Avram Grumer on power law extrapolations and the “Gillette Singularity”:http://agrumer.livejournal.com/414194.html.

(Via “Making Light”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/)

Something which I hadn’t ever thought of before jumped out when I read this “piece”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/technology/27soft.html?ei=5094&en=482f269e6e35b1c3&hp=&ex=1143435600&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print/partner/rssnyt in the _New York Times_ on problems with the new version of Windows.

bq. Skeptics like Mr. Cusumano say that fixing the Windows problem will take a more radical approach, a willingness to walk away from its legacy. One instructive example, they say, is what happened at Apple. … The approach was somewhat ungainly, but it allowed Apple to move to a new technology, a more stable, elegantly designed operating system. The one sacrifice was that OS X would not be compatible with old Macintosh programs, a step Microsoft has always refused to take with Windows. “Microsoft feels it can’t get away with breaking compatibility,” said Mendel Rosenblum, a Stanford University computer scientist. “All of their applications must continue to run, and from an architectural point of view that’s a very painful thing.”

Presumably Microsoft doesn’t want to break compatibility because by so doing it might undermine its enduring monopoly – if the mutual lock-in between Microsoft’s operating system and office productivity software is weakened, people might quite possibly move away from both. Apple, not being a monopoly (but having high customer loyalty) was much better placed to make the jump. While in contrast, Microsoft customers can look forward to a piece of bloatware that will be extraordinarily obese even by its previous standards. I suspect I’ll be switching to Mac meself next time I have the chance.

The other day I overheard a conversation between two guys in ROTC at my school. They were talking about a public presentation about the war that one of them had been to the day before, where the speaker had asked rhetorically, “When has war ever solved anything?” The ROTC guy was fuming – hadn’t the speaker ever heard of Germany? He continued: “they all say they believe in free speech, but never want to hear opposing views.” This launched an extended whining session between the two of them on this theme, disregarding the salient fact that he hadn’t said anything when he had the chance to ask questions of the speaker.

My first reaction was to be surprised that ROTC guys had to reach back to WWII to find an example of an uncontroversially just war – it occurred nearly half-a-century before either of them was born. I mean, what are they teaching in ROTC these days?

But my second reaction was how easily they slipped into thinking of themselves as oppressed victims. I certainly can imagine that the environment of the presentation had been strongly anti-war, and a defense of the war may well have drawn a heated reaction and maybe even some “boo”s. But I find it impossible to believe that the ROTC guy would have felt seriously threatened in any way. He just didn’t want to risk the possibility of being ridiculed for his support of the war. This is what so much of the right is reduced to: crying that they’re being oppressed – these guys genuinely believed that their rights had been taken away – whenever they don’t find themselves in the majority.

I had tickets to “Welsh National Opera”:http://www.wno.org.uk/ ‘s production of “The Flying Dutchman”:http://www.wno.org.uk/what.opera.106.html last night (my second trip in a week, having seen “Figaro”:http://www.wno.org.uk/what.opera.107.html on Wednesday). We Bristolians had been feeling slightly sore, since “Bryn Terfel”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/music/sites/brynterfel/ had sung the lead in Cardiff but had been replaced by Robert Hayward for later dates on the tour. Just before the was due to rise there was an announcement: Hayward was unwell and couldn’t sing. So now we get the third choice….? Not a bit of it! They had located Terfel on a golf course in North Wales that afternoon, put him in a car and rushed him down the M6/M5! Apparently it was touch and go whether he would make it in time. When the announcement was made the audience went wild (which made me feel extra sorry for poor Hayward). Terfel was, naturally, simply fantastic. A great singer with a tremendous presence. And a great guy … thanks for stepping in.

Until recently, I thought that famous quote about the king and the priests and the entrails and the running and the explosions and the monkeys was from Professor Frink Diderot. I learn now that the source of the quote was Jean Meslier, whose bloody aspirations ran as follows: “Je voudrais, et ce sera le dernier et le plus ardent de mes souhaits, je voudrais que le dernier des rois fût étranglé avec les boyaux du dernier prêtre.” Worse, the form of the Diderot quote I had in mind was wrong. Diderot actually had this to say, in Les Éleuthéromanes, “Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du prêtre/Au défaut d’un cordon pour étrangler les rois.” In a move reminiscent of a young Ben Domenech, however, one dastardly Jean-François de La Harpe attributed to Diderot the following version in his Cours de Littérature Ancienne et Moderne: “Et des boyaux du dernier prêtre/Serrons le cou du dernier roi.” Due to a distinct lack of blogswarms in the 1840’s, the error was never uncovered. I hope that after a sufficient period of contrition, perhaps involving live-cam self-flagellation, you all will someday be able to give my judgments about wankery the respect they deserve. In the meantime, Hitchens is still a wanker.

Via “Patrick Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007354.html#007354 I see that the Hugo nominees have been announced. They’re

Learning the World, Ken MacLeod (Orbit; Tor)
A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin (Voyager; Bantam Spectra)
Old Man’s War, John Scalzi (Tor)
Accelerando, Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit)
Spin, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)

For once, I’ve read all of them, and liked each of them quite a bit – it’s a very good field this year. That said, if I had to pick, it would either be McLeod’s _Learning the World_ or Wilson’s _Spin_. Both of these books see their authors reaching a new level of achievement. The McLeod book combines the political edge of his earlier work with a real degree of human warmth; it’s a little reminiscent of Vinge’s _Deepness in the Sky_ in its setup, but more subtle in how its plot plays out. _Spin_ strikes me as even more subtle, albeit chillier – using a gonzo science-fictional conceit and a slightly unreliable narrator to explore how we construct fantasies about an uncaring universe. As for the others, _Accelerando_ is very impressive, but I couldn’t entirely warm to it – I found that I was reading it more for the infodumps than the plot development. I prefer his “Merchant Princes” series which has less bells and whistles, but does a better job in my opinion of combining plotline with sociological speculation. More on this series later. That said, _Accelerando_ has some very nice sardonic touches. Most libertarian Singularities see the geeks inheriting the earth, but Stross’s version of the Singularity is dominated by feral intelligent financial instruments; hedge funds with stratospheric IQs run amok. _A Feast for Crows_ is a not-entirely-wonderful installment in a mostly wonderful series of books – the next should be better (it’ll have Tyrion). _Old Man’s War_ is great entertainment – I suspect Scalzi is getting a little tired of being compared to a modern Heinlein but there’s good reason for the comparison; he resurrects the feeling of golden age SF, but somehow manages to make it feel fresh. All good books in my opinion – feel free to agree/disagree in comments.

The “Ben Domenech”:http://blog.washingtonpost.com/redamerica/ plagiarism trainwreck is summarized nicely by “hilzoy”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2006/03/plagiarism.html at Obsidian Wings. (The discovery of an “entire column ripped out of a PJ O’Rourke book”:http://yourlogohere.blogspot.com/2006/03/nail-meet-coffin.html is the icing on the cake.) The two most entertaining things written about it so far are, first, the “in-the-bunker”:http://redstate.org/print/2006/3/23/22434/5436 “defences”:http://redstate.org/story/2006/3/24/03958/4019 being rolled out at RedState, and second, “this comment”:http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/002481.html#comment-130231 at “Sadly No!”:http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/002481.html

bq. No matter how brief Ben’s Post gig was, it’s still going to look good on his (Ctrl)C (Ctrl)V …

A “couple of years ago”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2003/05/08/copycats I wrote a post about kinds of plagiarism by college students:

Like hepatitis, plagiarism comes in several varieties.

# Google Plagiarism. Find a paper or discussion online. Pros: Copy. Paste. Done! Cons: Professor may also know about Google.

Sadly for Ben, the “may also know about Google” problem goes for thousands of bloggers as well. Never mind the joys of Amazon’s “Search Inside” feature, which allowed for the lift from O’Rourke to be confirmed.

This NYT story reports that Alcatel is negotiating to buy Lucent, the communications equipment maker spun off by AT&T a few years back. It’s not mentioned until the end of the article, and then only in passing, that the deal includes “the research and development unit Bell Laboratories, an intellectual powerhouse”.

That’s putting it mildly, at least in historical terms. Eleven researchers have shared six Nobel Prizes for work done while they were at Bell Labs, among many other awards. As well as the transistor, the photovoltaic cell , the LED, CCD and much more, Bell Labs created both Unix and C. It even had its own economics journal (the Bell Journal, which later became the Rand Journal). It was truly a unique institution.

Of course, all this was cut back drastically with deregulation and the breakup of the old AT&T monopoly, and even more so after the Lucent spinoff. Still, the passing of Bell Labs out of US ownership is worth recording. It remains to be seen whether Alcatel will follow the logic of the market and kill Bell Labs altogether, or make a quixotic attempt at reviving some of the glories of the past.

Several good books dealing with the American penal system and its effects on other aspects of American society are slated to appear this year. The first of them has just been published. Locked Out, by “Jeff Manza”:http://www.cas.northwestern.edu/sociology/faculty/manza/home.html and “Chris Uggen”:http://www.soc.umn.edu/~uggen/ examines the consequences of felon disenfranchisement laws for political participation and electoral outcomes. As might be expected, the United States puts much stronger restrictions than most Western countries on the voting rights of those currently imprisoned, on parole or probation, as well as on those who have served their sentences. When coupled with the fact that the U.S. has a relatively enormous segment of its population in prison, such laws may have political effects in themselves, as well as reflecting some of the deep effects of mass incarceration in modern American society. Here’s a map (from “Chris’s website”:http://www.soc.umn.edu/%7Euggen/felon_disenfranchisement.htm) showing felon disenfranchisement laws by state (for 2004). (Click the map for a larger, more readable version.)

In the book, Manza and Uggen find that about 5.3 million people were affected by these laws as of the November 2004 election. Of these, two million were African-American. In several states, as many as one in four black men is ineligible to vote. An “earlier article”:http://www.soc.umn.edu/%7Euggen/Uggen_Manza_ASR_02.pdf by the authors estimate that felon disenfranchisement is large enough to affect national elections when they are close: felons make up about 2.5 percent of the U.S. voting-age population (a steady upward trend from just under one percent in 1976). But there’s not much political hay to be made about this — who wants to say “70 percent of felons vote Democratic”? The racial history of these laws is more important: they are largely the outcome of racial conflict during Reconstruction. Moreover, according to the authors public opinion polls suggest 80 percent of Americans are in favor of allowing convicted felons to vote once they have completed their sentences. (Only a third are in favor of allowing prisoners to vote.)

Chris Uggen also “has a good blog”:http://chrisuggen.blogspot.com/, incidentally. Today, for instance, I “learned from him”:http://chrisuggen.blogspot.com/2006/03/federal-lawsuit-over-financial-aid-for.html that students convicted of rape (for example) remain eligible for federal financial aid, but students convicted of misdemeanor drug possession are automatically ineligible. Anyway, I recommend the book.

While responding to comments on a rather facetious Comment is Free article[1] on the UK “loans for lordships” scandal, I came across this fantastic investment opportunity. Burke’s Peerage are apparently the leading (which is to say, probably the only) brokerage firm in buying and selling genuine (by which I mean, fairly genuine) titles of nobility. They come in three categories:
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djw has a nice post up about whether children should have the right to vote (unfortunately it sems to load very slowly, but its worth reading). He is somewhat persuaded that they should, and outlines the argument of a paper by Michael Cummings arguing the case (my colleague Fran Schrag has another interesting paper making a different argument for a similar conclusion). I’m not sure I disagree with any of the arguments djw presents, all of which are responses to possible arguments against enfranchising children. So he calls for an argument that is not easily responded to, so, ever willing to oblige, here’s a possible reason, which, I think, makes a better version of the case that his comment #4 is a response to.

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Via David Glenn, this “wonderful chart”:http://hoverbike.blogspot.com/2006/03/partisani.html showing the political affiliations of Italian football team support groups. Lazio’s supporters, not surprisingly, vary from the right to the extreme right. A friend’s sister briefly dated a Lazio supporter; it sounds to have been an interesting experience. The links between soccer and politics are especially strong in Italy; Berlusconi’s “Forza Italia” is the only political party I know of that takes its name from a football chant.

Changing the subject a bit, it looks as though Berlusconi is going to go down in flames when Italians head to the polls next month. He’s had no success in lowering the opposition’s “5% lead”:http://www.repubblica.it/speciale/2006/elezioni_sondaggi/index.html in the polls, and the stench of desperation from him and his supporters reeks so strongly as to be nearly tangible. Public attacks on “Confindustria”:https://registration.ft.com/registration/barrier?referer=http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=Berlusconi+confindustria&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&start=10&location=http%3A//news.ft.com/cms/s/7e792606-b833-11da-bfc5-0000779e2340.html, the most important Italian business organization (and usually a reliable water-carrier for the right), claims that the left is organizing riots to create a “situation of democratic emergency”:http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-03-22T180212Z_01_L22597576_RTRUKOC_0_UK-ITALY-BERLUSCONI.xml&archived=False, and most bizarre of all, a public plea for pity from the press.

bq. I’m carrying all the paperwork for the cabinet meeting, which is very hefty as you can see. I stayed up and worked on this until five this morning, as I have done throughout these five years. I say this with little hope of it being reported … I’m sorry if I’ve been long-winded, but I am at peace with my conscience … Let’s hope that some good soul in the media world, out of pity, will write news of this.

What the Italians would call a ‘brutta figura’ (bad show). It sounds as if Berlusconi himself believes that he’s lost the election.

Update – Thanks to Scott McLemeee for the photo below – the Brigate Autonome Livornesi are clearly fans of Uncle Joe.

!http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/stalin.jpg!

I’m going to be in Boston on Saturday for a conference on Equality and Education, with papers by Debra Satz, Elizabeth Anderson, and me and Adam Swift, plus commentators. It should be very good; I’m looking forward to what Anderson and Satz have to say. I presume from the fact that there’s a webpage about it that it is open; whether so or not I always like meeting readers and hearing their complaints…

On unrelated news I got a lovely packet the other day from a former student, containing a signed copy of Loudon Wainwright III’s Here Come the Choppers. I mention LWIII in every class I teach, on the grounds that if they learn nothing else, they ought to know who LWIII is. The accompanying letter says

Likely you don’t remember me, as I was only a (mostly unmemorable) student in one of your classes 3 or 4 years ago. However, one thing you did was introduce me the the music of LWIII. I’ve always remembered that, and my life is better for it. Here is his latest CD, signed, and sent with my regards.

I do remember him, in fact, and am very touched by the gift. Even better, this is LW’s best in years; not as good as History or Album III, but his best in decade. Maybe the competition is doing him good.

The question. I’ve wondered for about 15 years whether the Chaim Tannenbaum who plays on many of Loudon Wainwright’s albums is the same Chaim Tannenbaum who is acknowledged in “The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom”. If none of our readers can enlighten me, I’ll give up wondering.

Like Henry George’s theory of land taxation, Peak Oil seems to be one of those ideas, reasonable enough in itself, and modest in scope, that attracts a cult following in which it becomes the answer to all kinds of questions. This piece in Salon gives a tour of some of the wilder fringes (apparently serious people suggesting we are going back to the 13th century for example), and indicates the need for a correction.

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