decisions yet unmade

The "Broken Market"

2010-02-28T17:11:00.003-05:00

The textbooks market does not operate according to the same economic principles as a normal consumer market. First, the end consumers (students) do not select the product, and the people choosing the product (faculty) do not purchase the product. Therefore, price is removed from the purchasing decision, giving the producer (publishers) disproportionate market power to set prices high.

This fundamental flaw in the market is blamed as the primary reason that prices are out of control.

Never considered this, but it makes perfect sense.

A Science-Related Public Circus of Our Own

2009-08-28T22:59:00.010-04:00

The US Chamber of Commerce wants a Scopes monkey trial for climate change. This brings up a point: Occam's razor can be dangerously enticing, especially for laypeople judging science.

. . . a cross examination is a lousy way to determine science, because all scientific conclusions are tentative and limited in various ways; there are always holes waiting to be picked at. But the other reason is that a trial situation is a great opportunity for people to confuse the public with what our former colleague Julian Sanchez termed a one-way hash argument.

The gist of this is that it can [be] easy to make a simple, intuitive presentation of an argument that is simply wrong. In contrast, reality is often complex and counterintuitive, and providing all the details needed to understand it can be arduous.

Such a trial can only lead to further misinformation and confusion. The issue is not that skepticism—a foundation of science—is a bad thing, but instead that scientific conclusions are rarely black and white, and courtroom arguments tend to be painted that way.

Modular English

2009-08-25T22:45:00.005-04:00

I should have encountered Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" at some point in my literary education.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing, is that it is easy. It is easier—even quicker, once you have the habit—to say In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think.

Sixty-three years later, the piece remains remarkably relevant; in fact, the situation now may be worse than in Orwell's time. MBAs today are like soldiers armed with assembly-line English—they are highly-trained buzzword specialists. I don't think any amount of journalistic jeering can change this.

An Introspective 16-Year Old, Was I

2009-08-05T11:39:00.006-04:00

Despite the content of the last few posts, I guarantee you this is not a tech blog. That said, I've been looking over my old blog again (pardon the disrepair—banner ads tend to creep in like cobwebs), and so it's Blast From the Past Day. The following is from May 17, 2005:

I look at other people's lives--or what other people say about their own lives--and they're all so much more complicated than mine. It seems that everybody has more problems than I do. On the same token, however, they have more things to be happy about. Other people's lives are more interesting. If someone wrote a biography about me I'd probably rather read one with more drama, because there'd be none in mine; it seems that in the distribution of drama some people got it all and people like me didn't.

I feel like the reason is that I never really got into the things I do. I'm kind of passive; everything just kind of goes by for me. All around me I see people who are driven hard with farsighted goals while I kind of coast along (somewhat) halfheartedly. It's apparent in the things I do. In track or cross country, I just manage to get by while others constantly push themselves to break records or win competitions. In orchestra, I've been playing for almost 9 years now, but I never really got into it. I see people who live for music and would die for music. I'm constantly alongside people who are more involved than I am.

I never attached myself to any expectations. That's the thing. The second you form strong expectations for something you're setting yourself up to be disappointed. Maybe things will go the way you want them to, but if they don't, you'll feel much worse for it. Failure is easier when you just don't care all that much. So I look around and see the troubled members of my generation, emotionally unstable, lacking motivation, psychologically scattered; they had a dream of what was to happen, and they wanted that dream, they wanted it badly, so badly that when it never came true and became impossible they broke down to pieces.

Having a dream is always a good thing, though--the problem arises with overly strong desire to reach it. Having no dreams can be a problem in itself. This is where I come in. If I stop typing right now and think if I have any clear, strong dreams for my longer-term future, I come up with nothing. Of course, I would like to be successful in one way or another, but that kind of goal is too nebulous. I don't have plans. This is a problem. The question arises all the time, especially in this stage of life: "What do you want to do (with your life)?" "Do you want to be a ________?" "What major will you pursue in college?" My answer is truthfully: I don't know. There's a problem with (this may be a violation of modesty) being good at and enjoying a number of things in life: then the path of life is less clear. If I went into science or math (which I probably will do anyway), I'll feel like I'm wasting my literary, music, or art skills. The other way around too.

I'd like to say that 4 years, 3 months, and so many life experiences later, this all has changed—but it hasn't. For some reason or another I'm continuing to coast through what is arguably the most decisive time in my life. Different people, different places, but I'm taking the same approach.

What I'm not sure of is how exactly I felt about that passivity at the time I described it. I can't remember if I thought it was preferable—the post reads more like a detailed observation than anything. Maybe I have changed, because today I won't hesitate to say that the dramatic life is better, low points and all. I'm working on it. I just need to counter my own nature to make it happen.

No, It's Not Dead, But I Wish It Were

2009-08-03T07:11:00.026-04:00

Ars Technica's Jeremy Reimer on the persistent use of Microsoft Word in incongruous contexts:

Like many conventions of society (such as mutual gift-giving) we keep doing things in a certain way simply out of habit, long after the original need (a barter-based economy) has vanished. [...]

Why do we do this? Because everyone uses Word, so we have to. And why does everyone use Word? Because everyone uses Word. It starts to make sense if you just hit your head on the wall enough times.

I've witnessed this phenomenon, especially in business school classes: people reflexively use Word for even the simplest of plain-text note-taking. Type up a .doc (or better yet, .docx) and attach it to your e-mail. They practically teach this in school.

That said, my real problem with Microsoft Word—with Office, in fact—is that it is the absolute worst piece of software that I am forced to use on the Mac. It is truly a painful experience. It is not unreasonable, I think, to believe that your document window or controls should not simply disappear before your eyes as you are working; or to want a shred of consistency in text manipulation between the program and the OS (or within the program itself). Don't blame the Mac—I can't think of another current application as broken as the Office apps.

Worst of all, for all this sacrifice, Mac Office doesn't even guarantee 100% compatibility with Windows Office. I've spent hours cleaning up its mistakes. Even so, it's better than the alternative; I work with Office users, and can't deal with the possibility of further deterioration from repeated conversions.

Edit: And it goes on and on...

Head for the Hills, the Apple Tablet is Coming

2009-07-30T00:11:00.010-04:00

I'm astonished that writers for (somewhat) respectable publications have decried the rumoured Apple Tablet as a certain failure, what with zero official information, or even acknowledgement from Apple as to the existence of such a device.

It's absurd. Each article repeats a laundry list of criticisms inherent to the slate form-factor Tablet PC, and to their own imaginary idea of an Apple Tablet—imaginary, of course, because no one knows anything about it. But since we actually all know with absolute certainty that this Apple Tablet will just be a big iPod Touch with a stupid flat on-screen keyboard, sell your Apple stock now 'cause it's going down in flames. These writers have built themselves a nice straw tablet, and summarily knocked it down.

Apple is a design firm. Their track record for releasing new products (and entering new markets) suggests that their engineers won't simply look at the snarl of potential problems and say, "well, too bad, let's just release a big iPod Touch and maybe it will be okay." It's far more likely that they'll sit down, look at each problem, and at least try to come up with a creative, effective solution to each. After all, Apple tends to introduce new products only when they can demonstrate some distinct advantage.

Speculation is fine—and there's only speculation at this point—but it's foolish to use language like "The Many Problems With Apple's Tablet" and "Apple Tablet is a Train Wreck" to summarize your completely baseless claims for a product that doesn't even exist.

P.S. Although I guess it is better than this.

My Foray into Forecasting

2009-07-09T13:09:00.003-04:00

Google's recent OS announcement has got the 'net all tangled in excitement and debate.

This could be one of the most important days in computing history.

After reading this and other thoughts from Yan on the Chrome OS, I thought I'd throw my own into the growing mix. Though I'll refrain from making such grand prophetic remarks, I do support Google's innovation. In fact, I support any interface-building venture that deviates from the antiquated—dare I say obsolete—spatial-desktop metaphor.

Like many others, however, I have less confidence in the current plausibility of a pure thin-client approach. While the functional gap between web apps and desktop apps has shrunk over the past few years, it still remains a sizable leap. Without local storage, any application that deals with large files—image editors, as a common example—are bottlenecked by network transfer speeds. Web apps for further resource-hungry tasks like video editing, musical production, immersive gaming, etc. remain beyond the scope of current technology.

Worse, the thin-client approach today severely limits the functionality of the computer, even for a typical "light" user. Device usability becomes dependent on infrastructure. Even in the U.S. today, internet connections are not ubiquitous. The inability to, say, watch a video or listen to music on a train presents a real drawback. Of course, something like an iPod can fulfill this purpose—but why should consumers give up basic functionality that the cheapest of netbooks already have?

No, I don't believe the Chrome OS approach will soon replace traditional operating systems. That's not to say it won't be successful. Instead, it may become a popular parallel alternative to existing choices. It isn't unreasonable to assume that the aforementioned flaws just don't matter for most light personal computer usage. Google claims that the initial deployment will be in the netbook sphere—an ideal arena considering netbooks' typical usage.

In fact, if Google can make online storage transparent to the user, and maintain web apps' reliability and responsiveness, they may well take over the netbook OS space. The attractiveness of a few-second boot time is considerable; it's very well-suited to the netbook form factor and could become a defining feature. (Such a feature would allow netbooks to cut somewhat into the smartphone market, but I digress.)

But until we see significant progress in wireless infrastructure and network technology, I don't foresee Chrome OS spreading outside of netbooks, least of all to desktop machines. Capable desktop hardware is relatively cheap, magnifying the thin-client's artificial limitations in comparison to a traditional OS.

Whatever the case, fewer companies are as well-positioned for this venture as Google, with its considerable clout and sparkling brand. So here, I must disagree with Yan: open source or not, if Google can't pull this off, no one can.

Edit: I should note that I've used the term "thin client" improperly, here. A thin client relies, naturally, on a central server. Google's proposition does not exactly fit this description. Though Google does host popular apps on its servers, there's little reason to doubt that the Chrome OS will be able to run any web app. Thus the machines can be useful even in the absence of Google servers.

Some Perspective, Please

2009-02-06T02:23:00.003-05:00

Companies that have gotten bailouts continue to make a mockery of taxpayers.

Until it came to light Tuesday, Wells Fargo, which received $25 billion in federal funds, was blithely planning a series of “employee recognition outings” to Las Vegas luxury hotels this month.

As ABC reported, Bank of America took its $45 billion in bailout funds and sponsored a five-day carnival outside the Super Bowl stadium, and Morgan Stanley took its $10 billion in bailout money and held a three-day conference at the Breakers in Palm Beach. (Morgan Stanley had also still planned to send top employees to Monte Carlo and the Bahamas, events just canceled.)

The New York Post revealed that Sandy Weill, former chief executive of Citigroup, took a company jet to fly his family for a Christmas holiday to a $12,000-a-night luxury resort in San José del Cabo, Mexico. No matter that the company just got a $50 billion federal bailout and laid off 53,000 worldwide.

The interior of the 18-seat jet, as described by The Post, is posh, with a full bar, fine-wine selection, $13,000 carpets, Baccarat crystal glasses, Cristofle sterling silver flatware and — my personal favorite — pillows made from Hermès scarves.

This is astonishing. What is wrong with you? Have you left any shred of decency?

A Psalm of Life

2009-02-04T23:04:00.003-05:00

(Of which my Fourier Analysis professor recited from memory the penultimate and antepenultimate stanzas, but, I believe, incorrectly attributed to Alfred Lord Tennyson.)

A Psalm of Life
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

WHAT THE HEART OF THE YOUNG MAN SAID TO THE PSALMIST

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
     Life is but an empty dream!—
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
     And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
     And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
     Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
     Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
     Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
     And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
     Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
     In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
     Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
     Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,—act in the living Present!
     Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
     We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
     Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
     Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
     Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
     With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
     Learn to labor and to wait.

Steve Vai

2009-01-19T23:13:00.003-05:00

It must take some serious restraint to do this:

when you usually do this (Vai comes in at 2:27):

YouTube comment:

This footage is a brilliant example of 20th (and 21st) century audiences's demands - show us an average singer instead of an amazing instrumentalist.

Nights Filled With Longer Hours

2008-12-03T02:22:00.003-05:00

In an attempt to keep this blog-boat from sinking, I'm posting.

I've been a good little consumer this Black Friday weekend. A monitor, a pair of headphones, and LittleBigPlanet—take that, recession! Ha!

In other news, I've tried Red Bull for the first time, and it doesn't keep me from sleeping in class. It's shocking just how tired I am these days on six hours of sleep. How was I ever awake in high school? In retrospect, I was probably only half awake most of the time. I remember a day, either junior or senior year, after I'd gone to bed at midnight and slept six (six!) hours—I was bouncy and euphoric all day and commented to several people about how much better everything is after a lot of sleep.

Sleep! Which I am currently forgoing to bail out this broken bleeding blog-boat. My priorities are kind of messed up! Good night.

Faith Restored

2008-11-05T01:47:00.004-05:00

We are soon to witness what the future holds—let the healing begin.

~ ~ ~

Watching McCain's graceful concession speech—as the crowd booed his calls for unity and his mentions of Obama—really drove home the tragedy in McCain's presidential bid. Here was a man of true honor and decency, reduced to a shell by a party that has learned to thrive on ignorance and hate.

I was struck by the lack of even a modicum of respect from that audience. As one MeFi commenter put it:

McCain's actually coming over pretty well. Better than his idiot crowd. God he must hate them.

Ahoy

2008-10-29T02:33:00.003-04:00

I'm in all the right places, yet somehow lost in life.

I've had a perpetual sense of impending doom, lately. Something just feels slightly off. I've come to a point where the criticality of the questions I face increases exponentially by the day, but I'm hardly better prepared to answer them than I was before.

If anything, the choices now are harder than they used to be—there are more options, and more considerations. Practically all my life I've been dutifully navigating the course charted by others, and though the waters were rough at times, I always knew where I was headed.

But the map ends here. I need to make my own way.

Here I am, sailing blindly into the night, hoping that when the sun rises I'll find myself in a world where I belong.

JAM

2008-10-19T15:10:00.010-04:00

I dropped my guitar yesterday.

Basically, it went something like this: I walked into the room holding the guitar and patch cable, and the strap (from my old guitar) slipped off the tail and it smacked the ground pretty hard. The three people in the room (including me) yelled for a moment before going on with the

It all started when I was late for a huge stadium gig 5 miles away. The problem was, the streets were empty and public transit was shut down because everyone was already at the gig. So I ran there, carrying the guitar on my back. When I finally stepped on stage (15 minutes later) the stadium exploded into applause.

Suddenly ninjas dropped from the sky, emerged from the crowd and circled me like a swarm of rats, brandishing swords and nunchaku and pointy stars and handguns and other menacing weapons. Everyone gasped. Somebody fainted. I saw murder in their eyes; I had no choice but to wield the guitar like the axe it was.

As they rushed me, I swung the guitar wildly, snapping bones, splitting skulls, lunging and dodging and spinning in a frenzied cacophony of musical justice. One by one they fell—until the last ninja, in a burst of rage, launched into the air, sword held high, and swung it down in a desperate arc—with all my might I hurled my guitar at the sword, and as steel met wood, the axe hit a single thunderous power chord, so righteous that his sword shattered into a million pieces and he instantly died.

Everyone started to cheer, but then the guitar crashed to the floor, exploded, burst into flames with a roaring fireball reminiscent of the sun, and everyone screamed.

~ ~ ~

In other news, does anyone have wood sealer/superglue/clear nail polish I could use to cover up theoretical exposed wood on a theoretical chipped guitar?

Stream of Consciousness, I swear

2008-10-17T02:34:00.003-04:00

So I haven't posted in my blog in quite a while; over at my tumblr blog (tumblog), I blamed this on a lack of time. However, reputable sources have since irrefutably demonstrated to me that

99% of time [sic], when people say that they don't have time to do something: what they really mean is that they're unwilling to reallocate their youtube/tv/sleeping/drugs/gorging/shopping/digg/video games time towards doing something.

As such, I have decided to reallocate some of my gorging and drugs time to write this post. The type of posting that I'd referenced initially in that tumblr comment was true, structured, long-form writing, written slowly with at least a modicum of care. What I'm doing here, which may in fact be ultimately more rewarding, is writing more or less just what comes to my mind as I type. Quantity over quality! [Edit: Perhaps (hopefully) more accurately, quantity before quality.]

Let this be the dawning of a new golden age of me blogging. While we have witnessed many false starts in the past two years, this one is TOTALLY FOR REAL.

Seriously.

Last seen on a Facebook wall

2008-08-25T10:00:00.000-04:00

I am single handedly democratizing China. Not really, just kidding. I don't know what kind of notions you have about China, but Beijing is alright. The first thing that got to me was the sky--even on a sunny day, it's not deep blue, but kind of a pale blue. We did get to see a real deep blue sky last Saturday, but that was the only time so far. A lot of the time it's been raining, which apparently is created by the government as a way to battle air pollution. [Edit: During my 8-week stay, I saw what I consider to be a true blue sky a total of three times, including the last day I was there--the news media made a huge deal of the first blue day of the Olympics.]

Food is cheap. I can get too much to eat for about US$1.50. I can get a pretty fancy meal for $5. Bottled drinks are generally around 50¢. I've actually gotten used to it now, so any meal over 10元 (~$1.50) is more than I want to spend.

I hadn't found any real internet restrictions until yesterday. What happened at times was that while surfing the 'net my connection to certain websites would suddenly be reset (even if I had just been on that site) but it would always come back shortly. Yesterday I found out that Chinese Wikipedia is completely blocked. I just get a "connection was reset" error if I try. English Wikipedia, however, is completely fine, and I can read all about historical Chinese oppression with no obstacles. [Edit: As the Olympics approached, Chinese Wikipedia was unblocked, perhaps a result of international journalistic pressure. Wordpress and Livejournal, however, were blocked during my entire stay. Blogger, curiously, was not; I get the feeling they struck some sort of deal with the Chinese government--the navbar was automatically Chinese when I looked at Blogspot pages (like this one).]

The whole city is a huge construction site. There is a mind boggling amount of construction going on, everywhere. Things get done FAST here; work goes on 24 hours a day, and I watched a whole strip of road get rebuilt in like 2 days, the kind of thing that takes like a month in the US. The workers here have pretty sad stories; they're migrant workers with homes in the countryside, who take on work in substandard conditions as it pays better than farming. I've seen their living quarters, temporary little shacks or tents adjacent to the construction sites.

At the same time there is a middle class in Beijing that appears to be trying pretty hard to mimic American excess. I've been to a few bars/clubs with people I've met; they're packed with strobe lights and flashing lasers and ridiculous thundering sound systems and drinks and fog machines and visualizations on the walls and bouncing floors and scores of young people and some creepy older people all coming together to form a cacophonous mass of excess.

Actually that's only truly applicable for the last place I went to. It was ridiculous.

I find linguistics fascinating now, but I'm sure if I studied it I would hate it. This post has nothing to do with linguistics.

2008-08-04T04:15:00.000-04:00

So I just read an article (中国今后的文字问题 The Problem of Present-Day China's Writing System) written in 1918 by a Chinese intellectual (钱玄同 Qian Xuantong), where he promotes the wholesale and complete replacement of the Chinese language with Esperanto.

It's hard to understand today the extent of Chinese self-loathing at the beginning of the 20th century. The author explains how "99.9%" of historical Chinese literature is composed of "confusing, dreamy" nonsense (that incorrigibly messes up children for their entire lives), and in order for China to progress and modernize as a nation it is absolutely imperative for China to abandon both its language, spoken and written, and its culture, namely Confucianist ideals of loyalty and piety which push a morality of "slavery". Similarly, prominent contemporary writer Lu Xun (鲁迅) claimed “If Chinese characters are not destroyed, then China will die.” (漢字不滅，中國必亡。)

For Qian Xuantong, complete romanization of the Chinese language was not enough. He died in 1939, ten years before the Communist takeover of China, and this article, written some 38 years prior to the official introduction of Simplified Characters, reveals that the simplification policy was pretty moderate on the spectrum of Chinese linguistic reform.

Introspectacle

2008-08-03T13:37:00.001-04:00

I've been trying to come up with new names for the blog, and on a bus the other day I thought up the name "Introspectacle", which I found appropriate, in a "tearing out your innards for the world to see" fashion (not literally—ick). Of course, I first had to run a search to see if my new word was actually new, and indeed I discovered "introspectacle" was not unsullied as I had hoped. The first result on Google is a blog written by an overtly Christian fellow.

There is a reason that I often say, "it's probably already been done"; it probably already has. Maybe I'm overanalyzing this, but as students who have grown up in the United States we have been exposed broadly to the same kind of education and culture. We share similar creative processes with other people. That is not to say that we are all the same, but rather that our minds often fit into categories (which paradoxically is encouraged by the same American culture that praises individualism--think about how engineers, art students, scientists etc are expected to think, or just look at politics).

A pessimist might draw the conclusion then that anything we do is already done by someone else, and shockingly we're not as special as they told us in elementary school. Especially considering a standardized and increasingly regimented education and entertainment that can be traced back to but a few sources, it is easy to assume that each person will fit neatly into a pocket of established culture, a classification, a stereotype--ultimately, it's all been done before.

That standpoint, however, neglects a crucial fact--the same fact that drives the evolution of species--that from the combination of old ingredients we can indeed create something new. It is our specific mixture of experiences and talents that define who we are as individuals; it is that which drives change and innovation in all fields.

Regardless, it is still generally discernible, given a set of circumstances, what constitutes an obvious result and what is truly creative.