1-30-16 Hodgepodge

Evernote's "5% Problem"

I have been following tech news about the Evernote productivity app/service for some time, being an occasional user and seeing sporadic predictions of the company's demise lately. One such piece made a point that might be useful generally:

[The then CEO Phil Libin] conceded that Evernote had so many features, in fact, that it could sometimes be difficult to explain to newcomers exactly what Evernote was:

"What winds up happening at Evernote conferences is that people go and they say, 'Oh, I love Evernote and I've been using it for years and now I realize I've only been using it for 5 percent of what it can do,' " Libin said. "And the problem is that it's a different 5 percent for everyone. If everyone just found the same 5 percent, then we'd just cut the other 95 percent and save ourselves a lot of money. It's a very broad usage base. And we need to be a lot better about tying it together. And I think we have. We've got a few things we're launching over the next few months to help with that."

Evernote had spread itself too thin, and there was no core experience. Though Evernote did, in fact, continue to push out new features and products, they never managed to fix the underlying problem. [bold added]

This might also explain something I have observed several times: Some people swear that they could never get by without Evernote, while many others don't quite get what all the fuss is about. I am one of the latter. Perhaps the five percent I tried wasn't the right five percent to hook me...

Weekend Reading

"Assuming you genuinely want to keep a rational resolution but your motivation is flagging, here are a few techniques that might help you achieve your goal." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Are You Struggling to Keep Those New Year's Resolutions?" at Forbes

"The aurocentric view also makes the question a lot simpler." -- Keith Weiner, in "Will Gold Outperform Stocks?" at SNB & CHF

"If work refers to a constant state of negotiation or angst, then there's something not right in the match between the two people." -- Michael Hurd, in "One More Time: Good Relationships Are Not Work!" at The Delaware Wave

"Fear is too often motivated by the search for an impossible and unnecessary 'security.'" -- Michael Hurd, in "Why Be So Afraid of Fear?" at The Delaware Coast Press

"It is revealing of our present intellectual climate that a reputable, intellectual magazine -- for decades a bastion of American liberalism -- has published an article that calls for putting hammer and chisel to the wall separating religion from state as a means of abating the threat from a cause seeking religious totalitarianism." -- Elan Journo, in "Devaluing Secular Government?" at The Times of Israel

I Wish More of Microsoft's Customers Thought Like Her

The Evil HR Lady writes of time-tracking software:

I love data. In fact, I spent many, many years doing data based HR jobs. Data, properly used can tell you things you never imagined. Like, did you know that it's taking your employees 20 hours a week to create reports in Excel? That doesn't mean they are slacking off. That's how long it takes. Could time be used more wisely by paying a programmer to come in and automate the reporting process? Maybe. It depends on the reports and your business, but I'm of the mindset that anything that can be automated should be.

Microsoft's GUI-centric approach to everything stops or slows down more advanced users from making simple automations. I think it also thwarts curiosity and experimentation by its user base, who never develop computational expertise past a certain very basic, naive point.

That said, I recently encountered a very good article that purports to explain how, in its words, "Shitty Products Survive (and Thrive!)." Perhaps not having to train people up more than makes up for inflexibility in most use cases.

-- CAV

Friday Four

1. A few months ago, I considered the idea that, if the standing desk fad died down, sit-stand desks might become cheap as demand went off a cliff. That hasn't happened, but with demand remaining strong, IKEA has sensed an opportunity and started making sit-stand desks for $200-300. From a short-term review of the SKARSTA:

Overall, the SKARSTA meets expectations. I would recommend it if you want an adjustable-height desk and only want to spend $230. I would not recommend it if you're very tall and want to use this desk near its maximum 47-inch height, or if you need an absolutely rock-solid desk that doesn't sway at all. If your desired surface height is around 41 inches (or lower), you'll probably be happy.

Eventually I'll post a long-term review, but if you are reading this, I've had no issues using this desk daily since January 2016.

With some rearranging, I could make this fit into our home office, but I remain very backlogged from our move and am in no hurry. At the rate things are going, I may well even have the benefit of the long-term review before I get around to it.

2. At the start of two days' worth of digging out of the snow -- with frequent breaks, of course! -- I noticed a trail of bird footprints on our snow-dusted doorstep.

Here's a photo.

"But Gus, you're a fan of technology," I can almost hear you ask. "Why didn't you get a snow blower?" I wanted one, and already knew what I wanted after asking a knowledgeable friend for advice, but in the days before the storm hit, I had to take care of our son, who had come down with a stomach bug. By the time he was well, it was the day before the storm and blowers were nowhere to be found.

3. If you were wondering why Rick Santorum is still in the race for the GOP nomination, the Onion has you covered:

Expressing frustration that he had yet to receive any divine counsel on the matter, former Senator Rick Santorum told reporters Friday that he was still waiting for the go-ahead from God to suspend his presidential campaign.

Vox populi, vox dei, Richarde.

4. The home office I mentioned earlier lacks a door on one entrance, a situation I remedied with a baby gate. One day, I forgot to close it only for my son, whose sense of order is apparently stronger than his curiosity, to find it open and alert me to the problem. He tugged me over to the room and pointed to the gate, obviously wanting me to close it. Anything you want, Little Man!

-- CAV

The Internet: Use It or Feel Used by It

As I may have mentioned at some point, I created a small backlog of about a dozen blog posts that are ready to post at a moment's notice. This allows me to maintain a regular posting schedule even when my entire morning is lost to illness or something else that demands my attention at that time. These posts cover what I call "evergreen" topics, rather than being about current events, so it generally won't matter that I compose them weeks in advance. This strategy dovetails with my practice of sometimes posting ahead of time by making it possible to ignore the news entirely if I know I'll be busy. So, in practice, I keep an eye out for "evergreen" material and, if I'll be posting ahead and have a good topic, I create an entry and refresh my queue with it. That is, it goes to the end of that line and I schedule the oldest post for automatic publication.

On more than one occasion now, I have noticed something odd in the process of writing such a post, specifically regarding a type of article I keep seeing pop up. There is a sort of push-back against the ubiquity of the Internet (and other means of rapid communications) in our lives. (If I recall correctly, I have even seen it called something like "the slow web".) The kind of article I keep seeing is that someone unplugs from it all for some time, for whatever reason, and, on returning, writes to tell everyone how great being unplugged is, apparently oblivious to the irony that modern communications make such insights available to us all. The insights sound good to me, too, so I flag the article as "evergreen" to write it up, and then, on re-reading it, I wonder why I was so impressed.

Why?

Now, I don't want to pick on anyone -- and my practice of queuing posts like this will probably keep this out of the limelight, anyway -- but this has just happened again. (I am writing this in late October in a hotel room.) I skimmed "3 Lessons About Disconnecting From Sailing Across the Atlantic for 1 Month: Offline Is the New Black" yesterday, and found myself impressed with how the author prepared himself to take an exciting vacation. And now, I find myself with a question.

First, for the insight:

My friend Arthur, a fellow crew member for this sailing trip, was on sabbatical, a great way to disconnect too. [He said,] "In terms of business, going offline felt like 'firing myself' for a month." And it was great!

That's true, and "mak[ing] yourself redundant" is necessary for such a break. It can also be quite instructive and lead to better ways of taking care of one's daily business. I think vacations are quite valuable in that regard on top of the rest they offer, but the raving about being unplugged was putting me off for some reason.

According to the author's friend, "When the internet is one tap/App away, it's tricky not to default to it!" That may be true, but is it really a problem with the new technology or with how we've adapted to it so far?

As someone who finds constant alerts annoying, I have, for quite some time, deliberately stayed away from my phone and email, checking them only at certain intervals just so I can put my thoughts together. My perspective may be odd in today's culture, but I think if people generally learned to say, "No," more often, and got more into the habit of asking, "Why am I doing this?" more often, lots of the vicious cycle of compulsively checking for communications would die down. In that way, rather than forgoing insights -- like this author's about the value of taking a step back once in a while -- by blaming our lack of focus on a machine and acting on it, we would do what I thought about on re-reading this: "Why not do some of these things all the time?"

By all means, if we find that something in our lives is wasting our efforts, we should find a way to do less of it, including by such means as delegating it or doing it only at times convenient to ourselves.

The Internet is a tool: If you don't use it purposefully, you will feel like it is using you.

-- CAV

Puffing Her Butts to Eternity

It has finally happened: a centenarian has credited cigarette smoking with her longevity in a media report.

Batuli Lamichhane says she's been puffing butts for the past 95 years, and she has an unusual technique to get her nicotine fix.

Instead of holding a cigarette with her index and middle finger, Lamichhane uses her entire right fist, which she then holds to her mouth to inhale.

Or maybe it's her way of "puffing butts" that did it. You never know with today's sloppy reporting.

What a breath of fresh air! It seems that every single time I have ever read about the venerable, there is something about what they credit for their great age. And if that something is in line with a behavior or attitude that our betters -- who went to journalism school -- want us to adopt, you'll never hear the end of it.

Smoking cigarettes -- at least those made of tobacco -- is definitely not on that short list of alleged virtues, as we are admonished by the first line of the piece: "A Nepalese woman has defied science by living to the ripe old age of 112 -- despite her 30-cigarette-a-day habit." It's as if the reader is going to dump everything he knows about smoking upon hearing about one lucky crackpot who treats that filthy habit like it's a bodily function.

To be fair, any sane person would say, "despite" here, but when I consider how much propaganda-disguised-as-news I've seen over the years, such an attitude would make sense. Someone who has spent years thinking of himself as a sort of guardian of the people will -- especially if he sees them as easy to manipulate -- perhaps forget that many of us have minds of our own.

Nothing will change about this kind of reporting unless our general culture changes, so expect the next vegan centenarian to be held up as a shining beacon to the Fountain of Youth. But perhaps, one day, we shall enjoy reports on what the venerable allege to have kept them alive for so long, that respectfully assume that the reader is capable of independent thought. Many of us -- dare I say most? -- are fully capable of deciding for ourselves whether a given centenarian is still making sense, or ever did.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected a typo. 

The Reductive Seduction of the New

Courtney Martin writes of an interesting cultural phenomenon at the Development Set blog on Medium. She calls it, "The Reductive Seduction of Other People's Problems." I'll set aside: (1) my major differences with the author on the morality of altruism, (2) the whole notion of "privilege," and (3) how an education that fails to challenge the young might breed this kind of thinking error. Instead, I'll focus on the broadly-applicable:

If you asked a 22-year-old American about gun control in this country, she would probably tell you that it's a lot more complicated than taking some workshops on social entrepreneurship and starting a non-profit. She might tell her counterpart from Kampala about the intractable nature of our legislative branch, the long history of gun culture in this country and its passionate defenders, the complexity of mental illness and its treatment. She would perhaps mention the added complication of agitating for change as an outsider.

But if you ask that same 22-year-old American about some of the most pressing problems in a place like Uganda's -- rural hunger or girl's secondary education or homophobia -- she might see them as solvable. Maybe even easily solvable.

I've begun to think about this trend as the reductive seduction of other people's problems. It's not malicious. In many ways, it's psychologically defensible; we don't know what we don't know.

This phenomenon isn't restricted to the young and idealistic, or to busybodies: It can happen to people of genuine goodwill, and exactly for the reasons Martin notes, be it ignorance of the "unknown unknowns" of the "new" problem or acclimation to (or even a feeling of being overwhelmed by) more familiar problems.

But Martin's altruistic persuasion causes her to miss something anyone can use: The same sort of thing can happen with regard to one's own problems. Who hasn't had a longstanding or difficult-to-address problem and felt the pull of an exciting, new project at the expense of working on it? There can be a sense of excitement, and an anticipation of personal efficacy that can come with embarkation on a new project, and which will make the new seem a refuge from the old. (This isn't always mistaken, but it can be.) But the new project, too, will bring disappointment if it isn't properly addressed, as becomes apparent from Martin's piece. This is not to say that a new project is always a bad idea: If attacked properly, the experience can help on in many other areas of life, including even the problem one ran from or put off before.

-- CAV

Name That Phenomenon

Writing about a trend in software development, Stavros Korokithakis describes an interesting phenomenon:

As with all fashionable practices, it starts out innocently enough, someone tries it, it works out very well for them, they present it in an eloquent way that outlines all the advantages of the new practice, and everyone is excited and eager to try it out. Soon, you have a deluge of articles saying how well it works, and how more people tried it with great results. What you don't hear, though, is the cases where it didn't work, simply because people aren't as motivated to write about their failures. [bold added]

I have seen things like this happen again and again, but am having trouble finding a name for the phenomenon, which seems like it should have one. Korokithakis notes that it leads in part to "cargo-culting" whatever it is others are saying is so successful, but he doesn't name the phenomenon. The best I have come up with is, "echo chamber." Maybe this is technically correct, in that opposing views are underrepresented, but there is connotation with that term that the process is deliberate, which doesn't apply here. Should any passers-by know the correct term for this, please leave a comment or drop me a line.

-- CAV

Early/Sick/Snowy Weekend

Editor's Note: I'm posting this week's "Weekend Reading" a day early due to illness. Since I caught this from my son, I expect to be better by around Tuesday. But I'm also in the bull's eye of that blizzard the news is making a big fuss over. I have a reserve post in the queue for Monday, but if you don't hear from me on Tuesday, and the Baltimore/DC area is especially paralyzed, you'll have an idea of why.

Weekend Reading

"At this point, you might form the impression that the refusal properly to identify and define ... the Islamist movement (let alone criticize it) is confined to leftist politicians and intellectuals." -- Elan Journo, in "Ignoring the Islamist Menace" at Times of Israel

"Whenever you come across a metaphor like wealth effect, I encourage you to ask what is actually happening." -- Keith Weiner, in "The Bull Market in Stocks May Be Done" at SNB & CHF

"[W]hen you hear somebody putting down ego, remember that they are actually attacking reality and self-preservation." -- Michael Hurd, in "The War Against the Self" at The Delaware Wave

"[C]ountless negative emotions and psychological problems can arise because of guilt -- specifically, unearned guilt." -- Michael Hurd, in "'It Must Be Nice' and Other Invitations to Feel Guilty" at The Delaware Coast Press

-- CAV

Updates

1-23-16: Corrected a typo and a formatting error.

Mother Nature Won't Wash Your Food

Via JunkScience.com, I learned of a recent New York Times op-ed about a recently discerned correlation between farmers' markets and certain types of food-borne illness. Steve Milloy wryly notes that, for once, a report on science in the popular media reminds us that "correlation does not necessarily imply causation."

Another point from the article interests me as well:

[E]ven if our results did identify a causal relationship between farmers markets and food-borne illness, it would not be possible to identify the precise mechanisms through which this happens, and it would be a critical mistake to conclude that the foods sold at farmers markets are themselves to blame. That is because most cases of illness are caused by consumers who undercook or fail to wash their food. Indeed, our results may suggest that many people erroneously believe that food bought at farmers markets needn't be washed because it is "natural." [bold added]

I wouldn't be surprised. Such a belief would be on a par with the chemophobia that drives so many into the arms of the environmentalist movement, which is ironic, given the simple, low-tech measures that are known to be effective against these very diseases. The "natural hygiene," if you will, that might explain the correlation also reminds me of an aside by Ayn Rand regarding said movement:

A cultural movement often produces caricatures of itself that emphasize its essence. The hippies are one such caricature. These ecological crusaders -- who would pollute any stream by stepping into it -- are the physical embodiments of the spirit of today's culture. Much more can be said about their motives, but for the moment observe the intention of the physical appearance they choose to assume. The purpose of flaunting deliberate ugliness and bodily dirt is to offend others (while simultaneously playing for pity) -- to defy, to affront, to bait those who hold values, any values. (from The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, p. 147)

Sanitation and cleanliness are life-promoting values. Being sure to obtain those values requires a modicum of understanding. "Man-made (e.g., chemicals) good, 'natural' (e.g., grown without pesticides) bad," would not be understanding, even if it happened to be true. I might find myself smirking the next time I encounter a hippie at a farmers' market.

-- CAV

A Busy Rancher Speaks

Reader C. Andrew has alerted me to a good piece, by rancher Keith Nantz, regarding the general situation ranchers face in terms of intrusive government, and that has provoked the latest standoff in Oregon. Like the author, I would describe myself as sympathetic with the position of the occupiers, but not with their tactics.

Just one of the things Nantz does very well is to summarize the intrusiveness and ineptitude of the federal government's management of much of the government-held land currently used for grazing:

Money isn't the only challenge. Raising cattle requires a lot of land, much more than most ranchers can afford to own outright. I lease about a third of the space I use from private owners. But most ranchers aren't so lucky. The federal government controls a huge amount of land in the west (more than 50 percent in some states, like Oregon), and many ranchers must lease that space to create a sustainable operation.

Utilizing federal land requires ranchers to follow an unfair, complicated and constantly evolving set of rules. For example, a federal government agency might decide that it wants to limit the number of days a rancher can graze their cattle to protect a certain endangered plant or animal species, or they might unilaterally decide that ranchers can't use as much water as they need because of a fight over water rights. Or they might take over land that once belonged to the state or private individuals, imposing an entirely new set of restrictions. [bold added, link in original omitted]

Although Nantz is silent on the question of whether the government ought to hold all this land or set these rules, he reminds me very much of a favorite quote of mine regarding the ineptitude of central planning with the following passage, especially when considered against the backdrop of the difficulties and long hours of his chosen occupation:

I saw this play out firsthand when the federal government considered listing the sage grouse, a chicken-like bird, as endangered. That regulation would have shrunk the amount of land where ranchers could graze cattle, putting many out of business and decimating the industry. To avoid this, ranchers like myself and local officials spent months meeting with federal officials looking for compromise. We ultimately found middle ground. But we already have an enormous workload in our daily lives. The pressure of having to drop everything to lobby against a rule (which happens more often than you'd think) is a tremendous burden.

Most of the time, those regulations are written by people with no agriculture experience, and little understanding of what it takes to produce our nation's food. The agencies that control these lands can add burdensome regulations at any time. Often, they will begin aggressively enforcing them before ranchers have a chance to adjust. [links omitted]

Again, Nantz is silent on whether the government has any business making all these rules, but it is clear that this situation threatens the livelihoods of many, as well as our food supply. (Does anyone doubt the same kind of thing is happening nationwide, and across industries?)

The only things I would add to Nantz's piece -- righteous indignation and a recommendation for a better tactic than armed confrontation with the government -- I addressed during Cliven Bundy's standoff a couple of years ago:

I think that the government's ownership of all this land is improper and that the [Bureau of Land Management] ought to be abolished, but the solution to that problem is not an anarchic revolt. There are ways to change the law, and they involve persuading others that the change ought to be made. I also agree wholeheartedly with the local, interviewed for the news article, that, "You just can't let this go by, or everybody is going to be like, 'If Bundy can break the law, why can't I?'" [link omitted]

Improper government increasingly brushes with making life impossible, but until significant numbers of people see that this is morally wrong, the situation will not change. (At best, they'll seek to do the impossible with "better people," for example.) The government's job is to protect us from the predations of criminals and foreign invaders, and to provide an objective means of settling honest disputes. Part of that job is to get out of the way, which, is made difficult or impossible by, say, pretending to be a land owner or dictating how people are to run their own businesses (beyond prohibiting harm to others). Government land management is poor, but this is to be expected from the fact that such a mission is contrary to its proper purpose.

-- CAV

How Would You React?

Writing at Dev-Human Pascal de Vink describes some of the things he learned by becoming the leader of his software development team. I was surprised that some of these were things he had to learn, but others were exactly the kinds of things that have blindsided me in leadership positions in the past, and for similar reasons. Doubtless, others, having different personal strengths and weaknesses from me, would have different reactions to these same items. And then there were things like the below:

Just a couple of days in on the job, people suddenly wanted to talk to me about sickness, their personal problems, vacation days, being stuck in their jobs, etc. A lot of these problems could be met with a healthy dose of common sense, but the stories I sometimes heard really stuck with me. I was really unprepared for any of these stories. I started to make the problems my own and instead of taking proper distance, I let my empathy get the upper hand. Being the person that I am, I started to process these problems unconsciously during my sleep and dreamed about them. This even led to a mild form of sleep deprivation at which point I had to actively take distance. Although I really felt like helping people with their problems, I couldn't be the superhero they needed. All I could be was a listening ear and perhaps make it a little easier for them to be a part of the team. This was a harsh lesson for me though.

I haven't had this kind of experience, but I guess that I'd probably react to a large number of such problems by maintaining or establishing emotional distance. Where this head-up helps me is as a warning not to allow myself to become jaded, and to try to make it clear that I am sympathetic. (I have been told that I sometimes strike people as stand-offish.) Considering the list further, it occurs to me that almost all of the points are the kind of things that it is worth pondering how one might react, and what one might need to do to improve, or what one might need to watch out for. I am grateful to de Vink for both the scouting report and his example of introspection. I am sure that many will find it useful.

-- CAV

FDA Distorts Generic Drug Market

Pharmaceuticals blogger Derek Lowe recently pointed to an interesting article detailing how an FDA drug approval process is causing generic drugs to increase in price, sometimes dramatically. Lowe quotes from the Journal of the American Medical Association:

In a competitive market, when a price is too high, another manufacturer could begin to produce and offer the product at a lower price. However, because there is an approval process to ensure bioequivalence and quality manufacturing, this self-correction can happen only at the speed of FDA review. FDA is now working on reducing a massive backlog of thousands of generic applications from prior to 2013. The agency's fiscal year 2014 performance report noted that none of the approximately 1500 applications for generic drugs submitted in fiscal year 2014 had been approved by the end of that year. Even with greater resources as a result of the Generic Drug User Fee Act, FDA will still take years to review these applications. [Lowe's emphasis]

Those of you who frequent this neck of the woods will doubtless be familiar with the FDA's practice of denying patients access to experimental drugs even when they might represent a last hope. But one clearly needn't be terminally ill or in need of cutting-edge medication to be concerned about this agency's interference with the economy. Lowe mentions a past drug shortage (and I remember another) that could quite feasibly have been at least partially the result of this problem.

-- CAV

1-16-16 Hodgepodge

David Bowie, RIP

Scott Holleran has written a good piece on David Bowie's passing.

The second week of the new year begins with shocking news that rock's renaissance man, David Bowie, died of cancer. Mr. Bowie was 69.

Whatever his artistic merits or legacy, and his music and movies are certainly indelible in my life, Mr. Bowie's body of work is astonishing for a few reasons. Though he reportedly struggled with addiction, mental illness and serious conflicts -- he apparently favored the work of his post-addiction Berlin period (Low, "Heroes", Lodger) -- David Bowie was singularly dedicated to making music.

Rock is not the first thing I seek out when I am in the mood to listen to music, so the enormity of Bowie's death to so many people was lost on me at first. But I soon after learned that he wrote his newly-released album knowing full well that he was dying, which I had to respect. And then, a tribute to Bowie on a jazz station helped me realize his great influence, in part by causing me to realize that several songs I vaguely remembered from various times of my life were his. The commentary on the music was top-notch, too, and allowed me to fully appreciate a couple for the first time.

Weekend Reading

"[D]on't pretend that refusing to dispose of things you don't need will somehow help somebody else." -- Michael Hurd, in "Post-Christmas Letdown?" at The Delaware Wave

"Perhaps you have watched what Uber has done to the taxi business?" -- Keith Weiner, in "Open Letter to the Banks" at SNB & CHF

"The best way to deal with a bully is to ignore him, thus giving him psychological invisibility and invalidation." -- Michael Hurd, in "Bullies in School and Around the World" at The Delaware Coast Press

"The truth is Apple is powered mostly by coal and other fossil fuels, but rather than tell Americans the truth -- that their amazing technological achievements are made possible by fossil fuels -- they are cooking their energy books in order to dupe us into believing that we can have innovators like Apple without the cheap, plentiful, reliable energy provided by the fossil fuel industry." -- Alex Epstein, in "The Truth About Apple's '100% Renewable' Energy Usage" at Forbes

"We need to give our politicians an ultimatum: seize America's energy opportunity -- or lose our vote." -- Alex Epstein, in "When Will the Presidential Candidates Debate America's Energy Opportunity?" at Forbes [link in original]

In More Detail

Alex Epstein's takedown of Apple -- a company whose politically correct snootiness has always annoyed me -- is both humorous and informative. I enjoyed the following analogy:

Think of it this way. Imagine you and 9 other people are traveling on a yacht that has both sails and a diesel engine. For the 10% of the time that the wind was blowing perfectly in the right direction, the yacht would use the sails. For the other 90% of the time, the diesel engine would do the heavy lifting. Now imagine that, after the trip, you want to claim that you traveled the entire distance by sail, so you pay every other passenger $10 for the right to claim that you used their 10% sail time. You get to claim that you sailed 100% of time, while the other passengers have to say they used the "dirty" diesel engine for their entire trip. That's basically what Apple is doing with their energy accounting sleight of hand. [link dropped]

Of course, the silver lining here is that, thanks to its decision to pander to leftists, customers who now know better will have a good "in" with fellow Mac enthusiasts to do a bit of debunkery.

Heh! Atlas Shivered

Stop by McSweeney's for a few more "Classic Book Titles Adjusted for Winter."

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected spelling of "Holleran." 

Friday Four

1. Little Man's efforts to avoid diaper changes have been a great source of amusement over the past year. This week, he made an appearance after emerging from his new "office." Yes. I would need to change him. Yes. He had figured out the doorknob. And yes, I would need to hunt him down. Or so I thought...

But then I heard a pair of shutter doors close on one end of the kitchen, where I was at the time. Not long after, the second door shut, and I could tell that Little Man was standing guard there.

So I had the satisfaction of leaving through the unguarded end of my now jail cell to ambush him. But yes, my son tried to trap me in the kitchen to avoid a diaper change.

2. The change of scenery that came with our move has come with the bonus of a new set of local beers to try. One brewery I now know about, Philadelphia's Yards, has an interesting series of "Ales of the Revolution," based on recipes from around that time. I like the Tavern Porter, which is based on a recipe from George Washington:

Detailed in a letter from the General to his officers during the war, Washington's recipe employed molasses to aid fermentation and give rich caramel notes to this robust, roasty ale. The recipe reflected his admiration for Philadelphia-style porters, especially those brewed by Robert Hare (whose original brewery stood just blocks from where ours is now). Our Tavern Porter, inspired by Washington's, is dark, smooth, and complex with just a hint of dried fruit in the finish.

I have also tried Poor Richard's Tavern Spruce. Only Thomas Jefferson's Tavern Ale is left to go.

3. Not to disparage new technological marvels, but have you ever found something that does exactly what you need it to? This has happened with a group of Apple Newton ethusiasts, who are still using them:

Searching through your Newton is far easier than searching through a Moleskine. And when you are done no transcription necessary. Just print, email, fax, or sync your notes back to your computer. Show your client what you captured from the meeting before leaving the room. A Newton allows you to preserve the natural habits of note taking, without the adapting to technology, or the transcription required for traditional handwriting.

Reading the rest of this, I can see why the Newton has its fans.

"Too bad they don't make them anymore," I thought. But then it occurred to me that perhaps someone has ported Newton functionality onto new technology. That appears to be the case. I don't currently have a need for such capabilities, but I could soon. If that happens, or curiosity gets the better of me down the road, perhaps I'll try that.

4. Three cheers for sleep schedule mismatches :

[H]aving different sleep schedules can benefit relationships, [Till Roenneberg] said. Those with babies can time-shift caring for the children, and others can schedule time to themselves. "Especially in marriages that have gone on for a long time, I hear complaints about not being able to meet with the girlfriends enough or go drinking with the guys," he said. "If both parties accept their differences, the late type can go out with the boys at night, and the early type can meet her girlfriends in the morning."

My wife is a night owl and I keep early hours. (But if being cheerful around other people upon waking is a qualification for the "morning person" label, don't apply it to me!) For a while, whenever we were both home during Little Man's infancy, I handled his bed time (which was as much as two hours earlier than Pumpkin's), and she took her bedtime.

-- CAV

The Quarter-Hour Blitz

Over at The Unclutterer, David Caolo elaborates on a trick I also use to tackle (or at least make headway in) tasks that are otherwise easy or tempting to put off:

[I]t's quite easy to work for 15 minutes without getting distracted by something else. Second, I've been amazed at how many tasks only take about 15 minutes. I've been able to completely organize my desk reducing visual clutter, get laundry folded and put away, organize the kids' stuff for the next day, and so on.

I also found that 15 minutes is perfect for doing one of my favorite things: a mind dump. I take a pen, a piece of paper, and the time to simply write down everything that's on my mind -- it is so liberating and productive. Even an overwhelming list of to-do items can seem manageable when you've got it written down. There's a sense of being "on top of it" that comes with performing a mind dump, all in 15 minutes.

I arrived at a quarter-hour a little bit differently than Caolo did. It just struck me one day, near the end of the day, as an amount of time small enough to provide a sort of break from a more intense task, and yet big enough to get something done. Caolo's piece demonstrates the latter quite well.

-- CAV

Coming Soon: Big Win for Free Speech?

In what could turn out to be very good news for freedom of speech, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday in a case brought by a group of California teachers who are contesting a requirement that they subsidize public sector unions as a condition of employment:

The court's five Republican appointees strongly suggested they believe it is unconstitutional to force an objecting teacher from Orange County and millions like her to pay for union activities they do not support. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy described the mandatory fees as "coerced speech" that violates the 1st Amendment.

George Will recently commented on the case, fleshing out its historical background and significance, noting that :

Interestingly, the 10 California teachers do not stress that they are conscripted into funding such direct, overt and explicit political activity. Rather, they make the more lethal (to public-sector unions' power) argument that even the use of their fees to fund core union activities such as collective bargaining constitutes a "multihundred-million-dollar regime of compelled" -- hence unconstitutional -- "political speech."

Will was careful to note that this would be a major reversal by the court, and I duly temper my optimism. That said, I would be ecstatic over a win for freedom of speech, particularly of such magnitude, in this day and age.

-- CAV

Watch for p in the Kool-Aid!

One "Johannes" Bohannon describes how he, "fooled millions into thinking chocolate helps weight loss". He fibs only a little, helped as he was by an army of scientifically illiterate -- and incredibly lazy -- "journalists".

I am Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D. Well, actually my name is John, and I'm a journalist. I do have a Ph.D., but it's in the molecular biology of bacteria, not humans. The Institute of Diet and Health? That's nothing more than a website.

Other than those fibs, the study was 100 percent authentic. My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.

Among his tricks was the misuse of statistics:

... We didn't know exactly what would pan out -- the headline could have been that chocolate improves sleep or lowers blood pressure -- but we knew our chances of getting at least one "statistically significant" result were pretty good.

Whenever you hear that phrase, it means that some result has a small p value. The letter p seems to have totemic power, but it's just a way to gauge the signal-to-noise ratio in the data. The conventional cutoff for being "significant" is 0.05, which means that there is just a 5 percent chance that your result is a random fluctuation. The more lottery tickets, the better your chances of getting a false positive. So how many tickets do you need to buy?

...

With our 18 measurements, we had a 60% chance of getting some "significant" result with p < 0.05. (The measurements weren't independent, so it could be even higher.) The game was stacked in our favor.

It's called p-hacking...

There has been quite a bit of soul-searching in the scientific community regarding statistical methods lately. I am not sure if Bohannon's work helped lead to -- or was inspired by -- this, but I am glad to see that there is at least some backlash against the misuse of statistics in reporting about science.

-- CAV

The Left's Linguistic Veil

M.G. Oprea notices a trend among leftist politicians and their media lapdogs:

During the Democratic presidential candidate debate on November 14, some on Twitter commented on the pronunciation of the word "Muslim" by Hillary Clinton and the other candidates. Rather than the common Americanized pronunciation of "Muz-lim," they opted to pronounce it "Mooss-lim," with a long "o" sound in the first syllable, and an "s" sound rather than a "z".

Similarly, the Left tends to pronounce the word "Islam" not as "IZ-lahm," like the majority of Americans, but rather "Iss-LAM," with the "s" sound replacing the "z" and with the emphasis on the second syllable rather than the first...

There is an audio sample, from one of the Democratic debates posted within the article.

I see this as a continuation of a trend that has been going on for at least a couple of decades, including the changing of the spelling of the first of these words, which I have always refused to go along with: I spell it "Moslem." Likewise, I have noticed that journalists frequently are more than happy to use the adopted names of Moslem converts hostile to the West (Why does this feel redundant?) or even the noms de guerre of assorted terrorists. (Why not learn the real name and use it?). I refuse to do those, too, unless I risk being misunderstood. Then I might use the nom de guerre once for context, maybe with an "AKA" or some other note that this is an alias. When the name change is basically a declaration of hostility, I refuse to go along. Using a name whose purpose is to make the very act of using it an act of deference is, under such circumstances, wrong: I don't willingly say things I do not mean.

Oprea basically hits the nail on the head in terms of what these leftists are doing, and she ends with a matter that needs some serious thought:

If the Left is using the pronunciation of "Muslim" and "Islam" as a marker of where they fall politically, what happens to the rest of us who are pronouncing it with an American accent? For now, there is nothing notable about pronouncing these words as "muz-lim" or "IZ-lahm," but one day there might be. One can't help but wonder whether these words will truly become a kind of political Shibboleth. Pretty soon we might be outing ourselves as so-called Islamaphobes, simply for pronouncing a word the wrong way.

Is this a bad thing? No. Will there be bad consequences for those of us who do this? Perhaps, but it will be less likely if we stand up for what we are doing now. This article will help, given that it notes the following outrage:

They don't do this with other foreign words or place-names. No, the Left reserves this little linguistic condescension for its favorite liberal minority causes. You didn't hear anyone pronouncing "Paris" as "Pah-ree," as the French do, after the terror attacks in November in order to show solidarity. There wasn't any effort to sound culturally authentic when discussing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But talk about Islam, and their tune -- and pronunciation -- changes.

Pointing this out, say, in conversation, will almost certainly not change a leftist. But it might provoke thought for any reasonable person who isn't as good at noticing such things. And that's what we need to start happening before people generally become afraid to "offend" those Moslems who are merely waiting to pick a fight, let alone to ask their own questions or to speak their own minds regarding the role that Islam plays in fomenting terrorism.

-- CAV

1-9-16 Hodgepodge

Giving the Cube Farm Some Love

With the slow rise of telecommuting, many people, myself included, dream of the flexibility of remote work. But such an arrangement requires a strong sense of discipline and, as Forrest Brazeal indicates, it might come with some costs that many aren't thinking about:

This seems like a good place to bring up the larger issue of distractions. Cube farms are notorious for being noisy, exposed to interruptions and full of "prairie dogs" -- people who pop their heads above the cubicle walls to engage in loud conversations. Reducing these distractions is a primary goal for many people who work remotely.

I struggle with office distractions as much as anybody, but I feel like working from home isn't really a solution for me. For one thing, there are plenty of other distractions at home. (My refrigerator calls more loudly to me than a whole office full of prairie dogs.) For another thing, as technology has improved, many of the traditional workplace diversions like unnecessary meetings and impromptu conversations have crept right into remote employees' schedules. In fact, several of my work-from-home colleagues are routinely forced to sign out of the team's instant messaging system during the day to cut down on interruptions. And that brings us right back to the "passive face time" dilemma, because if you're not in the office and nobody can get ahold of you, you have to be concerned about appearing to be off work entirely. [bold added]

Brazeal follows up his insightful post with another that addresses feedback from readers who strongly favor working from home.

Weekend Reading

"While whoever ran that red light felt like he was in control, he was actually undermining his ability to cope in the real world." -- Michael Hurd, in "Running Red Lights: A Metaphor for Life" at The Delaware Wave

"Each of these speakers is doing more to help the world move to the gold standard than all the sound money conferences in the world." -- Keith Weiner, in "Monetary Innovation Is the Path Forward" at SNB & CHF

"Cleaning your house is a tried-and-true way to gain a sense of control over your life in a visible and immediate way." -- Michael Hurd, in "Windex & Pledge vs. Prozac & Xanax ... It's a Thought" at The Delaware Coast Press

I Could Have Used This When I Was Younger

Dave Delaney, on applying some great customer relations advice from his boss:

When I returned to the office, I was laughing out loud. The jackass didn't get me in a bad mood, far from it. I was in an even better mood than before dealing with him, because I won. He couldn't have complained about me being too nice!

I think the best merit of this advice is that it depersonalizes such encounters by preemptively setting a psychological boundary. The "winning", which can be nice extra, come from the fact that people who do things like this are deprived of psychological visibility, which is what they are seeking.

-- CAV

Friday Four

1. Some time ago, the subject of Hurricane Katrina came up and my wife, who is from New Orleans, mentioned that the teddy bear she had as a child was ruined when the storm damaged her parents' roof and drenched part of her old bedroom. (And then, it got to sit there and mold for weeks while we were kept away.) Pumpkin immediately offered her her own teddy bear.

Lately, Little Man has had the double joy of seeing Christmas lights and showing off a new word. Whenever he sees them, he points to them and excitedly shouts his word for "Christmas," which comes out sounding like, "Cruh!" (For some time before the holiday season, he has occasionally led me to other rooms in the house to point to things and identify them.)

2. Here's one fans of Wile E. Coyote might enjoy: A hobbyist details safety lessons he has picked up over the years of running his own chemical and electrical experiments, including the following:

Turns out that ethanol burns really well. Well enough, for example, that its used as racecar fuel. When I lit the towel the ethanol in the flask exploded, covering my left arm and left leg with flaming alcohol. Surprised, I dropped the flask on the floor, lighting it on fire.

I realized I wasn't in any immediate danger, remembering my previous hand lighting trick. I quickly patted myself out and stomped out the floor. Other than a few singed hairs on my arm, neither myself, my clothes, nor the floor received any damage.

The post also led me indirectly to the next item, from the pharma blog of Derek Lowe...

3. Derek Lowe's drug discovery blog, In the Pipeline could engross me for days. Over the holiday, I allowed myself some time to explore his humorous "Things I Won't Work With" series, which includes a post about a very, very long and equally dangerous chemical synthesis:

So you're looking at eight months of this, handling the damn stuff every Monday morning. The authors describe this procedure as "slightly less hazardous" than the other one, and I guess you have to take what you can get in this area. But the procedure goes on to say, rather unexpectedly, that "longer reaction times lead to partial decomposition", so don't go thinking that you're going to get a higher yield on the one-year anniversary or anything. What way to spend the seasons! What might occur to a person, after months of azidomercurial grunt work ... surely some alternate career would have been better? Farm hand at the wild animal ranch, maybe? Get up when the chickens would be getting up, if they'd made it ... head out to the barn and slop the wolverines ... hmm, forsythia's starting to bloom, time to neuter the hyenas soon...

No, no such luck. The hyenas will have to remain unspayed, because it's time to add fresh azide to the horrible mercury prep. Only three more months to go! Sheesh!

The whole blog is quite a find, and another topic I think I'll enjoy is "Snake Oil."

(Oh, and I see that Geek Press refers to the same blogger on 3-D drug printing hype.)

4. Some users of the Apple Watch are using their noses to control them:

Morgan Hocking, a programmer from New York City, said the Apple Watch is the second Apple device that he controls with his nose. Mr. Hocking said he wears surgical gloves when tinkering with his motorcycle but keeps the instruction manuals on his iPhone. To access the manuals when wearing gloves, Mr. Hocking programmed his nose into the TouchID fingerprint sensor on his iPhone. Now, he unlocks the phone by resting his nose on the home button, then scrolls through the manuals using his beak.

Hocking is something of a pioneer: A magazine for fans of the Apple Watch found that just less than half did this. But about another third wanted to try, upon being asked the question.

-- CAV

Agnotology

Recently, Michael Hurd put out a list of "Eleven Go-To Words of the Hostile Leftist." He may soon need to add a twelfth: "Agnotist."

There is an article in the BBC about a man who studies "the spread of ignorance," such as the short-sighted efforts of tobacco companies to sow doubt about tobacco causing cancer. That's fair enough, and can be an interesting subject of study, but the article almost predictably uses "climate change deniers" as an example, hence my speculation.

Interestingly, the article demonstrates exactly why it could be easy to sow doubt in the minds of of the general populace and why such a term could become popular among those not interested in arguing for a point so much as shouting down any and all opposition, regardless of merit. Consider the following, which is mostly taken verbatim from Robert Proctor, the subject of the piece:

"We live in a world of radical ignorance, and the marvel is that any kind of truth cuts through the noise," says Proctor. Even though knowledge is 'accessible', it does not mean it is accessed, he warns.

"Although for most things this is trivial -- like, for example, the boiling point of mercury -- but for bigger questions of political and philosophical import, the knowledge people have often comes from faith or tradition, or propaganda, more than anywhere else." [bold added]

Call me an agnotist if you must, but if something someone calls "knowledge" comes from faith (i.e., blind acceptance), that person does not actually possess knowledge. The same is true for any other undigested notion anyone might have, regardless of the soundness of its source. The problem isn't so much that it is easy to spread ignorance so much as that there is so much of it out there masquerading as knowledge. (And, now that I think of it, knowing that one is ignorant is far preferable to what too many people actually are, which is "not even wrong.")

To be fair, Proctor does note that better scientific literacy might help, although he doesn't go far enough on that score:

Consider climate change as an example. "The fight is not just over the existence of climate change, it's over whether God has created the Earth for us to exploit, whether government has the right to regulate industry, whether environmentalists should be empowered, and so on. It's not just about the facts, it's about what is imagined to flow from and into such facts," says Proctor. [bold added]

So says a proponent of "scientific literacy" who evidently thinks there is no similarly objective basis in fact for what we ought to do with the information we have. That's too bad, because it permits those who accept the non-sequitur that massive government regulation is "the" answer to the supposed global warming crisis, to paint all dissenters as opponents of knowledge regardless of whether they agree, disagree, or don't know that global warming is a problem.

The attractiveness of labeling opponents as enemies of truth won't end there. Michelle Malkin, for example, recently detailed collusion between leftist politicians and media in the form of planted "town hall" questions. The spread of ignorance need not take the form of unwarranted uncertainty; it can also take the form of a preemption of debate. Thus the deliberate misuse of a term like "agnotology" (which has the added bonus of sounding erudite) sounds like it is right up the left's alley to me: When one has snake oil to sell, why not paint people honestly seeking the truth with the same brush as those who wish to obscure it? Such a charge can distract from other malfeasance while also discrediting people who might actually deserve to be heard.

Honest doubt, far from being the enemy of knowledge, is a prerequisite. This is because the admission to oneself that one does not know something will motivate a search for the correct answer if and when a self-interested person with integrity sees a need to rectify the deficiency. Until then, it will prevent such a person from spreading falsehoods.

-- CAV

When the Penalty Looks Good

The New York Times reports that many of the suckers healthy people who were supposed to prop up ObamaCare are crunching the numbers and choosing to remain without what leftists call health insurance:

[P]lenty of healthy holdouts remain, and their resistance helps explain why insurers are worried about the financial viability of the exchanges over time. They say they sorely need more healthy customers to balance out the costs of covering the sicker, older people who have flocked to exchange plans.

...

Many holdouts have made their decisions after meticulously comparing the cost of insurance premiums and deductibles with paying for doctor appointments, lab tests and prescriptions themselves. For some healthy people, the combined cost of premiums and deductibles, which can exceed $10,000, makes the penalty seem a better deal.

For 2016 and beyond, the penalty will be $695 per adult or 2.5 percent of household income, up from $325 per adult or 2 percent of household income last year.

Interestingly, few of the people in the story seem to have heard about some of the better options (outside the federally-run "insurance" scheme), such as concierge medicine, and the story makes it sound like they are taking a gamble. (And I imagine many are: The government running everything has a way of shriveling imaginations and causing people to assume that other alternatives aren't available.)

We ought to do something about this sad state of affairs: We should scrap the ACA and make actual health insurance legal again.

-- CAV

Dealing With Nice-Problems-to-Have

Some time ago, before I used a combination of finding a new web browser, switching to a new text editor, and scripting to take the pain out of writing, I wrote:

Were there an award for stupendous achievements in wasting computational power, it would surely go to some web scripter somewhere: I have six gigabytes of RAM, a 2.4 GHz, dual-core processor, yada-yada, and some page I want to load for the sake of reading a short article freezes it up? ... This is astonishingly bad and amazingly common. I run Linux and, if I caught the problem in time, [I] would usually kill my browser from the command line, but even then, I'd generally lose some work. Something had to give.

I have since learned that this problem is due to the methods used to advertise on web pages, but I ran across an explanation of the problem that is both detailed and amusing, by Maciej Cegłowski. He titles his talk, "The Website Obesity Crisis." I recommend the article for a couple of reasons. One is in the vein of making a phenomenon less annoying by showing the reasons for it/lampooning it, both of which this talk does. For example, in discussing the current fad of tablet interfaces for everything, Cegłowski notes:

After you decide where to go, the site takes you to this calendar widget.

It has equally enormous buttons, but the only piece of information I'm interested in -- the price of the flight on each day -- appears in microscopic type under the date.

My gripe with this design aesthetic is the loss of information density. I'm an adult human being sitting at a large display, with a mouse and keyboard. I deserve better.

Not every interface should be designed for someone surfing the web from their toilet.

The other is because I disagree with the proposed solution of "onerous regulation" (his words!) since (1) that isn't the proper purpose of government, and (2) I think many of the more annoying aspects of modern computing are manifestations of cultural issues, anyway. (And the solution to cultural problems is getting the word out and persuading people to change their thinking, rather than sic the government on a few scapegoats.) For example, another commentator explains why he won't bother with any product that gratuitously intertwines itself with "the Cloud":

Software as a service to many people is the way to convert what used to be licensed software into a repeat revenue stream and in principle there is nothing wrong with that if done properly (Adobe almost gets it right). But if the internet connection is down and your software no longer works, if the data you painstakingly built up over years goes missing because a service dies or because your account gets terminated for no apparent reason and without any recourse you might come to the same conclusion that I came to: if it requires an online service and is not actually an online product I can do just fine without it.

If more people adopted a similar attitude, boycotts of/complaints about products with schizophrenic cloud "integration" and of sites that waste bucketloads of users' time would drive proprietors towards better business models. (On a hopeful note, I see that Google is offering a way to subscribe to see fewer ads.) Part of the problem is that many people simply do not know better (either technology usually helps lousy sites get away with bloat and poor design (as Cegłowski points out) or makes it easy for people to escape learning anything about computation (perhaps the other edge of the sword of division of labor)). That said, both of these commentators speak of problems that have grown beyond technology and the technological ignorance of the general populace, as their articles, which are easily understood by laymen attest.

-- CAV

We Need a CHOICE Come November

Ramesh Ponnuru of Bloomberg View writes the most intelligent thing I've seen in some time regarding the premise that Republicans need to perform better among Hispanic voters.

... Instead of thinking about voters in racial categories at all, Republicans should probably make the case that their agenda would turn out better than the Democratic one for most people -- and make that case to voters of all races. The question Republicans should be asking themselves is not how to do better with this or that racial group, but how to make that basic case.

The only thing I could add to this regards said agenda: The GOP must differentiate itself from the Democrats. Ponnuru started his analysis with Mitt Romney, whose defeat came as no shock to me, given how little difference there was in the policies espoused by the two candidates.

Thomas Sowell has argued in a similar vein on the subject of Republican outreach to non-white voters, "Why should anyone who wants racially earmarked goodies vote for Republicans, when the Democrats already have a track record of delivering such goodies?" This reminds me of something I said (in the earlier link) that bears repeating:

The way to defeat an opponent is to say something to the effect of, "My opponent is wrong. I am better, and this is why." Follow this with actual arguments.

It is a shame that, four years later, anyone is having to say this at all.

-- CAV

1-2-16 Weekend Reading

"[T]he essential similarity in ideology between Saudi Arabia and ISIS is left unseen, and it is purposely disregarded when inconvenient facts -- like a death sentence for a poet -- unavoidably intrude. " -- Elan Journo, in "The Other Islamic State, Our Ally " at The Times of Israel

"[L]etting go of what you can't control leaves room for achievements in areas over which you do have control." -- Michael Hurd, in "Getting Angry Over What You Cannot Control" at The Delaware Wave

"Believe it or not, we have the power to choose how much holiday anxiety we endure." -- Michael Hurd, in "Holidays: Duty or Choice?" at The Delaware Coast Press

"[D]espite popular misconception, the ... paper of the central bank is not money, but credit." -- Keith Weiner, in "What Is Money Printing?" at SNB & CHF

"Avoid that paralysis by setting goals you can keep! Here are nine tips ..." -- Michael Hurd, in "The Thing About New Year's Resolutions" at The Delaware Wave

"[H]ow can we make a resolution work?" -- Michael Hurd, in "Fail-Safe Your New Year's Resolutions" at The Delaware Coast Press

-- CAV

Friday Four

On Friday, I usually post a list of four interesting or positive things. It seems appropriate to start the new year this way. Happy New Year!

1. Yesterday, we took Little Man and Pumpkin to an indoor playground made up of an assortment of inflatable attractions, like slides, bounce houses, and jump courses. That day, the playground was holding a New Year's party with a balloon drop, which Little Man loved. Towards the end, Little Man had done everything and had no use for dancing to blaring noise, so he went off to a small bounce house that was filled with balloons. He found an air leak and enjoyed conducting little physics experiments with the leak and the balloons.

And, while I'm talking about Little Man, who is inching closer to potty training, I can't resist noting that he has become more creative -- and yet, strangely less effective -- about avoiding diaper changes lately.

For the past few weeks, I know he's due for a diaper change when ... I hear him asking for help shortly after the door to the play room slams shut. He's made that room into the office where he does his business, but hasn't figured out doorknobs, yet.

In other toddler news, Pumpkin got her first bike, with training wheels, this Christmas and actually got to enjoy it since it was about seventy out.

2. Via HBL, I learned of an upbeat end-of-year review by one of my favorite columnists, John Stossel. Among other things, he notes:

Sure, income inequality has grown -- but so what? The rich don’t get richer at the expense of the poor. Poor people’s income grew 48 percent over the past 35 years. Bernie Sanders says that “the middle class is disappearing!” But that’s mainly because many middle-class people moved into the upper class. Middle class incomes grew 40 percent over the past 30 years.[italics in original, bold added]

Also worth noting is that today, even the poor have access to goods and technology that even the wealthiest and most powerful in the past could only dream of.

3. The front yard of our new house has what I now regard my favorite -- read: maintenance-free -- natural ground cover: moss. The back yard and the woods behind us have ample shares of it, as well. And so it is that an illustrated article on moss viewing first caught my eye:

Even in Japanese cities, seemingly far away from the natural abundance of Yakushima or Yatsugatake, you’ll often see moss growing on the asphalt along urban backstreets. And if you look at it closely, you’ll see that even this curbside moss comes in more than one variety. In a spot that, at a glance, may seem extremely inhospitable to any kind of plant life, close examination reveals more species of moss than you can count, growing greenly over small cracks by the sidewalk.

The pictures are beautiful, and I can't wait to get a magnifying glass out and start looking around for myself.

Both kids have been entertaining themselves with magnifying glasses lately, too, so maybe they'll enjoy this a little bit, too.

Do visit the article and enjoy the images.

4. Scott Berkun has come out with a list of his best posts of the year, one of which I think writers would do well to review. Here's a point from his "28 (Better) Things No One Tells You About Publishing":

Your reasons for writing must transcend fame and wealth as neither are likely from writing alone. Most books you read are written by writers who pay their rent through other means. If you want fame and wealth from writing be committed to the long term. This takes the pressure off each book, and you’ll be open to learning instead of foolishly trying to hit a grand slam on your first try. [bold in original]

He also notes in a couple of places that it can be quite easy to start selling a book.

-- CAV