interpretation. After all if you understand the amendment to guarantee people the right to bear arms when the government lets them join an official militia then it guarantees them no right at all. Of course the government can choose to let people bear arms and join a militia if it so desires. Slightly more plausible is the theory that the second amendment guarantees people the right to be defended by an armed militia so that in the absence of a sufficient official militia people would have the right to arm themselves for the collective defense. This, however, simply isn’t historically plausible.

It is quite well documented that the second amendment was viewed as a protection against government tyranny when it was adopted. In particular the militia was to serve as an armed defense against government soldiers, e.g., a situation like the colonies had faced in the revolutionary war. Yet surely if citizens only reserve the right to arm themselves in the absence of an official army this provision would provide no protection against such an army. In fact any interpretation of the second amendment that allows the government to narrow gun ownership to a small proportion of the population or otherwise keep most of the personal weapons under it’s control would clearly be incompatible with this purpose. If only a few national guard troops, more a part of the army than a state force, get to carry guns the people could not possibly rise up against the army. You might disagree with the founding father’s judgment that an armed populance is a good idea or even a good protection against tyranny but as I outlined at the start this isn’t justification for ignoring the rule.

On the other hand the second amendment clearly doesn’t say that people have the right to carry arms for personal protection or sport shooting or whatever. One might try to argue that these are part of the ninth amendment’s unenumerated rights but they simply aren’t part of what the second amendment says. Thus while the second amendment might guarantee that most private citizens can keep and bare arms it doesn’t seem inconsistent for these arms to be regulated. So long as those laws didn’t substantially interfere with the ability of the people to mount an ad hoc common defense it seems that anything could go.

For instance a state could outlaw all handguns, and perhaps even hunting rifles so long as it allowed its citizens to keep assault rifles in their basements. One might require that all transport of weapons occur under lock and key or even have the state pass out the only legal weapons to citizens who participate in weekly militia drills. Heck, you could probably even limit participation to married homeowners over 25 without getting into trouble with the second amendment.

In short it seems pretty obvious to me that both sides in this debate are twisting the second amendment to suit their preferences. The second amendment is about arming the people for the purpose of the common defense against both tyranny and foreign aggressors. Pretty clearly this is an outdated notion and it should be repealed but it shouldn’t be left on the books and misinterpreted.

Every additional government regulation or tort carries with it a substantial cost. So I find it really depressing when something like the recent drowning of a small child in the wave pool at the Santa Clara Great America creates significant popular support for a law to fix the problem. Apparently the fact that the mother didn’t require her kid to wear a lifejacket in some people’s minds means that the government should step in and force people to wear them. This is despite the fact that “[o]n average, two or three people a year have drowned at water parks over the past decade,” a number I suspect is less than the number of people who have died driving to the parks.

While wearing life jackets may save lives this sort of law probably puts children at greater risk. Fear of liability will cause the lifeguards to spend their time yelling at people to put their lifejackets back on instead of searching for kids in trouble and parents may pay less attention than they did before. Now Great America has already decided to require lifejackets at all their installations but the mere existence of extra laws always has a cost. In addition to the obvious direct costs the more safety laws you pass the less mindshare each law can occupy in the park’s management. Additionally if you have too many safety laws people stop using their judgment and start relying on what the law says

What’s so frustrating about calls for these sort of laws is the obvious irrationality involved. It isn’t like our estimate of the number of lives this law would save suddenly increased nor did people even notice that that we usually pass safety laws when things are this dangerous. I mean it is totally absurd that we allow parents to needlessly expose their children to much greater risks by choosing not to vaccinate them or pointlessly taking them along in the car but it is wave pools that people think we need a law about. Unfortunately when people aren’t going to spend a great deal of time thinking about the matter the emotional pull of a tragic story is going to override any reasonable considerations.

This is just another reason that I really dislike direct involvement of the people in government. If we had a more indirect system of government where politicians didn’t have as much incentive to pander to constituents on individual emotional issues this sort of effect could be minimized. In particular the original electoral college system had a great many virtues but that’s a topic for another post.

So I was just listening to this amusing segment on NPR where they read some of the humorously literal answers to literal questions that Professor Paul Brian has on his webpage. Now the humor is reasonably funny but his motivation for posting them was apparently somewhat serious. Dr. Brian teaches a (fairly interesting looking) course on science fiction and apparently this page was intended as a chide to the sciencey students in his classes who couldn’t appreciate the human interest or metaphorical commentary of the works because they got the science wrong.

Of course not every scientifically incorrect plot point is a flaw, for instance the steam punk style science in His Dark Materials Trilogy is obviously a virtue and even the hardest¹ science fiction like “Timemaster” by Robert L. Forward usually ask us to assume possibly false facts about our universe. However, a great many science fiction works are written in a decidedly realist way and therefore suffer greatly if their major premises turn out to be implausible².

So if Dr. Brian’s complaint was really that some of his students thought some well regarded science fiction works were critically flawed because of their scientific inaccuracies I could disagree more. If the men in “All Quiet on the Western Front” had been shooting ray guns or Gatsby had flown a helicopter instead of a car no one would dispute that the unrealistic elements seriously detracted from the story. The fact that Dr. Brian and others in the literary establishment might not have the background to be viscerally disturbed by the scientific inaccuracies is no different from the fact that some people may be sufficiently ignorant of history that private helicopters in the 1920s³ wouldn’t bother them.

On the other hand if Dr. Brian is merely saying that people should be able to appreciate the virtues of a work despite its serious flaws then I agree. Even if the flaws in a book ruin it for you it doesn’t mean you can’t acknowledge what it does well and understand the value it might have to others. However, I think this is a lesson that the literary and humanities crowd needs to learn more than anyone else. For instance science fiction writer Greg Egan might not have particularly complex characters or a great deal of psychological development in his books but he is far and away my favorite author because unlike every other author he actually presents philosophical and imaginative ideas that are worth thinking about⁴. Or consider international thriller type books whose characters and storyline may be generic spy novel but whose detailed background educates about current events and the way international diplomacy works. Or even mystery novels that may do nothing exceptional with their characters or psychology but masterfully lay out the clues and give the reader an intense mental workout.

So if Dr. Brian is serious about wanting people to acknowledge the value of books whose flaws we find too annoying to read he should start with the literary establishment (and for all I know he does). More than anyone else it is they who are unwilling to acknowledge that equally reasonable sensibilities may make a science fiction story without complex character drama better than Shakespeare or that the intellectual workout from an otherwise generic mystery novel is no worse (per unit time) than that of reading Ulysses. After all if it’s perfectly okay for them to overlook absurd scientific claims that viscerally ruin the realism for some of us why is it any worse to overlook characteristics that people with degrees in literature tend to find annoying?

I recently ran across an article on slashdot discussing the payments that hotmail accepts from businesses to have their email whitelisted and (indirectly) links to editorials praising and denouncing the 2006 deal AOL and Yahoo struck with goodmail that allows businesses to pay a 1/4 cent fee per email to guarantee their email makes it past spam and volume filters. Now I’ve been vaguely aware of calls to combat spam with micropayments for some time but this prompted me to actually take a look at some of the more carefully designed proposals for email micropayments. These schemes actually manage to answer many of the common worries about email micropayments (if really implemented). However, while I’m generally a big fan of clever economic/incentive based solutions to social problems, it seems to me that micropayments for email are a fundamentally flawed non-solution to the problem of email spam. In fact it’s far from clear if they would reduce the total amount of junk mail at all and even if they did the trouble they cause and risks they pose outweigh any benefits.

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So the big financial story of the day is the revelation that John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods posted anonymously on the Yahoo finance site. Unsurprisingly he tended to say good things about his company (and his haircut) while dissing his competition (Wild Oats which Whole Foods is now trying to purchase). In short he behaved like every other fanboi on the internet, he just liked his own company rather than the one that made his computer CPU. But because he is the company CEO everyone is getting really worked up about this. Frankly I don’t see what the big deal is.

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