Via daveon comes this wonderful article entitled The Fascism of Knowing Stuff. Basically, the article points out that modern society really is complex enough that we have to rely on the judgments of experts.

For example, my dad is a very smart individual, yet he asks me to fix his PC. I think I'm a smart individual, but if I need something mechanical repaired or built, I ask him. We both ask accountants, doctors and lawyers for advice in their fields of expertise, because we don't have sufficient knowledge in those fields.

The best line from the article: The price of technology, comfort and hopefully greater understanding of the universe and our place in it is an acceptance that we may not know best in all events and common sense, a hammer and a bag of leeches may not get you through it all.

I've had unfortunate dealings with a number of libertarians, and this "fascism of knowing stuff" really gets under their skin. They (as a group) don't seem to understand why we should defer to climate scientists or FDA regulators. The answer "because they've forgotten more than you'll ever know" is accurate but apparently unacceptable.

Now, this does not mean all experts get an automatic pass. For example, a pair of experts released a study in 2010 that purported to show that countries with high debt-to-GDP ratios always had low economic growth. Now we learn that the study is flawed, including errors in Excel spreadsheets. Peer review matters, but in the end, we will end up relying on experts.

I have no personal knowledge or expertise to contribute to the Boston bombing discussion. I will say that most of what we are seeing in the news is uninformed speculation, guesses and at best partial pictures from bystanders.

One of the best responses I have seen is this from a 78-year-old runner. You've seen the video - he's the guy who was knocked off of his feet by the first blast. Well, he got up (with help from a race volunteer) walked over the finish line, and walked to his hotel.

He kept calm and carried on. In the dark days of WWII, Great Britain, facing the most serious invasion threat since 1588, somebody came up with a propaganda poster to be displayed if the invasion happened. It didn't, so nobody saw it for decades. But it fits my mood today.

It's tax day, which I only know because it's all over the news. I get a refund and have an accountant file my taxes (write-offs from writing, don't ya know) so by the time April rolls around taxes are but a distant memory for me. Even before I got published, I would use TurboTax or Kiplinger's Tax Cut (H & R Block) software and efile, usually in mid-February. So, tax day always catches me a bit by surprise.

At any rate, since I'm thinking about tax day and TurboTax, it was interesting when i read that TurboTax is not your friend. It seems that Intuit, the parent company of TurboTax, spends millions of dollars lobbying Congress. What they don't want? "Return-free taxes."

See, for most people (AKA, "those not running a side business like writing") the IRS already knows all of your information. They could either mail you a pre-filled return or direct you to a website where your return is pre-filled. If you agree, sign or click okay, if not, make the changes. But that would seriously cut into Intuit's business (and other tax preparers), so lobbying efforts are expended to kill that idea.

Happy Tax Day!

I had a hankering for Chinese at lunch today. I was unable to find a Chinese restaurant, so I went to Panda Express, where I ordered my usual - fried rice, orange chicken and beef with broccoli, washed down with a Diet Coke.

Now, I have no illusions that orange chicken is anything but bad for you, but the placard of 400 calories per serving got my attention. So, thanks to the miracle of Google and a slow afternoon, I ran the calories as per Panda's handy online calculator. The result? 1010 calories! Ouch!

More gym, less Panda.

I firmly believe one needs to engage the opposite side (or all sides) of a debate. However, in many of the current political debates, I find myself getting weary of engagement.

For example, any time I post on Simberg's Flying Circus two or three of his commentors will fairly shortly post personal insults directed at me. They don't actually engage anything I say; rather they attack me as a person. So, I've decided to not bother myself on that site. I've talked before about getting kicked off Jordan Bassior's site for the crime of pointing out that Treyvon Martin had a right to live as well.

Now, I visit Marko Kloos site to note that background checks seem a reasonable part of a "well regulated militia." He informs me that, back in 1787, "regulate" didn't mean "regulate," it means “smooth out and make work”, not “put restrictions upon.” Well, no, "regulate" means "Control or supervise (something, esp. a company or business activity) by means of rules and regulations." Did then, does now.

So, my whine is this - why bother? If your opponent's response to engagement is insults, banning and/or torturing the English language, what good does engagement do?

Thing #1

(Recycled from a comment on daveon's LJ regarding Hugo whining)
There is a tendency that, if you don't do something, to think that doing it is easy. If, for example, one is not an IT person, it's easy to assume that all IT people do is sit on their computer and surf the Internet all day. Now, obviously that DOES happen, (exhibit A = this post) but that's far from ALL that happens. (Says the guy who was at work until 8:30 last night performing an upgrade on the bank's phone switches.)

Thus with the people who have you so exercised. They don't "do" con-running, so therefore con-running has to be easy and consist mostly of standing around in hotel bars. Again, this DOES happen, but that's usually after a metric shitload of hard work has been done to get the con off of the ground.

Thing #2

I voted in yesterday's municipal elections. I mentioned that at November's election I voted before 8 AM and was ballot #140 (or so). Today I voted after 5 PM and was ballot #100. Municipal elections have low turnouts.

Thing #3

I finished John Scalzi's serialized novel The Human Division last night. I have to say I was a bit disappointed to find that the ending was a cliff-hanger. It's one thing to have Book One of what's clearly marked as a serial end on a cliff, and it's quite another to end a (supposedly) free-standing book on a cliff. Don't get me wrong - I trust John would have released an ending even if Tor didn't up for Book Two. My complaint is that had I known it was a series I might not have bought in.

ETA: There's a discussion thread about this on John's site, and one person made a good point. Their point - if one considers The Human Division as more like a TV series than a book, a cliff-hanger is perfectly acceptable.

As many geeks have already seen, the US Navy, long working on ship-mounted lasers, has one that's demonstrated the ability to shoot down small targets. There's a cool video of one at the link. More importantly, the self-contained albeit a bit too large laser will be heading to the Persian Gulf next year for operational testing.

Lasers - they're not just for breakfast any more.

I had an enjoyable dinner Saturday night - it was a gourmet wine and food pairing, part of a fundraiser for Moraine Valley Community College. Other than that, no news worth reporting, so, have some links:

A) Smurched from jaylake - rocket powered by nuclear fusion promises 30- and 90-day expeditions to Mars. This is true fusion, but at microscopic levels, yielding small pulses of thrust. In terms of travel time, it's VASIMR-levels, but without the need to lug around a big generator. If they can get it to work, it's a big deal.

B) An interesting article about making police officers wear small video cameras. It was sold to cops as preventing false reports against them, but it also appears to cause cops to use force less often.

C) An interesting post in defense of the slave Leia costume. Money quote: To me, that gold bikini says, If you fuck with me, I will end you. (italics in original)

D) Presented for sheer coolness value: So I bought a firetruck.

For reasons unknown even to me, I was reminded last night of the Evans / Melbourne incident. One night in the summer of 1969, while I was eagerly awaiting my third birthday, the USS Evans, a WWII-era destroyer, was cut in half by the HMAS Melbourne, an ex-British carrier in Australian service.

The accident was caused by the Evans - she didn't know where the carrier was, and turned into her. Melbourne was damaged, but Evans sunk, taking 74 of her crew to the bottom with her. The hell of it was, some of the Evans' crewmembers knew (or should have known) that they were in the wrong.

Navy ships have a compartment called a Combat Information Center (CIC). It's where all the radars are, and the ship is fought from there. CIC knew Evans was in the wrong spot, but they didn't say anything. The collision cut the ship in half right where the CIC was, killing everybody in the space, so we don't know why they didn't speak up. The moral of the story is this: If you see something going wrong, speak up - the life you save may be your own.

I, like thousands of junior officers before me, learned of this via a US Navy training film. It's on YouTube, and is posted below for your edification. (Yeah, the special effects are cheesy - it was done on a budget.)

My reviews of the following books are available on POB People (click the picture to read the review):

A week ago Wednesday, I was standing in my kitchen putting a frozen fish patty on a baking sheet in preparation to cook it. Then the phone rang. It was my Realtor, and somebody wanted to look at my house in half an hour's time. Since I had a couple of gift cards for Shanahan's, a local independent bar and grill, I decided to change my dinner plans.

When I got to Shanahan's, several friends from Rotary were there, and they asked me if I was there for trivia night. I explained my situation, and was prevailed upon to stay for trivia. I had a blast, and my team, the "Rotary Earmuffs" (no idea where that came from) won!

So, last night I decided to repeat the experience. It was again a fun evening, although we did not win. (The baseball section killed us, even though I, the non-baseball guy, got two right. Lou Gehrig's number was the first retired by the Yankees and Ty Cobb holds the record for stealing home base the most. Alas, the other members of my team disagreed with these answers.)

Looks like I've found a new event for Wednesday!

Note The First

My publisher informs me that he is massively backed up and won't be able to even look at the sequel to Pirates of Mars for some time. So, I have decided to market the sequel to other venues. This means I spent last night writing a synopsis of the story, so I can supply same to various markets.

Note The Second

Pamela's Ghost, the aliens-invade-space-opera, progresses. I have decided that I need to back-fill some characters, thus pushing the climatic space battle further back.

In bad news from Rotary, at today's meeting, I had to serve as President, because the President and President-elect were both out of town. Our newsletter editor didn't show up, so I had to write the newsletter. In good news from Rotary, a humanitarian service project just swung from $1800 over budget to $2000 under budget. Overall, I'll call the day a win.

I read and enjoyed Terms of Enlistment by Marko Kloos. It started out as the bog-standard "Earth is an overpopulated shit-hole engaged in endless colonial wars" but had two unexpected left turns. There will be a more cogent review later.


Added to my tottering to-be-read pile:

Charlie Stross tends to be more pessimistic about the future than I do, but when he says "For most of the duration of the human species, change has not been an overriding influence on our lives" I have to agree with him. For much of human history, the rate of change of technology has been slow, and as a consequence, so has the rate of social change.

Technology drives social change! I've talked before about the 1900 House - a group of modern people put in a house with all (and only) the comforts of houses of 1900. Simply put, in 1900, the social model of "women stay at home" made sense (at least economically), because running a household was an 80-hour-a-week job. Somebody had to do it. What enabled "women's lib" was things like the washing machine. Similarly, what enabled the 40-hour work week we all know and love was technology. Back in Ye Olde Dayes, most people worked from can to can't because that was the only way to get enough stuff produced to support themselves. There are a slew of other social changes, but I think you get my point.

Stross's concern is that the current idea of democratic (note small "d") government, consisting of "one person, one vote" is endangered by a technological slowdown. This is really a revolutionary idea - for most of human history, leaders were born, not elected. His idea is that technological change forces upheavals among the elite, and these upheavals support democracy. See, for example, the ongoing impact of the Internet and computer billionaires.

Thus the tie-in to libertarian thought. In an industrial libertarian society, much effort is expended by elites to suppress competition. The Gilded Age monopolists were running around buying up the competition because it was easier to suppress a competitor than compete with them. Companies were suppressing unions because they were a threat to making money. A number of things prevented this suppression from succeeding long-term, but among them were technological innovations that forced everybody to adapt or die.

I've talked about how space colonies might come to be led by aristocrats. Stross sees a path for all of us to be led by aristocrats.

So no posting, intelligent or otherwise.

So, NPR recently ran a fascinating article about the explosion in Americans on Social Security disability (SSD). Basically, as the welfare roles declined, SSD went up. The "shorter" version of this story is in the graph below:



Those graphs are on the same scale, and it's a near 1-to-1 correlation. When NPR went digging as to why, they found a number of answers, which boil down to:

1) States are hiring consultants to get people out of welfare and into SSD. The Feds pay SSD, and the states pay welfare, so it's cheaper to cost-shift.
2) If you don't have a good education, in many parts of the country you can't get a job where you're not on your feet, and all the on-your-feet jobs available are shitty. Shitty as in "stock shelves at Wal-Mart for low wages, long hours and no benefits" shitty. You can make as much on disability as you can at Wal-Mart.
3) The American workforce is getting older. In my Rotary club, we have a 70-year-old man who's still working. Of course, he's a lawyer, and spends most of his time behind a desk. There's a reason factory workers tend to retire before they get to age 65 - the human body wears out over time.

Now, the libertarian answer to all of this is some version of "let them eat cake" but here in the land of reality that won't cut it. I'm not sure I have solutions, but the first step of addressing a problem is recognizing you have one.

There's a couple of items seen elsewhere that I want to talk about, notably two items from Charlie Stross's blog and a fascinating report on the explosion of Americans on disability. However, I don't have the mental bandwidth right at the moment, so I'll skip. Instead, have some humor - An Author's Life.

Spring is officially five days old, but you couldn't tell that from the weather. We're not buried in snow like the folks downstate, but it's cold, dreary and spitting snow. Of course, this time last year we were running the air conditioners (literally) because of a string of 80+ degree days, so maybe we're a bit spoiled.

In other news, my high availability network at work is actually, well, highly-available. (Go team!) Perhaps not coincidentally, writing-program-related-activities have resumed at Gerrib's Word Factory and Sausage-House. Two new chapters laid down over the past few days, bringing the word count to 53,453.

Like the label on the tin says:

A) Of interest to radio geeks (hi, jeff_duntemann!) why and how US radio stations got their call signs. (from jaylake)

B) Also from jaylake, a six-legged robot based on a lizard. The goal is to use something like this for robotic exploration of Mars.

C) A reminder that firearms have been a very stable technology for a long time. I would argue that most technology follows this pattern - rapid innovation followed by stabilization.

D) A staple of science fiction marches forward - in this case literally: robotic exoskeletons are walking this way. They are currently being developed for paralyzed individuals, but other applications are being worked on.

E) I have self-published, and may again, but Charles Stross lays out the case against self-publishing. It's mostly a matter of time and what you're good at doing.