Will have broken the Water Pitcher

Following up my Shelby post: Dave Weigel has a post, “Do Republicans Really Need Hispanic Votes? Nope!” He links to part two of a three-part analysis by Sean Trende (part 1, part 3). Trende proposes that even if Dems get 90% black, Hispanic and Asian, this is likely to depress the Dem share of the white vote to the point where Reps remain competitive for decades. He suggests that, electorally, the ‘Arizona model’ – i.e. apparently go out of your way to piss off Hispanics (he doesn’t put it that way) – is about as likely to work as the ‘Full Rubio’.

I have no opinion about Sean Trende and I don’t usually rely on “Real Clear Politics” for my wonky analysis, to say the least. But, whatever the merits or demerits of his specific deployments of data, this does strike me as noteworthy. It’s the first time I’ve seen a ‘wonky’ Republican suggest maybe extreme racial polarization should be on the table as a strategic option. It’s so obvious it would be a bad thing for the whole country that I find it dismaying.

Two weeks ago I noted that G.K. Chesterton had written a novel that is, as it were, the limit case of sf. A futuristic exploration of the hypothesis that nothing much will change, scientifically. I just noticed that, in What’s Wrong With The World (1910), he offers a bit of theory on the subject.

The modern man no longer presents the memoirs of his great grandfather; but is engaged in writing a detailed and authoritative biography of his great-grandson. Instead of trembling before the specters of the dead, we shudder abjectly under the shadow of the babe unborn. This spirit is apparent everywhere, even to the creation of a form of futurist romance. Sir Walter Scott stands at the dawn of the nineteenth century for the novel of the past; Mr. H. G. Wells stands at the dawn of the twentieth century for the novel of the future. The old story, we know, was supposed to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening two horsemen might have been seen—.” The new story has to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening two aviators will be seen—.” The movement is not without its elements of charm; there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so many people fighting over again the fights that have not yet happened; of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow morning. A man in advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in advance of the age is really rather odd.

It is amusing to imagine all sf novels written in the future tense, as if their authors were squabbling prophets.

The _Financial Times_ has an “excellent article”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0abb8eca-b45b-11de-bec8-00144feab49a.html summarizing the institutional issues facing the EU if, as expected, Lisbon passes. Read it for the substance. But enjoy it for this suggestion, which I haven’t seen floated before:

However, as became clear this week, many smaller EU member states do not want a high-profile president. Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands circulated a document contending that the first president should be “someone who has demonstrated his commitment to the European project and has developed a global vision of the Union’s policies, who listens to the member states and the institutions, and who is sensitive to the institutional balance that corresponds to the Community method”. Translated from Eurospeak, this means a person with a lower profile than Mr Blair and from a country more deeply committed than the UK to the European ideal. Across Europe there is a recognition that the EU would do its image a favour if it awarded the job to a woman, one possibility being Mary Robinson, Ireland’s former head of state.

Depending on how Vaclav Klaus’s “brinkmanship”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f5193342-b4eb-11de-8b17-00144feab49a.html plays out, the new president will have to be chosen pretty soon. It would be very, _very_ sad to see wingnuts’ heads exploding again in just a few weeks time …

“Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2008/10/surveying_the_wreckage.html has a tale of terror.

Recently, the system has been a bi[t] weird, with very slow file access times (windows explorer would take forever to open, ditto with file dialogs in programs), and I also was worried that my copy of Firefox was compromised … First, I decided to take the plunge and migrate to a larger disk, and ordered up a “green” WD7500AACS. (Three quarters of a terrabyte! Whoohoo!) About three or four weeks ago, I copied my files on to it using using XXClone, a nice piece of freeware that basically makes an entire copy of Drive A (including operating system) onto drive B. … But things were still slow sometimes. I decided it was time to kill the trojan, or whatever, that seemed to be infesting my system. I also decided that I should go back to hardware RAID, since I don’t back up my files enough. … When I got back, the files were there, and I ran the first one. It duly called for a reboot and I did it — only to get error messages and a lockup. …at which point the disk wouldn’t boot any more. But no problem, I had my backup, the 160GB version. … But now that the two disks are in the system, with the 750Gb disk on the second pair of SATA ports, which are RAID capable (but were properly set for ordinary non-RAID use in the bios), the Windows system on the first 160GB disk decided they needed to be reactivated. … But the 750GB version worked. So that’s good. But now I’m nervous, things seemed jinxed. So I order up a second WD7500AACS, and plan to RAID mirror them. … Now, time extra backups. I’m a little nervous about hardware raid, in part because I’m a little dyslexic. … So I decided to make a software clone onto the new disk with XXClone, so that whichever way I copied the data would be OK. … I installed the disk, started up the format, and went of to do some stuff. When I got back, I found a blue screen of death, a 0024 failure (that I gather means a loose wire, something version one the sata hardware standard made all too easy). When I tried to reboot, I got a smart drive error – the disk is bad. I flip some disks around. One of the 160GB disks won’t boot either — “Disk error”. When the dust settles I have some very high-tech paperweights. … I’ve lost 3 weeks or more of personal data, only most of which can be reconstructed. . My work files, on the other hand, either on a unix server or on a USB stick, which I religiously back up at home and work, so that’s OK. My personal financial info, which isn’t backed up for the last 3+ weeks, I can recreate

Some life lessons here – the most obvious being the frequently repeated one of backup, backup, backup and _keep non-local copies of your data_ in case of massive system breakdown/fire/nuclear war etc. If it can happen to Michael Froomkin, who is much more technically adept and conscientious about backing up than you are (for most local values of ‘you’) it can happen to anyone. Happily, Michael appears to have lost nothing more than some easily recreatable data (and a lot of time, assuming he can get refunds for non-functioning hardware). If he were someone who didn’t religiously back up his material, he’d be in far worse shape. Non-local file backup is pretty easy to do these days, and relatively cheap. I use “Sugarsync”:http://www.sugarsync.com/ which synchronizes my three Windows machines very nicely ¹ and as a side-benefit provides me with backups against local hardware errors. Kieran discusses a couple of alternatives “here”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/workflow-apps.pdf (PDF), but whatever system you use, I really recommend that you institute _some system for doing this_ and that you _do it today_ rather than putting it on the long finger (which will most likely mean, given most people’s heuristics for this kind of stuff, that you won’t do it until you REALLY NEED TO, at which point it will sadly be too late).

¹ I understand that it doesn’t work as well for Macs, which to my deep and everlasting regret isn’t a problem for me. The week before last, my university unexpectedly delivered me a lovely new MacBook Pro, which I had some eight hours to fall in love with before I discovered that it had been sent to me thanks to an administrative error, and that it in fact belonged to one of my colleagues. I’m still bitter, as you can tell (but in the unlikely event that an Apple executive is reading this post, and wants to reach out to the crucial academic-blogger constituency by handing out one of their new machines, they can find an enthusiastic evangelist for their product at this address …) More generally (and to get back from the griping), be aware that Sugarsync is not designed as a back-up product as such, and will do _nothing_ to save you from user generated errors (indeed it may make them more devastating). If you delete the one and only copy of your dissertation datafile from a synchronized folder, you will find of course that it is deleted from the copies of this folder on your other machines too. So caveat emptor.

From Powerline: “Being consumed by hate is damaging to your sense of humor.” Well, I have to admit it. I didn’t get the joke myself. Go ahead and read hindrocket’s original post and his somewhat petulant (so it seems to me) update.

I’m trying to figure out the joke’s nub or ‘cracker’ (I’m using humor lingo here!), the necktie-house analogy – which the author now claims was obviously supposed to poke fun at “how weird it seems, to us non-rich people, for someone not to know off the top of his head how many houses he owns” – can simultaneously obviously function by poking fun at the very idea that it seems weird not to know off the top of your head how many houses you own. This is some superfine complex irony conservative minds can parse with ease, which is lost on the plain people of liberalism, e.g. me.

But seriously, folks. I can at least analyze what properties the joke must have, even if I don’t get it: it is some sort of superpositional quantum irony, which depends for its appreciation on a given proposition P – in this case, P = it’s weird not to know how many houses you have – being self-evidently true and absurd at the same time. This superposition can only be maintained so long as the joke is unobserved (except by its author, who does not count as conscious – otherwise why would he have written such a thing?) Once conscious observers, e.g. liberals, took a look-in to see what was going on, the superpositional irony was bound to collapse into a state of grievance. And bob’s your uncle.

I have been obliged to invent a new blog category to cover this circumstance. I apologize for the complication this entails, but the universe is a rich, strange place.

UPDATE: Hey, categories aren’t showing any more, are they? (Am I missing something? Kieran?) Anyway, the category was supposed to be: ‘the water pitcher is both broken and unbroken.’ Get the picture?

“Mr. Marks, by mandate of the District of Columbia Prepardon Division, I’m placing you under acquittal for the future murder of Sarah Marks and Donald Dubin that was to take place today, April 22 at 0800 hours and four minutes.”

I like the way in which, thanks to Bush, Republican government inevitably entangles us in serious moral dilemmas: “Wait—can a president really pardon someone who hasn’t even been charged with a crime?”

And you thought that Republican science fiction was all about Intelligent Design.

UPDATE: In my defense, I didn’t really think this could work. I just wanted to call the post that.