2010/07/06
2010/06/26
South Africa imagined
I am writing this from Johannesburg, where I arrived a few days ago. Before I get to know too much about this country, I wanted to jot down why South Africa has always loomed large in my imagination, especially poltical imagination, going back to really young age. This is a long rambling post that's more personal than usual and is probably of interest to no one but myself. I also haven't checked the facts, this is just a raw memory dump that probably has some innacuracies. Proceed with caution or not at all.
My first consciousness of South Africa was when I saw in my passport, the words: "Valid for all countries except South Africa." I remember thinking, why? First of all, I knew Africa was a continent (I was in it), and I knew the names of several countries... This one I'd never heard of seemed kind of odd.. Second, what was this strange exception, why in the whole world, was there this one place I wasn't allowed to go? Maybe it was dangerous because it was all the way at the bottom and we might fall off the earth if we went there! Naturally I started asking questions. And I learned about apartheid. I'm not quite sure how I reacted to that at first -- I would love to think that I immediately decided it was an injustice... But the truth is, I don't remember. Maybe it became just another fact, like the fact that there were a lot of people in China, and pyramids in Egypt, etc.
Over the years through adolescence and teen-age, it started getting more concrete. Now kids, in those days there was no Wikipedia... And apartheid wasn't in our school curriculum. And I was too young to tackle a serious book. But in Kenya in the 1980s, hardly a day would go by where apartheid was not in the newspaper. So what I got was articles (I was a news junkie from an early age) that would talk about some OAU meeting or something like that, and they would mention in passing old events that the reader was assumed to be familiar with. The African boycott of the 1976 Olympics one day. Another day, Biko. Sharpeville was big, but it was all maddeningly unclear. The information was just trickling in, it took years and years of tidbits before I felt I had a coherent narrative. The most significant fragment was one day I read an article about the 1976 uprising. It must have been an anniversary because it was a full story just about that... I remember a picture of a dead boy, and it struck me that wow, these kids were my age! It was no longer just an accumulation of historical facts. I started feeling it viscerally.
And of course, there was Mandela. Just a name and a photo, always the same photo it seemed. I'm not sure why but the newspaper (usually the Daily Nation and sometimes the Standard) always used that one picture as far as I recall. The fact that the photo was ancient, and that they never said anything concrete about him except that he was in jail (of course what could they say, they probably had no information either), made Mandela very remote, he might as well have been Tutankamen, frozen in time, clearly "important" somehow, but not really significant to me.
Music was a large part of my evolving understanding. When I was 13, I had the privilege of meeting Miriam Makeba. We were in Abidjan, and she happened to be walking down a hotel corridor with a woman that my mother knew. So just like that, we stopped and said hi shook hands, and the adults chatted for a few minutes as my sister and I just stood and stared at the famous woman. At that time, to me she was the singer of the song that everyone loved -- "Malaika". Since the song was in Swahili, I had always assumed that she was from Kenya, or Tanzania. But naturally we talked about her a lot the rest of that day, and I found out about her remarkable life. A few years later, I heard her sing in person, at a Paul Simon and Lady Smith Black Mambazo's Graceland tour concert. (Major props to Paul Simon btw, what an awesome dude). Hugh Masakela was there too and sang "Bring back Nelson Mandela" and I was like "yeah, they better!"
By 16, I was completely radically immersed. I followed all the details of which countries imposed sanctions and which ones didn't, which companies divested from South Africa, and which ones didn't (to this day I still boycott Shell oil, for that and for their evilness in the Niger delta, and many other places --- they are really as close as you can find to evil in business). Anyway, by that point, it's not like I was a pioneer or anyhing, the whole world was demanding the end of apartheid.
Except of course Reagan and Thatcher ("a part bien sur Madame Thatcher" comme dirait Renaud). It really annoys me that they are considered respectable or even great historical leaders, when in fact, they were the last, the absolute last of all world leaders to continue supporting apartheid Even after the entire effin British Commonwealth wanted sanctions, Thatcher tried to help the apartheid government. Of course they didn't put it that way.... They called it "constructive engagement" .Meanwhile they were funneling billions in military aid to South Africa and their allied mass-murdering warlords like Savimbi in Angola, and the other lunatic in Mozambique whose name I don't remember. For this charade, Reagan employed a useless US assistant secretary of state called Chester Crocker who would periodically fly to Pretoria to kiss P. W. Botha's ass. All in the name of fighting communism. (Thatcher, Botha and Reagan are featured together on the cover of Fela's "Beasts of No Nation", an album which struck a deep chord in me at the time.) When I hear the mainstream consensus in the US about Reagan today, it makes my stomach turn. Children, don't ever forget, Reagan was a guy who tought apartheid was ok. He also thought it was a good idea to funnel billions of dollars into trans-national Islamic fundamentalist jihad in Afghanistan, also in the name of anti-communism. How did that strategy work out?
In those days, Mandela and the ANC were called terrorists. And Osama bin Laden and his merry band of mujaheddin were called freedom fighters. Kids, never ever ever understimate the power of propaganda. But I digress.
Eventually, both communism and apartheid ended. One thing I am eternally grateful for is that I was there and old enough to understand when those things happened. Every generation should have at least one such supposedly impossible completely unthinkable thing happen in world history. It really helps you understand that most political power is based on illusion, fear and propaganda, which seem inevitable and invicible until suddenly they crumble and you wonder how they could have lasted. Such events teach us that we don't ever need to support or even tolerate the bad guys just because that's the "reasonable" or "realistic" thing to do. (of course if bad guys can actually get you, well it might be ok to keep a low profile if you have to, but my point is, don't buy into their justifications.)
And of course, there was Mandela. He was a fantastic symbol when in jail, but now... this old broken martyr three decades removed from reality, what could he possibly do? I remember staring at the TV, live mesmerized waiting for him to appear on that first day. And suddenly there he was this strange man, very different from that old picture. As he walked, you could almost feel the hundreds of millions of eyeballs on him. And what a sight. Nelson Mandela walking side-by-side with Winnie Mandela. Just like Masakela sang. (Sadly it later turned out that Winnie was a less-than-worthy companion... ). He gave a short speech. he seemed fit, graceful, ... But he spoke very slowly like a primary school teacher, and it was a little weird.
Then things began to unfold. First, I feared a power struggle with the existing leadership of the ANC under Oliver Tambo. But no, Mandela said Tambo is the president of the ANC period. Wow. This guy is really different, not just another power-hungry pol. Then came the famous Ted Koppel interview. At one point, Koppel asked him what he thought about Castro, Arafat and Ghadafi. We were like: Damn! It's a trap! In that split second, I imagined America turning against Mandela, the disaster was imminent. I hoped he'd been watching American politics in his short time since coming out and that he would figure out how to doublespeak his way out of it like a candidate in an election. Instead, Mandela said something like: those were our friends when no one else supported us, they helped us, and I will not deny them now. My jaw dropped. Shock. Who talks like that?!! After a couple of seconds, we realized that Koppel also had been silent. No follow-up question, no gotcha, nothing. Just an awkward silence with 100 million people watching. Then Mandela said: "Mr Koppel, have I paralyzed you?" BOOM! Minds exploded. The audience erupted. Like Alexander facing the Gordian knot, Madiba had just taken out his sword, and sliced through decades and decades of bullshit, in one swoop. The simplicity, the honor, the integrity ... he just set it straight. We had just witnessed leadership of a quality that I didn't even know existed.
There is one other thing I remember from that same interview. Some douchebag member of the apartheid parliament from the Conservative party (which was worse than the National party that invented apartheid) was video conferenced in to present the "other side"... I forget what he said but he addressed him as "Nelson, you ...." The tone was familiar to anyone who has lived in Africa. That special mix of familiarity and condescension that the "master" would use to address his servant. The kind of tone people use to call a 70-year old man by his first name and ask him to go fetch something. Anyway MP Douchebag went on for a few minutes, smug in his belief that he could show America that this old kaffir was just a kaffir. I was ready to punch the TV. My blood was boiling. Mandela quietly waited for him to finish, and then responded in a polite tone in Afrikaans. He then turned around and translated what he had just said into English for the audience, and it was the most magnanimous response possible. Audience erupts again. Game, set and match. Then I knew this is really a Great Man.
But let us not forget, even Ghandi ultimately failed to accomplish what he wanted above all. He died by the hand of his own co-religionist for not being anti- the other religion. India and Pakistan partitioned, muslim and hindus killed each other by the millions. Six decades later, it's still not over, now they have nuclear weapons aimed at each other. Would that same fate befall Madiba?
What happened over the following couple of years is the true miracle for me. I was disappointed that the recent movie "Invictus" chose to focus on the 1995 rugby world cup story. (Particularly since Clint Eastwood is one of my favorite directors and in "Bird" for example he didn't shy away from the hard parts of the story). Yes it's a great inspirational story... And for anyone else it would be a great hommage. Or if there had already been great films about Mandela then this would be a nice interesting story to add. But for that to be the first major hollywood movie about Mandela is like making the first major movie about George Washington and not mentioning the dark days of the revolutionary war, the famous crossing of the Delaware river, Valley Forge, and things like that.
People forget that South Africa did erupt. People (at least outside of South Africa) seems to think he came out of jail, and it was all hugs and peace and love forever after. No, a while, it was mayhem. Day after day, killings, burnings. Post-apartheid had failed. The western media as they always do, portrayed it as an ethnic conflict between Zulus and Xhosas. Repeatedly hammering stereotypes of "age-old tribal conflict" just like they did in Yugoslavia or Iraq. Of course that's not what it really was, the true story is that there are other motives which sometimes invent ethnic hatred to serve a concrete purpose e.g. to get someone in power, or to exploit some resources through. And unfortunately is always easy to do even from scratch because people really are baboons. Given two religions or ethnic groups, even if they have lived side by side in peace forever, coming up with a reason to make a few of them hate each other and start a war is the easiest thing in politics. Oh and no I don't believe that international media are in some giant conspiracy with bad guys around the world. They are just incompetent, often unwitting, tools. See Gell-Mann amnesia.
Anyway, that period is when I finally got to see the Great Man in person. That whole year I was traveling around killing time between undergrad and grad school. He was traveling around for very different reasons than killing time. Several times our paths almost crossed but not quite. I was in Senegal at a Mandela concert where he was supposed to show up but had to cancel because of the shit hitting the fan back in South Africa. Finally, I was at another concert in Rio de Janeiro of all places. It looked like 100,000 people came out to see Mandela. And this time he showed up. He came on, but there were probably 50 other people on stage and you could barely see him.. the sound quality was poor and his speech was not translated into Portuguese so most people didn't even know what he was saying. But I remember being scared, very scared. His speech had zero "feel good" in it, he talked briefly about the problems going on, that he was thankful for all the support and so on but that the situation was very very dire. He said the whole thing was about to fail and mentioned some very specific things about what various parties should do. It was strange most of the folks were still cheering, they didn't get it. And for me, it was a downer: when I finally see my hero, he's all somber and talking about dark practical details that I can't even hear.. His voice seemed weak, his body frail from a distance. I was worried and scared. I started thinking he would die and things would fall apart (to borrow a phrase from Chinuah Achebe).
As much as I am enjoying the world cup, that's what's on my mind all the time as I walk around enjoying all of this that is his legacy.
My first consciousness of South Africa was when I saw in my passport, the words: "Valid for all countries except South Africa." I remember thinking, why? First of all, I knew Africa was a continent (I was in it), and I knew the names of several countries... This one I'd never heard of seemed kind of odd.. Second, what was this strange exception, why in the whole world, was there this one place I wasn't allowed to go? Maybe it was dangerous because it was all the way at the bottom and we might fall off the earth if we went there! Naturally I started asking questions. And I learned about apartheid. I'm not quite sure how I reacted to that at first -- I would love to think that I immediately decided it was an injustice... But the truth is, I don't remember. Maybe it became just another fact, like the fact that there were a lot of people in China, and pyramids in Egypt, etc.
And of course, there was Mandela. Just a name and a photo, always the same photo it seemed. I'm not sure why but the newspaper (usually the Daily Nation and sometimes the Standard) always used that one picture as far as I recall. The fact that the photo was ancient, and that they never said anything concrete about him except that he was in jail (of course what could they say, they probably had no information either), made Mandela very remote, he might as well have been Tutankamen, frozen in time, clearly "important" somehow, but not really significant to me.
Music was a large part of my evolving understanding. When I was 13, I had the privilege of meeting Miriam Makeba. We were in Abidjan, and she happened to be walking down a hotel corridor with a woman that my mother knew. So just like that, we stopped and said hi shook hands, and the adults chatted for a few minutes as my sister and I just stood and stared at the famous woman. At that time, to me she was the singer of the song that everyone loved -- "Malaika". Since the song was in Swahili, I had always assumed that she was from Kenya, or Tanzania. But naturally we talked about her a lot the rest of that day, and I found out about her remarkable life. A few years later, I heard her sing in person, at a Paul Simon and Lady Smith Black Mambazo's Graceland tour concert. (Major props to Paul Simon btw, what an awesome dude). Hugh Masakela was there too and sang "Bring back Nelson Mandela" and I was like "yeah, they better!"
By 16, I was completely radically immersed. I followed all the details of which countries imposed sanctions and which ones didn't, which companies divested from South Africa, and which ones didn't (to this day I still boycott Shell oil, for that and for their evilness in the Niger delta, and many other places --- they are really as close as you can find to evil in business). Anyway, by that point, it's not like I was a pioneer or anyhing, the whole world was demanding the end of apartheid.
In those days, Mandela and the ANC were called terrorists. And Osama bin Laden and his merry band of mujaheddin were called freedom fighters. Kids, never ever ever understimate the power of propaganda. But I digress.
Eventually, both communism and apartheid ended. One thing I am eternally grateful for is that I was there and old enough to understand when those things happened. Every generation should have at least one such supposedly impossible completely unthinkable thing happen in world history. It really helps you understand that most political power is based on illusion, fear and propaganda, which seem inevitable and invicible until suddenly they crumble and you wonder how they could have lasted. Such events teach us that we don't ever need to support or even tolerate the bad guys just because that's the "reasonable" or "realistic" thing to do. (of course if bad guys can actually get you, well it might be ok to keep a low profile if you have to, but my point is, don't buy into their justifications.)
Then things began to unfold. First, I feared a power struggle with the existing leadership of the ANC under Oliver Tambo. But no, Mandela said Tambo is the president of the ANC period. Wow. This guy is really different, not just another power-hungry pol. Then came the famous Ted Koppel interview. At one point, Koppel asked him what he thought about Castro, Arafat and Ghadafi. We were like: Damn! It's a trap! In that split second, I imagined America turning against Mandela, the disaster was imminent. I hoped he'd been watching American politics in his short time since coming out and that he would figure out how to doublespeak his way out of it like a candidate in an election. Instead, Mandela said something like: those were our friends when no one else supported us, they helped us, and I will not deny them now. My jaw dropped. Shock. Who talks like that?!! After a couple of seconds, we realized that Koppel also had been silent. No follow-up question, no gotcha, nothing. Just an awkward silence with 100 million people watching. Then Mandela said: "Mr Koppel, have I paralyzed you?" BOOM! Minds exploded. The audience erupted. Like Alexander facing the Gordian knot, Madiba had just taken out his sword, and sliced through decades and decades of bullshit, in one swoop. The simplicity, the honor, the integrity ... he just set it straight. We had just witnessed leadership of a quality that I didn't even know existed.
There is one other thing I remember from that same interview. Some douchebag member of the apartheid parliament from the Conservative party (which was worse than the National party that invented apartheid) was video conferenced in to present the "other side"... I forget what he said but he addressed him as "Nelson, you ...." The tone was familiar to anyone who has lived in Africa. That special mix of familiarity and condescension that the "master" would use to address his servant. The kind of tone people use to call a 70-year old man by his first name and ask him to go fetch something. Anyway MP Douchebag went on for a few minutes, smug in his belief that he could show America that this old kaffir was just a kaffir. I was ready to punch the TV. My blood was boiling. Mandela quietly waited for him to finish, and then responded in a polite tone in Afrikaans. He then turned around and translated what he had just said into English for the audience, and it was the most magnanimous response possible. Audience erupts again. Game, set and match. Then I knew this is really a Great Man.
But let us not forget, even Ghandi ultimately failed to accomplish what he wanted above all. He died by the hand of his own co-religionist for not being anti- the other religion. India and Pakistan partitioned, muslim and hindus killed each other by the millions. Six decades later, it's still not over, now they have nuclear weapons aimed at each other. Would that same fate befall Madiba?
What happened over the following couple of years is the true miracle for me. I was disappointed that the recent movie "Invictus" chose to focus on the 1995 rugby world cup story. (Particularly since Clint Eastwood is one of my favorite directors and in "Bird" for example he didn't shy away from the hard parts of the story). Yes it's a great inspirational story... And for anyone else it would be a great hommage. Or if there had already been great films about Mandela then this would be a nice interesting story to add. But for that to be the first major hollywood movie about Mandela is like making the first major movie about George Washington and not mentioning the dark days of the revolutionary war, the famous crossing of the Delaware river, Valley Forge, and things like that.
People forget that South Africa did erupt. People (at least outside of South Africa) seems to think he came out of jail, and it was all hugs and peace and love forever after. No, a while, it was mayhem. Day after day, killings, burnings. Post-apartheid had failed. The western media as they always do, portrayed it as an ethnic conflict between Zulus and Xhosas. Repeatedly hammering stereotypes of "age-old tribal conflict" just like they did in Yugoslavia or Iraq. Of course that's not what it really was, the true story is that there are other motives which sometimes invent ethnic hatred to serve a concrete purpose e.g. to get someone in power, or to exploit some resources through. And unfortunately is always easy to do even from scratch because people really are baboons. Given two religions or ethnic groups, even if they have lived side by side in peace forever, coming up with a reason to make a few of them hate each other and start a war is the easiest thing in politics. Oh and no I don't believe that international media are in some giant conspiracy with bad guys around the world. They are just incompetent, often unwitting, tools. See Gell-Mann amnesia.
Anyway, that period is when I finally got to see the Great Man in person. That whole year I was traveling around killing time between undergrad and grad school. He was traveling around for very different reasons than killing time. Several times our paths almost crossed but not quite. I was in Senegal at a Mandela concert where he was supposed to show up but had to cancel because of the shit hitting the fan back in South Africa. Finally, I was at another concert in Rio de Janeiro of all places. It looked like 100,000 people came out to see Mandela. And this time he showed up. He came on, but there were probably 50 other people on stage and you could barely see him.. the sound quality was poor and his speech was not translated into Portuguese so most people didn't even know what he was saying. But I remember being scared, very scared. His speech had zero "feel good" in it, he talked briefly about the problems going on, that he was thankful for all the support and so on but that the situation was very very dire. He said the whole thing was about to fail and mentioned some very specific things about what various parties should do. It was strange most of the folks were still cheering, they didn't get it. And for me, it was a downer: when I finally see my hero, he's all somber and talking about dark practical details that I can't even hear.. His voice seemed weak, his body frail from a distance. I was worried and scared. I started thinking he would die and things would fall apart (to borrow a phrase from Chinuah Achebe).
What was going then is now well documented, people have confessed etc. There was indeed a real effort by elements of the apartheid secret police and Inkatha who were deliberately planning that apparently spontaneous violence. Powerful organized forces were working to create a civil war so post-apartheid would fail. But it didn't. The greatest achievement of Mandela to me is not the fact that he survived three decades in jail, nor that he inspired a rugby team. It is that after he came out of jail, against enormous forces, he snatched peace from the jaws of virtually certain civil war. Many others deserve credit too, but there's no question that without him it would have exploded. I don't know anyone else who has played such a momentous role in recent history ... most of the other "leaders" are people who happen to be at the right time at the right place, and then screw it up, like Yeltsin or Meles. But with Mandela, it's as if Ghandi had managed to avoid the partition of India and Pakistan, entered elective politics, succesfully governed and retired in peace. Can you imagine? Well Madiba did it. And then, at the height of his power, when he could have been king if he wanted, he stepped down and set the example of peaceful transition out of power, for his country and his continent. No other leader even comes close to that level of wisdom, unselfishness and greatness.
Simply the best.
As much as I am enjoying the world cup, that's what's on my mind all the time as I walk around enjoying all of this that is his legacy.
2010/05/22
La cigale et la fourmi: CNY/USD revisited
At some point, the ant will be tempted to start "cashing in", converting all that past hard work into a higher standard of living. How? Well there are several ways the government can convert those savings it has accumulated in USD into benefits for consumers. It could subsidize imported goods like fuel for example. Or more generally, it could let the exchange rate of CNY/USD rise, which would make all foreign goods cheaper in China. So that's the fundamental thesis, which is not at all an original point of view. The question was (and still is) when will this play out?
But will it occur? I still think so. The reserves are still accumulating. Here's the picture I cited last time, Foreign Holdings of U.S. Securities
Country or category
|
Total
|
Equities
|
Long-term debt
|
Short-term
| |||
ABS
|
Other
|
debt
| |||||
Japan
|
1,197
|
220
|
133
|
768
|
76
| ||
2
|
China (Mainland)1
|
922
|
29
|
217
|
653
|
23
| |
3
|
United Kingdom
|
921
|
421
|
160
|
316
|
24
| |
4
|
Cayman Islands
|
740
|
279
|
236
|
186
|
38
| |
5
|
Luxembourg
|
703
|
235
|
104
|
320
|
44
| |
Country or category
|
Total
|
Equities
|
Long-term debt
|
Short-term
| |||
ABS
|
Other
|
debt
| |||||
China (Mainland)1
|
1,464
|
78
|
360
|
866
|
160
| ||
2
|
Japan
|
1,269
|
182
|
136
|
883
|
69
| |
3
|
788
|
279
|
64
|
422
|
23
| ||
4
|
650
|
227
|
140
|
210
|
73
| ||
5
|
578
|
137
|
49
|
312
|
80
| ||
Even more of the same! The pressure keeps building....
Moreover, the rumours are that China might have stimulated itself into a bubble of it's own. How does that affect our theory? You face a bubble, and you had a pile of foreign reserves.... Well that's like being in the kitchen with toast almost burning and a huge reserve of nutella. Pop the toaster and enjoy the sandwich, China!
Update: Note that in the above tables, the amount of Chinese holdings of US securities increased a lot both in absolute and relative terms. Also, I should point out one more argument in the same direction: that western policy makers are increasingly calling on China to strengthen CNY.
2010/05/09
Airline fees and the unbelievable worthlessness of CNN
Earlier this week I stumbled upon a mini-editorial on CNN, wherein the anchor "Campbell" (not sure if it's his first or last name, I think they try to market them like that) went off on the topic of the airline industry charging extra fees. That is, charges that are not part of the ticket price, like the fees for luggage, or food, extra leg room etc. He was all up in arms because new data showed it was EIGHT BILLION dollars last year. He said that airlines are profiting from your discomfort, his face running the gamut of expressions from mocking to outraged. Basically he painted a picture of an industry conspiring to deceptively price gouge.
But here's the thing. In the entire piece, he failed to mention a) whether overall cost of air travel has gone up or down; b) whether the airline industry as a whole was profitable or not. Without those two additional data points, his conclusions are entirely unsupported!
What is definitely happening is a shift to more granular pricing. For example, let's say 50% of travelers have luggage and 50% don't. Say previously everyone paid $400 for a ticket and now it's $350 for the seat + $100 for luggage. Why is that bad? You can argue that it it's annoying to have the cost broken down in pieces, or you can argue that it's great to have more flexibility. I, for one, am very happy to trade a luggage quota I don't use for more leg room! Whatever your opinion, in our example, since the average cost is still $400, you can't say that they are "profiting at your expense". Yet that's exactly what CNN did, without presenting any evidence that the total cost is higher! As a matter of fact, the cost of air travel has been going down for decades and as far as I can tell that trend hasn't reversed recently.
Second, is there price gouging, i.e. excessive profits due to collusion in the industry?Actually, the airline industry "as a whole has made a cumulative loss during its 100-year history". So while it's possible for price gouging to exist in on routes without competition, it's impossible that it is occurring on the industry as a whole. Yet that is what CNN is claiming without any qualifiers.
Wow! You couldn't design a more logically flawed editorial if you tried.
This would be a perfect opportunity for a warning against Gell-Man amnesia, if I didn't already believe that CNN is completely worthless. The only time I see it is accidentally while looking for sports.
Update: many years after I originally wrote this post, I learned the CNN guy's name is Don Lemon. He became famous, but unfortunately his journalism never improved. This little episode from 2010 was predictor of what was to come.
2010/03/31
Known unknowns and unknown unknowns
A lot of people made fun of poor Donald Rumsfeld for his infamous quote..
"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."
But actually, he had a very good point. There are things that have uncertainty but we know the shape of the uncertainty. For example, I don't know who will the lottery tomorrow, but we do know the probability of any one person winning, or the distribution of winning amounts. And by the way from that we do know that playing the lottery is one of the dumbest activities known to man, though it is a kind of stupidity that we can harness for good perhaps... but I digress. My point is the outcome of the lottery is a known unknown. Which is different type of ignorance than say, not knowing if God exists. There you don't even have a probability space to support a distribution. Once someone asked to me: What's the probability that God exists? Obviously it was a rhetorical question, and it assumed the answer is "very low" (the question came from an atheist). But then I was like: it could be 0.01% or 99.99% or anything. If you have to choose, it might as well be 42.
2010/03/20
Zen for my domain
After procrastinating about it for years I've finally switched this blog to be on my personal domain name (in case you're curious, here's how).. so adios nemozen.blogspot.com and hello nemozen.semret.org!
How long did I procrastinate? Suffice it to say, I've had that domain name since before blogger/blogspot or even the term "blogging" existed... Now maybe in another 3-4 years I will customize the templates! In the meantime, I hope this doesn't break the feedopology.
How long did I procrastinate? Suffice it to say, I've had that domain name since before blogger/blogspot or even the term "blogging" existed... Now maybe in another 3-4 years I will customize the templates! In the meantime, I hope this doesn't break the feedopology.
2009/11/08
Design bugs in everyday life
It's a striking example because the difference between the right and wrong solution is so trivial. It's a design error, and if you realize it early on, the fix is virtually free but later it's very costly. Nothing new in that, that's exactly the nature of software bugs and it's not surprising that similar "bugs" exist elsewhere. But what really fascinated me in this example is that the bug, doesn't get fixed even in subsequent versions! You still have many coffee places that have different size cup covers, for decades, for no good reason.What a fascinating bug! It should have been crushed years ago and yet it continues to hang around generation after generation.
Since then, I've noticed other examples of design bugs in every day life that are surprisingly resilient. Some, like the one above, probably survive because the inefficiency occurs in such tiny increments, we don't appreciate the cumulative cost. Others survive because all they need is one chance to get into the system and then they are locked in forever. Here are a few random ones that I can think of right now:
- Typographical Fonts where l (lower case L) and I (capital i) are hard to distinguish.... It seems like if you are designing a font, making letters distinct would be one of your first requirements, so how do these fonts survive, and even thrive? Imagine all the damage that has been done throughout history because someone misread a "l" as an "I"... it's hard to estimate but it must be huge. Maybe it caused a shipwreck at some point!
- Alphanumeric key mapping on phones: a neat old idea which allows you to make memorable words out of phone numbers, like 1-800-FLOWERS. But let's look at that mapping on our phones
We have 2: ABC, 3: DEF, 4: GHI, 5:JKL, 6: MNO, 7 : PQRS, 8:TUV, 9 : WXYZ , and 1 and 0 have no letters. This leaves a small doubt in a some cases: when you see O is it really an O which makes it a 6 or is it a zero? Similarly if I see a I, I'm not sure if I should dial a 4 or a 1. That's a bug in the design. The fix would obviously have been to assign I to 1 and O to 0, and then assign all the others alphabetically 4: GHJ, 5: KLM, 6: NPQ, .... with a nice side effect that now all the keys would have three letters on them (instead of two of them having 4 letters, or omitting Q and Z like they did in some old phones). Again a trivial fix but the design bug got locked-in, became the standard, and now it will never be fixed. Imagine.... maybe some lives were lost because someone wasted precious seconds by dialing a 4 instead of a 1!
- Bank ATMs that give the cash before returning the card; it seems obvious that will cause a lot of people to leave their card behind which in turn is a huge cost for the bank and the customer! The fix is to design the machines to always return the card first and then proceed with the withdrawal or deposit. Fortunately this last bug seems more prevalent among older machines than newer ones, which hopefully means it's on it's way to extinction...
2009/10/29
On Optics (channeling Safire)
William Safire recently died. Even though I disagreed with most of his political opinions, I loved and will miss his columns, especially "On Language". So I want to note his passing here, with my own little post on language. Now of course I don't aspire to be as entertaining or educational as him... so I'll just rant about something I find annoying.
Politicians and journalists in the US have started using the word "optics" when they mean "perception" or "appearance" . E.g. instead of "this looks bad" they say "the optics of this are not good"..... urgh! Extremely annoying fad! Here are two quick examples I just found using my favorite search engine. The first one is from a politician in 2008:
Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa [...] said that terrorists would dance in the streets if Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, is elected president [...] because Obama's middle name is "Hussein," his father's Muslim roots, and his appearance -- or "optics," as King put it. "I'll just say this that when you think about the optics of a Barack Obama potentially getting elected President of the United States -- and I mean, what does this look like to the rest of the world? What does it look like to the world of Islam? "
Well Mr. Congressman, the optics of this are that you are a pretentious buffoon who thinks that borrowing scientific sounding words makes you look smart. (Oh and it seems you are also a bigot... but that's off-topic here.) The second one is a more recent example from an actual writer this time:
"In response to the leak, the White House kicks into high damage-control mode [...], but even here shows some clumsiness, at least regarding civil-military optics: the 25 hours for the Olympics vs. 25 minutes for McChrystal optic..."
The "McChrystal optic"? To me those two words invoke a beam of light going through a solid material whose constituent atoms are arranged an orderly repeating pattern. Which of course has nothing to do with what (I think) the writer meant to communicate -- something about Gen. McChrystal and perceptions. The faddish metaphor failed, the sentence is ugly and borderline incomprehensible. Way to go, Mr. Professional Writer.
I think this usage of "optics" right now, in 2009, is just at the point where it's perfect indicator of a certain kind of pomposity. Normal people haven't started using it (and hopefully never will), but it seems to be trendy with hacks who either can't come up with better metaphors or fear that simple words would expose their paucity of meaning. Am I being to harsh ? OK, let's give that last writer the benefit of the doubt, and see what else he's written... in an even more recent post, the following:
"President Obama and his advisors seem to be wrestling with this fundamental issue in Afghanistan and the optics and the body language...."
Bingo! Optics and body language.... just horrible isn't it?
It's not that I am just a cranky conservative when it comes to language -- far from it, I love its constant evolution -- slang, jargon, lingo.. it's all great! But that doesn't mean that all neologisms are good. It doesn't mean that "any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes", to quote George Orwell. For a new word, usage, phrase, or expression to work, for it to be cool, in any language "what is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around."
R.I.P. William Safire.
Politicians and journalists in the US have started using the word "optics" when they mean "perception" or "appearance" . E.g. instead of "this looks bad" they say "the optics of this are not good"..... urgh! Extremely annoying fad! Here are two quick examples I just found using my favorite search engine. The first one is from a politician in 2008:
Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa [...] said that terrorists would dance in the streets if Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, is elected president [...] because Obama's middle name is "Hussein," his father's Muslim roots, and his appearance -- or "optics," as King put it. "I'll just say this that when you think about the optics of a Barack Obama potentially getting elected President of the United States -- and I mean, what does this look like to the rest of the world? What does it look like to the world of Islam? "
Well Mr. Congressman, the optics of this are that you are a pretentious buffoon who thinks that borrowing scientific sounding words makes you look smart. (Oh and it seems you are also a bigot... but that's off-topic here.) The second one is a more recent example from an actual writer this time:
"In response to the leak, the White House kicks into high damage-control mode [...], but even here shows some clumsiness, at least regarding civil-military optics: the 25 hours for the Olympics vs. 25 minutes for McChrystal optic..."
The "McChrystal optic"? To me those two words invoke a beam of light going through a solid material whose constituent atoms are arranged an orderly repeating pattern. Which of course has nothing to do with what (I think) the writer meant to communicate -- something about Gen. McChrystal and perceptions. The faddish metaphor failed, the sentence is ugly and borderline incomprehensible. Way to go, Mr. Professional Writer.
I think this usage of "optics" right now, in 2009, is just at the point where it's perfect indicator of a certain kind of pomposity. Normal people haven't started using it (and hopefully never will), but it seems to be trendy with hacks who either can't come up with better metaphors or fear that simple words would expose their paucity of meaning. Am I being to harsh ? OK, let's give that last writer the benefit of the doubt, and see what else he's written... in an even more recent post, the following:
"President Obama and his advisors seem to be wrestling with this fundamental issue in Afghanistan and the optics and the body language...."
Bingo! Optics and body language.... just horrible isn't it?
It's not that I am just a cranky conservative when it comes to language -- far from it, I love its constant evolution -- slang, jargon, lingo.. it's all great! But that doesn't mean that all neologisms are good. It doesn't mean that "any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes", to quote George Orwell. For a new word, usage, phrase, or expression to work, for it to be cool, in any language "what is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around."
R.I.P. William Safire.
2009/08/16
Do you feel lucky... punk?
Here are two reasons why humanity might soon go extinct, and why it wouldn't be such a big loss. As you can see, I am in a cheerful mood today.
Big rock from outer space
Last year, using the example of the asteroid Apophis that might destroy the world in 27 years, I made the point that human beings are sometimes astonishingly stupid when it comes to making decisions that involve low probability events.
If we were rational mathematical creatures, humanity as a whole should be willing to spend billions of dollars to insure against that 0.0023% chance that we will all be wiped out. If you don't like my argument based on the present value of future GDP, here's another way of arriving at the same point. If you are willing to spend a trillion dollars say on nuclear weapons to defend against other humans, and say there's a 1 in 50 chance that you actually need them, logically, you should be willing to spend a billion dollars on threats that have a 1/50,000 chance of happening. (I am using conservative orders of magnitude here, obviously a nuclear war has less than 1/50 chance of happening, so that makes my point even stronger).
Today, in this article from Ars Technica, I found out just how stupid we are.
Congress awarded NASA a $1.6 million grant in 1999 to put towards the NEO discovery program. Unfortunately, this was the only funding Congress gave to NASA to pursue this goal.Yup, the US government allocated $1.6 million dollars to save all of human life from extinction... Total! And just in case you are inclined to blame "the Americans" for being so short sighted, consider that all the other countries in the world are allocating.. ZERO! (Ok maybe they have a couple of telescopes pointing at the sky but we need giant laser beams or something...) At this point, I am almost rooting for the asteroid to kick human ass. We deserve it.
Small germs from inner space
And of course, a big stone falling from the sky is not the only threat we face. Tiny germs are threatening us too. Let's take the H1N1 virus -- the swine flu of recent fame. You'd think that at least when it comes to human health, humanity can be rational, right? Not so quick. Let's see how are favorite mammal is dealing with this problem. Consider the following article from the Guardian (great newspaper btw): "Experts warned dispersal of Tamiflu would do more harm than good" about the debate on anti-virus treatments for H1N1. Here's the scientific view, summarized by one expert quoted in the article:
"Some people wanted to take a long-term view of the risk of resistance developing and to seek to preserve the effectiveness of antivirals for the next pandemic, which may be more severe."
"If you get a resistant strain that becomes dominant in the autumn, Tamiflu will then be useless."And here's another scientist:
"I am concerned about the vast amount of Tamiflu that is going out almost unregulated," he told the Guardian. "We are increasing the possibility that the flu will become resistant sooner or later. At the moment there is no desperate need for Tamiflu. We should be reconsidering its issue, rather than encouraging its use. "I think we should stop the national pandemic flu service. It was put there for an outbreak of far higher mortality than we have. If you get a resistant strain that becomes dominant in the autumn, Tamiflu will then be useless."Ok, thank God for all these smart scientists who have thought it through! The politicians should logically follow their advice right? Well actually
"It was felt ... it would simply be unacceptable to the UK population to tell them we had a huge stockpile of drugs but they were not going to be made available"So they just decided to go ahead and do the wrong thing! It's like a parent saying: "If I told my 5 year old not to play with this loaded gun, he would have been upset, so I decided to let him play with it." Mind you we're not talking about some distant threat here. The next mutation of the virus could be this autumn. Granted there's a low probability that it will mutate into a real killer, but that's my whole point. It's a low probability but high impact threat. And faced with that, the British government is willingly increasing the probability of a pandemic that could kill hundreds of millions of people, because they are afraid of being unpopular for the next two months! Seriously! If this was a movie, whose side would you be on? I would be like: Humans suck! Go H1, Go N1, it's your birthday!
No rare events in the savanna
None of this is original of course. Evolutionary biologists will say it's because our brain evolved in an environment where we just never had to consider small probabilities. We have no problem dealing with quantities like "if I go left, I get 1 potato, if I turn right I get 12 eggs"... Our brain can compute those things even as a toddler. But things like "1 in 50,000 chance" just don't compute in ye olde wetware. It's only after years of formal schooling, e.g. by the high-school level, that we start to get intuition on really small numbers. Because until the modern age, we didn't need to! Sure there were rare things like being hit by lightning, or having an earthquake, but since there wasn't anything we could do about them, there was no evolutionary advantage to actually being able to reason logically about really small probabilities. Good old superstition would work just as well. You could say "I got hit by lightning because Zeus is angry at me because I didn't offer animal sacrifice". If you are a hunter gatherer living in the bush, that explanation is practically speaking, just as good as the scientific one.
But now, by our own hands, we have a world where we do need to reason about small probabilities... Problem is, the brain hasn't caught up! Global warming is another example. Twenty years ago, it was a low probability but high impact threat, just like our two examples above. Scientists were running around screaming "There's a 1 in 100 chance that the polar ice caps will melt! That's huge!" But humanity just couldn't deal with it. People were like: "One in a hundred chance of extincttion? Pffft. I'm feeling lucky. Let me go buy a lottery ticket."
Well now global warming is in the same range of probability as 1 potato and 12 eggs, so people are dealing with it, but it may be too late.
Is this the end-game of evolution? Is this what the epitaph will say:
Here lies humanity. They became really good at reproduction -- 6 billion individuals! But not quite good enough at probability.Maybe it's all part of a master plan. A conspiracy! Apophis contains some organic molecules which are distant relatives of the H1N1 virus. Together the asteroid and the swine flu are collaborating to take us out, and recolonize the planet with a new dominant species that they like better. After all, that could be how we got here too!
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